The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  AS THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION in the early 1800s gathered steam and spun people off the land and into the cities, Thoreau viscerally understood that these basic skills for survival—to use one’s own hands to acquire food, fire, shelter—define what it is to be human, to have a higher consciousness and be an animal among animals.

  As he expressed it in his famous explanation at the outset of Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…”

  This theme appears again and again in the writings of those seeking out the wilds. Marc Lescarbot, the French lawyer with a flair for poetry who’d just lost a big case, was disgusted with life in French society, with its aristocratic hierarchies and rigged courts. Joining that 1606 expedition to Acadia allowed him to “fly from a corrupt world” to the purity of the New World, to life in the woods, where he, as Thoreau did much later, would front only the essentials. Rousseau, one hundred and fifty years after Lescarbot and nearly a century before Thoreau, likewise rejected the “artifice” of Parisian society, the gilded intellectual salons with their beautiful ladies and clever repartee among philosophes, the social posing, the currying for favor, the corruptness of it all. In solitude, in Nature, he could find his true self.

  “Strip off the artificial habits of civilized man,” wrote Rousseau in his novel Émile, in 1761, “return to your own heart…permit yourself to be guided by the light of instinct and conscience; and you will rediscover that primitive Adam…long buried under a crust of mold and slime…”

  In the wilderness—in Wild Nature—humans wearied by corrupt society, disillusioned men such as Lescarbot, Rousseau, and Thoreau, could find redemption and purity. It shimmered out there, beckoning them. It was a fantasy, a mirage, a promise hovering beyond the ocean or just over the woodsy horizon.

  I know this mirage very well, for I’ve chased after it my whole life. The promise of something indefinable, ineffable, waits in those blank spots on the map—those wild places—as it did for these disillusioned men. What? What is it? I don’t know the answer. I don’t think they knew the answer. It’s less an answer than an expectation, a hope, or rather the hope of an answer. But an answer to what? To the ills of a corrupt society. To ennui. To disillusionment. To a sense of spiritual emptiness. It’s the answer to purposelessness. To rejection. To sadness. It somehow contains the answer to all these things. In the wild places, in the blank spots, what exists, we hope, is meaning.

  MARC LESCARBOT WAS JOYOUS when the Jonas at last sailed into the huge natural harbor at Port-Royal in July 1606, after escaping the corrupt life in Paris and arriving in the pristine New World. Its sheer wildness and uncultivated aspect struck him forcefully: “…it was a wondrous sight18 for us to see its fair extent and the mountains and hills which shut it in, and I wondered that so fair a spot remained desert, and all wooded, seeing that so many folk are ill-off in this world who could make their profit of this land if they only had a leader to bring them thither.”

  The Jonas approached a promontory deep within the harbor where the French had built a small wooden fortress the preceding year. The ship’s crew expected a party to rush out joyously to salute and greet their arrival. Nothing stirred. You imagine consternation rippling across the deck—what had gone so suddenly wrong with this shining adventure that was to be New France? You imagine the boys thinking not of the danger, but of the excitement. I could imagine Skyler there, fascinated by the quiet fort in the distance and the tension on the Jonas’s deck beneath the ship’s creaking rigging, by the swords now strapped on and cannons at the ready, by the armor quickly donned, to meet this first encounter with the unknown. Had the Frenchmen frozen during the winter? Had they perished of scurvy? Had the Indians killed them all?

  In fact, it was the Indian leader, Membertou, who at that moment was rushing into the French fort and shouting “like a madman” to rouse the two French guards nodding off over their midday meal in the otherwise deserted structure.

  “‘Wake up, there. You are dawdling over your dinner…and do not see a great ship which is arriving, and we know not who they are!’”

  Thus reports Lescarbot. The others of the French party at Port-Royal had temporarily deserted the fort. After waiting for the Jonas and its supplies until this late in the season, they thought they’d been abandoned and finally set off in their longboat to look for French fishing vessels off the Grand Banks to hitch a ride back to France.

  But the two sleepy guards were now roused, spotted the white ensign on the Jonas’s mast, jammed the cannons with charges, and let loose with a four-gun salute, which rolled and echoed among the low wooded hills, while the Jonas responded with cannon shots and trumpet blasts.

