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Lance Wheaton, a Registered Maine Guide who works out of northern Washington County, helps his two clients into the 21-foot canoe he built one winter, starts the outboard motor, and powers across Baskahegan Lake. The water mirrors the deep blue of the sky.
Twenty minutes later, Wheaton and his novice crew arrive at a special spot on the 6,900-acre lake, in front of the green, undeveloped shoreline. Before the rods are ready with worms knotted on hooks, something jumps close to the boat. One of the clients calls out, “A fish!”
“That’s the wind,” Wheaton responds, his humor nearly convincing. But after a second bass jumps, the clients are on to him, even though they can’t see his eyes behind his shades. It’s going to be a great day.
A professional guide’s typical workday is the envy of any outdoors-lover who works indoors. Season to season, whatever the weather, these guides get paid to lead clients to spectacular places and share insights that only years in Maine’s woods or waters can generate. They tell stories, some can clean a fish in 60 seconds (Wheaton does it without using a board), and they can prepare a delicious lunch over an open fire, and most of all, keep their “sports” comfortable and safe.
Guides also serve as teachers. Beyond the finer points of hunting, fishing, or hiking, most Registered Maine Guides consider land conservation and its preservation for future generations their core lesson. “You could go to 100 lakes around here and never see this,” Wheaton says, nodding around him as his clients fish. “No camps. No boats. No development.”
At 62, Wheaton has worked the woods and the water since his childhood in Grand Lake Stream. He did have one short stint living away, but six months in Connecticut as newlyweds in the 1960s convinced Lance and Georgie Wheaton to head back home. They’re still a team. While Lance takes clients out for the day, Georgie handles both bookings and book keeping, cleans the couple’s six rental cabins on East Grand Lake, and bakes the custard pies that serve as dessert for the next day’s clients.
The Wheaton name carries cache among guides in eastern Maine. There are three Wheaton siblings, and each is a Registered Maine Guide. Most days all three are out with clients through their separate guiding operations. Oldest brother Arthur recently retired as a vice president of Remington firearms. Youngest brother Dale runs Wheaton’s Lodge, established by their father in 1953 in Forest City, population 11. Arthur, Lance, and Dale Wheaton’s father was none other than Woodie Wheaton, a well-known outdoorsman and friend of sports journalist Bud Leavitt, whose legacy is honored through the Woodie Wheaton Land Trust in the Chiputneticook Lakes region.
In the guiding profession, longevity and legacy are highly treasured. Matt Libby of Ashland is a fourth-generation guide. Now 52, he has guided friends across woods and water since he was 12, and clients since he was legally of age to guide. Today, he and his wife operate Libby Camps on Millinocket Lake full-time. It’s a family business: He bought out his mother 30 years ago. Before that, his grandfather ran the operation that his own father had started in 1890.
Not all longtime guides own sporting camps. Charlie Hamel has paddled the Allagash for more than 25 years, and guided about that long, too. His one-time hobby has turned nicely into a one-man enterprise. “My business is me, it’s my energy,” he says, a business that centers on “showing the tremendous love I have for the woods and waters of Maine.”
-----
More people than ever are trying to turn their love for the outdoors into a livelihood. According to Maryann Foye, who works for the state licensing board, about 6,000 men and women are Registered Maine Guides. As many as 300 new guides are licensed each year. Licensees can gain credentials in five guiding categories—hunting, fishing, recreation, sea kayaking, and coastal tidewater fishing.
Yet only about 10% of current licensees are members of the Maine Professional Guides Association. Why do so many go through the grueling licensing process, which includes a notoriously tough written and oral, yet not make guiding a serious profession?
The problem isn’t a lack of people interested in experiencing the Maine outdoors. While national hunting and fishing license sales have declined about 15% over the past 10 years, for instance, Maine is holding its own. According to the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, there were 267,158 licensed anglers in Maine in 1996. In 2006, that number grew to 279,262, an increase of nearly 5%. In 1996, Maine had 210,183 licensed hunters. In 2006, that number was 209,165, a decrease of one-half of 1%.
Outdoor sportswriter, Maine guide, and Bangor Metro columnist Brad Eden has his own theories on why so many Registered Maine Guides don’t end up guiding for a living. “People always decide to get their license because of an intense love for the outdoors,” Eden says. “You start out thinking you’ll do a lot more of what you love, but you’re fooling yourself. It’s a lot of hard work. There’s stress involved. You have to meet the expectations of people who are paying you. In some sense, you’re in the entertainment business.”
