Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  Every summer Barry makes a trek with some young Penobscots, running a hundred miles from Indian Island to the base of Maine’s greatest peak, the old giant, Mount Katahdin. It occurs to me that in the difficult hours—those painful miles when you think you’re going to either pass out or at the very least, throw up on your shoes—stories of the Pure Men must seem like extra breath.

  All day long people on the street have been catching glimpses of the wigwam, this cinnamon-colored dome nestled in the cedars, and a lot of them have wheeled in for a closer look. Almost like they can’t help it. “It’s so beautiful,” says a woman from Kansas City, maybe forty-five, while her husband circles it, pokes his head through the east-facing door. “Will you be staying in it tonight?” he wants to know. “Not me,” says Barry. “I’ve got a motel room with a shower and a TV.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Bev spots the wigwam from halfway across campus, clutches her books tight to her chest and runs over. “Oh wow,” she says, panting hard to catch her breath. “I can’t believe this. It’s just the way I saw it. This is going to sound really strange, but…well, I’m studying to be a midwife. Last month I started dreaming about helping women give birth inside a wigwam. It looked just like this.”

  Barry nods, keeps quiet. She waits. “What do you think that means?” she finally asks.

  He smiles, tells her it’s not for him to decide. “Put it in your life where it fits best,” he says. To me, the dream seems perfect. Back in the 1920s, paper birch was chosen as America’s “Mothers’ Tree,” which is why you can still find it growing at the White House, where it was planted to honor the mothers of the presidents; and at the Capitol, for the mothers of the nation; at Arlington National Cemetery, for the moms of fallen soldiers.

  “Can I touch it?” Bev asks, looking hopeful. And she walks up and lays the flat of her hand against the skin of the inner bark, just like I’ve seen Barry do at the end of the day when we’ve finished working.

  Around eleven we take a break, lie on the grass beside the wigwam, eat bagels and drink coffee and play with Barry and Lori’s eleven-month-old daughter, Sakwani—the Penobscot word for springtime. In the two days I’ve been here, Sakwani has never once strayed from these pieces of the forest. She snubs squeaky ducks and Fisher-Price blocks in favor of sheets of birch bark—hugs them, rubs her cheeks on them, smiles like a blue sky whenever she feels them against the bottoms of her bare feet. When she’s not fondling birch she’s chewing on spruce roots, or running her fingers through the ribbons of basswood bark, or wobbling over for another whiff from the bucket of sealing pitch. When she sits on my lap I can smell the forest in her hair.

  Lori is saying that the best part of working with birch bark is going out and finding the trees. Being out in the woods in early spring looking for that special one—the way the trunk glows against the dark of the balsam and spruce. There’s a strong smell of sap when the knife blade cuts through the outer layers of the bark. And then a loud “pop” as it releases from the tree.

  We’ve set about our work again when a friend of Barry’s shows up: a woman in her sixties, a Penobscot artist from North Branch who’s come to town to be part of a weekend art show. She works with birch too, though her talent lies in using knives to make fine engravings on the inner bark, slicing delicate lines through the thin, rust-red winter layer to reveal the buff underneath. She describes her latest project to me—a series of three panels depicting her last deer hunt. She stays for a long time, just sitting quietly while we work—Lori scraping bark, Barry sewing, me with my roots.

  Nearby, a class of fifth-graders is playing some kind of nature game where the kids are supposed to act like different parts and processes in the life of trees: leaves falling, random visits by woodpeckers and bees, rain being sucked up along the lateral roots, nuts falling, water pumping up the xylem, moisture rising to the clouds through transpiration.

  “People are adrift these days,” the Penobscot woman says to me out of the blue. “It’s because they don’t have acts of creation in their lives.”

  And that’s all she cares to say about it. Later on, driving west across Maine in my van, I’ll find it hard to get that comment out of my head. In the end I’ll decide that people in America start out giving birth to all kinds of creative acts. But when those acts turn into something different than we imagined, something less than perfect, we walk away, tell ourselves it wasn’t meant to be. One of the most comforting things about the old Penobscot world is that the creators made mistakes all the time.

