The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  More like a whole lot of effort.

  I decided to keep going…at least a few more miles. I checked my pocket compass. I was still heading south. Lumbering upward in first gear, the car slowly climbed farther up the canyon. I wished I had my family with me. They’d be getting a big kick out of this. To Molly and Skyler, it would all look like adventure and not like difficulty.

  As I emerged from the canyon, the rocky hills on each side drew back. I crested a rise, overlooking yet another wide sagebrush valley. I paused, scanning across it, tracing with my eye the sinuous line of the two dusty tire ruts until they disappeared in the far distance. Nothing. Not a building, not a fence, not a truck, not a horse, not a cow. Nothing but sage and rock and wind.

  JOHN MUIR FOUND THE WILDERNESS LONELY, too—at first.

  His first epic adventure was a draft dodge.22 In late 1863, after two years at Wisconsin’s state university, Muir planned to enter medical school at Michigan, when President Abraham Lincoln called up another half million men to send into the bloody, raging battles of the Civil War. Muir’s brother Dan had already fled to Canada. Considering himself more a Scotsman than an American obligated to fight in American wars, John also fled for Canada.

  It’s not clear exactly what his plan was, or if he had one. For six months, he largely kept out of touch, wandering through the swamps and forests in the wilderness north of Lake Huron. Alone, homesick, sleeping at farmhouses when he could find one, he spent much of his time collecting botanical samples. It was here he had a central epiphany of his life.

  One day in June 1864, Muir struggled across a great tamarack swamp where he’d been collecting plants. Following a rough compass course to reach the far side, he found himself still in the swamp as dusk fell, hungry and tired and worrying whether he could find a house on dry ground to spend the night, or would have to weave himself a nest of branches in which to sleep above the soggy ground. Despairing in the gloom, he ventured beside a stream, and happened to spot two beautiful white flowers sprouting from a bed of yellow moss. These were Calypso borealis—“Hider of the North”—a rare orchid. The distraught Muir instantly identified with the flowers as his soul mates.

  They were alone.23 I never before saw a plant so full of life; so perfectly spiritual, it seemed pure enough for the throne of its Creator. I felt as if I were in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come. I sat down beside them and wept for joy.

  Not unlike William Bartram and Henry David Thoreau, Muir discovered in plants and in the wilds a kind of universal love and acceptance…a love and acceptance, one could conjecture, that hadn’t been forthcoming from his stern father and the harsh life of clearing a farm. In the complex and paradoxical equation of familial emotion, John Muir discovered love’s embrace in the very place—in the wilds, among the delicate, crushable plants—that his father, in his single-minded drive to homestead in the virgin forest, had long attempted to destroy.

  After his wilderness sojourn north of Lake Huron, Muir joined up with his brother and hired on as a mechanic in an Ontario woodworking factory, staying over a year. When the Civil War ended and the factory burned—and with it his precious botanical collections—Muir wandered back to the United States, taking a job at a steam-powered wagon-parts factory in Indianapolis. He had a bright future as mechanic and inventor because the U.S. economy, spurred by the Civil War and the munitions manufacturing and rail transport it demanded, was quickly transforming from agrarian to factory-based.

  One day at the wagon factory Muir was using a metal file to pry apart a splice in a power belt and accidentally jammed the file’s sharp end into his right eye. As he stood at a window, the aqueous humor that filled the eye dripped out into his palm, and with it, his sight disappeared in that eye. A few days later, due to nerve shock, his other eye went blind, too.

  For days, he lay in a sickbed in a darkened room, the pain spreading through his body, tortured by the thought of being blind for the rest of his life. But after a month’s slow recovery, the sight returned to both eyes. During this ordeal Muir resolved that he would return to the natural world he so loved, and that loved him, as embodied by those rare and delicate “Hiders of the North” orchids. He pledged that he would go on an epic wilderness romp—what became a “grand sabbath day three years long.” His plan was to walk south to the Gulf of Mexico. From there he would voyage to the Amazon, and strike into its deep jungles, following in the footsteps of his childhood hero, the explorer Alexander von Humboldt.

