This was the first in a series of articles about the former Champion land in Essex County.
Staff and passing motorists rescued this wooden bruin from the Nulhegan River this summer. Refuge Manager Keith Weaver is hoping someone may be able to identify it. Photos by Paul Lefebvre
BRUNSWICK —There’s a bear of unknown pedigree chained to the railing outside the federal headquarters above the Nulhegan River basin. Standing upright, it looks out over a changing landscape of bulldozers, backhoes, and hard hats. The federal presence here is undergoing a dramatic transformation with the construction of a new $2.5-million building. Only the bear —the oldest deity in human mythology — is a familiar presence.
Unlike the chained bears at the site years ago that provided a roadside attraction to motorists and pulled patrons into the restaurant and landmark watering hole known as Bear Mountain, this bear is a wooden one. It was captured several weeks ago when a couple stopped because of something they saw in the Nulhegan River at a spot along the highway known as Stone Dam.
With help from a couple of staff members from the U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service, they managed to rescue what turned out to be a chainsaw sculptured bear that had been unceremoniously dumped into the river, most likely by vandals or thieves.
The chain that tethers the bear to the post today is there so no one will steal it again. The feds don’t have a clue where the piece came from, who created it or who owns it.
Like much of the area’s history, both natural and human, the wooden bruin with the long, pronounced claws is one of the mysteries coughed up by a river that rises in Averill and flows east into the Connecticut River at Bloomfield. It’s a river that has added its name to the Nulhegan and Victory Basin Wildland, which environmentalists say is “the largest relatively undeveloped watershed area within Vermont’s Northern Forest.” And it’s a river whose name has been most recently borrowed by the United States government to define a 26,000-acre wildlife refuge within what used to be paper company lands. They used the river and its tributaries to drive their logs and pulp to market.
The river still follows the course it has run for hundred of years. But as underscored by the impressive, some might say imperial, dimensions of the new building — 6,028 square feet — the land and the basin are changing. Each are about to play host to a myriad of new uses that will have to be balanced against the land, as well as each other. Given the land’s high ecological values, its rugged open character, its traditional uses, and the hopes for ecotourism to prime the economy of the poorest region in the state, its future promises to be a balancing act; one that just might require the timing of a juggler and the agility of a diplomat to hold it together.
Keith Weaver is the refuge manager of what is officially called the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Silvio O. Conte National Fish & Wildlife Refuge of
Refuge Manager Keith Weaver (left) and Visitors’ Service Manager Rick Potvin stand where visitors will look out onto the Nulhegan basin once the new $2.5-million center is up and running.
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services. An accessible, talkative fellow who can be found some weekends outside the post office in Island Pond explaining what goes on at the refuge, Mr. Weaver concedes that the name is quite a mouthful. Among some natives, the decision to name a piece of the Northeast Kingdom after some Democratic congressman from Massachusetts sticks in their craw. But that’s the way these things work, and as Mr. Weaver points out, the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge encompasses 31,000 acres with holdings in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, as well as Vermont. It was named after a politician who died before seeing his legislative efforts to clean up and conserve the Connecticut River come to fruition. The feds bought the Vermont land in 1999 as part of the Champion lands deal, which saw roughly 133,000 acres of paper company land distributed among three major stakeholders — the state of Vermont and the Essex Timber Company being the other two players.
In the six years since the deal went down, the appearance of the land has stayed pretty much the same. Until now. The construction of an expansive visitors service center along a remote and forest-lined highway marks a radical break from the past. A thoroughly modern building, and the first in the country to be built from a design that allows the building’s orientation to be adapted to the contours of the land, the center will provide tourists and visitors with maps and information about the area. It will also provide a gift shop, conference rooms, and a viewing area that will overlook the basin itself. It is scheduled to open in July next year, and a federal clerk-of-the-works is on the site daily supervising a job carried out by Vermont workers working for a Vermont contractor. Vermont materials, such as granite, will be incorporated into the building, as well as an artifact from the site’s bygone days — the polished wooden bar from the fabled Bear Mountain roadhouse, where dances and fights were common weekend attractions before it closed in the early ’90s.
