The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [72]
IV
At last Roosevelt had the wilderness experience he was craving. The place was Island Falls and it was tucked away in the upper reaches of Maine along the shore of Lake Mattawamkeag, an arduous ninety miles north of Bangor. Ever since Arthur Cutler spent a few weeks there with T.R.’s cousins Emlen and James West during the summer of 1876, the region’s vastness, as Cutler reported back to his pupil, had beckoned him. The North Woods of Maine had dramatic storms that rolled in from the Atlantic, crisp air, fast-moving rivers, speckled brook trout, white-tailed deer, herds of caribou, cascading waterfalls, and much more.55 Here an aspiring naturalist could find moose with huge antlers, beaver kits, and flocks of Canada geese. Here was where a real American hunter could test his mettle in the chill of the new morning. “I was not a boy of any natural prowess and for that very reason,” Roosevelt wrote, “the vigorous out-door life was just what I needed.”56
As Roosevelt eagerly anticipated hiking in the North Woods and canoeing on Lake Mattawamkeag with his West cousins, Cutler arranged for the guide from the trip two years earlier. Will Sewall was a native of Island Falls, whose mother and sister ran a lodge while he tramped all over Penobscot and Aroostook counties. Standing six feet tall, with kindly, sparkling eyes that said, “I’ve seen it all, boys,” the gravel-voiced Sewall prided himself on being a stoic and on being early to bed and early to rise. Difficult to startle, wise to the ways of the North Woods, he could forage off the forest by sapping maple trees or eating wild berries.57 Roosevelt immediately enjoyed being in his firm grip.
But there was more than backwoods hardiness to Sewall—he was a virtuous Bible-reading Yankee—who, much like Theodore Sr., frowned upon swearing, drinking, and fornicating. He knew Norse mythology and English literature as well, and he had a penchant for romantic novels like Ivanhoe and the rhyming verse of Longfellow, a fellow Mainer. Sometimes on a long hike he recited John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” aloud. It begins with the lines “St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold.” Unschooled in Darwin, Sewall, as Roosevelt would soon learn, knew as much as Harvard scholars about Nordic figures like the one-eyed god Odin and the hammer-wielding mighty Thor. To Roosevelt, that Sewall romanticized Vikings as seafaring pagans wielding battleaxes was just another component of his charm as a storyteller.
So when Roosevelt headed north from Boston on the Maine Central (accompanied by his cousins Emlen and James West) past the sawmill centers of downstate Maine he was terribly excited both to explore the virgin sprucelands and to meet Sewall. Roosevelt had spent most of the summer of 1878 in Oyster Bay, playing the ornithologist and the swell. Now, for three weeks in September, just before having to start his junior year at Harvard, he was going to “get lost” in the wilderness. Meanwhile, Sewall’s job was to make sure he really didn’t.
Theodore and his cousins arrived at Sewall’s lodge in the first week of September 1878. Island Falls seemed more like a frontier outpost surrounded by howling wilderness than a town. It was scenic in the extreme: the largest peaks of Maine could be seen from its practically nonexistent town center. This was the great wide-open land. Even as late as 1878, glory-hound outdoorsmen could walk in practically any direction and