The monetary realities of guiding also come as a surprise to many. Getting insurance, for example, can be difficult because “you’re dealing with water, weaponry,” Eden says. “You have people’s lives in your hands.”
One last drawback—the need to give up your trade secrets—is perhaps the most painful consequence of choosing Maine’s oldest profession. “In order to guide people, you have to take them someplace, and you end up showing them your best spots,” Eden says. “Then, the next year, low and behold, you see the truck of the guy you guided last year parked next to your bird covers, without you.” GPS devices make going back to even the most remote spots a slam dunk.
Those realities of guiding full-time ultimately caused Eden to rethink how to put his woods and waters knowledge to work. He does so primarily through his writing, artwork, and his online business www.uplandjournal.com, and guides in the woods only a few times a year. This choice opened his eyes to another reality of guiding in Maine: the unspoken hierarchy of who qualifies as a “real” guide.
“A lot of full-time guides seem to have a lot of resentment toward people who are part-timers, which I think is unfortunate,” he says. “With issues like private land use at stake, we need to all work together.”
-----
No words strike more fear into the heart of a Maine guide than “No Trespassing.” Only a handful of Maine guides own enough land for their customers to hunt, fish, or paddle on. Fortunately for outdoor enthusiasts, Maine has a unique tradition of allowing public use of private lands. This tradition is strengthened through various Maine laws, most notably the doctrine of “implied access,” which states that if land is not posted, it is assumed the public has the right to use it. Maine’s “Great Ponds” laws actually set penalties for landowners who “deny access or egress over unimproved land to a great pond,” generally those over 10 acres. Maine law also protects landowners from suits by people injured on their land while engaged in recreational activity, removing a potential deterrent from allowing the public to use private lands.
Thanks to this tradition, huge tracts of Maine land have historically been open for recreational use, many owned by large timberland companies. Lance Wheaton’s chosen fishing spot, for instance, is on land owned by the Baskahegan Company, a family-owned company that has managed timberlands in Washington County, now totaling over 100,000 acres, for more than 80 years.
Yet, with more large parcels being subdivided, posted land is becoming more and more common. When Roxanne Quimby, cofounder of Burt’s Bees, chose to restrict access on the 24,000 acres of land she purchased, many members of the public came to realize something Maine guides have long known—that Maine’s voluntary open land tradition cannot be taken for granted.
Even in places where land access is not an issue, a day with a guide, though still exhilarating, is not exactly what your grandfather may have enjoyed. Some of the differences can be blamed on “progress.” On land, the logging industry has put up access roads that don’t show on maps. Gone are the places where it took a day to hike in to the perfect spot. There also is pressure on lakeshores for development. Consequently, on the water, the appearance of jet skis and private watercraft in what used to be remote areas is disconcerting. They can detract from the pure outdoor experience that clients anticipate.
But clients have changed, too. Anglers simply do not stay as long as they used to, for one thing. A generation ago they averaged eight to 10 days in the wilderness. Today, four or five days is a long trip. Incredibly, while clients appear to want to get away from it all, they also ask guides to take them to a point of cell phone reception.
An additional, little-considered challenge for today’s guides isn’t about woods or water at all. It’s simply that families have trouble getting their kids outdoors at an early age. “The kids are ready at 6, and still willing at 10,” Matt Libby, who guides out of Ashland, says. “But if you wait until they are teens, they probably will want to play Nintendo.” Most fortunate are the guides who get to take along father-son or mother-daughter pairs. They also get to see the kids laugh as they catch their first trout or spook their first moose.
The photo that used to say it all was that of grinning outdoorsmen holding up long strings of fish. Today, when whole families are the clients, the prized photo may be the youngster holding up his or her first fish. The experience is no longer about how many fish a party might catch: It’s more about how many they catch and release. How else can future generations of anglers have the same quality experience, if fisheries decline?
Thirty-five years ago, a fishing party could catch 60 or 80 fish in a day. Then bringing back a dozen or 24 fish became the norm. Today, regulations limit the catch and even vary by the season—only one smallmouth bass per day until the first of July, for example. The quality of the experience has replaced the quality of the catch.
