Because I Can

Another old Farm Side....

Moose Quest

Did someone mention Maine? If you’re a farmer, you probably thought of potatoes, Katahdin sheep, or maybe lobsters, which although not exactly farm animals, are included under the heading of farms, fisheries, and forests.

And if you are us, you thought about moose. We want to see one, and have been chasing the Adirondacks in hot pursuit for years. Thus the other day when our intrepid lad suggested that he and I go to Maine to look for moose, I figured I would learn a little
about the state’s agriculture while having a heck of a time. And that is just what we did.

We did not see any potatoes though, not so much as a single French fry in a fast food parking lot. We did, however, spot a couple of Ring-Billed Gulls perched on a lamp post
as if they were waiting for them.

Does that count?

In case you were wondering, potatoes came to the New World in two large cedar chests,
sent in 1621 to Governor Francis Wyatt of Virginia at Jamestown, by the Governor of Bermuda, Nathaniel Butler.

Potatoes are the second most popular food item in America. We each eat around 135 pounds a year, about a potato a day. I’ll bet we consume the majority of them in the same form desired by gulls too. 34% of the 46 billion pounds raised in the USA each year are consumed as frozen products, as in “Do you want fries with that?”

We saw no Katahdin sheep either, although we saw a good number of the regular, fluffy white kind. I remember the Katahdin brand of sheep from the days of attending sheepdog
trials and trying to train my own Border Collies up to some semblance of usefulness.
They are hair sheep, no need for shearing, and used largely for meat production.
Michael Piel developed them in Maine with an eye toward clearing power lines
and rights-of-way without spraying or mowing. In the sheepdog world they are sometimes bred to produce flighty, challenging, sheep that make the dogs sit up and take notice.

We saw a lot of wild country, and many pretty and prosperous looking farms. We passed streams and ponds and lakes, each filled with limpid, whiskey-colored water, sliding along all smooth, and pretty as a doe’s eyes looking out of the tangled woods.

We saw Long Tailed Ducks, which were once known as Old Squaws. I’ll bet I’m not the only birder who sees a flock and has to mentally change gears to call them by their new politically correct name either.

There were Snow Buntings too, pretty tan-and-white birds, which are a great treat for our local Audubon Christmas Bird Count some years. (However until then, the far, far north is a good place for them and their chosen weather.)

But no moose.

We saw busty mountains, draped with shawls of lacy snow, shouldering aside the clouds

that circled their majesty in the cold autumn air. I guess they like to take a higher view of things or something. Mount Washington is pretty impressive by the way and I just loved Mount Katahdin, after which the sheep are named.

Across all the New England states the oaks still clung bitterly to their leaves, releasing them a reluctant twigfull at a time. They whirled in the wind, trending up more than down,
bamboozling birders into looking for winged rarities. If I had been counting birds there would have been a lot of hash marks in the line labeled “flying oak leaves”.

We discovered that farm houses in Maine are connected to barns and outbuildings by enclosed walkways. What does that say about winters there, I wondered.

Still no moose.

So we decided we would go to Moosehead Lake. Gotta be moose there, right?

Said lake is accessed via the so-called Golden Road. The Garmin, which in our minds we referred to in slightly less kindly terms, insisted that the GR was a virtual expressway, going around the lake, and taking us out to another road.

She lied. 

The Golden Road is a logging road, built to accommodate log trucks, which are reputed to travel at high speeds, claiming the right of way over people from NY driving Camaros. (Everyone offroads in muscle cars, right?)

Thank goodness it was Saturday, when the loggers are parked for the weekend. However hunters traveling at supersonic speeds made up for any lack of logging excitement.

The GR is paved in just enough places to lure the unwary into proceeding down her rocky, muddy, pitted, potholed, lumpy, bumpy, no-guardrails-over-hundred-foot drops, and no shoulders length.

If you are crazy enough you can drive on her at speeds approaching ten or fifteen miles an hour.

Naturally we did so. 

For fifty-nine miles.

Because, through road and all.


Then came the checkpoint, manned by a dour fellow with a strong Canadian accent. Seems that after the first 59 glorious miles, the “highway” becomes a toll road.

14 bucks for the two of us to proceed….to Canada...which is where the road ends up.
(See, it is a through road, just not quite what Lady Garmin bamboozled us into believing.)

We declined the pleasures of foreign travel and turned around to drive 59 miles back to civilization.

Time to go home. On the way south we passed bogs full of Tamarack trees spreading golden skirts across watery purple dance floors. Winterberry Holly lent brilliant red candles to light the show.

Milkweed by the acre, for all the world like autumn cotton, was setting seed for next summer’s Monarchs.

What with the 75 MPH speed limit we saw a lot of roadkill too, mostly porcupines and foxes, but at one point a deer, actually suspended in a tree where it had been flung willy-nilly
by someone going faster than was wise.

No moose though.

We will be calling it MooseQuest, this strange desire to see the great even-toed ungulate
of the Northwoods.

And someday, just maybe, we will actually find one.