It’s a cold, gray morning on Songo Pond in the Maine mountains. Dry bags are sealed, food is stashed. We squeeze ourselves into dry suits, buckle on PFDs, and slide our kayaks into the water.
It’s the beginning of May, National Drinking Water Week, and we’re setting off to paddle 100 miles through one of Maine’s most critical watersheds—two rivers traditionally fished and traveled by the Wabanki people, who have been caring for this place for centuries. Outdoor photographer Andy Gagne and I have spent years photographing and writing about the land and waters we love, but this is a chance to get intimate with our home. To learn the journey of a water droplet by going on it.
It’s one thing to know what a watershed is. It’s another entirely to understand it in your body.
A whopping 200,000+ people—1 in 6 Mainers—get their clean drinking water from the Sebago Lake watershed. This is thanks to the forests around it, which act as a natural filtration system, making it one of the top 50 cleanest water drinking supplies in the U.S. But development in Maine is booming, and losing just 8% of this forest could have huge and costly consequences for clean water. It’s a rare environmental story where humans haven’t destroyed the natural system—yet. But the threat is real. Our mission is to transport our audience into the watershed, demonstrating how the rivers, forests and wildlife are all connected to the faucet, and to highlight the unique and creative ways people are working together to protect these waters for future generations.
Our first day on the Crooked River finds us chest-high in cold water, pushing our boats through a tangle of bushes, and playing a careful game of limbo with the trees that have blown down in recent storms. We slip silently through high rocky gorges, over glassy black water framed by hemlocks. It starts to rain, as if the water knows what we’re doing. As if it’s saying, ready, set, go.
I get my first taste of a Crooked River rapid—shallow, bony, and technical—and I come out bleeding, having bashed my knuckles with a too-deep sweep of my paddle. Though I’m the only one Charlotte had to push off a rock, I’m a tiny bit relieved to see the others scraping the bottom, too. Andy, Charlotte and Alex have all been boating for over ten years, which makes me very lucky. This is my second time in a whitewater kayak—the first was last Tuesday, when Alex gave me a crash course on pulling in and out of eddies. And though I’m the kind of person who, given a good cause, will cheerfully leap into just about anything, I’ll be honest: I’m terrified.
I know how to read a river. I trained as a raft guide on the American in California and the Kennebec in Maine. I’ve guided whitewater canoe trips on the Raquette River in the Adirondacks, and sea kayak expeditions in Casco Bay. The highest class rapid on the Crooked is Class III, which I know I can do. But I’m paddling a borrowed boat, and it’s loaded and awkward. I can’t roll, so if I flip, I’ll swim. Not to mention people don’t really paddle this route, and we’re about to find out why: Dams and downed trees, minimal camping, protected Atlantic salmon habitat, shallow rocky rapids.
I close my eyes and summon the voice of the very first river guide who trained me. Delton was so good at what he did because he could deeply listen. “You have to ask permission, Jenny,” he would bellow over the roaring whitewater. “You have to dance with the river.”
I grip my paddle. I take a breath. And I try to dance.
***
We’re doing this, I keep reminding myself, for a very good reason.
Before, after, and during our river trip, Andy and I spend a lot of time listening to the people and organizations who are invested in protecting this watershed. Sebago Clean Waters, who lead a collaborative of conservation organizations in conserving the surrounding forests. Friends of the Presumpscot, who are working to restore and protect water quality, river habitat & native fisheries in the once highly-polluted Presumpscot River. Friends of Casco Bay, who use science, advocacy and community education to protect the coastal ecosystem.
We visit a spawning site for Atlantic salmon with a wildlife biologist, climb aboard a boat for a water monitoring trip with Portland Water District scientists and tour a water treatment plant. Dick Anderson, one of the first fishery biologists to research the Crooked River in the 1960s, meets with us to discuss the importance of clean water for breweries over a cold beer with Allagash’s sustainability coordinator. Wolastoqey poet, artist and environmental activist Mihku Paul shares about the cultural and spiritual importance of protected waterways for First Nations people.
The story that’s starting to emerge shows just how connected we all are—people, river, ocean, land. How all of us are needed, right now, to protect the water that gives us life.
