The California Road:

If We Don’t Know Where We Were, How Do We Know Where We’re Going?

Imagine that you are paddling down the Allagash River, heading northward across Harvey Pond as you approach Long Lake Dam.

Looking at the west shore of Harvey Pond you trace the location of the ancient farm clearing, succeeded by a grove of poplar trees that slopes upward toward Harding Brook Ridge and, westward, the upper Saint John River. This was Harvey Farm, a part of the depot established in the late 1840’s by the Houlton, Maine, firm of Cary Brothers. The Allagash Winter Road, known as the California Road, extended beyond the farm and along the ridge to the larger settlement of Seven Islands on the Saint John.

As you gaze along the eastern shore of Harvey Pond you observe a fringe of younger tree growth along the shore’s edge, showing the retreat of the high water line as Long Lake Dam has washed away with successive spring floods. When I first saw the old dam twenty years ago, it held a fair head of water. Today the dam site is marked by a quiet ripple over a short drop. It is a dam in name only. The California Road ran eastward from here to Musquacook Dam, a smaller, similar ghost of a depot, and beyond to Ashland.

At the foot of Harvey Pond you are swept into the quickening shoal water that extends toward the dam, past a few worn mounds of rock that are the remnants of boom piers. The remaining dam is visible from upriver as an eroded abutment on each shore of the river. Between the two abutments the line of the dam is a rock-strewn riffle that looks from your canoe like a line of reflected sky, an unnaturally straight line crossing the river. An additional clue to its artificiality is the regular pattern of rocky patches alternating with the open channels that once were, respectively, cribwork piers and plank gates.

If you weren’t aware of the place’s history, you easily could fail to note most of these features. Probably most do. Even the dam isn’t obvious until one is almost on it. The frayed logs of the remaining cribworks are more evident from below the dam, in eddies where they are protected by the upstream rocks from the grinding of the spring ice.

Where the depot buildings stood a large campsite surrounds the east abutment. On a sunny July day Long Lake Dam is aswarm with swim-suited campers with lawn chairs, water toys, and beach umbrellas, along with nylon tents and Coleman stoves on the official picnic tables. Children jump from rocks into the deep pool below the dam. The air smells of suntan lotion. This is the high season on the Allagash, between the Fourth of July and Labor Day.

In June or September, though, Long Lake Dam is serene, often unoccupied. You can hear the rustle of the west wind blowing through the grass and scrub of the campsite clearing. You stand alone on the high abutment and admire the view – the expanse of pool that narrows into the shadowy current that will carry you into the forest, away from the chain of lakes you have paddled from the south.

Whether one’s impressions of Long Lake Dam are formed with or without the Daytona Beach ambience, it is startling to view for the first time a photograph of the place as it once was. During its incarnation as a lumbering depot and river crossing along the California Road, Long Lake Dam was once a company town. The photograph shows a massive cribwork structure designed to contain several vertical feet of lake, numerous buildings for supplies, personnel, watercraft, and draft animals.

With the machinery now used to build roads and harvest trees a log cut anywhere in northern Maine can become a stack of milled two-by-four studs by sundown of the same day, but it hasn’t been long since the era when the same process required months. From day to day, it’s easy to lose track of the subtle but irresistible creep of change. An effort of historical imagination is required to recreate the lost world of the California Road. For example, I recently read an earnest press release from a conservation organisation which asserted that before the building of today’s network of logging roads there were fewer people living in the woods than there are today. (Therefore, it continued, let’s stem the human tide.) This notion has it backwards – there are far fewer people living in the woods today than anytime in the past century-and-a-half. Since lumbermen can commute daily to almost anywhere in the forest, they no longer winter over, or require farms for food, depots for supplies, or schools for their children. But for anyone lacking a sense of the region’s history it’s obvious that fewer people must have lived in the woods when automobiles and graded roads didn’t exist. This imaginary trend underlies the urgency many feel about preserving the forest.

Part of the reason that the era of the California Road has faded from our historical consciousness is that many of its survivors live across the border in the Beauce area of Quebec. They speak French, of course, and their recollections are mostly lost to us anglophones. One day in Greenville a few years ago, I chanced to meet Denis Poulin, an elderly resident of Saint George, Quebec, whose father had worked in the Musquacook and Allagash area. Mr. Poulin told me that he had attended school at Churchill Dam (this was the school where Helen Hamlin, the author of Nine Mile Bridge, taught) and that he completed the second grade in a school at the Squirrel Pocket of Second Musquacook Lake. I had spent a day or two encamped at Squirrel Pocket, and I wouldn’t have guessed that the shoreline had ever held a school. But that’s true of most everywhere in the Maine woods. If all the telephone wires, roads, buildings, and dams magically could be resurrected there’d hardly be a spot from which one couldn’t hit some sort of man-made item with a rock thrown in any direction.

