The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  On the day after Christmas 1897, French, aged forty-eight, was opening a cattle gate on the P Ranch when a local rancher named Ed Oliver who’d had a land dispute with French rode up to him, fast. One account says that Oliver’s horse slammed into French’s. French responded by beating Oliver over the head with a willow whip, screaming, “I’ll kill you.” Oliver pulled out a revolver. He fired once at French.

  The short, feisty cattle baron was dead. Ed Oliver, acquitted by a jury of his fellow homesteaders, walked free.

  TWO MIDDLE-AGED MEN sat across from me at the breakfast table at the Frenchglen Hotel.

  “If you’re looking for blank spots,” said one of the men, “I have just the thing for you.”

  As we chatted, John, the hotel manager, carried plates of bacon and eggs, pancakes and muffins, mugs of coffee and tea, to the table. The two had driven from western Oregon—the wet, green coastal Oregon—to camp on these high deserts. But the weather had suddenly turned so cold and rainy they’d opted for the comfort of the Frenchglen Hotel. Most other breakfast guests were birders, too—a group of three women, another party of five. Draped with binoculars, fitted with billed caps and birding books and notepads, they annually gathered here at this season, in late May, when the flocks migrate through the desert marshes soaked with spring rains.

  The man went upstairs, and returned a minute or two later with a page torn from the alumni magazine of the University of Oregon. He placed it beside my plate of eggs and sausage.

  Titled “Long Drive for a Latte,”16 it was one of the coolest maps I’d ever seen. Created by the university’s geography department, it showed the entire Lower 48 states of the U.S.A. in white with the states’ borders outlined with thin black lines. The whole map, all forty-eight states, was white except for one small, heart-shaped black patch. It was labeled with an arrow:

  “The only place in the lower forty-eight that is more than…100 miles from the nearest general hospital; 150 miles from the nearest Starbucks; 100 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart.”

  I studied the heart-shaped shaded area and laughed. It was in southeastern Oregon. Here at the Frenchglen Hotel we sat just on its northern edge.

  “Where’s the nearest Wal-Mart?” I called out to John, the manager, still serving plates of breakfast.

  “Bend or Winnemucca.”

  “How about Starbucks?”

  “Probably Bend…and maybe Winnemucca has one, too.”

  “How far away are Bend and Winnemucca?”

  “Bend is one hundred and ninety miles and Winnemucca is one hundred and seventy-five miles.”

  “How about a hospital?”

  “That would be Burns. It’s about an hour by ambulance, or you can get to the hospital in Bend by air flight. That’s about an hour, too.”

  Much of the breakfast room now was listening in to the conversation.

  “The point is,” a woman called out from the next table, “don’t get sick!”

  I was more interested in finding blank spots than worried about getting sick. The map confirmed that I’d finally arrived at the blank spot that I’d sought, one as far removed as possible in these Lower 48 states from our usual points of reference, those nodes—the Wal-Mart, the Starbucks, the Super 8s—of instant communications, credit-card efficiency, and no-strain familiarity.

  Still, I couldn’t disengage myself entirely from that world.

  “Anyone know the primary results?” I asked.

  No one did. The birders from the coast were intensely interested—Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?—but the local people didn’t know and didn’t really seem to care.

  One of the birders, a retired doctor who had worked in rural Alaska, came through the creaking screen door and joined his friends at our big table. He’d just been sitting in his car, parked under the cottonwood trees out front, listening to its satellite radio.

  “Hillary won Kentucky by thirty-five points,” he now reported, “and Barack won overwhelmingly in Oregon, but they didn’t give numbers.”

  Breakfasters shifted in and out of the room. I ate my sausage and eggs and asked John the names of some of the largest ranches in the area. He referred me to Mandy, on the hotel’s staff, who had grown up on a local ranch.

  I caught up to her in the creaky hallway, carrying a big armload of sheets, her small boy in tow.

  “The Roaring Springs is by far the largest ranch right here,” she said.