  The great giant Gluskap, who created humans by shooting arrows into the trees, splitting the trunks and allowing the first men and women to step out into the world, was just a guy of average intelligence, a kind of blue-collar superhuman who learned as he went. Take fish. When he first started making them he was all thumbs, which is why even today some, like puffers and toadfish, are so incredibly homely. Likewise, Gluskap’s squirrels used to be enormous. Later on, when people stumbled onto the scene, Squirrel went berserk, running around gnawing off trees, tossing boulders around—a real loose cannon. Gluskap called him over and soothed his fever by petting him. Each time his hand stroked Squirrel’s back, the creature got smaller and smaller (and its tail curled a little more), until it reached the size and shape we see today. Squirrel still runs around chattering and tossing nuts at the sight of people, but let’s face it, the damage is trifling. Grasshoppers, skunks, moose, beaver—all of them were works in progress. Gluskap just kept fussing until he got it right.

  It’s nearly dark when we call it quits. All that’s left to do is seal the seams with pitch, then secure the bark with an exterior frame of ash poles. I’m leaving tonight, heading west to chase the ghost of Joe Knowles, so I’ll miss those final touches. Sakwani is asleep in the car seat, and Barry, Lori, and I sit on the grass in the last of the light, mostly just looking at the wigwam.

  “If we were going to use it in really cold weather,” Barry says, “we’d put another run of birch bark on the inside of the main frame, then stuff moss into the space between the layers. When you’re ready to move—maybe it’s time to go where the salmon are running—you just take off the panels, roll them up like a rug and be on your way. Use them on other frames in other places.” Ingenious, really. It’s curious that the earliest colonists, who were in no small measure ramblers themselves, used to sneer at the Penobscots for being so nomadic. Finally they claimed that the Indians’ refusal to stay put and farm was a breaking of biblical law, a transgression that left them ineligible to own land.

  We finish loading the last of the tools, say our good-byes, and just like that, they’re driving off into the night toward Bar Harbor, the taillights of the minivan blurring in a thin sheet of fog. I walk over to the wigwam one last time, lay my hands against the cinnamon-colored bark, find myself hoping for an act of creation.

  Chapter Two

  SOMETIME IN THE TAR BLACK of last night Cirrus sneaked over the lip of the east horizon for the first time this year, and with a tiny blink of white light, ushered in the dog days of summer. It will be hot today. Over ninety. Grainy clouds of flies and mosquitoes are already pushing through the forest, driving moose onto roadways and into water up to their necks, setting the ears of whitetails to a crazy twitching, as if something was short-circuiting inside. At an old tie bridge I watch the Dead River ease south in the dawn light without a whisper; it gathers up the springs and creeks gently, the way a person collects blackberries at the end of the picking season, handling the overripe fruit with exaggerated care, trying hard not to bruise it.

  Well beyond the banks of the Dead River, the terrain runs level for a while, bumps once or twice, then makes a sudden rise some thousand feet into crumpled loaves, leaving the horizon looking as though someone had slammed the oven door on a half-done soufflé. And yet the weight of the uplands can’t erase the feeling that this is a subtle place, a place of nooks and crannies: small bowls scooped out of the pine-covered hills where black bears snooze in the afternoon h
eat; smooth blades of granite plunging into gardens of bracken fern; muddy passages cut by beaver into the grassy skin of the willow islands.

  This is my second trip in as many days up this twisted gravel road to King and Bartlett Lake—point of departure in 1913 for wild man Joe Knowles. Yesterday everything ground to a halt some eight miles from the lake, at a roadblock made of steel cable hung with tattered ribbons of logging tape. And a plywood sign: “Private Camp—No Trespassing”—the hand-lettered words served up by someone either impatient or uninspired, slanted and uneven, trickles of paint hanging from the corners of the letters. From its anchor to a big pine, the cable crossed the road, then headed over open ground to the side of a small, slumped wooden cottage, passing into the front porch through a small box about the size of a telephone book. Behind the porch screen, a half-dozen people in fishing hats were slumped in lawn chairs, heads tilted back toward the ceiling, then rocking forward again, fastened to cans of beer.

