The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [77]
Book Two of Yagyu Munenori’s The Life Giving Sword (part of his samurai meditation on martial arts) gives some insight on Roosevelt’s euphoria during this sojourn. Writing in the seventeenth century, Munenori explains a state of mind he calls “total removal,” a swooping moment when sickness of the mind disappears.72 Conquering Katahdin was the culmination of something Roosevelt’s father had told him: that the body and mind needed to run in tandem, that he had to be whole to succeed. As Roosevelt was going through “total removal,” one can only wonder what Bill Sewall thought when his eager client shouted “Bully!” or “By Jove!” every time the dugout flooded or a thunderstorm drenched them to the bone. But when they parted that September, Sewall promised to keep an eye on the Cambridge-bound Roosevelt from the North Woods. Shared experience, after all, is the cement of all friendships. They had forged an alliance that had all the power of a blood bond.
When Roosevelt left the depot at Kingman, Maine, on September 24, he didn’t know he was saying good-bye to the North Woods forever (the next summer he would visit the well-heeled Maine coast). Over the previous year, he had spent sixty-nine days with Sewall and traveled more than 1,000 miles of rugged backcountry by wagon, canoe, pirogue, and foot. Everywhere they went was as serene as a forgotten battlefield. Never again would Roosevelt write about debilitating asthma attacks or the disease of puniness. In “Jabberwocky” (in Alice through the Looking-Glass and then in The Hunting of the Shark), Lewis Carroll used a word he coined: “galumphing,” meaning, roughly, galloping triumphantly or marching exultantly with “irregular bounding movements.” No word devised before or since then has better described Roosevelt when he conquered Mount Katahdin.73 “As usual it rained,” Roosevelt noted, “but I am enjoying myself exceedingly, am in superb health and as tough as a pine knot.” 74
The fact that Roosevelt left Maine’s North Woods didn’t mean that the North Woods left him. Ardor for the state stayed with him, as permanent as a ring in a redwood tree. Later in life, Roosevelt adopted the bull moose as his political symbol. He even dubbed his Progressive Party of 1912 the Bull Moose Party. Gleefully, Roosevelt, taking a cue from Dave Sewall, constantly accused his opponents of taking every opportunity to use “weasel words.” While serving as president, Roosevelt named his Blue Ridge Mountains retreat—a secluded cabin just outside Charlottesville, Virginia—“Pine Knot.” Bill Sewall’s cabin, where Roosevelt used to lodge, became the first official historic site in Island Falls; eventually, even the lean-to hunting camp on Mattawamkeag Lake was preserved. Meanwhile, the spot along the Mattawamkeag River, where it’s believed Roosevelt read the Bible on Sundays, now has a historic marker in the ground, detailing Roosevelt’s Maine adventures in the late 1870s.
And Roosevelt wasn’t done with the straightforwardness of either Sewall or Dow. Because they “hitched well,” as Sewall put it, Roosevelt summoned them to the Dakota Territory to operate a cattle business in 1884. But that was six years away. First he had to graduate from Harvard and marry Alice Lee—those were his two primary objectives.
Near the end of his life, Roosevelt presented his wilderness days in the North Woods as the apogee of his happiness during adolescence. He became the adventitious expert on Maine. In a nostalgic essay, “My Debt to Maine,” published as part of a volume celebrating the Pine Tree State’s centennial in 1919, Colonel Roosevelt (as his byline read in Maine, My State) noted that camping out in the North Woods had been transformative for him. His memories ran deep: the soft-needled branches; collecting kindling; shoveling snow; building a rainproof bonfire; stirring up embers with a walking stick;