UPTON — Aldro French peels off his shirt and saunters toward the edge of the aptly named Rapid River.

Kicking off his giant-sized, baby blue Crocs, he stands shin-deep in the water.

“I haven’t done this all summer,” says French with a slight grin, just before shallow-diving into the current.

French takes a few long, Australian-crawl swim strokes, pulling his head up once to look at the churning rapid below. He gives one strong scissors-kick, sliding head-first into the full force of the river’s current, arms forward, belly down like an otter.

French is barely visible as he shoots through the boiling turbulence and into a pool of slower-moving water below. He comes up slicking his silver hair back with his hand and smiling as he breast-strokes slowly to the side of the pool and the rock ledge leading to it.

A pair of helmeted and life-jacketed kayakers, who were playing in the whitewater, sit in their boats, nose clips on, watching. They shrug at each other as if to say, “What was that?” 

French, 68, has lived on the Rapid River for 52 years. The waterway is literally in his backyard, and each bend and rapid are as familiar to him as an old friend’s face. He is the curator and caretaker of Forest Lodge. The lodge was the home of author Louise Dickinson Rich and the inspiration for her novel “We Took to the Woods.”

On the National Register of Historic Places, it is one of dozens of sites along the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

French also organizes an annual week of guided fly-fishing on the river for combat-wounded and disabled U.S. military veterans. The program, known as Healing Waters, is in its fourth year and is one of his many achievements, says French, who is a Vietnam-era veteran.

French, a one-of-a-kind river guide and true backwoods character, is a sample of the many kinds of people you can meet along portions of the 740-mile Northern Forest Canoe Trail, which runs from upstate New York to northern Maine.

Nearly half of the trail, 347 miles of it, sits within the Pine Tree State, stretching from the New Hampshire border, where the Androscoggin River winds out of Lake Umbagog in Oxford County, to the trail’s northeastern terminus along the St. John River, part of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, at Fort Kent in Aroostook County. Portions of the trail even wind through parts of the Canadian province of Quebec.

The lakes and rivers of the Rangeley region, as well as Moosehead and Chesuncook lakes, are also part of the trail’s meander.

Kate Williams, executive director of the Waitsfield, Vt.-based Northern Forest Canoe Trail organization, says traveling on the trail is as much a trip through time as it is through space.

The very notion of traveling distances using canoe routes and foot trails — the only means available to early explorers, settlers and American Indians — gives a person a sense of what it took to make it in the wilderness of North America 100 or more years ago, Williams says.

“There’s a connection to a broader geography but also to history,” she says.

Long-haul paddler

Donnie Mullen, a Hope, Maine-based writer and photographer and former Outward Bound instructor, is the first person credited with paddling the length of the trail from end to end.

“It was a little mysterious whether it could actually be done,” Mullen says. The route, which has changed a bit since he did it, now involves some 50 miles of portaging — carrying your canoe and gear where you can’t paddle or to get from one body of water to the next.  Mullen’s original route involved 64 miles of portaging.

Mullen, 28 at the time, made the trek in 2000 and says the the journey was formative for him in many ways.

While he didn’t solo the entire length, he did spend many — about three weeks’ worth — of his 50 days on the trail in solitude, he says. He also made the venture in a wood and canvas canoe he built himself.

On day 41 Mullen sustained an injury while chopping firewood with an ax, which caused a six-day delay, he says. He wrestled with the idea of not finishing the route.

“I left not sure I wanted to return,” says Mullen. “But what was kind of cool, without even meaning to, it created a community and trip conscience around me.”

That led to a sense of responsibility to complete the trail, Mullen says. He says people had become inspired by his efforts, and when he left to recover from his wound, an Outward Bound colleague made it clear to Mullen that he had to finish the trail.

“You’re not done yet,” the colleague told him.

