Once upon a time in Maine, there was a powerful king who said, “All the largest trees in these forests are mine and shall not be cut down!”
But he was no conservationist. He wanted the trees to make masts for his many mighty ships.
He sent his surveyors into the woods to mark every tree greater than 24 royal inches in diameter with a broad arrow, made by three blows with a hatchet /|\.
The people of Maine protested, saying, “He’s taking all the best trees for himself!”
In rebellion, they went into the woods and cut down as many broad-arrowed trees as they pleased, and milled the lumber down to 23 American inches to hide the evidence.
The surveyors, not having been born the day prior, knew what the Mainers were up to. They caught a few red-handed, but before nary a fine could be levied, war broke out and the king and his surveyors were driven from the land.
But the colonists were no conservationists, either. They wanted the lumber, and the lumber they took. Today, less than one percent of Maine’s old forests remain.
Stands with “large sawtimber, 20 inches or more in diameter at breast height—the class of trees most closely approaching old-growth forest—represents only 47,000 acres, or three-tenths of a percent of Maine’s timberlands that are currently unprotected from harvesting.”
Kenneth M. Laursten, Maine Forestry Service
It’s rumored a few of those old king pines still stand. The locals know how to find them. Just ask around. Someone’ll know the general whereabouts of some big tree they remember seeing as a kid out hiking a remote wood. They’ll recall running their fingers over the tell-tale sign, weather-worn and grown over with bark, but still bearing the distinct shape of the notched arrow head.
“It’s a bit further north,” they’ll say, “over near such-and-such town,” adding with a wink, “but you can’t get there from here’ah.”
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One place you can get to is Big Reed Pond, a 5000-acre old-growth forest reserve in Piscataquis County. But you won’t find any royal trees there. This area was spared from the king’s loggers due to its lack of impressive pines. It was saved from American loggers because logs were transported to mills on rivers back then, of which there are none near Big Reed Pond.
Consequently, this forest has never, in all of American history, felt the civilizing touch of forged steel. Big Reed’s trees are centuries old. It’s fish, equally ancient.
Fish may not be the first animals that swim to mind when one thinks of forest critters, but they’re a critical part of the ecosystem. The arctic charr in Big Reed Pond descended eons ago from salmon and trout migrating into the hinterlands on glacial runoff. Now one of the world’s rarest fish, it inhabits fourteen remote lakes and ponds in Maine, according to the Fish & Wildlife Service.
Many years ago, they were all nearly wiped out in Big Reed Pond by an invasive species. To save them, wildlife biologists dipped out several with a net and took them away to breed in captivity, and poisoned the rest. They bleached the whole pond, killing all remaining fish. Then they reintroduced the charr they bred in captivity, and now the native species thrives.
Talk about “can’t get there from here’ah.” We’ve got a can’t-get-there-from-here’ah for ya. Not without a boat, ya can’t. This place is 90 miles off the coast.
We’re talking about Cashes Ledge, also known as the “Yellowstone of the North Atlantic.” Cashes Ledge is a mountain range in the Gulf of Maine with an underwater forest growing on it.
As forests go, this place has it all: fish, seaweed big as trees, carbon sequestration and biodiversity, rare and protected species, over-utlization by food-based capitalist markets…
Yeah, it’s here, too.
And the logic on this one seems so simple. Unimpeded, the area is a natural fish factory. Fishing boats should do it the way trucks do: back up to the perimeter of the factory and load the product as it comes out.
Fishing directly in it, as the federal government has given commercial fisheries license to do, would be like the truckers driving their rigs through the factory walls and smashing down the machinery to get the fish out.
As if we only wanted one last generation of fish.
Photos by Skyler Ewing, Leonid Antsiferov, David Bruggink, Carter Obasohan, US Fish and Wildlife’s Tom Barnes, dfaulder, ZachKilgore, Kristaps Ungurs, Christa Rohrbach, , Oleksandr Sushko; logging photo from the Ole Larsen Collection, University of New Brunswick, Canada as pictured on the dust jacket of A History of Lumbering in Maine, 1820-1864 by Richard G, Wood; painting: “View from Vaekero near Christiania” by Johan Christian Dahl photographed in the US National Gallery of Art
