Adam and I have been writing about past camping trips that we will add to the mainecourse.com site. As soon as the image map on the places.html page is updated, this one,which I recently finished, will be linked.
Tomorrow I’ll post photos from the part of the job Susan might be most interested in, the laying of the tiles.

October, 1995

La Casa De Fiesta is an unlikely name for a topless bar, especially one in Millinocket Maine, the heart of the used- to-be-thriving paper mill industry. Sure, there are foreign born loggers, but mostly French Canadians who drive down from the north. Mark Queijo and I, coming up from the south, had been on the road for five hours when we drove by the bar, looked at each other, smiled, turned around and pulled into the adjacent parking lot. We’d left Acton early, stopped at the Littleton Sub Shop for a late on-the-fly lunch and were now only an hour and a half from where we intended to spend the night – Chamberlain Lake. We were also alone. Dan and Adam with known work obligations, and later, unexpected car repairs, wouldn’t meet us until the afternoon of the following day. If we stopped for a beer or two we had nothing to lose but sleep.
We have a camping routine that is, by now, as predictable as the changing color of Red Maples in the fall. We know what our preparation entails -important gear left home; we know what the drive will be like – long; the first night’s sleep in a motel – fast; the subsequent breakfast-huge; the lake water temperature – testicle retracting; we can even predict squabbles that might surface. That would explain my reaction to walking into a room full of naked women when moments before I was scanning the skies for the Northern Lights. Dissociative. It was fun, it was memorable, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, especially the "Preferred" dance I arranged for Mark while he was in the bathroom, but I was happy to get back on the road, to search for our campsite in a birch meadow near the water.
We left the bar at 10:30 and arrived at Chamberlain before midnight. How convenient, I thought, I’ll get a good night’s sleep. But that was before Has to Have a Water View, met Can’t Turn Back. The logging road follows the lake north but other than at the ranger station, it’s a comfortable few hundred yards away. To get to the water, where I wanted to pitch our tent, we had to find an access road, a path, two ruts, matted weeds, anything that resembled a trail meandering in the direction of the water. Under the stars it was no moon dark and hard to find those trails, in the woods and on one of those trails, it was the color of lamp black.
The first path we chose began in a silvery green field of knee high grass. It curved down into the woods, but bit by bit the trail got narrower and narrower as encroaching branches of nearby trees closed around us – much like a Chinese finger trap. It was painful listening to the fingernail-on-chalkboard sound as the new Jeep’s black finish fought its way through those branches. It wasn’t my car, but I cringed as Mark continued to drive until the road died. We got out and with flashlights in hand, continued our water search. We climbed over fallen trees, plowed through brush, and stumbled on rocks before I suggested giving up. "We can’t turn back now, the water must be right over that hill," Mark offered. I laughed, "And then what, walk back for our gear and then all the way back to the water that we don’t yet know exists?" Retreat we did, but I was happy knowing that Mark wasn’t going to give up until tab A had been inserted into slot B. He had demonstrated that his need to move forward was greater than his love for his Jeep’s flawless finish.
I would like to say that the next trail we drove down took us right to a campsite on the water. But I can’t . I’d like to say the one after that one, or the one after that or the trail we took that ended next to a newly built cabin deep in the woods. The cabin that looked at that moment like it might have been owned by someone from Texas with a chain saw and meat hooks. I wish I could say, can’t-turn-back and has-to-have-a-water view conceded and slept there, but I can’t. We really are too much alike because we didn’t stop out search until the sun threatened to help us look, until we were too tired to continue and we had come to our last dead end – a muddy, rutted area next to a narrow stream. We climbed out of the Jeep, scouted for a flat place to pitch our tent, failed to find one, set up anyway, and climbed in just as it began to rain. We had found our water alright. It was falling on our tent, it was babbling from the brook and it was oozing up from the ground around us.
The next morning, nowhere near enough hours after we had fallen asleep, we got up, stuffed our wet tent into its sack, and headed back to the lake where we thought we’d meet Dan and Adam. It was still raining when we drove into the parking area at the south end of Chamberlain, and that’s why we ended up cooking breakfast on gathered wet wood, a few feet from a battered gray camper. This, after asking the park ranger proudly standing in front of three sheds full of seasoned wood, if he might spare a log or two. He said no.
While Mark cooked over easy’s in a small frying pan coated with rain and butter, I pulled out the year’s brain storm. A gold filter cone with which to make our coffee. Damn thing worked at home, sort-of, where time was not critical, but for whatever reason, old sediment clogging the holes or coffee ground too fine, water poured in hot would drip out like that nasty motel faucet you can’t quite turn off. Five minutes later, one cup full of coffee – anything but hot. Mark provided the morning’s entertainment when he insisted on cooking bacon, to accompany the runny eggs. It was fun to watch him dodge exploding grease as rain drops danced on his bacon fat.
Don’t mistake the self-pitying tone of this story; we were not miserable, and god knows, we never whine, in fact we were having a good time. Mark’s previous camiping experience had been a Battan-like march and paddle through the Boundary Waters in Minnesota with enough gear to squash a Russian weight lifter and for me, well, I had been to Maine before.


Adam Kibbe and Mark Queijo