  She gave me directions. These were a model of simplicity—drive straight south on the highway for twenty miles or so until I came to the first buildings. Those were the ranch headquarters. No, I didn’t have to make an appointment. I could just show up.

  I sensed how different this culture was, where our strict adherence to hours and minutes yielded to an attenuated sense of time that rode the rhythms of season or daylight.

  “The pilots were here at the hotel last night for dinner,” she said. “When the owner flies in, his pilots come up here sometimes to eat.”

  I returned to my seat at the breakfast table and sipped my tea. One birder group had left, and two neatly dressed men sat next to me. It turned out they were the pilots for the Roaring Springs Ranch owner, who’d flown in on his Citation jet for some fishing with his grandchildren.

  “Where do you land a jet?” asked a birder.

  “The landing strip is right beside the road,” one of the pilots replied. “Right beside it. Sometimes we scare both the cars and ourselves.”

  “Do you think the owner would talk to me?” I asked.

  “He’s a really nice guy,” said the other.

  AS I LOADED UP MY CAR at the Frenchglen Hotel, blackbirds trilled in the marshy ditches across the road, their lilt matching melodically with the sunny, cool, breezy morning. The Donner und Blitzen River17 flowed through these bottomlands like a rain gutter along the bottom edge of a gently sloping roof, carrying the water to Malheur Lake near Burns. As I looked to the east, toward the sun, the roof rose gently toward the sky—the long, easy slopes of Steens Mountain. This is a massive ridge running north–south that’s roughly sixty miles long. While this side of the roof sloped down gently over several miles, the far side, which I couldn’t see from here, dropped off in an abrupt escarpment that plunged some five thousand feet to the dry, dusty floor of the Alvord Desert.

  Highway 205 south out of Frenchglen climbed a sage-and-juniper ridge and rolled down the other side into another huge sagebrush valley, far larger than any I’d seen before. To my left, Steens Mountain rose long and gentle, its sloping green meadows flecked with dark juniper groves, and to my right, cloud shadows raced across the sagebrush flats, the shadows seeming to blow so fast on the cool wind they kept pace with my car.

  The road ran straight. I looked ahead for any sign of ranch buildings. There were none.

  I was giddy at all the emptiness that surrounded me—the simple lack of humanity and its structures, the infinite arching vault of tan earth and blue sky. Growing up in the bounded spaces of Wisconsin’s woods and fields and small lakes, I rarely could see as far as a mile to the horizon. Racing these cloud shadows down Highway 205, I gazed off to the west perhaps thirty or forty miles across the sagebrush flats to a languorous, distant horizon of bluish mountains.

  Was that what first attracted John Muir to the West? Was it this sense of infinity striking him in the face that kept him in the West, after the closer embrace of the Wisconsin woods or Scotland?

  When Muir was a ten-year-old boy—in 1849, while Emerson preached Nature in Concord and Thoreau scratched over multiple drafts of what became Walden—Muir’s family immigrated to America. Young John and his brother and their father went in advance of the rest of the family, riding an oxcart through the trackless woods and marshes and prairie openings to a hill overlooking Wisconsin’s beautiful Fountain Lake, where they built a house. Muir and his brother’s life in a strict Scottish schoolhouse gave way to freedom.

  “This sudden plash into pure wildness18—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—how u
tterly happy it made us!” Muir wrote in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. “Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us.”

  That glorious freedom, however, soon was leavened with the crushing work of clearing a farm. A strict authoritarian and Calvinist, Muir’s father put his eldest son, John, behind the plow at age twelve. Working seventeen-hour days, John dug stumps out of fields and split oak logs into fence rails. The family worshipped together every night before going to bed at eight o’clock on their father’s command, with little chance to do the leisure reading that John so loved.

  For all his Calvinistic strictness, Muir’s father viewed the natural world through the lens of God’s work. Leaving aside Christianity, this was not so far from what Transcendentalists such as Emerson were advocating back in Concord—that spirituality infused all Nature. In his memoir, Muir described his father’s ecstatic reaction to the Northern Lights shimmering over their farm one cold Wisconsin winter night.

