Soon the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands will draft the first long-range plan for the management of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. If properly drafted, it will offer invaluable protection to a national treasure to the year 2009. Conversely, if handled haphazardly, irreparable harm is probable.

Many within our increasingly more sedentary society would like to experience the “wilderness” adventure, but not without their motorized contrivances. Camps and cabins to the very gates of wilderness are allowable creature comforts to the baffling minds of some. Irrational and threatening, these views loom ominously over the waterway. They are serious yet vulnerable.

The management plan for the waterway must contain safeguards against the expansion of motorized intrusion and the encroachment of development within the one-mile zone of the Allagash. Of equal value is a vigorous effort to acquire more public land for buffers. Motorized traffic and development are the ingredients necessary to effectively render a wilderness designation incongruous. They must not be permitted.

Solitude, even in relatively uncluttered Maine, is elusive. Our thousands upon thousands of acres of privately owned working forest are laced with woods roads originally intended for the transportation of logs and pulp. These, left open after cutting operations, are used throughout the four seasons by motor traffic of all kinds. They quickly become well-worn conduits with little possibility for reasonable healing and regeneration of the land.

In most cases, these will not occur within a human lifetime. If we and those who follow are to experience the Maine of yesterday we must preserve our remaining wilderness. Though it is obviously contrary to the wishes of some, wilderness and development are not compatible. They are mutually exclusive.

Please make your concerns and fears for the future of the Allagash Wilderness Wateway known to the Bureau of Parks and Lands, State House Station 22, Augusta 04333. Alfonse C. Impallomeni Washington