Waiting for Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau climbed Mount Katahdin 153 years ago. What did he find there -- and what's left of it?

by Clint Willis

If you and your vehicle are reasonably fit; if it's not snowing; if you don't stop at Casa de Siesta (House of Nap?), the topless bar you'll pass on the way from I-95 to the gatehouse at the southern end of Baxter State Park; if the rangers let you in when you get there -- if you meet each of these conditions and hurry, you can get from Portland, Maine, to the summit of Mount Katahdin (5271 feet) in eight or nine hours.

My friend Hughes Kraft and I took our time. We departed Portland one Thursday last month in my wife's 1991 Taurus wagon, spent the night in the park, and climbed the mountain Friday morning. Total hours consumed: about 27.

The summit of Mount Katahdin marks the beginning (or the end, depending on your viewpoint) of the Appalachian Trail, which traverses roughly 2150 miles of land, all the way to Georgia. Our path up the mountain involves a steep climb of a few miles along the Abol Trail, which meets the main route at a place called Thoreau Spring.

The spring that Friday was a squishy little mud bog in the clouds; we had to step carefully to keep our feet dry. We couldn't see the summit, up an invisible rise to the northeast. We saw only white; the clouds seemed to float at chest level, confining our view to a 50-foot circle of ground, which was littered with big rocks. They seemed to have fallen from the sky. The wind rose, and we put on our Gore-Tex jackets.

There was a small sign:

THOREAU SPRING
NAMED FOR HENRY DAVID THOREAU WHO CLIMBED THIS MOUNTAIN IN 1846

I eyed the sign, feeling sad. It was like coming upon a gravestone.

---

I have loved Thoreau since I read Walden 25 years ago. Much of the book confused me, but I knew what to make of a passage that described his observations of ants. I had spent hours watching ants myself, just because I liked to do it. Now here was someone else who had spent his time in such a way for such a reason.

One of the other things Thoreau did was journey from his home in Concord to Katahdin, the tallest mountain in Maine. I went to Katahdin because I wanted to see what Thoreau saw there -- or, rather, something of what is left of what he saw. Thoreau traveled to the mountain (he spelled it Ktaadn) because he wished to visit a wilderness: "The mountainous region of the State of Maine," he noted with some satisfaction, "stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles . . . and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward."

Even better, Thoreau knew of just four previous expeditions to the peak (the first in 1804); he took pleasure in the notion that it would be "a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way."

By some measure, it's been a long time; and the tide of travel has indeed set that way. Wilderness itself, or what passes for it, is hot; people with money spend it climbing Everest or touring the Amazon, often in Patagonia-outfitted comfort. Once there, they're as likely to bump into other tourists as they are to witness anything wild. As for our hike up this once-remote mountain, it was literally a walk in the park: 202,000-acre Baxter State Park.

Former Maine governor Percival Baxter acquired and donated most of the land for the park over the course of 31 years; he also left the state $9.5 million to run it. Baxter meant for the place to remain wild, and, in fact, it's more so than some parks I've visited. The dirt road is narrow and heavily rutted, in sharp contrast to the crowded highways that crisscross much of Acadia National Park; the trails, where they exist, are more rugged than paths I've walked in the Tetons. Still, this park's road and its trails see a lot of traffic: some 85,000 visitors this past summer alone. Park naturalist Jean Hookwater figures 25,000 of them trod Katahdin's summit, which Maine's lawmakers named Baxter Peak in 1933. There even is hunting and some logging in parts of the park.

I don't know what Thoreau would make of all this. He wrote of his Katahdin that "Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. . . . It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet earth, as it was made forever and ever. . . . Man was not to be associated with it . . . here, not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make the world."

Nowadays he'd need to go elsewhere to find that sort of wilderness, if he could find it at all: even Antarctica, with its population of tourists and scientists, doesn't entirely fit such a description anymore. This park, this mountain, might no longer suit a man who confessed that he "never found the companion who was so companionable as solitude."

Still, I want to think that Thoreau might be amazed and delighted that so many people come here: clearly, we do find something to love about the place.

---

Thoreau took even longer than Hughes and I did to get up Katahdin; in fact, he didn't quite make the summit, turning around not far from the spring that carries his name. His climb culminated a wilderness adventure that lasted 12 days. The Maine Woods, a posthumous collection of his writings about the Katahdin trip and two other Maine sojourns (in 1853 and 1857), describes his itinerary; so does J. Parker Huber's book The Wildest Country: A Guide to Thoreau's Maine.

He traveled by train from Concord to Boston; then by steamer to Bangor. A horse and buggy and a day's walk brought him and three companions to the farm of George McCauslin, a former log driver whose friends knew him as Uncle George. (The farm is now under water, thanks to a dam built in 1907.) The trio stayed for three nights, time enough to persuade McCauslin to lead them upriver (their Indian guides hadn't shown up).

