Anthony Emerson
Covering FAMILY, PLACE, AND HEALTH
TDR Regular Contributor / October 20, 2021

Part Three: Promised Land

There is a place that I love so much I wish nobody else knew about it. And yet, people do know about it. I’ve seen other souls haunting the space, blind to my reverence and sense of ownership over this strange and wicked place that exists at the edge of the world, and center of my heart. I’ve seen planes overhead scoring the stratosphere with their contrails. I’ve seen fishermen trolling for trout behind rowboats and I’ve seen them casting ties waist deep in water that is only months shy of hardening into ice. The men themselves looked hardened by time and cold. I’ve seen moose tracks, bear scat, eagles and toads, and watched loonlets grow to become ferocious nighttime sopranos. Once, in the fall time, I watched an orange streak glide across blueberry barrens with a vulpine gait while her kits squealed out of view. I’ve heard the din of pubescent screeching from either a parliament of owls in distress or, more likely, the summer camp across the way. I don’t own this place, but I feel a sense of pride and defensiveness over it. It’s a feeling I can’t quite describe and I really don’t know what to do with it, except that it makes me wonder… should anyone really own the land?

The wilderness is more than space filled with natural formations of earth, water, weather, and beasts to be conquered or inhabited, preserved or developed. The wilderness is an idea. The men and women of centuries past who had faces shaped like mine and names that rolled off of Anglo tongues with sloppy, exaggerated vowels, who laid bricks that became cathedrals and factories, who helped found the modern institutions that continue to prop up our proud democracy— those people went to the woods for work. They cared only about opportunity, and sought to make something great that could have a chance at surviving long enough for me to lay my ungrateful eyes on it. They were building a legacy. They did it. It’s our’s. Now what should  we do with it?

To the rivermen dancing atop logs, the cookees baking beans and brown bread, the sawyers, the boat captains, the teamsters knee-deep in horseshit, and the rest of the weary old lumbermen, the woods were a resource. The regal White Pine was as good as gold. And so they felled them. They felled them until the great north woods were all but free of White Pine. The human capacity for greed and ingenuity is astonishing, and the primitive men of the early 20th century with their oxen and axes were able to ravage the virgin forest of the northeast’s last frontier. And despite the upsetting reality of the intrinsic flaw in capitalism’s need for constant growth on a planet with limited resources, I don’t blame a single woodsman for the state of the woods today. They worked the woods so that my kin could eat and grow and populate the cold little forest towns that provided paper to the world. And I am damn proud. Among those men who I admire for their self-reliance and fearlessness, I am sure was a bard, a philosopher, a man who not only heaved steal by day, but also waxed poetic about a life lived outdoors, who wrote by candlelight over a black tea whose steam mingled in the air with pipe smoke, fire smoke, and the fumes of singed hide. But even he who saw poetry in the humdrum of wilderness living, could never imagine what those wild places would come to mean to a man like me.

I fell in love with the wilderness through kayaking, camping, and hiking. Though I was never a weekend warrior, outfitted in neon parkas and matching goose down gloves, come to the forest to beta test my gear and wilderness tech, I was rarely present or aware while in the woods. I was there to recreate, I lacked gratitude, and that meant I mostly considered nature a venue. It wasn’t a thing to be exploited for value, or to be valued. It wasn’t a portal to an enlightened state of mind, or a lens with which to access the ethereal and holy. It was an amusement park created by god for the benefit of man. Mine was the Genesis view of the natural world. The idea that everything natural and beautiful and valuable in the world was constructed for the benefit of man. Then something changed.

I don’t imagine kids who grow up in the city ever crank their necks skyward to admire the titanic steel monuments to modernity and wealth. Not the way tourists from Des Moines do anyway. Growing up with tourist destinations like Baxter State Park, Acadia National Park, the Appalachian Trail, and the Maine coast just beyond the borders of my town jaded me to the power of the wilderness. It took turning thirty and feeling an existential displacement from anything resembling a home for me to yearn for the wildness of my youth. I sit on stoops in Brooklyn and watch teenagers smoke cigarettes and skateboard on cobblestone streets and I am nostalgic for my childhood when I ran bare chested through rose bushes with slurpee stains on my face. I biked to the video store and bought penny candy and left coins on train tracks and thought about them being squashed as I laid in bed and listened to the train roll through town on the last leg of its journey to Quebec. I am angry and confused and I find myself pining for a thing I am sure I don’t understand. Simplicity, wholesomeness, oneness, cooperation. I miss the 90’s, low tech toys, laser discs, and the incorruptible joy of picnics, camping, and swimming at night.

