Howard Frank Mosher - North Country: A Personal Journey Through the Borderland

Copyright 1997 by Howard Frank Mosher
All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Mosher, Howard Frank.

North country : a personal journey through the borderland / Howard Frank Mosher,
p. cm.

ISBN 0-395-83707-3 ISBN 0-395-90139-1 (pbk.)
1. Northern boundary of the United StatesDescription and travel. 2. CanadaDescription and travel. 3. Frontier and pioneer lifeUnited States. 4. Frontier and pioneer lifeCanada. 5. Mosher, Howard FrankJourneysUnited States. 6. Mosher, Howard FrankJourneysCanada.

I. Title.

F 551. M 67 1997

917.304'929dc21 96-29517 CIP

e ISBN 978-0-544-39124-6
v1.0714

Parts of this book appeared, in somewhat different form, in The Sophisticated Traveler section of The New York Times Magazine, March 3, 1996, The Boston Globe Magazine, March 17, 1996, and Country Journal, June 1986.

FOR PHILLIS

Yes, yes, yes, youre going on a journey. Anyone who wants to take a trip as badly as you do will find a way to take it. But dont be surprised if it turns out to be entirely different from what you expect.

A gypsy fortuneteller in New York City, summer of 1993

On the American side of the border, especially in remote northern frontiers where theres a long tradition of individualism, theres also a deep awareness of how precious an individuals personal liberty is and how one gets and keeps it. What I think youll find in your North Country outposts is the very strongest sense of independence, on all levels, left in America today. At the same time, I think youll also discover that in many places the border has created its own zone of independence from the rest of both Canada and the U.S.

Chris Braithwaite, Canadian-born Vermont journalist and editor

Ever since my grandparents began taking me on weekend trips to the Adirondacks when I was four years old, traveling north has exhilarated me. Later in my boyhood, my father and uncle and I headed north each summer to fish for trout in Quebecs Laurentian Mountains. I can still vividly recall the almost unbearable excitement I felt on those journeys. Long before we reached the border, I had the dramatic sense that we were entering an altogether different land from the tamer Catskills where I lived at the time: a boreal realm of deep evergreen woods, raw-looking paper-mill towns whose acrid tang you could smell ten miles away, swift dark rivers with hard-to-pronounce Indian names. And then, toward evening, the quickening anticipation of approaching the customs station and, stretching north to the tundra and beyond, Canada.

Next to going there, I loved nothing better than reading about the North. As a boy I read everything I could get my hands on having to do with the North Woods, the northern Great Plains, the Far North. I devoured all of Jack London and Robert W. Service and memorized the Paul Bunyan tales. Between college semesters, I took extended camping trips on my own, drawn north as surely as geese in the spring, searching in the Adirondacks and Laurentians and Maines vast forests for that transcendent sense Prologue of well-being that I experienced in the northern wilderness and nowhere elseleast of all in a classroom. I couldnt explain it, but somehow I felt that the North was where I belonged.

So in 1964, after graduating from college and getting married, I moved with my like-minded wife, Phillis, to Vermonts Northeast Kingdom, just a few miles south of the Canadian border, a remote enclave of narrow glacial lakes and north-running rivers, thickly forested granite mountains, half-forgotten hamlets, and high hill farms, home to some of the most fiercely independent Yankee and French Canadian individualists left on the earth.

I have spent the last three decades living here and chronicling the lives and times of these individualists in my novels and short stories; and as unusual as it is these days to live ones entire adult life in a single place, making our home in this last vestige of an earlier Vermont has turned out to be exactly the right choice. Still, for a number of years, as the ever-encroaching development spreading northward from southern and central Vermont began to reach the Kingdom, and as the old horse loggers and hill farmers and moonshiners and whiskey runners vanished like the dying elms on a thousand New England village greens, Id had a growing desire to search out what remained of the rest of Americas northernmost frontiers, to identify the qualities that characterized these regions, and to assess what they might look like twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now.

In the summer of my fiftieth year the desire to make such a trip acquired a certain urgency. Its not that I was experiencing a midlife crisisI wanted to celebrate turning fifty by having a midlife adventure instead. So at the end of that summer, thinking now or never, with Philliss encouragement and support I set out in a rented carour own had one hundred and thirty thousand miles on itwith a single suitcase, half a dozen notebooks and Papermate refills, my hiking boots and fly rod, a couple dozen of my favorite North Country books, and a brand-new Rand McNally road atlas of the United States and Canada.

My itinerary would be loose, though I decided ahead of time that I would deliberately seek out the wildest and most remote country I could findplaces like the big woods and lakes of northern Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota, the northernmost Great Plains along our border with Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the breaks and mountains of Montanas Hi-line, the upper Columbia River Valley, and the Cascades. Having lived hard by the Canadian border for thirty years, I would use it as a compass bearing, venturing into Canada from time to time if I felt like it. For the most part Id follow my nose and see where it led me.

What did I discover? For starters, just as my friend and neighbor Chris Braithwaite had predicted, I found not so much a border, in the conventional sense, as a vast and little-known territory so distinct from the rest of the United States that it has a special name of its own. From coast to coast its known as the North Country: an immense, off-the-beaten-track sector of America inhabited by remarkably versatile, resilient, and, most of all, independent-minded people, most of whom are still intimately in touch with the land they live on and with their respective communities.

At the same time, as I traveled westward, impelled by my search for northern lore and history and our last northern frontiersmen and women, I could not seem to escape my own history, so much of which has been informed by my love of all things northern.

The following account of my journey, then, is also a personal memoir: the story of my own life in the North Country and how I came to be a writer here.

PART ONE

In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of the sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber.

Ernest Hemingway, The End of Something

5:30 A.M. Irasburg, Vermont. I strike off from my home in the Northeast Kingdom on a clear dawn in late August, which also happens to be the morning of the first hard frost of the year. Caught off guard, as usual, I left my car outside last night, so I have to scrape the windows all the way around. Frost, with September still a week away! Yet, so far from discouraging me, the early freeze-upits severe enough to kill our tomato plantsseems fitting, emblematic of the harsh territory Im about to visit.