A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  Annie Fitch was a big, raw-boned lady, though not a fat one, tough as nails when she had to be. My daughters made her tell one short anecdote every summer, never failing to delight in it.

  "There was this boy down to the high school who had a fancy for me, but I wasn't interested," she'd begin, her lip curling in an altogether uncharacteristic sneer.

  "One day when we were all headed out to go home, he come right up behind and tickled me. Well, I didn't like that, and I just saw red. I turned and gave him a punch, put him right over the rail of the schoolhouse.

  "He got up and said, 'Hey, I was only foolin'.' I just told him, 'Well, I wasn't!' "

  So here we stood, at Annie's Camp, as it too will always be known. A FOR SALE sign was staked at the head of the dooryard path. Ginnie and Vinny had recently built a new house on the shore of Big Lake, toward Princeton, and they spent a fair portion of the winters in Florida now anyhow. I knew they'd been trying to unload the Oxbrook property, but the real estate swoon begun in 2007 had left it without a buyer for these three years.

  "Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?" my wife asked.

  "And you are too," I replied. It might make sense. It really might make sense.

  My brother and sisters and I took over the management of my parents' island after our mother's death in 2000. We had children of our own, and some already had children themselves. It was going to be increasingly complicated to sort out which crowd would be there, and when. If we had Annie's Camp, our own direct line would have something that was theirs alone in this dear territory.

  Of course I already owned my beloved river camp in the village, and had lately refurbished it, if not quite so elaborately perhaps as Vinny might have. Was I bidding to become a local land baron? No, but our grandchildren would be imperiled by the crashing rapids of Big Falls, the way their own parents had been when they were small. As all this progeny burgeoned, there'd be more than one option for my descendants if there was a full house at the bigger family place.

  That was the objective rationale. The deeper one had to do with some sense of symmetry in our taking possession of our priceless friend's retreat. It somehow felt as though to own Annie's Camp would almost be to enter her very bloodstream, to feel her generous spirit coursing through us until we too were gone. Then it would flow through our grandchildren; they hadn't known Annie, but they would somehow know her in their futures.

  Robin and I believed this instinctively. Annie was a haunt, benign as one could ever be.

  Now Vinny and Ginnie were the last people on earth we wanted to take advantage of, but we did know their price had sunk over time, despite their having bought out the lease on the camp property so that the plot would be freehold. To the eventual delight of our bankers, we made our decision on the spot.

  There was, however, yet another motive. That camp would in due course be engulfed, or so we profoundly hoped and still do, by a sustainable 22,000-acre community forest, one dedicated to the people of the settlement, perpetuating perhaps above all the traditional uses—hunting, fishing, canoeing, trapping, and so on—they had practiced for 180 years, clients in tow or not. I'm the chair of the campaign for those acres, which the local land trust means to acquire in three phases: first, the development rights to half, then those of the other half, and ultimately, all being as it should, the trust will buy the acreage outright.

  The trust's brochure explains that the current effort "will protect the key 21,700-acre gap in a nearly 1.4 million-acre international wildlife corridor between Maine and New Brunswick. This is a big hurdle in a successful effort to conserve the Downeast Lakes and over 370,000 acres of forests."

  1.4 million acres, a mass of land and water that's larger than my home state of Vermont—the notion will thrill me forever.

  The project includes the eastern shoreline of West Grand Lake and eastward still through largely coniferous woods to Big Musquash Stream, one of the loveliest and most unspoiled wetlands in North America. On the far side of Musquash lies Passamaquoddy land, and the tribe has wholeheartedly supported our efforts from early on, two chiefs in a row serving as campaign members.

