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Monday, July 21, 2003
A century of solitude
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||||||
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Also on this page: FOREVER WILD: Rediscovering Katahdin | |||||||||
TOWNSHIP 3 — Shafts of light at dusk reflect off the large stones at Rocky Pond. Boulders ring the pond's perimeter in beautiful big, round shapes, like charms on a bracelet, giving it the look of a timeless painting. It's easy to see how this favorite fishing hole in Baxter State Park got its name more than a century ago. It's also easy to imagine anglers from another age fishing here. In 1903, Percival Baxter likely fished here. That year, at age 26, Baxter made his first trip to the area around Mount Katahdin on a fishing trip with his father, James. During the trip, he gazed at Katahdin for the first time, sparking a lifelong quest to preserve the mountains and wilderness around it for the people of Maine. Baxter's trip 100 years ago marked the first of many he made to the area, which he eventually bought and gave to the state. His gift of land amounted to more than 200,000 acres, which later became a state park that he asked to "be kept and remain in the natural wild state." It is clear today that his wish was honored. In many ways, the sporting camp where Baxter stayed at Kidney Pond and the other ponds where he likely fished are unchanged. These remote trout ponds and fishing holes are at the foot of Katahdin, offering breathtaking views of Maine's largest mountain. Last month, a reporter and photographer from the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram retraced Baxter's historic first fishing trip to the Katahdin area. While day trips from Portland to Baxter State Park are common today, in Baxter's time the fishing expedition was a journey to the unknown, with none of the modern conveniences we now rely on. After hiking in to Kidney Pond the first day, modern-day visitors rose at daybreak to visit and experience the fishing where Baxter likely wet a line with his father and other companions. Ponds like Rocky, which are a hike from Hunt's Camp, where Baxter stayed, remain popular today. Some were fishing spots for anglers more than a century ago as well, and were identified as far back as 1896 in a map for lumbermen and sportsmen. The map hangs in Baxter State Park Headquarters in Millinocket. Like many places in Maine, the fishing in Baxter State Park is slow in the summer. But a well-informed fisherman discovers a bounty of wonderful fishing spots as well as some insight into why these ponds were held in high regard 100 years ago. "Kidney is moody. There is good fishing there, but the weather conditions and water temperature cause it to be moody fishing," said park director Buzz Caverly. "When there is a green drake hatch or other popular hatches familiar to fly fishermen, and you hit it at the right hour, it can be tremendous fishing." Hunt's Camp is at Kidney Pond, a modest, 96-acre fishery, but one of the larger ponds lying to the west of Katahdin. Smaller ponds, such as Rocky Pond, less than a mile away, and Celia Pond, about a mile and half to the west, are also well fished. These smaller ponds so close to the Kidney Pond campground are an easy hike today, even for a fisherman weighed down with a few fly rods, fly fishing vest, a paddle, and lifejacket. During Baxter's historic trip it's likely the sporting camp's proprietor, Irving Hunt, would have had guides lead the fishermen to the best spots, as Hunt advertised in a 1907 travel guide: "canoes and guides furnished; canoes and boats at all ponds." In 1903, Baxter probably had guides helping him carry his fly rods, nets, and lunch basket, just as anglers staying at fine sporting camps today have guides providing their lunch and paddling canoes for them. Hunt's Camp was a vacation made for the gentry. Transportation alone would have been something most people living in Portland at the time could not afford. Rocky and Celia are among the most promising outlying ponds, and probably were 100 years ago. These fisheries are the most popular places to fish today because of their reputation. "Rocky and Celia just grow large fish. They still do," said park ranger Stephen Malone. The journey to the well-known trout fishery would have been the same in 1903, as Hunt's Camp existed where the Kidney Pond Campground sits today. Around Kidney Pond, extending like spokes on a wheel are more than two dozen small, remote trout ponds. As early as 1903 at least 25 were named and linked to the sporting camp by forest trails. Woodland paths leading to the ponds today are likely the same trails the guides took 100 years ago, park forester Jensen Bissel said. Making the journey along the soft woodland trails to these ponds is similar to following a rainbow. The other end transports visitors to one of the more silent, special places in the park. For frequent visitors of Baxter State Park, that's saying something. Rocky Pond has no beach, no true canoe landing, no mountain plateau. It's unlikely the casual camper would go searching for this hidden sanctuary. But fishermen know it. From Kidney Pond Campground, where the trail to the pond starts, the slow upward grade leads along stones and stumps to a narrow opening in the brush. Once there, the remarkable fishing for which Rocky Pond is known becomes an afterthought. Remote and quiet, the destination is settling. The mountains surrounding it create a hidden valley. While views of Mount Katahdin are denied here, the base of two neighboring mountains, Double Top and Mount O-J-I, are so close to Rocky Pond that the peaks loom with austere authority, especially at dusk. Two loons gliding across the glassy water seem to skate, rather than swim, barely creating a wake. With the forest almost still, the sound of fish rising as they feed echoes like rocks thrown into the calm water. For Baxter, it would have been a hidden haven. A generous act At the time Baxter first visited Kidney Pond, Maine sportsmen had just begun to discuss the need to preserve this land. While President Theodore Roosevelt was busy making the need for conservation work a national issue at the turn of the 20th century, Maine sportsmen were talking at that time, too. By the time Baxter became governor of Maine in 1921 he already was part of a push to preserve the area around Katahdin, according to John Neff, who is writing a book about Katahdin and serves on the Friends of Baxter State Park board. "The idea of a game preserve in the area began to emerge in the (1890s). First a mayor of Bangor advanced the idea, then the Maine Sportsmen Fish and Game Association did," Neff said. "Percival jumped in and began to advocate an early preservation effort. That