Called to the Wild

from Yankee Magazine January/February 2018

Mary’s Farm

(continued from p. 115)

It takes an act of Congress to create a national park. By the late 2000s, after years of meetings and publicity, Quimby hadn’t gained the backing of Maine’s congressional delegation. “Ban Roxanne” signs were in storefronts and on truck bumpers and front lawns throughout the Millinocket region. Then, in a fateful 2011 Forbes interview, Quimby offered her unfiltered thoughts on her adopted state.

“We have the most aged population in the country,” she said. “I believe we have one of the highest adult obesity rates in New England. We have … oxycontin abuse … [and] Maine is the largest net receiver of federal funds, even though we supposedly hate the feds … it’s a welfare state.”

Cue the backlash. “Roxanne Quimby Calls Maine a Welfare State” declared the front page of the Bangor Daily News . To many unemployed Mainers, her words overshadowed the millions of dollars that her Quimby Family Foundation had donated to nonprofits across the state. And it became apparent that if Quimby’s national park was going to happen, she could no longer be the person to lead the fight.

At the time, St. Clair was still living out west. “ I just thought [the Forbes article] was another story, but it didn’t go away, and people kept talking about it,” he says. “Look, I’m used to my mom saying exactly what she thinks. And often she’s right. She’s incredibly intuitive and super-bright, so I was like, Those are the problems with where I grew up. Wouldn’t it be great to have a national park and bring new jobs and opportunities? But that’s not at all how it played out in the press.

“I hear a lot of people talk about her legacy and the fact that she wants this as part of her legacy,” he continues. “She lives this lifestyle that’s so close to the land and is really introverted. She doesn’t think about her legacy. She thinks about the trees and the rivers and the moose. Those are things that really move her. If she could have done this anonymously, she would have.”

The story of the creation of Katahdin Woods and Waters is not a new one. The hurdles and struggles, the fears about government intrusion, are threaded through the early histories of national parks such as Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, and Kenai Fjords. Former Maine governor Percival Baxter fought similar battles to create the 200,000-acre-plus Baxter State Park, a property just west of the Quimby land that includes Mount Katahdin and is New England’s largest wilderness area.

It’s also a story that finds a striking parallel in the founding of Maine’s Acadia National Park more than a century ago. George Dorr, heir to a banking and textile fortune, had grown alarmed over the rapid development of Mount Desert Island, and in 1901 he spearheaded the creation of a trust that would acquire land to restrain further construction and maintain public access to the island’s coastline. A decade later he fended off an attempt by Maine legislators to disband the trust; then he turned to the federal government for protection in the form of a national park designation.

Over the next several years Dorr traveled frequently between D.C. and Maine. At a time when the National Park Service did not yet exist and when all the national parks lay west of the Mississippi, Dorr’s vision sounded preposterous. Maybe even impossible.

“A congressman asked Dorr why would anyone want to give something to the federal government,” says Ronald Epp, author of Creating Acadia National Park, a biography of Dorr. “People don’t do that who are sane, he was told. He was thought to be naive for thinking the federal government was in the business of accepting public philanthropy. All these parks west of Mississippi were made from lands the federal government already owned. Now we had citizens coming forward saying, ‘Here, this is for free. You just have to take care of it and protect it in perpetuity.’ It sounded insane. I guess it still sounds like that to people today.”

Dorr finally realized his dream, as Acadia was named a national monument in 1916 and a national park three years later. However, it did not come without a price. Dorr spent down his family fortune—by the end of his life, friends were paying his mortgage—and drove himself to exhaustion.

The threat of rain hangs overhead as St. Clair pilots his SUV along a series of gravel roads and then grassy ones that grow increasingly worse. It’s late June, two months before this land will be designated a national monument, and St. Clair is attacking the ever-dicier route with a gleeful aggression. “The one thing I won’t be able to do when this becomes a national park is blindly take the turns,” he says with a laugh. In the back, a cooler of beer rattles around. “That may be off the list, too,” he adds.

Stopping on an old logging road, he unfolds his six-foot-five frame from the car and throws his arms into the air for a stretch. Then he points to a band of forest, from which are heard the faint sounds of the Wassataquoik Stream. “We’re going that way,” he says. He looks up at the sky. “It’s going to pour.” Then, as he is prone to do when happy, St. Clair, who begins to gather his fishing equipment, starts to sing. “It’s going to rain, rain, rain, rain.”

Several minutes later St. Clair is standing on the riverbank. The water churns gently past, curling around chunks of granite that slid off the back of Mount Katahdin during the last ice age. This area, Orin Falls, is a sacred spot for St. Clair—maybe his favorite on the land. It’s where he brings firsttime visitors who want a sense of what the park is all about. It’s remote even by northern-Maine standards, but it’s accessible, with a gorgeous river framed by boulders and tall pines. This same waterway is the one that a skinny Harvard student named Teddy Roosevelt crossed more than a century ago when he made his first ascent of Katahdin.

