“You can buy a bunch of high-tech stuff, wrap yourself in petrochemical clothing and go into the wilderness,” Garrett points out. “But that just adds to the feeling that you’re an estranged visitor. The source of your equipment is invisible—it has nothing to do with those mountains. You may or may not have a spiritual relationship with the landscape you go to, but I can guarantee that those things will slow down whatever emotional connection you have.” He concedes that in certain places—above timberline, or in a heavily used preserve—a person uses things like backpacking stoves because they have to. But if he’s traveling in Maine or the boreal forest, where it’s appropriate to cut wood with an ax, that’s what he’ll do. “Those tools give me a whole skill tradition—a life I can build and grow with. If I can make a crooked knife which makes me an ax handle which makes me a canoe paddle, and I go to interior Quebec in a wooden canoe that I can fix, then I’ve got this enormous string, this web, that goes directly to the environment I’m in, that teaches me more and more whenever I use it. I can’t imagine living without that kind of immersion.”
We clear the table and walk the half-mile of trail back through the woods, rubbing elbows with the balsam and birch, finally arriving back at the main lodge. The inside of the building is trim, like the lines of a well-made canoe, warmed by the gloss of red pine floors and walls and ceilings of white pine. Great dollops of sun are falling through skylights in the cathedral ceiling. Watercolors of the north country hang from the walls, seeps of gray and blue, as well as Nascapi snowshoes, and a large, uncluttered map of Labrador. At the rear of the main room there’s an entire wall of books. Enticing, appetizing books, the kind that as a kid I spent long afternoons pulling from the dusty shelves of my neighborhood library. Books like School of the Woods, The New North (Being the Account of a Woman’s Journey Through Canada to the Arctic), The River’s End, Bob North by Canoe and Portage, and Bob North with Dog Team and Indians. On the very top shelf, out of reach, are twenty-eight musty green volumes of the “Annual Report of the Journal of Ethnology,” 1881-1907.
Adjacent to the front room is a kitchen with stores of flour and dried fruit and vegetables, and a spacious, open workshop with stacks of canoes, and racks of ash and cherry stock that in Alexandra’s skilled hands will this winter be turned to paddles. In the midst of all the provisions sits an old Wellsmore and Company piano, several flutes, a Supertone accordion. Garrett explains that every year several dozen neighbors gather here for a spring fling, with big pots of food and people playing music and dancing until dawn.
We settle down again in the front room, beside windows that open to the woods. The conversation turns to upcoming river trips: the Penobscot and the Chesuncook, and two hundred miles in central Labrador, through ice-water canyons, past herds of caribou, and wolves running in the black of the spruce forest. Alexandra’s eyes are wide with the telling, as if a part of her has drifted away, is there already. It’s a look I see often in children, rarely in adults. She looks much the same way a few minutes later when I start asking again about her childhood in eastern Massachusetts—about the forested nooks and crannies that by the time she was sixteen had become “the arm around my shoulder, the place where I went to feel whole.”
“When we were young, we didn’t have a clue as to why we went to the woods,” says Garrett. “Young kids never do. But if you’re real lucky, you learn to trust the hunger.” With his parents’ support to attend an alternative high school, at fourteen Garrett pushed hard for the Vermont Academy, for the sole reason that the campus had woods on three of its four sides.
It was Garrett’s destiny to drive the counselor nuts. “I’ve narrowed down my choice of colleges to three,” he announced one day during a senior meeting. “All in the northern Rockies. But the University of Montana—that’s the one that really interests me.” The counselor, who by now should have known better, asked why, so Garrett pulled out a Forest Service map and unfolded it across his desk. “Look, he said. “There are five wilderness areas close by!” When he admitted he hadn’t given admission requirements or even course options much thought, the counselor put his head in his hands. “I thought he was going to cry,” Garrett says, sounding a bit sorry even now. “Someone looking at my life might assume I always knew what I wanted. But there was no plan. What I had was a search image. All I knew was what was acceptable.”
