Maine Guides

Sun blanched the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife building in Augusta, just off the Kennebec River. I’d been in the state ten days but had mentally emigrated months earlier. All winter at 10,000 feet in Colorado, I’d been thinking at sea level. I checked in early—9 a.m., thirty minutes to spare. The state official looked me over, then at the swollen tote in my hand: snacks, a thermos of Earl Grey, borrowed charts, navigation tools rattling with borrowed confidence.

“You ready now?” she asked. “You were supposed to go second, but the first person canceled. You can head down if you like—just not with the thermos.”

I glanced at my new boss—mentor, witness—who’d come along for moral support. He nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We descended past a barred owl arrested mid-glare and a bronze Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby—Maine’s first Registered Guide—forever mid-cast. My novice seamanship earned no approval from her fixed attention. Downstairs, more glass-eyed birds kept watch over two very alive assessors. The official left to gather the other candidates; the door swung shut.

“We’ll start with navigation,” said the first assessor, gesturing to a laminated chart of Penobscot Bay. She handed me a sheet outlining the legs of an imaginary passage. Her eyes flicked to the parallel ruler trembling in my hand.

“You brought your own tools,” she noted. “All right, then. Your fifteen minutes start now.”

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Registered Maine Guides are licensed to lead others through the state’s wild—over ledge and lichen, across water and ice. Popular mythology still pictures the archetype as a flannel-wrapped woodsman, a bearded figure lifted from an old L.L. Bean catalog. But the first person to hold the license, Maine Guide No. 1, was not a man. It was Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby, a forty-three-year-old bank clerk whose authority in the outdoors was neither inherited nor romanticized.

Born in 1854 and orphaned early by tuberculosis, Crosby was advised to “walk out the sickness.” She began doing so literally, following the Sandy River until she stepped past the perimeter of her life. She learned from local woodsmen and from Wabanaki knowledge keepers—people for whom these waterways were not recreational spaces but ancestral corridors. They taught her what moved, when, and why: trout behavior, seasonal winds, how a river reveals itself to those who watch long enough.

Crosby did not marry, had no children, and took up outdoor life relatively late. In 1886, a friend placed a bamboo rod in her hands—a five-ounce instrument of precision. The line sang. A storm on the river, she wrote, “set her on her course.” She returned to town with shoes full of silt and an unnamed shift in orientation. That night she wrote for the first time under the alias “Fly Rod”—plainspoken essays that treated the outdoors as a place of work, not bravado. She was skeptical of mystique. “I would rather fish any day than go to heaven,” she wrote. Not a metaphor. A preference.

By the time Maine formalized guide licensure in 1897, Crosby had spent a decade establishing that a woman in the woods was not an aberration. She earned License No. 1.

She sits in a broader, seldom-named lineage of women who became outdoor leaders not through institutional pathways but through repetition, observation, and necessity. Georgie White Clark, for example, didn’t run her first Grand Canyon trip until she was in her thirties, after losing her daughter in a car accident. Her explanation for becoming the first woman to row the full canyon was characteristically flat: “I didn’t mean to start anything. I just wanted to go down the river.” Mina Benson Hubbard—who completed the first accurate mapping of Labrador after her husband died attempting the same expedition—said simply: “I went because I had to go.” None framed their work as trailblazing. They framed it as common sense.

To become a guide is not mastery but resignation: this is the life that makes sense when nothing else does. The ones worth emulating rarely arrive early, or through straight lines. Crosby walked out her illness. Georgie White Clark rowed her way through grief. Mina Hubbard mapped Labrador because she could not allow the story to end with someone else’s failure. None of them framed guiding as a calling; it was simply the thing that remained when every other explanation fell away. That is the quiet commonality: not destiny, but inevitability. You follow the water, or the trail, or the chart, because you can’t imagine doing anything else. The work is orientation—first of yourself, then of the people who trust you to lead them.

