I don’t care what literary critics say, it was a dark and stormy night as we gathered around the campfire at the Big Bog campsite on the North Branch of the Penobscot River.

Driving there, we had seen a sign indicating a Boy Scout Camporee was being held in Glenburn. “Aha!” said my husband, Bill, a Scouter who claims that all Camporees are wet, “so that’s why it’s raining so hard.”

We hoped the Glenburn Camporee’s influence would not extend all the way to our destination, but no such luck. It was blowing up a storm and pouring buckets. All waterways — including puddles — were running high.

The history of the area was part of the reason our group of eight had decided to participate in the Penobscot Paddle and Chowder Society’s mid-May weekend on the North Branch. At the turn of the century, loggers built a dam at the outlet of Big Bog and later dug a narrow, 3-mile canal from Fifth St. John Pond to the North Penobscot just above Big Bog. The canal allowed logs to be flushed to Bangor instead of Canada.

Saturday, after the rain stopped, some of our group explored the upper part of the canal and the small dam at its head on the shore of Fifth St. John. Canoeists used to follow the canal to connect with the St. John River watershed. The 1971 AMC Canoeing Guide says the canal was so overgrown in 1971 that following it with a canoe was a “tour de force.” The 1976 AMC Guide reported, “Today the canal has very little water in it, and it is so overgrown that it is completely impassable.”

Though the canal now looks much like a natural stream, the dam at Fifth St. John Pond, though small, is impressive, set in a pleasant clearing near the shore of the pond, a great place for a picnic.

A year ago when some of us camped at Big Bog, it was unusually warm. This year, on May 17, it was unusually cold, with patches of snow in the woods. The March-type wind fiercly opposed four of us paddling across the bog. Tom and Barb Goodyear from Ellsworth, in a canoe with high bow and stern, had to fight especially hard.

We had it soft, though, compared to canoeists who paddled, poled and dragged their fully loaded wood-canvas canoes up the North Branch to reach the St. John. A 1923 issue of In The Maine Woods contains an account of the 25-mile trip taken by 11 men over “two days of hard labor” in June 1914:

“The water was very low at the time of our journey, and about a half mile from Pittston we began to pole. Within another half mile poling was impossible and we had to walk and drag the canoes. A hunded and nineteen pound canoe loaded with two hundred pounds of supplies is easily forced through ordinary water, but when the stream begins to be narrow and shallow and filled with sharp rocks, it requires hard work and skillful handling to avoid injuring the craft.”

As we paddled across the bog this year, we kept trying to catch sight of our goal, the dam abutments at the outlet. We could remember standing on an abutment years ago and being able to see a big part of the bog — and five moose feeding at five different sites.

Paddling in a flooded bog-lake, such as Big Bog or Sunkhaze, without being able to see the outlet can be unsettling. High water converts scattered vegetation into hundreds of islands that hide not just the outlet, but the whole shoreline. The high water, especially when whipped by wind, obscures the channel itself.

We checked our map, paddled southwest, read two boom islands as channel markers, checked the map again, took heart from the adage “only the good die young,” persisted, and finally found our way to the abutment.

So why couldn’t we see the abutment from the middle of the bog? In the 25 years since maintenance on the dam was discontinued, the water level in the bog has dropped, allowing alders and willows to grow and obstruct the view.

The North Branch view of the forest is another that has changed in 25 years. Some trees are growing back after clear-cutting, but they are small. Older trees scattered in their midst are dead or dying. The area looks like a wasteland. Ries Wichers and Jane Sanborn, on their first trip to the area, were astonished at the devastation. Thinking of last fall’s forest referendum, Ries asked, “Why the big fuss about saving the northern Maine forests? There aren’t any.”

Such bog matters were the topic of discussion at our Saturday evening campfire, which burned much more brightly than during Friday’s storm. Bill and I first visited the bog in 1972 while guiding a federal group that was considering the upper Penobscot River for possible inclusion in the Wild and Scenic River System. Since then, we have camped at Big Bog with our children. We bicycled in once before the new access road was built.

Just a few days before our recent trip, we learned about the proposal to rebuild the dam. With the dam scheduled to be rebuilt in late summer 1998, the day will come when we again can look over the bog and see moose feeding.

Sunday morning, in glorious sunshine, six of us decided to go the 12 miles from Dole Bridge to Pittston Farm. During the car shuttle, we checked Leadbetter Falls, noting the convenient portage, but things went smoothly on the river above the drop, so we all ran it, including Judy Hale of Surry and her mother, Ginny Williams of Belfast, experienced and lightweight in a 15-footer.

After stopping for lunch, we barely had to work to go our last five miles below Leadbetter. The high water was on our side. Sandpipers and a bald eagle were working harder than we were as they gleaned their lunch for the day, the pipers teetering along the shore and the eagle flying over the river. Unlike them, we knew where our next sustenance was coming from — the lunch counter at Pittston Farm.

We reached the farm by paddling part way up the South Branch so we wouldn’t get cross-threaded in the pasture fences on the farm’s north side. Horses grazed in the pasture, along with Canada geese. In the barn, once home to loggers’ draft horses, an assortment of pigs, goats and chickens reside.

Pittston Farm, a most spectacular cluster of buildings to encounter in today’s wilderness, was likely even more so when it serviced loggers. According to “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” by Durwood J. Fernald Jr., the farm “originated as a stopping place for sportsmen going to Canada via the old Indian trail. Sometime between 1850 and 1879 a Mr. Knight cleared 10 acres.”

After changing hands several times, the farm, along with all of Pittston Academy Grant Township, was purchased in 1906 by Great Northern Paper Co., which gradually enlarged the amount of cleared land to 100 acres. GNP built more barns, an icehouse, a telephone exchange, waterworks, a potato house and other outbuildings. One barn held as many as 50 horses and 275 tons of hay. The boarding houses were so big there was a hospital on the third story of one.

In “The Big Little World of Doc Pritham,” Dorothy Clarke Wilson writes that on one winter trip to Pittston — on a dark and stormy night — Doc stopped briefly in Rockwood, where he was told the chances of his getting through to the farm were poor. Prodded along by this challenge, Doc, on a homemade snow machine, climbed over snowdrift after snowdrift, passing “eleven stalled vehicles.” He attended his patients, writes Wilson, “and returned the way he had come, boasting that he had beaten a V-8 empty truck over the 40-mile route by an hour and a half.”

In 1973, GNP started allowing the Boy Scouts of America to use Pittston Farm. In 1992, Ken and Sonja Twitchell purchased the buildings and, in 1993, opened the farm as a four-season resort. Listed on the resort’s welcome sign, right up there with seven other staples such as gas and meals, is ICE CREAM.

These folks know what is important in life.

New Dam on Tap

The Big Bog wetland restoration proposal, including construction of a new dam with a fishway, submitted by the Fisheries Division, Moosehead Lake Region of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and by Great Northern Paper Co., seeks to “restore for fish and wildlife the wetland habitat values associated with Big Bog before the loss of the dam.”

Fisheries biologist Paul Johnson spearheaded the proposal, saying the restored wetland’s flowage “will increase winter and summer habitat available for wild brook trout” in the North Branch and its tributaries above and below the dam and will improve habitat for wildlife.

Bob Wengrzynek, a biologist with the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service who accompanied Paul on the bog trip, says that the restoration of the Big Bog dam has been completely funded by the National Fisheries and Wildlife Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture (under its Wetland Reserve Program) and Ducks Unlimited.

Great Northern Paper Co. plans to donate the Big Bog flowage by deed or easement to the state of Maine for perpetual management of fish and wildlife resources.

Dam construction is scheduled to start in late summer 1998.