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My goal for Monday 7/28 was to traverse a little piece of southern Quebec and enter the U.S. at Coburn Gore, ME. I had breakfast at the Happy Corner Rest. It started to sprinkle as I rode north but I kept waiting for the road to get wet before stopping to suit up. It never did until long after and further north where I rode into an area where the rain must have been heavy but the actual showers had since passed. The wind continued to blow from the south. I stopped to eat and drink at Deer Mt. Campground, a state-owned operation. I refilled my water bottles at the roadside spring and continued on a short way to the Canadian border.

The Canadian border agent checked my i.d. and answered my question about how long it would to take to regain the U.S. border at Coburn Gore. Four hours was his answer, reputed to be accurate because he’d asked a colleague who had done the ride by bicycle herself. I could look down at the village of Chartierville from the border from an additional few hundred feet in elevation. The road was a straight as an arrow descent right into the town but I couldn’t let the bike just rip down the hill because there were paving crews dispersed all along both sides.

From Chartierville I rode north to La Patrie and then turned right toward Maine. The no. 212 highway was called “La Route des Sommets” or Route of the Summits which sounded ominous. The road was die straight but had me climbing and descending like a fool. One minute I was in the highest gear and the next in the lowest. The final descent to Woburn was crazy steep, straight, long and fast (but not exactly smooth). My new max. speed, courtesy of that ride, was 49.4 mph. Once across the border the road was downhill for the most part and the wind shifted toward evening so that I’d had, at times, a tailwind going north, east and south during the day.

Maine Rte. 27 from the border station south had been newly redone with fresh grading and recent paving. It was a very nice ride with views of lakes from high road cuts. It was easy biking in a southerly direction. I decided to stop at a roadside rest area at the 67 mi. mark on the day. A sign at the picnic area said that I was at Sarampus Falls on the N. Branch of the Dead River. There were tables and a restroom, and also interpretive panels explaining facts about the log drives that happened on rivers like the Dead. I walked downstream and found a good place to string up the hammock out of sight of the road. I cooked a supper that I’d purchased in La Patrie and which consisted of a bowl of Thai noodles and a small can of Mexican style bean salad.

Tuesday was quite a day. This was the day I planned to navigate through the Maine woods. It started out with an earlyish wake-up but a slow pack-up and departure. I rode to “Eustice Village” looking for a breakfast location but only found two closed pub-type places and an old dog who resented my presence. There was ample evidence of heavy ATV and snowmobile use of the backcountry route I was interested in. I studied a map board and I could see that trails did connect where I was to an area I was trying to reach called “The Forks.” My biggest reservation in trusting any of these routes was the potentially boggy nature of snowmobile trails in the summer.

Further down the road was another map board at the Maine Forest Service building which showed roads not trails. I was able, with some difficulty, to coordinate what the map said with what appeared on the GPS screen. The GPS showed a road called “Scott Rd.” that went all the way to Grand Falls. There even appeared to be a bridge across Spencer Stream on the printed map but it didn’t show up on the GPS. The existence of that bridge was the key to any plan for reaching the Forks.

Further down the road I found a gas station and convenience store near the center of activity for the greater Eustice area. I bought a coffee and cinnamon roll for breakfast and some fruit and Nutrigrain bars for lunch. While in the store I overheard a conversation between the cashier and a motorcyclist that revealed he was headed to Grand Falls so I followed him out to the gas pumps and asked him about the route I was planning to follow. “No bridge” was his answer, but then added “unless you have a snowmobile.” I pointed to my bicycle and he encouraged me about getting it across the river. He couldn’t provide me with much information about the route down the other side but I was pretty confident I could follow the shuttle road used by the Dead River runners.

The beginning of my journey was frustrating. The Scott Rd. appeared on the GPS as beginning right near a cemetery in Eustice but that road was labeled Flagstaff Rd. when I found it. I asked some guys working on the cemetery if I could follow the road all the way to Grand Falls and the answer was “yes…but” (it was a long, rough road.) I figured I would still give it a try. When I’d gone less than one mile, I reached a junction with a sign saying “Scott Rd.” to the left so I followed it feeling very encouraged. After a mile or more of riding I began to wonder why the road did not bear more easterly (I was traveling due north, parallel to Rte. 27). I checked the GPS and the stretch of road I was on was called just “road” not Scott Rd. anymore.

I reversed direction, went back to the intersection, and looked at the Scott Rd. sign. It wasn’t obvious that the other direction wasn’t also part of Scott Rd. so I went that way for about a mile. There were acres and acres of blueberries and I stopped to ask a blueberrier if I was on the right road. She said she didn’t know the roads around there. The GPS called this road also just “road” and I appeared to be going too far south of east so I reversed directions and committed myself once and for all to the northerly route. The condition of the road steadily deteriorated and soon I was dodging deep water-filled wheel ruts and bouncing over softball-sized rocks embedded in the roadway. I bounced my taillight loose once too many times and lost it. Other than that my gear stayed attached and my bike and body held up to the punishment.

I reached a T intersection with a better-surfaced road and trusted the GPS that told me to take the right hand branch. It also appeared that if I had wanted to avoid the bouncing I’d just experienced I could have retraced my way up Rte. 27 and come in from north of Eustice Village. At least going the way I did gave me a chance to see how much beating I was willing to take before I got too far into the woods. After that, I had to keep checking my location according to the GPS and as long as it said “Scott Road,” which it consistently did, I kept going. There was also the encouraging sign of a motorcycle track in the dirt in places.

I got to a spot two to three hours in where I donned rain gear because it started to pour. Not much further along I met the motorcyclist coming out and he gave me renewed encouragement and directions to find the bridge. Just before a gate at the end of the public way, I met a group of walkers heading to the falls, the matriarch of which let out an exclamation of surprise at my presence. I passed around the gate and took a left as instructed onto a snowmobile route with the sign: “To Jackman and The Forks.” I came to a small creek ford where the snowmobile bridge had been washed off of its foundations. I was glad I’d still had on my rain pants and foot coverings even though the rain had stopped because my feet and legs stayed dry despite the splashing I did through the stream.

Soon I was following beside the river, heading upstream, and then came to the bridge that was chained and barred at the ends but not so completely I couldn’t lift my bike over the bars at the near end and roll it under the chain on the far end. The paddling put-in was very obvious just downstream from the bridge where Spencer Stream poured into the Dead just below Grand Falls. My mind harkened back to the Dead River trip Steve G. and I did when we paddled upstream from the put-in to look at the Falls before turning around and running downstream.

The shuttle road was in much better shape than I remembered it from that trip more than 20 years ago. In my memory it had been a grassy, narrow, double-track but now it was two lanes wide and graveled with numerous recent repairs to washed out culverts. Eventually I came across signs calling it Lower Enchanted Road that jived with my recollections from studying the maps before I left. Another piece of reassuring evidence was a snowmobile sign pointing in the direction I was heading that said “ the Forks Area 22 mi.” It didn’t take as long to get out as it did to get in, only around two hours, and when I hit pavement I went right and down a long, one mile, 9% grade at warp speed in developing rain. I reached Webb’s campground at West Forks and sheltered under a porch roof on the front of what used to be Webb’s Store when I was last there.

A sign on the front of the building said that inquiries about campsites should be made at Appleton’s Restaurant next door. I went in that direction, found the restaurant and the folks there were very happy to answer my questions about where to stay for the night (a cabin all to myself for $14.00) and about what roads I needed to take for my “over the river and through the woods route” to Greenville. When I said that I’d already come from Eustice via Grand Falls I was told that what I’d done was far worse than anything I had yet to face.

I celebrated the news with a couple of beers and a burger. While eating at the bar I asked questions about the operation. The restaurant was named in honor of the current owner’s grandfather, Appleton Webb. Andy Webb was in charge. He was young, barely into his 30s from what I could guess. He was also the owner of a rafting company called Riverdrivers. The waitress/bartender’s name was Bethanie and she also doubled as a raft guide as did most of the others who wandered in and out at various times such as Tom, Soleil, and Dana. I shared my recollections of the campground having stayed overnight during a Dead River kayaking trip two decades before. The Webbs ran a paddler shuttle in those days that one could use as part of a package deal with the tent site.

The only store in W. Forks these days was Berry’s across the highway from Webb’s. I might have overdone the beer consumption a bit because I slept a while before actually going to bed. The bed was comfortable and even though the showers required quarters the cost of things there were not going to break the bank. If I could bring a group of students up there for a raft trip I would. They seemed like very decent folks with a long history in the West Forks area.

