Saving the North Woods

At least the fish were still there. It takes more than oily marinas, motorboaters, partyboaters, waterskiers, jetskiers, parasailers, windsurfers, and second-home developers to deplete smallmouth bass, the resilient bread-and-butter fish of Downeast Maine. And, insulated as they are by 40 feet of epilimnion, lake trout—"togue" in Mainespeak—were nearly as prolific as they'd ever been. With the increase in angling pressure more landlocked salmon were being stocked, so, if anything, they were more abundant than in the days when this watershed was wild.

The 20-foot, square-end Grand Laker canoes used by the guides had been replaced by low-slung, glittery bass boats powered by enormous, time-conserving outboards. There used to be almost 50 guides in the 13 towns between Grand Lake Stream and Forest City—more guides per surface acre than anywhere else in Maine, or New England, for that matter. Now there were none. There had been more fishing and hunting lodges here than anywhere else in the Northeast. Now they were out of business. But who needs guides when you can propel yourself with a foot-operated trolling motor and find fish with a sonar unit that beeps like a tipped-over telephone? And why travel almost to Canada for lodge-based, guided suburban bass fishing when you can do it yourself an hour by air out of New York, Boston, Chicago, Philly, Detroit, or Atlanta?

Although some species of wildlife were on the way out, white-tailed deer had undergone spectacular recovery now that all the "no trespassing" signs had reduced hunting pressure. And while the economy had crashed after the guides, lodge owners, loggers and forest-products workers had moved away or gone on welfare, and after the Baileyville pulp and paper mill went belly up, the dollars were now pouring in (or, more accurately, out) as multi-national corporations developed the former Georgia Pacific holdings, starting with the valuable shore-front property.

As I gazed up along the Farm Cove Peninsula from Leen's Lodge, I saw a phalanx of trophy houses. Twelve miles down the lake they faded into the summer haze, betrayed only by their docks, diving rafts, and moored boats.

I encountered all this last July—but only in a daymare as I studied the North Woods and contemplated its future from a float plane en route from Bangor to West Grand Lake. After a 30-year hiatus, I was returning to this sacred land of lakes, streams and woods as the guest of the Downeast Lakes Land Trust and the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF). There was still time to save it all, but the window of opportunity was closing fast.

Out on West Grand Lake once more, in the Grand Laker steered by guide and folk singer Randy Spencer, I scanned the shoreline for signs of change, and failed to find any. Doubtless there were new cottages, especially on the lake's south end, but I hadn't noticed the cottages in the 1970's, and I didn't notice them now. Nothing looked new, obtrusive or out of place. Most of the 14,000-acre lake still appeared untouched by humanity. It was still silent save for the yodeling of loons and the lapping of waves. It was still embraced by a healthy mixed northern forest that stretched to the horizon or rose to meet purple ridgetops—not wilderness in the technical sense perhaps, but a damn fine facsimile. Collected by West Grand are the waters of 32 lakes, ponds and streams, all as wild or wilder. As nearly as I could discern, there hadn't been any change, but change was bearing down from all compass points.

Throughout the North Woods—that 26 million-acre swath of green from Machias, Maine to Syracuse, New York—timber companies, beset by changing world markets and hounded by ravenous stockholders, are hawking their holdings. These days they tend to manage their forestland not on time scales dictated by natural regeneration but by the average corporate life expectancy of their CEOs (less than 10 years). So, from the industry perspective, growing cellulose on shore-front property has become fiscally imprudent. It's more profitable to slick off the timber and sell the land. The primary threat to fish, wildlife and the local economy is liquidation cutting, subdivision, and loss of public access. "It's happening all around us," declared Downeast Lakes Land Trust director Steve Keith as we strolled along the remote beach at the narrows below Pocumcus Lake where American Indians had speared sea-run salmon. "Even in Washington County you can go 50 miles from these lakes and find everything we're trying avoid."

In 1999 the locals got a major scare when Georgia Pacific sold 446,000 acres—nearly all its property in Maine—to timber investors who consigned it to the care of Wagner Forest Management Ltd. The initial concern of the guides was not suburban sprawl; woods and waters were so immense that they couldn't imagine such a thing. They worried instead about loss of access. Would the new owners festoon the forest with posted signs, cutting sportsmen off from favorite streams, ponds, grouse coverts, trap lines and deer stands? It wasn't long, however, before they realized that their livelihoods depended not just on access but on wildness.

It's true that these lakes provide some of the best smallmouth fishing in the world, that the landlocked fishing is unexcelled south of Canada, and that lake trout are so prolific the state discourages their release, fretting that they'll get ahead of the forage base. But anglers don't come here from all over the world just for the fish. They come here for the North Woods experience—to be poled on still waters in Grand Laker canoes, to listen to the loons and warblers and the summer wind through birch, maple, spruce and balsam, to breathe sweet air undefiled by gasoline fumes. There are far more deer per acre in my central Massachusetts woods than in Downeast Maine, but there is not one hunting lodge.

Led by the guides' concerns, sportsmen, lodge owners and local environmentalists formed the Downeast Lakes Land Trust in 2001. Their mission: purchase and permanently protect the entire 27,000-acre Farm Cove Peninsula. Skeptics, including professional biologists, foresters and land conservators, smiled condescendingly. Only rich folk from, say, East Hampton, New York, attempt to do this sort of thing; and even when they succeed they're lucky to save only 100 acres. When approached by the land trust the Wagner company suggested that it find an experienced outfit to work with. So the landtrust turned to the New England Forestry Foundation. By anyone's standards the land trust had been thinking big with its dream of saving the entire Farm Cove Peninsula. But NEFF had just wrapped up the largest conservation easement America has ever seen. In two years it had raised $32 million, mostly from private sources, and, for $37.10 per acre, protected 762,000 acres of forestland in northern and western Maine owned by the Pingree family.