‘Wilderness’ important history of the Allagash

The Wilderness From Chamberlain Farm: A Story of Hope for the American Wild, by Dean B. Bennett, Island Press, Washington, D.C.; $30.

This comprehensive and so diligently researched history of Maine’s Allagash River and the lands around it would always be welcome. But given the current efforts to demean and dilute the standards that protect the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, it is a critically important piece of work.

It is important because those seeking with such relentless persistence to invade what has been unequivocally legislated as wilderness might have had an easier time of it were it not for the rigorous documentation Dean Bennett provides. Starting at the very beginning and as carefully laid out as a master bricklayer’s walk, this history of Maine’s prime wilderness region sets down, one after the other, each linked to the next, the details of the evolution of a river and a region from its geologic past to its controversial present. A remarkable achievement, given the remoteness of the river and its skeletal archives.

This is why the author has wisely chosen Chamberlain Farm, one of the region’s oldest and most long-lasting settlements, as a kind of very real and recognizable anchor.

As the centuries pass and attitudes toward the wild land swing full circle like a ship on a long mooring, Chamberlain Farm holds at the center.

That circle begins with the Wabanaki, the People of the Dawn, who made camp on the point of land that later became Chamberlain Farm. “They were a people,” we are told, “who arrived more than one hundred centuries ago … For ten thousand years these indigenous people lived off this land touched by the first rays of the morning sun. Here, in reverential adaptation, they conjoined with the natural world. They were one with nature.”

But in the blink of a cosmic eye, relations between man and nature spun 180 degrees. The Allagash River and the wild lands around it became places to be tamed, exploited, harvested and converted to economic gain. In the best Calvinist traditions, industry became Man’s destiny; whatever wild was there was there to serve industry.

Not until the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s (and the story of these decades is this book’s most dramatic) did Maine and the nation begin to comprehend the wisdom of protecting and preserving the essential wildness of places like the Allagash. First came Gov. Percival Baxter and his indomitable effort to keep Katahdin wild. Then, energized by the efforts of Maine residents such as Bob Patterson of Mount Desert, heavyweights in government like Sen. Ed Muskie of Maine, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and, on up the charts all the way to the White House and President John F. Kennedy, took up the Allagash cause. It is a mark of how much has changed since those days of such enthusiasm and hope to realize that the President of the United States, and his Secretary of the Interior took the time to make a trip to the Allagash with Ed Muskie and then Maine Gov. Ken Curtis.

When you try to visualize what set of circumstances could energize an expedition of equal stature these days, you realize how far the balance of government has shifted, how much excitement has been lost. But it was there in those days and out of that crucible of renewed concern for our few remaining wild and natural places, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway was officially established. The place that had sustained the Wabanaki in a harmonious circle of Man and Nature was, so the government intended, to stay wild for all the foreseeable future.

At least that’s what John Kennedy, Stewart Udall, Ed Muskie and the people of Maine and the nation believed when Maine voters went to the polls on Nov. 8, 1966, and approved the bond issue that would finance the creation of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. It is one of this book’s many attributes that it leaves us with a full understanding of the vigor of the Maine citizen’s commitment to the Allagash wilderness concept.

But these 400-plus pages are more than a linear history, as important as that may be. They are also pages literally alive with the men and women of the Allagash, the characters, the guides, the bush pilots, the lumberjacks, and the sports, the men and women who first arrived “from away” and became so overwhelmed by the majesty of the river and the Maine woods that they stayed to become its advocates and defenders.

Given the cycles of human opinion and values so well defined by this book, it should not be surprising that other groups are already energetically at work trying to undo all that has been done to protect the Allagash.

However, even a casual reading of Bennett’s fine work should convince you that these latest invaders will be proven wrong.