Bless the scientists who go to work each day to test water samples over and over, who rejoice in boring data. Bless the people who spend their lives protecting trees, bringing the fish back, helping rivers flow again. They are the reason we are healthy.
***
A good drysuit has a way of making one feel invincible, but the river reminds me that I’m not. At the top of a rapid we watch, mouths open, as a bald eagle takes off right in front of us. I’m so excited by the bird that I look at the rapids below and announce to Charlotte, “This doesn’t look so bad.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them.
“I didn’t mean it,” I whisper to the water as I bump down too fast, overshooting the lines. Just when I’m starting to get the hang of it, the river flips me against a rock, a slow-motion dump truck. After I’ve wet-exited and safely waded ashore, Alex pulls a pack of fruit snacks out of his PFD that he’s been saving for just this occasion. “Swimmer snacks!” he says. “Congratulations.”
At Twin Bridges, a protected tract of forestland 32 miles downstream from where we started, friends from the land trusts climb into canoes and we all go floating down. They look around wide-eyed at all the things they work behind computers to protect, remembering why.
It really feels like spring now, the air wild with hatching mayflies, wings catching the sun. That night, after everyone leaves, we camp under a sky full of stars. We’re starting to loosen, to lean in. Time passes in stone dams, darting fish, whitewater riffles and winding stretches of smooth water. The wood is the biggest problem. Unusually bad storms have blown down hundreds of trees, and we spend the bulk of every day dragging our loaded boats over, under, and around them. This makes Sebago Lake when we reach it feel like a big inhale: gray above, gray below, water and sky melting together. Nothing but open space.
Our entrance to the Presumpscot is rough: a long, muddy portage around a massive dam in driving rain. These two rivers could not have had a different history. We’re now paddling toward some of the most densely-populated areas of Maine, on a river that has been so industrialized that at one point you couldn’t go near it.
Thanks to Wabanaki Chief Polin, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the countless people who have advocated over the last 250 years, water quality and fish passage have largely been restored, but we hear stories of how the toxins dumped in these waters would peel the paint off houses.
It’s been a long day, and spirits are low. As the light starts to fade, we’re met by a surprise: A stranger named Peter in a faded green sweater has been watching our GPS tracker online and has come to help us with the long portage. He loads our kayaks into his Subaru one by one and shuttles us the half mile back to the river. On the island where we’re spending the night, his family is waiting with a welcome banner, banana bread and piping hot bowls of soup.
I don’t know what moves me more—the friends and partners who have been waving from the bridges, or the strangers like Peter, who have come to help or clutch umbrellas on the riverbank and cheer. The kayakers, canoeists, and paddleboarders waiting for us at the river’s mouth to paddle the final few miles together, or the crowd ringing bells as our bows touch the beach on Mackworth Island. It’s enough to bring me to tears. The fact that someone out there cares enough to track our blue dot. To show up.
***
What happens when you’ve been spilling downhill with the water for six days? You learn in your body what a river is.
We’ve been in this river. On this river. Dancing with this river, sleeping next to this river, drinking this river. My body carries her water, though that’s true every day when I drink from the faucet at home. I hope I never forget this.
If you run your finger down our route from Bethel to Casco Bay on a map, you’ll read six different names for waterways, but don’t let that fool you into thinking they’re all separate. It’s just one river.
“I would ask people to think about the waters not as a fluid, a thing that sort of moves. Not just as wetness. Not as salt or fresh or bog,” Mikhu Paul tells me. “Think of the waters as something alive that supports something larger, and something larger, until we have this incredible whole which we call our home.”
What if we remembered this—that the river was alive? Would we be able to see beyond what she is to us, all the ways we use her?
Could we let her just be a river?
Could we let her thrive?
***
Editor’s note: To learn more about the Crooked River Source to Sea Project or watch Follow the Water, a short documentary about their journey, visit https://www.andygagnephotography.com/crooked-river-project/.
Jenny O’Connell is a writer, outdoor guide, professor and environmental storyteller from Portland, Maine. She writes for the Appalachian Mountain Club, and her award-winning nonfiction has appeared in magazines across the U.S. She’s currently working on an adventure memoir that traces her 2014 solo trek across Finland following the footsteps of a legendary woman beyond the Arctic Circle. More of Jenny’s writing is available at jenny-oconnell.com.