An artist’s rendition of what the new $2.5-million visitors’ center and administrative offices for the Nulhegan Basin Refuge will look like when it opens next summer.
With the new building come new programs and new services. Groups like Friends of the Nulhegan, along with professionals from the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury and Sterling College in Craftsbury, will use the center to conduct programs.
“We are starting a relationship with various organizations who provide a level of expertise,” says Mr. Weaver, who as refuge manager has to balance what the land was before Champion moved out and what it will become now that the federal government has taken over. It’s a role that both excites and causes him no small pangs of anxiety.
“As time goes by, the public is going to seek more and more outdoor venues,” he says while sitting in his temporary office behind the construction site and keeping an eye on his black lab, Emma, as she wanders in and out of the room. “It will happen with or without us,” he adds somewhat defensively.
“We’re building on what has always existed, with hope we can improve that.”
If Mr. Weaver sounds cautious, he’s got reason to be. On board ever since the land changed hands, he attended the numerous public hearings and debates over what was going to happen to the land as traditional patterns of ownership were breaking down. Now, five years later and on the cusp of implementing changes, he hopes he can strike a judicious note based on what he heard at those meetings.
“What came through loud and clear is that the people who went to those hearings didn’t want to see the character of the land changed,” says Mr. Weaver, who is teaching a course this semester at Lyndon State College on politics, the law, and the environment. Rather, he continues, they wanted the wild and rugged profile of the land to be retained. No theme park; no Disneyfication of the resources. Those sentiments, he says, “made an indelible impression on me.”
The trick, of course, is how to change something and keep it the same. Or, more specifically, how to promote public use of the refuge and preserve its inherently rugged character without losing one to the other. Recently, Mr. Weaver had to wrestle with that question when the seemingly insignificant issue of signage came up on the refuge. “I was resistant of putting up land signs on the Refuge,” he says.
A hunter, Mr. Weaver recalls what happened to a piece of land in Maine’s north woods where he goes deer hunting. Over the short period of one year, he says, land 50 miles off the blacktop had been transformed from wilderness to something resembling civilization by the appearance of 911-type signs that were posted whenever two roads intersected. It was not something he wanted to see on the federal lands he managed in Vermont. And yet, with a self-tour auto guide in the works, the refuge needed signs so visitors could find their way around. “The staff finally made me see reality,” he says.
The sign Mr. Weaver’s staff has designed is, in all likelihood, their attempt to strike the balance their boss hopes to achieve. The signs consist of an eight-by-eight untreated hemlock block that has been planed into a shape resembling a blunt-nose bullet. The names of the roads will be routed into the block, and the letters painted with a reflective paint. Once erected, the signs will stand eight feet.
“It will be a heck of a lot better than seeing those green 911 signs,” says Mr. Weaver.
Kiosks at the three entrances to the refuge will be stocked with maps showing a network of the main roads, whose names, like the Upper Tin Shack Road or the Peanut Dam Road, have been retained in deference to the region’s culture. The hemlock beams are being constructed so signs identifying snowmachine trails can be added and then removed when the season is over.
The new center is bound to draw diverse groups of people to the area and to the woods. To help orient them, Mr. Weaver and his staff — in what he calls a Kumbai-ya session — have worked out a main theme to demonstrate why the land is significant and worthy of conservation. While the wording —“the Nulhegan Basin sculptured by nature, worked by human hands, a unique place to conserve for wildlife, habitat, and people” —might make a trapper wince, it fairly trumpets the beginning of a new ethic, a new era.
It’s probably too early to visualize that era, but it will most likely be one in which the land and its people are shaped increasingly by forces more pervasive and powerful than the price of pulp and paper.
Mr. Weaver says the refuge has to be managed “without irretrievably altering the reasons why these lands are so important to the people who come here.” The first test will come in five or seven years when he looks back to see how the land measures up to the wild and rugged character that the natives so loudly and fondly embraced at the time of the sale.
“We walk this fine line,” Mr. Weaver says. “Time will tell if it’s possible or not. I believe it is.”
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