So I went back to the forestlands of my childhood, the wilderness that stood adjacent to my formative years. I’m looking to connect with something that feels right and good and meaningful; I’m trying to find the thread. Now, when I walk in the Maine woods I am wholly present; I am open to it all. But I struggle with contradictory feelings that vacillate between paternalistic preservationism, which would ultimately be too austere and stifling for an insular town whose very existence is tied to the notion of the forest as a product to be cultivated,  and naive grandiosity that asks for an unrealistic level of cooperation and the suspension of hardlined beliefs from a people whose worldviews are shaped by decades of economic insecurity and conservative cable news. I am torn between the town and the wilderness, and I am both a local and an outsider.

Conserving the forested tract of land that begins at the edge of town should be a priority for anybody who cares about clean air and water. The Katahdin region contains a multitude of flora and fauna, lakes, rivers, mountains, and a historic and fertile ecosystem that should be in thriving existence for the rest of time. Which is easy for me to say because I don’t rely on the town or surrounding wilderness for my income. But people I love still do, and they are hurting. I want them to have secure jobs and benefits again. I want them to have access to what used to be called the middle class; the lifestyle that came from hard work and brought humble people the modest prosperity that they deserved. No man with calloused hands and a mastery over the inner workings of a small engine should be forced to wear a blue vest and greet patrons beneath fluorescent lighting. I’d like to live in a place where people can have families again and I don’t have to drive 70 miles to order a veggie burger.

On the other hand… I don’t want the views from my trailer at the end of town to be marred by chair lifts, vacation homes and Cabella’s super stores. I don’t want the rural charm of this town to be diluted by the presence of well-meaning gentrifiers trampling our precious soil with their Blundstones and electric cars. I also know that for a town that has never had to be good at anything but papermaking, a full fledged pivot to the service industry is out of the question. That kind of transformation is a generation or more away. Besides, a service industry economy means people, lots and lots of people, and the carrying capacity of the north woods can’t sustain that influx of human visitors and maintain its status of authentic wilderness. Frankly, I’m glad. I want the town to resemble for my young cousins what it is in the stories my grandmother tells us about her childhood. I wish the town could achieve long term stability while also preserving the forests around it. I want to feel a sense of pride when I look forward and not just backward.

More than anything though, I just want to be alone in the woods.

So yes, there is a place north of town where thousands of  acres of mature forest scrape the clouds. Through the stand of ancient trees, a backcountry pond reflects the granite cliffs above. The pond, accessible only by foot or floatplane, is home to a rare fish called the Arctic Char. The water is always cold and clear. To the northwest, the final scenic miles of the Appalachian Trail kiss the bluffs at the pond’s shores and snake through an emerald wilderness once referred to by the natives as “the carrying place.” With its grand views of Katahdin, palpable remoteness, rich anthropological history, biodiversity, and dense forests teeming with the splendor of the north country’s flora and fauna, this place I won’t name, is as good as any to step into the wild and gain whatever is to be gained from such an experience. It’s a place to seek reprieve, peace or solace, to better understand the natural world, or to better know yourself through the beauty and suffering that are mostly a package deal in the woods. This is a place to explore the tactile wonders of mycology, dendrology, geology, and to master the art of campfire coffee, shitting in the woods, and to wake with the sun and birds and share your slumber with the earthworms who dwell in the soil beneath your tent. You can walk among trees who were witness to history—pillars and symbols and totems for men and women of bygone civilizations who knew how to love a natural thing in ways we all now aspire to, though it may be too late for us. You can wash your body in icy waters sheltered by primordial rock where birch bark canoes once dotted the shores like sea-scarred flotsam. You can go there, and maybe it will give you what it has given me: a sense of pride over place, a connection to my biological and spiritual forebears, and the release of my soul from the bondage of modern anxieties. You can go there, yes… but I wish you wouldn’t.

Afterword

This essay was a few weeks late and I’m not exactly sure why except that I had a crisis of confidence; Or I was feeling disconnected from my muse, my home, my place.

That place is Millinocket, Maine. It is where my family comes from and it’s the mystery at the heart of these writings. It’s been a challenging, confusing, strange place for me to live and make a go of it over the last couple years. But as I write this right now from Brooklyn, New York, I really miss it there. I miss the cold grass beneath my feet at night, the way the stars look when they don’t have to compete with the purple spire of One World Trade, and I miss the people and how they drop their r’s and love nothing more than to talk shit about the Patriots and feed me. Nobody in all of King’s county cares if I ate today. I did, it was trendy and delicious, but it tasted nothing like home…

Anthony Emerson
Covering FAMILY, PLACE, AND HEALTH
TDR Regular Contributor /September 1, 2021

Part Two: Mill Town

I love nature. 

