JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Paul Doiron is one of my favorite writers. Not just for his terrific Mike Bowditch series - although I love following the Maine game warden as he struggles and grows into his role as a hero. Not just because he's a great dinner companion and stalwart tourer - ask him about our "Death to Bookstores" appearances in '10 - but because he cares passionately about Maine. From the bucolic coastal villages to the dying mill towns, from the metropolitan south to the almost-uninhabited north, he writes - in both his fiction and his nonfiction - wisely and well about the state we love.
Who hates national
parks? No one, right? According to the National Park Service, 278,939,216 people
visited the United States’s crown jewels in 2011. My own state of Maine is home
to one of the most popular in the East—Acadia National Park—which generally
receives more than 2 million recreational visits a year. So it might surprise
you to learn that one of the most controversial issues in Maine right now is
whether to create a new national park in the state’s celebrated North Woods as a
potential sanctuary for caribou, wolves, and lynx.
For more than a decade
environmentalists, joined by entrepreneur and philanthropist Roxanne Quimby, famous as the founder of Burt’s Bees*,
has been lobbying to create a new park in the vicinity of majestic Mount
Katahdin—and their efforts have been met with fear, resentment, and in some
cases, violence. Quimby has gone so far as to buy 70,000 acres herself to give
to the National Park Service, but state politicos — and the feds, at the behest
of local politicians — have so far given her the cold shoulder.
The fear in Maine is
that the park would signal the death knell of the state’s wood-products
industry (what most people call “logging”). And Quimby hasn’t helped matters by
halting lumbering on her lands and banning access to hunters, snowmobilers, and
ATV riders who had previously used it for years. Novelists know that a crisis
is very often the truest expression of someone’s character. That statement can
be as true of place like Maine as it is for a person.
A crisis can also be
the precursor to murder, of course. That’s why I decided to focus my new novel,
Massacre Pond
— the fourth in my Mike Bowditch series — around the creation of a fictional
Moosehorn National Park. My protagonist is no Anna Pigeon; he’s a young Maine
game warden who starts the book unsold on either the virtues of the park
concept (he likes to hunt and fish, after all) or the virtues of the wealthy
woman promoting the radical idea. But when a seemingly senseless moose massacre
occurs on her property he finds himself dragged into the debate—which escalates
very quickly to human murder, as well.
These days we’ve
become used to books and television shows being “ripped from the headlines,”
but from the days of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, fiction has also been a useful tool to start a public debate.
And that’s what I aim to do. “Sensational” and “serious” aren’t always
antonyms.
I used to have
misgivings about a North Woods National Park, primarily out of a respect for
the small Maine communities that would be most affected by its creation. (Some
sort of preserve modeled on Adirondack Park was always my preference.) When
asked about Massacre Pond, I’ve said that I had to write an entire novel to get my own
conflicted views on the subject on paper.
One irony to the
present situation is that it was Henry David Thoreau himself — the popularizer
of Mount Katahdin (and the effective creator of Maine’s tourism industry) — who
was the state’s first advocate for a Maine woods national park. He wrote:
“The kings of
England formerly had their forests ‘to hold the king’s game,’ for sport or
food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them . . . Why should
not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our national preserves,
where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some
even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of
the earth,’ — our forests, not to hold the king’s game merely, but to hold and
preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation,—not for idle sport or
food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation?”
How this crisis will all play out is
unanswerable by my Magic 8 Ball. The political 
winds aren’t currently in favor
of the park, but we know how quickly those can change. And the fate of the
American woods-products industry depends less on what happens in the Maine
capital of Augusta — or even Washington, DC — and more on what’s going on in
South Africa and the Amazon and Indonesia.
winds aren’t currently in favor
of the park, but we know how quickly those can change. And the fate of the
American woods-products industry depends less on what happens in the Maine
capital of Augusta — or even Washington, DC — and more on what’s going on in
South Africa and the Amazon and Indonesia.
One of my newest
concerns is this: By the time Mainers finally decide whether they want a North
Woods park, will global climate change have already transformed our beautiful
boreal forest into someplace subtropical? Instead of the Canada lynx will we
have the feral pig, and instead of the sugar maple, will we have the pecan?
I call this dystopian
vision of the future: “No Country for Old Moose.”
*By the way, did
you know that Taiwain has a national holiday devoted to Burt
Shavitz, the namesake of Burt’s Bees. Yep, they do.
The fourth Mike Bowditch mystery, Massacre Pond, comes out on July 16th. You can find out more about Paul and read excerpts of his novels at his website. You can read more of his thoughts at his blog, friend him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter as @PaulDoiron. Paul is also a contributor to the Maine Crime Writers blog.
The fourth Mike Bowditch mystery, Massacre Pond, comes out on July 16th. You can find out more about Paul and read excerpts of his novels at his website. You can read more of his thoughts at his blog, friend him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter as @PaulDoiron. Paul is also a contributor to the Maine Crime Writers blog.
