The snowshoe tracks pack over the park’s boardwalk leading to the Clement H. Beaulieu house, alone on the hill. It was a mansion in its day. Peeking in the windows, I see the undulating wood floor reaching between walls where the mud and stick construction is still visible. Other structures along the path are marked by snow filled divots, once inhabited by the hotel, homes, warehouse, and town well. A winter wind picks up over the ghost town, once home to some 600 souls, circa 1850.
We circle back toward the Catholic Church and cemetery, where their priest, Father Francis Xavier Pierz, is buried. A second cemetery stretches out over a river bluff by the present-day boat landing. Today, there are no birch bark nor Grumman canoes floating by. Today, there are no oxen bellowing their loads over the ruts cut into the earth. Today, like then, animal and human tracks follow the river, meander into the woods, and circumvent the Beaulieu house perched among the snow drifts.
And the basic needs remain the same: water,food ,clothing, shelter, and some form of connection/ kinship. We are what we are…