There’s something a touch romantic and mysterious about the idea of a loggers’ bunkhouse nestled deep in the north Maine woods.

To the dozen or so men who call it home four nights a week, however, it’s simply a warm, dry place to eat a hot meal and bed down at the end of a long day.

If its mystique is lost on those who live there, the three-story bunkhouse at Clayton Lake is just the kind of place where, if the walls could talk, oh, the stories they would tell.

Sixty miles southwest of Allagash in Piscataquis County, Clayton Lake can be reached by plane or rough woods roads. The hamlet boasts a grand total of three year-round residents. It continues to be a logging hub where Pelletier and Pelletier, and Clayton Lake Woodlands GP Lumber are headquartered. The two companies operate out of the bunkhouse, which also serves as a dormitory for a dozen loggers at any given time.

Built by lumber baron Eduard LaCroix in the 1920s, the bunkhouse has served as a front-row seat to the evolution of Maine’s logging industry. The building has survived through various booms and busts.

In the early part of the last century, logs were driven down the Allagash River to the St. John River and to mills in St. Francis while the pulp moved upriver to Churchill and Chesuncook lakes to the Penobscot River before reaching mills in Millinocket.

“LaCroix built several bunkhouses like this one,” Bill Sylvester, who has worked as a woodlands manager at Clayton Lake for 35 years, recalled one recent afternoon relaxing in Pelletier and Pelletier’s forestry office on the third floor of the bunkhouse. “Clayton Lake was a depot that carried all sorts of supplies for about a dozen smaller satellite camps around here. Back then, it was all horses and some Lombard-type haulers.”

Today, mechanized delimbers and feller-bunchers – machines that cut, haul, trim, size and stack a log in matter of minutes – have replaced the crews who cut and hauled wood by hand in the woods.

But no matter how automated

timber harvesting has become, nothing has yet eliminated the long hours the workers must spend far from home. Though these days, it’s hard to tell just when one day ends and another begins.

Expensive machinery and lumber quotas set by contracts keep some shifts working round the clock. Others put in 17-hour days to meet the demands of the bank payments and the mills.

It’s a schedule that has led to the near-demise of perhaps that most cherished of logging camp institutions: the camp cook.

A good cook, any logging camp veteran will tell you, could do no wrong. Fast, efficient and fiercely protective of their culinary domains, the cook’s word was law. Those most sought after could turn out a staggering variety of anything sweet – pastries, pies, cakes or cookies.

Decades ago, entire logging operations revolved around meals. Loggers sat down to breakfast plates heaped with bacon, eggs, ham, beans and pancakes with sugar, syrup and molasses coating the whole thing.

“Suppertime and cooks ruined a lot of vehicles,” Sylvester said. “You had to be back in time to eat or go without. There was a real rush to get back.”

These days, it’s every man for himself with less than a handful of logging operations employing cooks. Crews operate at all hours, some running machinery day and night. Expecting a cook to cater to men working different schedules is impractical, if not impossible.

Cans of soup and prepackaged, microwavable fare have replaced the hearty, home-cooked meals once served at the end of the day.

“Lots of people were unhappy when we lost our cook around 1997,” Wendell Soucier, forester at Clayton Lake, said. “People worked all day and didn’t have to worry about what to bring with them for the week or what would spoil.”

On any given evening during the workweek, instead of sitting down together for dinner, loggers now step from the cabs of their machines into one of the bunkhouse’s two fully equipped kitchens to fix their own suppers.

Brian Morneault, Fort Kent, fellerbuncher operator, tears into some store-bought precooked chicken. With one eye on a game show coming in over satellite on the TV, he remembers when there were camp cooks.

“It was nice,” he reminisced. “You walked into the cook room and grabbed a plate, had your fill and put the plate back down when done.” He considers a moment. “But, you get used to this, too.”

And having to fend for himself after 15 hours on his fellerbuncher? Morneault shrugs and keeps eating, “You have to put in the long hours to make ends meet.”

Herman Dubois, a logging truck driver from Fort Kent, reheats a plate of leftovers he brought from a home-cooked supper the previous weekend.

While Dubois digs into the chicken, mashed potatoes and carrots, fellow trucker Jim Bouchard holds up cans of Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee and Campbell’s soup.