After breakfast at Appleton’s and a rehearsal of the turns required to make it through to Greenville I set out by riding down to the bottom of the Lake Moxie Road. I saw Crabapple Whitewater’s rafting base and motel when I started up that road. Crabapple also runs raft trips on the Deerfield River close to home. The road climbed steadily but leveled out at one point where a parking area was located on the left side to provide access to the trail to Moxie Falls. I was interested in seeing the falls and Bethanie had recommended it. I hoped I wouldn’t have to leave my bike and gear unattended in the parking lot. The sign at the trailhead said no “motorized” vehicles so I took that to mean bicycles weren’t excluded.

The ride took me about a mile on winding single-track trail. There were some muddy spots but nothing too difficult to handle with my loaded bike until I reached a series of wooden steps leading down to the platforms overlooking the falls. At that point I didn’t think my gear was at risk for being pilfered even though there were quite a number of people coming and going from the observation area. The falls are called the highest free falling in the state according to the Delorme atlas. There had been a good amount of rainfall in the previous weeks so the falls were running at an impressive level. I got some pictures and returned to the road that continued to climb all the way to Moxie Lake.

I crossed the outflow from the lake and that was bridge number one. My directions were to cross two bridges but not a third. The road from the lake ran out to the put-in for the Kennebec River raft trip. It was in the process of being graded and there was a copious quantity of loose golf-ball-sized gravel on the surface of the road. It was also very dusty. One of the Riverdrivers trucks went past and Bethanie waved to me through the plume of dust in its wake. I reached one right turn and stopped to take stock of my location. An ATVer who was stopped at the intersection said it was the road to Shirley Mills. I knew that was not my road so I went on and just before the third bridge reached the turn for the Brochu Road together with its “Wally World” sign (the name of a camp along the road that I suspect belongs to someone named Wally).

The Brochu road went pretty much uninterrupted all the way to Greenville. There were occasional side roads that I could have taken but it remained the biggest of all of them and I was never enticed to consider any of the others. It climbed for a while, but steadily, and then once over a height of land descended fairly consistently all the way to the outskirts of Greenville. It added another 20 miles on gravel road making my total thus far about 60 miles since Eustice.

I rode side by side with another bicyclist as I approached the pavement in Greenville so I took the opportunity to ask him if there was a bicycle shop in town. He told me where to find Northwoods Outfitters. Once there I found a replacement taillight for a reasonable price. I also bought some energy gels and a tube of electrolyte replacement tabs that I could add to the water in my bottles. I asked the manager for advice on reaching Baxter State Park. I had earlier emailed the same question to the very same store prior to departure but had never received an answer. I was prepared for the news that the Golden Road, a famous Maine logging road that would be the only way to reach the park from that direction, did not allow travel by bicycle. This was the news that Andy Webb had told me. His suggestion was that I should take the road past Katahdin Iron Works as an alternative.

The woman manager was very helpful. She told me that the G. R. was not open to bicycles but she thought the K.I.W. road wasn’t open either. She called someone she knew in the Maine park or forest service and asked whether I was allowed to ride my bicycle along that road. The answer was “no.” She then said that I still had one option. The access to the G.R. from Greenville used to have a gate with signs that prohibited bicycle travel. She said that the gate had been removed and so had all signs. Technically speaking I could approach the G.R. using that access point and I would be able to truthfully say that I had “seen” nothing that prevented me from continuing.

It was getting to be about 4:30 p.m. Looking ahead, I asked if there was a place to spend the night. The manager told me of a legitimate unimproved public campsite available partway beyond the end of the pavement on the Siras Hill Rd. which was my approach route to the G.R. I thanked her for her help and then went shopping for my supper. With supper makings in my panniers I set out north past Lily Bay State Park toward the town of Kokadjo at the outlet of First Roach Pond which was my primary landmark before reaching the turn off to the campsite. The road climbed the hills overlooking Moosehead Lake that had been Thoreau’s access route on two of his trips into the Maine Woods. I rolled into Kokadjo (Koh-kie´-joe, was the way I thought I’d heard it pronounced) and was amused by the town sign that said “Population: Not Many.”

I found what I took to be the aforementioned campsite on the side of the road beyond a bridge across a bog stream. I had departed from my regular route to follow a road that was supposed to be leading to Spencer Pond Camps if I followed it far enough. The campsite was a bit austere. In fact while I was there at least two cars rolled in to look it over and left. There wasn’t much to recommend it. It was a little lollipop-shaped two-wheel rut track that left the road and went down toward the water. It probably got used for launching canoes mostly. Anywhere there wasn’t a wheel rut there was only tall sedge and grass with a couple of signs of occasional campfires. My biggest quandary was where to set up my hammock. I stepped into the alder bushes and found two trees that were a little too close but would have to do.

I marked the spot and then cooked my supper. The bugs came in force and I was required to don the full uniform of long warm-up pants, long sleeved shirt and a bug head net I’d purchased in Eustice. It was made with no-see-um netting which proved fortunate because they made up one of the squadrons that were descending upon me. The mosquitoes were able to bite through the stretch flannel back of my wind pants so there were bites on my butt at bedtime but otherwise I was protected. I couldn’t eat through the headnet so I DEETed my chin and that kept them at bay during bites.

The night went poorly. The trees were a bit too close and the hammock too steeply curved for any comfort on the long axis but on the diagonal my feet seemed to extend too close to the dripline for total comfort in a rain and it did start to rain before dawn and was raining when I got up. It tapered off to a stop before packing up. I did my sock & bags thing thinking it would commence again sooner rather than later but it never did and eventually I took the combo off of my feet. The roads to Ripogenus Dam were loose gravel or else bedrock or sometimes mud, but all very wide. The Golden Road was the widest dirt road I’ve ever been on (speed limit 45 mph) and the truck traffic wasn’t too bad.

The road became paved before reaching Ripogenus Dam which I had thought of visiting but missed seeing any signs with the exception of one that said Pray’s Store. I stopped down below Ripogenus Gorge to relax by the river, had a short nap, and got some pictures of rafters going by. I continued on, neglecting to stop and get an Appalachian Trail crossing sign picture. It was supposed to bookend a picture I’d taken when I crossed the trail going through Franconia Notch. I should have stopped at Abol Bridge to take that shot. I also missed seeing the right road to take me to the entrance to Baxter State Park but I’d already decided I wasn’t going in. If I’d wanted to follow through with my plan to circumnavigate Mt. Katahdin I would have needed to ride north to take the park tote road and retrace a parallel route on the opposite side of the W. Branch of the Penobscot almost 10 or 15 miles, nearly as far a distance back as Rip Gorge. My original plan had been to take the Telos Rd. by crossing the W. Branch just below the gorge and follow that north to what used to be the Nesowadnahunk gate into BSP. I was told in Greenville that route was no longer open. I have no doubt that I could have followed the now discontinued road with my bicycle and ridden around any barriers but I was pushing the legal envelope being on the road at all so it didn’t seem like the best idea. By the time I reached the putative turn to the park entrance I had already logged 80+ miles on logging roads and didn’t feel I had anything more to prove, so it seemed right to call Ripogenus Dam my turnaround point and head home.

I hadn’t detected any anger on the part of passing truckers while on the G.R. but I did encounter a person on the porch at Chewonki’s Big Eddy campground who seemed miffed that I was there on a bicycle and told me I should have seen the signs prohibiting it. When I told her the direction I’d come in, it didn’t mollify her and she just repeated that there were signs at the Millinocket end of the road. I told her I was on my way out at that point and there wasn’t anything more I could do. I continued on the G.R. unnecessarily for a few miles past where the G.R., the Baxter Park Rd and the Millinocket Rd. all come together between Ambajesus and Millinocket lakes. I eventually crossed over to the Millinocket Rd. that was a more direct shot into the center of Millinocket.

My last visit to Millinocket was 20+ years ago when I took a friend up there to rendezvous with the other members of his party who had a permit to climb Katahdin in the winter. I was on my way to a different rendezvous to assist in leading a Sierra Club backcountry ski trip in to Long Pond near Monson, Maine the beginning point for the famed “100 Mile Wilderness” stretch of the A.T. I had no recollection of the layout of town but very quickly found, by happenstance, the Appalachian Trail Café, a traveler friendly place where I had a blue cheese burger and banana crème pie. Because Mt. Katahdin is the northern terminus of the A.T. many hikers pass through Millinocket.

