11/08/2008
“As time goes by the whole trip becomes magical. And you reach a peaceful place. This place will change you forever. And all you need to do to get there is commit to being alone... I don’t fear it anymore. I welcome it.” — Tom Hanrahan, from “Your Maine Lands: Reflections of a Maine Guide”
By TRAVIS BARRETT
Outdoors Writer
WHITEFIELD — Watching Frannie traipse through the woods, bounding back and forth across the trail, it’s hard to believe she ever found the woods daunting.
“The first time I took her out on a hunt,” reveals Tom Hanrahan, a Master Maine guide from Whitefield, “she got to the edge of the woods and stopped. She looked at me like, ‘You want me to go in there? That’s not happening.’ ”
Frannie is now a year and a half old, a dog rescued from an animal shelter to replace Hanrahan’s former companion, a pit bull terrier. And under Hanrahan’s tutelage, she’s grown quite accustomed to finding her way through the wilds of Maine — or, at least, Whitefield — much in the same way the Maine Department of Conservation hopes Hanrahan can take others through the woods.
This month, Hanrahan released his first book, “Your Maine Lands: Reflections of a Maine Guide.” The Department of Conservation hoped that Hanrahan would help introduce Mainers to the 1 million acres of land that is protected for public use, both consumptive and non-consumptive. What they got instead, though, is a product that’s equal parts field journal, safety handbook, advice column and spiritual guide.
Brevity at its absolute peak, “Your Maine Lands” captures all of these elements because, essentially, so, too, does Maine’s wilderness.
It’s what Hanrahan loves about the places he’s documented, and what he’s trying — patiently — to reveal to Frannie.
“That they’re wild,” Hanrahan said on a recent hike. “These are undeveloped, beautiful places. They’re all the things that help define Maine and the natural beauty of Maine — which is so legendary.
“It’s a truly legendary place that’s known around the world.”
“The sunshine beats down on me with a comforting warmth. The sky is a deep blue. Such are the attributes of a northern Maine excursion.”
Maine’s qualities may be revered around the world, but that doesn’t mean that its residents know how much really is at their disposal.
“The challenge is that these are not beaurocratic land holdings,” said Pat McGowan, the commissioner of the Department of Conservation, the person who hired Hanrahan to write “Your Maine Lands.” “These are places where people have lifetime adventures. We wanted to convey that in the book, and I think Tom has done that.
“The fact is that the people of Maine own (these places). Our success has been putting over a million acres into conservation since we’ve been here in the last six years; our failure has been telling people where they are.”
To research the book, Hanrahan was as hands-on as one can be. He traveled thousands of miles during the calendar year of 2007, visiting publicly-held — and publicly-protected — areas in every season. He’s written about the nearby sporting camps, about the tremendous hunting and fishing, about the mountain climbs that are out there, about how to survive a night (or several), about the myriad ways there are to enjoy Maine.
And more than just enjoying Maine, Hanrahan has made it a point to portray wilderness as just that. Wild. But, therein lies the beauty.
“The emphasis is on being prepared,” Hanrahan said. “It’s our responsibility, if we’re sending people out into the wilderness, to tell them how to be prepared for that.”
“Solo visits require the most vigilance of all.”
The Maine woods didn’t come to Tom Hanrahan from some birthright, nor was he an infant tucked in a pack basket as his father trudged through the Allagash.
Hanrahan, though now a Master Maine guide, is from away. He tackled Maine through wide — and unprejudiced — eyes. He’d covered the New York boxing beat as a cub reporter in New York City, not far from his childhood home of Chappaqua. Now 52, Hanrahan took a job at the University of Maine more than 20 years ago and plopped himself in the wilderness.
Virtually alone. Alone enough to make mistakes that both terrified and delighted him simultaneously. Mistakes that became experiences that eventually drove him — alone — into the woods for hours, then days, then weeks.
Solitude.
No urban sprawl. No cell phones singing and buzzing. No e-mail, no world wide web. Just lots of wilderness.
“The Deboullie area,” Hanrahan said was his favorite spot of the ones he visited for the book, the place where the state-record brook trout came from. “It’s just a really cool place. There’s no place I went to that I didn’t like, but Deboullie is particularly remote.”
“You can tell that (Hanrahan) spends a lot of time in the woods and has a great deal of love for the woods,” McGowan said. “When we gave him maps, and we asked him to do this — it’s like giving a kid a new bowl of candy. He was out there finding the new sweets in the candy bowl.
“Now he’s sharing them.”
“Twice I stopped my truck to gaze upon a woodcock mother with her brood and a partridge mother with her brood. The baby birds were a mere three inches tall. My spirits lifted.”
“Your Maine Lands” is not a field guide, and it’s not a massive work of non-fiction. But neither is it an especially lighthearted work. Though broken into extremely manageable passages, numbered in the same way the chapters of a novel would be, it can be ingested wholly or in small bites.
Take a little or take a lot with you, to chew on, as you traverse the wilderness.
It reads as though it could have been written 20 years ago. Or last week.
The timelessness is in Hanrahan’s words, but it is also in the very mystical artwork of Kelly Thorndike — a combat-wounded Iraq war veteran whose illustrations lend a tangible quality to the book. Hanrahan met Thorndike, who suffered a brain injury in Iraq, at Spencer Pond sporting camps.
Thorndike inquired about doing some artwork for Hanrahan’s columns in the Northwoods Sporting Journal; Hanrahan was so enamored that he offered to have Thorndike illustrate the book.
“They authenticate it,” Hanrahan said of the illustrations.
They are the perfect accent to Hanrahan’s work, which remain majestic through the simplicity of simply going to the woods and bringing it back to an audience.
“Tom’s been a writer, he’s been a columnist. He’s been controversial,” McGowan said. “He’s a great writer, and he keeps you on the page. Whether he’s writing politically or otherwise, keeps the reader on the page.
“With Tom, you have to suck it all in, I guess, with the things he wrote. That’s what brought us to him.”
And it’s what brings Frannie into the woods.
Travis Barrett — 621-5648
tbarrett@centralmaine.com
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