The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  Fogs kept the Jonas tacking off the Acadian coast for a week. Then, on July 15, after a thunderstorm, the skies cleared and the sun came out, the coastline appeared, and they spied the sails of two longboats approaching from shore. The Frenchmen and young Biencourt and La Tour were crowded at the rail and, at this moment, Lescarbot writes, “…there came from the land odors10 incomparable for sweetness, brought with a warm wind so abundantly that all the Orient parts could not produce greater abundance. We did stretch out our hands as it were to take them, so palpable were they, which I have admired a thousand times since.”

  From that first visceral taste, the new land captivated the two boys. Uninterested in clearing farms and building rigorous Christian communities, unlike their British counterparts to the south, they would range these wilds in their quest for furs and enthusiastically embrace the Indian life. They would become what Henry David Thoreau, growing up two centuries later in the green-manicured, white-clapboard, God-fearing town of Concord, Massachusetts, wanted to be. They were children of the wilderness.

  The two young Charleses represented a new environmental consciousness for Europeans, whether the boys were aware of it or not. They understood the wilds as a place benign rather than hostile, uplifting rather than evil, generous rather than depriving. Two centuries or more would pass, however, before this wilderness consciousness gained broader currency among most other Europeans who had come to America. That wilderness consciousness had to be mightily helped along by writers and thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Bartram, Emerson and Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold, by the women who shaped their ideas, and by others whose names will never be known.

  I WONDERED HOW MANY TIMES young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour had paddled this same stretch of the St. John River,11 which from Baker Lake flowed four hundred miles down to the Atlantic’s Bay of Fundy. It was a well-known route through the forest, then, in the early 1600s. Many of my “blank spots,” I would discover, had been far less “blank” in centuries past than now, like northern Maine.

  In the gusty downpour, we waved goodbye to David at the Baker Lake campground and, digging our paddle blades rhythmically into the rain-pocked river, we twisted into the spongy forest. Shallow and rocky and maybe three or four canoe lengths wide, the river gurgled swiftly through bends, slacked in flat, marshy sections, dropped gently, bubbling over boulders. Clear but slightly tea-colored, the water had been stained by vegetation. It was a nice-sized little river, a kind of cozy river.

  We saw neither person nor dwelling, but within a half hour of leaving Baker Lake encountered our first moose. A yearling, it stood in shallow water along the brushy left bank on stilty legs, dipping its head to pull up mouthfuls of vegetation with its big dripping lips. Paddling side by side, we all shouted excitedly to one another—“Look! There’s a moose!”—and of course the moose swung its head toward us in alarm, turned, trotted up the bank, and disappeared into the forest.

  I’d been surprised by Molly’s and Skyler’s cheeriness from the start, despite the steady rain. After that first encounter, they eagerly looked for more moose. Around a few woody bends we encountered more—a mother and calf. We shushed one another and, paddles stilled, drifted quietly toward them on the smooth, rainy surface. The mother was enormous, her shoulders looming taller than my head, and probably weighing close to a ton. Where squirrels and songbirds speak to the daintiness of lawns and parks, a moose is a presence. She stood in the river, silently staring at us drifting closer, little eddies of current gently spinning around her legs, unyielding and vast and mysterious as the forest itself.

  Eventually she, too, turned and lumbered up the bank with her calf in tow.

  Around seven, as the wet daylight began to fade, we spotted the cabin’s grayed logs. It sat in a grassy clearing against a backdrop of dark spires of spruce trees—like a classic woodcut engraving of a cabin in the forest. We beached the canoes and clambered up the steep cut bank. With a swaybacked roof and low to the ground, it looked like it could have been built by young Biencourt or La Tour themselves in 1606. Unlike the horizontally laid logs of the pioneer cabins I knew, the logs of its walls were planted vertically to the earth in a style that appeared Abenaki Indian in origin.

