5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #4 "Farewell to the Nineteenth Century"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

This is the fourth post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “Farewell to the Nineteenth Century” (The New Yorker, September 27, 1999; Chapter 4 of McPhee’s fascinating The Founding Fish, 2002). 

In this absorbing piece, McPhee and his friend John McPhedran canoe down a fifteen-mile stretch of Maine’s Kennebec River, from Waterville to Augusta, through a landscape that until only a few days previous had been under water for a hundred and sixty-two years. The trip is McPhee’s way of exploring the subject of dam removal. 

The piece unfolds in three segments. In segment one, McPhee and McPhedran put their canoe in the river. McPhee writes,

With John McPhedran, I carried a canoe around a ballfield in Waterville, Maine, and on into the woods. The terrain fell away there sharply. The boat was heavy but its skin was indestructible, and we dragged it, bumping on roots. So much for the loving care reserved for canvas, bark, and Kevlar canoes. This one had no need of it. Its makers promote its type with pictures that show one being thrown off the roof of their factory in Old Town. So we twitched it downhill like a log. On the threshold of the year 2000, this was just one of the countless ways of saying farewell to the nineteenth century. 

A few days earlier, we would not have had to choose a model so tough. We put it into Messalonskee Stream, which carried us into the Kennebec River, which, in this stretch, had suddenly lost about five million tons of water as a result of deliberate demolition. Fifteen miles downstream, in Augusta, Edwards Dam, two stories high and more than nine hundred feet wide, had been breached on the first of July. 

As they paddle, McPhee describes what they see:

Beside the second rip we came to was a sofa bed, its skirts showing the stains of fallen water. We expected more of the same. We expected grocery carts. This, after all, was not Township 13, Range 11, of the North Woods, where nearly half the State of Maine consists of nameless unorganized townships. This was settled, supermarket Maine, but in the fifteen river miles upstream of Augusta we would see one beer can, no grocery carts, and three tires. Now we saw a mallard, a pewee, goldfinches. We heard song sparrows, a wood thrush, a veery. I wouldn’t know a veery from a blue-winged warbler, but John McPhedran is acute on birds. I had known him since he was seventeen, seventeen years before. Since then, he had become a botanist, a general field naturalist, and a freelance water-quality consultant working for the Maine Department of Transportation. We saw sticking up from a large and newly emergent river boulder an iron bolt fully an inch and a half in diameter and capped with a head like a big iron mushroom. I knew what that dated from – the log drives of the Kennebec, which began in colonial times and came to an end in 1976. Put a chain around that bolt and you could stop a raft of logs.

They come to Six-Mile Falls, a rapid that was covered by the rising impoundment in 1837. McPhee describes the scene:

Six-Mile Falls was a white riverscape of rock and plunge pools, small souse holes, tightly coiled eddies, and noisy, staired cascades. As we approached, we had to stand up and look for the thread of the river. The place was making scenery lifted from the dead. For six, seven, eight generations, it had been as withdrawn from the world as Debussy’s cathédrale engloutie, but now, as in the time long gone, it was making its own music. Its higher rock, in broad, flat segments, was covered with filamentous algae, which under water have the look of long grass, combed straight by the current. These algae were in thick brown mats, opened to the sky by the breaching of the dam and on their way to removal by the wind. We picked what seemed to be the most promising chute. The canoe slipped through it. We spun around and hung in an eddy. From riverbank to riverbank, water was falling in a hundred different ways.

Segment two cuts away from the canoe trip; it flashes back twelve days to July 1, 1999, when Edwards Dam was breached – the first big dam in a major American river to be ordered out of existence by the federal government. McPhee was there. He describes the moment:

On the cofferdam near the west bank sat Reggie Barnes, of Alton, Maine, at the levers of a Caterpillar 345 backhoe with a two-and-a-half-yard bucket and a thirty-nine-foot ground-level reach. Even from across the river, it looked Cretaceous, its head above the trees. Facing east, it swung right, and it bit a few tons of gravel. After swinging farther to the right and dropping the load, it went back for more. It was eating the cofferdam. It ate from south to north, toward the restrained water. Swing left. Bite. Swing right. Drop. Swing left. Bite. The machine was opening a chasm, and the north end of the chasm was becoming a pillar of gravel separating air from water. Bite. The pillar thinned. Frankly, I had not imagined this moment in history to be dramatic – the engineering was so extensive, monumental, and controlled. I mean, a Stuka wasn’t dropping one on the crest and flying off to Frankfurt. But this backhoe, positioned on the very structure it was consuming – swinging to and fro on the inboard end of the cofferdam – was hypnotizing a thousand people. It hadn’t far to go. The bucket had not reached water before water reached the bucket. From a thousand feet away, even through binoculars, not much could be seen yet but occasional splashes in motion, south. They were occasional enough to cause Reggie Barnes to roll his treads and get the big backhoe out of there, fast. It scooted off the cofferdam and partway up a hill. A bottle of champagne had been cracked on the bucket before it all began, and now from beneath a mass of hard hats came a cheer that might have been audible in Portland. While the hard hats watched and the Nature Conservancy watched with the leaders of American Rivers, the licks and splashes increased in frequency and height above the cofferdam, which was now being eaten by the Kennebec River.

Rapidly, it widened and deepened its advantage. It became a chocolate torrent. It shot through the gap in the western end of the dam itself and smashed into the foundation wall of the gatehouse, once the entry to the power canal. The foundation wall of the gatehouse consisted of very large blocks of granite. The liberated currents caromed off it and angled into the lower river. A milky brown plume spread through the clear water there and nearly reached the eastern shore, a thousand feet away. In eight minutes, the Kennebec, completely in charge of everything now, melted down the cofferdam until a channel had opened seventy feet wide. The rage of high water seemed to fly through the air before hitting the granite wall and exploding back into the river. In the Tree-Free Parking Lot, the assembled phalanges of the environmental movement were standing as one, standing on their chairs for a line of sight through a forest of elbows apexed with binoculars, framing Babbitt on a cell phone before the frothing river. The volume of the rapids grew. After the initial blowout of sediments, the thundering water turned white and the slicks were cordovan glass. The Kennebec River in Augusta, after a hundred and sixty-two years in the slammer, was walking.

That “forest of elbows apexed with binoculars” is inspired. The whole passage is inspired – quintessential McPhee action-writing. 

Segment three cuts back to the canoe trip down the liberated Kennebec. Evidence of the breaching is everywhere apparent. McPhee notes a concrete boat launch that had launched its last boat. “Its lower lip was many yards back from the river and much higher than the surface of the water.” “Broad shingle flats had become exposed here and there.” “Small hanging streams and small hanging falls were cutting fresh canyons to the river.” “Standing high in the river now like stockade towers were the rock-filled cribs of the log drives.” “An island, high and elongate, sat up like a warship on its hull of rock, with twenty-three towers leading to it and five away from its downstream end.” 

He points out that, in order for the Kennebec to be completely free, at least another hundred dams in its watershed above Augusta would have to be removed. Nevertheless, the removal of Edwards Dam is significant. He writes,

In the resurrected rapids of this stretch above Augusta, its fifteen miles seemed both modest and momentous. It was about the length of Manhattan Island. A lot of fish could spawn there. In its possibilities as a state park, its beauty and seclusion, it rallied the nineteenth century. From no river in the country of the Kennebec’s size or stature had a dam ever been removed. 

The last paragraph brings both journey and narrative to beautiful conclusion:

On the fresh current, we rounded a final bend. Down the long thoroughfare of water and trees we now saw – three and a half miles away and rising from mid-river like the blade of a gunsight – the bronze and granite Capitol of Maine. To left and right, above the trees, were the spires of two churches. With John’s father, Alexander McPhedran, we had scouted early in the morning for a place to end the trip, and, with some difficulty, had found one, about a quarter of a mile through the woods from a small roadside park. We had left a white-birch log on a rock to mark the spot. Seeing it now, a mile down, John McPhedran rummaged in his pack, removed a cell phone, and asked his father to pick us up.