I didn’t stay in town but instead decided to gamble on a rest area marked on the map of my route south and found it suited my purposes when I got there. I couldn’t easily fall asleep so I ended up riding on a six mile round trip to East Millinocket and the Hamlet Pub for a pint of P.B.R. and two pickled eggs. I did eventually get some deep sound sleep (the trees were better spaced that time) and woke to the sound of heavy and continuous rain. I expected it was going to be a slog that day.

Slog isn’t quite the best word to describe it. Epic comes closer. From Millinocket to Bucksport the distance was right around 100 miles according to the odometer. If ever a route was set up for a century ride this was it, following the Penobscot to the sea. The rain was falling steadily when I woke up and it continued to fall throughout the packing and departure. One thing that wasn’t at all affected by the rain were the mosquitoes which swarmed around as soon as I emerged from the net tube that surrounds the hammock and kept plaguing me until I rode away. I found breakfast at a roadside restaurant on the other side of E. Millinocket. It was nice to sit inside out of the rain, a further benefit to my policy of breakfast indoors.

It was raining when I suited up after breakfast and stayed rainy throughout the morning. I stopped for a break in Mattawamkeag inside what I took to be a school bus shelter. I was familiar with the town, having been the take out spot from a three-day canoe trip on the Mattawamkeag River many years before. I was more familiar with it than I would have liked since my car was the shuttle vehicle we’d spotted at the take out but my car keys were in the pocket of a pair of pants left inside a truck 60 miles away at the put in. Needless to say it was another instance where my absent mindedness cost me some congeniality points with friends on a trip.

The route followed the Penobscot down the east bank and rarely climbed. The usual signal for a climb ahead was a RR track crossing. And when it climbed, the road often took me through the center of some hamlet and then descended back to the floodplain and continued on. My one foray onto the west bank came when I crossed the river to stay on Rte. 2 in the Milford/Old Town area but I then opted to return and follow Rte. 178 instead which I took to be the more bike-friendly route. I had planned on a cookie and a coffee in Old Town but the Subway restaurant only had the former and the fire station had only the latter. I opted for the coffee and a conversation with a young paramedic on the Old Town Fire Dept.

The highway took me through Brewer, across the river from Bangor and the birthplace of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. I was reminded of that fact as I waited for a light to change and studied a statue erected in his honor. Chamberlain was a civil war hero, medal of honor winner, whose company was anchoring the end of the Union line on Little Round Top on the second day at Gettysburg. His action of ordering a bayonet charge at the moment when out of ammunition and about to be overrun, turned the tide of the battle in that sector and prevented a possible flanking of the Union lines. It was one of those moments upon which history hinged and the door of fate swung in the favor of an eventual Union victory. It is worthwhile trying to imagine what might have happened if Chamberlain and the 20th Maine had not been in that place at that moment.

From Brewer to Bucksport my memory is a blurry scene recollected through the fog of fatigue. The final five miles or so were the worst of the whole day with numerous climbs and descents. My troubles didn’t really end once I got there either. First there was a motel that rented its last room to the person at the desk in front of me. Then after I did get a room further UP the road, I started out for a laundromat and my front tire was flat. I walked to the laundromat instead and their change machine was broken. I went to the restaurant across the parking lot and even though I offered to buy supper they wouldn’t give me change. I gave up on the laundry idea at that point—the time was about up anyway. I walked down the road to a restaurant looking for some simple seafood but it was too over- the-top gourmet for my needs.

I got my laundromat change at the Irving so that I’d be ready to go in the morning and walked back to the motel with a stop at McD’s for a filet-o-fish sandwich and fries. That was my seafood dinner. Oh well. The hotel manager let me call Faye on his phone and leave her a call-back number in order to help me avoid being soaked on the cost of a call billed to my credit card. The motel room was a nice change of pace: no mosquitoes, an a.c. blowing cold air, a shower and a t.v. What more could I ask? No flat tire, perhaps.

The following day was not without drama. First, the laundromat. I got going by 8:00 a.m. (check out at 10:00). After wrestling with the tire and my mini-pump, which didn’t seem to be working, I had to again walk down the road to the Irving that had a 75¢ air pump. Yikes!! I hoped it wouldn’t take too many attempts. Fortunately it filled my “old” spare and I went to the Laundromat and started my wash in a top loader. The Laundromat was in serious need of upgrade beyond the “Amazing Grace” and “Jazreel’s Prayer” signs on the walls. Every third machine said “Temporarily out of Order”. The soap dispenser was out of every soap except Clorox 2 “for colors” and there was more yet to come.

I left the laundry washing and rode back up to McD’s for breakfast. It was the super deluxe with eggs, 3 pancakes, biscuit, hash brown and sausage patty plus a coffee and juice. I figured that ought to hold me for a while. When I got back to the laundromat my wash had been stopped prematurely because of an unbalanced load and so instead of being ready to dry, it still had 15 min. of washing left to do. Then when it was finally done, the first dryer I put it in was cold after the first 6 min. (25¢ per) at low delicate. I clicked it up to medium and 6 min. later it was still blowing cold. I clicked it up to high and 6 min. later, still cold. I switched dryers and 6 min. later still cold. After a third dryer that was also cold, I gave up. Check out at the motel was only 15 min. away at that point.

I asked the motel manager for help and understanding and he threw my cotton things in his own dryer while I packed up. The cycling stuff was just going to have to dry out on my body. After picking up my dry things I rolled my bike off of the step and guess what? A flat front tire! The “old” spare turned out to be a bad gamble. I walked the bike, now loaded, back into town thinking I’d gotten to know that stretch of sidewalk most intimately. (An interesting fact emerged after I returned home. Eric Sussbauer, who is another teacher at Mohawk, was in Bucksport with his family. When I returned to school he asked me if I had been there too. It seems they had seen me during one of my sidewalk sojourns. Small world!)

By then the gas station across the street from the Irving was open with FREE air. I hoped now that Chris Ethier at Bicycle World in Greenfield hadn’t been feeding me a line of b.s. when he told me I could get away with a slightly oversized spare tire. I also hoped I hadn’t missed seeing glass or a tack embedded in the tire. This time I discovered the culprit was a bad stem connection and when I looked at the original flat tube that appeared to have been the reason there too. I’d missed seeing it in the subdued light in the motel room.

With fingers crossed I inflated the new inner tube and everything looked fine. So I was off heading south in hopes that along the way I’d come across a bike shop with more spares, for the “what ifs”. I found one right beside the road in Searsport (before the center of town and across from a flea market). The owner was sitting next to his repair stand, apron on, and his 7-8 y.o. grandson was all excited about the numerous tools he was being allowed to play with and all of the treasures amongst the snipped spokes, etc. scattered over the floor. He had my size tube, yahoo! I thanked him and was off. After passing through Searsport center and starting to climb I heard a “poing!” like a stick or rock had ricocheted off my rear spokes (or worse). I looked down and at first nothing seemed amiss but a subsequent look as I was rolling along revealed a wheel badly out of true and after stopping and looking more closely I saw two broken spokes.

I turned around and rode back to the bike shop. I got to know the owner better this time. His age was 68. His name was Doug Birgfeld, owner and operator of Birgfeld’s Bike Shop for “not quite 30 but more than 25 years.” Originally from PA, he had led long tours in France and the U.S. over the years. His operation was typical of the once ubiquitous “l.b.s.” (local bike shop) but now was kind of a dinosaur, the others having been squeezed out by the Walmarts and slick super sports stores. He gave me advice on short cuts to avoid sections of Rte. 1 and I was off once again along with some replacement spokes (thicker gauge than the originals).

I didn’t make it past Wiscasset before dark, still I was just shy of 90 miles on the day. I had been aiming for Brunswick and a search for Nick Crawford a junior at Bowdoin and a former cross-country skier at Mohawk whom I had coached briefly. He now skied for Bowdoin. That plan was unrealistic. When I reached Wiscasset I was ready for something hot to eat. I bought a can of Campbell’s Chunky Beef soup. I heated the soup on a picnic table at the town dock. I asked at the fire station about a place to stay but the fire capt. was closing up—“just volunteers.” I kept going in the pitch dark but less than a mile out of town Pottle’s Cove Rd. caught my eye, especially the “dead end” sign. I turned down a road that paralleled some high-tension lines that had no houses and had woods on both sides. A grown-over woods road to the left led across a stream via a culvert and into a stand of ash and pine. Two trees later I was set up and talking to Faye on the cell phone.

