Publications

AMC Outdoors, September 1999

By Madeleine Eno

"I want to be a bird in my next life," says John Willard, staring up through mirrored sunglasses at a red-tailed hawk hanging in the wind above him. He's got one tanned hand on the steering wheel of his pontoon boat, a green Gore-Tex® jacket zipped up against the cool of the late June afternoon. Filling in for an employee taking a long weekend, Willard is leading a "Moose Cruise" around the northwestern edge of Moosehead Lake and up Sacateau Stream, to an area Willard calls a "moose hatchery."

Willard knows these waters. For much of his life—until the Safe Water Act prohibited it—all his drinking water came from here. He flies over them in his own plane to business meetings in Boston and Portland, and has even driven over them. While earning his forestry degree from the University of Maine at Orono, he got a job as a logger for Scott Paper just across the lake from The Birches, his father's fishing camp in Rockwood, 15 miles north of Greenville on Moosehead's western shore. One winter, when the ice froze solid, Willard commuted 10 miles across the lake in his '62 Chevy truck, shaving his travel time considerably.

We creep up the river as two couples from West Virginia stand in the prow and watch for moose. "There's one," whispers one of the women, pointing. Willard cuts the engine and lets the boat drift. The couples take out video cameras and focus them on the bull moose, his head submerged, about 20 yards away. Suddenly he pulls up his head in a great arc of water, his mouth stuffed with greens from the river's bottom. "We wait to start the engine until their heads are up," says Willard quietly. "The sound of the engine starting underwater scares them."

Willard is sensitive to moose; they are very good for business. At $20 a head, his now upscale outfit, The Birches Resort and Wilderness Expeditions, took out 2,000 moose-seekers last year. Two years ago Willard banned moose hunting on his land. "But in the '70s when I started out, ecotourism was not where it was at," he says.

Willard quit his logging job after a few seasons when he realized, "I wanted to enjoy the woods, not destroy them." He spent a decade as a whitewater raft and canoe guide for The Birches and took over as manager in 1985.

In 1993, he noticed surveyors in the woods. "The Birches was on leased land then, and it was getting scary," he says. "All it would take is one Bill Gates coming in to buy everything up. I made some calls and found out the land [11,000 acres in Tomhegan township] was for sale."

Willard scrambled to borrow $5 million and bought the land outright, and then developed the shoreline. "I then sold every piece of land I had on the lake and got 90 percent of my debt erased."

While some in the conservation community might not agree with Willard's plan, he's known around town as a developer with a conscience. Says Currier, "It's good to have John Willard here and good to have a plan—otherwise all the unscrupulous developers would come in."

"There aren't many places you can go and just hear the sound of the wind. It's hard to find. You have to protect it," says Willard. "I want to protect traditional uses of the forest," meaning recreational use along with managed forestry. Most of Willard's land not on the shore is left open to the public. He's named the 11,000 acres "The Birches Wilderness."

He does log his land, and throughout, he says, you can see a mix of young and old spruce, fir, and pine trees. "I can show you a real forest on my land," he says. He waves his hand, indicating a ridge we're drifting past. "That's selective harvesting—can you tell?" he asks. I look from that ridge to one that hasn't been logged in years. The difference is imperceptible.

"A lot of people here don't want state or federal owners of the land—they think the paper companies should just grow trees, cut trees, and we should leave them alone," says Willard. But he believes the state can help. He's been working to secure state and federal money to make the Moosehead Trail, a 180-mile trail around the lake which he's cleared, into a multi-use, permanently protected trail corridor—a rarity in Maine. "Maine backcountry is not managed properly," he says. "Besides Baxter and the Bigelows, there are so few places you can even go 10 miles without crossing a road or seeing other people."

Willard sees a prime opportunity for the state with the Plum Creek offer, and is actively working with Businesses of the Northern Forest to pressure Governor Angus King to fund land protection. He also gives selective-cutting demonstrations at The Birches. "I let it be known that this land is a good model for other landowners to follow," he says. "I put in my two cents whenever I can."

The threat of development looms large for Willard. "Plum Creek is definitely going to sell their land. They have to," he says. "I've crunched the numbers: With the interest rate clicking away at hundreds of dollars an hour, they can't make back the money just by cutting trees.

"There are billionaires already coming to the area," he says. "They post their land 'No Trespassing.' They put up gates. That's lost access." When he flies over the area, he always keeps an eye out for new construction. "I notice new cabins more than clearcutting," he says. Willard's hope is that the area be developed enough economically—through a mix of tourism; healthy, controlled development; and managed timbercutting—that people could have a good life and good schools. "There's a lot of room for improvement in tourism here. This town is ripe."

But how much development is too much? Willard believes that the presently undeveloped shoreline should be protected by the state and that "lake-shore development be kept to certain areas, namely Greenville and Jackman [50 miles north]," he says. He cites Crested Butte, Colo., as an example of a town where the development has all been kept in one concentrated area and left the natural beauty of the surrounding area unspoiled. Some development is inevitable, says Willard, and "if we take development off the lake, it'll just go elsewhere."

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

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