Willem's Yankee Notebook - May 19, 2008 - Indian Stream

EXCITING TIMES IN THE INDIAN STREAM REPUBLIC

PITTSBURG, NH ¬ I find that life gets more exciting as I get older. It's not that I'm doing more exciting stuff than I used to; it's that the stuff I used to do has become more exciting, now that physical limitations are part of the picture. A relatively simple downhill curve on cross-country skis conjures images of the emergency room ¬ again. A hut-to-hut transit of the White Mountains has become a strenuous hike; and a vigorous day of climbing in, say, the Tetons, probably has become impossible. So I try to cut the coat to fit the cloth, but still have some grand times.

One thing that's getting less exciting is driving anywhere. The old days of listening with anxiety to every click and knock in the old flathead six just the other side of the firewall are, I hope, gone forever; my truck will get me there and back without trouble. And no more frantic dashes across northern New England on secondary roads to get where I'm going. I've compiled a record of mileage and driving times (to the Maine border via Route 2, two hours), and try always to leave an extra half-hour for school buses, road construction, and pit stops.

So it was that I arrived in Pittsburg, New Hampshire, half an hour early. I picked up a Coke and a sandwich at the general store, drove to the rendezvous, and ate lunch with a pair of newspapers. I was going to take a little nap, but got involved in a scientific experiment. I know that black flies usually don't enter houses, and if they get there by accident, don't bite. I know that they do enter tents ¬ usually on the clothes of persons crawling in ¬ and that they don't bite in there, either. But do they enter vehicles? A few minutes' watching confirmed that they do. Would they try to bite? I was just about to collect some evidence on that question when the crew of three from New Hampshire Public Television pulled up beside me and interrupted the experiment.

To film our epic adventures we will travel to the ends of the earth ¬ or at least as far as our budget will allow. The crew has a long drive from Durham to reach north of the notches, but my shot from Vermont, now that we live there, is a piece of cake. We were here today to talk about the history of the Republic of Indian Stream; tell the story of a hapless Inuk who's buried in, of all places, the Indian Stream Cemetery; run some rapids on the upper Connecticut River; film the Canadian border at Halls Stream; and stay overnight nearby. The next morning we'd film a little fly fishing on a nearby pond and head home about noon with perhaps two programs in the can.

Probably very few of the sports who come to Pittsburg appreciate its history or its size. At over 282 square miles, it's the largest township in the United States. It was also, along with Texas and Vermont, the home of one of three independent republics that existed in the United States.

After the Revolutionary War settlers began to move into the wild country that's now Pittsburg. They battled each other over property that had been sold them by conflicting land companies, and they battled both the United States and Canada over which country they were in. The 1783 Treaty of Paris established the border as "the northwesternmost tributary of the Connecticut River," but no one knew which stream that was. Tired of officials of both countries levying taxes, drafting soldiers, and collecting debts, the residents formed a republic, elected officers, and wrote a constitution. They even fought a small war. It didn't last, of course, but it's a great story. See Daniel Doan's book Indian Stream Republic.

Our next visit was to the quiet Indian Stream Cemetery, where, over by the back fence nearest the stream, lies the grave of Minik, one of six so-called Polar Eskimos brought from Greenland in 1897 by Robert Peary for anthropological study. Poor Minik had a strange and unhappy life, ultimately dying in a New Hampshire logging camp in the 1918 flu epidemic. His gravestone, in a final insult, misspells his name; but someone has placed a piece of granite and a small Inuit sculpture beside it. For Minik's story, which also was recently featured on PBS, get Give Me My Father's Body, by Kenn Harper.

From the cemetery it was only a few rods to the put-in spot on Indian Stream, where I began my voyage down the relatively mild rapids of the Upper Connecticut. I was paddling a boat that was new to me, a once-state-of-the-art whitewater canoe that hates to go straight, but can turn on a dime. After a few gyrations on the placid runout of Indian Stream, I ventured into the river. The crew hopped along the shore in the vehicles, shooting video from the banks.

I stopped briefly at one point to record the last of the Indian Stream story and, as I got ready to leave, said, "Gee, it's too bad we don't have a waterproof camera to mount on the bow. These rapids look a lot hairier from upstream than down." I should have kept my mouth shut. A few minutes later I pushed off with a non-waterproof camera taped onto the canoe. With the lapel mike, I could record the trip orally now.

The rapids rapidly grew steeper and faster, and the sun glinting on them obscured all but the most obvious rocks. "Hmm," I think I murmured. "This begins to look interesting." A few seconds later I hollered, "Whoops! There's a sleeper. Got it. Uh oh, there's another one!"

We don't know yet whether the tape in the camera survived. I did, but it was touch-and-go there till I finally slopped ashore. I recall thinking, "You ain't the man you were fifty years ago. But this would have been exciting even then."