Page updated April 24, 2007. If you would like to contribute any photos, reflections, or quotes,
please send them to ijnr@ijnr.org.

The story of Andrew's Canoe continues. The beautiful wood-and-canvas boat that Andrew Weegar made by hand for me in 1991 has, without leaving the garage, taken me to Montana. It also took me to a funeral today in Augusta, Maine.

The story of the canoe resonated deeply with people who knew Andrew, and set a number of events in motion. Andrew, as you may or may not know, was many things in life, so many things that friends and admirers — and there were many — called him a Renaissance Man. His environmental journalism, and his training and mentoring of other journalists through the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources (IJNR), touched many people. When Andrew died in an accident on his Maine farm in 2005, the mourning was widespread, deep and genuine. His death was felt most grievously at home, where he left a young wife, Abby, and a beautiful daughter, Molly, then barely six.

When I wrote about my annual dilemma over the Weegar canoe — keep it or sell it — quite a few people wrote to say they would be interested in purchasing the boat. They all seemed to be people whose lives Andrew had touched, and who would be good stewards of such an heirloom. Then I received an e-mail from Abby Holman, Andrew's widow. Here it is, in part:

"...if you ever want to sell Andrew's canoe, I would like to buy it for his daughter. (Andrew was my husband). When Andrew died, he didn't leave behind any of his canoes, not that he was expecting to leave us...So I am very sad that Molly doesn't have one of his canoes and I don't know anyone that owns one."

I replied that when the weather warmed up and the boats left the garage I would put Andrew's canoe on my roofrack and drive up to her house. I didn't say so, but my plan was to simply give the canoe to Molly. Of course, the weather still hasn't warmed up.

After Andrew's death, Abby had joined the board of the IJNR, and after our e-mail exchange she recommended me for an IJNR fellowship. Frank Allen, the director of the Missoula, Montana based organization, graciously accepted Abby's recommendation and as a result I'll be joining 16 other journalists in Montana in June for a High Country expedition. I wrote to Abby to thank her. She replied:

"Good for you! Have a great time out there. Give my regards to Frank and Maggie. Best - Abby"

That was March 30. Eight days later Abby Holman was dead. After crossing the finish line in a charity ski race at Sugarloaf Mountain, she hit a tree.

At Abby's funeral today in Augusta, hundreds of people filled St. Mary's Church to overflowing. Just as Andrew had been, so, too, was Abby Holman a life force, someone whose spirit, joy, power, integrity and love had bonded legions to her. Abby had been a force in politics for most of her life and had been elected to the state legislature in November. I think most of the legislature was in the church today, along with three governors, Abby's extended family, and scores of other mourners, testimony to the living spirit of Abby.

And of course there was Molly Weegar. There was no more heartbreaking sight in all the world than Molly's stunned, sad face following her mother's casket out of the church.

Molly, I will tell you one true thing: Andrew and Abby live on, in you. I know you are in unfathomable pain, but they are with you and always will be, and will guide your own life in ways you can't yet imagine.

Your father's canoe — your canoe — is waiting in my garage. It's a beautiful boat, and I know that in a deep and subconscious way, Andrew was thinking of you when he made it with his own hands, even though you were still years in the future. When you are ready for it, tell me and I will bring it to you.

— Nick Mills lives in Cumberland and Upper Dam, and tries not to let work interfere with fishing.