  AT TWENTY MILES OFF THE HIGHWAY, according to the Isuzu’s odometer, I began to have doubts. The dirt track still wound through the sagebrush valleys and barren hills, and I still hadn’t seen a structure nor living thing. Was this the right track I’d chosen? I checked the compass. It showed that I still headed south, as Rob Sanders had instructed. But if I got a flat tire, which seemed quite likely on the track’s rocky sections, twenty miles would prove a very long walk.

  At mile twenty-one, I crested another rise. Again, I scanned across another broad sagebrush valley bounded by low, dry mountains, looking for something, anything, that indicated a human presence. At first nothing…then, scanning again, I spotted what appeared at first like a faint plume of smoke, blowing away on the cold wind. It was maybe four miles away at the base of a dry, tawny mountain. I looked closer. Some faint dark lines lay there. No buildings. But a corral? The wind whisked up another white plume, glimmeringly backlit by the afternoon sun. Dust? Some living creature had to be kicking up that dust.

  I drove steadily toward it on the two dirt ruts winding across the valley. Drawing closer, I saw that it was, in fact, a wooden corral. A few boxy pickup trucks and a horse trailer sat near it. With mounting excitement, I jounced up the track that led to it, and stopped the car. A herd of several hundred bellowing cattle milled between the wooden fences, kicking up plumes of dust blown away on the wind. Riders circled on horseback among the dusty herd, swinging lariats.

  Yes! I thought. I’ve just arrived in the Old West.

  SOMEONE SHOULD—okay, maybe I will, someday—write the story of the women who influenced the thinking of the “great men” who shaped our notions of Wild Nature. Rousseau had Madame de Warens, the aristocratic Deist and herbalist with the Savoy country estate who, supposedly converting the runaway teenager to Catholicism, educated him in the arts of love and literature, and as a nature worshipper who questioned “civilized” man. Thanks in good part to Madame de Warens, Rousseau would go on to change the Western world’s thinking about Wild Nature and Savage Man.

  Billy Bartram left home in Philadelphia for his uncle’s plantation at Cape Fear. There, amid the semitropical lushness of the Carolinas, he secretly fell in love with his first cousin, Mary Bartram. Their love forbidden, Billy Bartram cherished the memories of his and Mary’s cavortings in the “eternal spring” as he wandered alone for four years, as if in exile, in the Southeast wilderness. The book that resulted, Bartram’s Travels, would broadly influence the European Romantic movement and transform the American wilderness—or, rather, the image of it—from a place of forbidding and evil to one of soulful and “sublime” experiences.

  Thoreau found muses in two proper young New England women. He apparently went so far as to propose to Ellen Sewall, who shared his love of the outdoors, but whose father strictly forbade her to marry this Concord weirdo and demanded she cut off all relations. Thoreau also apparently fell in love with another young Massachusetts woman of good family, Mary Russell, who also rejected him. Thwarted twice in love with young women, Thoreau took to the woods, where, by his own only partly tongue-in-cheek admission, he “found a match at last” during one winter afternoon’s walk. Its dead leaves and branches poking above the snow and whispering wintry thoughts to him, reports Thoreau, “I fell in love with a shrub oak.”

  All were odd men, standing off from social conventions of their times—often vehemently opposed to them. Each was infused with his own idiosyncratic passion that ultimately expressed itself in
love for wild places. Through their writings, they became famous for it. But only “great men” of the era were recognized to write “great books,” and history itself followed their biographies. At least until contemporary times, few women appear in the written record of our changing ideas and feelings toward wild places. If you read between the lines, however, you can detect the profound influence of women who encouraged these “great men” of the wilds, sometimes loved them, and almost always gave them the gift of much deeper insight into the value of Nature.

  Such was the case with John Muir and Jeanne Carr. The two met through her husband, Ezra, one of Muir’s professors of geology and chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. Having moved to the Midwest from New England, the Carrs personally knew Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle, and knew the writings of Thoreau, whose Walden had recently been published, in 1854. Introducing him to Emerson’s writings, Professor Carr deeply impressed on Muir “the harmony, the oneness, of all the world’s life”24—a view that Jeanne shared.

