The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  Pulling himself up the boulders, he ascended into the mountain’s blowing cloud cap. He soon topped out on the high rocky ridgetop—the tabletop—from which protrudes Katahdin’s topmost peak. There he stood “deep within the hostile ranks of clouds” with the wind blowing fleeting patches of sunlight across the jumbled rock. He tried to spot the summit through the spinning mists but instead glimpsed only the dark, damp crags to his right and left. He thinks of Atlas, of Vulcan, of Prometheus, of the great figures of myth. But now, instead of leaping forth to take part in the scene, to frolic with the gods who inhabit these high, wild places, Thoreau starts to have doubts—doubts whether he should be there at all. He begins to get very nervous up there among the dark, mist-driven crags, with good reason.

  “It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits.…He is more alone than you can imagine.”

  Thoreau looks about to find comfort—any comfort—in the warm, forgiving embrace of the Nature that he knows so well from gentle Concord. Here on Katahdin it’s not forthcoming. The transcendent moment he long anticipated becomes fright as he finds himself a mere speck of life clinging to the mountainside, thousands of feet up among clouds and freezing wind, boulders and dark cliffs. Rather than welcoming him, Nature rebukes him, rebuffs him, almost abuses him. Later, in his Katahdin essay, he wrote:

  …inhuman Nature has got him at a disadvantage,51 caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your time? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? Should thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.

  He should have been scared. The spot where he stood on the edge of Katahdin’s rocky tabletop lies quite a distance from the actual summit, which rises a few hundred feet above the table. Thoreau realized, if he were to seek the summit itself, how easily he could become disoriented in the thick, blowing mist sweeping the tableland. With such poor visibility, he could have stumbled off the cliffs that drop nearly two thousand feet from the table’s eastern edge. Even if he’d managed to find the summit, it would have been very difficult to retrace the same route back across the tableland in the blowing fog to the exact spot where he ascended from camp, unless he’d carefully marked his way, as modern-day mountaineers do with wands in white-out blizzards. He could have mistakenly descended the mountain on its wrong flank, encountered cliffs or an impassable route, and spent days wandering through the dense Maine Woods trying to find his companions or his way back to civilization. He writes that he was carrying a pack for this eventuality. But the idea of wandering off the wrong side of Katahdin is clearly too much even for Thoreau. If he continues toward the summit, he understands there is the distinct possibility that Nature will callously let him “freeze, or starve, or shudder thy life away.”

  Thoreau—to our everlasting benefit—possessed a unique strength for turning rejection into literary advantage. When the two young women with whom he fell in love in Concord spurned him, he went to the woods and, quite literally, embraced its plants and animals. “All nature is my bride,” he wrote. Now when Nature herself spurns him—“why came ye here before your time?”—on the wild top of Katahdin and he retreats, perhaps frightened, descending out of the cloud layer and down the steep, rocky mountainside with the unbroken forest and rivers and lakes spreading out below, shimmering distantly in the sun, Thoreau draws a much larger lesson from it.

  Eventually finding his companions where he had left them, picking blueberries and mountain cranberries, Thoreau and party headed down the mountain through thick forest toward the Penobscot River. They soon emerged into a large, meadowy strip of “burnt land,” which Thoreau assumed was created by lightning fires. It’s here on the “burnt lands” that he underwent some of his most powerful revelations about nature. Who, he wondered, is the “proprietor” of this meadowy place?

  It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man.52 We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, drear and inhuman…Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. Man was not to be associated with it.

  Right here, from this very spot, we get so much of our modern idea of “wilderness.” Man was not to be associated with it. The Henry David who so comfortably embraced Nature in the woods and fields of Concord, where man is “at home” in Nature, had just been spooked by the craggy, misty upper reaches of Mount Katahdin. Coming into this large barren clearing in the forest, Thoreau lays out a definition of wilderness that has endured for 150 years. We wrestle today with the legacy of this moment. Though Thoreau virtually eliminates man’s presence from the wilderness, Abenaki hunters may well have burned that particular strip of forest to allow meadow grasses to sprout, which would attract deer and moose and other game. This intentional burning of forest and prairie was a widespread practice by Native Americans. While these “burnt lands” at which Thoreau marvels may have been fertile and well-known Abenaki hunting grounds, humans don’t appear anywhere in Thoreau’s concept of it. This, in some ways, is a loss. By banning the humans who have traditionally used these “wild” landscapes, you ban the deep understanding of them.

  But there is something to be gained, too. Thoreau dwells on the alien-ness of humans to this landscape. And it is because the landscape is so alien to humans that Thoreau finds the divine there. Yes, he can find the divine in his cozy woods and fields of Concord, too, but not like this—not with this profound power. Here on Katahdin and the burnt lands it is the hard fact of matter itself—including his own body—that moves Thoreau to some of his most soaring spiritual reveries.

  We walked over it with a certain awe…[It was like] being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me.…What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

  We’d had plenty of contact, that sixth day on the St. John, with Thoreau’s matter. Rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks—and moving water. Running wilderness rapids like the Big Black, as we did that day in open canoes laden with our survival gear and with our children in the bows, makes one as alive as one can possibly be to the actual world—aware, tuned in, taking in every nuance in the sound of rushing, in the curl of a wave, in the flash of spruce trees on the bank, the low soar of a bird, the sun glistening off the wet, flexing arm muscles of a child.

