Brooklyn Streets
to River Retreats
"Give me one wilderness or the other," said Phyllis Jalbert '67, who lives in New York City but spends her summers operating the Willard Jalbert Camps in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway of northern Maine.
"What the Allagash does for me is gives me peace and tranquillity," said Jalbert, who is one of 81 women among the 1,979 active registered Maine Guides. "But New York City . . . I could never get enough of it. Wanderlust doesn't have to be just about nature."
"I didn't like living in the suburbs at all," recalled Jalbert, whose first job out of college was teaching French and German on Long Island. "I just hated it."
Jalbert is co-owner of the Brooklyn real estate firm Whitaker, Brooke & Harrison, which she founded in the early 1970s. The business is named for Whitaker Brook, which feeds the Allagash River. She sees the real estate business as not only selling, renting and managing buildings but renovating them as well.
Her home in Boerum, N.Y., is an 1847 brownstone recently placed on the National Historic Register. Fifteen years ago Jalbert bought the rundown building and restored it to classic condition.
"I enjoy being out on the job more than sitting behind a desk," said Jalbert, who has renovated over 40 buildings. "It is very rewarding to have a building that's completely destroyed and revitalize it, bring it back to life."
Jalbert's other love is The Willard Jalbert Camps, situated on Round Pond along the Allagash River on the western border abutting Quebec. Her grandfather, Willard Jalbert, Sr., built the camps that bear his name in the 1940s as a sportsmen's haven. She took over the family business in 1986. Her family is one of a few allowed to have a private camp in the wilderness waterway, an unincorporated area accessible only by sea plane or canoe.
Jalbert, who grew up in Fort Kent, Maine, along the Allagash, is an experienced and accomplished canoeist. She has navigated the lower canyons of the Rio Grande, as well as the Salmon, Machias, St. John, Bonaventure, and Dead rivers.
She spent her childhood summers at her grandfather's camp and every October did what virtually every other student who lived in Aroostook County did-picked potatoes. She hadn't really considered college until a family friend's daughter talked about how much she liked Colby.
"During my admissions interview I talked all about the Allagash," recalled Jalbert, one of the first members of her family to go to college. "I think it's what got me in."
She says the other Colby students were much more worldly and sophisticated, but she did her best to fit in. One major difference, she says, was that all her classmates dressed alike while she wore what now would be considered "L.L. Bean conservative."
Jalbert, who was a French major with a German minor, worked as a waitress at the dowtown Waterville bar The Chez, waited on tables in the dining halls and worked "among the stacks" at the library to help pay for college. She also played clarinet in the band and was a member of the Glee Club-an activity she says somewhat satisfied her childhood dream of being on stage.
"My life just sort of evolved," said Jalbert. "I never did any long range planning. It just happened."
She says she sees no contradiction between her dual lives in New York and the Maine woods. "I have real ties to Maine and especially the Allagash," she said. "You'd have to be a hermit to live along the Allagash, but that doesn't mean you can't love the wilderness."
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