Publications

AMC Outdoors, September 1999

By Madeleine Eno

The last town with electricity on the road north from Greenville is Kokadjo. "Population Not Many," reads a sign across from the trading post. Just before you get there, an old logging road bears off to the right. About 10 moose- and hawk-filled bumpy miles down it you'll find West Branch Pond Camps, home of the Stirlings.

But for the row of four or five parked cars in a field, the place might feel abandoned. Weathered gray log cabins and outbuildings lean at slight angles, the grass is long and shivers in the late afternoon breeze, and a huge pile of laundry spills from an open shed. Hand-strung electric lines loop from building to building. But laughter from a cocktail gathering on the porch of one of the cabins echoes across the pond.

Carol Stirling warmly greets the guests who've stumbled into her kitchen by mistake. An ebullient woman in her late 40s, she's whisking gravy and shooing a black Lab out of the large, jumbled kitchen. The counter is covered with steaming loaves of fresh oatmeal bread, bowls of lemons and limes, piles of cookbooks. Jeremy Clayton Guay—"named after Clayton Lake up near Jackman," says Stirling—a high-school student working here for the summer, opens the door of the black cast-iron stove, releasing a sizzling aroma of hot onion and beef.

Since 1961, the camp has put on a locally renowned prime-rib supper on Thursday nights. Dinner's served on a screened porch off the lodge—pink lemonade in small glasses, baskets of hot bread, heaping plates of prime rib and mashed potatoes, and hefty triangles of apple pie. Built close to the water as a logging camp in the 1890s, ghosts of tired lumberjacks hammering down biscuits and pie are not hard to conjure.

"Serenity. Peace and quiet. All the words like that you can find in the thesaurus," says Stirling about what she finds here, what her guests find here. "They expect it not to change, and love it when it doesn't." She points out the large earth mound that's a leaching field they recently had to put in to take the pressure off their plumbing. "It looks like a grave. People don't like to see it—it jars them," she says. "I'm a preservationist. I like things to stay the way they were when my grandmother and grandfather had the place. Why change it? I wouldn't have put bathrooms in, but my father wanted to." Stirling's is one of several camps left in the area sitting on land leased from the big paper companies—the way nearly all of them used to be. "I lease from Scott Paper. Before that it was Hollingsworth and Whitney, and before that, it was Indians," she says. "I would buy it if I could."

This place is in Stirling's blood. In 1921, her grandfather bought the business from his half-brother and ran it as a moose-hunting camp. In those days, she says, all the woods belonged to the paper companies. Stirling spent every summer living and working here after her parents had turned it into a trout-fisherman's paradise. But in 1974, when Carol and her husband, Andy, had "two in diapers and one on the way," they bravely set out from their home in Newcomb, New York, to make their lives in this remote spot year-round. She shows photos of her three grown boys, all home-schooled on a wide table surrounded by stuffed bookshelves in the back of the warm kitchen. All three showed strong environmental spirits because of their roots here, says Stirling. Her oldest, who'd left home to build his own cabin in the Montana woods, was killed in a construction accident last year.

Stirling pulls a hand through her pepper-and-salt hair while she speaks about him, a Cafe de Paris apron double-tied around her waist. "All things bad that happen fade," she says.

Stirling finds the landscape around her a source of strength as well as a call to action, saying, "I see living here as a special privilege." She looks across the still pond to the vast paper company land—"It's been changing hands so much I don't even dignify it with a name," she says—on the other side. "I look out and I can see the clearcuts, but above that I see beautiful, natural forest—mostly hardwood and old growth. Then I can see the treeline on Whitecap Mountain. That diversity is what we have to protect from companies who have a line-item focus."

Stirling also sees over-development as the fallout from the land sales. "Some of these vacation houses going up out here are enormous. They are bigger than the houses my friends have in Greenville. The property tax for all of us is going to go up," says Stirling. "Maybe that's what will stop the development from happening."

Twice over the past 10 years, moved by the notion that things in government were moving too slowly, Stirling has entered the race for state representative. "The second time I got 300 votes," she says. "It doesn't hurt anyone to get involved in the legislature. Look what's happened with citizen activism on the nuclear-waste issue. I ask myself, What can I do? The answer is anything and everything that you have a heart for."

Musing on the best-case or worst-case scenarios for the current land-sales, she says, "is like sitting at the dinner table trying to predict the future. What you can't do is continue worrying in a negative way. To project beyond the dinner table you have to have hope. Hope for the right way to handle the great North Woods." She maintains that the forest should be cared for unobtrusively and that small outfitters have proved themselves the best stewards. "They cut my dad's land and did a beautiful job. We need to keep the bad cats with the big claws off our backs.

"We've got an overcrowded situation here [in the Northeast]," she says. "The people who really care to not have the land compromised and degraded have to work on it—with their minds, with gatherings." Stirling has been active in Glavine's business group that has met with Plum Creek. She has also met on her own with some of the developers in the area, including John Willard, to talk about her concerns. She doesn't rule out another attempt for public office down the road. "It's not a time to feel scared and hopeless," she says. "I can't think it won't work out for the best. It always does." She leans to straighten a bent-over iris growing outside her kitchen door.

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

Stand by your land, main article  |  Jim Glavine  |  John Willard  |  Carol Stirling