Mountain of the People

BAXTER STATE PARK - For two weeks, we have been playing peekaboo with Mount Katahdin, here and there getting great views of its summit and the flat, broad shoulders that seem to hold up the sky.

Hikers at the top of Mount Katahdin. When Thoreau arrived at this spot, he was overwhelmed by the ''primeval, untamed and forever untamable nature'' he found there. Staff photo by John Ewing.

Maine's highest mountain is our nearly constant companion as we retrace Henry David Thoreau's route through the north woods, appearing over the treetops or as a purplish dune in the distance.

It truly is, as Thoreau wrote, a ''permanent shadow,'' a massive and immovable butte on the landscape.

We saw it from atop Mount Kineo on Moosehead Lake, from our fishing hole on the West Branch of the Penobscot River, off the front porch of the Chesuncook Lake House and as we exited the Allagash.

Now, photographer John Ewing and I, and a three-person team from WGME-TV (NewsChannel 13) - anchor and reporter Felicia Knight, photographer Scott Episcopo and producer Barbara Noyes Pulling - are staring straight into its granite face as we scramble over scree and boulders, following Thoreau's footsteps to the top.

The author climbed the 5,267-foot-high mountain on a dreary September day in 1846 - only the eighth or ninth white person to do so. And he was overwhelmed by the ''primeval, untamed and forever untamable nature'' he found there.

This startling encounter with Katahdin had a profound effect on Thoreau and prompted him in 1853 - before just about anybody else - to call for the creation of national parks, wilderness areas that would be preserved for all time.

''Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be civilized off the face of the earth,'' he wrote, nearly 20 years before the creation of Yellowstone National Park, the first such sanctuary established anywhere in the world.

Today, a century and a half later, Mount Katahdin it.is a preserve, part of the 204,733-acre Baxter State Park. But is it still the ferocious, unforgiving place Thoreau experienced?

We have not seen much evidence of that frontier elsewhere on this trip. The overgrown and largely uninhabited wilderness of Thoreau's time still is verdant and full of wildlife, but it is a strictly managed resource now - a woodlot for papermakers and a playground for thousands of canoeists, campers, hunters and fishermen.

''You get moments of wilderness out here,'' says Dean Bennett, the author of a book about the Allagash and our traveling companion for a few days. ''But it's really only moments.''

White water and solitude

Mark Shanahan dives into the chilly waters of Grand Lake Matagamon for an early morning swim. Staff photo by John Ewing.

Reaching Webster Stream, which Thoreau likened to a ''thunder-spout,'' we are compelled to get out of our canoe and walk, not wanting to risk our necks - or John's camera gear - on this stretch of sometimes-treacherous white water.

Thoreau, too, walked here, allowing his Penobscot Indian guide, Joe Polis, to ride the wild rapids alone.

''He commenced by running through the sluiceway and over the dam, as usual, standing up in his tossing canoe, and was soon out of sight behind a point in a wild gorge,'' Thoreau wrote. ''It is exceedingly rapid and rocky, and also shallow, and can hardly be considered navigable, unless that may mean that what is launched in it . . . may be dashed to pieces by the way.''

The stream winds like a racetrack for perhaps four miles, taking sharp left and right turns before dropping over a series of ledges and cascading downstream. We pause at Grand Pitch, a raging, rock-walled waterfall that thunders like a jet engine. It is a surreal sound to hear so deep in the Maine woods.

In this dusky forest, full of old, mossy spruce and dying white pine, we feel alone, away finally from those summer vacationers who, looking for wilderness, line up for ice cream in Greenville.

Grand Lake Matagamon likewise gives us an uncommon impression of solitude and wildness. Here, on one of the small, forested islands that dot the 8-mile-long lake, we meet a minister and his wife.

Camping at this same site last summer, the couple read ''The Maine Woods'' aloud to their two young daughters. From here, they can see Louse Island, the ''high, rocky island'' where in 1857 Thoreau stopped for a dinner of fried moose.

''We haven't found any place that feels quite like this,'' says Tora Huntington, a schoolteacher from Pittsfield, Mass. ''Thoreau seems like a real person when you're out here, not just a bunch of ideas. It's almost like you expect to see him come around the corner.''

