Appalachia, Summer/Fall 2010

Monts Groulx, an entire earth
Will Kemeza

Whether he does this now, I can’t say: Surely, the passing years and entry into a life of salaried responsibility have changed the texture of his mornings as they have mine. But ten years ago, when we were working for the summer at Lakes of the Clouds Hut on Mount Washington, Mike Jones used to throw himself out of bed in the morning. I mean it; he’d lie still and silent, eyes open, while the rest of us talked quietly, cutting through the night’s cobwebs and slowly emerging from our sleeping bags into the gray light. Mike would gather himself as if compressing some invisible spring. Then, in one motion, he’d pull on his gray wool hat, slough off his bag, and leap from the top bunk, hitting the warped wood floor with both feet. This was the summer when he became obsessed with wolverines. Skunk bears, he’d call them: at 50 pounds, the largest members of the weasel family, known to hold an adult grizzly bear or an entire pack of wolves at bay over a kill.

These things are not entirely unrelated, I think. Mike’s morning leap was not borne of enthusiasm for the day’s routines—not exactly. Though I’ve never asked him, I think he needed to face the harsher realities of the day squarely and entirely: to enter the day as if diving into cold water. In wolverines— or in the landscapes that contain them—I think Mike saw some of these interior energies mirrored. Wolverines mean wilderness; if you see one, you’re way out of town. And you’re seeing a place that hasn’t lost its edge—which still has teeth and claws and eyes burning bright in the boreal night. Henry David Thoreau, whose great commandment was WAKE UP, felt similarly:

“When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here—the
cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf —I cannot but feel that I live in tamed
and, as it were, emasculated country. . . . I should not like to think that some
demigod had come before me and picked out the best of the stars. I wish to
know an entire heaven and an entire earth.”

This desire to experience things entirely, harshness and all— universal among naturalists, perhaps—drove Mike to long for a northeastern mountain range with all its potential members intact, and he convinced me that I should too. This struck us, then, as quixotic. Like cougars and gray wolves, wolverines were ghosts of alpine summits past. But midway through that summer ten years ago, Mike heard a rumor about some mountains up north, beyond Katahdin and the Gaspe Peninsula (where the Appalachian summits finally slip into the Atlantic). This range, the Groulx (in Innu— “White Mountains”) was vast and remote. These mountains were part of the Canadian Shield, so joined at the root to the Adirondacks, and other ranges—the Otish just west and the Mealy Mountains to the northeast, which were not yet accessible by car, and still are not. And they were cousins of our mountains, the Whites as well, but still entire, ecologically speaking. There were caribou, he heard. And, maybe, wolverines. We went that summer, spending three straight days on the road to get there and back—but only caught a glimpse of the range. Mike and Liz Willey, his wife and fellow biologist, have since returned. And what had started impulsively has become methodical: Mike and Liz are studying these mountains with some hope for their conservation, and they’re seeing them as naturalists had seen the Whites, Katahdin, and the Adirondacks a century-and-a-half before: islands of alpine wilderness in a ragged industrial frontier.

Will Kemeza is a program manager with The Trustees of Reservations, a Massachusetts- based conservation organization. He has worked for the Appalachian, Green, and Randolph mountain clubs, and he holds a master of divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with his wife, Charlotte, and son Liam.

This excerpt is from the Summer/Fall 2010 issue of Appalachia.  To order this issue, visit the AMC Online Store.