Mild Days Ahead.

Haying Time. Houlton Maine. Circa 1944.

     In its own way, locally as prominent and iconic as Katahdin, the mighty St. John River, known by the Maliseets as “Wolastoq,” runs 418 miles in length, emptying into the Atlantic Ocean’s Bay of Fundy. For eighty miles the St. John forms the International border between Maine and Canada. Virtually all of Aroostook County, Maine lies within the St. John watershed which amounts to 21,000 square miles, one of the largest watersheds on the East Coast. Slightly over one-third of the St. John watershed happens to be in the State of Maine. So, if a snowflake or raindrop falls anywhere in Aroostook it will eventually make its way into the Atlantic courtesy of the St. John River.

     At our farm’s latitude the International boundary lies to the west of the St John as the river begins to flow towards the southeast. The St. John then remains entirely inside Canada until it flows into the Bay of Fundy. For thousands of years, the St. John and its tributaries have served as primary travel routes for its human inhabitants.

     Early European settlers, both the Acadian French and the English/Scotch/Irish, used the navigable St. John, and its tributaries including the Aroostook River, as the primary means to extend their settlements into the roadless forested wilderness. As the new settlers spread into the St. John’s upper reaches, in short order trees began to be cut down, stumps pulled and the new fields planted to Potatoes on both sides of the border.

     Now of course, the phenomenon of flooding is well known most everywhere, and our St. John River is no exception. Flood records, in fact, have been kept for the lower basin of the St. John River ever since 1696. It is noteworthy that in the Upper and Middle reaches of the St John River, in addition to those common components usually behind flooding – excessive rainfall and snow melt – is a powerful additional complicating element known in the north country as “ice jams.”

     This time of year during Spring, rapid snowmelt waters snake their way into the St. John and power along huge floating chunks of ice, often each the size of automobiles. Packed shoulder-to-shoulder from shore to shore, the ice blocks grind against one another as they steadily make their way en masse down stream powered by high water.

     River obstructions such as river narrows, islands or bridge abutments can quickly form massively problematic ice jams should the ice begin to pile up and in doing so obstruct the free flow of river water. Most years the annual ice flow makes its way down river with minimal harm. The occasional momentary ice jam normally quickly corrects itself, forced on downstream by the colossal weight of ice upstream pushing Atlantic-bound.