Highway maps show a blank rectangle east and slightly north of Bangor. It stretches roughly 55 miles east-west from U.S. Route 1 to U.S. Route 2 and roughly 45 miles north-south from state Route 6 to state Route 9, the Airline. Maine Route 188 ventures a little way into it from its western border. Otherwise, it is unpaved - webbed with gravel logging roads, veined with rivers, streams and brooks and spattered with lakes, ponds and bogs. The land is gently contoured, with few elevations over 1,000 feet; much of it is sandy and well-drained, the sort of terrain red pines and blueberries love.
The Machias River rises in the eastern half of this country and is shaped like a question mark. It flows north from Fifth Machias Lake, then a little east from Fourth to Third Machias lakes, then south through two smaller lakes, under the Airline bridge, and on down to tidewater in the town of Machias - about 76 miles in all. It is a justly famous canoe route.
In the middle of May, 11 of us - nine customers and two guides - canoed from Fourth Machias down to Route 9, spending three nights en route. As a canoe trip, it was hard to beat. We paddled across splendid lakes, down gliding stretches of river and turbulent ones; we ran rapids, lined canoes through them, and portaged around them. We walked along a beautiful esker; we saw moose, beavers, loons, terns, wild azaleas and, unexpectedly, an eider; we heard warblers, rain pattering on the tent, the lake sloshing on a windy night. One day was hot enough for two of us to swim; the next was wet, raw and wild enough for all of us to shiver and to make Fourth Machias look like the North Atlantic.
Some of us were natives; some, like myself, were interlopers. All of us were conservationists, sharing not only a concern about the future of this region of the state, but also a respect for its long past.
Dwayne Shaw, the executive director of the Downeast Salmon Federation, picked up a thumbnail-sized sliver of stone - a scraping tool, a tiny scrap of an ancient, unrecorded past. Somebody else pointed out the narrow band of young birch along the shores of Third Machias ; when the dam at the outlet of the lake was removed in 1974, the lake level dropped a few feet and the birches moved in, giving the lake a beautiful, park-like fringe. Somebody else pointed out a rough wing-dam made of boulders, or found a fragment of a boom chain - more reminders of the log-driving days on the river. People talked about trapping, hunting and fishing, which have long, rich traditions in this area. The Machias was once one of the great salmon rivers, back when Maine rivers swarmed with salmon. Now it is one of the handful with even the vestige of a spawning run, and so is crucial to a certain kind of hope, and an indicator of what kind of future we have in store for ourselves.
At one point, we stopped to talk with Steve Keith and David Tobey, of the Downeast Lakes Land Trust. They had come over from Grand Lake Stream, a dozen miles to the east. Their small organization, in conjunction with the New England Forestry Foundation, has undertaken a hugely ambitious capital campaign. If it succeeds, 340,000 acres of woodland, including 445 miles of lakeshore frontage, stretching from the Canadian border west to public reserve land adjoining Fifth Machias Lake, would be preserved from residential or commercial development; public access, over existing gravel roads, would be maintained.
The community of Grand Lakes Stream, its economy tied to hunting, fishing, canoeing and the emerging possibilities of eco-tourism, depends upon such access. The project will require that $35 million be raised in less than a year.
And all the way down the river, we talked about what the state and others have done and what remains to be done along the Machias . The first phase of a plan to protect the whole river system is essentially complete; a second phase, concentrating on Fifth, Fourth, and Third Machias lakes and their connecting links, is under way. Currently, the Maine Department of Conservation owns a number of riverside campsites.
On the Machias , in the middle of that blank space on the map, you can imagine that nothing ever has changed or ever will. But, those miles and miles of pristine lakefront and prime habitat are threatened by development; the opportunity to save these places as they are exists now - this year. If it passes, it will not come again. Development will be followed by loss of habitat, followed by loss of public access, followed by lament and elegy for what we let slip away.
The people I traveled with, representatives of the state, of conservation organizations, of Maine sportsmen, and of the beleaguered Atlantic salmon, were visionary, pragmatic, realistic and committed. They understood that those who cherish the culture and geography of Maine's remarkable backcountry are necessarily stewards and advocates, engaged in a complex collaboration and under great pressure of time and money. Their company and conversation alone were worth the trip. As was that of our two guides, who were skilled in canoeing, cooking and all the arts of camping, and who took meticulous care to leave no trace of our visit behind.
Franklin Burroughs is a writer and professor emeritus of English at Bowdoin College.
