Passage III

Logging the Lake

Last June while I was visiting family in Maine, my uncle Lee invited me, a total city girl, to his “summer office”－a nickname for his boat. He's a teacher, but in the summer he salvages sunken logs from lakes and sells them. So one morning as we walked to the dock to ready the pontoon, a versatile type of boat that's essentially a platform atop two hollow metal flotation cylinders.

After a chilly ride across Moosehead Lake, we reached a bay that Uncle Lee had tagged on his GPS. He activated the boat's sonar, and piloted slowly forward as we watched a monitor. Soon, ghostly images appeared on the screen, showing what looked like a collection of matchsticks on the lake bottom. They weren't matchsticks, of course, but sunken logs.

For centuries, Maine loggers sent their harvests to market by floating them down rivers. When the logs reached Moosehead Lake, they were bound together and towed to lakeside sawmills. Each year, some of the logs sank. In the deep water, protected from insects and oxygen, the wood remained well preserved.

On the boat, another monitor displayed and showed the underwater video camera's view: the boat's grapple arm reaching for a log that Uncle Lee thought was birch. The arm's iron pinchers grasped the log, coaxed it from beneath another log, and, aided by a winch, they pull it from the depths. When the log surfaced, it looked like a gunked-up, mega-big telephone pole. As my uncle lashed the log to the boat, he pointed out the axe marks on the wood. Because it was felled by an axe he explained the tree was probably cut in the mid-nineteenth century. Add to that when it was cut the age of the tree—easily two hundred years—and we were looking at a birch that had seen centuries come and centuries go.

By the end of the day, I'd gotten pretty good at operating the grapple arm, and we had nine logs tied to the boat. Uncle Lee said that one day last year he hauled out twenty logs, but some days he'd leave the lake without finding a single salvageable log.