Author sets standard for history of Maine woods

THE INTERRUPTED FOREST: A HISTORY OF MAINE’S WILDLANDS, by Neil Rolde. Tilbury House, Publishers. Gardiner, 2001, $20.

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

– T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

If Neil Rolde, our pre-eminent living Maine historian, had wanted a quotation to introduce this finely researched book, he would have had to search diligently for one more appropriate than these lines from the poet.

For what Rolde has done is to start at the beginning – a geologic past more than 1.6 billion years old – and work his detailed way through Maine’s time past to time present and from there to thoughts on Maine’s time future. This is, however, not a civics lesson, but a tightly focused examination of the

past, present and future of what some of us still call “the Maine woods,” those millions of acres of Thoreau’s “wilderness” that occupy almost all of the state’s northeast half.

A tall order – a very tall order that would challenge the best of historians aided by large research staffs. It is greatly to this author’s credit (and he had no large research staff to assist him) that he not only keeps such a comprehensive history under control, but also is eminently readable and often entertaining. For this his readers, and there will be many of them among future school and college students, will be most grateful, for there can be little question that Rolde’s new book will set the standard among histories of the Maine woods.

But beyond the facts of history, there are his musings about how the current turmoil of change in Maine’s wildlands will resolve itself. If, in fact, time future is contained in time past, what will become, for example, of the plan to create an expansive national park in the same wild places Thoreau explored and wrote about? Or will those same millions of acres (which so many of us have never visited) become residential and recreational sites: a future already given credibility by the recent sale of hundreds of thousands of wild acres to commercial land developers.

Rolde avoids detailed conclusions; he leaves those to the readers who have been led so diligently through the centuries that preceded ours. And diligently is the right word. Once we are started on the journey through Maine’s past with an examination of early geology and prehistory, we meet the Paleo-Indians and others who were here before visitors from the Atlantic’s eastern shores. In remarkably detailed yet quite readable step-by-step chronological fashion, we move through the centuries with special attention paid to individuals and events that affected Down East Maine. Pedantry is avoided, thanks to Rolde’s affection for and attention to lively anecdotal details.

Thus we arrive at time present fully informed of time past. We are introduced to the individuals and groups who now take the vast stage that is Maine’s millions of acres of woods. We learn of plans for a national park; a land use plan that balances industry and recreation; a series of large land purchases that already have put much waterfront in private hands. We are introduced, one by one, to the individuals at the forefront of these constituencies: men and women many of you already know of, if you don’t know them personally.

Something you will not easily find in these pages is Rolde’s opinions. As a committed historian should be (so goes the conventional wisdom), his take on the past, present and future is studiously objective. We are not being led down any particular path toward any particular conclusion. We are reading this history, as the author tells us, because, “Today’s headlines make so much more sense when historical memory can put them in context and add to the public debate. That is especially applicable to the future ruckuses that are sure to bloom over the land question in Maine, whether on a small scale in the settled parts of the state or in massive confrontations in that vast tree-covered expanse north, west and east that can still called wild.”

Those of you who read this most informative book will be much better able to comprehend those massive confrontations.