Stand by Your Land

AMC Outdoors, September 1999

By Madeleine Eno

It's a still June morning in Greenville, Maine, and the town is starting to stir. Weekday fly-fishermen cast from the dock into the dark blue water of Moosehead Lake. Outdoor guides bundled in fleece meet for breakfast at the Boom Chain Cafe. Loaded log trucks rattle down Main Street, past a small band of high-school kids smoking on the corner.

Around Maine's largest lake curls a thick forest dotted with friendly outposts, less than an hour by car from the border of Quebec. Greenville, with a population of 1,500, is the only organized town on the lake. It sits at its most southern point, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Portland. Electricity doesn't reach to the opposite shore, 40 miles away.

It's a fine day for a sightseeing flight, and I head out with Roger Currier, who has flown over these parts for 17 years now. Today he's on his weekly fish-and-game run, surveying the edges of the lake, counting fishing boats. He slowly banks his 1948 Cessna floatplane over the remote, wooded north tip of the lake. "There was a German POW camp down there during World War II," he says, pointing down at tiny Seboomook Village. "When the war was over, some of the prisoners actually didn't want to leave." Released prisoners, he says, have even found their way back to the village for several reunions.

We fly low as we circle back over town and I can make out the bright, orderly cluster of small restaurants and motels, outfitters and guide services, gift shops specializing in moose kitsch, busy real-estate offices, and a couple of flying services like Currier's. The town's edges all meet with dense forest. Our plane quickly passes over Greenville, and from here, 100 feet above the blue-black water, the land falls away in a smooth green rhythm. We see dozens of clearcuts, tiny to sprawling, some peppered with even, new larch replantings, some just brown and empty. But beyond them, despite them, the lush hills stretch farther than we can see.

Back on the ground Dan Legere, owner of the Maine Guide Fly Shop, is packing up his truck to take a group out fly fishing on the Kennebec River for a few days. "Fifteen years ago," he says, "I thought we were all as safe as in your mama's arms up here." For generations, timber companies like Great Northern Paper that owned thousands of acres had been as familiar to locals as the milkman and the schoolteacher, delivering Thanksgiving turkeys to their employees and paying loggers as much as $40,000 a year. Starting 10 years ago, however, the handful of trusted owners began selling most of their holdings to large international timber companies, as the market, like most others, went global. These companies are now primarily beholden to shareholders looking for a quick return—no longer responsible to those who'd planned on cutting wood and making paper for the rest of their lives—and might do anything to make a profit.

The sales, and in particular, a burst of activity last fall that ended with a surprise transfer of 905,000 acres from South African Pulp and Paper Inc. (SAPPI) to Seattle-based Plum Creek Timber Company, have made people like Currier and Legere sit up and take notice, along with the others who care about the quality of life in this quiet place — which is just about everyone who lives here. Some of them have changed their lives as a result. Read their stories below.

Jim Glavine | John Willard | Carol Stirling

—Madeleine Eno is publisher and co-editor of AMC Outdoors.