Howard Frank Mosher embarked on a journey following America's northern border from coast to coast in search of the country's last unspoiled frontiers. What he discovered was a vast and sparsely settled territory largely ignored by the rest of the United States and Canada; a harsh and beautiful region populated by some of the continent's most independent men and women. Mosher brings the remote North Country vividly to life, and reflects on the powerful characters he has encountered in his own life and how this land has shaped his life and his books. "After this book, I'll always think of the northern border as Mosher country." Boston Globe "A combination of Hemingway, thoreau and Jim Harrison." The Los Angeles Times HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books, including Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, which, along with Disappearances, was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont. North Country A Personal Journey By Howard Frank Mosher Mariner Books Copyright ©1998 Howard Frank Mosher All right reserved. ISBN: 0395901391 CHAPTER ONE Part One THEGREATNORTHWOODS Notes from Route 2 In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one wholived in it was out of the sound of the big saws in the mill by thelake. 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-up--it's severe enough to kill our tomato plants--seems fitting, emblematic of the harsh territory I'm about to visit. 6:00 A.M. St. Johnsbury, Vermont. I pick up U.S. Route 2 thirty miles south of my home and head due east, into the rising sun, toward New Hampshire and Maine. Route 2 stretches most of the way across the North Country to the Pacific, and during the next six weeks I'll bump into it here and there from Maine to Michigan to Montana, like an old friend. For the most part I'll use it as a kind of unofficial southern boundary; in general I'll stay much closer to the Canadian border. Still, in New England, Route 2 passes through quintessential North Country, including many of the same deep woods and big rivers my father and uncle and I passed on those early fishing trips to Canada. And glory be, I'm nearly as excited now, forty years later, at the beginning of my cross-country odyssey, as I was then, though at the same time I can't shake the feeling that here in the North Woods of NewEngland, I'm witnessing--like Nick Adams in the Hemingwaystory--the end of something. * * * 7:00 A.M. Near the New Hampshire state line. For one thing, it's the end of summer, always a reflective time for me. Look at the roadside flowers: tall pink fireweed (the ubiquitous late-summer flower of North Woods clearings from Maine to Washington), goldenrod, asters, and here and there in swampy patches back from the road a soft maple turned red as fire for the fall just ahead. The farmhouses are weathered a November gray, gray as the granite outcroppings in the surrounding fields. The barn roofs, still sparkling with the first frost of the year, have a wintery look, steeply pitched to shed the two to three hundred inches of snow that falls annually in these mountains. The long, linked chains of sheds known as "North Country ells" connect house and barn so that on January mornings when the temperature plummets to forty below zero, farmers can walk from kitchen to milking parlor without stepping outside. Many of these places are abandoned now, the fields behind them overrun with wild redtop grass and alders and clumps of poplars and birches. The self-sufficient family farm has become an anachronism in northern New England just during the thirty years I've lived here. When at last I spot a small herd of Jersey cows headed from barn to pasture, I can't help feeling that this last working dairy farm for ten miles in either direction, where there were once thirty or forty, represents the end of a tradition and a way of life. 8:30 A.M. Up into a steep cut through New Hampshire's Presidential Range, past black-water bogs fringed with jagged necklaces of ice, past a sequestered backwater broken by the ring of a single rising brook trout (reminding me how drastically the brook trout fishing has fallen off in such places over the past three decades), into a region of vast clear-cuts: totally denuded hillsides that look as though they've been subjected to weeks of saturation bombing. I stop briefly a few miles farther along to watch a logging operation in progress. The early-morning woods is filled with the savage whining of two leviathan red-and-or