  The West Grand Lake Community Forest will be managed in accord with the Forestry Stewardship Council's "green" guidelines. It will be managed, too, as much for wildlife as for timber, with the wildlife's habitats in fact getting preference at any point when the two might come into conflict. In these respects, it will be like 34,000 acres of woods on the other shore of West Grand, the Farm Cove Community Forest, which was part of a vaster project, grassroots at its very heart, for which my brother Jake and I and many others had also labored long and hard during the first ten years of the century. The land trust—in partnership with the New England Forestry Foundation—had succeeded in completing the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership, which involved the purchase of that Farm Cove territory, together with the development rights to over 300,000 further acres.

  All along, I must confess, I longed for a time when the very need to do this work, to preserve the wildness of this neighborhood, would have been the last thing on anyone's mind. For well over a century, locals in this region were in many ways beyond the reach of what others called the modern world, and most were content to be. If they left for employment elsewhere, almost all made their ways back.

  I'd lived in that blithe period, the end of it, as it turned out, and I had loved it. That was then, however, and this is now. I've had to face up to the fact. So have a lot of folks.

  The work goes forward. Those of us who are deeply committed to it were of course delighted when, in 2010, our project was selected by the federal Forest Legacy Council as the number one forestry conservation project in the United States. As such, it stood to receive a crucial $6,700,000 in aid toward its completion. We could also expect a million via the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, or NAWCA.

  In 2011, however, the new House majority in Washington recommended that these grants either be zero-funded or radically diminished. Of course, close as I've been to this effort, I was bound to grumble at such a decision, especially given the majority's unwillingness to consider wastefulness, say, in the military.

  Yet I won't let what started in tenderness turn even briefly to mere polemic. The money did come through, after all, thanks in considerable measure to the advocacy of Maine Senator Susan Collins. I believe that she, like so many of us closely involved in this endeavor, saw our project as something beyond mere tree-hugging. In this dirt-poor corner of the nation, even to work on a crew that installs and maintains culverts for the hauling roads is a boon. Old-time employment in actual logging and related operations is rarer and rarer in the Northeast—as in a lot of America now, the pulp and paper industry having first gone literally south, to places like Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi, where environmental laws and labor costs were less restrictive than in the north country, and then overseas, thanks to the marvels of globalization, to Poland, Slovakia, Siberia, and, of course, China.

  So no, no rant from me, whose most genuine motive for involvement had been Harley, Annie, Bill, and many like them, people who have meant so much to me for as long as I've lived. Sustainable forestry, the harvesting of specialty wood, species-focused cutting, that is, would have a much weaker hold on my imagination if all didn't have these crucial human applications.

  The word ecology, after all, is based on a Greek root meaning home; the traditional uses that our effort means to guarantee, then, have as much to do with the homeland, the community, of men and women and children as with that of beaver, fisher, moose, salmon, and rare black tern, profoundly important as all these doubtless are.

  Our effort means to safeguard and promote the economic activity to which guides—our area having the greatest number in the state of Maine—can point, along with lodge owners. Forest practices that keep the woods and the wildlife, aquatic and terrestrial, in good health are essential in this respect too. Had the effort been aimed at the mere setting aside of wilderness for the pleasure
of those who like us could afford to visit it, Jake and I might not have signed on.

  After my wife and I made our decision, our friend Dave Tobey told us he was glad we'd decided to buy the place. Like me, like Robin, he thought this marked a proper line of descent. I'm proud that he thinks so, though no matter how much a woodsman I half-rightly think myself, given yet another seven decades I'd be no Harley, let alone Dave.

  Dave is one of the most intelligent and canny people in my circle, a guide and hunter and trapper of exorbitant intellectual and natural curiosity, more so than even Harley or Bill. He was crucial to the founding of the land trust; he and several other local guides charted a course of action when word got out that their neighborhood was up for liquidation logging and development.

  "If that happens, then you can kiss our way of life goodbye," they told one another.

  And surely he was right. Either that whole mass of forest land, including the entire west shore of beautiful West Grand, would go the way of a Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire, or some of that state's Upper Connecticut Lakes, quarter-acre lots dotting the shores, or worse, so far as the locals were concerned, it would be transformed into a few "kingdom estates," complete with chains and bars and No Trespassing signs.

