As a young man, I read Hemingway and Steinbeck, Harrison and McGuane. Along the way, the fly-fishing raconteur Richard Brautigan brought tears to my eyes while the rabid environmentalist Edward Abbey had me raising my fists in outrage.
I took to heart the words of Gary Snyder, the acclaimed poet turned Buddhist, found in his thought-provoking book, “Practice of the Wild”:
“The wild requires… we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home.”
Over the years, I’ve tried to follow his advice, attempting from time to time to tell a good story when returning home from the Rangeley Lakes Region of western Maine. My wife and I have owned a camp there for more than 40 years.
This part of the Pine Tree State has not changed much. Logging roads have replaced some river routes that once carried timber to mills across the New Hampshire border. Grand hotels catering to wealthy sports may be gone. But the rivers, streams and ponds surrounding our cabin are much the same as Johnny Danforth and Fred Baker found them when they spent the winter of 1876 hunting and trapping above Parmachenee Lake.
This region is known for its brook trout, fish that have called these waters home since glaciers receded more than 10,000 years ago. They are not as large as they once were, but a 16-inch native brook trout is not uncommon and certain to make an angler’s heart flutter. Landlocked salmon, introduced in the late 1800s, are now as wild as the moose that sometimes plod down to the shoreline to muse over the mysteries of the conifer forest.
When Trish and I first arrived, I cast large streamers and weighted nymphs in a manic pursuit for ever-larger fish. I wore a vest with more fly boxes than Samuel Carter had little liver pills. My pack was heavy with reels spooled with lines that sank at different rates, along with extra clothing for northern New England’s constantly changing weather.
Such angling requires time on the water, especially after the spring thaw, which in western Maine may not begin until mid-May.
This is when ice leaves the lakes and smelts, the region’s principal bait fish, enter the big rivers to spawn, with brook trout and landlocked salmon following closely behind.
By late September, trout and salmon swim up rivers like the Magalloway, Kennebago, Cupsuptic and Rapid on their own spawning runs. This provides a second opportunity to take fish measured in pounds rather than inches.
I have fished in rain and sleet, under snow squalls and blistering sun. I was buffeted by wind and harassed by black flies, mosquitoes and no-see-ums. Rapids threatened to take me under, and storms sent the occasional lightning bolt my way. All while I stripped streamers across dark pools and bounced nymphs over river bottoms from first light until after dark. I am addicted to the tug of fish measured in pounds rather than inches.
As the years passed, I discovered another type of fishing, one found on the many tannin-stained brooks that slip across the Canadian border. These streams twist through balsam and spruce for mile after mile. Some have no names, others form the headwaters of larger rivers where most anglers continue their search for trophy fish.
Along these secret rills, I have learned to enjoy casting my flies to brook trout far smaller than those in the big rivers. A few are no longer than a finger, the largest fitting in the palm of a hand. In these narrow ribbons of water, hidden under shadows cast by a vast conifer forest, I have come to appreciate what Thoreau described as “…these jewels…these bright fluviatile flowers, made beautiful, the Lord only knows why, to swim there.”
Now, on the losing side of middle age, I seek waters too small to gather attention from other anglers — forgotten places where trout live under boulders, in shadows cast by conifer branches, along undercut banks, or hiding in plain sight in sunlit riffles. These are fish that have rarely heard a wading boot or the splash of an artificial fly.
This type of fishing requires an angler to heed the words of the legendary American naturalist John Muir, who wrote, “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.”
No longer do I feel compelled to wing heavy flies past my ear or make 60-foot casts until my shoulder aches. I carry a single metal tin that fits in the pocket of my canvas shirt. Once holding cough drops, it now holds a handful of flies: pheasant-tail dry flies, patterns with parachute wings for casting upstream, a few elk hair caddis or black ants for summer and fixed-winged and soft-hackled hare’s ear wet flies for when I work downstream.
I leave my 8-foot fly rod constructed of space-age material at the cabin. Instead, I carry a 6-foot-6-inch rod, made of cane the color of maple syrup, the good stuff produced at the end of the season and once classified as grade B. I could never afford such a rod but bought this one secondhand. The cork base is stained from its prior owner.
Seated on a lichen-covered boulder or fallen tree trunk, I sometimes wonder who might cast this little bit of fishing history after my time on this whirling orb ends.
When a 6-inch brook trout splashes through the surface, my mind is free to be in the moment. With less distraction, I enjoy the creatures along the edges of running water — the mink slinking around boulders on the opposite bank or the beaver slapping its tail so loud it sounds like a shotgun echo.
Sometimes it is simply the flash of a tiny warbler or the song of a secretive thrush. I catch myself smiling at the splash of a frog or staring into the eyes of a bashful toad no larger than a button.
Seated by the wood stove on a November evening, a mug of tea warm against my palms, the sound of hail pinging against the windows as it mixes with damp snow, I can retrieve these moments that, like a Basho haiku, remain frozen in time.
Tramping through western Maine’s fields and forest, casting a fly while kneeling on a mossy bank, holding my breath in anticipation of a rising fish, I escape the madding pace of modern life.
As long as my legs allow, I will tread that trail less traveled — the one alongside a stream where brook trout play tag with a bit of feather and fur — and return to tell a tale or two.
Evan Ipsaro scored 24 points to lift Miami of Ohio to a 93-61 win over the University of Maine in a non-conference men’s basketball game on Saturday in Oxford, Ohio.
