The Land Itself, Maine's Interior and the Question of Wild

More than eighty percent of Maine is forested, a higher percentage than any other state in the contiguous United States. Drive north from Bangor on Interstate Ninety-Five and within an hour the towns thin out, the commercial strips vanish, and the road narrows to a line through unbroken spruce and fir. Continue past Millinocket and the forest swallows everything. The North Woods of Maine, a territory roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, contains no incorporated towns, no county governments in the normal sense, and no road grid. It is managed by a bureaucratic abstraction called the Unorganized Territory, administered by the state, and inhabited by loggers, hunting guides, river runners, and the occasional hermit who prefers it that way.

This landscape is old in ways that are hard to grasp at road speed. The Appalachian Mountain chain that forms Maine's western spine is among the oldest mountain ranges on earth, its peaks worn down by hundreds of millions of years of erosion to gentle rounded ridgelines rather than the sharp peaks of younger ranges. Mount Katahdin, at five thousand two hundred sixty-eight feet the highest point in Maine, is a remnant of hard rock that outlasted the erosion of the softer material around it. It stands alone, rising steeply from the surrounding plateau, its summit table a mile across and its faces dropping abruptly on three sides. The Penobscot called it Katahdin, the greatest mountain, and the name is accurate.

Henry David Thoreau climbed Katahdin in eighteen forty-six and descended shaken. He wrote that on the summit he had encountered a nature that was not the benign pastoral he had known at Walden Pond, that the mountain was made of a different order of matter, rock that did not care whether he was there or not. Thoreau called it titanic and inhuman. He returned to Maine twice more, drawn back by something he could not fully describe.

Thoreau was right that Maine's interior is different. It is not scenic in the way that managed landscapes are scenic. It is simply immense, cold, and indifferent to human presence in a way that the eastern United States rarely offers. The Appalachian Trail ends here, at the summit of Katahdin, or begins here depending on which direction you are walking. Either way, this is the edge of something.