It was a comfortable night’s sleep but the morning brought rain and, off and on, rain would be part of the entire day. My breakfast escape from the showers was Karen’s Kitchen Restaurant south of Wiscasset. It rained steadily and hard at times all during my ride to Brunswick but by the time I arrived it had started to break up and the sun even began peeking through. I visited the Bowdoin campus and asked a couple of students how to find Nick C. with no success. Then as I was cleaning and oiling various sluggish components of my bicycle at the Chamberlain statue (Joshua L. Chamberlain had been a professor and president at Bowdoin) I flagged down a passing cyclist who knew the XC ski coach and called him to ask about contacting Nick. I got Nick’s phone number but was forewarned that he was on a White Mt. trip with friends and probably wouldn’t be back until later in the day. I left him a message of hello and then, in an attempt to avoid Rte. 1 south, headed off in the wrong direction.

I stopped at a clam shack and figured out from the configuration of the coastline that I was headed out to a dead end on some point south of Brunswick. If I had known that my search for clams later in the day was going to be so fraught with difficulty I would have ordered a clam roll right then. They certainly seemed to have a loyal clientele, an indication that it was a safe bet the clams were good. Instead I ate some of my own food and headed back into the center of Brunswick once again. I asked directions of some locals who gave me the clues needed to find the back road to Freeport and though a bit of a roller coaster ride it was infinitely better than dodging the summer traffic on Rte 1.

I rolled onto the main street at the end of Bow St. that is right opposite L.L. Bean. What a zoo! I couldn’t believe how agoraphobic it made me feel. I emerged into a sea of milling people on sidewalks and creeping cars in the streets. I wanted to get back on the open road but couldn’t cross the street to get pointed in the proper direction. I finally reached a ramp onto Rte 1 but stopped at a fire station to use the bathroom and ask for directions. I was told about the back road to S. Freeport that would keep me off of Rte. 1 just a bit longer so that was were I went.

South Freeport has an attitude. Homes there are offered by Sotheby’s and I guess they probably fall in the appropriate price range for such a listing. I stopped on the dock and looked out over the harbor and watched a ferryboat arrive from an island shuttle. I was reminded of a night at anchor in the harbor on board my father’s boat while I helped him sail her back to Gloucester from Rockland, Me. It was our last time sailing together and now that his boat has been sold it probably will remain so. Concerned about his recent heart operation I called to touch base and see how he was doing. I did start to talk with Sandy but the connection was bad and we were disconnected before finishing the conversation.

I got onto Rte 1 at the “big Indian” and made it to the Maine info center north of Portland. I asked for suggestions on making it into Portland and beyond but help was limited. The volunteers there probably don’t get many bicyclists stopping in. I kept on Rte 1 and made it over the bridge on a marked bike lane and then around Baxter Blvd. on the same. I began to suspect that Portland was a very bike friendly city. I followed my nose and found Rte. 77 South and threaded my way through the city center and out the south side again on a bike lane over brand new bridges confirming my impression that the city planners were plugged into multimodal transportation in their designs. Another nice touch was the walking/jogging path that paralleled Baxter Blvd. around the Back Cove as well as regularly placed signs that said: “Right turn yield to bicyclists”.

Rte. 77 was a longish extra journey through Cape Elizabeth and when I got back to Rte 1 it was nearly time to quit for the day. I asked for a space on the floor of the Scarborough (Oak Hill) fire station from the paramedic/firefighters on duty there. My question went up the chain of command by phone and the word came back that it was o.k. provided everyone on the shift was good with it. Since the last overnight guy wasn’t due for about ½ hour and I was hungry for some supper I asked where I could get some seafood nearby. I got suggestions but the best was a bit of a stretch away and one thing led to another and I was on my way following the Coastal Green Trail (www.greenway.org) to Old Orchard Beach and a sidewalk clam shack (I hoped) and a place to stay, in theory, at the O.O.B. fire station.

Things certainly don’t always turn out as you plan. I decided to skip the stop along the beach-side strip for something to eat until I had assurance of a place to stay for the night. I was turned down flat at the fire station not by the young firefighter manning the front door but by his lieutenant upstairs who didn’t take the time to come down and tell me that to my face. The next closest station was Saco. The answer there was also no, with the same kind of brush off. Then Biddeford, across the river, appeared to offer the same kind of welcome but at least the person making the decision told me “no” to my face. There was rain falling pretty steadily by then and it was well past dark. My dander was up and I figured I’d ride through the night stopping at every manned station between there and my mother’s house in Rye and see if there was at least one place where they’d give an emergency services brother a place to sleep for the night. They had been so willing in Scarborough that I’d been lulled into this false sense of welcome.

I stopped at a Wendy’s for something to eat without even taking off my rain pants. I just sat there dripping on the floor feeling dejected and intimidated by the prospect of riding the shoulder of Rte. 1 on a rainy night. I had my flashing red L.E.D. taillight. There were reflective stripes on my panniers, reflective stripes on my rain jacket, a red reflector on my rear rack and two reflective ankle straps that kept my rain pants from flapping too much. I was also wearing an L.E.D. headlamp that I set to flashing mode. It was kind of like riding in a strobe chamber but I saw enough of the road to navigate and felt more secure that a vehicle stopped at a side road would more likely notice a flashing white light than a tiny constant light and therefore be less likely to pull out in front of me.

The captain at Biddeford had given me directions to Kennebunk, the next manned station. It was a long dark stretch of road and when I found the station there was no obvious front entrance that I could see but after circumnavigating the building I settled on the most likely door and pushed the doorbell. It was after 10 p.m. and all the lights were out. I had put in nearly 90 miles at that point and was ready to stop riding .A very groggy and burly firefighter came to the door not looking happy. I told him he could tell me to get lost but that I was a fellow EMT riding south and needed a place to sleep for the night and had been turned down at every station south of Scarborough where I could have stayed, but for the mistaken thought that I could find a place further south. He thought for a moment and then said he had no authority to let me stay but that he would stick his neck out and let me have a place to sleep if I promised to be out of the building when his shift ended at 6 a.m. I said I would gladly do that. He asked for some I.D. and then made copies of my driver’s license, EMT card and passport.

I was true to my word, leaving before 6 a.m. and rolled into Congdon’s Doughnut and Family Restaurant in Wells after a ride of a few miles. The sun was shining and the day held promise as a comfortable one. I didn’t have too far to go. Rye was just south of Portsmouth, NH and I wasn’t more than a couple of towns away from crossing the Piscataqua River and entering the city. Faye was supposed to meet me at my mother’s and then we would drive back home. After Congdon’s I noodled along on Rte. 1 and saw in the distance an orange flag flapping above a wheeled conveyance that I couldn’t quite discern. At first I thought it might be an electric cart used by someone with mobility problems but as I got closer I could see it had panniers on either side of a single rear wheel and was a recumbent tricycle being pedaled by someone wearing a broad-brimmed white hat. I rolled up alongside and said hello and the rider removed earphones and returned my greeting.

We struck up a conversation that lasted until Kittery with me sometimes riding on the traffic side of the recumbent and him sometimes riding outside of me. It provoked more than a few hostile gestures from passing motorists. But neither of us was too concerned. I’d been dodging cars for fourteen days and figured they owed me something. Contrary to the popular conception, the road doesn’t just belong to internal combustion engines. A check of the history books will show you that the first widespread use of pavement in America came as a result of the bicycle lobby and that automobiles really got their start in popularity thanks to the improving road conditions. Early automobiles were poorly adapted to the kinds of road conditions that generally existed in those days and it wasn’t at all obvious that cars were an advantage over horses until the proper road surfaces existed to prove that they were.

Andy Hall, a.k.a. Squidlyman, hailed from Cullowhee, N.C. and had started out in June on a journey that was just turning over 2500 miles at that point. He’d been to Canada and was returning down the Maine coast on much the same path as me. His bike was a Terra Trike made in Kentwood, MI and had taken him on a similarly long journey out west the summer before. He was very sold on the benefits of a recumbent, one of which was the absence of numb hands, which I had to agree was a drawback to two-wheeled traditional bikes as I shook mine out occasionally to restore the circulation and feeling. An additional advantage was being closer to the ground for, besides safety and stability, there was a greater likelihood that occasional treasures would be noticed. Proof of that was a Nelson figurine that was wire-tied to his toptube (if one can call it that on a recumbent trike). It was a talking figurine, something that probably once graced a Happy Meal, or its equivalent, and when Andy was feeling like the joke was on him he could push the button and hear a “Nya Hah!” to confirm his feeling of chagrin.

