A River City Almanac

The River In Question
By Colby Quid

It is said that Portugese explorer Estevan Gomez was the first European to give Maine's largest river a name. Sailing up a wide river off the coast of Maine in June of 1525, he declared the river the Rio de las Gamas, or Deer River, apparently after many a sighting of Odocoileus virginianus.

This raises the question of what the river had been called for the several millennia before Gomez-come-lately sailed a mere half millennium past. For an answer, I turned to that venerable source, Indian Place Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, first published in 1941. Despite six decades of advances in the linguistic sciences, this book continues to hold its own as a meticulously researched source.

The first chapter deals with the naming of the river. It appears the Indians chose descriptive names for sections of the river that may have served as "travel advisories" for those who would navigate it. Thus, the word "penobscot," by which the entire river is known today, and which, according to Eckstorm, means "at the descending rock," was applied only to the stretch between Old Town and Bangor, where there is roughly ten miles of falls in close succession. From Bangor to Bucksport, Eckstorm says, the river was known as Pemtegwatook, "wide river," a name that was familiar to Champlain.

There are many names for points along the banks namimg alewife fisheries, eel-weir shallows, and slippery ledges – and one that warns travellers of an abode of unfriendly spirits – all up and down the river from the bay to the tributaries of the West Branch.

I cross by foot over this river nearly every day of my life and consider that I am, like the water that flows through it, a part of a stream that runs through time, pulled forward by a force I cannot resist and buffeted by forces beyond my ken. I often feel I share a soul with this river. And when I pass by Fannie's home in Brewer, which in her lifetime was a place of hospitality to the Native people she studied and loved deeply but without sentimentality, I hope that I, too, share some bit of brotherhood with all the other lives that have shared a soul with this river in the long stream of history that has run parallel along it.

When I'm Between Books

I'm between books and the ice is out and the fish are biting
By Marc Berlin

Spring in Maine not only heralds our famous mud season but also signals the opening of our rivers and lakes to canoes, kayaks and yes, fishing. Tradition holds that the first salmon caught on the Penobscot River be delivered to the current President of the United States. Scarcity of salmon and a determined catch and release policy has doomed this tradition, but fishermen can still be found at the various salmon pools above the Bangor Waterworks. Fishing, and especially fly fishing, becomes the topic of conversation in certain circles.

Single-mindedness can define certain fisher-folk during a Maine Spring so it was fun to revisit David James Duncan' classic romp The River Why. Here an obsession for fishing is a metaphor for every bit of philosophical lure a bait box can hold. It's as if Tom Jones decided to join Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair for a wild ride on the fast moving, rock strewn river called: the meaning of life.

Gus Orviston, scion of a world famous fly fisherman and an equally renowned bait fisherwoman, grows up believing that fishing is life but, alas, one day he has cause to question whether, in fact, there might be more to life than fishing. An engaging group of neighbors, local children and a visiting sage with the name of Titus and dog named Descartes all try to answer Gus' questions by using Indian lore, storytelling, and a rambunctious sense of life.
If, like yours truly, you prefer to do your fishing from a living room armchair, David Duncan's book will provide a great deal of pleasure and few bug bites. It's a keeper.