The nature of the experience has also changed. As “ecotourism” has grown, so has the interest in non-consumptive sports such as hiking, kayaking, bird-watching, and nature photography. Many guides like Lance Wheaton are Master Maine Guides in fishing, hunting, and recreation, so they can be ready for anything. Special guide niches, such as white-water rafting (which requires additional credentials) are also a response to a changing consumer demographic.
John Gaskins, 61, has been a guide in upper Washington County, not far from Danforth, for 32 years. Despite the many changes over the last few decades, Gaskins says guiding is still “a grand activity. You get to see folks at their very best, most of the time. They are on vacation, and that usually equates to being happy. And,” he adds, “the lakes, woodlands, and wildlife where I work are simply spectacular.”
-----
In the end, the biggest constant in the guiding profession, beyond a kinship to the land, may be the power of storytelling. Registered Maine Guide seems to be a profession where big personalities can go far, starting with the first official Maine guide, “Fly Rod” Crosby (see sidebar). Guides have their specialties, but they tend to share the gift of gab, and get lots of practice in front of a captive audience.
Gary Tourtillotte, of Gary’s Guide Service in Howland, likes to tell the story about the time a 510-pound black bear climbed 12 feet up a tree stand, after it was shot. “When the next shot was taken, the bear’s head was between the hunter’s feet,” Tourtillotte says. “Claw marks on the stand confirm the story, and I was close enough to hear all four shots taken. I found the bear entangled in the lower rungs of the stand a few minutes later, along with one very stunned hunter.” The bear was No. 4 in Maine in 2003, and the story was written up in Bear Hunting magazine.
John Gonya, 51, holds guide licenses for fishing, hunting, recreation, and saltwater fishing, and operates the Penobscot Guide Service. He has a favorite one-liner he uses when the changing water levels and shifting winds make maneuvering the river seem a little scary. “I always tell people that I know where all the rocks are, because I’ve hit every one of them at least three times.”
On the canoe ride home over Baskahegan Lake, Lance Wheaton tells the story of how he got into the business, how guiding was in his blood, even before he was born. Arthur Wheaton, his grandfather, was one of the early guides in Grand Lake Stream. He died in his canoe in 1938, after getting his clients back to shore in advance of a looming storm.
These afternoon waters have no clouds darkening them. But if they did, it’s clear that Wheaton, like his grandfather, is ready to be not only a guide, but also a lifeguard.
The excursion ends when Wheaton extends his hand to help his now-not-so-novice fishing clients out of the canoe and onto shore. Then he backs his truck and trailer into the water to hoist the canoe for transport. Two faded stickers cover each end of the bumper. The fish-shaped one reads: “Love ’em and leave ’em.”
Even after Wheaton drops off his clients, his day won’t be finished for another 90 minutes. He will clean and vacuum the canoe, replenish the motor’s gas tank and get the boat ready for the next morning’s clients.
Asked if he ever thought of doing anything else for a living, he stops. He looks straight at the client.
“There isn’t anything else,” he says.
-----
Woods and Waters Headliners
“Fly Rod” Crosby: Maine’s First Guide
Guiding officially began back in 1897, when the Maine Legislature enacted a bill requiring hunting guides to be registered. That first year brought forth 1,316 guides—and “Fly Rod” Crosby was deliberately bestowed the first license.
Crosby was actually Cornelia Thurza Crosby (1854–1946), a woman whose remarkable life included being the first woman to legally shoot a caribou in Maine, catching 200 trout in one day, and, according to rumor, facing off with Annie Oakley in a sharpshooting competition. A captivating storyteller, Crosby became known as “Fly Rod” after submitting accounts of her Maine fishing outings to a newspaper, which were eventually published in a syndicated column, “Fly Rod’s Notebook,” in newspapers from New York to Chicago. The Maine Central Railroad eventually hired the six-foot-tall celebrity to travel to expositions and fairs to lure travelers to Maine. Crosby displayed marketing prowess ahead of her time, attracting visitors to her booth with an elaborate log cabin display, a scrapbook of her photographs, and a scandalously short (knee-length) doe-skin skirt.
Chief Joe Polis: Thoreau’s Hero
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau’s personal heroes were three men: poet Walt Whitman, abolitionist John Brown, and Penobscot chief Joe Polis, who served as Thoreau’s guide to the Maine woods in the summer of 1857.
