Thoreau Farm

“Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine on the top of a hill, and though I got well pitched I was well payed for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before…”                                                                                               –   Thoreau, Walking

By the time I push off from Lookout Point, the forecast winds are already hurrying across the bay, and the water’s roughed to a sharp chop. I get two washovers (waves that sluice over the whole boat) in the first hundred yards and they bring both a frisson of excitement and the realization that this first mile is going to be work. But once across it, I can see that I’ll gain the wind-shadow of Birch Island, and, after easing along its mile length, I’ll have only a short crossing to Little Iron and the nest I’ve been visiting since April.

So I set to work on crossing over.

Confession: “work” is the wrong word for the slow pleasure of riding this live water. Twenty minutes later, I arrive at Birch, salt-flecked and smiling. Yes, I can do this sort of “work.”

The wind wraps around the south end of Birch and presses its hand to my back as I ease north along the shore; the tide is also with me – today, life is aligned amid these islands.

Even from a quarter-mile away I can see the nest’s dark bulk, but as I draw near I can sense also its emptiness. No totem bird sits atop the host oak; no dark wings cross the sky; it feels the way your room did when you left home for school or to marry.

For months, I have approached slowly, sensing for and keeping to some perimeter of eagle comfort. Across these yards I have watched the eagle parent on duty as he or she has watched me, and, since late May, I’ve watched also the periscope of the eaglet’s head as it swiveled first this way, then that, waiting for the next meal. In June, I first heard a mewling sort of complaint and figured it was the eaglet learning the skill of tantrum. But closer attention said it was the parent, who, perhaps, was learning the truth of exhaustion – hungry, he is always hungry, she may have been thinking; I’ve barely slept since the hatch.

In July the mewling became keening, and now it came from the nest. “More,” it seemed to say, “When is more?” The parents sat stoically on either side waiting. “Time to get your own,” they seemed to say. In the nest a small ruckus and a stick flew up and out, bounced once on the ledge and splashed into the water; the head reappeared. “More now?” it seemed to say. “No more” was the answer. The eaglet hopped to a branch, flapped in demonstration once. Fledging couldn’t be far away.

Today, I go ashore on the iron-rusted, orange rocks and grab bayberry bushes to haul myself up the fifteen feet to the narrow ridgeback of the island. Beneath the nest there’s a litter of discarded or failed sticks as thick as my thumb. Amid the litter there’s a rodent skull – unlucky weasel? – and some tufts of duck feathering. The oak lists a bit seaward with its hundreds of pounds of first-year nest, but they seem securely matched, tree and nest. I shinny and stretch to reach a first branch and haul myself aloft – ponderously, precariously. I climb up under the woody bulk and look out across the bay. I am no eagle, but for a moment I can see like one.

By Corinne H. Smith

“I perceive that scent from the young sweet-fern shoots and withered blossoms which made the first settlers of Concord to faint on their journey.” (Thoreau’s Journal, June 11, 1856)

I can’t help myself. Each time I walk along the northern shore of Walden Pond, I have to reach out and squeeze a sweet-fern leaf. Then I hold my fingers to my nose and take a deep breath. What an amazing aroma!

During recent walks at Walden Pond and along the trails behind Thoreau Farm, I introduced fellow hikers to this habit. It bothers me that many folks sail right past this plant without giving it a chance to introduce itself.

Here are some facts. Sweet-fern isn’t a fern; it’s a shrub. Its scientific name is Comptonia peregrine, and it belongs to the bayberry family. If Thoreau scholar and botanist Ed Schofield were still here to expound upon this plant at length, he would tell you that sweet-fern is one of the few species that is able to “fix nitrogen.” This means – if I understand the science correctly — that it can take nitrogen from the air and redirect it into the surrounding soil, thus improving the quality of nutrients in the immediate landscape. But sweet-fern needs to partner with a specific kind of bacteria to do this. Ed would gleefully dig up a small sample to show you the nodules of the fungus that grows among the roots of the sweet-fern. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. And this complex biology proceeds invisibly in the woods behind Thoreau Farm and also at Walden Pond, where hundreds of humans stroll past patches of sweet-fern daily.

I always got the impression from Ed that its heady bouquet was related to its nitrogen-fixing capability. But no print or online authorities I’ve located make this claim. I have learned that the Native Americans used the crushed leaves to relieve the itch of poison ivy, and that drinking sweet-fern tea could resolve a variety of medical maladies, from toothache to diarrhea. I’m not sure I want to dabble with these remedies any time soon. Getting a good whiff is enough for me.

