Plum Creek Gets the Green Light

Maine's Land Use Regulation Committee, affectionately known in these parts as LURC, is recommending a controversial proposal by Plum Creek Timber to create the largest residential development in Maine history. This decision follows four years of heating public hearings, plans and counter plans, and dozens of newspaper and magazine op-eds. The Plum Creek proposal will develop a thousand house lots and create two large resorts on the shores of Moosehead Lake. The plan also protects thousands of acres in the region under conservation easements—although it keeps them as working forest. I have misgivings about the economic benefits Plum Creek is actually going to bring to the depressed area around Greenville (the thousand houses will certainly sell, but I doubt those resorts are going to prosper), but I'd be happy to be proven wrong since the development is now likely to move forward. I expect lawsuits to slow things down—and I won't be surprised if EarthFirst stirs up some mischief—but in the end Plum Creek will have its way. Watching this process unfold has been an eerie experience for me since it resembles, in many ways, the scenario I wrote about in The Poacher's Son. I hope in real life the outcome is less violent.

Missing Moose

My wife Kristen and I are spending the Labor Day Weekend in Greenville on the shores of Moosehead Lake. At 5:30 a.m. this morning our kind hosts at the Lodge at Moosehead Lake arranged a "moose safari" for us. We drove to First West Branch Pond and then paddled through a cold but lifting fog in search of moose.

Alas, the big animals didn't make an appearance for us (they tend to lie low before the annual fall rut, so it was no surprise), but we did see some great birds, including a family of solitary sandpipers (evidently not so solitary after all), a merlin, sharp-shinned hawks, and a young wood duck that rocketed out of a beaver flowage. As Maine natives, Kristen and I have both seen dozens of moose so we were content just to spend the morning in a canoe on a remote North Woods pond taking in the scenery.

Probably the highlight of the trip for me was when our Registered Maine Guide described a bull moose during rutting season as "Bill Clinton with four legs." That was one joke I hadn't heard before.

One True Sentence

"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written."

—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Poaching As a Way of Life

You don't need to talk with a game warden to learn that poaching is a widespread phenomenon in rural Maine. If you live in the sticks, it's not uncommon to hear gun shots in the woods at night, and every fly fisher I know has witnessed someone poaching fish. Today's Portland Press Herald carries a story about one recent episode in Mount Abram Township — not far from the setting of The Poacher's Son — that is noteworthy in only one regard: the poachers here were caught, literally red-handed.