The five men departed September 5, 1846, picked up Uncle George's son-in-law, then set off up the west branch of the Penobscot River. They poled, paddled, and portaged their way past lakes, rapids, and falls, glimpsing superb views of the mountain. At one point, Thoreau and one of his unskilled companions tried to pole up a small rapid: " . . . we were just surmounting the last difficulty, when an unlucky rock confounded our calculations; and while the bateau was sweeping round irrecoverably amid the whirlpool, we were obliged to resign the poles to more skillful hands."

Hughes and I had no such trouble getting to the base of the mountain. Rising early on a Thursday morning, we stuffed our gear and food into duffel bags and ice chests (we'd be camping out of the car) and drove up I-95, finally stopping for gas and food at noon. An hour later we were up to our chins in Togue Pond, just outside the park gatehouse: a sandy bottom near the shore, and farther out the water clean enough for us to see our feet; not too cold, at least not compared to the ocean at home.

We dried off and slowly drove the 15 minutes or so to Abol Campground, where we backed our wagon into a squarish patch of flat dirt with a fire ring and a picnic table. Through the sparse trees we saw other sites, some with cozy lean-tos. We pitched our tent, and I somewhat compulsively organized gear while Hughes napped on his air mattress in a pile of leaves; he looked odd lying there in the daylight, vulnerable to spiders, ticks, moose -- but content.

He woke in time to walk with me to a waterfall. On our way, we encountered the biggest pile of moose shit I have ever seen; it lay, steaming, smack in the middle of the trail like a warning -- or a joke. It reminded me of another joke, this one involving moose-shit pie; also of Thoreau's wish to see a moose when he came to these parts. None of the creatures appeared during his trip to Katahdin, though on a later visit to Maine he encountered a cow moose and the tracks of a calf.

In fact, Thoreau saw little in the way of quadrupeds in his Maine travels: a beaver skull, a muskrat, red squirrels, a dead porcupine, a bearskin ("the bear just killed"). He saw no wolves, caribou, or mountain lions -- but he knew they were here. Hughes and I saw none of these three species, because they no longer inhabit these woods. There are still lots of moose around, though, and we, too, hoped to see one or more of them.

At the waterfall, however, we encountered neither beast nor man, and swam again, but briefly -- this water was cold. Afterward, Hughes cooked our supper of Thai noodles. Thoreau and his friends cooked on enormous pyres of tree branches; we cooked on a backpacking stove and bought wood from the ranger to build a tiny campfire, one that might just have served to toast marshmallows if we had brought any.

We had not. The fire was almost out by 8 p.m., when a fellow camper, 20 yards distant, reparked his jeep, rolled down the window, and turned on the radio. Loud. And now, the news: a man has killed his wife and child; a woman is sentenced to death for killing her children; other stuff less lurid but also bad.

I looked at Hughes. I told him that it occurred to me on these occasions (the ones with radios) that we human beings know too much about goings-on in Texas and Kuwait. Were I Thoreau, I might have said -- as he did in his journals -- "My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe . . . is perennial and constant." Even as I complained, the news ended -- and we found ourselves communing with the Doobie Brothers.

This would not do. I grabbed the park regulations from the car and scanned the fine print to confirm that audio devices are banned in the park, along with much else: chain saws, metal detectors -- mostly things Thoreau had never heard of, things not around in 1846. Feeling sneaky and self-righteous -- an ugly mix -- I found the ranger and complained. The ranger investigated, to find that the jeep-owning news junkie and music lover had moved some rocks to build his new parking space, which kept his vehicle out of the smoke from his enormous campfire. In making these arrangements, our neighbor had parked on top of some two-year-old pine seedlings, raised up from infancy by the ranger and his colleagues. A voice was raised, the jeep was moved, and for some time we listened to the ranger hurl rocks to and fro like an angry Hercules; this fool had tried to kill his baby trees. Although it did not occur to me at that moment, I'll bet that Thoreau would have been pissed too.

---

But Thoreau and his companions did not have to contend with audio devices or tree-crushing jeeps. September 6, 1846, found them camped at the mouth of Abol Stream, which flows down Katahdin's flanks. The men rose early the next morning, moved up Abol Stream a little way, then left their flat-bottomed bateau to strike out on foot up the mountain. Thoreau took the lead, with five or six miles to cover. He later estimated the distance at 14 miles: it must have felt that far, since there was no trail for him to follow.

At around 3800 feet, the group veered west to Abol Stream; they wished to camp that night near water. Thoreau tried to finish the climb alone that evening, climbing a watercourse up a steep ravine, but he turned back upon reaching the clouds.

