Reporter Mark Shanahan leads the way on the trail of the Mud Pond Carry, a portage between Umbazookus and Chamberlain lakes. The 92-mile-long Allagash Wilderness Waterway, a series of connected lakes and large ponds that bisect some of Maine's wildest and most scenic country, was set aside by the Legislature in 1966 to ''preserve, protect and develop the maximum wilderness character'' of this unique watercourse. Staff photo by John Ewing.

Being neither comfortable in a canoe nor a particularly good swimmer, I recommend to my boatmate that we heed the advice of others and head for shore at the first sign of froth on Chamberlain Lake, which runs 154 feet deep in spots.

''Absolutely,'' comes his reply as we start across.

Minutes later - barely 200 yards from shore - we're bobbing like a cork on the ocean, trying without success to fend off the three-foot swells that occasionally break over the gunnels of our boat. Our hats are blown over our eyes and we struggle just to lift our paddles against the wind.

One hundred and forty years ago, Henry David Thoreau came to Maine looking for an unspoiled wilderness and took this same E-ticket ride on the Allagash. Now, photographer John Ewing and I, and a three-person team from WGME-TV (Channel 13) - reporter and anchor Felicia Knight, photographer Scott Episcopo and producer Barbara Noyes Pulling - have come looking for Thoreau.

We want to see if the frontier the author saw and described in ''The Maine Woods'' still exists, or if people and progress have taken its place. What ever became of that primitive forest?

Our three-week trip follows Thoreau's own route, from Greenville to the Allagash to the top of Mount Katahdin, which the author climbed in 1846, on the first of his three visits to the Maine woods.

John and I have walked and paddled to the Allagash by way of Moosehead Lake, the West Branch of the Penobscot River and Chesuncook. We have seen ample wildlife - moose and mergansers, grouse and bald eagles - and a fecund forest, if one not fully recovered from 100 years of lumbering. But we still are waiting to experience the ''vast, titanic and inhuman nature'' that so impressed Thoreau.

We must be close, I think, as the rugged surf nearly swamps our boat.

Thoreau visited the Allagash in 1857, on the last and longest of his trips to Maine. He waded across the merciless Mud Pond Carry and paddled up Chamberlain Lake to Eagle Lake before heading south to Telos Lake.

''We did not intend to go far down the Allegash (sic),'' he wrote, ''but merely to get a view of the great lakes which are its source, and then return this way to the East Branch of the Penobscot.''

Today, Thoreau's path is a part of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, a series of connected lakes and large ponds that bisect some of Maine's wildest and most scenic country.

The 92-mile-long waterway - and the menagerie of cedar swamp, peat land and old-growth white pine that surrounds it - was set aside by the Legislature in 1966 to ''preserve, protect and develop the maximum wilderness character'' of this unique watercourse.

Thirty years and hundreds of thousands of visitors later, however, people still are unsure how to do that. Environmentalists want access and development along the waterway limited, while paper companies, snowmobilers and some fishermen contend current restrictions are sufficient.

Blueprint for the future

A view of Chamberlain Lake. Staff photo by John Ewing.

''You don't manage wilderness; you manage people,'' says Tim Caverly, the waterway's manager and chief ranger since 1981. ''We're at a point where we have to plan for the future, or what you see here won't exist much longer.''

What we see here is very different from what greeted Thoreau and his two companions when they paddled out of Mud Cove onto Chamberlain Lake. It is even more beautiful today.

Two dams built 15 years before Thoreau arrived raised the water level on Chamberlain, giving the boot-shaped lake a distinctly unfriendly feel. ''A belt of dead trees stood all around the lake, some far out in the water, with others prostrate behind them,'' he wrote, ''and they made the shore almost inaccessible . . . savage-looking.''

Thoreau stopped for supper, starting a small fire that drew the attention of two loggers who were across the lake at Chamberlain Farm, a lumbering depot that was then the only clearing on the 18-mile-long lake.

''The smoke of our fire on the shore brought over two men in a canoe from the farm,'' Thoreau wrote, ''that being a common signal agreed on when one wishes to cross.''

John and I, having conceded to the wind and retreated to the rocky shore, do not start a fire but instead wave our arms. And soon, John Richardson - owner of Nugent's Chamberlain Lake Camps, the only clearing on the lake now - comes across in his powerboat and picks us up.

''When you get out on one of those lakes in a canoe, you do not forget you are completely at the mercy of the wind, and a fickle power it is,'' Thoreau wrote. ''The playful waves may at any time become too rude for you in their sport, and play right on over you.''

Two year-round residents

John Richardson, owner of Nugent's Chamberlain Lake Camps, a sporting lodge on Chamberlain Lake. Staff photo by John Ewing.

Remarkably, Richardson and his girlfriend, Regina Webster, are the only year-round residents of Chamberlain Lake, and together operate one of just two year-round sporting camps on the whole of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

The cabins, which the couple lease from the state, sit on a high, grassy bank less than 10 feet from the water, giving guests a clear view of the often-spectacular sunsets over Allagash Mountain. Some nights, the sky looks like a fresh lava flow; other nights, it is all black but for the stalled sun that sits like a peach gaslight on the horizon.

But we're under no illusion that we are alone here. Picking up a pair of binoculars, we see canoes moving slowly up the lee shore of the lake. On this weekend, 371 people in 101 boats - most of them canoes - enter the waterway at Chamberlain Bridge, one of six authorized access points on the waterway. Eighty-seven of those people - in 14 canoes - will spend a week paddling the length of the Allagash, vying for available campsites with dozens of other people who already have begun the trip.

''Wilderness is where you don't see people and where you don't expect to,'' says Kevin McKeon of Springvale, who is on a nine-day canoe trip with his wife, Patty. ''This ain't bad, but it ain't true wilderness - not the kind of wilderness Thoreau was talking about, anyway.''

Buffer from clear-cutting

Author Dean Bennett and his wife relax at Chamberlain Farm, a historic site in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. ''. . . It's not an easy thing anymore to convince people there's value in land that's wild,'' Bennett says. Staff photo by John Ewing.

All that separates visitors to the Allagash Wilderness Waterway from these vast tracts of treeless ground is a 500-foot buffer - the so-called restricted zone that is owned by the state.

Dean Bennett, author of ''Allagash: Maine's Wild and Scenic River'' and our traveling companion for a few days, believes the state should buy or lease additional land around the waterway to preserve its ''wilderness character.''

''But it's not an easy thing anymore to convince people there's value in land that's wild,'' Bennett says, standing on the shore of Pillsbury Island in Eagle Lake, the northernmost point in Maine that Thoreau visited. ''The question of placing limits causes such an outcry today. It's a wonder we have any land set aside at all.''

As we sit down to dinner tonight, wind from the northwest begins to gust again and Chamberlain Lake, which has been as still as a millpond for the past two days, once more rocks and roils. My thoughts turn to Thoreau, who on July 28, 1857, was caught in just such a sudden storm on Eagle Lake.

''We listened to some of the grandest thunder which I ever heard,'' he wrote, ''rapid peals, round and plump, bang, bang, bang, in succession, like artillery from some fortress in the sky. The Indian said, 'It must be good powder.' ''

Later, I drift off to sleep, carried closer to Thoreau by the falling rain.