Eulogy
by Wayne CurtisI first met Andrew about a dozen years ago, when I was editor of Casco Bay Weekly. He walked in to the newsroom on Congress Street in Portland wearing wool pants over a union suit and carrying a chain saw, and he trailed the smell of freshly cut pine and chain oil as he walked around and shook everyone's hand. It was a tribute to his personality that no one asked, “Andrew, why do you have a chainsaw in downtown Portland?” It was the first of many visits. Sometimes he would show up with a two-liter bottle of Moxie and invite everyone to share, whether they wanted to or not. Another time he arrived in hip boots and hauled in a spackle bucket full of surf clams, and would not leave until everyone marveled at their hugeness with him.When Andrew walked into a room he brought the whole of the Maine outdoors with him – very often quite literally, but always in his tales of where he'd just been, or some damned thing he had just seen. He loved all the seasons, and loved all the Maine woods, but as for the coast and the cities, for chrissakes. you could have them. As he put it in one Maine Times story, "As far as I'm concerned.... this whole ocean thing can go straight to hell." He didn't like the scale of the sea, nor the smell of it, and he thought it lacked intimacy. As for the cities, well, he moved to a small apartment in Portland for a brief while in the mid-1990s, and whenever I ran into him he always had a pinched look, as if he were wearing shoes two sizes too small. I was relieved when he moved back to the woods. Whenever he returned to the city he brought with him the zeal of a missionary intent on converting heathens who lived amid asphalt and concrete. He wanted nothing more than to drag us out of our hard cocoons and make us take a fresh look at the natural world around us. He told us about the lakes and the woods and about the old codgers he'd met who knew more about the state than anybody before or since. He was a natural educator, among his many other talents.I suspect everybody in this room can make a long list of arcane facts they learned from Andrew. Let me start with a few things I learned:1. When cooking up fishy-tasting seabirds such as eider, be sure to first coat them with French's mustard. Use only French's mustard. All other mustard is unsatisfactory and there is no point in further discussing the matter. 2. If you find a dead alligator in the swamps of Florida and you think it’s a good idea to take off its head with an axe to bring this home to study it, be assured, my friend, that this is not a good idea. It will turn nasty faster than you can imagine.3. If you see two iguanas advertised for sale in Uncle Henry's for the astoundingly low price of five dollars, it does not mean you have to buy them. Unlike salamanders, which are endlessly fascinating, iguanas are about as animated as a bucket of rocks.4. If you get the idea to dismantle an early 19th century home by hand, for the love of God, make sure that every square-headed forged nail goes into the pail so it can be used again, because do you know how much christly work it took to make one of those suckers? Andrew often struck people at first as someone who didn't have much to say, but of course that was misleading. If you brought up the subject of, say, the Bicknell thrush or American eel and then let it just sit there, he would regard it for a time in silence. But eventually he couldn't help but poke at it with his boot. Then, quietly and slowly, like the start of an avalanche, the facts would clump together and tumble out, with astonishing force and coherence. And you just went along and tried to keep your head up and not suffocate in everything he knew.Perhaps most of all, Andrew taught us to be patient. I don't know that anyone would claim that punctuality was among his strengths. Waiting for him to show up was a large part of the whole Andrew Weegar experience. This applied whether you had commissioned him to build a canoe, or were an editor waiting for a story, or were a friend he planned to meet up with at Dysart's for a canoe trip up north. I have known few people who were so unreliable when it came to appointments and deadlines. Yet never have I known anyone who was so easy to forgive for his lapses. Because we all knew that the whole of life was an irresistible distraction to him, and we could be no match for that. The Maine Times did us all a great favor when it gave Andrew space for his column for several years. Andrew chronicled the Maine seasons with more detail and vividness than anyone since E.B. White. But more than that, Andrew's column finally answered the question many of us had about where he was when he didn't show up for one meeting or another.He wrote once about a high state of distraction brought on by simply knowing that the leafless woods were starting to swell up with pussy willows. So he left his desk to go in search of them down the road, only to attract the attention of a policeman. "The officer .... seemed a little startled to see me hopping out of the woods," he wrote. "'It's springtime,' I yelled, more than a little too loudly, arms stretched wide.... 'Probably you ought to come right down here and pick a few pussy willows...' [The policeman] looked at the 'no trespassing' sign, and then back at me. He shrugged. The season was infectious." In a piece about snow fleas – which I believe to be the only story ever written about snow fleas that quotes Pliny the Elder – he wrote of standing out in the frigid winter woods, just watching the tiny things hop around in his hollow footprints in the snow, and trying to figure out what was up with that. This small mystery enthralled him until the bitter cold at last drove him inside. In another column, he admitted he wasn't very adept at producing owl calls, and so when he went into the forest one February night, he brought along a tape recording of a great horned owl. When he played it, an owl answered instantly and nearby. And then kept answering. And answering. Andrew wrote:
Up in the pine, the owl called again and again, hopping from limb to limb, its eyes glowing yellow. After a few minutes, my fascination gave way to guilt, and I wondered what I had done with this short burst from the tape."Hey," I screamed at the owl, hoping to drive it back into the woods. Didn't it have something else it should be doing? The more it called the worse I felt, imagining a half-built nest, and white eggs growing cold under the dim starlight."Hey," I yelled again. "Go away. It's OK now, Go home. It was only a joke." The dog whined. I turned and headed back and followed my tracks through the woods and toward the road. The owl called behind me, still looking for something it knew it had heard....I guess this is something we can all say from here on out. Whenever we're near the woods, we will all be listening for an echo of someone wise we knew we had once heard.