Upright bikes can climb more quickly and so on the occasional short rises in the road I soft-pedaled to stay in contact. He also admitted that he was at more of a disadvantage in off-road riding so I remained satisfied that my choice of bicycle was a better fit for my preferred routes of travel. We stopped at a gas station/convenience store across from the Kittery Trading Post and I knew from experience that Portsmouth was just across the river. The traffic situation was likely going to get much more complicated so I told Andy we’d probably reached a parting of the ways. We exchanged emails and took mutual pictures with the promise that we’d send each other the results.

Almost immediately after leaving our stopping place I had the feeling that any thoughts that bicycles might try to get from Maine to New Hampshire had never occurred to the road planners for that area. I was funneled onto a section of high speed divided highway with “no bicycles or pedestrian” signs but with no alternate routes provided and no way to reverse direction even if I had seen something. I assume that something else existed and would have liked to know what it was. In fact, I had sent the state of Maine an email requesting bike maps before leaving. A follow-up phone call when no answer was forthcoming revealed a backorder situation that would not allow the maps to be made available before I left on my trip. I was assured they were coming out in August. (It’s now a year later and nothing has ever arrived). To be fair there were downloadable maps available online. My problem was the printer I would have used to produce them did not use waterproof ink, a certain guarantee that, on a trip such as the one I had been on, all I would have had available to guide me at that point would have been an abstract watercolor painting. (A recent check reveals that unless I wanted to follow their specific loop routes there wasn’t much use to having the maps; not much help anyway in navigating from Point A to Point B of a self-directed path.)

The next bit of annoyance occurred trying to cross the Piscataqua River on a metal deck drawbridge. There was traffic stopped waiting for the bridge to drop following the passing of some boats. I rolled up beside another cyclist on a mountain bike towing a trailer full of camping gear. We exchanged enough info to determine we were both on the homeward leg of tours, and though his was a long weekend’s worth, he was a kindred spirit nonetheless. The displeasure came when traffic began to move forward and I pedaled along trying to keep a place in the flow as my tires wriggled along on the squirrely surface of the bridge. As I did, I passed signs announcing “cyclists must walk bicycles across bridge.” That was all fine except that attempting to stop to follow the directions at that point would have resulted in a significant loss of control and the very real possibility of being crushed by the car only a few feet from my rear wheel. No such signs had been clearly visible as I approached the bridge when I could have safely made adjustments to comply with them.

On the New Hampshire side of the river I rolled through the more scenic parts of Portsmouth’s downtown, including past the Strawberry Banke museum, and eventually found my way up a short rise behind one of the state government buildings. Sitting on a bench at a shady corner I was able to contact my mother for directions through the maze of streets to find my way to her apartment in Rye. After arriving, we shared news. I was able to put my pictures of the trip on her computer and tell her the story of my travels and before too very long Faye arrived. We said our good byes and then in an attempt to make things more interesting for Faye we went in the direction of the shore before turning toward home.

I was still on a mission to get a clam roll, having felt thwarted during my rainy evening ride of the day before. Faye was willing to indulge me but all three of the places we knew from experience to be sources of such things were either closed for the day or out of business. After some rather fruitless wandering we found ourselves back on one of the shopping strips and stopped at a franchise-style seafood place that offered whole-bellied clams. I finally had my roll, though not in the setting I had imagined. It was the figurative period at the end of my journey, a trip full of varied experiences that gave me many good memories to savor through the months that followed.

Appendix 1 ------- Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. (Wikipedia)

I see two intersections between my trip and Thoreau’s life. The first was his published account of a river trip rowing a home-built dory down the Concord River and up the Merrimac. The journey occurred in 1839, when Thoreau was 22 years old, in the company of his older brother John. After his brother died, Thoreau compiled the book as a tribute to him. He completed the first draft while living in his cabin on Walden Pond. Unable to find a publisher, and at the insistence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau paid to have the book published in 1849 with the title A Week on The Concord and Merrimack Rivers. It was his first published work and it did not sell, leaving him in debt and hurting his relationship with Emerson.

The book tells of a putative “week-long” trip up the Merrimac river to a point just short of Concord, N.H. and a brief description of a subsequent hiking excursion in the White Mountains along with a return to the skiff and downstream journey back to Concord, Mass. In fact, the length of time reported was a literary device since the journey lasted longer than a single week. Thoreau also used the book for expounding upon various points of his philosophy including his thoughts about the “Hindoo” religion. The edition that I have, edited out much of the digressive philosophy so I can’t say how tedious it was in the original, but the bits that I did read were distracting and may be a reason why the book was hard to sell.

My main enjoyment of the book is in its value as a travelogue and descriptions of New England river life in the first half of the nineteenth century. I will touch upon some of the various intersecting points further down the page. I have read the book several times, beginning when I was quite young and again just before setting out on my bike ride, and I feel a connection with Thoreau through our mutual love of the adventures and discoveries that come during a journey which is conveyed very plainly in this book.

The second connection with Thoreau and my summer journey is the chronicle of his three trips to Maine collected under the title The Maine Woods. The first trip happened in 1847 in the company of three companions and two river men. The six journeyed in a bateau up the West Branch of the Penobscot from the last settled town as far as Murch Brook (now Katahdin Stream). They left their boat and climbed Mt. Katahdin (Ktaadin in Thoreau’s spelling) although only Thoreau reached the summit. After the ascent they descended to the river, followed it back downstream and returned home.

Thoreau’s next journey to Maine occurred in 1853 when he crossed Moosehead Lake in a paddle-wheel steamer and entered the West Branch of the Penobscot via the Northeast Carry. Together with an Indian guide, Joseph Attien, and a relative he descended the river to Chesuncook Lake and up the Caucomgomoc in order to give the companion an attempt at killing a moose. Thoreau was uninterested in the hunt but came as an observer of the Indian guide and the natural surroundings. They worked their way back upstream to the carry and Thoreau returned to catch the ferry and journey home.

His final trip occurred in 1857 and was a real “river trip” of the type a modern paddler might take. He and a companion, Edward Hoar, hired the services of an Indian guide, Joe Polis along with the use of his birch bark canoe, and all took the stage from Old Town to Greenville at the foot of Moosehead Lake. They canoed up the lake, crossed the carry into the W. Branch of the Penobscot, paddled downstream to Chesuncook, up the Umbazookskus to Mud Pond Carry into Chamberlain Lake and the Allagash system. Using the carry from Telos Lake to Webster Pond they entered the watershed for the East Branch of the Penobscot and descended that through Grand Lake Matagamon back to the main river at Nicketow (now Medway) and then descended from there all the way back to Old Town.

The edition of the book that I read utilized an editing device that combined all three trips into one narrative, chronicling a hypothetical complete circumnavigation of Mt. Katahdin. It was confusing since it was geographically oriented but chronologically shuffled. I think I would have preferred all three trips told in their entireties even if there was considerable repetition (the editor’s stated purpose for doing it the way that he did.) It did have very nice pen and ink illustrations that helped in visualizing the sights of the trip. In fact at the end of the book, in a section of the appendix that described the Indian way of life, the illustrator used a photo of the adopted son of Joe Polis as a model for the face of the Indian at the head of chapter.

Again, where this book succeeds in my mind is as a travelogue and as a chronicle of the days of pre-mechanized logging and travel in the north woods. It is with mixed emotions that one reads Thoreau’s accounts of the Penobscot Indians interspersed as they are with some of the prejudices of his day but also marked by a sensitivity that is a product of his prototypical anthropological and linguistic interests and, I suspect, a refusal to participate in the wholesale prejudice that must have pervaded his time period.

Thoreau had refined his craft as a storyteller by the time he published his accounts of the Maine woods as articles in various magazines. He editorialized, as his comments on the wholesale disappearance of the white pine demonstrate, but his digressions are slight and not distracting unless you happen to strongly disagree with his opinions. Most loggers, hunters and industrialists of his day would probably have disagreed with his perspective. One perspective I find very much worth studying is his attitude toward wilderness. The Maine woods were a wilderness equivalent to that found a thousand miles west in Thoreau’s day. He reveled in the wildness of the place and lamented its eventual passing, predicting the coming of civilization and the tremendous loss such a coming would create in the experiences available to people. He openly envied the life of the timber cruiser, a couple of whom he met during his second trip, and held up a life lived in concert with wilderness as one that has great merit.