The notion that the northern woods have somehow become more populous and more developed with the advent of modern road-building and timber-harvesting reveals the romantic – and mistaken – mind-set of many who are lobbying the government for more restrictions on access and use of the Allagash, and the northwoods in general. This attitude assumes that improved technology has increased human occupation and disruption, and therefore the woods were quieter and less crowded in the past. The truth is more complicated. If we could go back in time to canoe the Allagash, Saint John, Aroostook, or Penobscot a century ago, we would see a great deal more of human occupation than we see today, with rude buildings, acres of stumps, piles of sawdust and slash, garbage dumps, abandoned machinery, dams, and other evidence of human enterprise. If our notions about the value of wilderness lead us to feel disturbed at such sights, we ought to rejoice that conditions in the Maine woods have been improved by the greater scale of modern technology. The woods today are lonelier than they were during the ascendancy of Maine lumbering. Ironically, they are both lonelier and more accessible.

The earnest promotion of more “wilderness” by the more naive sort of conservationists is an old story. A brief glance at contemporary accounts shows that Maine lumbermen have always been criticized for ruining the recreational and spiritual experience of the forest. The foremost commentator is Thoreau, of course, but there’s also sportsman-author W. H. H. Murray, who wrote in 1865 that he wouldn’t travel to Maine in search of trout because of the depredations of the lumbermen. Forty years later, Holman Day accused the loggers of ruining the forests with their wasteful practices of leaving piles of slash and unused timber all over the woods. After the First World War, Forrest Colby, Maine’s Forest Commissioner, advocated a state takeover of the forest in order to save it from the feckless logging industry. The Allagash became the focus of national park proposal through the 1950’s and 1960’s. The state’s expropriation of the Allagash, to prevent the federal takeover, was justified by accusations of mismanagement of the forest, and by warnings that left in private hands the Allagash would become more like the rest of northern forest, doomed for “unrestricted” and “unregulated” development. The creation of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway prevented that eventuality, for the Waterway is now somewhat more developed and congested than the surrounding forests and rivers. Few of the people militating for further protection of the Allagash understand this. They fail to see that the occasional problem of congestion is at least partly the result of the recreational demand fueled by the Allagash’s welcoming status as a state park.

A few years ago I spent an afternoon in the offices of the Department of Conservation browsing through the collected public comments concerning the proposed management plan for the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Among the many similar and fatuous postcards sent from Falmouth Foreside and California, a mail blitz apparently organized by the Sierra Club (Put the “Wilderness” back in the Wilderness Waterway!), I found a brief letter from John Sinclair, written in an old man’s laborious, rickety scrawl. When John Sinclair was president of the Seven Islands Land Company no one was more respected by those who worked in the woods. This was the great man, son of a lumbering family from the Allagash area, who had preserved the vast forest holdings of the Pingree heirs through prudent management, quiet lobbying, and an engineer’s detailed understanding. The island shown (and misnamed) on the map as “Saint Clair Island” (below the Saint John’s Big Rapids) is named for his family. He is the John of John’s Bridge, locus of controversy on the Allagash. He had decided to compose a few remarks about the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

About the creation of the official waterway he wrote, “Just as the vote was taken on the Allagash Wilderness Waterway I was asked to take Stephen Wheatland and Stephen Phillips, both Pingree heirs, to the north end of Pillsbury Island on Eagle Lake where Thoreau had visited their land years earlier...

“These knowledgeable gentlemen sat before a little fire and looked north over Eagle Lake and began their stories of Indian travels and land uses...

“The stories continued about their paying taxes and caring for their family lands all their lives.

“At times they rested quietly with their individual thoughts.

“Then they began to express their deep feelings about the Allagash Wilderness Waterway taking which to them and many of us was crude and rude. The care and protection of the lands for more than one-hundred years seemed to amount to very little to Washington, the Department of the Interior, the political people in Maine, many environmentalists, and the hoodwinked Maine voters.”

