Excerpt from A Love Worth Fighting For -- Lobster Lake

Lobster Lake

Carol’s awake, talking to herself. Hallucinating? Too much ammonia in her system? “You okay?” I ask.

She smiles. “Just remembering vacations we had." Your dad would tell everyone he met that they had to come to Lobster Lake.”

I laugh. “Yes. It was like a romance, a part of who we were.”

From when I was fifteen, my parents and I would travel to Lobster Lake in summer. It was a wild adventure to the North Maine Woods. Outside Alaska, Maine is the most forested in the nation. Carol and I kept the tradition—with our three boys, we’d travel north three hours to Greenville, where the trip had just begun. Past Moosehead Lake, we rode on rough dirt roads to the Golden Road that runs from the Millinocket paper mill west towards Canada. We had to pull over for logging trucks dragging tree-length wood and clouds of dust. Just before the border, we hit the West Branch of the Penobscot River. There, we put in our fifteen-foot Boston Whaler with a forty-five horse Johnson outboard motor. It was one-mile due south down Lobster Stream, its muddy shores tracked by moose and deer. Later in life, I would canoe down this stream with my troubled son, Ted, to the splashing sounds of game under a moonless, starlit sky, paddling in silence across a lake as still as a sacred prayer.

The entrance into Lobster Lake always stuns me with its crystal blue waters, cotton clouds, and lonesome, unsoiled purity. A mile to the opposite shore lay our camps across vast blue waters, along boreal green-forested shores and white beaches. Mount Katahdin’s majestic peaks rise to the East. Wild ducks frolic in the reeds. For me and my sons, and my dad, this is God’s country—the land of tall firs and moose. Approaching our camps, a protective cove shelters a sandy beach. We unload, eager to climb past the boat house up the hill to our five log cabins, sitting atop a ridge overlooking the Big Claw under tall Norway Pines. Only two other camps on this entire lake. Not a soul for miles. For Carol, it was a bit rough—no running water, privies, and you haul in all your needs and haul it all out. Decades ago, Henry David Thoreau was here. Eons ago, the Penobscot Indians wintered here and left traces, like pointy flint arrow heads.

In our kitchen camp with the Atlantic wood stove, visitors must write in the log. They scribble rapturous stories about catching fish off the point to the setting sun in the west, counting the moose, hearing an owl hoot in the dark, spotting an eagle soar. Everyone hears the lonely cry of loons across the dark lake and their sunny daytime laughter. No one has to write what we all know—the smell of the pines; the reflection of Big Spenser Mountain in the glassy waters of the Big Claw; the lazy afternoons sleeping in a hammock to the sweet soft soughing breeze and sun on your face; the boat rides crashing into swelling whitecaps that whip wind and spray all over you.

There were funny times there . . .

Late at night, awake, talking. I prompt her: “Remember when you and Holly were out alone in that metal boat?” Holly and Buzz sometimes joined us at Lobster.

She laughs. “Oh my God, yes. We got away from everyone, just jumped in this rowboat, and Holly rowed us off shore and she had a couple fishing poles. So, of course, we were fishing, but never expected to catch anything. She must have baited the hooks. I didn’t. We were enjoying ourselves. We lit up cigarettes and kicked our feet up, sunning ourselves, just chatting, and then Holly’s rod bent over. She had a fish.”

“We heard you from the camps. You made quite a racket.”

“We didn’t know what to do with it.”

There were scary times . . .

Carol recalls when we dropped off the three kids to let them canoe downstream and across the lake.

“I remember the dark clouds, and the kids in that metal canoe in a lightning storm. I was scared.”

“Me, too.” I drove like crazy over logging roads to get close enough to walk a mile on a woods trail into camp. Carol and I dashed through the woods and unlocked the camps. I dragged a motorboat out of the boat shed and headed out to haul the kids back in before lighting struck.

“And that time we got lost on the logging road,” Carol says. A sudden deluge slickened the muddy roads and threatened to send us into a ditch. We’d never find our way out.

“Yeah, I was losing it, but you were so calm and cool, and you talked me down from the edge.” We made it back to a logging crew who gave us better directions.

“I never told you about when the kids were very young, and I’d taken them down the West Branch and it rained so hard that we were into the rips before I knew it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. We lucked out—a lone canoe with an outboard motor happened by, and they towed us back up through the rips, so we could return to camp. The kids were sworn to secrecy.”

Carol had her limits. She would not slave over the Atlantic wood stove all day to make pies, like my mother did so that the men and boys could take their fishing trips. Truth be told, Carol would rather have shopped at Bergdorf’s than go to Lobster Lake.