  “Come! Come, mother!” shouted Father Muir.19 “Come, bairns! and see the glory of God. All the sky is clad in a robe of red light…Hush and wonder and adore, for surely this is the clothing of the Lord himself, and perhaps He will even now appear looking down from his high heaven.”

  This sense of spirituality in the natural world shaped the way John himself would see Nature.

  I recalled reading Muir’s The Story of My Boyhood and Youth as a fifth- or sixth-grader in Wisconsin, and identifying with his many rambles in the woods like those around our own log cabin. But what I remembered most vividly was Muir’s discovery that by waking very early in the morning—as early as 1:00 a.m., he claimed—he found the leisure to read Milton, Shakespeare, Mark Akenside (the British poet and Deist who had so influenced William Bartram), and the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose five years in South America captured Muir’s imagination. On other predawn mornings Muir descended to the cellar and tinkered by candlelight with his beloved inventions. He rasped and filed bits of wood and metal into gears and dials to construct homemade clocks, thermometers, and an “alarm bed” that tipped him upright at a preset hour.

  These inventions finally liberated Muir from the backbreaking work of the family farm, set him on the road to an education, and, eventually, the wilderness. At a neighbor’s suggestion the twenty-two-year-old Muir strapped his inventions onto an old washboard, asked his brother to drop him via the family’s wagon in a nearby village, and boarded the steam train to the state capital at Madison. Here he entered his inventions in the Wisconsin State Fair, which he hoped might lead to a machine-shop job. To his surprise, Muir’s homemade wooden clocks and thermometers were the biggest hit in the Fine Arts Hall.

  “It was considered wonderful that a boy on a farm had been able to invent and make such things, and almost every spectator foretold good fortune,” he recalled. “But I had been lectured by my father above all things to avoid praise…”

  His budding mechanical genius welcomed by the administration, Muir enrolled at Wisconsin’s state university in 1860, where he lived on a dollar a week, studied geology, and read deeply and thirstily, including the works of Emerson, Wordsworth, and Thoreau, who, back in Concord, would soon die of consumption at age forty-four. Muir happened to attend the university at a particularly heady moment in the field of natural history. Darwin’s startling and new Origin of Species had been published only the year before, in 1859, exploding the notion that life on Earth was created in one stroke by the hand of God for the benefit of Man. Soon after Darwin, George Perkins Marsh,20 in his Man and Nature, systematically proved how human civilization, rather than living in “harmony” with the earth, had thoroughly degraded, deforested, and altered the landscapes of the Mediterranean basin.

  Muir’s personal awakening in botany arrived in a kind of Bartramian flash when, as he stood on the stone steps of North Hall, a fellow student named Griswold reached up and plucked a blossom from an overhanging locust tree and handed it to Muir.

  “‘Muir,’ he said, ‘do you know what family this tree belongs to?’

  “‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about botany.’21

  “‘Well, no matter,’ said he, ‘what is it like?’

  “‘It’s like a pea flower,’ I replied.

  “‘That’s right. You’re right,’ he said, ‘it belongs to the Pea Family.’

  “‘But how can that be,’ I objected, ‘when the pea is a weak, clinging, straggling herb, and the locust a big, thorny hardwood tree?’”

  Griswold pointed out the blossom’s similarities in petals, stamen, and pistil, the locust tree’s dangling seed pods like pea pods, and had Muir taste the locust tree’s leaves. To Muir’s surprise, they tasted like pea leaves.

  “Now, surely you cannot imagine that all these similar characters are mere coincidences,” said Griswold. “Do they not rather go to show that the Creator in making the pea vine and the locust tree had the same idea in mind, and that plants are not classified arbitrarily? Man has nothing to do with their classification. Nature has attended to all that, giving essential unity with boundless variety, so that the botanist has only to examine plants to learn the harmony of their relations.”

  “This fine lesson,” wrote Muir in his autobiography, “charmed me and sent me flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm. Like everybody else I was always fond of flowers, attracted by their external beauty and purity. Now my eyes were opened to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos.”