What of its effect on early settlers that Thoreau spoke about? He must have gotten this story from reading Edward Johnson’s book, A History of New-England (also known as Wonder-Working Providence of Son’s Savior in New England), published in London in 1654: it was a book that Thoreau checked out of the Harvard library 200 years later. Johnson painted a scene of the early pilgrims walking from Boston to Concord in 1636, struggling across a land full of “ragged bushes.” The day was so hot that it resulted in “such a reflecting heate from the sweet ferne, whose scent is very strong, that some herewith have beene very nere fainting, although very able bodies to undergoe much travel.”

Well, I don’t think the sweet fern scent’s THAT strong. None of our hardy New Englanders or even out-of-town visitors have keeled over in recent days because of it.

On March 18, 1860, Thoreau noted in his journal: “The sweet-fern grows in large, dense, more or less rounded or oval patches in dry land. You will see three or four such patches in a single old field. It is now quite perfect in my old bean-field.” He was referring to his former garden at Walden Pond, of course. Now we know that sweet-fern grows best “in dry infertile soils” (according to www.bostonnatural.org) and “is among the first to colonize barren, nutrient-poor soils” (says gobotany.newenglandwild.org); this realization could explain why Henry chose not to plant a garden during his second year at Walden. The earth didn’t WANT to say beans. It was ready instead to sprout sweet-fern and oaks.

Nevertheless, and putting all science aside: The heady scent of sweet-fern is one that everyone should experience. Go out and find some and squeeze a leaf for yourself. Or stop by Thoreau Farm some day, and we’ll go walking. Let me know what you think.

Note: This piece flows from thought about Thoreau’s time on Katahdin, and it is a little lengthy for a post. But sometimes – when you’re traveling into Maine’s interior or pointing out into its seas – it takes that time to get out there.

Getting Out There

Let’s begin with a detail in that minutiae often determine a trip’s arc: there’s no “e” on “haut” to match the masculine “jour” of this day, and it’s good to begin any journey with correct alignment. That seems especially true when one is traveling to Maine’s Isle au Haut and its southern (seaward) end, because this isle is a place apart, the kind of place Shakespeare may have had in mind when he conjured the deep magic of his final play, The Tempest. To get there you have to cross over. And so we should have our purpose and paddles well lined up as we leave for this island whose rippled back already determines the skyline to our south.

There is nary a breeze when we set out in our narrow boats at 6:30 with the July sun already risen 20 degrees from horizon’s birth. The water is glassy flat, and only the constant thrum of lobster boats working from trap to trap stirs the morning. The tide turned some 90 minutes ago, and so with each stroke we are also riding its broad back as it eases seaward. Such a big, effortless being, always in motion. As happens on those rare mornings when I do rise very early, I look around and say, “I should do this more often.” Of course I should, but it’s also good that this is a singular day; the early hour and aligned tide signal a chance to try this circumnavigation I’ve aimed at for years.

Isle au Haut lies six miles off the southern tip of Deer Isle, itself a sort of Rorschach blot of an island midway along the Maine coast; beyond Haut (pronounced Ho by Mainers) there is an emptiness of ocean whose end can only be imagined by resorting to large-scale charts. For those of us who like to travel in thin, hand-powered boats shaped like compass needles, the sea that washes onto Isle au Haut’s southern shore is “big water.” And so, even given today’s benign forecast of flat seas, there’s an amperage of anxiety loose in our systems as we point toward this water; it is where the big fish swim and most little boats don’t go.

Paddling’s repetition defuses most of that current as we settle into passage among the many islands and islets on the way to Haut. Cadence summons memory, and I think back to a solitary paddle four years ago, when I first believed that a one-day rounding of Haut was possible. It was another still summer morning when I slipped from the inner harbor by a rental cottage seaward and began an isle-skipping that brought me to the aptly named Enchanted Island, with its small white-shell beach sheltered by two arms of stone. From Enchanted I looked seaward and saw only the low phantasm of Fog Island and huge finny bulk of Haut, and minutes later I shoved off on the three-mile crossing to Fog all the while approaching too the northern end of Haut. Some hours later I was four miles along Haut’s six-mile eastern shore and wondering what lay beyond. But the tide had turned and was running at a knot against me, and an emptiness had spread across the water and day before me; I was emphatically alone, and it seemed that paddling on would be leaving the day and myself behind. I turned and the tide carried me back into this world. Still, by day’s end I had clocked nearly 25 sea-miles, and a round-the-Haut day asked for just that number.

It’s still early when we paddle by the quiet village on Haut’s north end. Its lawns are trimmed and its wide summer porches empty. A lot near the town dock has a dozen pick-up trucks in two rows, their engine-blocks long cooled from the 5:00 a.m. departures of the Isle’s lobsterfolk (the village’s most famous fisher is Linda Greenlaw, swordboat captain of Perfect Storm renown). None of the 73 year-round Isle-landers is evident, nor are the summerfolk who double the population for a few months.