At one point the two of them depart to tend a phone call, leaving me sitting in the sun surrounded by the books and paintings, by the smell of balsam rolling through the open windows. I wonder how many guests fall in love with the symbols of these people’s lives—the wall-tent home by the river, the crooked knives, the wood-and-canvas canoes. Especially if they’re longing for place, if they’re hungry for connection. It’s easy to imagine being overcome by the kind of seductive thinking so often exploited by advertisers, the kind that promises new leases from the trappings of other lives. I can already see the television commercial or the magazine ad: Garrett and Alexandra out on a whitewater river deep in the boreal woods, paddles slick in the murky light. And a plug line: “Conover Canoes. When the river demands your very best.” We think that maybe if we have a boat like that, we can know something of the qualities it takes to animate it. And so we go buy one for a small fortune, bring it home and hang it in the garage, shuffle out to look at it when there’s nothing on TV.
“I think it comes down to being in touch with yourself,” Alexandra has said. “Being content with who you are. It so happens that we found that contentment in nature. But for someone else, it might come from art, from music or religion. The point of using a crooked knife—or of making a paddle or learning a difficult canoe stroke—is only this: that these things allow us to do something with care; they’re merely the channels for our passion. Anything done with care leads back to the self. And it’s from there that people tend to do things that matter most to others.”
I tell them I’m curious about the men and women who come on their trips. What does a week on a river in the woods do for them? Is it really just a vacation, or something more like a rite of passage? Garrett says over the years he’s noticed that people’s sense of ease in the woods tends to be proportional to how they’re feeling about themselves at the time. If someone comes on one of their trips short on self-esteem, he usually ends up spending the first couple of days worrying about how he’ll be perceived by the group. Wild, unfamiliar landscapes make the problem worse because they generate uncertainty; and when you’re already feeling shaky about yourself, giving up control to nature feels terrible. Any guide, he says, knows the symptoms: someone eating more or eating less, retreating to the tent as soon as camp is pitched.
I’ve talked to other outdoor leaders who like to apply what amounts to fireside therapy—group hugs, sharing circles, that sort of thing. Maybe it’s the New England blood in them, but the Conovers never suggest that at all. They seem to think the best way to beat anxiety is to teach people how to be just a little more in control of their immediate environment. Learning to build a fire or to filter river water, they say, is a small dose of mastery. And with mastery comes a sense of contribution. And with contribution, people start weaving roots—first to the group, later to the surroundings. Out in the woods, being relevant means fetching water, finding kindling, pounding in a tent stake.
“After the trips,” Garrett says, “I’ll watch these former strangers exchanging addresses and phone numbers, and it occurs to me that for a lot of these people, there’s no sense of community in their lives. Here, they’ve gotten a taste of it. They all put up a rain fly in the rain, and they all benefited from it. They talked at night around the fire about stuff, about life with a capital ‘L.’ There’s this little tribal entity, born out of nothing more than five days together in the woods.”
Sometimes people ask the Conovers whether they get bored running the same rivers year after year. “It’s a sign of inexperience,” Garrett says, “this notion that if you do something once, you know what that is. It’s like
a person. You don’t get sick of them because you see them all the time. You love them more because they’re always revealing more of themselves.”
Part of Garrett’s passion, I suspect, rests in the blissful knowledge that this particular home woods is in the toe of a boreal forest that stretches for hundreds of miles to the north and west. “One goal in all this learning,” he confesses, “first from the old Maine guides, now from the Nascapi—is that we’re planning to take a multiyear trip, largely self-contained. I want to make our own moccasins when it turns from canoeing to snowshoeing. We want to be able to say, ‘Well, here’s where we’re going to be until we have traveling ice.’ And that place had damn well better be where the caribou are, because we’re going to need a few of them. One day we’ll walk out of the bush at Great Whale River, Quebec, four hundred miles west of where we started, and come face-to-face with the farthest-upriver native trappers. And we’ll greet them in their own language. And right from the start, they’ll know two things: One is that we’re coming out of the bush with a body of skills that they remember if they’re over forty; and two, that we’ve spent some time among their people, because we can speak their language. And that gives us light years more acceptance. Imagine if we stumbled into the village and said, ‘Gee, where’s your best snowshoe builder, because we want to learn to build snowshoes?’ They’d say, ‘C’mon, get out of here. We’ve already been bothered enough by you people.’ And they have.”