  “No sir,” the lone woman on the porch tells me when I ask about going through, folding her ample arms, which are flushed and bitten by the out-of-doors. I scan the other faces—all belonging to men, mostly middle-aged and older—looking for encouragement. But they merely nod and stare at the floor. “Just can’t let you through,” the woman says. “The place is for registered guests only.” Without thinking I ask whether it’d be okay to grab my backpack and walk in the eight miles from here. Beers stop in midair and faces turn, openmouthed, as if trying to figure out if I’m being funny, sarcastic, or just plain stupid.

  And that was when I knew the only chance I had of making it to King and Bartlett short of an air drop was to ride in on Joe Knowles’s coattails. So I squatted on my haunches beside the empties and the pretzel bowls and started recounting the strange story of this middle-aged wild man, buck-naked, disappearing into these same woods for two months just to prove that the average American still had sap in his veins. Thankfully, some of the older men have heard of Knowles—actually grew up with older relatives telling the tale. Maybe it’s the beer, but for whatever reason they seem to turn wistful at the mere mention of it, eager to remember if not the story, then at least the tellings.

  By the time I finish with Joe Knowles going off on a vaudeville tour, I’ve been offered a lawn chair and a cold can of Busch, and the woman is calling the owner of the camp to see if it’s okay for me to come up and look around. On the phone, she’s downright enthusiastic. “He’s researching this wild-man thing,” she says, then turns to me, passing on the owner’s approval with a quick nod. When she hangs up we talk a little more. She tells me how the fishing’s been slow, how the flies are so bad this year that moose are crazy with them, bolting onto highways and being killed by cars.

  After ten or fifteen minutes, I finish off my beer, offer my thanks, tell them I hope the fish start coming around and head back to the van. As I pull forward, the cable drops onto the road, lowered from the porch by one of the men sitting within arm’s reach of a trailer crank screwed into the small box the size of a telephone book on the side of the cottage wall.

  I find Fred Thurston sitting in a room off the back side of the kitchen in an old lodge—a classic woodland building, comforting with its stone fireplace and heavy logs, its big stuffed furniture meant for big stuffed men. Thurston is a thick-legged, heavy-fingered, barrel-chested Welshman, sitting like a coach with his team of guides by his side, drinking fifty-dollar-a-bottle cabernet. His wife Betsy is there, too—an attractive, poised, forty-something woman in khaki shorts and a safari blouse, busy spilling out details of her latest sail-fishing exploits in the Caribbean.

  “Ah yeah,” Fred says when I mention Knowles, nodding his head, seeming plenty familiar with the story. “Probably didn’t really do all that, though. At least most of the old-timers around here don’t think so. But then, what the hell do we know?”

  For a long time Fred and Betsy Thurston were guests at the King and Bartlett Camp, coming year after year to unwind, using it as a combination spa, summer camp, and neighborhood tap. Finally they just up and bought the place, funding the purchase with part of a small fortune made juggling more fast-food chicken franchises than probably even the Colonel ever intended of one couple. Between stories of carousing in gambling houses in the Bahamas with a certain famous country-music star, Fred invites me to poke around for as long as I like—even offers me the services of his guides. The last of the wine disappears around midnight; Fred gets up, suggests I follow him and Betsy home, says I can use their house as a place to sleep and work. Back at the cable roadblock, Fred honks his horn and someone sitting in the dark on the porch of the cottage cranks down the wire and we go roaring off toward Eustis at fifty miles an hour in a cloud of dust. Rolling hell-bent through the woods, I’m thinking I really should’ve gotten around to putting those deer whistles somebody gave me three years ago on the front bumper of my van. Then I could be busy right now praying that they work for moose.

  At around four in the morning, somewhere in the thick of a wine sleep, that country-music singer we were talking about earlier eases through the front door, accompanied by Fred’s son and his girlfriend, creeps up the steps, throws open the door to the bedroom beside mine and with a bloodcurdling holler that would scare the hell out of any audience at the Grand Ole Opry, leaps into bed with Fred and Betsy. Fred lets out a roar like a snoozing bear being launched with a douse of ice water. That peters out into cursing, chiding. “You crazy little shit!” Pretty soon the whole troupe shuffles past my door and down the stairs into the kitchen. I lie in bed until about four-thirty, then head down to join them. Everyone is dressed, fresh cocktails in hand, talking about fishing. Fred smirks at me when I walk in. “Christ,” he says. “You guys from Montana sure like to sleep late.”

