On Maine Guides
The sun blazes over the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife building in Augusta, just beside the Kennebec River. I’ve been in the state for just ten days, but my mind arrived months ago. All winter long, while my feet turned through the snow at 10,000 feet in Colorado, my thoughts were here, level with the sea.
I check in early. I always do. It’s 9:00 a.m., half an hour before the exam begins. The state official sizes me up—along with my tote bag, bulging with snacks, a thermos of Earl Grey, and borrowed navigation tools.
“You ready now?” she asks. “You were supposed to go second, but the first person canceled. You can head down, if you like.”
“For the oral?” I ask.
She nods. I glance toward my new boss, who's been mentoring me through this process and came along for support. He nods encouragingly.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”
We descend past a taxidermy barred owl frozen mid-glare and a statue of Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby—Maine’s first Registered Guide, outdoorswoman, and writer. Hmm...that feels familiar.
Down in the basement, we’re greeted by more stuffed birds and two live assessors. The official disappears upstairs to greet the other candidates. The door closes behind me.
“We’ll start with navigation,” one says, leading me to a room dominated by a laminated nautical chart. They hand me a sheet marked with the legs of an imaginary journey. Their eyes flick to the parallel ruler and compass trembling a little in my hand.
“Looks like you brought your own tools.”
I nod.
“All right then. Your fifteen minutes start now. Have at it.”
Registered Maine Guides are licensed professionals allowed to lead clients through the state’s wild terrain—on land, water, or ice—while hunting, fishing, hiking, paddling, or camping. Here, you can’t legally accept a dime for guiding someone into the backcountry without this credential. It’s a legacy steeped in L.L. Bean flannel and the kind of myth that gathers around cabins and campfires. I hadn’t even heard of it until last year.
For me, the path to becoming one began in the most unlikely of places: lockdown in New York, when no one was leading anyone anywhere—except in and out of Zoom calls.
Back then, I’d just moved into my 1920s farmhouse in the Catskill Mountains. My friend M, her husband, and their cat had fled Brooklyn to ride out the first wave of the pandemic with me and my partner. We all tried, in our own ways, to escape—each other, the news, the sense that life as we knew it had cracked open and spilled something we couldn’t yet name.
I bought a foldable Oru Kayak and took to the water. Most afternoons around four, while the rest of the household clustered around Cuomo’s briefings, I paddled to the center of Colgate Lake, chasing quiet and open sky. The weeks blurred. We reordered bulk hand sanitizer. The creases in my kayak softened.
One day, a stranger in a canoe called out across the water: “I see you out here all the time. You seem like you’re becoming a paddler. When this is all over, you should go explore Maine—it’s a kayaker’s mecca.”
Months passed. The city exhaled, then inhaled again. My friends returned to Brooklyn, only for M to come back alone, at the beginning of her divorce. The farmhouse, with its thin walls and heat holes in the floorboards, offered no privacy. Her quiet sobs became my morning alarm.
One evening, after I came in from a paddle to find her puddled in sorrow again, I said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Where?”
“How about Maine?”
We booked an Airbnb that allowed her cat and drove seven hours from Edgewood to Edgecomb. The cottage sat fifty yards from a tidal inlet, quiet as a postcard. Pines framed the water, which glowed deep teal in the golden hour. I couldn’t wait. I unfolded the Oru and launched, kitted out with only a PFD. M stayed back to settle the cat and cry some more.
A great blue heron lifted off ahead of me, encouraged by the salt breeze. For two hours, I was moving again—free of the pandemic’s eddy, nudged toward the horizon.
Then, my paddle struck bottom.
The tide had gone out. I was marooned in thick, gray muck, a quarter mile from shore. A few clammers downriver chuckled. I had no choice. I stepped out of the kayak, and the mud sucked me down to my knees. Sloshing and muttering—this would never happen in the freshwater rivers back home—I dragged myself and the kayak forward. Each step pulled at the soles of my Tevas. When I finally reached solid ground, M stood waiting, cigarette in hand, amused.
I collapsed on the grass, caked head to toe in drying mud. The kayak beside me was no longer white. I looked like a reverse Pompeii cast—frozen not in plaster and death, but in sludge and slog. For the first time in months, M laughed.
Cornelia Thurza “Fly Rod” Crosby was born in Phillips, Maine, in 1854. Tall, athletic, and unapologetic, she defied every expectation of Victorian womanhood. She preferred rivers to parlors, tackle to petticoats. In 1897, at forty-three, she became the first person licensed under Maine’s new Registered Guide program. When she was not leading fishing or hunting trips at her beloved Rangeley Lake, she scribbled her popular syndicated column dedicated to the Maine outdoors, Fly Rod’s Notebook.
At the 1898 New York Sportsman’s Exposition, she caused a stir by appearing in a knee-length skirt and staffing a recreated log cabin exhibit while brandishing a rifle. She never married. She had no children. Instead, she befriended Penobscot elders who taught her to walk the woods like wind through leaves and went on to inspire generations of city-dwellers—especially women—to find their way outside.
“I would rather fish any day than go to heaven,” she famously once wrote.
She died at ninety-two.
For me, becoming a guide meant first learning how to guide myself—out of the muddy mess that is one’s mid-thirties, compounded by a global pandemic. It started with getting stuck, and learning how to get unstuck—slowly.
The summer following that trip to Maine, I signed up for a sea kayaking lesson in New York, on the Hudson. Then another. I paddled from Poughkeepsie to midtown Manhattan. Who knew the river bounding the west side of the center of the universe was tidal, the perfect place to learn how to paddle? A symposium on the Great Lakes followed the summer after that. Then, my first coastal instructor certification, again in the homewaters of the Hudson. Another symposium—the Autumn Gales, in rougher water. Then an expedition in Alaska. And eventually, a job guiding with Maine Kayak, not far from the Midcoast inlet where I’d first been stranded.
I grew up landlocked by mountains. Trails and rivers are my native language. I know how to gain and shed elevation, how to read the snow packed in between peaks. But the sea—that’s different. Where mountains have contours and edges, the ocean offers none. It is motion and mystery. A brand new language of charts and buoys and tidal streams that I am only just starting to learn.
To paddle is to court freedom. A sea kayak can go where other vessels cannot. It glides with grace and vanishes without a trace. But sea kayak guiding is not just about instinct. It’s about scaffolding intuition with knowledge underwritten by experience—so you don’t lead yourself, or anyone else, into danger.
“For me, sea kayaking is the ultimate freedom,” a coach from the UK told me at the Gales. “But with that ultimate freedom comes ultimate responsibility.”
After the navigation comes the rest of the oral exam: questions on flora and fauna, boating regulations, first aid, and a mock emergency. Ninety minutes, give or take. Then upstairs again for a hundred-question, pencil-on-paper written test.
I turn it in and take a seat between the owl and Fly Rod. I can see my boss pacing in the parking lot outside. I wait.
Before long, the same official who’d greeted me that morning calls me to her desk. She slides open a Tupperware of patches—embroidered ocean blue, iconic.
“How do you want to pay for your new license?”