  Daughter of a freethinking Vermont doctor and a mother of old New England stock, Jeanne Carr’s Puritan ancestors, like Emerson’s, had arrived in New England seven generations earlier, convinced that Satan inhabited the North American wilds and the devil possessed the heathen Indian. Like Emerson and others in the Concord circle, Jeanne Carr broke dramatically with that dark, hoary view of Wild Nature.

  With her curious and progressive mind, she found herself frustrated by the constricted female role in mid-1800s America of home-maker and housewife and helper to her husband’s career. She chafed for ways to reach out intellectually, to transcend this narrow life, having at various points enrolled in a seminary, worked as a schoolteacher, and pursued amateur botany. When John Muir, working at the sawmill in Canada to escape the draft and feeling lonely and homesick, wrote a letter to Professor Carr, Jeanne quickly replied to Muir. She remembered him as standing out from other students for “your power of insight into Nature, and the simplicity of your love for her.” Jeanne proposed to John Muir, via letter, that they begin an exchange of ideas:

  [I am] a woman whose life seems always to be used up25 in little trifling things, never labelled “done” and laid away as a man’s may be. Then as a woman I have often to consider not the lilies only, in their perfection, but the humble honest wayside grasses and weeds, sturdily filling their places through such repeated discouragements.

  Thus began an intimate, ten-year correspondence between the two. She exposed Muir to her wide-ranging intellectual interests—from painting to feminism, to landscape gardening, to poetry, to psychic phenomena, to Asian philosophies. He was twenty-seven years old and an odd-mannered farmboy draft dodger, and she forty and a polished New England lady. She served as both his muse and his guide, a mother figure and sister, and offered him a kind of universal love as she loved the “humble honest wayside grasses and weeds.” It was as if Nature itself provided the lush medium through which their feelings for each other flowed.

  At the time, psychic readings were much in vogue across the United States. While John Muir lay in bed recovering his sight after poking his eye with a file, and deciding to follow the explorer Humboldt’s steps to South America, Jeanne Carr wrote him to say that a friend of hers, a psychic, predicted he would end up in the western United States and the Yosemite Valley.

  Muir read the prediction with skepticism.

  “My faith concerning its complete fulfillment is weak,” he wrote to Mrs. Carr.

  THEY’D SEEN ME COMING—my tiny Trooper in the distance kicking up a plume of dust far across the sagebrush valley. As I neared, bumping up through the sage, one of the riders sidled his horse to the edge of the corral. As I got out of the car, he dismounted and walked over to the fence, leading his horse by the reins, while eyeing me carefully. It wasn’t as if someone would just stumble across this place; you’d have to be way beyond lost. I’d be suspicious, too.

  I gave him a jaunty little wave, hoping to look friendly, hoping to look unarmed. I approached closely enough so he could hear me above the bellowing, churning, dust-shrouded mass of animals behind him.

  “Hey,” I said in greeting, as warmly as I could.

  He watched me steadily with cool blue eyes from under his cowboy hat.

  “Can I help you?” he replied evenly.

  “Rob Sanders sent me,” I said, figuring that invoking the boss’s name might put him at ease. “Are you Stacy Davies?”

  He said he was. I hurriedly explained what I was up to—my quest for the blankest, emptiest places in America. He listened carefully while his horse stood patiently beside him. A long lariat was looped over the saddlehorn. He wore dusty leather chaps on his legs, battered cowboy boots, an old tan coat.

  I noticed the other riders, working their horses through the “pairs”—each consisting of a mother cow and calf—swinging lariats and throwing them down to rope the calves. It looked like a Western. They were dressed like in a Western: heavy leather chaps; dusty worn boots; cowboy hats; bandannas knotted around their necks. They hadn’t dressed up for me, or for anyone else. They just were. I thought the American cowboy was dead. But here he was—cowboys and cowgirls—vaqueros, the old Spanish called them in California, or buckaroos as they were known here, a bastardization of the Spanish noun. There was a pretty vaquera, too, with tight jeans and leather chaps and white hat and knotted black bandanna around her slender neck, wearing silver earrings, and working near the fire. It blazed bright orange at the far end of the corral. Branding irons poked from it. I’d walked onto a damned movie set! It felt more surreal than a movie set, less explicable, because we were way, way, way out here in the desert…as if in the many intervening miles since I’d last seen another human and through that long sequence of empty sagebrush valleys I’d slipped through a rent in the fabric of time and emerged in the 1880s.

