by Porter Fox
“DON’T LET THE NAME FOOL YOU,” Abby Pond said of Forest City. There was no city, just a boat launch and a single-lane dirt road that ran two miles to town. I walked for an hour down the road without seeing anyone. Orange leaves helicoptered from the sky. I eventually found East Grand Lake Road and followed it north toward Wheaton’s Lodge, where I had reserved a room for the night.
It was surprising that a middle-aged man with dark hair and a dark complexion, wearing a black down parka and carrying a laptop computer, could illegally sleep in Canada, cross the border thirty-five times, and then walk, unobstructed, into an American town. There was no law enforcement at the boat landing or on the outskirts of Forest City. “You can cross wherever you want,” Pond told me. “But they have a saying up here: There aren’t any local papers because everyone knows the news before it could go to press.”
An elderly woman with a gray bouffant pulled up behind me a hundred yards down East Grand Lake Road. She was driving a four-wheeler and wearing a tracksuit. She didn’t say anything at first, just stared at me and scowled.
“Where you coming from?” she finally asked.
“The boat launch,” I said.
“What boat launch?”
“Forest City. On Spednic Lake.”
“But where did you come from?”
“Vanceboro,” I said.
“How did you get here?”
“I canoed. From Vanceboro. To here.”
“But where are you coming from?” she asked again.
We stared at each other for a long moment, then I walked away. She followed me for a minute, then took off in the opposite direction. That night at Wheaton’s Lodge, the owner, Patrick Patterson said, “That would be Georgie.” Georgie had called the lodge after confronting me to report that someone she didn’t recognize was walking through town. Patrick’s wife, Sandy, had left the front desk to join the hunt. The two women drove around town—Sandy in a John Deere 4×4, Georgie on the four-wheeler—but didn’t find anything. Sandy and I must have just missed each other, because I spent the entire episode waiting at the front desk beside a hand-scrawled note that read, “Writer guy arrives today.”
I told Patrick that small-town, grapevine security was apparently more effective than the border patrol. “I guarantee you the patrol knows exactly where you are,” he said. Patrick is just under six feet tall and north of two hundred pounds. His presence is channeled through a voice two octaves deeper than anything I’ve heard come out of a human. He used his gift in a previous life as a radio DJ and only recently reinvented himself as a guide. He and Sandy bought Wheaton’s Lodge in 2012, and Patrick was still getting his head around the idea of driving skinny canoes through rough waters five days a week.
It is hard to imagine Patrick nervous about anything when he’s wearing his northland business suit—duck pants, suspenders, flannel, wraparound sunglasses. He is the reincarnation of Paul Bunyan, with an affection for military terms and a seemingly endless supply of one-liners. He is the kind of northlander who knows a lot about the woods but also how to tell a good story. When I asked him how the border patrol knew exactly where I was, he unfolded five meaty fingers, one at a time, and said, “Cameras. Drones. Satellites. Sensors. Air surveillance. One way or another, they’ve got eyes on you.”
The patrol had eyes on him one night when he was ice fishing with friends. “Ice drinking, we call it,” he said. One of his friends loosed a couple of rounds from his 9-millimeter pistol at a beer can, and four snowmobiles approached “in formation.” The snowmobiles stopped a hundred yards away and watched the crew. Eventually, four border agents walked over and asked if anyone had firearms or narcotics. “Every one of us has a firearm,” Patrick told them. They asked what kind, and Patrick and his friends produced their weapons. “Does it bother you that your buddy’s gun is bigger than yours?” one agent asked.
Sandy showed me my cabin, and Patrick offered to pick up my canoe at the landing. His demeanor changed the moment we pulled onto East Grand Lake Road in his pickup truck. He had more pressing problems than the border. He had unknowingly joined another of the northland’s dying tribes when he bought the lodge. A shift away from remote wilderness getaways among American travelers was cutting into his margins. Wheaton’s Lodge has no TVs and limited cell phone service. Internet speed is dependent on meteorological conditions. The lodge is two hours from the nearest airport and is the perfect destination for anyone looking to unplug in one of the last untrammeled regions of America. The problem was, most Americans didn’t want to unplug.
