The father drove all the way over with a pair of fast horses, picked up his son’s pay – about $300 – climbed back into his buggy, and left. The rivermen buried the boy beside the falls and scratched his information upon a stone. The last time I looked, it was almost impossible to spot. But as far as I know, it’s still there beside the river. If you go to the falls this summer on June 21, just 115 years later, you’ll see brightly colored kayaks darting through the rapids, fishermen’s boat trailers empty by the landing, and picnickers in the grass under the trees. Not one of those people will have any inkling of all that’s happened there since colonial times.

During the last week of February 1704 a raiding party of French and Indians marched over 100 captives from Deerfield, Massachusetts, up the river past those falls on the way to Quebec. On October 31, 1759, Robert Rogers and a couple of his famous Rangers, starving and freezing, lowered a rough raft over the falls near the end of their desperate retreat from Quebec. Later there were settlers in flatboats, a dam for a mill that never had a chance when the ice went out, and an attempt at a canal. Someone who knows what he’s looking for can still find evidence of some of that, but nobody really cares much anymore.

I think of the brute of a father from Cherryfield when I turn the nose of my truck toward the headwaters of the Androscoggin River. Living well east of Mount Desert, he had to cross quite a few river drainages to get to the Connecticut. I have no idea how long it took him. A horse-drawn buggy would require two or three days to cover what I now travel in two hours. I follow the dwindling Winooski (St. Lawrence watershed) up a few hills to Mollys Pond, and leave the west-flowing water behind just a little way before Joes Pond. Then down the Joes Brook Valley to the Passumpsic at St. Johnsbury. Up and over again and alongside the deadwater of the Connecticut behind the dam at Gilman. Across what I call Alexandra’s Bridge, where once, on a canoe trip, I found a pay phone and learned of the birth of our first grandchild. Follow the Connecticut to Groveton in a literal parade of large pickup trucks hauling snow machine trailers the size of bread vans, some of them. Leave the Connecticut at Groveton and travel up the Upper Ammonoosuc, once used, despite its tight bends, to drive logs down to Groveton. Then up and over probably New Hampshire’s second-bumpiest road and finally into the Androscoggin watershed.

I strike the Androscoggin here at what’s called Thirteen Mile Woods. To people of a certain turn of mind, it’s a historic site. For decades the river, which runs right beside the road without any guard rails between them, bore millions of feet of logs, and later pulp, down to the mills at Berlin. The woods that now buzz with the sound of snowmobile engines once rang with the sound of axes and crosscut saws. Teams of horses hauled sleds of logs out of the woods to the riverbank, where they were stacked up parallel to the shore in piles called rollways. In the spring, after the ice had gone out, the logs were chivvied with pikes and peavies until they rolled into the river. It was the most dangerous procedure of the whole season.

After that, it was pure pleasure for the men – up to their mid-thighs in ice water all day, prying logs off rocks, breaking jams, dancing like rustic Nijinskys in calked boots across the heaving, deadly sea of logs all the way to Berlin, sometimes on to Gorham or even Rumford. If they didn’t die by payoff time, and didn’t blow their pay before they got home, they had almost enough to last them and their families until the next November.

I can’t help but wonder, as I stop to look at the river – the only one open of all the rivers I’ve crossed this February day – how many of the passing pickup drivers, speeding toward high excitement on the trails to Pittsburg and Canada, have any idea what they’re passing. There’s little left of all the work those thousands of men did here. No more bunkhouses, forges, or horse hovels. The traveling kitchens that followed the men down the river on either rafts or wagons have moldered into dust. For years there stood beside the river an iron capstan used to tighten the booms that held logs back in the river till the river below was cleared; that’s been gone now for twenty or thirty years. The log-and-stone islands in the river that held the middle of the booms are now just piles of stones. My friend Jack Noon tells me there’s an abandoned bateau, rotted almost to invisibility, at the head of the Diamond Gorge on the Dartmouth College Grant. I’d like to see that.

For now, it’s off the the Grant for an evening with a group of students whose class years are almost meaningless to me – although I’ve figured out that a “Thirteen” is currently a freshman. Several older people associated with the Outing Club are trying to acquaint them with the joys of the rugged outdoors. Some of the kids will spend the night in a fir bough-roofed leanto with a fire on its open side. They’ll go snowshoeing, dogsledding, and cross-country skiing. They’ll cook for themselves in their cabins and tramp about in the woods with a naturalist looking for animal tracks and the stories they tell. Speaking of which, I’m supposed to tell them a story or two tonight after supper. There are hundreds of them, of course. But I have a feeling the students wouldn’t be much interested in tales of the old-time days of logging. Those are for sentimental old guys.