5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #2 "The Keel of Lake Dickey"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

This is the second post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “The Keel of Lake Dickey” (The New Yorker, May 3, 1976; included in McPhee's 1979 collection Giving Good Weight).

This piece chronicles McPhee’s 100-and-some-mile canoe trip down the wild, remote St. John River, in northern Maine. In late spring, 1975, he and seven others (Mike Moody, John Kauffmann, Tom Cabot, Lev and Dick Byrd, Dick Saltonstall, and Sam Warren) fly in three float planes from Greenville, Maine, and set down at the south end of Baker Lake. McPhee beautifully describes their flight:

We were brought in by air – in three float planes from Greenville, at the foot of Moosehead Lake. I was in the third plane. In the air, the two in front seemed to hang without motion, pontoons pendent – canoes tied to the pontoons. In the shallows of Moosehead we could see clearly the rocks of the bottom. There were whitecaps over the deeps. Off to the right, with more altitude, we saw Allagash Mountains, Caucomgomoc Lake, Chesuncook Lake, the West Branch of the Penobscot River, and beyond all, the Katahdin massif, aglint with ice and snow. Moving north-northwest, we flew about sixty miles over streams and forest, and set down at the south end of Baker Lake, downstream a few miles from the string of ponds that are the headwaters of the St. John River. 

That “pontoons pendent – canoes tied to the pontoons” is very fine, exemplifying McPhee’s eye for vivid detail. Note also his wonderful use of place names – Moosehead, Allagash, Caucomgomoc, Chesuncook, Penobscot, Katahdin. There’s poetry in those names!

The purpose of the trip? McPhee writes, “For us, just being out here – in this country, on this river – is the purpose of the journey.” 

The piece is structured in seven untitled segments. The first segment, in typical McPhee in medias res form, plunges us directly into the action. It’s May 28. The men are four days into their journey. They’re approaching Seven Islands, about to shoot Big Black Rapid. McPhee writes,

The rapid is beautiful, boulder, and bending – the forest rising steeply from the two sides. It is called the Big Black Rapid because it is near the mouth of the Big Black River, which flows into the St. John a mile downstream. There is nothing black about the rapid. It is blue and mostly white, running over big rocks and ledges, with standing waves on long diagonals, like ranges of hills. The wind is so still now it is tearing spray off the tops of the waves. The rapid curves left, then right. 

The men assess the rapid and plan their course:

The plan is that I will lead (paddling an eighteen-foot Grumman, with Mike Moody. John Kauffmann will follow [in a red Royalex canoe], with Tom Cabot. Lev and Dick Bird, in their fifteen-foot Grumman, will go next. And Dick Saltonstall, with Sam Warren, in a big E. M. White canoe with mahogany gunwales, will sweep.

McPhee describes their passage:

We shove off. One by one, the four canoes describe an easygoing, bobbing S down the rapid. The Byrds hit a rock and add a deep, tympanic bass to the contralto of the rapid, but they do not stick (as aluminum canoes too often will). No one else comes even close to buying the river. At the foot of the rapid, the aggregate water in all the canoes is maybe five or ten quarts.

That “The Byrds hit a rock and add a deep, tympanic bass to the contralto of the rapid” is superbly evocative. 

The second segment flashes back to the start of the trip – the flight to the south end of Baker Lake and the first night of camping. McPhee humorously describes an “equipment shootout” between him and Dick Saltonstall. He tells about shopping at L. L. Bean with John Kauffmann. Most notably, he introduces the piece’s major theme – the fate of the St. John River:

In Congress each year, a debate takes place about the fate of the St. John, and whether the Army Corps. Of Engineers can or cannot have another year’s funds for the advancement of a project that would backflood the river from a dam at Dickey, the first village one encounters after going downriver through the woods.

Segment two concludes with this beautiful passage:

The shadow continued to cover the moon until just a small brightness, like a spot of yolk, remained; and then that, too, was gone. In the crystal sky, the moon was totally eclipsed, and appeared to be hanging there in parchment. When the last of its bright light was cut off, millions and millions of additional stars seemed to come falling into the sky. The Milky Way became as white as a river. Sam Warren said skies were like that up here on clear, moonless nights in winter. With the passing of the shadow and the return of the light, the stars of lesser magnitude evanesced as quickly as they had come into view. The air was down to freezing now. In the morning, there was frost over the ground, mist curling from the lake, and ice solid in our cups. 