“It took me awhile to absorb that, but by pursuing something I was passionate about I ended up pulling in a bunch of other people,” Mullen says. “I had created something that kind of lived in spite of me. And faced with enough clarity that I couldn’t let them down, eventually I came to (realize) I can’t let myself down.”

In 2008 Mullen re-paddled the Maine sections of the trail as he prepared to write the Maine chapter of a new guidebook issued by the Northern Forest Canoe Trail organization this year.

Being from Maine, he says he’s partial to the sections here. He notes that Maine offers some of the most remote wilderness and there’s value in that, even for people who may not take on as big of a challenge as he did. 

“Most of Maine is pretty wild,” Mullen says.

And traveling by a human-powered canoe for more than a simple recreational voyage can be a thought-provoking experience.

“It helps connect you to what paddling once was. You start thinking, ‘Wow, this is a little bit like what it might have been like were I trying to penetrate northern Maine 100 years ago.’

“The canoe itself, really hasn’t changed much for thousands of years. It’s generally fun on the weekends, but you can use it as a real mode of transportation.”

Short trips, too

“If you bite off even a couple-day chunk it gives you pause to reflect, and that’s part of the concept of the trail, Mullen adds.

On the lower Rapid River, where it pours out of the forest and into Lake Umbagog, Brett Shifrin and his friend Craig Bramley are canoe-camping with their daughters.

Shifrin says it’s always remarkable to him how close at hand wilderness can be in Maine.

Many of the state’s lakes, even places once considered wild, have become dotted with camps and cabins, some of them huge. Yet the lakes and rivers in and connected to the Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge, which the Northern Forest Canoe Trail passes through, remain largely wild and uninhabited, Shifrin says.

“You feel like you are out in the wilderness — that’s always struck me as a good reason to go,” he says.

The trips Shifrin and Bramley have taken each year since their girls, now 9 and 10, were 4 and 5  have involved paddles on both the Magalloway and Androscoggin rivers, which, like the Rapid River, also connect to Lake Umbagog. Other trips they’ve taken include paddles on Pierce Pond and Aziscohos Lake on the New Hampshire border.

They started with a single night out and have progressed to two nights and three days of paddling, says Shifrin, a mathematics teacher at Gould Academy in Bethel and a resident of Weld. “The kids now want to go for four days,” he says.

Shifrin, also a former Outward Bound canoe instructor, says traveling by canoe with children is more fun than you might imagine.

While not as easy as car-camping — you have to plan and prepare and pack more carefully and know you are committed to sticking it out in inclement weather — other advantages abound.

“In terms of getting outdoors, you can really take anything with you (in a canoe),” he says. “You can take anything you want. You can eat better than you can (if) hiking and you can get gear-heavy, but at the same time … you’ve got to really prepare to go to a remote site and pack it and plan it, and you are in with whatever the weather is.”

Also, unlike hiking or car-camping, canoeing gives you a sense that, while you know others have been before you, it doesn’t always feel that way, Shifrin says.

“Hiking, you are on this beaten trail and that sense of being all alone in the wild is diminished. (Canoeing) seems untouched; seems like nobody is there.”

Peace and quiet are major bonuses, he says. “There are no interruptions. You are not going to get a cell phone call.”

The trip isn’t monotonous for children, either. “Traveling with kids, there’s always diversions,” Shifrin says. You can watch wildlife with binoculars, throw a fishing line in the water to see what you can catch or go for a swim whenever you like. All help keep the trip fun, Shifrin says.

In three days on the water, they saw a bounty of wildlife: loons on a nest with chicks, a beaver, an eagle soaring, a squirrel swimming across the Androscoggin River.

“It’s the second time we’ve seen that,” Shifrin says. “The only thing we didn’t see was a moose.”

For young or old, the portions of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail in Maine can offer a transformative experience, Mullen and Shifrin agree.

“You can’t help but be carried to a different mental and physical place,” Mullen says. “It’s a gift the state has. I think as more and more people recognize that, the more well-known the trail will become.”

sthistle@sunjournal.com

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