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After navigation came the rest of the oral exam: flora, fauna, boating regulations, first aid, and a mock emergency—a stroke on an island near Bar Harbor requiring a MAYDAY call. Ninety minutes later, I climbed upstairs for the written test. One hundred questions, pencil on paper. I turned it in and sat between Fly Rod and the owl, watching my boss pace outside. I looked at her bronze gaze, not his outline, and waited.

Soon the official called me forward. She opened a Tupperware of patches—embroidered ocean blue, iconic.

“How do you want to pay for your new license?” she asked.

In The Land Before Time

The avalanche-swept Chilkats rose above me, and the silver-grey saltwater of Lynn Canal stretched out below—a long exhale from summit to sea. I could feel the transition in my ribs as clearly as the dry bags clattering in the hatches of my loaner NDK Explorer.

It had taken two flights, a five-hour ferry, and months of saving and circling REI clearance racks to reach Haines, Alaska. First came the Southeast Alaska Sea Kayak Symposium; then a five-day expedition along the northernmost corridor of the Inside Passage. I understood immediately why it’s named that—inside. Protected waterways, yes, but also a corridor that pries open whatever you’ve managed to keep sealed. Miles through wilderness, and miles into your stowaway self.

In Southeast Alaska, rain doesn’t fall—it inhabits. It rises from the ground, settles into your bones, and claims you with quiet authority. Forty degrees here is not forty degrees in Colorado. I doubled baselayers, added a vest, swapped gloves. I accepted dampness as the price of admission into a domain ruled by whales and grizzlies.

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On the morning of May 6, the journey stopped being weather forecasts intersecting lines on a chart. We left our luggage onshore and paddled off—just me, my seventy-six-year-old paddling partner, the Wolf, and our two unfussy, unflappable guides. The Wolf is compact and deliberate, the kind of paddler who wastes no motion. He rolls without drama, comes up blinking and expressionless, and settles back into a steady cadence that seems older than he is. Age shows mostly in the way he pauses before lifting his hull onto his truck. Once he’s in the boat, it’s gone. Sea kayaking suits him: a discipline where economy outperforms strength and longevity is earned stroke by stroke.

That first day was a reminder of what the body remembers when asked gently: the slip of the blade in cold water; the way engagement from the feet spares the shoulder later. Rain held as we moved past ululating scoters, sea lions rising like pylons from the dark, and pocket beaches arranged as if for a postcard. We pitched our tents on Shikoshi Island, devoured burritos, and collapsed by nine under a sky that never fully darkened.

While the guides scrubbed microscopic hints of food from pans down the beach—bear country etiquette—I climbed onto a rock, bear spray at my hip. Far enough to feel alone; close enough to still be found. The stillness was immense. Unexpectedly, a thought surfaced: I wish my mom could see this. The tears followed with no fanfare. Grief can feel dormant for years, then rise cold and quick as tidewater. The landscape was large enough to hold it; I let it.

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The Chilkats are younger than the Rockies where I grew up and now winter. Lower, yes, but geologically restless—glaciers still softening their flanks, moraines drawing straight lines down to the sea. No roads, no lifts, just tectonics and time.

“That’s the Davidson Glacier,” the local guide said, pointing to a blue-brown cradle of ice high above. “In Muir’s time, it calved right into the water.”

As the sun slid behind peaks, a strange memory visited: an old VCR tape, an animated ridge line. The Land Before Time. I hadn’t thought of it in decades, but in that moment the echo was unmistakable—mother loss, the ache of separation, the long pursuit of a new valley. The film had carved something into me, a glacial striation I didn’t know I carried.

The next morning, a black triangle flitted at the surface. “Orcas,” our lead announced, already scanning. “Moving north. Do you see?” I did not. “There. Sometimes I swear people think I’m full of shit.”

Wind came up. Then died. Then returned. When my fingers throbbed with cold or when peeing through four layers felt like a complicated moral exercise, I whispered my private mantra: You chose this. You gave your time and money to be here.