  It was emblematic that the guards had been roused by Membertou. From the beginning, this Micmac chief, or “Sagamore,” kept careful watch over the French in Acadia—these innocents to the ways of the forests, to the hills and the rivers. Membertou and his people essentially taught the French how to survive in the New World.

  After a happy reunion with the guards, the Jonas crew and passengers spent the day visiting the small, dark French “manor house.” Membertou then led them to the temporary Indian summer village nearby, much larger than the tiny French outpost, and centered around large meeting halls made of carefully woven bark.

  The party began a few days later, after the return of the group that had gone off in the longboat, which included the navigator Champlain. For the next month the French at Port-Royal, reports Lescarbot, “made very merry.” The openhanded M. de Poutrincourt, young Charles Biencourt’s father and the expedition leader who had gone back to France to fetch supplies and brought them to Port-Royal aboard the Jonas, set up a barrel of wine that was free to drink for all comers, “some of whom made gay dogs of themselves.”

  Lescarbot rhapsodized about the beauty and richness of the new land. Exploring up the Dauphin River (now the Annapolis), which emptied into the big harbor, they found lush meadows bordering the banks where moose grazed, countless clear brooks flowing into it, and dense forests covering the hills. A waterfall cast rainbows of spray at the harbor’s mouth and young whales frolicked in the waters. The carpenters and stonecutters and other workmen labored only three hours each day constructing the settlement, and spent the rest of the time collecting mussels on the tidal flats, as well as crabs, cockles, and other delicacies. There was abundance and generosity everywhere. The Indians gave them salmon, sturgeon, beaver, moose meat and other game, or traded the hunted meats for the bread baked by the French.

  That autumn unfolded in a kind of pleasant idyll at Port-Royal, but by November the situation grew tense. At the end of August, the Jonas had sailed back to France with the plan to resupply Port-Royal the following spring. At the same time, Champlain and Poutrincourt headed south in the longboat toward Cape Cod, seeking a still warmer spot than Port-Royal for France’s ultimate settlement in the New World. With them was Poutrincourt’s son, Charles Biencourt, and no doubt his cousin, Charles de La Tour, as well as another boy, Robert Gravé, son of Du Pont, the leader of the whole enterprise.

  At first, on this journey south, the encounters with the Indians were friendly. Eager to trade for French knives, pots, and glass beads, flotillas of Indian canoes paddled out to greet them. Indians ran joyously along the shore to keep pace with the sailing longboat, carrying bows in hand, arrow quivers on their backs, and singing. Lescarbot wrote: “Oh, happy race! yea, a thousand-fold more happy than those who here [in France] make us bow down to them, had [the Indians] but the knowledge of God and their salvation.”

  The French liked the land’s fertility and abundant grapevines as they sailed south, but hostility from the Indians grew. Near present-day Chatham on Cape Cod, a party went ashore for several days to bake bread. When Indians stole a hatchet from them, a few of the younger, cockier French apparently fired at the thieves with muskets. Poutrincourt then noticed bands of Indians sneaking through the woods, and ordered the obstreperous young baker
s into the longboat before nightfall, but they refused, insisting on remaining ashore to eat the bread they had baked.

  Sometimes I wonder, if only those five bakers had returned to the longboat when ordered, whether France would have managed to establish its New World colony farther south—in the warmer climate and better growing season of present-day coastal New England instead of Canada. Boston, and maybe much of North America, would be French-speaking today. But, as the sweep of history sometimes turns on the flukes of personality, the five cocky bakers stayed on shore that night on Cape Cod. At dawn, a thick volley of arrows awakened the young Frenchmen, killing two of them instantly. The others leaped into the shallows, where the longboat rescued them, although two more of the bakers would soon die of their wounds. The French kept up a volley at the Indians on shore. Young Robert Gravé, in his enthusiasm to shoot at the Indians from the longboat, overloaded his musket and its barrel exploded, accidentally blowing off three of his fingers. On the beach, the Indians mocked the French by standing with their backs toward the boat and throwing handfuls of sand between their buttocks while howling like wolves, then quickly ducking out of the way whenever they saw the French lighting another cannon fuse.

