Transcript:
“Go for it.
All right. Well, so, so my, my brother, my middle brother, Eric, says to me about 6 weeks ago, um, ‘You wanna go for a week long canoe trip in northern Maine with uh my friend and his stepson?’, and I was kind of like well I hadn’t done anything like that in about 20 or 30 years, but it, I was intrigued, and um at the time I wa-, I was also unemployed and had a lot of, a lot of free time, so I was like ‘If not now, when?’ so um I made a plan to uh go up to uh Maine uh with him uh and his friend and stepson for a week, so the day, the appointed day came, and we uh we piled into a car and um drove up to the far northeast corner of of Maine, a place called Washington County, which is right on the border of of Maine and New, New Brunswick. And um which is also the easternmost point of the United States. So, at that point uh the border between uh the U.S. and Canada is defined by a river called the Saint Croix, and uh it’s a, it’s a river and lake system. So, uh we were, our plan was to spend a week basically canoeing down this this river and and lake system that forms the international border. So, we uh we left our…met uh uh an outfitter who provided us with canoes and dry bags, and then we left our our car at the uh at at the basically outlet of of the river near the near the coast and then we drove about an hour and a half or two hours inland up river to our put in point. And we put in with uh with 2 canoes and the 4 of us. And um spent the first few days on these lakes that uh form the headwaters of the Saint Croix, and and also as I said the international border. So you’re basically looking out across these, the far side of the lakes is Canada, and the near side is the U.S.. And there’s no one up there on these lakes. I mean nothing. You look look around for miles in any direction and you don’t you don’t see houses, you don’t see people. You see, you see a few bald eagles and some loons. And a whole lot of water. And forests. So uh this was really quite something for me you know having lived in cities big cities for so long and not really been camping and into the wilderness uh for so so many years and it kind of freaked me out a little bit at first to…just the quiet and the, the calls of the loons and the spiders in the tents and uh and that sort of thing. But uh it was absolutely uh beautiful, and um…So, we spent the first few days on on the lakes and the headwaters kind of making our way across these lakes uh which um form part of this kind of lake and river system, which actually was developed in the nineteenth century for logging. So these these lakes are formed partially by dams which um kind of the the big timber merchants created uh in the mid-nineteenth century to basically build up enough water in the lakes and river so that they could float logs down down these uh down the Saint Croix to the to the coast, where they would you know be shipped off to various parts of the country and cut into lumber and turned into homes and and such. For the development of the country at that time, Maine was a big, big…it still is a big timber area, but this area, the Saint Croix, is now a kind of a protected wilderness, and there hasn’t been any logging going on there for years. But you see the bottoms of the lakes and rivers covered with al this, these logs that sank. And once the logs are at the bottom of the water, they don’t rot. They don’t oxidize. ‘Cause there’s no oxygen, right? So they just sit there and the and the whole system of the of these lakes and river’s covered with with logs at the bottom, which is kind of a strange kind of uh leftover of nineteenth century industry. Otherwise it’s basically wilderness and all the trees have grown back. Um, so we spent our first few days on the on the lakes. And then we reached the dam where the Saint Croix River um flows out of uh this big lake called um Lake Spednic. and we did this portage, carried our canoes uh around the dam and then got on the river and then it’s a completely different experience. Instead of being on these big wide open lakes, you’re on this very narrow rapid-flowing river. And literally Canada is like a hundred feet away on the far side, and the U.S. is on the near side, and you see people uh flying uh you know U.S. and Canada flags on either side of the river um where there’s a house here and there. A lot of, a lot of Trump Trump signs as well. Definitely rural Trump country up there. So we kind of spent the next few days making our way through down the river through these rapids um seeing like bald eagles hunting from the treetops and just kind of swooping down into the river to gather fish, and um spending the night illicitly on the on the Canadian side of the border one night and um basically just having very very placid days canoeing down the river. Sometimes dragging our canoes across the rocks where the river was was too uh too shallow and um chilling out at these just beautiful campsites in the woods. And um kind of getting to know each other and spending some quality time with my brother. Um so uh yeah what’s the synopsis to that story? I don’t know. It was a good,it was a, it was a, it was a good time, and uh you know cool to kind of reconnect with with nature in a way I haven’t for for so long, and uh…
How many days of actual canoeing?
I’m sorry?
How many days of actual canoeing?
I’m kind of losing you but um it was uh I think we did 8, 8 days and nights all together.
That’s a lot!
So we ended up basically right back where we started you know had left our car and um had covered probably by canoe I don’t know exactly you know by it’s hard to tell uh by because you’re kind of criss-crossing a lot, but um I would say we probably did a hundred and, a hundred and fifty miles or something by canoe. And uh yeah great way to travel.
Sounds amazing!
And uh really kind of uh interesting to experience far northern Maine, uh an area I hadn’t been to before. And it kind of really feels a little bit almost like the Alaska of New England. It’s just just deep woods, wide open, people are kind of big and burly, lots of like hunting camouflage. And so for this city slicker it was that was kind of interesting as well. Some Native American reservations up there too. So yeah. And all within like a 6 hour drive of Boston. It’s kind of a sort of surprising to me that you can still find that much kind of wilderness and uh you know and they’re that close to the densely populated northeast corridor.”
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