“Jim’s wife must be mad at him again,” a fellow logger jokes.

Jokes, light conversation and respecting each other’s space are all part of getting along with eight to a dozen roommates during the week.

“You have to get along, you never know who you will have sleeping in the bed next to yours,” Morneault said. “You learn to be a diplomat – to turn the other cheek and keep the peace.”

“Secret to getting along is doing your own thing [and] don’t boss people around, Bouchard chimed in. “You have enough to do on your own without bugging someone else.”

Evenings are divided between the kitchens and the two common sleeping-recreation rooms on each floor. Due to no prescribed arrangement, French-speaking Canadians gather on the ground floor while French- and English-speaking Americans gravitate toward the second floor.

There is precious little time for much beyond cooking, eating, cleaning up and going to bed.

“We watch TV and Herman goes to bed,” Bouchard said.

All of this is a departure from the past.

Card playing, cribbage, scat or Rummy were popular and there used to be some seasonal rivalry between logging camps on diamonds around the bunkhouse.

“Guys from Second Mesuncook – Blanchette’s camp – would come over and play softball,” Sylvester said. “It was a ritual every Tuesday and Wednesday night in late ’70s.”

Decades before that, companies would hold dances in the bunkhouse.

“There were lots of people living around here then,” Sylvester continued. “Fire wardens, rangers, workers and their wives would all come.”

Some of the spirit from those days, some loggers claim, has lingered.

“One night I was sitting by the window and I was alone here,” Bouchard said. “I could see the front door down stairs and suddenly heard it slam open and shut about 10 times, but there was no one there.”

Others talk of footsteps, articles placed in one location turning up in another, and the strains of violin music echoing in the house and from the dark woods beyond.

Not even Steve Pelletier, co-owner of Pelletier and Pelletier, is immune to the spectral visits. He remembers one odd occurrence when, for no apparent reason, coffee literally exploded out of a freshly poured mug.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before or since,” he mused.

“If the ghost worked and died here, he must have been a hard worker,” one man said. “So he’s welcome here.”

Morneault is not convinced there’s anything otherworldly going on.

“This is an old house,” he said. “It creeks and makes a lot of noise.”

Both Steve and his brother Keith Pelletier have tried to make the bunkhouse as comfortable as possible for those living there. Three years ago, new insulation was blown into the walls and thicker, more efficient windows installed. With these improvements, even on some of the coldest, windiest days, when the wind whipping off the lake pushes the wind chills down to 50 below or worse, modern baseboard heating keeps the place cozy.

Backing that up is the old six-burner, wood-fired cook stove in the downstairs kitchen. The cast-iron stove is not the only holdover from the past.

Upstairs, in the foresters’ office, pipes and drying racks hang above modern computers. GPS-generated maps hang on walls with the original moldings and rough, hand-hewn planks.

“A lot of the wood that built this place was cut right around here,” Sylvester pointed out.

In earlier years, when there was no work in the woods, workers were tapped for whatever talents they possessed. Carpenters, smiths, electricians were all kept busy on routine bunkhouse chores.

“There was never any real down time,” Sylvester said. “When the guys were not cutting they were doing maintenance around here – firewood, milling, cutting lawns [and] fixing vehicles. You used people’s talents where you could.”

In the early days of logging, workers did not have the option of returning home each weekend.

Dubois recalled his own father, who harvested lumber using horses and who stayed in the woods all winter, coming out only in the spring. “That’s probably why all our birthdays are at the same time,” he said.

“Those were long winters, all right,” Bouchard added. “Imagine, three-quarters of those guys did not wash.”

That observation prompted a rush of comments from various loggers about the state of various unwashed bodies and articles of clothing – which many claimed could lean, stand or walk by themselves.

Slowly, as meals wrapped up, dishes were cleared and put away, the talk died down. Outside, the wind had finally calmed and the night sky was full of stars. Smoke curled from the bunkhouse chimney and a single upstairs window was softly illuminated.

For a moment, time stood still. It could have been 2003 or 1903. There have been a lot of changes at Clayton Lake, but two constants remained. The loggers continue to put in backbreaking days far from home and the same bunkhouse awaits them at day’s end after all these years.