  Davies pointed to a hole in the fence to crawl through, so I could stand in the dusty corral and talk more easily.

  “So what do you want to know?” he asked.

  Still the cows bellowed and dust flew and wind blew and the riders roped.

  “Well, I want to know how a ranch like this works, and what it’s like to live here in such empty country, and how big it is.”

  “This allotment we’re standing on is 640,000 acres,” he said, with some pride in its sheer scale. “One pasture is 427,000 acres. The whole ranch is one million acres. From here it’s forty-five miles back to ranch headquarters. It’s twenty miles to pavement. It’s eighteen miles to the Nevada border.”

  A boy of maybe eleven walked up, wearing a sweatshirt with shoved-up sleeves. Dried blood, caked over with white dust, smeared his hands, forearms, face. Wind and dust matted his hair, like some Huck Finn of the High Desert, and in one hand he gripped a short, elegantly curved and very sharp knife, and in the other, a whetstone, on which he worked the knife blade back and forth, honing it.

  He asked Stacy a question about what he wanted done next with some pairs.

  “This is my boy,” Stacy said to me. “He’s been doing the cutting. Do you have kids?”

  “I do,” I said. “A girl thirteen and a boy ten.”

  “Good,” he said. “I have three boys working here now, and my wife. That couple over there, they’re getting married in a month. This is a place where families can work together.”

  The Davies family, Stacy and Elaine and their sons, lived back at ranch headquarters, forty-five miles away, where I’d encountered Rob Sanders and the Citation jet in the pasture. Stacy said the boys went to elementary school in Frenchglen, about fifteen miles from headquarters. For high school, they’d go to Crane Union High School, a boarding high school in Crane, about seventy-five miles away.

  “So exactly how big is a million acres in total?”

  “The ranch is seventy miles north to south,” he replied. “It’s forty-five miles across at the widest point.”

  He nodded the brim of his hat—nodding it across the broad valley floor, nodding it toward distant
bluish hills, nodding it toward the utter, absolute absence of a dwelling or any sign of human life.

  “This is the heart of the big empty, as you can see. I don’t know anyplace that’s farther from a highway.”

  I had to smile. Wherever exactly the center of that “Long Way to a Latte” map lay, I was pretty sure I was standing on it.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1867, at age twenty-nine, Muir walked out of Louisville, Kentucky, pausing at the town’s outskirts to spread out a map and trace the wildest way to the Gulf of Mexico. From there, his plan was to follow Humboldt into the Amazon.

  Across Kentucky and Tennessee and into Georgia he traipsed—into William Bartram’s old territory—through forests and along country roads, staying at sharecroppers’ shacks and trappers’ cabins. He slept several nights in one memorably peaceful and enchanting graveyard and gained a visceral understanding of how the human body is recycled into the natural world. Ending only two years earlier, the Civil War had left much of the countryside in ruins. Gangs of long-haired highwaymen on horseback prowled the roads. They found nothing in Muir’s meager sack—a plant press, botanical samples, crackers, a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Muir’s own journal, inscribed “John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe”26—worth stealing. One highwayman, after rummaging through it, thrust the bag back to him in disgust.

  These encounters may have encouraged Muir to side with the wild animals and heathen Indians—also victims of ruffians and “honest” citizens alike. The alligators of the Florida swamps were fierce and cruel in the eyes of man, Muir noted, but no doubt they were happy and beautiful in the eyes of God. “Lord Man” felt free to kill a bear or a savage heathen Indian, but if bear or Indian killed Christian man, no matter how worthless that individual, “oh! that is horribly unorthodox,27 and on the part of the Indians atrocious murder!…if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”