There seems to be one fairly obvious contradiction in the Conovers’ lives. On the one hand, they live in a wall tent by the river, and on the other, they make a living taking city people into the woods—people who don’t really have to be there—and charging them a fair amount of money for the privilege. They take from the culture’s existing economic structure, while at the same time trying to live apart from it. I ask about this, and Garrett nods. “We’ve made choices. And those choices allow us to live outside those parts of the system that we find unacceptable. The truth is, that’s a skill. You’re supposed to do that; as Wendell Berry pointed out, you’re obligated to do it. We’re not hiding out. The books I write, the lectures I give, the town meetings I go to—the things our guests are able to take from a week with us—that’s what I can do. And that’s enough. Your highest calling is that thing which you’re really good at. Don’t exceed the bounds of your passion.”
Building conversation with the Conovers is turning into another birch-bark wigwam; I hate to overstay my welcome, but on the other hand, it’s awfully hard to leave. A hot, sticky afternoon begins to fade into a sultry evening. Standing on the front porch, I can smell every corner of the forest: the aspirin-like whiffs of birch bark, the dull lemon of leaves and grass, the scent of wet dirt, which is the olfactory equivalent of a motherly pat on the head.
On Alexandra’s suggestion we head out for a bite to eat—down the road twenty miles, to Dotty’s. When we arrive it looks like half the county is there, a wonderful collection of homegrown faces smiling over plates of steaks and hamburgers and fish, while fifteen or twenty of us stand in a line curling out into the mudroom, trying to jockey for a better view of a glass case spinning platters of cherry, chocolate mint, and banana cream pie. Perspiring waitresses squeeze in and out of the crowd like water balloons, seeking the easy paths through old men talking at tables on their way to the bathroom, out and around five-year-olds galloping up the narrow aisles.
It takes more than thirty minutes to get a table. With it comes a thin waitress in her early fifties named Jean, who in the midst of the craziness still finds time to make us laugh and call us “Honey.” We turn in our orders, Jean takes back our menus, and with a snap tucks them under her arm, slips back through the crowd. Waiting for our salads, I ask Garrett and Alexandra about the clients who don’t come, the ones who somehow hear about North Woods Ways and call up for more information, thinking its trips are something they’re really not. Entertainment. Distraction. It’s true that their brochures make it fairly obvious what to expect. Still, there must be some who don’t get the message. Surprisingly, the question causes the first flash of distress I’ve seen in Alexandra all afternoon.
“Oh, we get those all right,” she finally says. “‘I’ll want to see at least six or seven moose,’ they’ll say. Or, ‘I know there are bugs up there. Will any of them bite me?’ Or, ‘How many days of rain will there be next September?’ It’s terrible,” she says, crunching a piece of ice, her voice a strange mix of aggravation and worry. “I know that in this country this is heresy, but Disney’s version of nature scares me. Scares me like a Southern Baptist opening the front door and finding the porch filled with devil-worshipers. When that’s your only experience, you tend to see nature as something quantifiable, prepackaged. And pretty soon your most pressing concern is trying to get your expectations met.” She says she’d be surprised at the degree to which even people who do come on their trips are tied to the need for predictable experience. “If we’re on a trip and we say we don’t know where we’re having lunch—which is almost always the case—some of them will get frantic. It has nothing to do with appetite, because when we ask if they’re hungry, they say no. They’re just obsessed with having this target, this concrete expectation. Sooner or later one of us will have to say, ‘Oh, it’s just two and a half miles now, this perfect place on a bend in the river. We’ll be there in just over an hour.’ And then everything’s fine again.”