  The sun lowered over the St. John at the end of that sixth day and we scouted the banks for a good campsite. We passed a marked campsite called Ferry Crossing and one called Seminary Brook, walked around, and kept going. Too buggy, too closed in, too open, too far from the river—always something. We finally chose a spot called Boom Chain, tucked in among a thick stand of birches on the right bank. It looked unused. Ferns poked up around the rock fire ring. The rich light of the lowering sun skittered across the river, reflected upward, and illuminated the arched underside of our campsite’s bower of birches in a dappled fresco of green and gold.

  “Don’t look, Dad,” Skyler said to me.

  He was crouching down at the fire ring near the pile of wood we had collected. He wouldn’t let me approach as I brought in one more armload and dumped it.

  “Okay,” h
e finally said, “you can look now.”

  He stepped back. Inside the fire ring stood a perfect teepee of small, dry sticks that he’d constructed and within the teepee he’d crumpled sheets of birch bark.

  “That’s really good, Skyler,” I said with a glow of pride. “That’s a really good fire you made.”

  I helped him set a match to it. The birch bark flared with bright yellow flames, quickly igniting the sticks. We placed on larger logs. Soon I was reclining beside the fire, propped on one elbow, while Skyler and Molly roasted hot dogs on sticks. I was so pleased that he’d taken the lesson. While for an outsider the forest is unknown—a great blank spot—to those who paddled its rivers and treaded through its groves in hide moccasins over the many centuries, knowledge of it was codified into names, stories, songs, useful tips, and little phrases passed from grandparent to grandchild. In these many ways the knowledge carried through hundreds of generations. What may be a “blank spot”—that state of ignorance about a place—at one time may not be at another time, while long and unseen connections link the two.

  I’d learned that birch bark makes excellent tinder years before, from horse-mounted hunters in the birch forests of Manchuria, members of a small, seminomadic tribe called the Orochen. As it started to spit rain one afternoon, I noticed the lead hunter, Mung, sidle his horse against the trunk of a birch and peel off several large sheets of bark, rolling them up like scrolls and stuffing them into the inner pocket of his coat. We rode on into the rain and swamps, and, that evening, he produced the dry bark. Despite the soggy woods, the fire flared to life. Now, in Maine, we sat in the same birch forest—part of the great post–Ice Age boreal forest that encircles the earth. The Orochen tribe from whom I learned in Manchuria was probably an ancient, distant ancestor of the Abenaki and Micmac hunters whose forebears had crossed the Bering Strait and eventually roamed these banks of the St. John. And so the knowledge traveled in an arc of time and space.

  This boreal forest contained thousands upon thousands of bits of useful knowledge like the birch-bark tinder, most of them now lost. I knew of some myself that had disappeared. The earliest French explorers—Jacques Cartier’s expedition, in particular—chronicled how they learned from the Indians to make tea from the bark and needles of the “annedda” tree, which finally saved them from scurvy after 25 of their party of 110 had died. The tree was probably the white cedar, which, its seedlings taken back to France, received the name arborvitae, or “tree of life.” Many of the later European explorers were nevertheless ignorant of its antiscorbutic properties and died all the same. Knowledge of the arborvitae tea nevertheless was passed down in the New World from the Indians to the Acadians and on to their mixed or métis descendants. Thoreau quotes a French-Canadian loggers’ ditty about the cedar tea his party brews one night en route to Katahdin:

  A quart of arbor-vitae53

  To make him strong and mighty…

  Unfortunately, the swirls of smoke from Skyler’s campfire barely kept the mosquitoes at bay in our bowered camp at Boom Chain. Through the smudge, I spotted a short length of extremely heavy, rusted chain hanging from a nail driven into a birch tree, each link the size of a saucer. Here, I realized, was a bit of the actual “boom chain” that lent its name to the little campsite. Right here, loggers annually stretched this chain, or rather a huge length of it, out into the river to corral the logs driven down the St. John on the spring flood of snowmelt.

  Now this scene of frenetic human activity had passed simply to a name marking a campsite. That afternoon, at “Seminary Brook,” I’d wandered over the little meadow with a pretty brook running alongside it, wondering if this were in fact the site of an old seminary. The previous day we’d passed an old homestead, now overgrown, called Simmons Farm, and before that the long-abandoned logging center at Seven Islands. It had a post office once. These had become marks on the map, or the name of a campsite, or a few aging memories, or a chunk of rusting iron, or recollections in a book.

  Slowly, the region had slipped back into a state of “blankness.” To modern eyes like mine, unfamiliar with the logging life that had unfolded here before, this was an “untracked wilderness.” Likewise, so many early Europeans saw North America as an “untracked wilderness” when in fact to the Micmac and Abenaki and the other tribes it was as well mapped as the pages of a Rand McNally Road Atlas. In the early exploration literature, you constantly read how the Indians would squat down and with a stick or a finger trace in the earth a map to show the ignorant European how to travel through the rivers, lakes, and mountain chains that lay ahead. The Inuit, among whom this talent has been scientifically studied, are able to sketch a remarkably accurate map—detailing mile upon mile of coastal headlands, inlets, rivers—from their geographic memory.

