Another thing we did a lot of was eating. In Allagash, there's a place called Two Rivers Lunch that serves stick-to-your-ribs diner food among mounted deer heads and photos of successful hunts. We couldn't eat there on Saturday because it'd been taken over by baby-shower attendees; the antlers of a taxidermed moose were beribboned with baby-blue "It's a Boy" streamers. Instead, we drove to Fort Kent, parked the car, and crossed the border into New Brunswick, Canada, where we dined at the Maple Leaf, a combination diner/Chinese-food-buffet establishment. Up there, they call poutine (the Canadian delicacy consisting of french fries doused in gravy and cheese curds) "mixed fries," and that's what I ate, along with French onion soup. Sara also got an egg roll. Poutine and egg roll: less breakfast of champions, more lunch of hibernators.
And hibernate we did, hunkering down in one location or another, drinking gallons of hot beverages (coffee! tea! hot chocolate! mulled wine!), playing word games, chatting in front of fireplaces, the whole nine. We bundled up and trekked through the snow. I gawked at dead deer, strung up triumphantly on posts in people's front yards — thinking that perhaps, in this region and in this economy, those deer also served as symbols of reassurance and self-sufficiency; and at the building-height crosses that adorned several lawns — offering up a different type of affirmation. We visited with some of Sara's family and neighbors, including her cousin, Maine author Cathie Pelletier, who has returned to live in the house she was born in, on the banks of the St. John.
"Do you know that many people in southern Maine don't realize there's a town named Allagash?" Pelletier asked in the essay she wrote for A Place Called Maine: 24 Authors on the Maine Experience (DownEast Books, 2008). "They think of it as The Allagash Wilderness Waterway. [If that! Most southerners I talked to said, 'Like the beer?'] We were so isolated that, sometimes, it seemed as if everything important was happening somewhere else. We never even made the top of the map in most atlases. The northern tip of Maine is often set to one side, in its own box, like a sad hat that's gone out of style so no one wears it anymore."
From what I could see over the course of a day and a half, therein lies the paradox of these far-north lands. In essence, they are so solid, so heavy, so hearty — the nature, the people, the accents, everything. Yet they're forgotten, unacknowledged, remote.
Still, at night, from Pelletier's back porch, you can hear the river rushing by, and see stars, unmarred by light pollution, shining brightly overhead. They don't care.