  The elaborately carved latch testified to long winter nights spent in front of a fire while the snow piled up deep outside, passing the time with a whittling knife.

  Amy pushed open the heavy door. Low windows admitted a dusky light to reveal a table sprouting drip-waxed candles, a cast-iron woodstove, a crude counter holding an enameled washbasin, log roof beams varnished with a patina of woodsmoke. A partitioned nook at the rear enclosed a few old bedsprings padded with slabs of ragged cardboard and thin foam.

  “This is great!” she said.

  The children poked around, exploring. Amy found a note hanging on a nail near the door.

  “It’s in French,” she said, studying it. “It’s the score of a whist game.”

  I was checking the kindling box near the stove. The old newspapers inside it were in French, too, papers from small towns somewhere across the border. It felt as if we’d suddenly slipped beyond the United States, and had entered a vast, ambiguous swath of territory—the North—and slid hundreds of years back in time. Since the arrival of the first few Europeans four centuries ago, this region had been neither really French nor really British but a borderlands whose contours shifted with the waxing and waning of the two great empires an ocean away.

  Rough, rocky, and forested, it was nearly useless as farmland. European settlers didn’t stampede in to stake land claims and grow crops, as they did in many parts of America. Rather it served as wildlands, a buffer between empires. Biencourt and, especially, La Tour lived their lives almost entirely within this enormous region, within this blank spot. This is the life they chose, not seeking to create the careful settlements of farmers, but living instead on the wild, ragged edge of the known. What was it about this region that attracted them so, I wondered, and attracted Thoreau much later?

  Amy and I watched, shivering, as the children swam contentedly in a clear pool of the river, just in front of the cabin. Soon they were bundled up and sitting before the popping woodstove, sipping hot chocolate. Candles guttered on the table. Glowing headlamps shone cheerily from the dark-smoked roof beams where Molly had decorously hung them from nails amid our drying clothes.

  “Can we sleep in tomorrow?” she asked, liking the look of the place.

  Amy tended to a makeshift pizza baking under a foil tent on our camp stove. I sat beside the woodstove with a camping cup full of wine. Scribbling the occasional note by candlelight, I read from Thoreau’s essay about these same wild regions, titled “Ktaadn” and written in the 1840s—more than two centuries after the French arrival.

  WHEN THOREAU FIRST MET HIM, as he recounts in “Ktaadn,” Young Tom Fowler—Galen Hale’s great-great-great-granduncle by marriage—was in the act of sawing through the two-foot-thick log walls of the cabin he’d just built on a pond beyond Nicatou. These openings would be the holes for the cabin’s windows. Thoreau closely observed Fowler’s construction, for he’d recently completed his own cabin on the shore of Walden Pond. On the spot, Thoreau reports, Young Tom agreed to serve as boatman for Thoreau’s party for its expedition deeper into the Maine Woods. Tom dropped his tools and went to throw a few items in a pack, serving the waiting party drafts of his homemade spruce beer. This, Thoreau wrote with typical ardor, tasted as strong and stringent as cedar sap, and drinking it was “as if we sucked at the very teats12 of Nature’s pine-clad bosom…”

  Thoreau was a true oddball, a rebel against his time. He took to the woods so passionately because he’d been roundly rejected by conventional society generally, and by two young women in particular.

  Thoreau had come of age at a moment of intellectual rebelliousness in the United States, when major change wafted in the air. I think of him breathing it in with the concentrated, lung-pumping vigor that marks his writin
g. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, and always loving its gentle woods and fields, he entered college at nearby Harvard—with considerable economic sacrifice from his family—just as the Romantic movement spread from Europe’s youth to the United States. Gone was the great faith in rationalism and classicism. Rather, passions and the senses ruled. Youth rejected the ossified authority of the musty old guard, nowhere more brazenly than among Thoreau’s schoolmates in the Harvard class of 1837—instigators in what became known as the Dunkin Rebellion, a1960s-style revolt that erupted in the 1830s.