I have tried to avoid Thoreau’s digressive style in writing this account of my own travels. Rather than follow tangents as they arise, which leads the narrative down sidetracks, I’ve decided to reserve my opinions for the appendices. This way a reader who is more interested in the journey and less interested in the reflections of the journeyer is not frustrated by the digressions. My first tangent here, of course, has been to explain the connections I see between my own and Thoreau’s journeys. My device for this will be to retrace my steps, picking those points in the journey where I was reminded of something I had read in these writings that preceded mine by a century and a half.

Clearly the starting point for my trip is one of the major sites for comparison. Thoreau went to live at Walden Pond for two years for the same purpose I had for living on the road for two weeks. He is quoted on a wooden sign that sits beside his cabin site at Walden. When I visited the spot on the morning of my first full day on the road I was reminded of our similar perspective on life.

Riding a bicycle for two weeks is hardly the same thing as building one’s own cabin and living a solitary and semi-self-sufficient life of reflection for two years. But the quote doesn’t challenge the reader to imitate the achievement, only the frame of mind. What can life teach us? How can we be taught if our lives are so circumscribed and predictable, or worse, if they are cluttered and preoccupied with worries about possessions and income?

On a bicycle ride such as the one I took, you rely upon a very small set of possessions: only those things you can cram into your panniers, strap onto your racks, and are willing to push up all of the hills you encounter. You must be very deliberate in your choice of equipment. Your objectives are reduced from all of the cares that normally crowd your thoughts to just the mechanics of turning your pedals, reading a map, avoiding collisions with traffic and finding a place to sleep for the night. Everything else is extra. Encounters with people, whose lives you would never have had an occasion to become acquainted with, are one of the great blessings of such a trip. New and interesting sights are always welcome. Solving the problems that come up, from mechanical ones, to logistical ones, to route selection and dealing with the weather are all part of the adventure. Can you learn anything in such an endeavor that gives you the ability to say that at the end of all things you have indeed lived? I think you can.

I am not prepared to say that everyday life doesn’t also present us with adventurous circumstances but they are much more easily overlooked or dismissed as problems rather than opportunities to learn. My advice would be for everyone to strike out on some adventurous quest from time to time and see where the road leads and what lessons the experience has to teach. Don’t hedge your bets with copious amounts of equipment. Don’t plan your itinerary to death. Be ready for spontaneity to take over. Be prepared to deal with the inconvenient inevitabilities by using your own wits or by digging deeply and finding the strength to push through. Aren’t those things really life’s essentials, just as Thoreau had said?

I wanted a location or two along the road that I could say were spots where Thoreau had also been. Riding a bike along the shore of a river isn’t the same as paddling upon it. The Old North Bridge in Concord was an objective for that reason. There were many intersecting threads involved in visiting the bridge. There was the obvious reason most people go to gaze at it. It is a powerful symbol of our independence from the British monarchy. It is also an icon of one of the most enduring themes in our collective imagination, that ordinary citizens can effect change in the face of entrenched and overweening power.

The farmers who formed the Minutemen were not professional soldiers and yet they stood their ground against the British army. The statue of the Minuteman shows him with one hand on the plow and the other holding his musket. In fact, probably more than one Concord militiaman fired not a soldier’s musket but his own humble squirrel rifle. Thoreau’s friend Emerson wrote the words of the Concord Hymn that is used for the inscription on the base of the monument.

Revisionists can write histories that contradict it, but that doesn’t change this image that so many Americans have lived with and which has inspired and influenced the body politic for the life of this country. Thoreau was one who had a healthy dose of skepticism toward the sentimentalities that make up the national consciousness. He spent a night in the Concord jail for failure to pay his poll tax. It was his way of protesting an unjust practice in a country with which he had serious disagreements. His disagreements were with the institution of slavery and a war with Mexico that he saw as a land grab from a poorer neighbor. It is interesting to speculate how he would be reacting to wars like the one in Iraq if he were alive today.

However, his essay Civil Disobedience has become inspirational for those who would follow the example of the ideals of the Minutemen, that the disenfranchised can stand up to an unjust government. Thoreau adopted a position of non-cooperation toward the U.S. government. He had very little faith in the idea of “working from inside” for change. His writing inspired both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in their respective pursuits of justice.

I reflected upon my stealth camping philosophy in the light of Thoreau’s essay. I was clearly not following the law when I ignored the “No Public Entry” sign to enter the Walden woods, so I was in league with him on that point, but I feared my motives were much more selfish than his. I wanted to say I’d slept at Walden Pond for my own personal reasons only and yet I like to think he’d understand and approve. We live circumscribed by so many regulations and laws, perhaps much more even than in Thoreau’s day. Most of them make sense. If a society is to function, people need to acquiesce to the common good.

Squatting on public land is a detriment to that good in the majority of cases. However leave-no-trace, stealth-style camping on public land really does no demonstrable harm. The legal path, asking the DCR for permission to camp at Walden, would have raised such a specter of precedent it would never have been considered fairly, on its own merits. Almost before I could have finished asking the question, the steel doors of bureaucracy would have slammed shut in my face. No bureaucrat would ever take a chance on approving such a request. So I took the only realistic route open to me. The proof that I was correct in my contention is in the fact that I wasn’t noticed. I was the only one who knew that I’d slept there and if I hadn’t told, no one else would have ever have known. But unlike Thoreau this is not exactly the stuff of inspiration.

My second Thoreauvian location of the day was my campsite on the banks of the Merrimac just below Hooksett Falls. Thoreau mentions Hooksett in his book. The falls were an obstacle to flat boat travel and a canal, with locks, had been built around them, but he and his brother declined to use the lock and left their boat behind to travel further upstream on foot. Thoreau mentions Hooksett Pinnacle, a rocky prominence that overlooks the town and river. I had some thought of climbing it myself but it doesn’t have a maintained trail so I would have needed to snoop around looking for a route through the yards of the houses at its base and I worried about leaving my bike unattended, so I never followed through on the idea.

Sleeping on the banks of the Merrimac in Hooksett was my closest approximation of Thoreau’s experience on the river. When I left home, I had that town in mind as a good general objective for night number two but until I arrived I had no idea where I would find a place for my hammock. Early in the journey I decided to overcome my innate shyness and approach people for help with directions, etc. Going to the fire station and striking up a conversation with the firefighter there took a little bit of courage but in the end proved well worth it. At least this time, I had local approval for my chosen campsite, together with the sanitary benefits of a bathroom to use. It turned out to be a very pleasant spot to spend both the night and the following sunny morning and, again, it disturbed no one to have me there.

For the remainder of my ride alongside the Merrimac, and higher up the Pemigewasset, I have only fleeting connections with Thoreau’s journey in A Week…. My campsite at The Eddy was in Thornton, the same town where Thoreau and his brother spent one night. I rode through Franconia Notch where he spent another night. After Twin Mountain our paths diverged and wouldn’t reconnect until I reached Greenville and the areas recounted in The Maine Woods.

Thoreau doesn’t spend much of his writing describing Greenville on the two occasions he passed through it. He was much more interested in describing the wild lands. As I rode north from Greenville, I saw Moosehead Lake, described by Thoreau as “a suitably wild-looking sheet of water, sprinkled with small, low islands, which were covered with shaggy spruce and other wild wood” and stopped at the entrance to Lily Bay State Park which, at the time of his first visit, was the limit of travel north by road (and then only in winter). Now the area is clearly an important tourist destination. An impressive hotel, the Blair Hill Inn, commanded one particularly nice vista of the lake along the Lily Bay road.

My next intersection with a location mentioned by Thoreau was the foot of Chesuncook Lake that I reached just before the paved section of the Golden Road. I was able to get a good look at the lake from the shore of a southern bay which was choked full of dry-ki (driftwood from trees flooded by damming of the lake).

None of the lakes traversed by Thoreau have the same exact shapes now that they did when he visited them. Even in his day there were dams at the outlets that were used to control the release of water to assist with the floating of logs to the mills in Bangor. Those dams have been raised higher since then and, as an example, the flooded shores of Caribou and Chesuncook Lakes have now been joined into one larger body of water.

