When thinking back to a special time in our lives, we have a way of remembering people who influenced us — whether they knew it or not. But that memory is etched in our minds.
That is what happened to Peter Blood of Island Falls, formerly of Houlton, when he was finishing up a hunters safety course. A gentleman walked into the Island Falls Fish and Game Club and when asked if he needed help, the man said he was looking for Peter Blood.
As Blood raised his hand, the gentleman said, “We took a canoe trip together 50 years ago.”
Blood quickly deducted he was 17 years old and answered, “You must mean a seven-week Allagash trip during Camp Wanderlust.”
That was exactly what the gentleman meant.
As a teenager in the 1960s, Blood had worked for Wes and Fos Herricks out of Molunkus Lodge.
After apologizing for not recognizing the gentleman, Blood was introduced again to Dick Yourga of Amherst, Mass.
Yourga remembered Blood as a camp counselor who knew canoeing and the art of fishing. Yourga said to Blood, “You told great campfire stories and you were living the life that the New Jersey and New York kids could only dream of.
“I have made you famous with all my friends over the past 50 years,” he said to Blood.
Yourga grew up in New Jersey, but spent one week each summer at his family camp on Shin Pond in Mt. Chase, which Yourga’s great-grandfather built 99 years ago.
“Peter fascinated me,” Yourga said. “He lived my dream — spending all his free time outside hunting and fishing in the woods of Maine.”
Yourga and his wife retired to the camp on Shin Pond.
“About three years ago, I saw a letter to the editor of the Houlton newspaper by a Peter Blood,” recalled Yourga. “I wondered if it could be the same Peter Blood from my canoe trip. The following year, I saw a notice of a hunter safety course to be taught by someone of the same name.”
Curiosity won and Yourga — on his last day at camp that season with plenty of closing chores — decided to drive to the Island Falls Fish and Game clubhouse.
It indeed was the same Peter Blood he had known 50 years ago.
After a bit of catching up, Blood invited Yourga and his wife back to his camp. Blood dug out a photo album and the original camp flyer.
The original pamphlet was called “Canoe Cruise for boys thru Northern Maine.” It was printed green and white; with a giant green moose tramping through a hole tapered back that revealed trees, mountains, reeds and water.
Wesley and Foster Herrick were experienced woodsmen and professional guides, along with a staff, who conducted groups of boys on the Wanderlust Canoe Trips. The camp brochure explained that Camp Wanderlust was different than your usual boys’ camps.
“It spends the entire season camping out, fishing, photographing wild game and canoeing along the famous Allagash [River] starting at Moosehead Lake traveling northward to Fort Kent on the Canadian border. It moves from one campground to another in a complete unit, carrying all personal articles and equipment in [20-foot white cedar and canvas] canoes.”
“The brochure stated ‘Give us a kid and seven weeks later we will give you a man,’” said Blood. “It was close to being true. We slept in Army pup tents with no fly netting and our only contact with the outside world was a bush plane once a week.”
The bush plane dropped food, personal items and mail.
“I remember I ordered corn muffin mix and pizza mixes,” smiled Blood. “I had learned how great one could cook with reflector ovens.”
The group bathed in cold water and washed their clothes in large kettles. While Wes and Fos used a small motor on their canoe to carry the cook and all of his gear.
“The rest of us paddled,” said Blood.
Blood worked at the Wanderlust Camp his sophomore and junior years in high school.
Last summer, the couples had dinner together at the Hangar Restaurant in Patten.
“We spent the evening reliving old times and playing cards at their camp on Pleasant Pond,” said Yourga. “We talked of getting out on the water and into the woods together.”
As emotions from years gone by flowed, Blood was pleased that Yourga had taken time to look him up.
“My wife, Joyce, spent many years listening to me tell tall tales of that canoe trip down the Allagash with Peter and my best friend, Jay Green,” said Yourga.
With age comes the “bucket list,” things we want to do before we die. For Blood, recreating that seven-week trip in seven days is an item on the list, as it is with Yourga’s wife.
“She heard those stories full of adventure and excitement so many times that she put the Allagash on her list,” said Yourga. “Years later, after surviving a bout with cancer, she told me that thinking of the Allagash helped her get through chemotherapy. Once she had the doctor’s OK, she made plans to make that same journey she knew so well through my story telling.”
In September, Yourga’s wife crossed that trip off her list.
“She decided to go with a small group, but without me,” said Yourga. “She wanted to experience the adventure on her own; and she did. It either snowed or rained each day of her trip. She certainly had her own Allagash adventure.”
“I recently asked my schoolboy best friend, Jay Green, if he was going to attend our 50th high school reunion in New Jersey this fall,” Yourga said. “I told him of finding Peter again after all these years. Jay’s response was that he would rather that we all got together to go down the Allagash again for a 50-plus anniversary canoe trip than go to the high school reunion.”
Green and Blood are both lifelong athletes, so Yourga believes it would be “smooth paddling for them,” but he’s a bit more hesitant, “though excited,” about the idea.
“The three of us will have to put our heads together to see if guys our age — and my condition — can actually pull it off,” said Yourga.
Yourga and Blood both live locally in the summer, but Green lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Blood has asked his canoeing partner, Clint Cushman of Hodgdon, to also make the trip in June.
“Considerable travel would be involved before his canoe can slice the crystal waters of Maine,” added Yourga.