In the winter of 1972, I moved to a small cabin in Washington County, after coming to Maine to help a friend winterize a summer cottage where he planned to live with his young family. But tightening up the cottage was like trying to heat a lobster trap, and he gave up (or his wife did, which I came to realize was the same thing) and they moved away two months after I arrived.
It was crazy, but with nowhere else to go, I bought a chainsaw and began cutting pulpwood for a logging contractor who had a contract to supply International Paper with 500 cords of spruce and fir. Like everyone else in Washington County, I spent the winter cutting pulp, then dug clams in the spring and fall and raked blueberries on the Barrens for Jasper Wyman in the summer. After two years, I went to forestry school to try to make something out of myself.
After forestry school, I got my first real job, with a salary, health insurance, a week of paid vacation—the whole bit. My parents were thrilled. My job was to chase after French Canadian logging crews in the remote Allagash region of northern Maine. The chief forester who hired me said, “You won’t be much good to us for the first six months because it will take you that long to learn how to get around on our private woods roads.” Nothing could have excited me more. “I’m not the kind of man who tends to socialize,” as Paul Simon sang.
But the woods were like nothing I had imagined. The district manager told us that he wanted to see us heading out of town Monday morning at six and we had better not be back in town before noon on Friday. I spent the week in French Canadian logging camps, where only the bookkeeper spoke English.
“No cupe le epinette,” or “Don’t cut the spruce” was the most common phrase I used with logging crews week in and week out. In the woods, you would say of a mean-spirited logger, “He has a face like ten miles of bad road.” And there were a lot of bad roads in the woods. The camps were single, male and occasionally violent. The only education that mattered was what you learned from the school of hard knocks. My dog, Jesse, was my best friend.
The camp housed maybe 25 loggers—Canadian bonded laborers who came in from Quebec through a remote border gate. In the winter after a really cold night, they would get up at 4 in the morning and go down to their skidders to build a little brush fire under the machine’s belly pan to thaw the congealed oil and diesel so the beast might cough reluctantly to life after the sun rose.
There were four meals a day served in the cook shack—breakfast at 5:30 a.m., dinner at 11 a.m.(unless you packed a sandwich when you were going out timber cruising beyond the known world), supper at 5:30 p.m. and then lunch before you went to bed. We went through at least 100 pounds of potatoes—about a pound day per person—between Monday noon and Thursday when everyone headed home for the weekend—except for the forester (me), the bookkeeper, the cook and the cookee (not a dessert, but a woods term for the cook’s helper).
One winter afternoon I was cruising timber with Jesse, out beyond the end of the woods road trying to get a general heading for where I might lay out the rest of the road. I had gone several miles, looping back and forth through uncut stands of timber when I suddenly realized that darkness was descending rapidly. I turned around and began quickening my pace back through the woods, but after a short while, there was not enough light to see my compass. I had a few matches in my pocket, so I could stop to light a match and get a bearing. But that took time and was good for about a quarter of a mile before I needed another bearing.
Then I ran out of matches.
I was thinking that the end of the road, a 50-foot wide right of way, was an uncomfortably small target to find and was starting to get anxious about a night in the woods. Jesse cued right in on my panic and started loping off ahead of me. I had little choice but to follow him, as I couldn’t see anything else. A good 40 minutes later, well past dark, he brought me right to the truck.
That spring before mud season shut everything down, I came to the intersection of two woods roads. I had to stop and take out the aerial photos and a compass to figure out which road to take. There was very little radio reception in the woods, but occasionally I could catch a snippet from somewhere, and through the static I heard the opening cords of Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years.” Whenever I hear that piano intro I am instantly alone in the woods again: “Four in the morning, trapped out, yawning, longing my life away”¦” By the time the alto sax cut in, tears were streaming down my face.
Crazy as it was, I was going to leave the only real job I had ever had and start all over again somewhere else. I headed to the coast and got a job teaching natural history on a remote island for $125 per month, plus room and board, but that’s another story.
Philip Conkling is the founder of the Island Institute.