As soon as Thoreau hired Polis to guide him, he knew he had befriended a man of vast knowledge. “I told him that in this voyage I would tell him all I knew,” Thoreau wrote, “and he should tell me all he knew, to which he readily agreed.”
Thoreau was a skilled botanist, but Polis trumped him by knowing medicinal uses for every plant they encountered. Chief Polis also had a foot in aspects of both white and Native American cultures, living in a beautiful house on Indian Island, while feeling equally at home in the Maine wilderness. Polis’ ability to synthesize both worlds left a lasting impression on the naturalist.
While Thoreau has been remembered as one of our state’s most famous and appreciative visitors, documented in his classic, The Maine Woods, he wouldn’t have made it halfway to Katahdin without Maine’s original cadre of guides—chief among them, Joe Polis.
L. L. Bean: Close, but No
Though Leon Leonwood Bean, the man who started the L. L. Bean catalog empire, can be credited with customer-friendly service and appearing as the ultimate expert in the ways of Maine’s outdoors, he was never a licensed guide.
Truly one of Maine’s most celebrated and original outdoorsmen, L. L. Bean manufactured Bean Boots—the first “Maine Hunting Shoe”—back in 1912. He spread the gospel of Maine’s woods and waters by catalog, and added to his sporting image by publishing the book Hunting, Fishing and Camping in 1942. His brand is still as close to the heart of the Maine mystique as lobsters, moose, and lighthouses.
Leon Leonwood Bean was an authentic outdoorsman and brilliant businessman, all right, but for those who wonder—no, never a Registered Maine Guide.
Coffee, Guide-style
“Would you like coffee with your lunch?”
“Yes,” the client says politely, not sure if Lance Wheaton would hand her a cup of instant. Coffee is soon served—fresh, hot, just off the fire. Delicious. No grounds, either. How did he do that?
This is guide’s coffee, made without a filter, using a method that guides have relied on for more than 100 years. With guide’s coffee, grounds are mixed with a raw egg, then poured into the boiling water. When the coffee is done cooking and the guide fills up your cup, the grounds stay bound to the egg. Lance Wheaton learned how to make Maine guide’s signature drink from his father and mentor, Woodie Wheaton.
Twenty minutes later, Wheaton and his novice crew arrive at a special spot on the 6,900-acre lake, in front of the green, undeveloped shoreline. Before the rods are ready with worms knotted on hooks, something jumps close to the boat. One of the clients calls out, “A fish!”
“That’s the wind,” Wheaton responds, his humor nearly convincing. But after a second bass jumps, the clients are on to him, even though they can’t see his eyes behind his shades. It’s going to be a great day.
A professional guide’s typical workday is the envy of any outdoors-lover who works indoors. Season to season, whatever the weather, these guides get paid to lead clients to spectacular places and share insights that only years in Maine’s woods or waters can generate. They tell stories, some can clean a fish in 60 seconds (Wheaton does it without using a board), and they can prepare a delicious lunch over an open fire, and most of all, keep their “sports” comfortable and safe.
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Guides also serve as teachers. Beyond the finer points of hunting, fishing, or hiking, most Registered Maine Guides consider land conservation and its preservation for future generations their core lesson. “You could go to 100 lakes around here and never see this,” Wheaton says, nodding around him as his clients fish. “No camps. No boats. No development.”
At 62, Wheaton has worked the woods and the water since his childhood in Grand Lake Stream. He did have one short stint living away, but six months in Connecticut as newlyweds in the 1960s convinced Lance and Georgie Wheaton to head back home. They’re still a team. While Lance takes clients out for the day, Georgie handles both bookings and book keeping, cleans the couple’s six rental cabins on East Grand Lake, and bakes the custard pies that serve as dessert for the next day’s clients.
The Wheaton name carries cache among guides in eastern Maine. There are three Wheaton siblings, and each is a Registered Maine Guide. Most days all three are out with clients through their separate guiding operations. Oldest brother Arthur recently retired as a vice president of Remington firearms. Youngest brother Dale runs Wheaton’s Lodge, established by their father in 1953 in Forest City, population 11. Arthur, Lance, and Dale Wheaton’s father was none other than Woodie Wheaton, a well-known outdoorsman and friend of sports journalist Bud Leavitt, whose legacy is honored through the Woodie Wheaton Land Trust in the Chiputneticook Lakes region.