“I love fishing this stream because it’s so small you can walk all over,” St. Clair says. “It looks like a powerful force was involved in making this at one point. It’s intimate and still feels wild. And the fish here are really pretty. If you can catch them.” He moves with ease into the water. In part, that’s his natural way of navigating the world. He projects a comfort with himself, and that, combined with his ability to make those around him laugh, softens the sheer physical advantage he has over most people. He is tall but not imposing.

On this day St. Clair is quiet and contemplative. He makes his way along the uneven riverbed with the kind of assurance that comes from knowing an area so intimately. The water is warm and the trout are hard to find. So St. Clair keeps moving, picking his spots to fish as he ventures upstream.

Orin Falls is a snapshot of what Katahdin Woods and Waters offers. This is not a land of eye-popping visuals like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. Sure, there are some big views of the surrounding valleys and a deadon shot of the east side of Katahdin, but its appeal and, some have argued, its importance is that it is an uninterrupted stretch of wilderness, spanning thousands of acres of trees and rivers. In the heavily populated, heavily landfractured eastern United States, that is no small thing.

When St. Clair moved with his wife and young daughter to Maine in early 2012, he set out to change the debate about the proposed park so that it was less a referendum on his mother and more a discussion about the land. He put a bed in the back of his Volkswagen van and canvassed northern Maine. He searched through Facebook to see what people were saying about the proposal, then set up meetings with the commentators for faceto-face talks. On the weekends, he sat behind a card table at the local transfer station to answer questions and hand out information sheets. He made it a morning ritual to visit a former Buick dealership in downtown Millinocket where a group of retired mill workers gather regularly to drink coffee and talk about the old days.

St. Clair’s ability to connect with others helped set him apart, says

Dan O’Leary, retired director of the Portland Museum of Art and former CEO of Quimby’s three philanthropic organizations, including Elliotsville Plantation. “I was a museum director for many years, and my job was to work with people, often powerful and wealthy, to get them to work as a team,” O’Leary says. “But I have 25 percent of the skills that Lucas has in that way. I’ve never known a person who is better at channeling and moving the feelings and the beliefs of people forward.”

There were more formal meetings, too, in which St. Clair weathered personal attacks from park opponents who savaged the project and his mother. “He was treated as miserably as anyone I’ve seen in public life, outside of

“Roxanne is a purist—she didn’t want snowmobiles, she didn’t want hunting,” says an associate familiar with the project. “She liked the idea of helping the economy, but she wasn’t willing to compromise on any of her very pure motives on protecting the environment. Lucas is more pragmatic. Lucas was willing to sit down with snowmobilers, the off-terrain folks, and hunters. It was Lucas who worked out the plan to allow hunting east of the East Branch, and it’s because of Lucas that the snowmobile trail heading out of Millinocket found a way to go through their property.” getting arrested for a heinous crime,” says Sambides, the Bangor Daily News reporter. “They didn’t want him there. They called him a liar to his face. But he’d deflect with humor and earnestness and patience. A lot of patience.”

There’s a story that St. Clair likes to tell from his childhood, a story that defines something about him. When he was 6 or 7, a young family moved next door to his father’s place in DoverFoxcroft. Every day his new neighbors would go on a bike ride, and St. Clair, who desperately wanted to make friends, would trail after them.

It was a reset in both tone and style. It didn’t hurt that St. Clair looked like and had many of the same interests as the people he was trying to win over. And where he could, St. Clair moved away from the project’s earlier iteration. He hired a high-end consulting firm out of Montana to help him navigate Washington, D.C. He reopened a portion of the land to hunting and snowmobiling. Then, in late 2015, he made his biggest pivot: choosing to pursue national monument designation, which requires only a declaration from the president, rather than full national park status.

“Day after day I did this, and eventually they were like, Do you want to come with us?” St. Clair says. “Oh, I thought you’d never ask —that’s definitely my personality. I’ll just keep showing up. Oh yeah, Lucas is here again. With something like the park, that’s what it’s taken. There are some folks who I doubt will ever support this, but it’s at least important we get to know each other.”

The park’s opponents include Governor Paul LePage, a man who has a seeming allergic reaction to anything with even a whiff of federal government control. LePage spent his early career working in the forest products industry and has been one of the monument’s most outspoken critics. He’s questioned the land’s visitor appeal, deriding it as “the mosquito area,” and, following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, he lobbied for a reversal of the monument designation.

About an hour after St. Clair leaves Orin Falls, he comes face-to-face with what he believes is a product of the governor’s opposition. Within the Quimby land is a 1,200-acre parcel owned by the state; access to it includes a right-of-way over the future monument property. The previous winter, the state Bureau of Public Lands set about reconstructing the road in order to log the parcel. The project has included helicoptering in a temporary steel bridge, cutting back trees, and digging gullies. Alongside stretches of the gravel pathway are collections of concrete abutments and Jersey barriers. At the road’s gate, St. Clair steps out into the rain to take a look at what’s ahead. “It was this tiny, snaking trail,” he says. “Now it’s just wide and muddy. They’ve got a legal right to do it, but it’s just upsetting to see.

