Maine Guide Tip

Every week, I'll offer some wood wisdom gleaned from Registered Maine Guides I've known.

The Little Orange Book

For more than thirty years, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has been passing out a little orange book titled You Alone in the Maine Woods that's chock-full of quirky illustrations, tips, and humor to help you save yourself if you ever get lost in the Maine woods. The booklet, described in depth in the November 2007 issue of Down East, teaches you how to make a compass out of a wristwatch, ways to start a fire in the rain, and how to build a basic shelter, among other things. For your own personal copy, click here and download a PDF version.

(c) 2007 Down East. Used here by permission.

A Child in the Woods

In the new issue of Down East I write about my childhood in Scarborough, Maine. My family moved to town with the first real wave of suburbanites. Our house stood at the edge of what had been, mere months earlier, a cornfield. Woods were all around us, and I was fortunate to be able to explore trackless stretches of forestland that wandered down the hill to a fetid salt marsh. Today, Scarborough ranks among Maine's fastest growing communities, and many of my old haunts are now gone, replaced by modern, three story homes. I still feel a deep affection for the town, but whenever I return to my old neighborhood, I am dogged by the sad thought of children who will never know what's it like to spook a partridge (that's what we Mainers call a ruffed grouse) from its hiding place in the underbrush. Watching a partridge explode from beneath your feet and rocket away through the tree trunks is an experience no human heart ever forgets.

The Geography of the Book

As I note in The Poacher's Son, Maine is a pretty big state — roughly the size of the other New England states combined — and the book spans a great deal of that real estate.

Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch's district includes a portion of the midcoast, a district based around the fictional town of Sennebec that includes the Damariscotta, Rockland, and Camden regions.

Many of the places in this story don’t exist on the map of Maine (at least not under the names I have given them), but two important exceptions are the townships of Flagstaff and Dead River. In 1950 the Central Maine Power Company built a dam above Grand Falls and flooded the Dead River valley northwest of the Bigelow Mountains. Flagstaff and Dead River are gone, but sometimes, when the water is low on Flagstaff Lake, you can take a boat out and peer down at the ruins of what were once two vibrant North Woods villages. To anyone interested in learning more about these lost towns I recommend There Was a Land, distributed by the helpful people of the Dead River Historical Society.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=44.353314,-68.947449&spn=3.707733,8.64624&t=p&z=7&msid=100341262191836573262.00046d49a77611ee9b8f5

Maine Guide Tip

Every week, I'll offer some wood wisdom gleaned from Registered Maine Guides I've known.

Drugstore Fuel

Cottonballs are inexpensive, compact, and will easily catch a spark so include them in your survival kit as a ready source of fuel. In the wild, birchbark and old man's beard moss are reliable alternatives, and birchbark will ignite even when damp.

Why Is Maine So Bookish?

Within a few short miles of my house live three New York Times bestselling authors, two of whom have also won the Pulitzer Prize. In a city like Boston that might not be any great shakes, but Camden is pretty much a village by any definition. And I've found this hyper-abundance of talented authors to be a pervasive phenomenon along the Maine coast. Over at my day job, I consider the question and try to come up with some answers as to why we're such a magnet for writers.