In the guiding profession, longevity and legacy are highly treasured. Matt Libby of Ashland is a fourth-generation guide. Now 52, he has guided friends across woods and water since he was 12, and clients since he was legally of age to guide. Today, he and his wife operate Libby Camps on Millinocket Lake full-time. It’s a family business: He bought out his mother 30 years ago. Before that, his grandfather ran the operation that his own father had started in 1890.
Not all longtime guides own sporting camps. Charlie Hamel has paddled the Allagash for more than 25 years, and guided about that long, too. His one-time hobby has turned nicely into a one-man enterprise. “My business is me, it’s my energy,” he says, a business that centers on “showing the tremendous love I have for the woods and waters of Maine.”
-----
The Lure of the Patch
More people than ever are trying to turn their love for the outdoors into a livelihood. According to Maryann Foye, who works for the state licensing board, about 6,000 men and women are Registered Maine Guides. As many as 300 new guides are licensed each year. Licensees can gain credentials in five guiding categories—hunting, fishing, recreation, sea kayaking, and coastal tidewater fishing. Yet only about 10% of current licensees are members of the Maine Professional Guides Association. Why do so many go through the grueling licensing process, which includes a notoriously tough written and oral, yet not make guiding a serious profession?
The problem isn’t a lack of people interested in experiencing the Maine outdoors. While national hunting and fishing license sales have declined about 15% over the past 10 years, for instance, Maine is holding its own. According to the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, there were 267,158 licensed anglers in Maine in 1996. In 2006, that number grew to 279,262, an increase of nearly 5%. In 1996, Maine had 210,183 licensed hunters. In 2006, that number was 209,165, a decrease of one-half of 1%.
Outdoor sportswriter, Maine guide, and Bangor Metro columnist Brad Eden has his own theories on why so many Registered Maine Guides don’t end up guiding for a living. “People always decide to get their license because of an intense love for the outdoors,” Eden says. “You start out thinking you’ll do a lot more of what you love, but you’re fooling yourself. It’s a lot of hard work. There’s stress involved. You have to meet the expectations of people who are paying you. In some sense, you’re in the entertainment business.”
The monetary realities of guiding also come as a surprise to many. Getting insurance, for example, can be difficult because “you’re dealing with water, weaponry,” Eden says. “You have people’s lives in your hands.”
One last drawback—the need to give up your trade secrets—is perhaps the most painful consequence of choosing Maine’s oldest profession. “In order to guide people, you have to take them someplace, and you end up showing them your best spots,” Eden says. “Then, the next year, low and behold, you see the truck of the guy you guided last year parked next to your bird covers, without you.” GPS devices make going back to even the most remote spots a slam dunk.
Those realities of guiding full-time ultimately caused Eden to rethink how to put his woods and waters knowledge to work. He does so primarily through his writing, artwork, and his online business www.uplandjournal.com, and guides in the woods only a few times a year. This choice opened his eyes to another reality of guiding in Maine: the unspoken hierarchy of who qualifies as a “real” guide.
“A lot of full-time guides seem to have a lot of resentment toward people who are part-timers, which I think is unfortunate,” he says. “With issues like private land use at stake, we need to all work together.”
-----
Shared Acreage
No words strike more fear into the heart of a Maine guide than “No Trespassing.” Only a handful of Maine guides own enough land for their customers to hunt, fish, or paddle on. Fortunately for outdoor enthusiasts, Maine has a unique tradition of allowing public use of private lands. This tradition is strengthened through various Maine laws, most notably the doctrine of “implied access,” which states that if land is not posted, it is assumed the public has the right to use it. Maine’s “Great Ponds” laws actually set penalties for landowners who “deny access or egress over unimproved land to a great pond,” generally those over 10 acres. Maine law also protects landowners from suits by people injured on their land while engaged in recreational activity, removing a potential deterrent from allowing the public to use private lands. Thanks to this tradition, huge tracts of Maine land have historically been open for recreational use, many owned by large timberland companies. Lance Wheaton’s chosen fishing spot, for instance, is on land owned by the Baskahegan Company, a family-owned company that has managed timberlands in Washington County, now totaling over 100,000 acres, for more than 80 years.