The next morning, he once again led his companions up the slopes for a time before leaving them for another solo attempt at the summit. This time, Thoreau aimed for the top of a subsidiary peak (now called South Peak: 5240 feet), which blocked his view of the mountain's real summit. Arriving on Katahdin's vast tableland at the ridge between those peaks, he saw clouds and rocks; occasionally the clouds would part for a moment, revealing dark, damp crags on one side or another. He didn't stay long, finding the scenery "vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine."

Some 153 years and two days later, Hughes and I leave Abol Campground early in the morning. We encounter only five hikers on our foggy walk up the steep and, in places, slippery Abol Trail to the sign at Thoreau Spring. If we could see through the clouds at our backs, we would look down upon much of the land Thoreau traversed to get to this mountain; tomorrow I'll see that it still looks wild, with hardly a visible trace of man's occupation or pursuits.

In fact, much of the area around Katahdin appears to be wilderness of some kind, and Baxter State Park itself is partly wild. But I know that the Maine woods in general are not: clear-cutting, pesticides, herbicides, logging roads, and subdivisions have changed it forever. I wonder if early logging in Baxter may explain why the trees we see up close on our trip are, as a rule, smallish. Later I'll inquire and learn that this is so; few, if any, of these trees are as old as my father (born in 1921).

Thoreau saw and marveled at the carpet of trees that covered the region when he visited it: "What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. It is even more grim and wild than you had imagined, a damp and intricate wilderness. . . . "

Today, any pilot or passenger who flies over the Maine woods will see a patchwork of clear-cuts -- the result of generations of increasingly high-tech logging. In many cases, the clear-cuts are hidden by "beauty strips" -- an ugly term for narrow strips of trees left along roads and around lakes to hide the desolation from public view.

Many of the monster king pines that once dominated this forest were gone even when Thoreau walked here. Still, back then the average tree diameter in the vicinity of Katahdin was almost two feet; now it's down to four inches. It would take generations for the current trees to reach 1846 proportions.

The appendix to The Maine Woods includes some 20 pages of lists: trees, plants, animals, and other natural phenomena Thoreau encountered in the state. Much of what Thoreau saw has vanished -- but not all of it. Among trees, he recorded fir, spruce, cedar, canoe and yellow birch, aspen, white pine, alder, elm, black ash, larch, beech, Norway pine, red oak. . . . Today all of these species remain, though each has dwindled in size or number, or both.

But the big trees are gone. And though I'm not thinking that we shouldn't have cut down some trees, I am thinking about what people such as Jonathan Carter and Mitch Lansky at the Forest Ecology Network have told me: shortsighted logging methods by companies that own one third of Maine and two thirds of the state's North Woods have destroyed much of the industry's ability to generate jobs and revenue and products over the long run. Meanwhile, we have damaged the region's stupendous potential as a recreational retreat for people who, like Thoreau in his day, want to see a wilderness of sorts.

And why should we want to visit such a place? Why should we mourn for what we have lost since Thoreau's visit here? In his scrambles on this mountain, Thoreau walked on treetops; he peered down through the scraggy spruce into what he imagined were bear dens. He and his companions caught fish and cooked them over their enormous wood fires. Descending the mountain, he felt awe that inspired him to wonder -- and to an almost hysterical prose style: "Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature . . . rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?"

He doesn't know; nor do we. As Edward Abbey once wrote, we don't know what it means -- not any of it: the fog, the rocks, the trees that remain. We know only that it's beautiful; not where this great beauty comes from, nor why we experience it as such a fundamental good.

I like to think that it is this mystery and this beauty that 85,000 of us came looking for this year with our air mattresses and our radios. We came looking for whatever it is that is most apparent in wild or quasi-wild places like this one. I recall Ralph Waldo Emerson's words about Thoreau: "The meaning of nature was never attempted to be defined by him . . . every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole."

And so my friend Hughes and I arrive at the sign at Thoreau Spring on this Friday morning, and I stand there in the wind feeling sad. Seeing his name carved in the wood reminds you that he's not coming back. I wish he were here with us, though by some accounts he was a difficult companion -- still, Emerson loved to walk with him.

Hughes and I follow the trail in the wind and fog up a gentle slope; we linger on the summit, which is still wrapped in clouds; eat sausage and cheese; turn back. By now, more people are on the mountain. We pass a dozen or so on our way back down to the spring -- more, perhaps, than climbed this peak in all the time that passed before Thoreau came here.

After leaving the spring we elect to take a different trail down. It is surprisingly steep; halfway down, rain begins in earnest. Each step requires some care; a slip could be ugly; soon it is impossible to imagine wetter feet than mine. I am having a good time. By tomorrow, seven inches of rain will have fallen and Katahdin Stream will be a torrent. Tonight we manage to scrounge a lean-to 12 feet from the banks of this torrent (some rain-averse soul, God bless him, has canceled his reservation). This gives us a chance to dry ourselves and eat our rice and beans in comfort. We go to sleep to the sound of rushing and falling water.