Keelan Steel scored 14 points for Maine, which has lost 11 straight games to start the season. The Black Bears trailed 28-6 just over 10 minutes into the first half.
Eian Elmer added 16 points and six rebounds for the RedHawks (8-0).
Sara Bronin is the founder of the National Zoning Atlas, a George Washington University law professor and author of “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.”
Over the last few years, the nonprofit National Zoning Atlas team has set out to map every zoning code in America to do one simple thing: let the public see how their communities regulate land. We developed this goal because zoning rules can have big impacts: they dictate to property owners what they can do with their properties.
Before we started work in Maine last spring, we would have never guessed that Maine’s codes would be the most bureaucratic and convoluted of the 30-plus states we’ve worked. We thought that Maine’s relatively small population and few urban centers — not to mention its proud commitment to property rights and personal freedom — would mean the codes would be short and straightforward.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
We can say authoritatively that Maine’s zoning is far out of the norm because we’ve analyzed zoning conditions in nearly 9,000 cities, towns and counties across America, and we’ve read over a million pages of zoning codes. We’ve become experts in analyzing the arcana of minimum lot sizes, setbacks, height caps and parking mandates.
In Maine, we started first in Washington County. More recently, through a partnership with GrowSmart Maine, we’ve completed analysis of zoning in and around Portland.
Well, mostly completed. Of the 123 jurisdictions we have reviewed so far (of Maine’s 496 total with zoning authority), 17 never provided a full copy of their zoning text, map or both.
The texts we could find — totaling 17,500 pages — revealed that Maine appears to have some of the longest zoning codes in the country. New Hampshire, with roughly the same population, has half the number of jurisdictions exercising zoning, and zoning codes half as long as Maine’s.
And when we located maps, some existed only as grainy, pixelated PDFs with faded lines and unclear boundaries. Others existed only in paper copy, not online.
What’s worse, Maine piles “shoreland zoning” on top of zoning. Shoreland zoning was created to protect water quality, but it’s hard to see how it achieves this goal. Zoning maps and shoreland zoning maps often conflict or don’t match up, and too often codes refer to outdated or inconsistent data about wetlands and watercourses. Even analysts who had handled notoriously complicated coastal zoning in California struggled to make sense of Maine’s regime.
When we had questions about interpreting texts and maps, we often had nowhere to turn. That’s because many of the 123 jurisdictions were very small towns, with part-time staff, or no staff at all. If our trained analysts cannot make sense of the rules, and no one’s on the other end of the line, it’s unrealistic to expect homeowners, builders or neighbors to do so. We imagine that many well-intentioned local officials feel caught administering systems that no one fully understands.
State legislators have taken action on zoning — primarily to promote more housing. They recently expanded opportunities for multifamily housing and made it easier to build accessory dwelling units. These are laudable and necessary reforms. Our analysis so far shows that only 15% of residential land allows multi-family housing by right, and more than half of single-family land bans accessory dwellings.
But legislators have not tackled a more fundamental need exposed by our Maine Zoning Atlas: to simplify and clarify the state’s land use regulatory framework. Property owners and policymakers alike experience zoning as a maze, where they must navigate missing information, conflicting requirements and procedural runaround.
To provide a way out, next legislative session, state lawmakers should consider requiring zoning codes to be available to the public online. Or requiring maps to be legible, with shoreland zoning clearly mapped. How can people be bound by rules they cannot find, or understand?
Legislators should also consider legalizing — and providing incentives for — local governments to share resources in land use administration. Small towns might be more empowered to achieve their land use goals if they have the tools and manpower they need to interpret and enforce their own zoning codes. Legislators might also rethink shoreland zoning altogether.
I’d like to say our nonprofit is eager to find funding to finish our analysis in Maine. But honestly, it’s been a bit of a nightmare.
For the sake of our team — and anyone else trying to make sense of zoning in Maine — I urge people in power to take action to streamline the state’s regulatory framework. There’s just no reason Maine’s land use rules should be the most complicated in the country.
ORONO — Alfond Arena has long been among the toughest rinks in college hockey for opponents to come in and win. Barely two months into the season, though, the refurbished building hasn’t been its typical cozy home for the Black Bears.
Maine lost to New Hampshire 1-0 at Alfond Arena on Friday night. The Wildcats improved to 8-7 overall, 4-4 in Hockey East. Maine is now 8-6-1 overall, 5-4 in conference play. The teams will meet again Saturday night at Alfond.
It was Maine’s third loss in nine games at Alfond Arena this season, giving the Black Bears more home losses than in each of the last two full seasons. It was the first time Maine was shutout at home since Feb. 24, 2024, a 4-0 loss to Northeastern.
“We don’t have that next level of push in our team right now. It’s not that we don’t have good players and can’t do some things. We can,” Maine coach Ben Barr said. “Right now, the honest truth is, we don’t have a very good culture in our room, and that starts with me.”
The Wildcats scored the lone goal at 4:14 of the third period when Cam MacDonald recovered a Maine turnover at the New Hampshire blue line, skated untouched down the ice and slipped a shot over the glove of Black Bear goalie Mathis Rousseau.
Maine outshot UNH 21-14, and 9-1 in a dominant first period in which the Black Bears controlled play and did everything but put the puck in the net.
“I think sometimes it’s almost a scary feeling when you come out in that first period playing as well as we did and not coming away with anything. You feel like it’s a missed opportunity,” said Thomas Freel, a Maine captain.
Rousseau made 14 saves. Kyle Chauvette stopped 21 shots to earn the shutout.
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