Matthew Dickerson, Reprinted from the Addison Independent, May 18, 2000.
I just returned from my annual fishing and camping trip to the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in the heart of the North Maine Woods. It's a trip I've been taking with my father almost every May for the past twenty-nine years: a pilgrimage that I look forward to with great anticipation, partly for the fishing, partly for the wilderness experience, and largely just for the chance to spend quality time with my father and brothers.
This year was a special bonus as my wife Deborah was able to join us for the first time. She'd heard me talk about the trip for so many years that she finally decided to experience it for herself. Some things about our trip never change. Breakfast pancakes cooked over a Coleman stove. Instant soup with peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. Fresh trout for dinner every night. Lantern-light cribbage in the tent. Falling asleep to the sounds of crooning loons and frogs. And waking before dawn to crows and woodpeckers. As usual we saw lots of wildlife including osprey, loons, herons, bitterns, a bald eagle, several moose, and a black bear that must have weighed close to 400 pounds.
The fishing, like fishing anywhere, varies wildly. In fact the degree to which it changes from day to day and year to year is itself one of the things that doesn't change. In our first forty minutes on the river Thursday evening we caught five brook trout over 14". And within two hours on Friday morning we had caught at least a dozen more measuring 15" to 18". Then on Saturday I caught nothing all day.
Some things, however, do change. Tents, for example. The first several years we made this trip, we slept in a big old canvas tent that my father had picked up at a surplus store. It had to weigh at least a hundred pounds, filled most of the car trunk, and took four of us an hour (and several pinched fingers) to set up. We got lots of practice setting it up, too, because it tended to collapse one or twice a day. Since the tent poles were inside the tent, it was a non-trivial task to reset them when they collapsed. Not that having the tent made much difference; it leaked like a sieve. This year we slept in a new L.L.Bean hundred-square-foot three-room tent (yes, the tent actually had three rooms) with high-tech breathable fabric and pencil-thin shock-corded aluminum poles. The tent weighed only a little more than twenty pounds. Two of us set it up in about ten minutes, and could have done it alone in twenty. The high winds and pounding rain that struck us on Saturday night had no effect at all on the tent. My kids will never know what the phrase "roughing it" means!
And though the Allagash itself has changed only slightly over the years, the way it is managed has changed considerably. When my father first started traveling there in the 1960s, the river was open to all motor boats and the daily limit for trout was ten fish. Now the river is restricted to canoes only, and the bag limit has dropped to two brook trout plus one togue (lake trout) per day. At first we begrudged the decreasing creel limits. Then we saw the quality of fishing steadily improving over the next several years. Now we can't understand why anybody would need to keep more than two fish in a day. Just one big Allagash trout will feed two people. In fact, I consider the dramatic change to much more protective management strategies to be one of the biggest reasons there have been so few changes in the wilderness. Which is a big concern of mine because next year I plan to start passing the tradition on to my own boys, and thirty years from now I hope they will be able to look back on as many years of that same experience.