Being in and around the wilderness makes me feel a razor-sharp closeness to my truest self, and to my spiritual antecedents like Percival Baxter, the visionary and namesake of Baxter State Park—a promise kept by Baxter when he vowed to keep Katahdin the mountain of the people of Maine. There were also lesser-known figures who roamed the valleys driving logs, felling trees, trapping fur, and making a way in the wild. Some of those obscure men who helped etch a society out of the forest and eked out a life for themselves and their families in the brutal north country were related to me by blood. Percival Baxter, I know, had an intense and enduring love for nature; he fought and paid to preserve Katahdin and the surrounding forests, and when it came time to write the parameters that would regulate the park in perpetuity, he couldn’t help but wax poetic when he decreed that the land “shall remain forever wild.” What I don’t know is how the men who worked the woods—and shared my family name—felt about the wilderness that took them from their families, reamed them of their blood and sweat, and not infrequently ended their lives. Was it awe or agony they felt when they took to the woods?

Moving through groves of hemlock, spruce, and pine, beneath the green spires of the near wilderness feels— especially in the quiet cold of winter—like a journey to my self; the whole self, that contains the unbroken chain of wildness that lives in me and was borne of some ancient ancestor embarking on an overland odyssey to the fertile wilds of whatever continent he inhabited, searching for a food source and the raw materials necessary to build a life. And maybe it was he who passed along the love for mossy river rocks, the smell of fire spilling across the scarlet leaves of autumn, and high, open spaces that I inherited. 

The relatives of my past who are not abstractions or the manifestation of my romanticized relationship to the snow-covered earth were mill workers and mountain men. They were men of pride and little wealth, and so they went into the woods out of an abiding drive to provide for their families. My great-grandfather—a man who lived until I was in my mid-twenties—started work at age twelve. His hands were thick and strong, and he had knuckles like boulders. At only twelve years old he shoveled coal at the trainyard to support his mother. At sixteen he started work at the mill but left after two years to join the Navy and fight in WWII.  During that time the mill continued to run with the wives and daughters of the enlisted men making paper from trees that were in part provided by the prisoner of war lumber camps that contained German soldiers captured in North Africa. My great-grandfather, Atlee, never graduated from high school, but was a lifelong employee of the Great Northern Paper Company, and a union leader. His family lived comfortably in the quiet mill town that sits on the banks of the Penobscot; some of us still live there, though the mill remains whole only in the memory of those that saw it at its greatest. While Atlee’s biological father was a construction baron and alleged prohibition-era bootlegger with a taste for pinky rings and fur coats, the man who adopted him and raised him was a simple man whose life was filled with work and little else. He was among the mill’s first employees. Lloyd would tend his trap lines after an eight-hour shift in the paper room, in the middle of the night, walking the entire distance with my great-grandfather by his side, and then the entire way back, with the two of them sharing the load of fox and beaver pelts, their footfalls penetrating the early morning silence as they found their way home in the dawnlight. 

If my meanderings among the boreal forests of the Katahdin region don’t put me in closer touch with the countrymen who shared my DNA then I think it is because of the nature of work. Recreation feels like a modern luxury, one that my grandfathers wouldn’t understand. Hiking, camping, kayaking, photographing birds perched atop snags, and sitting on the dirt shaded by clouds and canopy contemplating life would have seemed a peculiar waste of time.  Thoreau, who was built of relatively feeble constitution, was scared out of his wits by the ruggedness of Katahdin, and said of the barrel-chested men who dwelt at its base “the mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.” They did what they had to. And although I have no family who relies on my labor to eat or be sheltered, and I have a combined two hours of experience with axe swinging, I feel a primal urge to build with my hands something that would make the great men of my past proud. And I will. But right now I am focused on telling their stories and the stories of the town they founded and grew so that I can help in the resuscitation of its spirit and vitality.

The mill is gone.

In the final days of July, my grandmother and I drove on logging roads and snowmobile trails and trespassed on private land in search of the best spot to view the back of the former mill site. It was hot and dry and a soft grey haze from the wildfires in western Canada hung in the air and fed dim rays of light into the river valley. More than once we were stymied by impassable windthrown trees; moose tracks crisscrossed the roads and I expected to see one around every turn, but we never did. From the closest disused logging road, my grandmother—a humble, brawny, broad-shouldered woman who walks slow and with a slight hitch in her gait—hiked alongside me down to the spot on the river directly across from the old mill, following the sound of the river spilling over the dam. We wanted to get to the backside because it reveals the truth about what remains of the mill. To the cars driving down main street the mill could seem only shuttered, not destroyed. There is a Potemkin structure that faces the town and makes the former mill seem whole, but it is an illusion. Though the skyline looks the same, the town’s pride has been gutted from the back. I once looked at the chimney stacks leaking foamy steam across a canvas of sky as monuments to my ancestral roots. Standing on the banks of Penobscot’s West Branch, staring into the ruins behind the facade, absorbing the carnage with my grandmother—a native daughter—it felt like we had uncovered a hidden desecration of a once holy place. And maneuvering the logging roads on the way back I noticed numerous patches of new growth lining the road in perfect rows. The paper company planted seeds after cutting; they took the old growth that was provided by the land and they at least replenished the soil and had an eye toward the future. I wish they had done the same for the town and its people.

