We Took to the Woods

Fans of the Maine backwoods, down-east humor, and New England-ania more generally will want to read Louise Dickinson Rich's We Took to the Woods (Down East Books, 2007, or if you are really lucky, Grosset & Dunlap 1942, like Bill gave me for my birthday).  Rich has a marvelous eye for the funny detail and a dry sense of humor that combine to pretty brilliantly describe her experience in a very remote region of Maine.  No hothouse flower she, Rich describes her life with a certain amount of relish, organizing her chapters as responses to an omniscient third-party interrogator who poses questions like:

Isn't housekeeping difficult?
Don't you ever get bored?
Aren't the children a problem?

And the like.  (Many of these chapters appeared as stand-alone articles in publications like the Atlantic.)  You could say there is a certain defensiveness about it all, and there is definitely a sameness in that pretty much all of the anecdotes are light and the woods are omnipresent.  But there is a wry-ness to her humor and I do like a writer who uses the word swell occasionally.

Richardson meets her future husband, Ralph, on a canoeing trip in the area in 1933 and moves up to Maine pretty quickly to live with him year round.  (Tragically, Ralph dies in 1945 and that is the end of that.)  They support themselves by writing, and by providing a transport and portage service between Pond-In-The-River dam and Lower Richardson Lake, where is the so-called hotel as she calls Coburn's Lakewood Camps, precursor to our happy place Lakewood Camps.  While they are several bumpy hours by car and maybe boat or ice-sledge from any town, this is no solitary Thoreau-ian existence.  The woods, as it turns out, are filled with characters ranging from their straight-from-Maine-Central-Casting handyman Gerrish, to loggers who may or may not be felons but are gentle giants with kids, to the damkeeper's jolly extended family, to the occasional FBI agent.

You can learn a lot from We Took to the Woods, like how to drive on thin ice - "keep the doors open, go like hell, and be ready to jump" (80) - or how to make a very tasty-sounding upside down raspberry shortcake (162).  Or how to be an authentic Maine guide.  I'm going to quote a long piece here about this specimen - a type both completely serious and hilariously invented - because I think it nicely represents Rich's style and subject.

  "Of course a guide has to be a good woodsman and canoeman and camp cook and emergency doctor, and the State of Maine ascertains that he is, before issuing him a license to guide.  But he could never earn a living if he didn't also make the grade with the sports - same as dudes of the West - as 'quite a character.'  He has to be laconic.  He has to be picturesque.  Maine guides have a legend of quaintness to uphold, and, boy! do they uphold it.  They're so quaint they creak.  They ought to be.  They work hard enough at it.
  Here's the Maine guide.  He wears what amounts to a uniform.  It consists of a wool shirt, preferably plain, nicely faded to soft, warm tones; dark pants, either plus-fours, for some unknown reason, or riding breeches; wool socks and the soleless, Indian-type moccasin, or high laced boots.  He carries a bandana in his hip pocket and may or may not wear another knotted around his neck.  But he must wear a battered felt hat, with a collection of salmon flies stuck in the band, and he must wear it with an air; and he must wear a hunting knife day and night; and he must look tough and efficient.  If he has high cheek bones and tans easily, that is his good luck,  He can then admit to part-Indian ancestry, accurately or not.  Indian blood is highly esteemed by sports.  Naturally he could do his work as well in mail-order slacks, or in a tuxedo, for that matter; but the sports wouldn't think so.  Sports are funny.
  'That fellow there,' the sport is supposed to say, showing his vacation movies in his Westchester rumpus room, 'was my quarter-breed guide.  He's quite a character.  Never had any education beyond the seventh grade, but I don't know anyone I'd rather spend a week alone with.  That's the real test.  He's a genuine natural philosopher.  For instance, we were talking about the War, and he said - and I'd never thought of it this way before - .'  What the guide said he probably lifted from Shirer's book, but translated into Down East, it wouldn't be recognizable.
  A few livid scars are a great asset to a guide.  It doesn't matter how he got them.  Maybe as a barefoot boy he stepped on a rake.  The holes make swell bear-trap scars, acquired one night up in the Allagash when the thermometer was at thirty below and the nearest settlement was fifty miles away."  (53-54)

The whole book is like that.

Rich particularly loves the events of the woods:  when the logging camps are in session, or a log drive down the river (one of the last of its kind) or the National Championship Whitewater Races which used to be held on the Rapid River because the flow down its rapids could be regulated by the dam.  She also likes the solitude of the woods:  fishing in remote ponds, berry picking, tramping through the snow.  The Richs have plenty of access to modern comforts:  a telephone trunk line, electricity, mail order to supply every want and need.  Just no indoor privy, which even Louise admits is a tad chilly in the winter.

But you know, it is a small price to pay.  Good company, baked beans, beautiful scenery:  really, who needs anything else?  The final chapter is about her need, as perceived by others, to go to the Outside.   Locals feel that you need to go Out every once in a while, or else you get a bit squirrely.  Rich does finally, after about three years, and appreciates the experience, but doesn't feel the need to go again anytime soon.
  "So after all, why should we bother to go Outside?  there would be only one reason, to see our friends; and our friends come here instead.  We have swell friends, as I suppose everyone has, and we'd much rather see them here, undiluted by people we don't like, than Outside.  So if they are willing to put up with off-hand meals for the sake of lounging around in their oldest clothes and being free to do and say what they please; if they are willing to swap their own good beds for our not-so-good ones plus a lot of excellent scenery and fishing; if they want to take the long, involved trip in with nothing much at the end except us and the assurance that they are very much more than welcome, why, that's the way we want it, too.  And that's the way we have it."  (315)