Bacl to the Past

Near my fishing camp in New Hampshire’s Rockingham County, there’s this archeological site said to have been constructed by ancient druids or their precursors. Several large, flat stones have grooves—blood grooves, we are told. Now that the site has been physically restored, a volunteer 501c3 citizens’ organization is attempting to restore historical function as well, including the sacrifice of virgins (though only on summer weekends for tour groups). While the organization has yet to find a virgin in the county, I am concerned that a friend of our neighbor’s young nieces might be one. Our families have repeatedly suggested simulated sacrifices with inflatable virgins, but the citizen’s group has informed us that this would lack authenticity.

I guess I should point out that only the first two sentences of the preceding paragraph are true. I offer the remainder as an allegory for comprehension of a situation currently unfolding on southern Maine’s Crooked River. “They’re claiming they need to build a dam in the name of authenticity to show how our ancestors screwed up the environment,” says conservation activist and Maine Rivers board member Bill Townsend on the topic. But before reading the details you need to understand the history of this river and the lake it feeds and why both are nationally important.

The Crooked River meanders (hence its name) about 50 miles through mostly small villages and big woods from the eastern slope of the White Mountain National Forest south to 30,513-acre Sebago Lake, second largest lake in Maine and home to one of only four native populations of landlocked salmon in the state. All other populations—even the few self-sustaining ones—are the result of stocking. Not only is the Sebago race genetically unique; it is the largest and an important source of broodstock in the United States and even other nations.

About 70 percent of all salmon caught in Sebago were naturally spawned in the Crooked River. Farther north in Maine you can enjoy good fly-fishing for landlocks on Grand Lake Stream and the West Branch of the Penobscot, but these fish eat mostly invertebrates; you’ll do well to catch a slim 17-incher. The fish running up the Crooked are smelt-eaters, and it’s not unusual to catch five-pounders built like a false albacore. Most of the river is wadeable, and the fish respond well to streamers.

Possibly the first record of a Sebago Lake landlocked salmon is the 1825 diary entry of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne: “On the way home from Frye’s Island, Mr. Ring caught a black-spotted trout that was almost a whale. It weighed, before it was cut open, eighteen and one-half pounds.” In 1907 Sebago produced a landlock that weighed 22.5 pounds, still the state record, beating out an even larger fish taken from the Crooked River in 1882 because, as the Maine Fisheries Commissioners reported that year, “A man named Paul is now under arrest for spearing a fish weighing 24 pounds.”

Since those early days Sebago’s world-famous landlocked-salmon fishery has fluctuated wildly. In 1960 it was nearly ended by the aerial saturation of the Maine woods with DDT. Then, in 1972, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (IF&W) stocked lake trout. The alien predators quickly naturalized, swilling smelts to the point that the salmon population again crashed. Since 1982, when IF&W quit stocking lake trout, managers have been trying to reverse some of the damage by upping lake-trout bag limits and extending seasons. And they’re looking into other possible means of control such as gillnets, electro-fishing and water draw-downs.

Following the lead of the state professionals, bucket biologists have illegally unleashed pike (voracious predators of salmon) and, in headwater ponds, landlocked alewives (potentially deadly in that they contain high concentrations of thiaminase, an enzyme that degrades thiamine, thereby killing emerging salmonid fry). Still, in the face of all these insults, Sebago’s salmon have somehow managed to survive, even flourish. The reason is the Crooked River.

Like many game and fish departments, Maine’s IF&W suffers from multi-personality disorder. In 1972—the very year it nuked Sebago’s native ecosystem with lake trout—it widened the narrow breach in the dilapidated Scribner’s Mill dam in Harrison. Two years later the agency forced good fish passage at the next and last upstream obstruction, the dam at Bolsters Mill. For the first time in 150 years, landlocks had run of the entire river. The result has been stupendous salmon fishing in both lake and stream.

Enter John and Marilyn Hatch, fresh from the mid-Hudson River Valley where they’d fed their passion for historical renovation by making over a house built in 1798. Driving through Harrison, Maine, they came across this old mill. The door was open, so they walked in. Ed Scribner welcomed them. They told him that this beautiful old site needed to be restored; he agreed. The year was 1975.