  It started the spring of Thoreau’s freshman year, on May 19, 1834, presumably one of those warm, sunny days when ebullience and revolution float in the air. A student who was reciting in Instructor Christopher Dunkin’s freshman Greek class abruptly stopped. When commanded by Instructor Dunkin to proceed, the student replied, “I do not recognize your authority,”13 and shut his book.

  That was all the spark it took. By nightfall students were destroying classrooms, smashing furniture, breaking out windows, and ripping the shutters off buildings and burning them in bonfires on the steps. The college set guards on a watch to quell the violence. Students attacked by pummeling the guards with stones. Fights broke out. One of the most shocking acts, in a college founded by Puritans two centuries before, was the disruption of the mandatory morning prayers by groans, whistles, scrapings, and, according to the official report, various other “offensive noises” emitting from the chapel’s pews and by contemptuous latecomers bursting through the doors.

  The immediate target of the rebellion was Harvard’s new president, Josiah Quincy,14 a politician who’d recently served as a get-the-garbage-collected-on-time mayor of Boston. He had instituted an unpopular point system that rewarded the students for rote memorization and good attendance in classes and chapel and discouraged original thinking and discussion. Students petitioned the faculty—Thoreau being a signatory—and burned President Quincy in effigy. But still the point system had gone forward.

  In the years preceding the Harvard uprising, starting about 1800, Europe’s intellectual youth had been set aflame with the Romantic cult of the individual, embracing the power of emotion, embarking on grand Byronic adventures, celebrating what came to be called Wild Nature. Rather than the stern Old Testament deity that prevailed at Harvard, imported by Puritans from a medieval Europe two hundred years before, God had become a creative and divine force embodied in both Art and in Nature. God had become a Bohemian.

  The Romantic spirit was channeled15 directly to Harvard by the preacher-turned-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Heir to a long line of those same stern New England Puritans and preachers dating back to Mayflower days, Emerson, in 1832, after his young wife died, had fled both the pulpit and Boston for Europe. He encountered Romantic writers and thinkers such as Coleridge who caused him to question his traditional religious beliefs. Adapting much from these Romantics, he began to formulate his own philosophy of the self and nature—what became known eventually as “Transcendentalism.”

  Returning to Boston in 1833—the same year Thoreau started at Harvard—Emerson soon gained a wide following among youthful intelligentsia and was reviled by their conservative elders. He shocked Harvard with his “Address at Divinity College,” in which he spoke out against Jesus as the foundation of the Church’s divinity, advocating that man needs to look inward to find it instead. Thus man could “transcend” the material world—the concrete world defined by facts and the senses, which included the historical Jesus—by instead experiencing the divine that infused all parts of the universe, including the self and nature. He laid out his fundamental ideas in the essay “Nature,” which Thoreau twice checked out from the Harvard library. At Thoreau’s graduation in 1837, Emerson gave his famous “American Scholar” address,16 in which he rallied the graduates to create a literature and way of thinking that was American. In a way, the address could be viewed as a compass course that Thoreau followed the rest of his life:

  We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

  MY HEAD NODDED as I read Thoreau that first evening before the whispering orange embers of the woodstove. We went to bed, and rose late in our trapper’s cabin on the banks of the St. John, lulled by morning rain pattering on the shake roof. We were exhausted by the several days of travel simply to reach this spot, still at the start of our wilderness journey. We’d driven a frantic eight hours from our home in Missoula across two states to catch our flight in Seattle, flown through the night across the entire country, and landed in Boston at dawn. Jamming gear bags into the rental car, we’d driven into Cambridge, where Amy wanted to show the children her old house at Harvard. Silvery-haired alums in their blue reunion blazers tottered to breakfast across the shady green lawns of Harvard Yard. I had thought of Thoreau, cutting down these very footpaths with, as one classmate later described it, “his grave Indian stride.”17

  Then we’d headed north to Medway and the St. John.

