Speaking of classics, I don't know a little boy who doesn't thrill to the tale of Donn Fendler, who spent nine days lost in the North Woods and somehow survived. Seventy years ago this week, the twelve-year old Boy Scout from Rye, New York was climbing Mount Katahdin (Maine's tallest peak) when he got separated from his party in a thick blanket of fog. He ended up wandering, lost and alone, while 350 searchers combed the area for what many presumed would be his dead body. But despite an early series of rash decisions, his Boy Scout skills — and a whole lot of luck — kept him alive. On July 26, 1939 Donn Fendler emerged from the forest; exhausted, emaciated, and dressed only in his underwear, he came upon a remote hunting camp where he was finally rescued. In the days that followed, he became a national hero and even received a medal from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Seventy years later, Maine's original "lost boy" still gives talks to school kids on the importance of being prepared before one enters the woods.
Long Live Dersu!
Dersu the Trapper: A True Account by V.K. Arseniev is one of my favorite books, and I owe my discovery of it to my friend Bill Roorbach, who once showed up at a cocktail party with a dog-eared copy and just would not shut up about how wonderful it was. He insisted upon reading aloud the scene where Arseniev and Dersu, caught alone in a frozen swamp, must hurriedly weave together a shelter of rushes as a Siberian blizzard descends upon them. That chapter got me hooked. Jaimy Gordon, who wrote the preface to the McPherson & Company edition, describes the book this way: "A Russian classic little known in the west, Dersu the Trapper is at once a geographer's memoir of his expeditions in the Siberian Far East, and a tale of adventure on the wild frontier in the same family with the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fennimore Cooper and the Western novels of Irish-born adventure writer Mayne Reid, both of which certainly influenced it." I'm not sure what I could add to further describe this weird and wonderful tale except to say that the woods-wise Dersu (my understanding is that he was a fictional composite of several of Arseniev's guides) remains one of my favorite characters in literature.
The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa made a film version titled Dersu Uzala which, for some reason, I've never got around to renting, although I'm a big Kurosawa fan. It's almost worth restarting my NetFlix subscription.
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.