Lining up for Katahdin

Cars line up at 5:30 a.m. to get into Baxter State Park. The gate opens to day-trippers at 6:30 a.m. and closes, in the summer, one hour later - when the parking spots are all taken. Staff photo by John Ewing.

We've arrived so early to ensure that we get one of the coveted parking spots for people who are not camping in the park. The gate opens to day-trippers at 6:30 a.m. and closes, in the summer, one hour later - when the parking spots are all taken.

Limiting parking is the primary way the Baxter State Park Authority protects this special place from the overcrowding that plagues many other state and national parks. As it is, Baxter is visited by 100,000 people every year - 50,000 of whom climb Katahdin.

Before Thoreau, it is believed that fewer than 10 white people - mostly geographers and scientists - climbed the mountain. Though Penobscot Indians did guide a few of those first climbers, American Indians generally avoided such eminences, considering them sacred places not to be visited merely for a view of the world around.

Unfortunately for us, Thoreau bushwhacked a more or less direct - and very steep - route up the mountain. The trail that today approximates his path is called Abol. At 3.8 miles long, this slide of big and small granite blocks is the shortest and the steepest of the four trails that lead to Baxter Peak.

''It was the worst kind of traveling,'' Thoreau wrote. ''Having slumped, scrambled, rolled, bounced, and walked, by turns, over this scraggy country, I arrived upon a side-hill . . . where rocks, gray, silent rocks, were the flocks and herds that pastured, chewing a rocky cud at sunset.''

And that's barely halfway up.

Thoreau climbed on an overcast day and soon found himself ''deep within the hostile ranks of clouds.'' He could not see, as we do today, the shaggy carpet of evergreens spreading below, or the narrow seam cut in it by the West Branch of the Penobscot.

The Tableland - the plateau just below the summit - is as far as Thoreau climbed because his companions were anxious to descend before dark. Still, the appearance of that moonscape, shrouded by mist, left Thoreau awe-struck, and even a little frightened.

''What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!'' he wrote. ''Think of our life in nature . . . rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?''

The Tableland is no less impressive today. The sloping field of granite slabs and rugged, wind- blown Alpine flora looks like a science-fiction film-set at 5,000 feet. It is spooky, one of the ''unfinished parts of the globe,'' Thoreau wrote.

The notable difference between then and now is the number of people who climb the mountain. Whereas Thoreau was alarmed to see ''the fresh print of a man's foot'' - his own, it turned out, from the hike up - we are not surprised, on a Tuesday afternoon, to find 50 people at the top, many of them lounging shirtless on the rocks as if at the beach.

In the summer, an average of 450 people reach Baxter Peak every day. Their presence is recorded by the occasional gum wrapper and cigarette butt, apple core and orange peel we see on the ground.

''We won't climb on the weekend, because it's like a superhighway,'' says Susan Morrill, a schoolteacher from Derry, N.H., who is climbing Katahdin for the fourth time. ''It's so incredible up here. It's like a religious experience. But I think Thoreau would turn around and run the other way if he saw all of these people.''

The late Gov. Percival Baxter bought this mountain, and the surrounding land, in pieces - and with his own money - over the course of 32 years, purchasing the last parcel in 1962. While there is no evidence Baxter was a student of Thoreau, or even an admirer, the two clearly did share a commitment to the preservation of the Maine woods.

''Man is born to die, his works short-lived,'' Baxter once wrote, sounding remarkably like Thoreau. ''Buildings crumble, monuments decay and wealth vanishes, but Katahdin in all its glory shall forever remain the mountain of the people of Maine.''

As we make our way down the mountain, we reflect on our trip, and what has become of the ''solid and interminable forest'' visited by Henry David Thoreau. It is not the same today. It is thinner, less wild and more often interrupted by the constructs of man, by chain saws and subdivisions.

But there are traces of that stern and savage country, too. We still can hear the lonely shriek of loons across giant lakes at night, see the lush river meadows where Penobscot Indians came to hunt in the summer, and wrap our puny arms around 130-foot-tall pine trees that have stood in the same dark place for 300 years.

Just as Thoreau did 150 years ago, we have helped ourselves to a slice of the Chesuncook woods, and to a hearty draught of the waters of the Allagash. And we are leaving with our senses full.