“It’s going to cost a lot to get up there,” he adds, his voice sounding tight and annoyed. “And they’re doing it at the total bottom of the market. Just from a business perspective, it’s dumb.”

He pauses for a moment. “It’s just really disappointing,” he says, in a near-whisper to himself.

With the gates pushed open, St. Clair gets back into the car and drives on. He’s quiet as he scans the scene. Ahead is the spike of South Turner Mountain and a mix of pine, spruce, and hardwoods that the state is targeting. After several miles, the road concludes at a scabby turnaround just south of where the cutting will begin.

“Oh, what a bummer,” says St. Clair, driving back. “This was such an incredible moose and bear habitat. Our governor has felt like a victim and felt powerless in this. This is his way of saying, ‘Don’t forget about me.’”

Three months after the monument’s declaration, a stillexhausted St. Clair and his wife, Yemaya, loaded up an RV in the driveway of their Portland home, and with their two children, Ella, 5, and Whalen, 2, they set out on a four-week journey down and back up the East Coast. They would cover nearly 4,200 miles, visiting friends and national parks along the way, and for the first time since they’d arrived in Maine, they would spend a prolonged stretch alone as a family. St. Clair welcomed the chance to travel, to be with his wife and kids, and to start thinking about an important question he has to answer.

What’s next?

It comes up frequently for him. From others. From himself, too. The truth is, he has anxiety—mild, maybe, but it’s there just the same. He wonders if bringing the monument across the finish line will be the biggest thing he’ll ever do with his life.

“It’s been hard, complex work, and what I’m most nervous about is that I won’t have a hard, complex problem to work on now,” St. Clair says. “The anxiety I feel more than anything is waking up in the morning and wondering what I’m supposed to do.”

He’s reminded a bit of what it was like after he finished hiking the Appalachian Trail. For the first two weeks, he slept in his tent in his mother’s backyard. Even after such an intense, grueling journey, he wasn’t ready to let it end. He’d grown accustomed to the challenge, and he nearly turned around and hiked back to Georgia.

“Every day I put on my hiking boots, put on my backpack, and hiked,” he says. “I’d do the same thing day in and day out. And then I finished, and the next day I was like, What am I supposed to do now? I remember feeling really lost. There’s a part of me that wonders if I might feel that way again because there’s been an intensity to [the park process]. I get up super-early; I drive long distances or fly to Washington. It’s fast and furious, with a lot of meetings. And if I don’t have that stuff anymore, will I feel like something is missing?”

What’s clear is that this effort has allowed St. Clair to find his voice and stick with something in a way he hadn’t done before. “The work was so diverse,” he says. “I wasn’t just doing the same thing over and over again. That’s why I stopped cooking—you’re basically cooking the same four dishes, and that’s what your day is like. This was the first project in my life where I said, I’m going to devote everything to it to see how far I can get with it. I didn’t have that kind of drive with anything else in my life.”

He thinks about staying involved in land conservation work. Maine’s economy and the issues around its rural poverty intrigue him. Even before the national monument declaration came through, speculation swirled that St. Clair’s future lay in politics. He never ruled it out, and in early October, at the Appalachian Trail Café in Millinocket, he announced his candidacy for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Running as a Democrat, St. Clair faces a crowded primary, the winner of which will face the incumbent, Republican Bruce Poliquin, in November 2018.

It could be a long shot. It may be that St. Clair is just testing the waters. Or it might be the first step in a political career that will see St. Clair knocking on the door of other offices.

Still, regardless of what happens this year, the work on behalf of the Katahdin land continues. In April, President Trump ordered a review of all national monuments created since 1996, especially those named by President Obama. That list, of course, included Katahdin Woods and Waters. In May, St. Clair testified before the U.S. Senate on the value of the monument. The following month, he returned north to welcome Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for a tour of the land. Zinke was impressed and even suggested that perhaps it deserved to become a national park. “It was an amazing trip,” St. Clair says.

On August 24, 2017, a year to the day that Katahdin Woods and Waters was created, Zinke—spurred no doubt by the area’s increasing property values, the bubbling up of new businesses, and the growing acceptance of the park by former opponents—declared that the land would remain a part of the National Park Service.

For St. Clair, the final hurdle in a near-two-decade-long quest has finally been cleared. As he plots his future, he will keep visiting the Katahdin region. He’ll fish Orin Falls, maybe follow a trail up the east side of Katahdin he’s always wanted to try, and ski the trails that the Park Service continues to blaze throughout the property. Just another visitor to the national park property he brought into existence.

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