God, I wish I could write like that. McPhee is known as a meticulous structuralist. But he’s much more than that. His rhythm is impeccable; his word choices are inspired.

In the third segment, the group paddles down the river to Nine Mile Bridge. McPhee describes the river, developing his theme:

The St. John is the only Maine river of any size that has not been dammed. From its highest source – First St. John Pond, above Baker Lake – the St. John goes free for two hundred miles, until it breaks out into Canada, where it has been both dammed and, in places, polluted on its way through New Brunswick to the sea. It ends, incidentally, with a flourish, a remembrance of its upper waters – a phenomenal rapid. The phenomenon is that the rapid turns around and thunders back toward the source. The white water flows alternately in two directions – down with the river and up with the tide.

I know that rapid well, or at least I feel I do. It’s known as the Reversing Falls. For a couple of years when I was a kid, my family and I lived in Saint John, on Douglas Avenue, in a house that overlooked the river just above the Falls. And before that, we lived on Gibson Street, Fredericton, a couple of blocks from the St. John. And later, when I was a teen, my family bought a cottage on Oromocto Lake. The drive to the Lake took us along the St. John from Fredericton to Longs Creek. I feel a close connection with the St. John, even though I’ve never been on it in a boat. But the St. John that I know is the lower part, the developed part. The St. John that McPhee writes about in his piece is the “natural” upper section that runs through Maine.

In the fourth segment, McPhee and his companions paddle from Nine Mile to Seven Islands, where they spend the rest of the day fishing. They join a couple of other campers there – Richard Barringer and Herbert Hartman, who, together, constitute Maine’s Bureau of Public Lands. McPhee is impressed with Hartman’s canoeing prowess. He writes,

He had a black-spruce setting pole, full of spring and glistening with boiled linseed oil, and with it he could move his big twenty-footer at a handsome clip upstream, even against a stiff current. Standing in the stern, the twelve-foot pole in his hands, he looked like a gondolier, with the difference that he was jabbing his pole against the bottom of the pure St. John and not sculling the cess of Venice. To move the canoe, he reached forward, set the pole (point on the bottom), and then seemed to climb it like a gymnast on a rope. Sometimes – waxing fancy – he twirled it, end over end, on the recovery. To correct his course, he now and again poled behind his back.

Also in this segment, McPhee sounds his theme again – the destruction of the river, if Dickey Dam is built:

In the low light and mists of that early morning, Seven Islands was even more beautiful than it had been the afternoon and evening before. The bottoms of clouds were touching the plains of grass. I thought of all the water that had fallen in the night, and of the engineered flood that would stop the river. Seven Islands, not far from the head of Dickey Lake, would at times be under fifteen feet of water. At other times, as the dam made its electricity and coped with the river’s irregular contributions of water, the surface of the lake would go down as much as forty vertical feet, and Seven Islands would then emerge, like the engulfed cathedral, coated with mud.

In segment five, the group continues downriver, heading for Chimenticook Stream:

A bend or two, and Sam Warren sees a yearling moose. He gets out of the canoe and goes after it, on a dead run up the riverbank. He learns that he is slower than the moose. He wanted to ride it. We have seen otters, ospreys, black ducks, mergansers, loons. No bears. There is ice this morning in the river – small chunks from big pieces on the bank, near trees with shredded bark. It is sixty hours to June. 

In segment six, they reach Big Rapid. McPhee sets the scene:

The four canoes stop on the left bank, and we study the rapid. It does not look forbidding or, for the most part, fierce. It will not be like crossing a turnpike on foot. It is a garden of good choices. Overwhelmingly, it is a spectacular stretch of river – big and white for a full mile before continuing white, it bends from view. The river narrows here by about a third, pressed between banks of rock, but it is still hundreds of feet wide – big boulders, big submarine ledges, big holes, big pillows, big waves, big chutes, big eddies. Big Rapid. 

The men tackle the rapid in two stages. Here’s stage one: 

And so we’re in it. We make choices, and so does the river. We shout a lot above the roar. Words coordinate the canoe. My eye is certainly off the mark. I underestimated the haystacks. They are about as ponderous as, for this loaded canoe, they can safely be. I look steeply down at Moody in the bottoms of the troughs. But the route we picked – generally to the left, with some moves toward the center, skirting the ledges – is, as Kauffmann would say, solving the problem. We are not playing with the Big Rapid. We are tiptoeing in and hoping it won’t wake up. Under the slanting birch, we swing into the eddy and stop. Two. Three. Four. Everybody home, and we bail many quarts.