  For the two aristocratic young Charleses this was surely far more interesting than sitting in a musty library back in France and reciting their Latin declensions to some disapproving tutor.

  Those who remained back in Port-Royal, meanwhile, had begun to wonder what had happened to the longboat group that had gone south. September turned to October. Lescarbot, who had stayed behind to oversee the contingent of men at Port-Royal, began to hear grumbling as winter approached without word from the expedition’s leaders, who’d sailed south. The tension built as the weather chilled. A mutiny appeared to be in the making. What to do to stave it off? The lawyer-poet had an idea: Let’s put on a show! Maybe some slapstick, farcical playacting would occupy their mutinous minds.

  In mid-November, the longboat under Pourtincourt and Champlain finally sailed into Port-Royal’s beautiful but chilly harbor, after the two leaders, due to the hostilities between bakers and Indians on Cape Cod, had abandoned the idea of a more southern colony. The returning expedition was greeted by a humorous play written by Lescarbot, titled Neptune’s Theater. This reunion was yet another excuse for a wild celebration. At Port-Royal, every day was an excuse for a party. It was Champlain who first proposed L’Ordre de Bon Temps—“The Order of Good Times”—on the observation that it was melancholy that caused scurvy, and the saddest and loneliest of men died first. The best preventative to the disease, he reasoned, was to make merry. Under his scheme, each day a different member of the fifteen who made up the order was designated to assemble a feast for the others. The day’s “Ruler of the Feast” actually started preparing two days in advance by going off and, with the help of the local Micmac Indians under Membertou, fishing and hunting for the choicest game. The feast’s ruler oversaw the preparation of the meats by the cook, and delivery of the dishes to the table in a grand parade of the members, each bearing a dish, which the ruler headed with a napkin draped over his shoulder, a staff in his hand, and a chain or medallion draped around his neck that “was worth more than four crowns.”

  Wine flowed abundantly during this winter of 1606–07 and the fare rivaled the restaurants in the Rue aux Ours back in Paris—especially the tender moose meat, the delicate beaver tail, and the sturgeon that the Micmac caught. While twenty or thirty other Micmac looked on, Membertou and other chiefs, when they weren’t away on their frequent hunting expeditions, ate and drank at table with the order.

  “And we were glad to see them,” writes Lescarbot, “while, on the contrary, their absence saddened us.”

  WE HAD OUR OWN FEAST that second night on the St. John River around the campfire Skyler and I had ignited with birch bark. The rain had stopped, for now. Over the glowing embers we grilled steaks, and the children made s’mores, and afterward, in the calm evening, with the backdrop chorus of the soft ululating rush of the Southwest Branch whispering in the darkness from the opposite bank, where it spilled into our main river, Amy, Molly, and Skyler played their recorder flutes together, to the lilting shush of the water. Then we climbed into our bags inside the big tent, read a story aloud, and fell asleep.

  It was raining again in the morning—our third day on the river. With the addition of the Southwest Branch swishing out of the dripping forest on the left bank and swirling its dark waters into the St. John, the river had swelled to fifty or sixty yards in width. The morning’s rain blew in hard gusts up the river’s straight sections, spraying across the ruffled gray surface, plastering our faces. It seemed pointless to stop. For what? Along the right bank, we spotted a pair of geese with a line of fuzzy goslings trailing behind. As we paddled, they chased downstream ahead of us, the goslings falling farther back.

  “Hurry up! Hurry up!” Molly called out to them.

  A bald eagle perched in a treetop, scanning the river for fish to pluck in its talons. A pair of loons bobbed lightly on the current midstream, the fine white speckles on their black backs looking like flurries of snow against dark firs. Loons, with their haunting cry, were the emblematic bird of the north.

  We’d seen no other people since waving goodbye to David two days before, nor any other signs of human activity except for the old trapper’s cabin where we’d spent the first night and a few small campground openings in the forested shore.

  Amy and Molly sang rounds in their canoe. In ours, paddling forward into the spraying gusts of rain, Skyler wanted to hear stories. I told about canoeing as a child.

