March 5, 2013

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  White Night Ride to Northeast Carry   

   

   

  It snowed last night in Northeast Carry

   

  The first day of autumn... September 25, 1947… a mere 65 years ago

  And there he was... just coming awake in his '36 Special Series Buick 40

  Zipped up and cozy in his army surplus down-sleeper stretched out on the horizontal back

  Of the wooden interior he had sawed and angle-ironed - his mattress resting on the jump-seats

  Of the pre-war limousine bought last year for six hundred mostly-borrowed dollars

   

  That afternoon it started snowing... small flakes mixed with hail and plentiful with both

  Coating the narrow unpaved road within the hour with a white-washed veneer

  Snow-wrapped and canopied giant spruce in over-arching lapstreaks

  Feathery plumes swaying slightly in the soundlessness of absent birdsong

  Views of the lake glistening occasionally through the logged-out spacings

   

  Yesterday he managed to drive the big car from Rockwood some twenty angry miles

  Through a wilderness of towering forests to the end of this muddy rutted road

  And it was almost midnight when he reached the tiny village of Northeast Carry, Maine

  At the upper end of Moosehead Lake… It really did seem like the edge of the world to him

  And as he climbed out of his bag this morning… there were the cabins up ahead

   

  Donny Hawkins was an old retired logger who leased lake-front from Georgia-Pacific

  He built these roughed-out camps for loggers and occasional hunters and fishermen

  The kid at the pump when he gassed up in Greenville and helped him put on his chains

  Said he rented cheap… so here he was knocking on Donny’s door for a place to stay

  Five bucks a night and breakfast and all the coffee he could drink

   

  Donny told him there was no one else here… Season’s done for a while he said

  It was eight in the morning but he’d been up since four o’clock fishing

  He brought him a pot of coffee and bacon and eggs then retired to his “A” frame for a nap

  He finished eating and then went out to park his car behind the camp and get his gear

  Folding easel… Acrylics and brushes… Arches watercolor block

   

  He made some sketches of the cabins and the mountain views across the lake

  The gas was cut off so after a can of Dinty Moore’s cooked on his little Coleman stove

  He decided to walk into the woods because he could see a cleared area up ahead

  To his astonishment there were five or six huge diesel rigs lined up next to these long flatbeds

  With two big skidders alongside… snow melting off them because it had warmed up some

   

  Donny told him later that come February when the lake freezes deep enough

  The truckers and jacks will show up and load the long fifty-foot double flatbeds

  With thousands of huge stripped spruce logs cut last year and stacked on some thirty cleared acres

  And hook up those big Peterbilts and Kenilworths and set their compasses

  And drive some forty miles down the middle of the lake to Greenville and the pulp mills

   

  Once he said just before the war… one of those rigs broke through the ice

  But the trucker radioed his position and got out before she went to the bottom

  The State Guides sent their ski plane and picked him up before he froze

  Donny told him one of those rigs full-loaded weighs about seventy tons

  But as long as the temperature stays below zero… four feet of ice easily support it

   

  This time of year he said it’s nice and quiet and will be for another few months

  But come early February the boys will come up and load the flatbeds with last year’s timber

  And hook them up to the big rigs and set their compasses and drive over to the lake

  And haul-ass down the ice to Greenville… usually at night when it’s colder

  And come back next morning for another load

   

  He told Donnie maybe he could come back next year

  When one of those rigs would haul-ass down the ice to Greenville

  Maybe he could follow behind it in his big Buick for the thrill

  Donnie got a laugh out of that but told him those ice truckers are a tight bunch

  And wouldn’t take kindly to a flatlander joining them for a lark

   

   

   

  News Item: Barrie Fortier 65, the last of the ice truckers passed away unexpectedly in Guilford Maine in

  January 2009… And there is no more winter ice-truck log-hauling on Moosehead Lake… Plum Tree Inc,

  a huge land conglomerate is planning to build two large resorts on the more than 80 thousand acres it owns

  along the lake…

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

  • 12:19 pm
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