In truth, Garrett and Alexandra aren’t the only ones in these woods worried about this growing sense of impatience, of unease, in their clients. Another couple living just up the road, who own one of the oldest tourist camps in the state of Maine, say much the same thing. Only, they blame a lot of it on the fact that people have been deluded by television to expect that nature will provide them with one big parade of miraculous events. When it isn’t like that, they leave their little cabin on the lake and scour the countryside in search of outlet malls.
“If I can just get them to pull the rocker up to the edge of the porch and stare at that lake for one hour,” the woman says, “then they’re okay. They feel wonderful. But believe me, that gets harder every year.”
Chapter Four
THE NEXT MORNING I SNAP a couple of photos of Garrett and Alexandra for the fridge at home, and then I’m off, rolling south on a web of sloop-shouldered roads, past ditches lined with bindweed, down valleys filled with pulp, the smell of it turning, moiling, like a crock of sourdough batter left out in the heat. In places, the woods draw back, yielding the ground to long runs of potatoes; across the fields are old homesteads, easy to recognize by the pairs of maples or oaks growing outside the front doors of the main houses. “Husband-and-wife trees,” they used to be called, and the ritual of planting them was a celebration of intent, a pledge to place. Soul trees presiding over lives wedded to the woods: over fathers and brothers splitting fence rails with hickory mauls; and in spring, over women who sat patiently folding strips of basswood into berry boxes. Shade for daughters straining at oak churns to make their first batch of butter; for young boys sitting with knife in hand and tongues wagging, carving out apple-butter paddles for their mothers’ birthdays.
My plan is to sooner or later end up over a thousand miles to the south, in the big woods of the southern Appalachians. But for now, for at least the next several days, it seems best to travel much as Garrett Conover described his life moving—armed not so much with a plan, as with just a search image. Of course one of the great things in waltzing the woods is that you can stand at twenty paces and toss a dart at a map of the eastern United States and more than likely, you’d hit some grand tale of history or prehistory born of trees; nearly every back road, every woodlot, every small town still carries the echoes of that past.
Except for a curious abundance of Italian sandwiches, the road food is about what you’d expect in a land of woodlots and spuds. Tucked between the big, double-decker houses that front Main Street in the village of Mexico are broilers and mashed potatoes at the Chicken Coop
Class A Family Restaurant (“No Brag, Just Fact”), hot coffee and warm apple pie at the Going Home Cafe. If you choose to eat on the road, as I do today, for company you can count on Preacher Paul, the FM apostle from WWOR-FM, who begins his afternoon talk with pleasant, blue-sky thoughts of the hereafter—easy to digest with my pint of potato salad. Later on he starts wandering into the land of the strange—notions to pick the chicken out of my teeth by—cryptic, confusing ideas, like the need for preachers of the world to find the Alpha and Omega of grace.
Following Preacher Paul, and just in time for dessert, is a health show that starts off with Bob calling from New Jersey to tell us listeners he’s cured all that ails him—and I’m telling you, Bob was one sick man—through the miracle of Bogdana Power Creme for the feet. I glance at the pharmaceuticals rolling by the window—sweet clover for flatulence, mullein for asthma, dandelions for regularity—and have to admit that all of them put together couldn’t begin to do that.
The landscape of southwest Maine and northeast New Hampshire is choppy—dimples and roller-coaster runs of corduroy covered in mixed woods. This is prime moose country, a fact the state of New Hampshire doesn’t want you to forget. “Brake for Moose,” says a sign at the border. “It Could Save Your Life. 211 Collisions.” Moose are among my very favorite animals—so much so I sometimes have this weird notion of being protected against ever hitting one. Still, I have to admit that plowing into one with a Chevy van would be a horrible thing, a frightful omen foretelling the sourest of summers. To be safe I slow way down, switch off babbling Bob from New Jersey and focus all my attention beside the road—on these sweet, dark runs of maple and spruce, on wetlands near campgrounds wearing names like “Timberland” and “Pine Knot” and “White Birches.” Sure enough, in a few miles I spot a young male moose standing up to his kneecaps in copper-colored water, scooping up water lilies. A red Caprice is parked beside the road, and a large, fair-skinned woman is leaning out the window nearly to her waist with a disposable camera, snapping one picture after another.
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