Mining Maine memories

Betty D. Steele’s husband, David, had gone without her to fish for trout in Chesuncook Lake in remote northern Maine for many years when, in 1975, he decided to take her along.

As the couple returned to the lake each year, Betty Steele would record her thoughts about their adventures in a series of journals that, she said, started “as kind of a freak thing.”

“Our friends and family couldn’t imagine why we were going up there. ‘What do you do up in the woods?’ that was the question, so I started keeping little journals just to report to my mother that I hadn’t lost my mind,” she said. “Meanwhile I was doing more and more writing, so they became a little more detailed.”

Those accumulated details filled 36 journals, which the Enfield, Conn., woman has distilled into a 232-page retrospective of the vacations over a quarter century.

After boiling down the journals to the most unusual episodes, the sometimes frightening and the emotionally charged ones, Steele selected about 80 photos she took and put them all together. She published a thousand copies of the book, “Chesuncook On My Mind: Recollections of Historic & Remote Chesuncook Village,” late last year at her own expense. The volume is starting to appear in bookstores near Greenville, Maine, where her publisher is located.

The book recounts the time in 1992 when a late ice-out on the lake left Steele and her husband unable to get around for five days. It describes the couple’s encounters with Bert and Maggie McBurnie, former owners of the area’s small country inn, the Chesuncook Lake House, and Bert McBurnie’s struggle with cancer, from which he died in 1997.

It also depicts the Steeles on their most productive Maine moose-spotting jaunts by powered canoe around the lake. “If you analyze it, it is a strange animal,” Betty Steele said. “But if you’ve ever watched them move, once they get going, boy, they look pretty graceful.”

She is in good company in writing about life around the Chesuncook, a lake 22 miles long and fed by the western branch of the Penobscot River. Henry David Thoreau, the esteemed New England naturalist, toured the Chesuncook in 1853. His encounters with moose and other life there are recorded in his posthumously published work, “The Maine Woods.”

A Hartford man, Thomas Sedgwick Steele, retraced Thoreau’s route in the 1880s and wrote two books about his travels. He is an ancestor of David Steele, a fact Betty Steele said she discovered only recently. “It was an uncanny find. I said it must be in the blood.”

Steele, who will only admit to being “well over 65,” sat down some years ago to edit her journals into something she could give to Maggie McBurnie as a gift, and through persistence found her way to a publisher. The book is dedicated to the McBurnies and to her husband.

A graduate of Lasell Junior College in Auburndale, Mass., Steele later worked as a bookkeeper and a corporate librarian. She was a member of a camera club for two decades, did oil painting and took a few writing courses at local high schools and at Manchester Community College. All those abilities were useful in recording her long love of the quiet Maine community.

There are few tricks to becoming a published writer, she said.

“A little luck has to come into the picture, of course. I think it’s what other writers have said, you just write. You have to love the creative process. Otherwise, don’t bother.”