by Laurie Apgar Chandler
Maine Authors Publishing, 2021
A Solo Journey to Maine’s New National Monument
In her memoir, Through Woods & Waters: A Solo Journey to Maine’s New National Monument, Laurie Apgar Chandler invites readers along as she canoes and hikes through Maine’s storied north woods, following the paths of the Penobscot people, who have lived here for millennia, and of Henry David Thoreau, who paddled these waters in the mid-1800s. Beginning on Seeboomook Lake, Chandler canoes the West Branch Penobscot River to Allagash Lake, into Baxter State Park, then down the East Branch Penobscot River through Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. Along the way, Chandler provides useful details for the traveler while skillfully interlacing natural history, Penobscot Nation history, and stories of shifting land use and conservation.
This isn’t Chandler’s first foray into canoeing and writing. She was the first woman to paddle the 740-mile Northern Forest Canoe Trail, at age 53, and wrote about that journey in her first book, Upwards.
Chandler is a contemplative guide, poetic in her description of the river in Through Woods & Waters. “I glided out into a still and quiet dream,” she writes. “From afar layers of different colors and textures overlapped. A long finger of shaggy moss-green, topped with pointed fir, met the brilliant green of verdant marsh.” Her description enchants and draws in the reader. Yet, like Thoreau, she’s pragmatic. She shares what she ate, and which foods carry best on a canoe trek. She suggests ways to be cautious in rapids, and how to locate a portage.
In addition to her north-to-south canoe trek, Chandler hiked four days in Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. Whether paddling or on foot, she is ever aware of those who traveled before her. “These are the ancestral lands of the Penobscot Indian Nation… [Place names] like Caucomgomoc, Kenduskeag and Nesowadnehunk, bear witness to the people who knew them first. For the next seventeen days, I would paddle and portage for 185 miles, crossing twenty-two rivers, streams, lakes and ponds, and never leave this vast watershed.” She follows some of the same routes as Thoreau’s 1846, 1853, and 1857 trips, detailed in his book The Maine Woods, including Webster Stream, of which Thoreau wrote, “It is somewhat like navigating a thunder-spout.” Chandler indeed finds this stretch daunting, and carefully portages around treacherous stretches.
A century and a half later, as she begins her trek, Chandler writes, “The raw material to work with was stunning.” It’s this stunning natural beauty that inspired Governor Percival Baxter to propose a state park, with strict guidelines for preservation, and to donate land for Baxter State Park’s establishment in 1931. Eighty-five years later the nearby national monument was established by executive order, after Elliotsville Plantation, Inc. donated the land to the National Park Service and the Roxanne Quimby Foundation provided a substantial endowment to fund initial operations and to support its ongoing administration.
Chandler weaves this history throughout her narrative. She includes the human presence, from the Penobscot and Wabanaki nations to logging drives to the present sporting camps in and near the national monument. Detailed, artistic maps of both the national monument and the region enhance the book, as do several pages of color photos.
Near the end of her journey, she writes, “The solitude was complete, but I did not feel alone. I imagined the company of the travelers of this land, back through a hundred centuries.” Laurie Apgar Chandler is traveler, canoeist, hiker, naturalist, and historian. With this book she takes her place with Thoreau and others who have written eloquently of Maine’s woodlands and waters.