Homage to Hoagland: "Fred King on the Allagash"

This is the first post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Fred King on the Allagash,” included in Hoagland’s excellent 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River. 

This great piece is an account of a six-day, ninety-two-mile canoe trip that Hoagland made through Maine’s Allagash Wilderness Waterway. The exact date of the trip is difficult to ascertain. We know it was July 17, because Hoagland says so in the piece. But the year is unspecified. The piece originally appeared in the January-February 1973 issue of Audience magazine. I’m guessing Hoagland made the trip the previous year, 1972. His purpose was pretty basic: “I wanted to see what it was like.” He says he hired a guide “so that I could use my paddle as a writing table part of the time and, being a novice, not bother with questions of navigation.” 

The guide’s name is Fred King. Hoagland describes him:

He’s fifty-eight, looks forty-five, has short hair which is bluish gray, round glasses, a boyish doggy grin, a face deeply cut by grinning and a mouth big enough to grin with. It’s a pleasing face; his body is straight and quick like a chipmunk’s and he has an immediate laugh, provocatively loud, and likes to stop still when on the move and sound off on the matter at hand, then impulsively move forward again, seeming never to walk if he can run. At home in Augusta he keeps a jug of Allagash water to mix with his drinks, and doesn’t much like December because of the short days: “I’d sell December awfully cheap.” 

Fred is as much the subject of Hoagland’s piece as the Allagash river. You can tell Hoagland admires him. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but it’s implicit in the many vivid lines of description that he devotes to him. This, for example:

He still likes to be by himself. His ideas sound as if they had been worked out in isolation in the woods and perhaps spoken first in a loud voice all alone. He has a tight shipshape cabin on Chemquassabamticook Lake where he goes in midwinter and works on improvements, hauling now with a snowmobile. He’s got to break trail for the snowmobile on snowshoes – it’s not like the ads – but he loves the rigor of the winter woods, cooks for himself and sleeps fitfully, listening to the radio and waiting for his mouse trap to snap. The mice he feeds to the gorbies – Canada jays – outside.

And this:

When we walked, Fred was quick, and with his small intelligent face looked like a professor afield, though his right arm is beginning to go bad on him – too much holding a chainsaw. In the black-fly season he sometimes sews his socks to his pants to protect his ankles, and leaves them on for four or five days, he said. 

The trip begins on Chamberlain Lake. There are two others in their party – a Long Island couple, Jim and Audrey, being towed in a second canoe. The foursome go up the lake toward Lock Dam, pass through the lock, and then head down the river to Eagle Lake, where they run into a storm:

We ran into waves tipped with whitecaps, the wind shifting into a headwind, and a navy-blue curtain lowered in front of us. The murky curtain turned purple, the water turned black and the wind hard and strong – the waves coming in gusts, the canoe shipping water – as we met the storm. It was a smothering front, and passing beyond it, we were soaked in a pellety rain, but found some protection in the lee of Farm Island, then in a narrows, where we tied up at Priest’s Camp. In the drumbeating rain as, laughing, we threw up our tents, Fred pretended we’d almost drowned to make it more dramatic for us. He said that when he first began guiding he’d been scared he might do something wrong and had gone to an old-timer for advice: “Just take lots of eggs and jam, Fred.” 

Next day, they explore the lake:

We circled the lake, slipping into each estuary and up Soper Brook, then up Snare Brook. Dozens of ducks: fish nests down through the water, scooped in the gravel. A great blue heron flew up. A dragonfly chased by a kingfisher got away by dodging close to our bow. The brooks were silty but the wetland grasses were a tender light-green. After a half-mile or so the alder growth would close in and beaver cuttings would block the brook, and where we had to stop we’d see moose tracks.

They stay at Priest’s Camp a second night. Next day, they head for Churchill Lake, where they encounter a moose:

On Churchill, with the sun a silvery band on the water, we caught up with a swimming cow moose midway across. Her body was invisible; her head was like a blunt boat, the ears the housing, and her hairy neck hump nearly underwater. It was a groping blind-looking head, sightless as a whale’s, a feeling and suffering-looking head, the nose so huge and vulnerable that other undiscovered senses might have been contained inside. Two terns were diving on her with creaky cries. Her ears lay back as her big pumping legs hurled her ashore, and she swerved to look at us, first over one shoulder, then over the other.

Hoagland and his group move on through Heron Lake and into the Chase Rips – “the one risky spot” on the route:

The river before us fell off, abrupt as the end of a table; all of a sudden it didn’t appear to be there. Then, curling up like a hairdo, it fluffed around us, high at the prow, as we slid down into the rapids themselves. The noisy water was popping in points, peaks and tufts, blotting out all other sights and sounds. We could have been surrounded by other canoes and not noticed them. This was the first pitch, full of rocks, several hundred yards long. The second was shorter but “downhilly,” the many rips sticking up as if to chum with us, as the water curled and crabbed around. Riffles, bumps, a wild backdrop of trees.

They stop at a place called Big Eddy to dry out and have lunch. Then they push on, “the Allagash partying along, popping with rocks but forty yards wide, leaving plenty of current, till it tipped down steeply again and we slid at the edge of a whole thievish mob of rocks that nattered away, feeling their tug, zipping by Harrow Brook.”

