Backwoods Blog

HARVEY SIDING

The Isolation Blues;

reflections during covid-19

My father built a woods camp at Harvey Siding back in the early 1950s on the north branch of the Meduxnekeag River in Monticello. The camp was located next to the iron bridge where the woods road crossed the river and after he cleared a few trees he had a splendid view of the backwoods waterfront. Once the fall potato harvest was completed and the crop was in Dad would head to the woods. He wasn’t much of a hunter, but he enjoyed walking in the woods and any excuse he could find to cook something. Going to the woods for my Dad meant coming up with a meal menu, stocking supplies, cooking it up and then afterwards finding a good place to take a nap. He was equally comfortable cooking for a crowd of forty or just for himself. He would spare no effort. Typically when Dad went to the woods with a group of other men he was promptly elected “camp-cook” which suited him just fine. 

Unfortunately, by the time I was born in 1960 the Hutchinson camp had been sold and my only memories of it were when we drove by it and Dad would say, “That’s the camp I built back in the day…” The above photograph is a print of a color slide that my father took with his 35mm camera as he was working on the camp. If you look at the license plate on the truck you will notice I put the slide in backwards, so the true camp angle (and truck) is inverted. Of course, now, my cabin sits on the same riverbank that my Dad’s did over sixty years ago, I just happen to be four miles downstream on back of his old farm. I always thought it was odd he never built another camp on his own land since the Meduxnekeag River was his west property line. Perhaps it was too close to home? Since the farm was mostly cleared for potatoes and dairy cattle it didn’t really feel like you were in the woods. The potato fields went right down to the river and I was still finding barbed wire fencing when I cleared a space for the cabin. In 1988 I planted a small tree farm on three acres next to the cabin where the lower end of the potato field used to be. At the time my father said, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Do you know how much work it was to clear this field a hundred years ago and now you’re putting it back in trees?” Well, now those same trees are over forty feet tall and the little cabin that was once in the open is now in the woods.

When I was seven or eight years old Dad would drive the family to Harvey Siding for a day in the woods and I remember feeling like it was so far away (even though it was less than ten miles distant). It was the great north woods, rocks and stream and it seemed like the woods went forever. Even now, when I look west of my place there is nothing but woods all the way to Allagash Lake and then to Quebec, the largest swath of unorganized territory east of the Mississippi. My cabin is only half a mile west of US Route One, the busiest transportation corridor of northern Maine, but then nothing but woods and wild. During this extended pandemic it seems like that is not such a bad thing after all.

Through the years my Dad helped me with various cabin projects and attended numerous cookouts and gatherings “down back” along the stream. As he told his old stories about the camp up at Harvey Siding, I’d sit there and think “Here we are just downstream keeping the stories going…” Pass the pork chops, please. 

In the woods, 

Dave

October 22, 2021