The river wild

Now, though, things move fast and nearly always. Steel timber trucks with claws hanging from their long arms and blades hidden up their sleeves push in to grip and grab the biggest trees standing. Other trucks with flatbeds strong enough to carry a quarter-million pounds charge over those same dirt roads, whether hot and dusty or locked beneath ice, at speeds up to 75 miles per hour to mills where their cargo is turned into planks, pulp, and paper.

This relentless rhythm slows only rarely, for a few weeks each spring when the snow melts, low stretches of road gunk up, and the forest calms.

It was during this time, on a Tuesday in May, that I climbed into a pickup truck with two guides and a photographer for a ride over some of those empty roads -- the Michaud Farm Road, the Maibec-Blanchette, and the Depot, specifically -- to a low bridge over the fat, full waters of the Big Black River. Our plan was to canoe with the strong spring current down the seldom-run river to the confluence with the St. John River and its wide ride back to town. This journey into the relative wilderness would provide a chance to measure the present, recall a more rooted past, and consider, amid the rush of spring runoff heading for the sea, the acceleration of our technological times toward an uncertain future.

A few miles east of the Canadian border, a low, single-lane bridge delivers the Depot Road across the Big Black. Like many of the tributaries that feed the upper St. John, the Big Black weaves through Quebec farmland before flowing into the northwest corner of Maine's 10 1/2-million-acre woods, part of the largest swath of forest east of the Mississippi.

We paddled downstream from the bridge, where the high water ran easily between banks lined tall with evergreen and still-bare hardwoods. Occasionally, pairs of ducks took flight, or a bird of prey circled above the trees. Then, after three miles, a bend opened to a sweep of river and, on the left bank, an A-frame cabin.

Two women were bent over, cleaning gas lamps.

''Bonjour!" one called to us.

She turned to her friend: ''Are they Canadian?"