Yet, with more large parcels being subdivided, posted land is becoming more and more common. When Roxanne Quimby, cofounder of Burt’s Bees, chose to restrict access on the 24,000 acres of land she purchased, many members of the public came to realize something Maine guides have long known—that Maine’s voluntary open land tradition cannot be taken for granted.
Even in places where land access is not an issue, a day with a guide, though still exhilarating, is not exactly what your grandfather may have enjoyed. Some of the differences can be blamed on “progress.” On land, the logging industry has put up access roads that don’t show on maps. Gone are the places where it took a day to hike in to the perfect spot. There also is pressure on lakeshores for development. Consequently, on the water, the appearance of jet skis and private watercraft in what used to be remote areas is disconcerting. They can detract from the pure outdoor experience that clients anticipate.
But clients have changed, too. Anglers simply do not stay as long as they used to, for one thing. A generation ago they averaged eight to 10 days in the wilderness. Today, four or five days is a long trip. Incredibly, while clients appear to want to get away from it all, they also ask guides to take them to a point of cell phone reception.
An additional, little-considered challenge for today’s guides isn’t about woods or water at all. It’s simply that families have trouble getting their kids outdoors at an early age. “The kids are ready at 6, and still willing at 10,” Matt Libby, who guides out of Ashland, says. “But if you wait until they are teens, they probably will want to play Nintendo.” Most fortunate are the guides who get to take along father-son or mother-daughter pairs. They also get to see the kids laugh as they catch their first trout or spook their first moose.
The photo that used to say it all was that of grinning outdoorsmen holding up long strings of fish. Today, when whole families are the clients, the prized photo may be the youngster holding up his or her first fish. The experience is no longer about how many fish a party might catch: It’s more about how many they catch and release. How else can future generations of anglers have the same quality experience, if fisheries decline?
Thirty-five years ago, a fishing party could catch 60 or 80 fish in a day. Then bringing back a dozen or 24 fish became the norm. Today, regulations limit the catch and even vary by the season—only one smallmouth bass per day until the first of July, for example. The quality of the experience has replaced the quality of the catch.
The nature of the experience has also changed. As “ecotourism” has grown, so has the interest in non-consumptive sports such as hiking, kayaking, bird-watching, and nature photography. Many guides like Lance Wheaton are Master Maine Guides in fishing, hunting, and recreation, so they can be ready for anything. Special guide niches, such as white-water rafting (which requires additional credentials) are also a response to a changing consumer demographic.
John Gaskins, 61, has been a guide in upper Washington County, not far from Danforth, for 32 years. Despite the many changes over the last few decades, Gaskins says guiding is still “a grand activity. You get to see folks at their very best, most of the time. They are on vacation, and that usually equates to being happy. And,” he adds, “the lakes, woodlands, and wildlife where I work are simply spectacular.”
-----
Storytellers All
In the end, the biggest constant in the guiding profession, beyond a kinship to the land, may be the power of storytelling. Registered Maine Guide seems to be a profession where big personalities can go far, starting with the first official Maine guide, “Fly Rod” Crosby (see sidebar). Guides have their specialties, but they tend to share the gift of gab, and get lots of practice in front of a captive audience. Gary Tourtillotte, of Gary’s Guide Service in Howland, likes to tell the story about the time a 510-pound black bear climbed 12 feet up a tree stand, after it was shot. “When the next shot was taken, the bear’s head was between the hunter’s feet,” Tourtillotte says. “Claw marks on the stand confirm the story, and I was close enough to hear all four shots taken. I found the bear entangled in the lower rungs of the stand a few minutes later, along with one very stunned hunter.” The bear was No. 4 in Maine in 2003, and the story was written up in Bear Hunting magazine.
John Gonya, 51, holds guide licenses for fishing, hunting, recreation, and saltwater fishing, and operates the Penobscot Guide Service. He has a favorite one-liner he uses when the changing water levels and shifting winds make maneuvering the river seem a little scary. “I always tell people that I know where all the rocks are, because I’ve hit every one of them at least three times.”
On the canoe ride home over Baskahegan Lake, Lance Wheaton tells the story of how he got into the business, how guiding was in his blood, even before he was born. Arthur Wheaton, his grandfather, was one of the early guides in Grand Lake Stream. He died in his canoe in 1938, after getting his clients back to shore in advance of a looming storm.