Maine’s northland was once an exotic destination in America. Wilderness lodges in Aroostook and Washington Counties helped create the idea of domestic destination travel in the late 1800s. Wealthy tycoons of the Gilded Age rode the trains they built to Augusta and Bangor. “Sports” spent weeks in hand-hewn lodges hunting caribou, deer, and bear and drinking whiskey with rugged Maine guides. Many of the men who shaped modern America cut their teeth in the Maine woods. Henry David Thoreau’s first naturalist essay was published after an expedition to nearby Mount Katahdin in 1848, six years before Walden was published. Teddy Roosevelt’s first hunting trip was in Maine in 1878. He was nineteen, asthmatic, and skinny. He walked hundreds of miles with his guides, became lifelong friends with them, and took them with him years later to run his cattle ranch in North Dakota.
When Woodie Wheaton built his lodge in 1951, many of his guests were wealthy businessmen and celebrities from the coasts. East Grand Lake was featured in national magazines for its trophy smallmouth-bass fishing, and Wheaton’s became one of the top fishing lodges in America. Rooms were booked May through October, a year in advance. Generation after generation of Wheaton’s diehards arrived for their annual dose of blueberry pancakes, guide’s coffee, and steak-and-fried-potato shore lunches. Things had changed, though, Patrick said. People these days wanted easy, not hard, and bookings were down during shoulder seasons. “It’s getting hard to keep it open this late,” Patrick said. “Ain’t worth it after a certain point.”
Patrick waited for me to empty the canoe and haul it onshore before loading it onto the trailer. We didn’t talk on the drive back and repeated the routine in reverse at the lodge. Patrick drove away, and I looked for a place to keep the canoe. There was a small dock nearby, protected by a homemade dike. I tied it up there next to three cedar Grand Laker square sterns.
That night, East Grand Lake transformed into a cauldron of orange-blue light. The sky lit the water, and the water reflected it back up in an infinite loop. River flies buzzed through the twilight, and a commercial jet etched a magenta streak across the clouds. The northwest wind was gone, and glassy swells left over from the gale rolled through the water. The weather report said that the front had blown through. The next day was supposed be seventy degrees with southwest winds at five to ten miles per hour. If it held, I’d be able to reach the headwaters of the Saint Croix by afternoon.
SEA SMOKE SWIRLED OVER the lake the next morning. There was no wind. The water was a mirror. Sandy packed two sandwiches, a wedge of pie, and a Stanley thermos full of guide’s coffee in a wooden picnic basket, and at seven o’clock I headed out. Border commission surveyors had paddled near here two centuries before to resolve other disputes with the 1783 Treaty of Paris. One was the location of the “highlands” that the agreement named as the northern extent of the Maine border. The highlands had been a well-known portage east of the Saint Lawrence River since before European contact. When it came time to enforce the border, though, the British claimed that the ridge was located two hundred miles south, putting twenty thousand square miles of the northland in question.
Maine planted settlers in the contested region. Canada dispatched timber operations to cut forests there. On July 4, 1827, a logger named John Baker and his wife, Sophia, attempted to secede from what was deemed Lower Canada by the British. Baker raised a white flag with an eagle and a semicircle of red stars on it that Sophia had sewn and declared the region the “American Rep
ublic of Madawaska.” That night, the Bakers’ American neighbors, and one Frenchman hired to play music, threw a house party to celebrate. The following morning, likely a bit hungover, Baker wrote out the framework of the new republic, and a dozen families signed the document.
Baker ended up in a British jail a month later, and the Republic of Madawaska disappeared quietly. The border dispute did not. The Aroostook War broke out in 1838 between Maine and British Canada. US President Martin Van Buren authorized $10 million to raise a militia to fight the Canadians. Nova Scotia raised just $100,000. The war ended the following year without a shot fired.