  That corner of Maine owes Dave and the others a vote of thanks. I'm not embarrassed to call them heroes.

  "Too bad," Dave commented, "you couldn't buy the stories along with the camp."

  Amen.

  And yet I do know a few of those stories by way of Harley himself, his son, and especially, as I've indicated, his daughter-in-law. There's the one about Paul Hoar, the village storekeeper, for example, who remained handsome as Apollo until he died in his mid-nineties.

  One year, shortly after the Second World War, Paul was guiding a female deer hunter out in that section, and Harley guiding one of her friends. It seems there came a dreadful early-evening snowfall, a virtual whiteout, and Harley rightly advised his sportswoman that they'd do best to head for the lakeshore camp.

  Paul and his client did make it back to Paul's truck, and he understood not to wait around. Harley knew that territory out by Lower Oxbrook well enough to negotiate it blindfolded. He'd be all right. Paul would drive back and fetch him and his sport come dawn.

  Next morning, Annie told me, the whole party reunited at Weatherby's Lodge, where she was cooking, and where the women hunters had taken a room for the trip.

  "Where were you last night?" inquired Paul's client.

  "We stayed out to Harley's camp," the other replied.

  "Damn!" said her friend, a word rarely heard from genteel ladies in those days. "Damn! I've been trying to get stranded with my guide all week long!"

  Annie remembered Paul blushing and excusing himself to "go check to see the ammunition weren't wet." Even the Boston ladies must have known the silliness of such an alibi.

  That was the yarn that came to me as Robin and I stood on the stoop of Annie's Camp. I chuckled aloud.

  "What's funny?" she asked.

  "I'll tell you when we live here," I answered.

  We walked down to the lake, where a familiar feeling crept into my being. Gazing at the unspoiled far shore, with its pickets of driftwood and its lichen-fuzzed stone, I suddenly remembered a bass fishing trip with my brother after the Downeast Lakes project had been completed.

  For the preceding decade, Jake and I had been deep in thought about conserving that great swath. We were in and out of meetings, making phone calls one after the other, traveling to push for donations. Thus preoccupied, we'd almost forgotten the bigger picture. Remarkably, or not so remarkably perhaps, we both looked up at the same time on another back lake, scanning its beautiful ridges and shoreline. We thought out loud, "This will never change!"

  I won't speak for Jake, though I bet I could. In that moment I recognized that our parts in effecting this result, though we were a mere two of many, needless to say, would likely be the most important ones we'd ever play, at least as citizens, in our earthly spans.

  The wind suddenly picked up on Lower Oxbrook Lake as my wife and I made ready to leave. I noticed a brilliantly white gull fighting against it, aiming at Grand Lake, but soon, it would seem, thinking better; it banked abruptly, then soared right toward us where we stood, a few feet from water's edge. Now the bird turned again, hovering just overhead, almost motionless, the stiff blow suspending it. We could nearly have touched it.

  In that instant, I remembered an account passed down by her father Frank MacArthur to the place's prior owner, Good Mother Annie. After the death of his wife Nelly, her own good mother, Frank was out in his canoe, glum, bait-fishing for his lonely dinner. Suddenly, just such a gull dropped onto his bow.

  "I know it was Nellie," Frank told his daughter. "She said she'd come back to look after us, and she'd be a white bird."

  I am neither a mystic nor given to superstition, but I think back on that moment as I write this, when the bright gull hung like a lantern at the Oxbrook camp, and I somehow feel trust. I'm sure that Annie and others like her will hover over our struggles, will see to it that we conserve as much as possible, human and wild, public and personal, of what we've come over decades to love.

  Bill Fitch, co-builder of the Oxbrook camp and Annie's life companion, tonging out ice.

  _______________

  *This, in minimally revised form, is the oldest essay in the present collection. I include it in part to remember the sort of hunter I was, which is both continuous with and different from the one I am today. I hope at least that some of the young one's immodesty has abated, as I know his youthful physical energies have.

  Cold Time: Reprise

  Daybook, January

  I took a hike to The Lookout yesterday, a day that soon became my latest candidate for Most Beautiful of Winter. Now words must fail to render it.

  They'll fail to render you, too, Mt. Moosilauke, accursed and blessed! As the air of late afternoon purged itself for one of those nights of severe, absolute clarity, you took on a glow like caramel; today you show a lilac, to give some puny name to a color ineffable, beyond the capacities of the great water-colorists.

  From now on, I shouldn't try to describe the mountain, or this feeling of bittersweet frustration that she spawns in me. I should work at some oblique remove from her. Having been cleansed by the mountain's grandeur—for good, I always think—I can make myself ready for other, lesser responses to other, lesser things.

  So, to start again as easily as possible, the day was indeed beautiful, as always in this month, provided we have adequate light. I sometimes wonder, in fact, how it is that people so revile this month; the response seems automatic, not thought through. Surely I can't be the only watcher to have witnessed a yesterday so splendid, to have known such glorious January light.

  The morning had broken gray, the world reduced to grim flatness, flat grimness. But that was a necessary lull. Out of it, given sunshine, everything could erupt again into the sort of splendor I find more moving than autumn's. It seems to cause an actual ache, too much of which would destroy me.

  I had an absurd and absurdly grandiose thought on wandering downhill from The Lookout: the north country, I mused, may be a bit like me. Not of course with regard to beauty, but rather to something like temperament. Those given to astrology could provide an explanation, itself of course absurd and grandiose: I'm a Capricorn, thus tending to reserve, resistant to highfalutin' notions of the sublime. Since I'm born on the

  Sagittarian cusp, however, one might predict occasional airiness, artiness, hyperbole from me.

  Needless to say, I disbelieve entirely in such foolishness. If I'm a border character, that was a geographical matter at most in the moment I describe. I'd been standing on a granite hill, almost as far east as you can go in Vermont, gazing across the river at a much vaster one in New Hampshire, nearly as far west as you can get in that state.

  Who needs to go beyond such mere facts? And yet on a day like yesterday, just as that glory of land and
air could burst from drabness, so indeed may I break out of suspicion and skepticism, at least temporarily, leaping into romance.

  Bring on the elves and fairies.

  Wild Black Duck

  I am reducing a sauce whose recipe came down to me, like so many, from Annie Fitch. I hear it bubbling over the stove's low heat; soon it will look a little like maple syrup, and in due course it will complement the wild black duck that my wife and I will be sharing this evening, New Year's Eve, which will find us in bed before the famous ball drops way south, in the city.

  I will grill the bird over oak coals in an outdoor hearth. I mean, how else would anyone cook it?

  I lost my brilliant duck dog Topper some nineteen years ago, and have hunted few ducks since. I made such a drastic training mistake on his successor Rosie (I'm embarrassed to go into detail) that she, or rather I, washed out. Muddy, the bitch pup who was meant to be her successor, turned out to have so many major health problems—a pair of intestinal surgeries before she was even two—that I could never train her, and there hasn't been an apt moment since to find another duck dog, three dogs already in our house quite enough.

  But Topper's death by cancer (a more and more common story among dogs in our time, especially purebreds) coincided with other discouragements. I used to wait until the second half of our season for the ducks, the whole month of October given to ruffed grouse over pointing dogs. But November and December ducks here have always been the migratory blacks, the red-legged ones come down from Canada, and as greater and greater chunks of precious wetland have been lost to so-called development, and as black ducks have increasingly hybridized with their more adaptable mallard cousins, the species has been badly threatened. Quite some time ago, then, federal authorities reduced the limit on black duck to one. That's a worthy measure, but as I say, a discouragement: who wants to rise two hours before dawn, put out his spread of decoys, sit unmoving in a brutal cold, only (ideally) to take a single shot, retrieve the decoys, his fingers burning with the chill, and paddle back to the truck?