Today, I’m paddling with my friend Geoff, and, as we pass the iconic lighthouse south of town, we leave usual waters. It is good to be here with Geoff, both for the ease we feel together and because he is prepared. I glance over the fifty yards that separate us and watch the easy cadence of his Greenland “stick” as he slides forward. Geoff is contemplative, his head tilted a bit toward the sky, and that seems right – he is, after all, a therapist, whose life’s work is helping people contemplate where and who they are. And with a glance, Geoff can tell you exactly where we are and the speed with which we keep arriving there. His GPS links him to satellites, and the radio he carries can join him to the whole network of seekers who go looking for the lost. Geoff is also fully geared and amply practiced in handling both boat and self. And last year, he surprised himself when he turned an exploratory paddle into a solo rounding of the Isle, a complete circuit that he said traversed an eeriness he’d not felt before along the southern end. For eleven miles that day he saw no other boat.

I’m less equipped and less practiced, though, given the calm conditions and a good level of fitness and ability, not over my head either. Still, I am happy to look over and see my friend, an other-rigger of competence, as my boat slices into this new and colder water.

There is a point in any adventure when you cross a line. For some time, you are getting there getting there, and then, you are elsewhere; the world has turned beyond usual. Today, that happens when we pass Duck Harbor, a little indentation along the west side where the National Park maintains a summer ranger station and small encampment. Duck Harbor has a pier, and once each morning the Isle’s mailboat arrives (we are an hour ahead of it) to drop campers and walkers; it returns at 4:00 to retrieve day-walkers. It is the last outpost before five miles of uninhabited coast.

But even before this evident line, there are markers of another world, one where water supplants terra-firma stone as the dominant force. Just beyond the aptly named Trial Point we pull into a steep, cobbled beach for a rest stop. Both the beach’s steep slant and its rounded stones are water’s work, and, even without much swell, landing is trickier than a simple running-ashore on flat sand. It takes little to imagine serried waves pounding this shoreline, rolling these million stones up-beach and then raking them back down with a rattling sound like so many dice, wearing them into round compliance. Anything the water can reach, it modifies. Like this once-pine that is now a bleached, skeletal sculpture of wood at the top of the beach. Its bark has been beaten away, its root system is a pale, soiless tangle. We look out over the day’s flat sea; even when calm, it is suffused with power. Some day this isle will not be haut.

Some of the Million Round Stones

Beyond Duck Harbor the coast is dotted with “rock gardens,” those constellations of ledges that appear and vanish with the tides. There is the premonitory sound of today’s little sea meeting these rocks, the wash and suck of its breathing that stirs the hair on my neck; even a modest sea would be a turmoil of wave and currents. Today, however, I can ease through small passages and, with a feeling akin to patting a whale, I can sidle right up to these leviathan rocks. It’s slightly eerie fun.

Haut has two detached promontories on its ocean-end; the first is Western Ear, and the next, predictably, is its eastern cousin. Here, upthrust ledges fifty feet high make their stand, and they are fringed with a penumbra of pine. The whole effect feels like a huge stone eye watching you. Whatever geological upheaval helped form Haut also turned these ledges on end so that floating off them is also akin to viewing the volumes of some giant’s library. Here too the scent of the sea is stronger with a cold fishiness that says, deep deep water’s not far off. I feel cast back into some elemental moment before human narrative began to layer and soften the land. Whatever appears will be outsized, I think. It is the sort of “contact” that Henry Thoreau felt and wrote about when he climbed Katahdin.

The Ocean End of Eastern Ear

As often happens, nothing appears, at least overtly, but as we paddle along this absent south shore, its hundred-foot cliffs and occasional cobble pockets form an otherscape that makes us too feel new. All the daily layerings of life feel peeled back – fresh eyes, and, even in the cold rising from the water, fresh skin.

Western Ear feels and is the day’s more remote point, its emotional Haut-point too. Then, somewhere between the Ears, the day tips into its second half: it is evident that the calm weather will hold; the cliffs dwindle; a boat appears; we near the turn for home; first fatigue enters our shoulders. We are on our way back.

Looking South Along Isle au Haut’s Eastern Shore – on the way back

End note: Our return is also a paddle through beauty, though it settles into a usual beauty. And there are the small creaks of our bodies’ complaints from this long, seated day of pressing paddles through water, its thousands of strokes two lines alongside us always. We paddle, we land; we quaff water, eat a bit; we paddle again. Near 5:00 p.m. and back at our launch point, we find that we have been 24.88 miles. We divert for a few hundred yards and make it just over 25.