The community is broken.

The feeling of being witness to something’s end sits heavy over the town like a cloud of smoke. This town is filled with ghosts. When my grandmother was a young girl, the town was a charming place where success and stability were attainable for everyone. Today the town is ailing from a lingering opioid epidemic and the detritus of late-stage capitalism has clogged our main street. Most of the young people with the means to flee have, and what is left is an aging population too old to work… and the rest of us. It can feel at times like the town of the past was a dream, that what we are are vaguely similar strangers chained by circumstance to the same carcass; we tread upon the same dirt and our personal vicissitudes read like slant rhymes in the bygone manifesto of the American dream, but most notions of being in this together were left to die when the mill bailed, and the recent political climate was the final, lethal dose. Rather than weep for the great loss at the heart of it all, I take to the woods and summon the essence of my forebears by walking through spaces they once occupied, through fields and forests they influenced with their physical might. I want to connect to my past, in part, because I want to be brought closer to the people who are now my neighbors. 

I think about the winters of my childhood when the snowdrifts touched the eaves, and I would pluck six-foot icicles off the porch and bat them at trees to watch them shatter like frigid glass. There always seemed to be an exchanging of Tupperware and casserole dishes between my mom and our family and friends. The house smelled of slow-cooked meats and we ate sticky, starchy meals throughout the day. On weekends we would drive the snow sleds to the various clubs and wilderness camps–—the East Branch Sno-Rovers and The White House Landing. There was always hot cocoa, beans, and slow-cooked game of moose, venison, and bear. The adults would huddle around each other drinking booze and eating hot food and talking with their snowsuits still on. I remember the smell of gasoline and cigarettes and the sound of revving engines behind human chatter. This was the thing to do, to quell the anxious pangs of cabin fever, and to feed and be fed by your neighbor. 

There is a comradeship that comes with sharing the experience of winter in the rural north woods. The wicked cold is more easily endured as a community. Handled together, the indignities of poverty are diminished and transformed into the foundations and fodder of communion. As northerners, Mainers, and the remaining progeny of this former boom-town, we have the stuff we need to return our region to glory; it is coded into our being from generations of men and women who survived the savage privations of the lean times and built a magic city that sat on the shores of the Penobscot River and the vanguard of industry. It is our duty to access the tools they gave us—wildness, humility, a high tolerance for suffering, and whatever sorcery gives us the ability to feed a family of five with a single can of tuna—and to use them to build a new way of life here. We have to search for the remnants of our past that we can build upon and also preserve the things we cannot afford to lose.

Anthony Emerson
Covering FAMILY, PLACE, AND HEALTH
TDR Regular Contributor /July 15, 2021

Part One: Where I’m Coming From

There is a town north of Bangor, east of Moosehead Lake, and 200 miles west of the Bay of Fundy, where great men went into the woods to make a life. Their wives lived with quiet, determined intention, and their children were reared beside a river engorged with timber and lakes bespeckled with rocky isles. These families built a life, a community out of the northern forests of snow and pine. They lived off the land because they had to, because prosperity loomed in the collective imagination of the community. But it was not ripe for the taking, it was a thing to be etched in hard stone like a sculpture, a promise seen only by those who knew their way in the woods. Like a birch bark canoe, it had to be coaxed from the hardwoods of the north country by men with skill and grit and a drive to go places that were unforgiving and wild. Those men were pioneers who turned their backs on the sea and the sun-weathered faces of their fathers, said goodbye to their mothers and the dreary coast, the fisheries and promises of a good life; or bid farewell to their mother countries like Italy and Lithuania, and followed the hallucinations of manifest destiny inland, to the Maine frontier. And there they built a city in the wilderness, the largest paper mill in the world, and churned out newsprint for publications like the New York Times. This town, named after an Abenaki word, that means “land of many islands,” that sits on the West Branch of the Penobscot River, with its leafy gold that lays in the shadow of a great mountain, where tough men drove logs and felled trees the size of buildings, and made paper out of pulp… is still there, though long past its glory. It is called Millinocket, my people are from there, and today I call it home.