  No one was in a hurry to leave the dim, calm hush of the cabin. I recorded yesterday’s events in a notebook, lying in my bag on the sagging bedsprings, while Amy and the children flipped pancakes. It was a pleasant, lazy morning—a sleep-in morning. It took several hours to repack our gear, which we’d hastily stuffed in the canoes in the gusty rain at Baker Lake.

  We finally got back on the river in mid-afternoon. As we pushed out from the bank, the rain touched the surface with a tinkling sound.

  “Can leeches kill you?” Skyler asked thoughtfully.

  He and Molly had spotted them crawling in the muddy shallows. He’d seen giant leeches in the movie King Kong. I’d noticed before how he constantly assessed threats to himself—the distances of falls out of trees, the possible attacks of wild animals, the power of a tornado—and wondered if this were an instinctive male trait, especially when in unfamiliar territory, with all his senses attuned, as I knew mine were.

  Molly’s was a more scientific curiosity about the leeches.

  I made the children practice their draw strokes again. I was surprised how easily they could both pull the bows of their canoes to one side or the other, a crucial maneuver for the rapids that lay ahead, and one that I’d taught them before leaving Montana. The map showed the first rapids four miles downstream from our campsite, and both Molly and Skyler were eager for them to arrive. I was more anxious, wondering how powerful they’d be for our little party.

  A young male moose with antlers held his ground—or his patch of water—in the middle of the river. As the distance closed between us from three hundred feet, to two hundred, to one hundred and fifty, he still didn’t move, staring us down.

  “I’m getting scared,” Molly said.

  “Let’s paddle gently to the right bank,” I ordered quietly.

  I knew moose could make lethal charges when challenged, and I didn’t want to test this one. I’d been on a kayak expedition to an African river—Rio Lugenda in remote northern Mozambique—where we faced highly territorial male hippos in similar circumstances. Our guide gave them a very wide berth.

  With the river running low, rocks protruded in shallow sections. The St. John headwaters drain a relatively small area of rocky terrain, and so the water levels of the upper river fluctuate dramatically—running very high during spring’s heavy snowmelt and after big rains, but dropping rapidly after that. We’d arrived just as the Upper St. John fell toward its low summer levels. It offered just enough depth to float the canoes through the rocky sections, although if the rains continued the level surely would rise. It wasn’t a total surprise, then, that when we reached the first rapids marked on the map, they amounted to little more than riffles trickling between a shall
ow scattering of boulders.

  We careened from one rock to another, the plastic-hulled whitewater canoes easily ricocheting off them. Skyler stood in the bow of our canoe to scout the way ahead, like George Washington crossing the Delaware, as Amy remarked. He shouted out directions to me.

  “Go right! Now left!”

  The rapids emptied into a flat, quiet section of river and we drifted along, hanging on to the gunnels of each other’s canoe, eating a river lunch of crackers and a French cheese spread, apples, and granola bars. Everyone seemed happy enough, drifting down the river in the rain.

  It wasn’t until seven o’clock and the light was beginning to fade again that we stopped to camp, where the Southwest Branch tumbled out of the forest on the left and joined our stem of the river, known as the Baker Branch. A beautiful campsite at the confluence centered on a big white pine, with a grove of spruces behind it providing a kind of canopy for a tent site. As Amy and Molly pitched our big tent, Skyler and I collected dry wood from under sheltered trees and built a fire using birch bark as tinder, to cook a steak dinner over the coals.

  Put to the match, our birch bark flared up like it was soaked in kerosene. Skyler watched with fascination.

  “That burns better than paper,” he remarked.

  There was something inherently very satisfying in passing on to him these woods techniques that I’d learned over many years, something qualitatively different from, for instance, helping him learn to read, although that had its own satisfactions. Here, literally, was a skill for survival. How could a human be complete without understanding how to create and wield fire? I began to see that here was one reason Thoreau took to the woods.