Here's stage two:

The run this time is more difficult – the bow kicking high into the air and returning to the surface in awkward slaps. We dig for momentum, sidestep rocks, but not nimbly, for the canoe is sluggish with shipped water. Anxious to get into the calm below the maple, I try a chute that is just about as wide as the beam of the canoe. It’s a stupid and almost unsuccessful move, and I get out of the canoe and climb up on a boulder to wave the others around the chute. 

All four canoes make it through without incident. Standing on shore, looking back up river, the men see another canoe coming through the rapid, bouncing in the waves. Half a mile above them, it rolls over and begins to wash down. McPhee and his companions run up the bank, but as they get nearer the capsized canoe, they realize there’s nothing they can do. It’s near the middle of the rapid. The two paddlers are afloat and are hanging on. McPhee’s group watches them helplessly. Eventually the two men and their canoe wash downriver to a place where McPhee and his party can haul them out. The incident underscores the danger of the rapid and what can happen if it's misread.

In the seventh and concluding segment, the men complete their journey, camping on Gardner Island, where the Allagash River enters the St. John. Facing upriver, McPhee describes the scene and artfully sounds his theme for the final time: 

The river is framed in hills, the one on the right rising steeply some eight hundred feet above the St. John, the one on the left set back a mile from the river across the low, marshy ground at the end of the Allagash. The scene is a big one, but nothing of the size of what the imagination now superimposes on it. Outlined in the air between the hills and above the rivers is the crestline of Dickey Dam. It is more than three hundred feet above us, and it reaches from hill to hill. The dam is two miles wide. It plugs the St. John. It seals the Allagash marshland. Smaller than Oroville, bigger than Aswan, it is the twelfth largest dam on earth. It contains what were once Aroostook mountains (Township Fifteen, Range Nine), blasted to shards and reassembled here. It’s long downstream slope – the classic profile of the earth-fill dam – moves up before us to the crest. If we could put our canoes on our backs and portage up that slope, we’d see fifteen miles of whitecaps in the wind – a surging sea, but just a bay of Lake Dickey, whose main body, bending around a point to the left, reaches fifty-seven miles over the improved St. John. Paddles dipping, we fly the Big Rapid at three hundred feet, and, where the native trout have departed, we fish – thirty-five fathoms above Chimenticook Stream – for stocked Confederate bass. Chimenticook Bay is a five-mile reach, and Big Black Bay is thirty. In all, the lake bottom includes some ninety thousand acres of stumps, and, because Lake Dickey is one to three miles wide, no bridge is contemplated or economically feasible, two hundred thousand acres of standing timber are isolated from the rest of Maine. The lake fills up in spring, and the water is mined for power during the rest of the year, gradually revealing – along three hundred and fifty miles of shore – thirty thousand acres of mud. From the dam, and through the St. John-Allagash north Maine woods, runs a transmission line, continuing for four hundred and fifty miles to southern New England, and carrying seven hundred and twenty-five megawatts of electricity for two and a half hours a day. That’s all. That is the purpose of the Dickey Dam. It is a soupçon, but anything more would drain the lake.

It's an appalling vision. It’s also a polemical tour de force, vividly imagining the scale of destruction (“ninety thousand acres of stumps,” “thirty thousand acres of mud”), putting us squarely there on the crest of the dam, looking out at “fifteen miles of whitecaps in the wind.” 

Art is in the details. My summary of this remarkable piece doesn’t do it justice. It omits dozens of McPhee’s felicitous touches, e.g., his description of Hartman fishing (“Hartman dropped anchor occasionally, picked up a bamboo rod with an English reel, and began to massage the air with sixty feet of line”), his portrait of Tom Cabot (“Listening to him is like listening to a ballgame on the radio, and in the canoe he makes the hours fly”), his observation on drinking rum in the rain (“Certainly, gin has good loft and weather repellence. But this rum – a hundred and fifty-one proof – is watertight”). 

“The Keel of Lake Dickey” is a great canoe trip down a great river. It's also a perfect illustration of the use of narrative as a subtle form of argument. McPhee doesn’t rail at the dam builders. He simply shows the magnificent beauty of the upper St. John and what would be lost if the Dickey Dam were built. It’s a powerful piece of advocacy. Apparently, it was effective. Three years after the piece appeared in The New Yorker, the U.S. House Committee on Public Works voted to kill the project.