  “One time my father—your grandfather Poppy—was paddling in the canoe ahead of my cousin and me on a little twisty river and he disappeared around a bend. We came around the bend and he ambushed us by suddenly swinging out over the river on a rope, like Tarzan, and giving a war whoop, but all of a sudden the rope broke and he crashed down into the middle of the river with a huge splash.”

  Skyler laughed heartily at that one, to think of his grandfather plunging into the middle of the river.

  I told him about the time my uncle attempted a backflip off a cliff above the Wisconsin River and bellyflopped, almost knocking himself unconscious.

  On another trip, also on the Wisconsin with my father, we were setting up camp deep in the woody bottomlands along the shore, and two boys wandered into our camp, true Huck Finn characters—ragged, barefoot, grubby, smiling with gap teeth, and each toting a big bowie knife strapped to his waist, foraging for river clams.

  “Those were river rats,” my father told me after they’d left, with a kind of wonder and admiration, as if this were a rare, throwback breed of human to two hundred years ago, like fur-trapping mountain men and French-Canadian voyageurs.

  “Poppy really liked fireworks,” I told Skyler, “and on these canoe trips he always brought along a few huge ones. He’d light them off at night on the end of a big sandbar where we were camping, and they went way up and exploded in big flower shapes. Then my friend Stephen and I would take glowing sticks from the fire and throw them up into the air, and watch them spin into the black sky against the stars, and come crashing back down on the sandbar in a shower of sparks. Those were our own fireworks. That was really fun.”

  “Tell me another story,” Skyler said, dragging his paddle blade aimlessly through the water.

  “Let’s paddle to warm up,” I replied.

  I was getting chilled. The headwind drove the rain up the surface of my rain pants and under my rain jacket. I felt my chest soaked underneath.

  “I think we should stop for lunch and get out and walk around,” I called out to Amy.

  Dense forest lined the banks. A rocky bar in mid-river offered the only open spot. We beached our canoes, opened the lunch cooler, and took out crackers, cheese, apples, chocolate. Wind swept the rain through the willow bushes, making them twitch and sway, across the rock bar. I stumbled around over the glistening stones, but I couldn’t get warm. The childr
en and Amy sat on the gunnel of a beached canoe, quite happily nibbling chocolate and cookies in the blowing rain. I began to shiver.

  It felt bleak enough here in midsummer, on the Upper St. John. What would it be like, say, during a cold sleet storm in autumn? I thought of young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour, paddling on this river in the early 1600s, dressed in furs. The two fascinated me. I wanted to understand them, know what motivated them to take to the life of the woods rather than, when the chance arose, return to France. What was it they saw in these blank spots? To them, these regions were not really blank. They lived in them and learned them well. What we call “blank spots” are only blank insofar as there is little or no recorded history—written memories—in these places. But for thousands of years they served as hunting grounds and waterways to the Indians. Their landforms, their lakes, their streams all had names, legends, memories, and knowledge attached—weather and currents, animal migration patterns, medicinal plants. Part of this region along the St. John was called Madawaska by the Indians—“Land of the Porcupine”19—while the Maliseet Indians knew the St. John itself as Wolastoq—“the Beautiful River”20—and themselves as Wolastoqiyik, “People of the Beautiful River.”

  These “blank spots,” in other words, were very much “known” centuries before the Europeans arrived. What the Europeans brought to these places, initially, was ignorance.

  I could imagine the excitement for the young Charleses in simply learning—learning the secrets of these places that were utter mysteries for the European arrivals. Privy to the esoteric knowledge of the woods, the boys resembled, in a fashion, those two Huck Finn characters whom we met along the Wisconsin River when I was a boy canoeing with my father. They suddenly appeared in our camp, carrying the secrets of the thick, tangled bottomlands—the animal paths through the forest, the clamming spots, the fishing holes, the fox dens, the sloughs to swim across to reach an island. I’d felt that same excitement myself. As a boy, I knew the few hundred acres of forest, meadow, and swamp surrounding our log cabin better than anyone alive. A special power comes with that knowledge, a sense of privilege. You are the possessor of secrets. The young Charleses felt it in Acadia in the early 1600s. I’m certain Thoreau did also, two centuries later in his woods and fields of Concord, and so did John Muir, in the 1870s, in his beloved High Sierra.