When I reached Ripogenus Gorge I was following a section of the W. Branch of the Penobscot that Thoreau never visited. The river falls through rapids that are now run using rafts, but in his day would never have been attempted, especially in a birch bark canoe. When I reached Abol Bridge I was back alongside a section of the river he would have visited on his first trip, the one during which he climbed Katahdin. The place I stayed for the night below Millinocket, at the rest area where the road and railroad cross Dolby Pond, is beside a flooded section of the old course of Schoodic Brook. In Thoreau’s day one of the rivermen that had helped pilot the bateau up to the foot of Mt. Katahdin, George McCauslin, had a farm on the bank of the Penobscot in the area now flooded by Dolby Pond. Thoreau described him thusly: “McCauslin was a Kennebec man, of Scotch descent, who had been a waterman twenty-two years, and had driven on the lakes and headwaters of the Penobscot five or six springs in succession, but was now settled here to raise supplies for the lumberers and for himself.”

From East Millinocket on down to Old Town and further along to Bangor, I was following either roads or paralleling sections of the river that Thoreau would have traversed during his Maine journeys. In fact, from Bangor on down to Bucksport, Thoreau would have traveled by ship in coming from and going to Boston.

Backing up, my stop in Old Town had given me the opportunity to visit Indian Island which is still the center of Penobscot Indian life. I neglected to take that opportunity but it is something I intend to do someday. My conversation with the paramedic at the Old Town fire station touched on the subject of Indian Island. The impression I gathered was that it generated a disproportionately large number of ambulance calls. That may have been white prejudice but I didn’t detect that in the paramedic’s tone of voice. He said it in the matter-of-fact way a professional would discuss the characteristics of his job.

According to the 2000 census there were 562 people, 214 households, and 157 families residing in the Indian reservation. Thoreau wrote “In 1837 there were three hundred and sixty-two souls left of this tribe.” Earlier he wrote “The ferry took us past the Indian Island. As we left the shore, I observed a short, shabby, washerwoman-looking Indian — they commonly have the woe-begone look of the girl that cried for spilt milk — just from "up river" — land on the Oldtown side near a grocery, and, drawing up his canoe, take out a bundle of skins in one hand, and an empty keg or half-barrel in the other, and scramble up the bank with them. This picture will do to put before the Indian's history, that is, the history of his extinction.”

The tribe evidently has outlived his prediction but his description of the Indian climbing the shore with an empty keg and a bundle of skins to pay for having it filled is an allusion to the terrible scourge of alcoholism that afflicted Native Americans in Thoreau’s day and continues to afflict them. This information, taken from the Internet (www.ericdigests.org/pre-9221/indian.htm) supports that. “Data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (National Institute, 1989) show that about 50 percent of all U.S. adolescents have used alcohol. The comparable figure for American Indian and Alaskan Native youth is approximately 80 percent (Beauvais, Oetting, & Wolf, 1989)”.

My own closest contact with native North American people was initiated, like Thoreau, as a result of a canoe trip that I took in northern Ontario in 1976 and then continued through work at the Moose River Bible Camp in 1977. The people of the river country that drains into James Bay, Ontario are Cree. My impression then was that the Cree culture was one that revealed itself rather reluctantly to outsiders. The people there were similar to some of the fleeting descriptions Thoreau provided of his Indian guides. One of the things Thoreau mentioned was the brevity of the response that his guides provided to many of his questions. I noticed that as well. One-word answers were the norm when I first began conversations with some of the Cree teenagers while my friends and I waited for the “ Polar Bear Express” to take us south from Moosonee, on the shore of James Bay.

I returned the following summer for a two-week stint as a counselor at a camp upriver from Moosonee. All the adults at the camp were “English,” that is non-native, with the exception of the camp director’s wife who was full-blood Cree. The camp director’s name was Dale Tozer. His father Percy had founded the camp and was titular head of it still. My main contact with the Cree people came through interactions with the campers themselves who ranged in age from very young (the youngest I worked with was only four) to slightly older (the oldest were either 12 or 13).

I can’t exactly say I immersed myself in Cree culture through the experience. The kids taught me some Cree vocabulary. I learned to count to ten in Cree. I learned some of what their life was like in talking with the older ones as well as listening to Dale and Percy and the other adults from the James Bay area. There was no high school in Moosonee. Those who wanted to continue their education were required to travel to an English high school and live away from home. Most of those who did, did not return to spend their adult lives in the community. The Cree Indian culture is one of only a few with a written language. It was an historically recent creation, but in Moosonee I saw signs in Cree and there was a Cree language newspaper. Nevertheless, it was a culture struggling for existence.

There have been strides made recently, from what I can tease out of Internet sites, but I would also suggest that an Indian culture anywhere must be like that of a displaced people still living in their former land. For a people to have been the residents of a place, to have called it their own home for time out of memory, and then to have to endure its loss and lose control of all the anchors of their culture: the burial places, the hunting grounds, the fields, the woodlands, the rivers and lakes, and the mountains; surely must be something white Americans have no concept of. We were a culture in crisis when our two next-to-biggest buildings were destroyed. As traumatic and horrible as that event was, it must still pale in comparison to the shock Native Americans have experienced. I think that the entire Indian culture must suffer from a society-wide form of post-traumatic stress that has been continuing for centuries. If alcoholism and suicide are more common among them it shouldn’t take a genius to understand why.

On that “happy” note I want to make mention of an area that I can’t offer even a token match with Thoreau. In both of the books with which I am drawing parallels he was careful to observe the kinds of plants and animals he saw on his travels. I must confess that except for an occasional notice of the roadside flora, particularly the ubiquitous rabbit-foot clover (Trifolium arvense), I failed miserably at keeping a catalog of my natural surroundings. I can remember the scent of sweet fern (Comptonia peregrina) while climbing through a particularly sandy road cut and of course knew when I was tying my hammock between two hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) at The Eddy. But as for dedicated journaling of the species that I was encountering I admit to none, with some regret.

On his Maine voyages Thoreau brought a plant press with him, presumably to preserve specimens of the hard-to-identify plants in order to get a more positive fix on them after he got home. He had, until recently, been considered only an amateur botanist but his records of flowering times and other observations of plant species and their cycles has been added to the growing list of evidence for climate change. A recent Boston Globe article quoted a BU biology professor, Richard Primack, as saying: “Thoreau was the earliest person to keep detailed records of when plants flowered in the US, and as a field scientist this is an extremely valuable data set to work from.”

The article went on to share the following alarming statistic: “Scientists from Boston University and Harvard reported that 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have disappeared, and another 36 percent are in such low numbers that their disappearance is imminent. These findings occur even though most of Concord's natural areas have been protected or undeveloped since Thoreau's time. During that same period, Concord's mean annual temperature climbed by 4 degrees, the researchers said.” (Baker, Billy. "Troubling Toll in Thoreau’s Backyard: Scientists Say Species Drop Amid Warming." Boston Globe 28 Oct. 2008). His botanical records are another part of the things for which we can thank Thoreau.

With that, I take leave of Thoreau and the convergence of our separate experiences and move on to other tangents.

Appendix 2 --------- Bicycle Advocacy

As stated earlier, “long bike rides through unfamiliar urban terrain encourages one to become a more vocal bike advocate.” Cycling advocacy is defined in Wikipedia as: “activities that defend the rights of cyclists to use the public right-of-way roads for travel, to improve the conditions for cycling, and to make cycling more popular.” One of the major U.S. advocates is the League of American Bicyclists.

Their history is summed up on the League website thusly: “The League was founded as the League of American Wheelmen in 1880. Bicyclists, known then as "wheelmen", were challenged by rutted roads of gravel and dirt and faced antagonism from horsemen, wagon drivers, and pedestrians.

In an effort to improve riding conditions so they might better enjoy their newly discovered sport, more than 100,000 cyclists from across the United States joined the League to advocate for paved roads. The success of the League in its first advocacy efforts ultimately led to our national highway system.”

Nowadays, the L.A.B. continues to advocate for “bicyclist-rights.” They are an important lobby in Washington and keep tabs on legislation that affects bicycling. Funding for bike paths and bike lanes is often under attack by conservative elements of the government. The L.A.B. posted a description of a new proposal by House Republicans to slash funding for bike projects. In the face of rising rates of obesity, climate change from carbon emissions and oil dependency it would seem that the bicycle is a logical alternative means of transportation but, despite that, conservatives want to see an end to government funding of the “Transportation Enhancements and Safe Routes to Schools programs and [the termination of] four non-motorized pilot projects mid-stream.”