  I’ve watched, with rising alarm, subdivisions and culs-de-sac flatten those woods and fields that I loved around the Wisconsin cabin of my childhood and firmly believe all the momentum of human life on earth seems to move toward eradicating the blank spots on the map—these places which I so hankered to visit. But here along the St. John was a blank spot almost literally forming before my eyes.

  It is a kind of paradox. Blank spots on the map, in my mind, cease to exist when the map shows the straight and curving lines—black or blue or yellow—of roads running through them. “Blank spots,” as I define them, are technically just that—patches of the map showing no human features. A good part of the Maine Woods, starting especially in the 1950s, had been crisscrossed by small log-hauling roads, along which trucks hauled out the logs instead of floating them downriver. Paradoxically, these roads meant the end to the need for big logging camps like Seven Islands, and places to feed them like Simmons Farm. Because of the construction of these roads into them, the Maine Woods, while more deforested, actually became “blanker”—they had less human presence, and humans had less hands-on knowledge of them.

  Skyler’s fire flamed in the rock ring. I sipped my camping cup of wine. Here was a bit of firsthand knowledge of the forest’s intricacies—the use of birch bark as a superior tinder, as well as a remarkably versatile building material for canoes, wigwams, containers—that would be lost without a human presence. I found it distressing that Thoreau had banned humans, and their knowledge, from his wilderness. I realized that, in this way, a “blank spot” represented a tragedy.

  ACADIA MAY WELL HAVE STAYED FRENCH, and kept far more of its original “Indian wisdom,” if not for a magnificently nasty feud among the French who gained control of it.

  With the Scottish gone—at least for now—Charles de La Tour essentially split Acadia and its fur-trading profits with the French vice admiral Isaac de Razilly. In 1632, Vice Admiral de Razilly had helped to rescue La Tour from his years of abandonment by leading an expedition of three hundred colonists to reestablish France in Acadia. While the king named La Tour the governor of Acadia, Razilly was put in charge of the larger entity of New France, which included Champlain’s settlements on the St. Lawrence River as well as La Tour’s in Acadia. When Razilly chose to settle in Acadia, La Tour agreed, in 1633, to split the fur-trade profits in half,54 with each man having a key to the other’s warehouse for inspections.

  The arrangement worked well for two years until Razilly, known for his fair-handedness, suddenly died at age forty-eight. (La Tour’s father, Claude, in his house at Cape Sable, died about the same time, in the mid-1630s.) On Razilly’s death, his half of the Acadian fur trade went to a highborn nobleman who had served loyally with Razilly’s fleet, Charles de Menou d’Aulnay—soon to be known in the New World for his hauteur and ambition. D’Aulnay reestablished a French colony on the site of Port Royal, after its forty-six remaining Scottish colonists had sent been back to the British Isles. He married the daughter of a shareholder in the Company of New France whom he met when she visited Acadia—twenty-one-year-old Jeanne Motin. Her dowry no doubt included some of her father’s company stock, further consolidating d’Aulnay’s position in Acadia and further threatening La To
ur’s. In a letter, d’Aulnay described his bride-to-be as “a modest little servant of God.”

  The forty-six-year-old La Tour, whether in retaliation or out of a yearning for companionship after three decades in the woods of the New World, sent an agent to France to arrange a marriage contract of his own. The document still exists, signed on New Year’s Eve 1639 in the fashionable Paris district around Rue de Honoré, signed by La Tour’s agent and by the family of Françoise Jacquelin, daughter of a well-respected doctor in the town of Nogent, some seventy miles from Paris. It is not clear whether Charles de La Tour had met Françoise Jacquelin during a society function on an earlier trip to Paris, or if they first met in person when she stepped off the ship in Acadia.

  Nor is her background entirely clear. Some stories—without any factual basis—place her in Paris as an aspiring actress. Some historians speculate that, based on her fluent writing, she was well educated, and thus presumably versed in property laws, as in her era, property management was considered a proper part of a young woman’s education. An old Celtic tradition then codified in parts of France—but later to disappear—stipulated equal property rights for married women. Whatever her exact background, Françoise Jacquelin was no “modest little servant of God,” as d’Aulnay had condescendingly described his own French bride. She would soon cut a dashing and formidable figure in the New World.

  Awaiting the arrival of his bride-to-be, Charles de La Tour spruced up his fort at the mouth of the St. John River by enlarging and strengthening it. Surrounded by a log stockade on a grassy promontory over the St. John’s harbor, the quadrangle of buildings measured about 120 feet in length and could house ninety people. La Tour ordered his men to build a courtyard paved in stone, and two massive stone fireplaces, each eleven feet long, which heated the living quarters, one for the men’s dormitory and the other for the officers’ living and dining areas. For himself and his bride, La Tour had the men construct in the same wing a private sitting room, fireplace, and bedroom.