Introduction

In June of 1994 I was driving north on Route 7 in Connecticut to attend a precipitous meeting at Schaghticoke Falls. It was a miserable and moist Saturday, one of those days where unless swimming, showering, in the shade or a moving car with the windows down, or under the influence of conditioned air, you were sweating somewhere. Driving on through Brookfield, I was dropping perspiration even with the windows down.

I called the rendez-vous for Schachticoke because it is one place where, on a day like today, the rocks beside the coldwater falls held a temperature was twenty degrees cooler. A seventy or eighty foot rock face was all that needed to be overcome to enjoy the benefit of the oasis of old trees and plunging water. The topic of the afternoon involved discussing a proposal by a friend who had called earlier in spring. The conversation revolved around a statement of how he “wanted to go somewhere out in the middle of nowhere and hike for a week.”

The call was from one of my eighth grade lawn mowing business partners, Nelson. Nelson had moved from Staten Island, where he grew up with few chains, to our little town in southwest Dutchess County in the Hudson Valley area of New York. On the first day of school in eighth grade, a kid named Anthony Santoro was removed from his assigned seat to isolation in the corner by Mr. Green, who was a pretty mellow art teacher. Whatever Santoro did which prompted the move I don’t know, but I do remember in seventh grade, Anthony provoked a senior to challenge him to stand up so he could take a swing at him. Anthony was perhaps the smallest kid in the entire school and was sitting in the cafeteria, where his head barely cleared the table. “I am standing.” he defiantly shouted. He was not standing. He was messing with the oldest of the Hegarty brothers who was not known for his sense of humor.

Anthony Santoro’s move saw me placed in his spot as I was a late assignment to Mr. Green’s homeroom. I sat down across from Nelson, who I had never spoken with. “Are you taking Spanish?” he asked. He was looking over his schedule intently. At this point, I only knew that Nelson had gotten into a fight last year his first week in his new school, and was reportedly insane. “Spanish?” I said in shock. “You are taking Spanish?”

Languages were not mandatory. As an educational elective, this was not what I was expecting. “Everybody is taking it.” he carefully noted. The manner in which he annunciated everybody meant the hot girls. He was not interested in education or school beyond the social opportunities to hook up and appeared to be testing me.

I signed up for Spanish. During one quiz, of ten or twelve questions, he asked me, “How do you say I don’t know in Spanish?” “Yo no se.” I replied. He wrote yo no se for every answer and immediately handed in his result. He got a D and triumphantly high fived those confident enough to be seated around his storm. At the end of the year, Miss Brenneman, the Spanish teacher, called us aside and politely and earnestly recommended we not take Spanish 2.

By my parents vision, I was supposed to take up with the other eighth grader who founded of Lawn Kings, Collette. He was destined for Dartmouth via Hotchkiss and an immensely successful career. Nelson was all about hedonism and self enjoyment at anyone’s expense. At the same time he was extremely entertaining. He was popular, good looking and most interestingly, he was inclusive to the point where you could make friends with him as long as you were not afraid of him. There was one kid named Bill Ramsey who had a pointed chin and wore the stigma of a back brace to school one year. Rob called him “Triangle Head” and “Ram Rod.” But he was so well known for being insane and an attraction, that Ram Rod couldn’t help but smile. Everytime he saw Bill Ramsey he would shout “Ram Rod!” and high five him. This impressed many kids about Ram Rod and buoyed him socially.

We loved to campout as kids. We had a series of forts we constructed to sleep out in. We played ice hockey in the winter and camped in the woods in the spring, summer and fall. One day, Nelson talked me into taking his father’s new Massey Ferguson lawn tractor up Pergatory Hill to move a fifty-five gallon drum that was welded into a woodstove from the Rob Muenier-Darren McGrath camp to ours. They were a year older and donated the stove to us, as they had designed and built a new one. We wrapped the tractor around an oak tree on the descent and the service mechanic scratched his head telling Rob’s dad that “I had never seen this before” referring to the bent frame. When Rob decided we needed a summer garden for our camp, he suddenly appeared to have been paying attention in class one day. “Slash and Burn, like the Indians!” We, of course, burned down the mountain that day.

Were we were old enough to drive, Nelson sought out whole other order of adventure. One day we went to Candlewood Lake with an eight foot sailboat his father bought for fifty bucks. We sailed out with the wind a couple miles south, oblivious to the other sailboats which were tacking east to west. When it was time to turn around and sail back into the teeth of the wind, we capsized. Rob tried swimming with one arm and pulling the boat. I laughed so hard I almost drown. We did learn to tack that day.