The misplaced priorities of these attacks are summed up very nicely on the League’s webpage: The programs under attack are very popular and the demand for bikeways, etc. is currently greater than even the present programs can supply. Most of the traveling in this country, by car or other means, is local. The majority of it is two miles or less. A three percent reduction in vehicle use resulted in a 30 percent reduction in urban congestion in 2008. The final irony is that “subsidies given through tax breaks to drivers to pay for parking at work cost the taxpayer almost as much per year ($4 billion) as [the Republicans’] proposal to slash support for bicycling and walking would save in five years.”

One only needs to look at the livability of cities, in places such as southern California, that are based upon the exclusive use of automobiles, versus those that attempt to incorporate public and alternative forms of transportation, such as the bicycle, into their city plans. I had a chance to experience this first hand on my way through Portland, ME. I was impressed by the pleasantness of my transit through the city and the ease with which I was able to exit the city on brand new bridges and overpasses that were designed for both automobile and bike traffic. Andy Hall had more difficulty finding his way through Portland, so the city still has some hurdles to overcome, but it is a model for others to follow. The “cars only” model is not sustainable. I hope more people become aware of that.

The “Rails to Trails” programs that are turning the abandoned railroad rights of way into bike paths are another example of money well spent. Though in many cases bike paths are not ideal for commuting cyclists, they are a wonderful recreation resource and promote healthy alternatives to other forms of amusement. They are also the most family-friendly way to go bicycling, especially with young or new riders. I had exposure to bike paths in Franconia Notch and also after leaving Scarborough and heading to Old Orchard Beach in Maine. The old rail line that I followed is now part of an expanding trail called the East Coast Greenway (www.greenway.org) that is a project connecting all the major cities of the eastern seaboard for a total distance of 3000 miles. Over 21 percent of the trail is currently on traffic-free paths.

Their website says of the objective: “The East Coast Greenway vision is for a long-distance, urban, shared-use trail system linking 25 major cities along the eastern seaboard between Calais, Maine and Key West, Florida. It will serve non-motorized users of all abilities and ages. A 3,000-mile long spine route will be accompanied by 2,000 miles of alternate routes that link in key cities, towns, and areas of natural beauty. This green travel corridor will provide cyclists, walkers, and other muscle-powered modes of transportation with a low-impact way to explore the eastern seaboard.”

My brother told me an amusing story about a conversation he’d had with a woman who’d seen one of the “Share the Road” signs. It either said “Bicyclists” or showed a bicycle along with the statement. The S.T.R. campaign, being run by various bike advocacy groups including the L.A.B., is trying to educate both cyclists and motorists how to coexist. However, the woman in this story exclaimed to my brother, “Yes, those cyclists need to learn how to share the road!” thinking that the campaign was being run to teach bicyclists better manners. This is not to say that cyclists couldn’t also learn to be better users of the road, but the average motorist usually doesn’t pay much attention to how they need to act around bicycles and the laws say the bicycle has as much right to be on the paved surface as the car.

One way to get everyone on the same page might be through the “yellow-bike” programs that exist and are being started in urban areas worldwide. Boston is soon to be starting a “smart bike” program according to a bike advocate friend who keeps track of such things. These are community fleets of shared-use bicycles that anyone can take and ride to some place in the city and leave at their destination for someone else to use when the need arises (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_sharing_system). In some systems the bikes are free to use and are left unlocked. They are marked by a consistent color, hence the name “yellow” or “white” bike. In others they are dispensed through a locked docking station of the type that exists for shopping carts, etc. in malls and airports. A person receives their deposit back when the bike is returned to a station somewhere in the system. The “smart bike” system uses a card swipe process to release a bike from the station. In such a system only registered users could take advantage of the bikes but registration is made as easy as possible (http://www.smartbike.com/home).

One thing is clear, bicycles deserve more consideration as an alternative to the automobile. Riding a non-polluting, carbon neutral (at least post-manufacture), health-promoting means of transportation ought to be a no-brainer, but advocates for the bicycle have an uphill fight in this American culture.

Appendix 3 ----- Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

I’ll admit it. Joshua L. Chamberlain is one of my heroes. A professor, a philosopher and a true leader who seized a critical moment in history and made a certain difference in the outcome of a conflict that had earth-changing potential.

The inscriptions on the base of his memorial statue at Bowdoin are a good summation of the man. There are three sections to the wall that ring his statue. They are inscribed: “Soldier, Scholar, Statesman.” They refer to his civil war service, his life as a Bowdoin professor and later its president, and his tenure as the governor of Maine.

The best of the three, for me, was the soldier inscription. I will quote it here and hope that it will inspire someone else to look more closely at the life of this man who could easily be ranked with the best that Maine has produced.

“Colonel, Brigadier General, Brevet Major General. Army of the Potomac. Fought in 24 battles. Wounded six times. Distinguished for his unwavering courage and leadership under fire. Awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism at Gettysburg. Received surrender of Confederate arms and colors at Appomattox April 12, 1865. Ordered Union salute honoring defeated Confederate forces.

‘Joshua Chamberlain’s greatest contribution may have been not at Gettysburg but at Appomattox… Instead of gloating as the vanquished army passed, he directed his bugler to sound the commands for… a salute… That set the tone for reconciliation and marks a brilliant leader, brave in battle and respectful in peace, who knew when and where and how to lead.’ Field Manual 22-100 Army Leadership, August 1999”.

Appendix 4 ------ The North Woods

The northern reaches of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine are unique locations in our country. Far from fulfilling Thoreau’s predictions of domestication, there are vast reaches of forestland in the areas that he visited in the first half of the 19th century that are still untracked and unsettled.

The primary reason for that could very well be the logging industry. The land of the Northern Woods has been in the hands of that group for generations now. The contrast between the area north and south of the Connecticut Lakes is remarkable. Just over the international border one enters farmland where fields of wheat and hay are the dominant features of the landscape. It is clear that some hand has been over the New England North Woods that has kept them from succumbing to a similar fate. The climate is probably not the answer. I doubt the St. Lawrence River can exert a sufficient influence over areas like Chartierville and La Patrie to allow them to grow crops that couldn’t be grown over the border to their south.

The history of logging in New England is a varied and interesting one. A good book on the subject is Robert Pike’s Tall Trees, Tough Men. It is full of anecdotes and hyperbolic accounts of the life of the lumbermen. Quite a bit of it consists of first hand accounts from the early 20th century. Much of Pike’s material came from the people that lived it. Thoreau lamented the logging of the forests that he traversed. Ironically the coming of civilization, that he also lamented, was thwarted by the timber barons who were more interested in the profits to be gained by harvesting the trees than in selling their holdings for other uses.

The evolution of those timber interests has been profound. The original objective, and continuing through the time of Thoreau, was the white pine. Those trees towered above the rest of the forest and provided exceptional boards and lumber for building. The other evergreens of the forest, the spruce and fir, were largely unprofitable for harvesting in Thoreau’s day. The timber cruisers he met in his travels were hired by the lumber companies to search all of the untracked reaches of the forest for the, as yet, uncut stands of pine. Those last stands disappeared shortly after the time of Thoreau and the towering pines exist now only in memory. That memory is preserved in the symbol of Maine, which is called the “Pine Tree State.”

The needs of society changed, however, and the paper industry began to make use of the spruce and fir for making paper pulp. Pike’s accounts of the industry followed the growing demand for pulpwood. The log drives along the northern rivers ended as the current method for bringing pulp to its destination, the tractor-trailer, began to replace the river. The lumber companies were wise in their decision to manage the forest for sustainability, hence the need to maintain ownership of the land. But now there is another transition taking place. Paper is losing some of its place in society. The publishing industry is giving way to electronic means of information dissemination. Most of the big northern paper mills have closed and much of the industry has moved to the southeast.

The logging companies are more willing to sell some of their property. It will be interesting to see where this next chapter takes us. Public ownership is one option. The New Hampshire Fish and Wildlife department as well as private non-profit conservation organizations such as the Society for the Preservation of New Hampshire Forests have been acquiring some of these holdings. One large purchase involves the country south of the border with Canada in the watershed for the upper Connecticut Lakes.

The remainder of these old holdings might well end up in the hands of other private commercial interests with recreation objectives. The most desirable lots are being purchased for vacation home sites. Perhaps Thoreau’s prophesy will come to pass if populations grow and the climate changes to make the northern forests more like the hardwood forests to the south.

An excellent book to read on the subject is The Northern Forest by David Dobbs and Richard Ober, published by Chelsea Green Press in 1996.