They enjoy peaceful minutes of drifting, too. Then “for three hundred yards the river would turn feisty, roaring, tergiversating, as busy as rush hour, each rock having its say.” Hoagland writes,

We twisted through new rips and rapids, eluding sweepers, seeing the trout jump, and dragonflies in a mating clinch; jays called in the trees. The clouds were lovely, if we took time to glance upward. There were still-water sloughs, and gulls on the mud-banks, and parakeet cries from the bear-jungle. Then a swift chute, dark choppy water, on into a wide, luxurious pool. Buzzing birds in the woods, occasional pines, more shaggy cedar, big pairs of spruce, a heron flying high with folded neck, a gangly flying loon, some green grassy islands. A winter wren sang. Then again the water crawled with ripples, with stream birds flying up, the water slanting alive with bubbles over a gravel bar.

They go through a bog and then out onto Umsaskis Lake. They camp for the night in the Thoroughfare leading from Umsaskis into Long Lake. Fred keeps a jeep at Umsaskis. Next day, he drives the group forty miles across International Paper Company roads to Chemquassabamticook Lake, where they boat to his cabin. Hoagland describes the place:

His curtain rods are old setting poles, his clothesline is tied between saplings skinned by beavers. He had a potato garden to tend, and we went out to see the stump of a virgin pine with the marks of a broad-ax that cut it still visible and a forty-year-old birch tree growing on top. We saw two barred owls calling each other, and a woodpecker drinking down ants on a stump, and moose and deer prints on the sandy beach, among the debris of mussel shells the gulls had dropped. 

In the morning, “the sun was golden through the thick trees. A soupy mist covered the lake, which smoked like a hot spring. Two connubial loons floated side by side, then dived together. The water was as dark as blueberry jelly.” They head back to the Allagash and get underway toward Long Lake again:

We passed bits of islands covered with driftpiles, saw a doe and a fawn, a sheldrake with seven ducklings, a squirrel swimming the river, its tail like a rudder. A heron flew up and stood for a minute atop a fir tree. The river curved gently in a stretch as sweet as honey, softening its water sounds so that we could hear the white-throated sparrows. After tilting again with a few rocks we entered a dead water which lasted for an hour’s paddling, birds warbling all around, the water smooth, black and waxed. Tying the canoes together, we drifted as a raft, eating Fig Newtons, and hearing chain saws. Sweeney Brook, Whittaker Brook and Jalbert Brook joined the current.

That “Tying the canoes together, we drifted as a raft, eating Fig Newtons, and hearing chain saws” makes me smile. It’s quintessential Hoagland – “raft,” “Fig Newtons” and “chain saws” bumping against each other surreally. No one but him could’ve written it.  

They camp at Round Pond for the night. Next morning, they’re on the river early: “We got started at 6 A.M., a sailing hawk peering down at us. A mist almost the color of snow lay between the lines of trees, so that although the weather was warm it was a wintry scene.” They go through the Round Pond Rips. Next, the Musquacook Rips. Fred’s loud voice in the quietness irritates Hoagland "exceedingly" because it’s scaring away moose and other animals. He writes, “I had to remember that this was real history he was reliving, that he was a link with the boisterous rivermen whose intent was to knock down the forests and let the light in.” 

And now comes one of my favorite passages of the piece – Hoagland’s vibrant description of the river from the Musquacook Rips to Allagash Falls. It’s worth quoting in full:

A buckskin-colored deer exploded with springy bounds. We saw a merganser family, a ridge scalped by a tornado. In a dead water we looked down and saw grasses growing on the bottom, while a whole populace of insects bounced in the air. The sun streamed through the morning vapors in warm yellow combinations on the west bank, but on the east the view was still snowy-looking. The black-growth forest humped into low hills. We floated past grassy islands, then sibilant stretches, the water combing through the rocks, turning the big ones yellow with reflected light and leaving a platter of calm downstream of each. There’s a disastrous-sounding crunch when a canoe hits a rock and the floor lifts under one’s feet, but the sound is worse than the results. We passed an old shack with a sod roof, now burgeoning with raspberries, and saw Savage Brook debouch through its delta, and Five Finger Brook. The water itself looked like running gravel, and we passed several old cabins that used to belong to characters like Sporty Jack (so called because of a birthmark he sported), and the Cunliffe Depot, the abandoned headquarters of a logging boss who rivaled Michaud. Michaud’s hay farm was two miles below, now devoid of buildings but spacious after so many miles of woods. Then beaches and finally a slough called Finlay Bogan, where we saw kingfishers, fish jumping, islands foliaged with willows and silver maples, ice-scarred. It became a still, rainy day with some occasional neighborly thunder. We ran by a few gentle rapids and shoals, seeing huge waterlogged stumps that were shaped like moose. The river here was a dream – rustling, windy, wild-looking and lush – chipper with birds, overhung with sweepers, dense with slow channels forking between the islands. It was beautiful and remote. 

“Platter of calm,” “neighborly thunder,” “stumps shaped like moose,” “chipper with birds” – who writes like that? No one. Only Hoagland. He’s incredibly specific. He's the king of specificity. He loves using place names: Savage Brook, Finger Brook, Cunliffe Depot, Finlay Bogan. His words call up pictures: “A buckskin-colored deer exploded with springy bounds”; the water combing through the rocks, turning the big ones yellow with reflected light”; “an old shack with a sod roof, now burgeoning with raspberries”; “The water itself looked like running gravel.” 

The trip is almost over. Hoagland swims below the falls, “in deep potholes where the water was warm.” Then they carry on down the river to its mouth where it empties into the St. John River, at which point the trip ends and the parties disperse. Hoagland writes: “Fred King departed like a boy let out of school: no more entertaining or catering to us, no more wincing at the bumps delivered to his canoe. He would drive south until he got tired and sleep by the side of the road.”

Accounts of canoe trips on wild rivers are catnip to me. I devour them. This is one of the best. Hoagland puts us right there on the Allagash. His writing is active, concrete, vivid. Great subject, delectable prose – the piece is double bliss.