Such border skirmishes weren’t all bad for the United States. America instigated many of them to spark rebellion in Canada against the British. The Founding Fathers’ ambition to include their northern neighbor in the Union was no secret. Benjamin Franklin demanded that the British cede all of Canada at the end of the Revolutionary War. Written into the Articles of Confederation was the line, “Canada acceding to this confederation, and adjoining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this Union.”
The Continental army attempted to invade Canada in 1775 to convince French-speaking citizens to fight alongside them. The campaign failed, and they soon retreated. US forces tried again in 1812 with a similar result. As late as the 1920s and ’30s, the US Joint Planning Committee drew up plans to seize Canada. “War Plan Red” would commence with bombing raids on port cities like Halifax and Quebec. In 1934, chemical weapons were approved for the attack, and a year later, $57 million was allocated to build three airfields, disguised as civilian airports, on the northern border. After the New York Times got hold of the plans and ran a story on the program, it was dropped.
Final resolution of Maine’s border didn’t come until 1842, when Secretary of State Daniel Webster forged the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Webster was a canny negotiator and worked with Alexander Baring, Baron Ashburton, a former banker who had come out of retirement to save Britain from what looked like certain war. Ashburton’s orders from the British were to preserve the north side of the Saint John Valley, which connected the maritime colonies to Quebec. Webster’s job was to convince a half-million Mainers, who refused to give a square foot of territory following the Aroostook War, to let it go.
Webster hired a Portland lawyer to write newspaper articles under a pseudonym, encouraging the citizens of Maine to support negotiation. He then produced two maps. The first, for the British, showed the northern highlands as the clear, agreed-upon border referred to in the Treaty of Paris. The second, used to leverage the Americans, marked the border more than two hundred miles south along the Kennebec River—nearly cutting the state of Maine in half. The line had been proposed and drawn by Benjamin Franklin himself.
The evidence was enough to convince the two sides to compromise. The treaty drew a line due north from the source of the Saint Croix River to Grand Falls, then west along the Saint John River—giving seven thousand square miles to the United States and five thousand to Great Britain. The treaty also finalized the border between Lake Superior and Lake of the Woods in Minnesota, ended the slave trade on the high seas, and mandated shared use of the Great Lakes.
I MOTORED ALL MORNING along the border, past brown sandy beaches and garage-sized boulders poking out of the water. White pines, lodgepoles, and red spruce grew along the shoreline. The border pushed me close to land a few times, and I spotted a black-backed woodpecker and yellow-bellied flycatcher darting through the trees.
It didn’t make sense that Americans had lost interest in this. America was born in the wild. Explorers and pioneers shed their European roots as they traveled west and created a new identity. Champlain’s expeditions, Lewis and Clark, Thoreau, the emigrant trails, the hunting lodges of northern Maine—all blazed through the wilderness. As the “Frontier Thesis” historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, “The American character did not spring full-blown from the Mayflower, but came out of the forests and gained new strength each time it touched a frontier.”
Thoreau passed within thirty miles of East Grand Lake on two of his three expeditions to Maine. He published his account of the trip in Sartain’s Union Magazine. The essays were eventually collected in a posthumously published book titled The Maine Woods, which revealed a lifelong fascination with the northland, conservation, and naturalism.
Two of Thoreau’s guides were Penobscot Indians—Joseph Attean and Joe Polis. The group traveled by canoe, in French bateaux, and on foot. They slept in blankets by a campfire. The 3.5-million-acre boreal spruce-fir forest between Moosehead Lake and the Canadian border was unmapped at the time. (Much of it still is.) Thoreau drank cedar beer and hemlock tea with homesteaders, ate moose lips, and learned to speak Abenaki. He documented the hard, spartan life of the frontiersman (“We breakfasted on tea, hard bread, and ducks”) and the beauty of backwoods rivers and lakes (“a suitably wild-looking sheet of water”).
He floated under the stars in a canoe while Joseph lured bull moose with birchbark calls. Northern Maine was still a borderland then. Canadians and Americans alike wandered across the line, looking for timber and game. The endless miles of evergreen changed Thoreau forever: “Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man.”