But as the days wore on and the landscape wore me into it—like rivulets braiding down a mountainside—I wondered if I chose anything at all. Or if choice is only a polite name for current and countercurrent, a slack tide flipping direction without warning.

When the wind eased just enough for the guides to greenlight our crossing, I imagined every failure point: capsizing in the cold, soaking my tent and sleeping bag, blowing my angle and drifting toward the sea-lion rocks. You chose this, I repeated. But the water had its own ideas. We reached mainland, exhausted and relieved. The Wolf collapsed on the beach, still sealed into his PFD like a child who’d fallen asleep in a snowsuit.

We would need to make up at around twenty-five nautical miles the next day. While we ate tortellini, the lead looked out toward the channel and said, almost offhandedly, “I see sun on the horizon.” I took that into my tent like a borrowed talisman.

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This summer I’ll guide not in Alaska but in Maine. Still, that trip handed me a horizon wide enough to hear the quiet part of myself say: This is why. Not because an inner adventurer needs indulging, but because something in me recognizes the utility of maps, bearings, crossings. Watching the guides hang tarps, call out bear-fence placements, decipher wind with a glance, I wondered which kind of guide I’ll become. Whether I’ll be good. Whether I’ll enjoy it.

When I was young, I wanted to be an “explorer.” The adults laughed, partly because I was a girl and it was the 90s, partly because modern life insists there’s nothing left to explore. But the explorers I loved—Frodo, Littlefoot—weren’t charting territory. They were leaving the familiar because home had changed shape beneath them.

The realization surfaced gently, like the mother humpback and calf we encountered on our third day. The mother exhaled first—tall, resonant. The calf followed, a smaller punctuation. They moved alongside us, unconcerned. A quorum of gulls marked the bait ball beneath. They knew we were there. They simply didn’t adjust themselves around our presence.

Maybe I am not seeking the thrill of new terrain but the permission to feel something primordial that has always been at the waterline—grief, wonder, memory—held long enough to come up for air.

The primordial is not ancient or remote; it’s as ordinary as dropping the skeg and turning downwind. In my boat, I am Littlefoot—small, unsure, moving through immensity anyway. Or like the fire our local guide attempted on our last night in Berner’s Bay—rain-soaked wood, no kindling, no chance. She kept at it. Then, the Wolf remembered the cracked cutting board in his hatch. We fed it to the flame. Finally, a spark held.

Many times the earth beneath me has shifted—divorce, death, breakups, pandemic. Sharp-tooths abound. But the “Great Valley” is not a destination; it’s a clearing, a pause, a space where grief exhales without demanding resolution.

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Back in Juneau, our re-entry to time coincided with Mother’s Day. A holiday I’ve long treated like a bruise—best ignored. Brunches, flowers, the forced sentimentality of it all. But that day, moving through gift shops and trailheads dotted with mothers and daughters, I didn’t brace against anything. I just moved among them. I chose to be here, and found I could.

Maybe that’s what the Inside Passage teaches best. Not grandeur or grit, but access—to the remote places outside us, and the more remote ones within. Five days in the Alaskan backcountry loosened something that had been calcified in me for years. The grief didn’t vanish. It simply found room.

Southeast

Poems composed on the Marine Highway ferry to Haines.

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Juneau

Rainforest welcome:
skunk cabbage brightens wet trails,
fog stitches the woods.

Marine Highway

Fjord currents ferry
skiers northbound for Skagway;
I will paddle back.

Symposium

Truck with boats pulls in—
Hera finds me on the pier,
paws parting the rain.

Haines

Hammer museum,
people exist between scars
of avalanches.

XtraTuf

Brown boots everywhere—
locals wear them like logic,
the tall ones only.

The Maul

Bear spray at my hip—
a constant, like a cell phone
with no reception.

Distillery

Whisky tastes of sea;
Alaskans drink like weather—
deep, sudden, stormy.