Unpretentious and tucked away, it is not easy to drive past the tiny hamlet of Allagash, population 237, in the far northern tip of Maine. That’s because the blacktop ends at the town’s western edge. Allagash is one of a handful of jurisdictions in the east above the 47th parallel. Beyond the paved road, to the north, west and south stretch more than one million acres of forest. To be sure, there are logging roads in the woods, but no towns, gas stations or supermarkets. Just miles and miles of boreal forest whose birch, pine, alder and spruce blanket the hillsides, lakeshores and river bottoms.
The people in Allagash, along with the residents of a handful of towns scattered around the perimeter of the north Maine woods, are mainly employed in the logging industry or as outfitters guiding hunters and fisherman. It’s a hard life without much in the way of a safety net. In the 2017 film Wind River, a Wyoming game warden played by Jeremy Renner, a tribal police chief and his FBI counterpart approach the backwoods trailer of a suspected drug dealer with a history of violence. Just before they knock on the door, the big city-based FBI agent asks nervously whether it might be advisable to call for backup. The chief’s testy answer: “This isn’t the land of backup; this is the land of you’re on your own.”
And so it is in Allagash. The nearest law enforcement is 40 miles away in Fort Kent. Wages are low and temperatures can plunge to minus 30 in the winter. Ice out, the time when ice on the lakes finally melts, arrives in late April and early May. A woman I know there who works as a cook in a hunting camp keeps small logs stashed all around her house, under the sofa, in a cabinet, in winter so she won’t have to run out to the wood pile in sub-zero cold to replenish her wood stove.
I try to get to Allagash at least once a year for the exceptional ruffed grouse and woodcock hunting. It’s a test because the birds are wary and fly at lightning speed, while the covers are scattered with downed timber and hard to traverse. It’s easy to get lost. On one trip, shooting was slow so, to ward off boredom, my hunting companion and I began to sing a medley of old Burt Bacharach songs as we ambled through the woods. (“You see this guy, this guy’s in love with you…Yes, I’m in love, who looks at you the way I do,” and on and on). Before long we realized each of the logging roads we’d crossed looked exactly like the last one and that we had no idea where we were. A moment of alarm ensued, and we briefly entertained the idea of hovering over a campfire in sub-freezing temperatures for the night. Fortunately, we’d taken a compass heading at the start and were able to find our way back to the truck, returning to camp before nightfall.
Such physical and psychological tests are part of the appeal. At the very least, they make fun dinner party stories. But on a deeper level, a trip to Allagash and other remote regions of the American outback is also a bracing antidote to life in the cosmopolitan corridor stretching from Boston through Washington, DC. You can’t get further from the precious affectations of Washington, DC nor Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and their correlates on the West Coast, than to be stomping through the bogs of the north Maine woods or some other place far off the grid. I used to joke with my tennis partners in Washington that the only power tool most men there ever get to use is their hair dryers. This is no knock on the grooming habits of Washington men, it’s just that most inhabit a world that has little to do with the lives of everyday Americans.
Politicians know their life experience is far removed from that of the people who vote for them. That is why in every presidential campaign there will be the obligatory staged pheasant hunt to prove their blue-collar bona fides. These outings often end badly because they are so transparently fake. Tim Walz learned this the hard way when he and a platoon of staff, press and Secret Service personnel went pheasant hunting on an Ortonville, Minnesota, farm during the 2024 presidential campaign. Someone on his staff no doubt thought it would be a capital idea to cast Walz as an approachable, blue-collar everyman exuding Alpha male energy, no metrosexual he. But the ploy fell apart when Walz was filmed having trouble loading his Beretta 2400 semi-automatic shotgun at the start of the hunt. A video of the incident got 142,000 views on YouTube.
Nothing quite matches the catastrophe of former vice president Dick Cheney’s 2006 quail-hunting trip in Riviera, Texas, when Cheney breached two cardinal rules of gun safety – be sure of your target and always keep your gun pointed in a safe direction. During the hunt, as a covey took flight, he swung on a lone quail and accidentally blasted a member of his hunting party, prominent Texas lawyer Harry Whittington. According to one account, Cheney “peppered” Whittington with birdshot, as if he were some sort of menu item subject to the tender ministrations of a celebrity chef.
A trip to Allagash is a bracing antidote to life in the cosmopolitan corridor
The end of the paved road isn’t necessarily a place so much as a point of view and way of looking at the world, an end to pretense. It’s a meet-up with reality few political leaders ever have, though they should.
Several years ago, I met a German diplomat for lunch at Einstein café, the lunch and dinner spot popular with German politicians near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The aim of the meeting was to renew an old friendship but also to check my impressions from a trip that I’d taken several days earlier to Dresden, to report from the weekly demonstrations there of an anti-immigration activist group. At the lunch, I’d asked my friend Hinrich whether the German policy establishment was perhaps too far removed from concerns of everyday Germans and whether this might explain why so many voters were turning from traditional parties like former chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and voting for the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which has focused single-mindedly on immigration. Yes, he said with a touch of resignation, but what was he to do? He couldn’t just invite his carpenter or plumber over for lunch.
Now, the AfD is either tied or ahead depending on the poll of the CDU, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and his coalition partner the Social Democrats. Maybe Merz and other leaders of his coalition government ought to get out more. A walk in the woods might help.
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