The visit to the Allagash this summer by officials from the National Park Service has left state government a little embarrassed and a little defiant, as if Maine were surprised by guests before it had a chance to clean house and so decided to insist it preferred sloppy living. The embarrassment of not having filed a necessary federal permit to rebuild Churchill Dam and then building it with an architectural style more appropriate to interstate highways than wild waterways is understandable, even reassuring. The defiance, however, is superfluous: remedies proposed by the park service are far from onerous and could improve the Allagash.

Until 1997, Churchill dam was a cribwork structure, or two structures, the original having been replaced in the late 1960s. The historic significance of the cribwork dam to Maine’s logging heritage was of such a degree that the state’s original management plan for the waterway mentioned it specifically, along with two other dams and the famous abandoned locomotives that sit forest-bound between Eagle and Chamberlain lakes. In 1997, a concrete dam at Churchill went in without, apparently, so much as a whisper of protest from environmentalists, but shortly after that a new management plan by the state Conservation Department brought howls.

The new plan proposed to expand access, at John’s Bridge, which drew such attention that it caused the issue of access along the entire waterway to be examined, which led to a review of all development along the waterway, which exposed the permit-missing dam, leading to the inspection by the park service. Conservation Commissioner Ron Lovaglio recently defended the use of the dam by logging trucks, saying his agency has “a responsibility to serve the commerce up there.”

That interesting thought raises a question to which Maine returns often with the Allagash Wilderness Waterway: Is it, in fact, a wild place, as suggested both by its name and its designation under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act? Four years of debate shows that wild is about as hard to pin down as truth or beauty. One person’s wilderness is another’s backyard. Better that the federal legislation protecting the Allagash had been called something like Scenic Rivers Preservation Act, which, as the park service’s recommendations show,

is really what the government is after.

For instance, the service has this to say about the cribwork dams: “Both the historical significance of these structures and their ‘essentially primitive’ timber appearance are relevant to meeting and maintaining the ‘wild’ classification standard.” That is, wood is “wild”; sand, gravel and cement are not. And this: “each new or additional conflicting development within the unbroken stretches of wilderness experience takes a distinct toll on the cumulative value of the experience.”

There’s nothing wrong with the park service’s observations and plenty that is good, if a bit deceptive. It doesn’t want Maine to have a wild river, it wants Maine to get hold of the river it had 30 years ago and to provide today the profound experiences canoeists had then. Because the dam “represents a direct and adverse impact to the values for which the Allagash was designated … ‘wild,'” the park service wants Maine to come up with some specific ways to mitigate the affect of the dam and to improve its management plan to better reflect the federal designation. One way to meet the first goal, it is strongly suggested, is to reduce the number of access points along the waterway.

The Conservation Department seems loath to do this, but it cannot justify all of the new access points that have appeared since the 1960s with the original intent of the waterway. Reducing drive-up access is an opportunity to preserve a place the state holds dear and make up for leaving out an inappropriate dam where guests would see it.