Tan stripes marked the high-water line on bluffs across from Blueberry Point. A stand of red and orange maple and oak rose over a small hill and dropped to the lakeshore. A large window at the Fosterville border crossing faced the road. I hugged the American side of the channel under a small bridge between the two border stations. I glanced back from the other side and saw the top of a border agent’s head looking the other way.
Cedars swooped over a beach on the southern shore of North Lake. Water lilies and duckweed turned the water green near the mouth of Monument Brook. A massive, restored farmhouse stood on the eastern end, surrounded by pasture. The water in between was flat calm.
The boundary runs through North Lake into the brook, then to a concrete marker at its head, where it shoots due north to the Saint John River. The marker is called Monument 1 and is the first of more than nine hundred that reach across America to the Pacific. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, not in the sense of the phrase, but literally not a single vapor formation—just striations of light to lighter blue lifting from the horizon. It was the quietest place I’d seen on the border, a no-man’s-land at the head of Champlain’s Saint Croix.
I heard a single-engine plane but couldn’t see it. The only thing watching me right then was a turkey vulture perched on top of a pine tree and a few dozen bullfrogs. I paddled to the mouth of Monument Brook. I wasn’t sure how far upstream I would go. The channel twisted left, then right. I made it around the first bend with a breeze at my back. There wasn’t enough water around the next turn, and the canoe hit bottom. I stared into the trees for a while and waited for the stream to push the bow around. Then I paddled a few strokes, drifted into America, and followed the current back to the lake.
PART II
THE SWEET-WATER SEAS
5
THE WAITING ROOM AT SAINT LAMBERT LOCK IN MONTRÉAL IS FURNISHED WITH TWO black, pleather couches, six office chairs, and a large wooden table pockmarked from what looks like an all-night knife game. There are holes in the sheetrock and sand tracked across the tiled floor. Two windows look out on a quarter mile of chain-link fence surrounding the building, a parking lot, six security camera towers, and a guardhouse where several armed men watch 750 feet of placid, blue-green water rise and fall twenty-four hours a day.
It was a warm June day, and a few scattered showers had left puddles in the parking lot. The bluestem growing around the Saint Lawrence River, where the lock is set, was brilliant green. The air smelled
like fresh-cut grass. Lachine Rapids, which Champlain portaged around on several trips, is a few miles upstream. Sixty miles beyond that, the US-Canada border enters the Saint Lawrence and continues west, splitting four of the five Great Lakes.
Saint Lambert Lock is part of the oldest and most traveled inland waterway in America—a 2,300-mile corridor that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes and the American Midwest. Since deep-draft navigation opened on the river in 1959, more than two and a half billion tons of cargo, worth about $375 billion, has traversed the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Western coal floats east on the route, along with limestone from Michigan and wheat, sorghum, corn, and soybeans from the upper Midwest. Iron ore, finished steel products, and project cargo are transported west.
I’d been waiting twenty minutes for my ride, a 740-foot freighter called the Algoma Equinox. The Equinox is owned by a Canadian company, Algoma Central Corporation, that has operated trains, ferries, trucks, and freighters on and around the Great Lakes since 1899. The Equinox is the flagship of a new class that Algoma is building. It is the most advanced bulker on the Great Lakes—faster, larger, and 45 percent more fuel efficient than the company’s existing fleet. The $40-million ship sails from Quebec across the Great Lakes twice a month, transporting iron ore west and grain back east. Like many freighters around the world, it also occasionally carries passengers. Algoma family and clients, and the occasional journalist, willing to take the slow boat get a private cabin, three meals a day, and shore leave wherever the ship loads, unloads, or stops at a lock.
The Equinox’s captain, Ross Armstrong, emailed me the itinerary two weeks before. Pick up at Saint Lambert lock. Follow the border across Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Superior. Drop off at a grain terminal in Thunder Bay, five hours north of Duluth, Minnesota. It took Champlain three months to make half that journey. We would cover it in six days.