That was only the beginning. Go see Neil Young at the Garden and return to watch the northern lights and do dozens of donuts in the school soccer field? Move to California? His whole life to the present, Nelson is a proven geyser of thought when it comes to having a good time. Twenty years after that day in Mr. Green’s homeroom, we were scaling the granite face at Schaghticoke to review the latest bright idea and whether I was going to accept the invitation that his wife would not.

Rather than blindly agree to jump in the car to the middle of nowhere, and with his bar of adventure now much higher, I wanted to get more information. Sitting beside a twenty foot cascade that fell into a pool, before streaming past large shady conifer and plunging into the Housatonic, was educational. Couldn’t a person plant a large water tank in the yard where the year round temperature is fifty-five degrees, and then pump that water through the house in pipes or, since the waterfall was so soothing and cooling, make a living room waterfall? Wouldn’t that be nice? Then in the dry winter, heat the water and again run the falls for cold weather comfort?

Pulling out official Appalachian Mountain Club maps, I also learned Nelson wanted to fly in on a bush plane and hike and climb Mount Katahdin, the highest point in the state of Maine. Having rarely camped out for even two consecutive nights, hiking and climbing for a week was certainly attractive, especially considering we were talking October in Maine, among moose and trees. However, when you live near sea level and have no mountaineering experience, climbing a mountain that is over five thousand feet high is by most standards, a challenge.

“We fly in on a bush plane…” I cut him off. “We do what?” I asked incredulously.

“We fly in on a bush plane, it costs like fifty dollars.”

“I don’t care what it costs, what are going to land on?”

“A lake.” He replied.

“You’re kidding me.” I said. “No! It’ll be a blast.” he said with a laugh.

Nelson, who gleaned this plan after his friend Frank, having just returned from Katahdin, convinced him of the need to go. I agreed to go provided we run a couple of preparation hikes. Since we live alongside the Appalachian Trail, which terminates in the north on Katahdin, we resolved to make two weekend hikes with packs to train for Katahdin. During runs of eight and then twenty miles that convinced us we had no chance to survive Maine, we gained enough entry level experience to understand our limits. We learned plenty about what worked and what we needed to do in order to at least try. With better equipment and food choices, we decided to cut down the route. Out the window went the plan to land on Lake Katahdin and bushwack to the mountain. Instead we choice to more competent route of picking up the well marked Appalachian Trail forty miles south of Katahdin at Nahmakanta Lake, and then heading north.

Hence, knowing nothing little about much, and much less, Thoreau, on September 30, 1994, I climbed into a loaded Chevrolet Suburban which took me somewhere I should have been all my life, on a walk in the North Maine Woods. Since this running into the wilds of Maine was made for me, I have been back several times and keep tripping over Thoreau’s steps, which are long faded from the trails but resound in his commentaries of “The Maine Woods.” Seems many places I have been by now, Katahdin, Webster Stream, the Alagash, and the west branch and Chesuncook, the man with the feathery pen had been well more than 100 years previous.

Without a single one of his writings in my head, I took an interest in seeing moose, and hiking and climbing rocks, along with a wholly empty head into the place. (One example of the void involved leaving at 5 pm on a Friday evening, with Friday evening traffic though Hartford.) The plan was for Nelson and me to drive all night and jump a bush plane onto the AT in Maine’s 100 Mile Wilderness. Even though sleepless, we would walk eight miles from there before the climbing to the granite top of the monolith of Maine and continuing over the Knife Edge Trail, and down to Roaring Brook Camp ground in bountiful Baxter State Park.

One important fact learned on the trail leading up to decision to take on this challenge was that we knew we were still as green as was likely to be in those woods. This humility helped us to avoid any possibility of underestimation in Maine. Since embarking and returning from this incredible introduction to the northern boreal forest, I eventually read The Maine Woods and learned the details of Thoreau’s wanderings. I also learned that there is a tradition in providing accounts of travels to places such as Katahdin and the west branch etc., which began with Professor from West Point in 1838 and continues today online with bloggers. It seems that visiting the North Maine Woods is such an overwhelming experience, that folks have always been compelled to write up and publish their stories. In my case, having met Thoreau first at the height of Tableland and later at home in print, the want to document the unlikely passage of two Greenhorns traveling in famous footsteps has produced the text of Chasing Thoreau.

Click Here For Slideshow of Nahmakanta to Katahdin