These afternoon waters have no clouds darkening them. But if they did, it’s clear that Wheaton, like his grandfather, is ready to be not only a guide, but also a lifeguard.
The excursion ends when Wheaton extends his hand to help his now-not-so-novice fishing clients out of the canoe and onto shore. Then he backs his truck and trailer into the water to hoist the canoe for transport. Two faded stickers cover each end of the bumper. The fish-shaped one reads: “Love ’em and leave ’em.”
Even after Wheaton drops off his clients, his day won’t be finished for another 90 minutes. He will clean and vacuum the canoe, replenish the motor’s gas tank and get the boat ready for the next morning’s clients.
Asked if he ever thought of doing anything else for a living, he stops. He looks straight at the client.
“There isn’t anything else,” he says.
-----
Woods and Waters Headliners
“Fly Rod” Crosby: Maine’s First GuideGuiding officially began back in 1897, when the Maine Legislature enacted a bill requiring hunting guides to be registered. That first year brought forth 1,316 guides—and “Fly Rod” Crosby was deliberately bestowed the first license.
Crosby was actually Cornelia Thurza Crosby (1854–1946), a woman whose remarkable life included being the first woman to legally shoot a caribou in Maine, catching 200 trout in one day, and, according to rumor, facing off with Annie Oakley in a sharpshooting competition. A captivating storyteller, Crosby became known as “Fly Rod” after submitting accounts of her Maine fishing outings to a newspaper, which were eventually published in a syndicated column, “Fly Rod’s Notebook,” in newspapers from New York to Chicago. The Maine Central Railroad eventually hired the six-foot-tall celebrity to travel to expositions and fairs to lure travelers to Maine. Crosby displayed marketing prowess ahead of her time, attracting visitors to her booth with an elaborate log cabin display, a scrapbook of her photographs, and a scandalously short (knee-length) doe-skin skirt.
Chief Joe Polis: Thoreau’s Hero
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau’s personal heroes were three men: poet Walt Whitman, abolitionist John Brown, and Penobscot chief Joe Polis, who served as Thoreau’s guide to the Maine woods in the summer of 1857.
As soon as Thoreau hired Polis to guide him, he knew he had befriended a man of vast knowledge. “I told him that in this voyage I would tell him all I knew,” Thoreau wrote, “and he should tell me all he knew, to which he readily agreed.”
Thoreau was a skilled botanist, but Polis trumped him by knowing medicinal uses for every plant they encountered. Chief Polis also had a foot in aspects of both white and Native American cultures, living in a beautiful house on Indian Island, while feeling equally at home in the Maine wilderness. Polis’ ability to synthesize both worlds left a lasting impression on the naturalist.
While Thoreau has been remembered as one of our state’s most famous and appreciative visitors, documented in his classic, The Maine Woods, he wouldn’t have made it halfway to Katahdin without Maine’s original cadre of guides—chief among them, Joe Polis.
L. L. Bean: Close, but No
Though Leon Leonwood Bean, the man who started the L. L. Bean catalog empire, can be credited with customer-friendly service and appearing as the ultimate expert in the ways of Maine’s outdoors, he was never a licensed guide.
Truly one of Maine’s most celebrated and original outdoorsmen, L. L. Bean manufactured Bean Boots—the first “Maine Hunting Shoe”—back in 1912. He spread the gospel of Maine’s woods and waters by catalog, and added to his sporting image by publishing the book Hunting, Fishing and Camping in 1942. His brand is still as close to the heart of the Maine mystique as lobsters, moose, and lighthouses.
Leon Leonwood Bean was an authentic outdoorsman and brilliant businessman, all right, but for those who wonder—no, never a Registered Maine Guide.
Coffee, Guide-style
“Would you like coffee with your lunch?”
“Yes,” the client says politely, not sure if Lance Wheaton would hand her a cup of instant. Coffee is soon served—fresh, hot, just off the fire. Delicious. No grounds, either. How did he do that?
This is guide’s coffee, made without a filter, using a method that guides have relied on for more than 100 years. With guide’s coffee, grounds are mixed with a raw egg, then poured into the boiling water. When the coffee is done cooking and the guide fills up your cup, the grounds stay bound to the egg. Lance Wheaton learned how to make Maine guide’s signature drink from his father and mentor, Woodie Wheaton.