People that I love, love it here. They fit in. They drop their r’s and eat fiddlehead soup.

They’ve mourned and wedded and grown up and then became old here. They’ve sat in the pews, the grandstands, headed unions, hosted knitting groups and Tupperware parties, and joined or started every organization that makes a person a bona fide local.

Today, the mill is gone and only rubble and emptiness occupy the space where the pride of Millinocket once stood. The last version of the mill left in 2008, but the dream of a day when the mill would again be up and running and return the town to paper-making splendor has died only recently. In my time as a resident, I have felt the slow anguish of a dying thing fade into the cold nothingness of death. For more than a decade, the people of Millinocket have resisted the tides of change, balked at non-papermaking proposals, and languished in economic hardship exacerbated by the opioid crisis. There is a confounding ethos of anti-conservationism, something the locals refer to as “tree-hugging.” I feel like an outsider. And yet, these are my people. I want to know them. I want to know what they want for themselves, for their community, and for the wilderness just beyond their homes—the forests where our fathers’ fathers worked and lived and made a life for themselves; and where our fathers drove trucks and built second homes after they got hired straight out of high school and “followed the window.” What are we to do with the acres of pine and hemlock and hardwoods that were to be our birthright, but that stand to this day steadfast in the face of climate change and the inexorable will of man to forge on— all while our dreams dissolve into dust?

This is not a love letter nor an appraisal of what is right or wrong about a place or a community. It is not a critique, nor could it be; I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know what it all means to me, but I find solace in examining the bonds between myself and the here and there. No matter how I feel about it, I come from here. But I came back for the woods.

Beyond the borders of town, a brilliant expanse unfurls in all directions, blanketing the earth in summer’s green, autumn’s amber, and the soft cotton of winter snow. Just past the banks of the Penobscot River’s West Branch—in a far-off country—the crown jewel of Maine rises from the wilderness. It is a special place that I love wholly and inexplicably, where men I admire found meaning in the formidable landscape and where I search for my own meaning among mountains and men.

Without ever having reached Katahdin’s peak, I knew I was in the presence of something special. The way the mountain materialized on the horizon, beyond a lee or muskeg and around every wooded corner of the backroads outside of town—was a gift; it was a thing that never got old, its majesty deserving of celebration. Katahdin’s crown seemed to hang from the sky like an ornament and changed color with the seasons or glowed different purplish hues with the cloudbursts of spring and early summer. It remains a monument in my life, both literal and abstract: it’s a wellspring of inspiration—the mountain and the wildernesses that skirt its base—and a vestige of my childhood; it’s a place on earth that scrapes the firmament, where I have always stored my aspirations, and a luminary, a symbol for what I care about: the land and its most vulnerable inhabitants. It is an idea, a gospel, a thing created in the image of god; it is a revelation. Man could never conquer nor make sense of it, only fight to preserve it and store it in our consciousness. The wilderness at its base is the altar upon which I worship; on Knife’s Edge I risk becoming a martyr, and in the waters of Chimney Pond, Katahdin Lake, and Wassataquoik Stream, I am baptized. Fording the rapids of the West or Each Branch I pay my respect to past disciples, wild Bodhisattvas like Thoreau and Roosevelt; I can feel their presence and their reverence too. Their wilderness dreams are mine now, we store them in the clouds with the words of the man who made it happen, the one who decreed that this land remain “forever wild.”

I want to know myself and I never feel more rawly myself than when I am paddling or hiking or camping. In fact, just being in nature strips me down to who I essentially am; and being in this nature—the north Maine woods— makes me feel rooted, connected to a timeless throughline that is elemental to my personhood. Who I am in relation to the Maine woods is who I am as an individual, on the most basal and primal level; in the wild, the good and bad of my character are revealed. But I am not a hermit, the whole of my spiritual and psychological makeup cannot be deduced from the wilderness alone; I am a member of a family, a community, and a generation. MY generation, whether born and bred or interloper, has no memory of the good times, the prosperous years when Main Street had an opera house and teenagers could afford to buy their own homes. We may be few in numbers, but we carry the burden of ancestral trauma with an unentitled poise that I am genuinely proud of.

This essay and the ones that will follow are my attempt at probing the consciousness of a place, a people, and a landscape, so I may better understand what it means to be from Millinocket, of the north woods, and to see what remains of the noble lumberman of our past. Is it only names, geography, and frostbitten skin we share with the strong men and women who built this town? Or is an inimitable desire to live and work in a place where most men couldn’t coded into our DNA? Who are these people? And how do I fit in?