period, the early 1900s, conservation groups were speaking out." However, Baxter's conservation work, starting in the 1930s, did not have the kind of support it would today, as land preservation has become more common. Baxter knew he had many opponents, as he told Maine Attorney General Clement Robinson in a letter at that time, as quoted in the book "Legacy of a Lifetime." "I know this is a generous act, prompted by genuine public spirit. If there be those who criticize it, I shall not be broken-hearted. Let us go through with it and take the consequences." Baxter grew up with a respect and reverence for nature. From the time he was 6, Baxter made many fishing trips around Maine with his father - sometimes to the Rangeley Lakes region and other times just to the Brunswick area for a day trip. The famous photo of young Percival holding a sizeable trout caught on one of those annual trips hangs in Baxter Museum in Gorham and at Baxter State Park headquarters in Millinocket. Baxter told the fish tale about the catch in the biography of his father, James: "On my second trip to Rangeley Lakes, I being seven years old, my father said to me, 'I will give you $10 a pound as a reward for every fish you catch, five pounds or over.' Within the hour I had hooked and landed an eight-pound spotted trout, all by my own efforts. . ." When Percival and his father visited Kidney Pond in 1903, it was then Hunt's Camp, a backwoods outfit with fishing guides that catered to wealthy anglers. The camp offered sportsmen a "string of camps at full-trouted Nesowadnehunk Stream and near-by ponds," as well as "boats and canoes on ponds," according to the 1902 edition of "In the Maine Woods," a popular travel guide published by the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad. Reports of large trout run throughout the earliest versions of this publication, such as the boast in 1900 that "the best fishing for trout weighing from one to four pounds each is found within a radius of 25 miles of Mount Katahdin. No better trout fishing can be had than this." The 1904 edition of the annual guide stated how in Nesowadnehunk Stream, any angler "can catch the speckled beauties until he actually tires of the sport." State fisheries biologist Michael Smith said such references are undoubtedly in reference to brook trout. Park naturalist Jean Hoekwater said there was a great volume of these "square-tail" fish caught at that time. "In a magazine in 1912 there's a story of a woman who visited Kidney Pond and caught 63 fish in Polly Pond," Hoekwater said. "She was tickled and at the end of the day she was so proud to be in possession of all those fish. She came into camp through the garden gate and found a string of 100 fish a doctor from Connecticut had caught. And that was in August, when the fishing was not that good." Today, there is a five-fish daily bag limit on brook trout in Kidney Pond. Back in the early 1900s, there was no limit on the number of fish caught. According to travel guides at that time, the daily limit on fish was as much as 25 pounds. "And they didn't have scales with them," Bissel pointed out. When more fish are taken from a pond, the fish are able to grow larger there, so it's possible fatter fish were caught 100 years ago, said Smith, who has worked for the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife in the region for 29 years. "Brook trout can fluctuate as far as numbers and size," Smith said. "When you get high survival, you get high populations, and you don't get as good growth." Timeless surroundings On Kidney Pond, the morning sun shines on stones and old stumps twisting toward the sky like ornamental columns; it offers a timeless image for fishermen up at 5 a.m. The smell of pine near the shore is overwhelming, as it would have been then. And then, as now, the sounds would have been of red squirrels and mountain wind, but few people. On Celia Pond later in the day, the sounds most likely would be different, the silence more dramatic. There, watching the water covered with tiny blue damselflies and yellow-flowered lily pads, you learn to listen to the quiet. Hidden in the woods a mile and a half from Kidney Pond Campground, the noise of a paddle on this smaller pond is almost a distraction. Baxter undoubtedly would have enjoyed fishing these simple, silent surroundings, where fishing is unhurried and the trek to a pond can take an hour. Such taxing but fortuitous labor would suit a fisherman who spent 32 years buying up land so that he could eventually preserve a wilderness park for his state. In 1903, Baxter and his father first went fishing in the Katahdin area in September or early October, when the water temperatures are cool and the fishing optimal. That was probably the time Baxter visited the area, based on the fact his father's 1903 journal had only two lapses in the regular entries dated from Portland, and each was two weeks long during those months. Baxter mentioned the 1903 fishing trip in a 1967 speech he wrote for the dedication of the Togue Pond Gate House, saying it was the first time he laid eyes on Katahdin. He offered no other insight to the trip, other than to say "it was an interesting experience." The experience of casting from a canoe on Kidney Pond and in the park's more remote ponds is similar to what it was then. "The ponds around Kidney Pond, based on what we know, have not changed much," Smith said. "Few species were introduced here and there, like smelts, but (the regulation has) been fly-fishing-only for a long time. That kept introduction of other fish away." Sportsmen like Baxter at Hunt's Camp visited most of those ponds during a two-week stay. Typically such trips to sporting camps back then lasted a couple of weeks. Undoubtedly, leaving this wilderness beside the quiet of Kidney Pond would have saddened Baxter. For a city dweller, the view of the unending blackness of the pond at night is a reminder of what is left behind in the wake of progress. After hiking out of Rocky Pond in the cover of night, it's not uncommon to find other campers already having turned in after days filled with fishing, hiking, and canoeing. It would have been the same for Percival. As he sat beside Kidney Pond at nightfall, there were sounds of insects and nocturnal animals stirring around the pond. Then, he would have heard farm animals rustling, since livestock was kept at sporting camps for food. He may have visited a neighbor's cabin for conversation. The native nighttime sounds in this wilderness would have offered the same reassurance they do today: that a place so simple can provide generations with immeasurable pleasure. Staff Writer Deirdre Fleming can be contacted at 791-6452 or at: dfleming@pressherald.com
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