I have read and heard much evidence of change and loss at Katahdin -- the smaller trees, the disappeared species, the crowds, the rules, the radios, the tree-crushing jeeps -- all things easy to dislike. Thoreau saw similar changes in his neighborhood: the woods around his beloved Walden Pond were hemmed in by surveyors' lines (some of which he'd been paid to draw) and harvested by woodcutters. But he never failed in his affection for the place, which he'd known and haunted since childhood.

It occurs to me that his great love for the truth of things led him to accept change -- another word for loss. One day in 1858 Tho-reau, feeling gloomy, noticed a snowflake on his sleeve; the flake's six spokes were shaped like perfect little pine trees. It cheered him, reminded him that "Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart? . . . the maker of the world exhausts his skill with each snowflake and dewdrop he sends down . . . in truth they are the product of enthusiasm, the children of an ecstasy, finished with the artist's utmost skill."

Hughes and I wake to glory -- the world washed clean and clear, high pressure, blue skies. The park has closed various trails as too risky for hiking in the storm's aftermath (mudslides? flash floods? rockfall? bureaucratic paranoia?). No problem: we walk and scramble to the summit of a nearby peak that we admired yesterday. Early on, we spot a spider's web in progress. We stop to watch the spider spin a full circle to connect the supporting strands. It occurs to me that the spider knows nothing: not the fact that I'm watching, nor whether he'll catch anything in his web -- nor even that he's spinning. But I see him. It occurs to me that I am nothing but a way for the universe (including the spider) to see herself. Having discovered (or concocted) this purpose, I pursue it for some steps as my life's entire mission, just taking things in: this rock, this tree, this dirt, this step.

---

When Thoreau died at age 44, some 16 years after he climbed most of Katahdin, Emerson wrote his eulogy. The dead man had been Emerson's friend and in some sense his protégé. He had lived in Emerson's Concord house at various times -- once staying two years -- eating Emerson's food, talking with him and his children about . . . what? Birds, weather, work, slavery, neighbors, breakfast.

Thoreau died almost unknown to the wider public; a local eccentric, a mere personality, a sort of failure whose books were largely unread. Yet Emerson, the great man of American letters, knew well that he had lost a friend who also was a peer.

Emerson made no attempt to hide his grief, which was compounded by his disappointment. He complained that Thoreau's work was not done -- and that no one else could finish it. He recognized Thoreau's particular attractiveness to a certain type: "I have repeatedly known young men of sensibility converted in the belief that this man was the man they were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they should do." In his anger and his sadness, Emerson faulted Thoreau for having no ambition: "Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party."

Mostly, though, he mourned. America, wrote Emerson, "does not know yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost." The word "son" may tell us something of the love Emerson bore the younger man.

America lost Thoreau in 1862; since then, we have lost more. When Thoreau visited Katahdin, much of America was still unexplored -- he noted that even the coasts, for the most part, were sparsely settled, and the East still held its share of wild country. In particular, there was this "howling wilderness" that fed the Penobscot. From Bangor, 12 miles of railroad led to Orono and the Indian Island, home of the Penobscot Tribe. Beyond that "commence the bateau and the canoe, and the military road; and sixty miles above, the country is virtually unmapped, and there still waves the virgin forest of the New World."

The trees are smaller, the caribou have vanished, the country is mapped. What remains? We have Thoreau's wisdom and his example, which teaches us to honor every aspect of creation -- tree, rock, snowflake, moose, spider, person -- by being present for it. Thoreau wrote this passage in 1842, when he was 25 years old: "It does seem as if mine were a peculiarly wild nature, which so yearns toward all wildness. I know of no redeeming qualities in me but a sincere love for some things. . . . My love is invulnerable. Meet me on that ground and you will find me strong. When I am condemned, and condemn myself utterly, I think straightway, `But I rely on my love for some things.' Therein I am whole and entire. Therein I am God-propped."

The disappearance of so much wilderness over the past century and a half cannot really surprise us -- but it can teach us to value what remains. I'll never see Katahdin as Thoreau saw it: empty of man and his works. But I've decided not to mind the crowds at Baxter (which disappear in winter, anyway). I will do my best to believe that every person who lines up at the park gates on a summer morning may be another Thoreau, a neighbor who, however loud his radio, at his core knows what I know at mine: that we've made grievous mistakes; that this depleted and crowded forest is far better than no forest at all; that the mountain Percy Baxter bought for us belongs to us for as long as we love it; that loving it is what we are made for.

Clint Willis, a writer based in Portland, Maine, is the editor of Wild: Stories of Survival from the World's Most Dangerous Places (Thunder's Mouth Press/Balliett & Fitzgerald).