  HIGHWAY 205 RAN ALONG the base of a long, bald slice of rimrock that protruded from the sagebrush flats, the Catlow Rim. Around a bend of the rim, a distant, yellowy-green patch of willows and cottonwoods slid into view, and underneath the trees a large cluster of ranch buildings, surrounded by green pastures. Something tubelike and bright metallic-white shone on a pasture nearby, like a space capsule descended onto this green and sere landscape, this looming rock rim and these broad sagebrush flats.

  It was a Citation jet.

  “Roaring Springs Ranch,” announced a sign beside the highway. A creek gushed forth from the rimrock, giving the ranch its name.

  A few men and boys in windbreakers and caps fished in a marshy pond along the road. I pulled over. The wind blew hard as I walked to the fencing that stood between us.

  “Can I help you?” one of the men said politely.

  It turned out to be Rob Sanders himself, a businessman from the West Coast who, with other family members, purchased the ranch in the early 1990s.

  I told him I was interested in the history of the ranch.

  “If you really want to know its history,” he said, “you should talk to the foreman, Stacy Davies.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “They’re all out branding in the desert.”

  “Can I drive there from here?”

  “You can, but it’ll take a while. And it’s pretty rough in spots. What kind of vehicle do you have?”

  He glanced over at my rusting Isuzu Trooper—an early, scrawny-looking version of an SUV.

  “You should be okay in that. You have good clearance. Just be sure you have plenty of fuel, and a spare tire.”

  “I have a spare, and I have lots of extra water, and enough food to last for days.”

  “As long as you have all that good stuff, you should be all right.”

  Like Mandy’s at the hotel, the directions Sanders gave me were exceedingly simple in this big country—go straight down the highway for another twenty or thirty miles until the place where the highway bends, then bear right on a dirt road out into the desert for a long ways. He wasn’t sure exactly how far.

  “Just keep heading south,” he said. “If you keep heading south and stay on that main dirt road you’ll run right into them. They’ve been out in the desert branding for the last two or three days.”

  AN HOUR
OR SO LATER, I was “walking” the car—driving at a crawl—up a steep, narrow canyon. The rubber tires twanged as I jounced over big chunks of rock and the car bucked forward and back, side to side. I hadn’t seen a single person nor structure since I’d left Rob Sanders. After thumping off the highway onto the crude dirt road, I’d driven through a long series of sagebrush flats, through dusty valleys, through barren, sun-scorched hills, with a pocket compass lying on the console to ensure I was always heading south.

  Halfway up the rocky canyon, I came to a small flat spot and got out to relieve myself. The wind blew hard but the sun shone pleasantly. Just for reassurance, among all these big, tire-puncturing rocks, I double-checked that I had air in my spare tire, mounted to the rear of the Trooper. I pounded the tire with my fist. It felt nice and firm.

  But then I noticed…there was a padlock on the spare. In all the years I’d owned the car, I’d never used the spare. And I’d never noticed that it was padlocked to the rear door to prevent theft. And I didn’t remember ever seeing a key for the heavy-duty padlock.

  “Oh, shit!” I said.

  I tugged on the lock. It was thick…and solid. I looked at the rocks lying scattered about. If I had to, could I smash the padlock with a rock? I doubted it would break. I remembered seeing a metal stake a ways down the canyon. I might be able to use that to pry it off if I had to.

  I climbed back into the car. I checked the odometer. I’d driven ten or twelve miles since turning off the highway. If I had a flat tire now, I could walk that distance to get back to civilization—or at least a road. But I didn’t want to turn back. I wanted to get to the branding.

  I wouldn’t perish out here—I had plenty of water and food. I had a cell phone with me but hadn’t received a signal since about sixty miles up the road, back near Burns. How much inconvenience was I willing to risk to experience a blank spot? I’d been down this same road, so to speak, many times before on various travels, and occasionally I’d had to make the equivalent of an unwelcome fifteen-mile hike back to the highway. But there is a certain time in one’s life when that starts seeming less like a wild adventure and more like…what?