I felt a twinge of guilt as I read John Sinclair’s letter, for I had not completed the assignment he had once suggested to me. When my first article about canoeing the Saint John River had been published, he had phoned to tell me that he thought I had captured the nuanced attitude of those who live and work in the region. I had been flattered by this generous comment from a man who had not only read John McPhee’s essay on the Saint John but had been part of its subject. And so I had met John Sinclair – I have never heard him called anything but “John Sinclair” by Allagash men, never “John” or “Mr. Sinclair” – and we had talked of the woods and of books. He had suggested that my next writing project should be about the California Road, because so little was known of it. Even when he first had cruised the woods sixty years ago the road was disused but still shown, in places, on maps. He had seen its wagon ruts leading west from Harvey Farm, he said, and he had supervised the razing of the few remaining buildings of the ancient farm at Seven Islands after its last occupants left.

I had begun research on the California Road but had found little beyond the basic facts of a few dates and places. Like the overgrown ghost buildings that mark its old path, the road itself seems a variety of ghost. Even the origin of its name is uncertain. Perhaps someone will find a cache of letters on the subject; the story of the California Road should reveal the lives of the people along it.

The lives of the people along it. I understand the grievance that underlies John Sinclair’s letter -- “We who live and work here care for this country. You reduce us to insignificance, or worse.” I also understood his choice of the California Road as a topic. Crosswise to the natural direction of the watershed, the California Road was the original man-made highway that spanned the northern Maine woods, the human artifact that made the lumbering livelihood possible. That was John Sinclair’s point. Care of the natural world does not preclude exploitation, for exploitation is inevitable if we are to live. Our efforts, like the California Road, will vanish but if we have been careful, nature will remain unscarred. If we have been careful, we need not be ashamed and should not be maligned.

“Put the wilderness back in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway” is the slogan of those disaffected by the state’s management. Wilderness, it seems, is not a self-evident concept. The dirigiste optimism of the state’s creation of a public waterway in the 1960’s, an act intended forever to settle the wilderness issue, contrasts with the often embarrassingly rancorous tug-of-war of the political interests that sway its present-day management. Isn’t an effort that’s subject to politics, with its attendant public oversight and controversy, nearly impossible to manage with consistent vision? This is an irony that the earnest advocates of more, and more regulated, park fail to see. No one ever asks: Have the desired qualities of the Allagash – solitude and remoteness – been improved by government ownership?

The question doesn’t answer itself. There is no definite answer to this “what if?” question, but the fate of the Saint John River, practically a twin to the Allagash, provides a clue. The same politicians who “saved” the Allagash proposed to “develop” the Saint John with a catastrophic boondoggle, the Dickey-Lincoln Dam, the destructive scale of which would have shown that the timber owners’ purported unconcern with wilderness values wasn’t so horrible after all. Before those who want to advance their ideas of managing the North Woods call upon Washington to act as umpire or proprietor, let them remember that the same pols who competed for their names on the prospective brass plaque of the national park monument at Allagash Falls also wanted their names on the prospective brass plaque of the Dickey-Lincoln Dam.

Unlike the Allagash, the preservation of the serene and remote character of the Saint John River was accomplished through the persistence and generosity of private individuals, who lobbied for defeat of the dam proposal and subsequently purchased a share of the river’s shoreline from the timberland owners, who today continue cooperatively to manage the river’s recreational uses. Curiously, in the thirty-something years between the creation of the Allagash Waterway and the purchase of the Saint John’s shoreline by the Nature Conservancy, the wilderness qualities of the Saint John remained unspoiled at the hands of the same timber owners who had seemed an imminent threat during the Allagash Waterway’s creation. Today the Saint John River has more “wilderness” character than the nearby Allagash, although in fairness it must be said that this result is due, in part, to other factors (relative remoteness, fewer canoeing days per year) than the efforts of the owners. Nevertheless, while the calling upon the federal regulatory furies to “save” the forest is the reflexive habit of the “wilderness values” lobby, history shows that a better way to preserve the woods would be to avoid drawing attention to them and to hope for federal neglect.

In the mythology of the Maine woods the owners of the timberlands have always had the deep pockets necessary to buy legislators while liquidating the forests. In reality, the woodlands of northwest Maine have been valuable only as woodlands through cycles of profit and loss. Lots of development ideas -- hotels, sporting camps, and other recreational services -- have been tried and mostly proved unprofitable. Despite frequent alarms of destruction the forests have remained. Are potentially destructive developers now waiting to turn the forests into parking lots and camp lots? Considering history, that’s doubtful. Should we pre-emptively turn the forests over to the Department of the Interior? When the gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers.