The Tonic of the Wilderness

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken to concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured As April’s green endures

—Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

Although Henry David Thoreau mentions Schoodic Lake only once in his travels through the Maine woods, a legend persists in our neighborhood that he was led by an Indian guide by way of a trail that eventually became the road to the North Cove, our part of the lake. I like to think that I have been traveling the road on which he set foot, though, even if it were the case, I can hardly claim the wilderness he explored. Although he was not the first white man to travel through north-central Maine, nor the first to climb most of the way to the summit of Mt. Katahdin, he did indeed enter a wilderness vastly different from the one to be encountered 160 years later, an era of clear-cutting and backpacking on well-maintained trails—a wilderness given largely to tourism and logging—and that, even as I write, is in the process of great change.

Much still remains of the wildlife and vegetation Thoreau identified. I have seen moose and deer, which still abound, caught a glimpse of bear, and on occasion have come upon beaver, otter, fisher, weasel, and fox. A musquash hiding under a railroad tie once bit our eager golden retriever on the nose when he went to introduce himself. Last summer a hedgehog, a great bristling specimen, appeared before me in the road. And we’ve lived among numerous generations of rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks. No wolves did Thoreau hear howling in the distance, and the coyote had yet to make its appearance. We hear them now at night sending their voices to the moon. And the wolf is beginning to make a comeback. In its heyday Schoodic was known for landlocked salmon and lake trout, for bass, and, long ago, for white perch. And I’ve been bitten by the descendents of all the insects that pestered Thoreau—black flies and mosquitoes, deer flies and no-see-ums, which are emphatically present.

I have been to the towns of Lincoln, Millinocket, and Bangor in their extended modern scope. He visited them when the surrounding areas were sparsely populated. A few tracks led through these open spaces, dotted by a farm here and there, but visited mostly by loggers in search of white pine, the wood of choice for the furniture and finish work of the more settled areas to the south, such as Boston. Indeed, Thoreau said, “the mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of country, from every solitary beaver swamp, and mountain side, as soon as possible”—a statement that seems quite as relevant nowadays.

Certainly Thoreau’s is a wilderness that has to be imagined, a wilderness moist and dark, damp and mossy, with forests that seem to extend forever. The closest I can come to a parallel experience is that of the rain forest in northwestern Washington, part of the Macah Indian reservation. The forest seemed primeval, as though man had never set foot there. The giant trees owned it, indifferent to the puny creatures walking below. Since I haven’t explored much beyond Schoodic and certain designated areas of Baxter State Park—which was created with the behest that the land be turned back to the wilderness that awaited the Pilgrims when...