ROCKWOOD, Maine — The night before we left, I spoke with a woman at the front desk. We were staying in a resort, and she was in the main lodge.
“Remember, when you leave in the morning, moose will be around,” she said. “Once I left my house at dawn and saw a moose half frozen in a lake and an eagle trying to pull it out. That’s a morbid scene. So, be careful.”
I thanked her, and early the next morning I pulled my Jeep onto a logging road, right in front of a logging truck. I floored the pedal. The truck bore down, and I had enough time to recognize that my impending death would be my fault. Then the driver swung his wheel hard and steered around my Jeep.
I was shaking so hard that I never noticed the moose. Two of them, regarding my approach like a pair of Secret Service agents. One stood on the shoulder of the road, one watched brazenly from the oncoming lane. I hadn’t seen either until a moment before. Which reminded me of something else the woman at the desk said: “You won’t see ’em until you do. Suddenly there will be this great big thing there.”
Male moose are called bulls; with their huge iconic antlers, they get all the press. These were females, or cows. They watched as I slowed, then they trotted alongside the Jeep, almost keeping pace with us for a quarter mile or so. Moose are huge; their legs long and spidery, their faces thin. They resemble anteaters on stilts. When they run, the ground seems to meet their feet too soon. I watched this loping gait, then I looked away, at a traffic sign showing a silhouette of a moose:
“High Rate of Moose Crashes Next Six Miles.”
My girlfriend and I ended up in the backcountry of western Maine, at the edge of its hallowed north woods, for a pair of reasons: We wanted to head away from typical Maine — L.L. Bean and Portland, Camden and the calendar-ready coastal outcrops. Also, we had never seen real moose.
Fortunately, Piscataquis County, a couple of hours north of Portland, holds the conveniently named Moosehead Lake, a long glowing patch of flat water, 40 miles long, the largest lake in Maine, surrounded by dense wilderness, “stern and savage” as Henry David Thoreau called it in “The Maine Woods,” his 1864 travel journal.
“One of the things I love to point out is a map of New England beneath a night sky,” said Karen Woodsum, the Sierra Club’s senior northeast representative. “When you look at one, you see lights all up the coast and very bright near the cities, then all of a sudden, this vast blackness. That’s the largest unbroken forest east of the Mississippi, 10 million acres, and Moosehead Lake can be found right at the edge of that. Greenville’s your gateway.”
It’s the largest town (pop. 1,600) on Moosehead Lake, as it was when Thoreau came rowing along 150 years ago, noting “moose horns” hanging outside the public house. Today, large splayed antlers remain Greenville’s motif; the local newspaper is so awash in mangled animals that “possible moose” is like a literary theme. The roads are paved, but the silence made it clear that more vacationers come when the roads are frozen.
We arrived at our cabin late in the day.
I walked to the shoreline. Locals say the Moosehead that Thoreau knew vanished when the logging companies moved in. But from the water’s edge, looking north, the horizon shifted from blue to the silver of the sun to the green of the forest line, and it was hard to see evidence of logging. Trees jutted from banks. White gnarled branches rose out of placid harbors.
This still could all vanish in the near future: Five years ago the Plum Creek Timber company announced plans to build a sprawling development here, with almost 1,000 homes and a pair of vacation resorts, and the pros and cons of that have been a fierce debate in Maine ever since. We stayed at the Birches, an 11,000-acre resort with 18 cabins. Ours was chocolate brown, with stacks of wood at the ready, a porch and two Adirondack chairs and a small bathing dock maybe 10 feet from the shore that a large family of ducks climbed onto every evening. “Tranquil” understates it; the area is so remote that John Willard, owner of the Birches, told me that his resort, once a high-end sporting lodge (now more casual), became an oasis during Prohibition. (birches.com; cabins range from $180 to $333.)
Directly across from our cabin stood Mount Kineo, the source of the lake’s name, its long tapered features reminiscent of a prominent moose in repose, according to Penobscot Indian legend. From the top of its 700-foot cliff face (once the largest source of flint in the world), a hiker seems to stare across all of New England. A small shuttle runs to Kineo a few miles north of Greenville. Once there, you find a small neighborhood of second homes, a few seaplanes docked at the shore and miles of trees. We hiked a bridle trail to the top, stopping every few feet at the crunch, then scatter, of leaves.
Moose, probably.
Late on the afternoon of the last day, we chartered a boat to see some moose. Our driver, Steve, headed north, then cut the engine. We drifted into a shallow nook, then waited for a crunch of underbrush. The flap of osprey jerked our heads. We drifted some more. Then the bow turned into a tributary, and a moose stood in the river, her head beneath the water. She was not moving, and she did not move for a while, and we did not move. Then her head rose from the water, and she turned to us, and I felt embarrassment, as though I had been peering through a window at a family eating. She looked small. But I remembered something the woman at the desk in the main lodge had said: “Our moose only look small when they’re standing in Moosehead Lake.”
cborrelli@tribune.com