And for that, we will all be forever grateful, and I will feel forever blessed.

It’s too bad you didn’t have the chance to meet Andrew Weegar. You would have liked him.Andrew, who died last week in a tractor accident on his farm in rural Maine at the age of 41, was one of those guys we need more of in the woods and in the waters of New England.He helped write the 1999 guidebook "Exploring the Appalachian Trail: New Hampshire, Maine," and was also a registered Maine whitewater guide since 1981. He was a naturalist who fished, hunted, farmed, and for some time operated a boat-building business in Maine, handcrafting traditional wooden canoes for clients that included L.L. Bean.He was also a journalist — but don’t hold that against him. He used his keyboard to write about the natural world and American history.I was fortunate to meet Andrew in September when I attended a week-long seminar put on by the Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources, a national non-profit that organizes educational field-based fellowships for journalists. Andrew led 14 of us through Maine and into New Brunswick looking at issues like rural sprawl, the changing ownership of New England’s forests, organic farming and commercial fishing.In a newspaper account of his life and death last week, Andrew was remembered as a Renaissance man, because he was so well-versed in so many subjects. Nowhere was the depth and breadth of his knowledge more evident than when he was outdoors.I’ll always remember Andrew standing in a canoe using a setting pole to propel his way down the Penobscot River, with massive Mount Katahdin looming over one of his shoulders. Poling is the traditional Maine riverman’s way of canoeing — none of this sitting-with-a-paddle business — and Andrew did it with an elegance and expertise that suggested he might have been a holdover from the northern Maine log drives of the late 1800s rather than a man who studied at Harvard’s Divinity School.I remember, too, a conversation we had on a foggy ferry ride to Grand Manan, New Brunswick, when he admitted he’d ordered a new jacket with a Gore-Tex lining. He explained he was a big fan of natural fibers, but realized their limitations. Wool was good up to a point, he said, but there came a time when its just plain better to stay dry.Andrew was the kind of guy who would walk through the woods picking out softwoods like a child naming toys in a Christmas catalog — balsam, he’d say, running his hands through the branches, jack pine there, red spruce here. Then he would stop to explain why tamaracks were used in the knees of sailing ships and why white pines from Maine were prized by mast builders. None of it ever came across as a lecture.He seemed tickled by the notion that whatever or whoever created trees, wool, rivers or mountains didn’t leave any owner’s guide for using them. He looked at the outdoors as a laboratory, stocked with things to smell, taste, see, eat and hear — a lifetime of puzzles and riddles to solve. While he might have worked out some of the answers, he was quick to point out he didn’t have them all.His brother-in-law was quoted last week as saying Andrew "could show you things in your backyard that you never knew were there." I’ll add that he’d do that without making you feel inadequate for overlooking those things in the first place.

Like I said, it’s too bad you didn’t have the chance to meet Andrew Weegar. You would have liked him.