Adrift, Fifth St. John Pond, Maine
Our 14-year-old daughter, Gail, and I had decided to canoe a placid stretch of New Hampshire’s Saco River in Conway to Hiram, Maine, repeating a three-day camping trip we had made once with our family and neighbors. With just the two of us, it reminded me of sailboat camping long ago, “cruising” together with cousins as kids, overnight by ourselves on our protected Rhode Island salt water Quonchontaug Pond. Unable to contain my enthusiasm, I called my cousin Betsey about it, close to bragging. Her response caught me unprepared.
“No, no. Wait, just wait! We have a camp family trip coming up on the St. John. Let me see if we can add you to it! It’s with old Cragged Mountain Farm (CMF) trip leaders, directors, and some 15-year-olds who missed their turn last year. Twenty-two, and you’d make it twenty-four. We can handle that, I think. You must come, if Willie agrees.” He is her brother, trip organizer, and CMF was an old camp “for poor little rich children,” as my pediatrician uncle had long ago explained to me. The camp had been the idea of his and a practice partner’s in the 1920s and was still going strong.
My cousins all talked fast, but I burst in, “Betsey! I have never carried a canoe far, never even seen or been at a portage, or run real white water. I know the Saco a bit. We can handle it. But I never even paddled stern in my family’s big Old Town. In surf, I was always the white-knuckled passenger, the kid clutching the gunwales.”
“Your daughter can help carry your load. She’s done the camp’s Allagash trip. My son Carl will be my helper.” She actually paused. “Just wait two days, and I’ll ask Willie, I’ll tell Willie that you and Gail should come. It’s a strong, experienced group—old camp directors, trip leaders, counselors, and teens. And us.”
And that’s how the CMF River trip, from the Fifth St. John Pond to St. Francis began. Bets was three years younger than I was. Willie, one. That made me the group’s oldest, the adventure’s least experienced.
In mid-June, before the children’s camp opened, the whole group gathered at Willie and Isabel’s family home in southern New Hampshire the afternoon before departing north, to pack food boxes, load the canoe trailer and vehicles. We put our tents and waterproof bags into the camp’s rugged vans—used, bought from the people who run the Mount Washington Road business. In early morning, my nephew Henry took off first with the canoes, and we left last on this long drive to Greenville, Maine, where a sea plane would fly the group in, four at a time, across Moosehead Lake and paper companies’ forested wilderness.
After the next-to-last planeload took off, the dock was suddenly silent. Two strong men, Betsey, and I were told that we would be driven by truck along a lakeside dirt road north, to save the pilot time. He would land miles above Greenville for his last run to the Fifth St. John Pond. Why did I suddenly feel like a kid at this moment as we drove north? I was a happy camper, thrilled.
When the plane landed on a narrow arm of the lake, the day was still bright and warm. I had never seen a small seaplane close up before, and instantly loved it, its white high-tailed spume and the motor’s sounds, yet all so small, so delicate, its symmetry enlarged as the men lashed a canoe atop each pontoon. We were four passengers, a heavy wooden food box, ice chests, and our own bags. It was late afternoon; the pilot was in a hurry.
Below us, bell clear, lay a Maine I had never known, endless forest, threads of gravel roads, reflective lakes, some collecting silver logs, pulled, poised above their exit streams. From the air, the countryside appeared relatively flat, excepting that climbers’ giant, Katahadin, looming to the east. Aloft, we smiled at this treasure of a day, clear blue, high above the blue-dotted green land.
Close up, the Fifth St. John Pond looked black from the air, ruffled with waves and a few whitecaps. As we landed, we saw our campsite and friends on the shore.
“Guess you’ll just have to get in and drift,” the pilot said. “I’ve got to get back before dusk.”
The seaplane’s pilot moved quickly back and forth along a pontoon, unlashing one of two canoes, the one my cousin Betsey and I had been given. With each motion he slipped a rope, yet in the plane we sat, glued to an ice chest and a food box, for we had no paddles. After this last flight north from Greenville and Moosehead for our big trip, we must drift 100 yards to the campsite, with a wind at our backs. Considering the thorough planning of canoes, food, tents, and gear for this crowd, it was impressive. There had been more than enough paddles for nine canoes, so this was just a last-minute packing slip-up.
Our bright orange life jackets were tossed into the canoe atop the large wooden food box. With one hand, I clutched my unprotected old Kodak, then jammed it into my pants pocket. In debarking, we “ladies” were motioned to please go first.
We could sail with ballooning parkas, we could paddle with our hands, or just confidently sit and drift, and hope that our friends on shore would bring us paddles, but they, busy setting up tents and a cook fire for dinner, hadn’t noticed our plight.
Excerpted from a copyrighted manuscript by Jean C. McCrosky, Old Littleton Road