  By the time I reach King and Bartlett this morning, an east wind is up. Six-inch waves are running arm in arm past the boats of the fishing camp, past the pontoons of the float plane, cresting at the beach in flashing lines that throw off the reds and silvers of the sunrise. The guides are huddled in the back room again, this time peering out the windows, fretting that their clients won’t be able to fly-fish in such choppy water. “She’ll lay down this afternoon,” Glen says, turning away from the window to search for his mug of coffee. Two drakes roar over the trees and drop hard onto the water. Glen is the senior guide at King and Bartlett. His other job—his dead-of-winter work—is as a skidder driver, snaking sawlogs out through the frozen woods to be loaded onto trucks and taken to the mills. Physically, he’s exactly what you’d imagine from either profession: six-foot-something and square-jawed, skin the color of toast, and shoulders and upper arms swelled from the year’s labors. And whopping hands—log-wrestling, splitting-maul hands.

  A large woman dressed in white from head to toe, Linda hurries in from the kitchen, gliding like a butcher on roller skates, her arms cradling four huge plates covered with hot biscuits and eggs and bacon and perfectly browned potatoes. “It’s thanks to my Aunt Ida,” she yells from the kitchen when I ask her where she learned to cook like this. Aunt Ida, the housekeeper who lived with the family for seventy years, Ida the fairy godmother and keeper of the hearth, who could grow absolutely anything and cook absolutely everything.

  “Did Roger have too much to drink last night or what?” Linda asks Glen, changing subjects as fast as she flips pancakes. Roger is a guest, the CEO of a large electronics firm in New York. “First two days,” she says, filling me in as she eases down the last of the platters, “you couldn’t calm the man down with a hammer to the head. He should be out here in the kitchen by now, driving me crazy.”

  “Keep your eye on Roger,” Todd says. “He’s a classic cliff dweller” (a more or less friendly guide term for people living in New York). “Tomorrow he’ll stop talking so much. His shoulders will drop a little. By Tuesday he’ll be so relaxed he’ll practically be falling asleep in the boat.” In the middle of this last remark Fred comes through the back door, sniffing the air as if to make sure the kitch
en is running right, pulls up a chair next to mine.

  “One thing you’ve gotta realize,” he says, his small, deep-set eyes flaring above his copper-colored mustache, showing no sign whatsoever of last night’s drinking. “The guys who visit here work damn hard nearly every week of the year. They come to get refueled. A little fishing. Maybe a drink or two and a little talk. When they leave, they’re back on their feet again.” An image flashes through my mind of these executives as boxers and Fred as their manager, rubbing their shoulders with the woods between rounds, feeding them a diet of clear nights and the cold smell of pine pouring through the cabin windows.

  On my way out, I say hello to a large, pale man, walking briskly, hands in the pockets of a new pair of jeans, eyes straight ahead. It’s Roger. He almost stops to chat, but in the end just slows a bit and talks over his shoulder, as if breakfast is an appointment and he’s late. And being late isn’t yet an okay thing.

  Stuffed with breakfast and conversation, just like Joe Knowles was by the grace of some other King and Bartlett cook more than eighty years ago, I grab my pack and set off through the woods. By reading Knowles’s accounts, as well as by talking to a couple of old-timers who claim to be versed in his adventure, I’ve pierced together at least the first part of the wild man’s route. My plan is to follow it out from the lodge, first heading northeast on an old tote road toward Beck Pond, then east across the shoulder of Bear Mountain toward Lost Pond, where Knowles hung out off and on for the first several weeks of his adventure.

  For about the last twenty years I’ve had this fondness for going through wild areas, especially woods, off-trail, cross-country with map and compass. I started playing with it during college in southern Indiana, stumbling through the hardwoods of the Hoosier National Forest, got more serious out West, in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. It’s one of those things that’s especially exciting right at the start, when you don’t know what you’re doing. The first few times you find the courage to take off through a mile or two of forest, you’re as likely as not to find yourself locked in this overwhelming feeling that the compass broke, all the while this little voice saying you’d be a damn fool to depend on some flimsy needle surfing the earth’s magnetic lines instead of trusting your own gut feeling that north is somewhere else altogether.