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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com with We Took To The Woods. For me, however, there is a more obvious and meaningful comparison. If one wishes to find companion works to My Life in the Maine Woods one need look no further than Dorothy Boone Kidney and her two books on living in the Allagash. Like Annette Jackson, Dorothy Boone Kidney accompanied her husband into the deep north woods. The couple lived at Lock Dam on Chamberlain Lake, where Milford Kidney tended the dam as an employee of Bangor Hydro. Dorothy Boone Kidney, whose work appeared in Discover Maine Magazine before her passing, wrote two books of her Lock Dam experiences, Home in the Wilderness:Away From It All in the Allagash Wilderness of Maine, and Wilderness Journey: Life, Living and Contentment in the Allagash Woods of Maine. Kidney's work, like that of Annette Jackson, is aimed at those who have lived in or near the woods or have dreams of doing so. The comparison of Annette Jackson's writing to the likes of Edwin
Way Teale aside, My Life in the Maine Woods is important for a reason other than the fact that it may be a classic of the ecological genre. What Jackson does is to memorialize a Maine game warden. While there are any number of Maine game wardens who deserve to be so honored, there are few that have been so. My Life in the Maine Woods is replete with the everyday activities of Dave Jackson. He organizes a 500 - man search party for the crew of a downed Royal Canadian Air Force bomber. He comes home with a bullet hole in his hat. He brains a bobcat he had picked up, thinking it already dead, by swinging it against a tree or rock. Are these the activities of a run-of-the-mill individual who just happens to live in the woods? To me they are the exploits of a larger-than-life figure. If I were to compare Dave Jackson to anyone, it would be to his contemporary Caleb Scribner. Both men were game wardens in the same time period,
from the Depression to the early 1950s when both retired. Scribner's home base was the Katahdin region. Scribner was Warden Supervisor for Division H, the division which included Umsaskis and Allagash Plantation, the warden posting Dave Jackson was assigned to in 1938. Scribner was Jackson's boss. Caleb Scribner was as remarkable in his way as Dave Jackson was in his. Sadly, except for all-too-short sketches, no one has yet to write in depth on this other remarkable north woods game warden whose work life encompassed many of the formative years of Baxter State Park. Annette Jackson's My Life in the Maine Woods is a remarkable book. It is remarkable in its timelessness. The fact that it deals with the 1930s and '40s in no way detracts from its immediacy. It is worth reading for no other reason than it reveals there is little that separates the basic thinking and motives of those of seventy and more years ago from those of us living today.
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