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Classic: An Allagash Love Story
(page 5 of 6)
Nuge ran over 100 miles of trapline. He'd be gone two weeks at a time, living off beaver and muskrat stew, sleeping in tiny, outlying cabins he built along the route. Each day the dam keepers, like worried aunts, phoned Patty. "They needn't have worried," Patty says. "I didn't have a care in the world then. There was nothing I didn't feel I could handle."
She set her beaver traps around the ponds, mink traps around the edges of streams, and bobcat traps back in the woods. There were a lot more trappers in the country back then, but there were a lot more animals, too. Come spring Nuge hauled the furs to Chesuncook, then to the buyers in Greenville. "We'd never have made it without the trapping," she says. "One year we made over $4,800. That came in awful handy."
One year Nuge told her he wanted to give her a coat of her choice, beaver or otter. "That winter," she says, "we were getting a dollar an inch for beaver and they were all running large. I said I'd take the otter 'cause it was cheaper." They took the skins and a pattern to a furrier, paid $200, and waited. When the coat arrived, a note was attached. The furrier was offering $2,000. "I asked Nuge and he said, 'It's yours. You decide!' Well, I didn't sell the coat. You know what they say about otter? It makes chorus girls' mink look like floor mats." She laughs. "Not that I had as many places to wear it as a chorus girl"...
Go anywhere along the Allagash today and ask people about Allen Nugent and the first thing they'll mention will be his strength. Once it took five men to load a cookstove into the boat at Telos. Single-handedly Nuge got it out of the boat, over the knoll, and into the kitchen. He filled the icehouse with 400-pound blocks of ice, hauling them on a sled harnessed to his broad back as if he were a team of oxen. He'd pick up 500-pound gasoline drums, roll them along his leg, and set them into his boat...
She laughs, a congested, throaty laugh always on the edge of a cough. "Nuge was powerful, but when guests got rowdy I took care of them. You never saw that man without a smile. He'd get up in the morning and it'd be raining or snowing and he'd say 'It's a beautiful morning.' I'd say, 'Nuge, what's so beautiful about it?' 'Any morning you wake up, darling, is a beautiful morning,' he'd say. That's how he was. No matter what happened, he always said, 'Just right. Just right.' He wouldn't fight with me even when I'd fly off the handle. So I gave in. On the 17th of September 1942 we were married. Just a couple stood for us in Lincoln"...
They entertained governors and celebrities and outdoorsmen from around the country. Nuge was a gifted storyteller and at night, after the meal, everyone gathered in the dining room in the glow of the lanterns and listened to Nuge while Patty rocked and knitted. They were taking in over $1,000 a day now, and they bought a house in East Millinocket and a Winnebago for getaways right after deer season. And without telling Nuge, Patty bought a second set of camps up the lake a bit because she knew they would fill them, too, as long as the name said "Nugent's."
"Every day lasted so long," Patty says, "yet time went so fast. People who don't know the woods will never understand. It's the first thing they ask me. And I tell them. We were never lonely. Never. Never."
It is evening now of another day. In the morning, a plane will arrive for the visitor. Eight years have passed, but it is still difficult for Patty to talk about the tenth of February 1978 when Nugenpatty became simply Patty.
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