by Peter Stark
It took us most of the day to drive there. Starting from Silver City, where we’d supped the night before on an exquisite posthike dinner at a restaurant called Shevek & Co. (Kobe tips, calamari piccata, veal scaloppine, lamb tagine), we looped far to the west and north on deserted Highway 180 to skirt the great roadless heart of the Gila Wilderness and Forest. Big, big empty country greeted us the whole way, rolling grasslands and dry hills, and in the distance on both sides, sometimes near, sometimes far, rose empty, bluish mountains. We were in Catron County—the largest and least populated in New Mexico.
I felt that sense of discovery again—that far beyond the homogeneous nodes and exit ramps and strip malls, lay this other life in America, one tied closely to our national identity, of America as a collection of self-possessed individuals creating an individual destiny in this vast land.
We had a late Sunday lunch at a roadside café in the tiny (population 387) county seat of Reserve, where the green chili stew sprang sweat from my forehead and sent tears rolling down my cheeks. The women at the family table next to ours were dark-haired and wore elegant Sunday dresses. They carried themselves almost aristocratically, as if of old Spanish descent. Their men wore huge silver belt buckles.
Eventually the smaller highway joined U.S. 60 and we swung east, over the top of the big emptiness. A few cars and pickups passed us now. Suddenly the highway spilled out of low hills onto the Plains of San Agostin.
“There it is!” someone said.
The brownish high desert of the plain spread before us about twenty-five miles across. In the distance it finally washed against a breaking wave of scrambled mountains. But strung across that huge flat expanse was a perfectly symmetrical row of what looked like perfect half eggshells, spaced about a mile apart, each one in the row appearing smaller in the distance until they were so tiny and far away they disappeared, as if over the horizon. They pointed expectantly up to the northeast quadrant of the late-afternoon blue sky, all in precisely the same direction with a kind of surreal symmetry, as if they were some kind of alien beings taking orders from somewhere far beyond this world.
We drove a spur road a few miles to a cluster of hangars and headquarters buildings. The place felt deserted. Twilight Zone territory. A tame antelope stood passively beside the empty parking lot of the little visitors’ center. Inside, we gave ourselves the self-guided tour—a video, the exhibit room. It explained that the VLA, built in the late 1970s by the National Science Foundation and a consortium of universities, is far more powerful than normal optical telescopes because it listens to the broader spectrum of radio waves emitted from distant objects. With the dishes spread out as far as they are across the Plains of San Agostin, it is the equivalent of one giant dish twenty miles across. Here before us stood one of the most powerful listening tools on Earth.
We exited through the rear door and walked down a graveled path several hundred yards to the nearest dish itself. It was beautiful, in its own way, standing there in the last of the low, golden sunlight, this giant, cream-colored, perfect eggshell—as large as a baseball diamond, the exhibit inside had noted—propped high up on its spidery white scaffolding. A soft whirring emitted from electronic components suspended beneath the dish, where supercooled fluids kept their temperature at minus 427 degrees Fahrenheit. Faint radio waves emitted by objects in distant outer space hit the dish’s curve and bounced up to the listening device suspended on a kind of tripod projecting from the center of the dish. They were amplified, and then processed in banks of computers in a two-story building a few hundred yards away. It had a balcony and large blank windows that overlooked the site. It looked deserted, too.
They’d chosen this spot on the Plains of San Agostin, a sign explained, because it was so distant from cities and sheltered by mountains from man-made electrical signals. It occurred to me that this was another definition of a blank spot.
Suddenly there was a low hum, startling us.
“Look!” Amy called, pointing up. “It’s moving!”
The giant dish was, in fact, shifting, slowly upward and to the right. It moved a few inches, and then it stopped.
We watched it for a minute or two. Then the low hum began again and the dish shifted a few more inches.
I began to figure out what was happening. The dish—all twenty-seven of them across the plain were no doubt moving in unison—was shifting position slightly every few minutes to compensate for the rotation of the earth and the earth’s movement around the sun. The dish’s movement kept it fixed on whatever distant spot in the universe that particular experiment was exploring.
On the wall of the visitors’ center auditorium, I’d seen a poster trumpeting one of the VLA’s achievements: “Astronomers Find Enormous Hole in the Universe.”
Discovered by scientists at the University of Minnesota using the twenty-seven dishes of the VLA, the hole in the universe measures nearly 1 billion light-years across.
“[It is] empty of normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen ‘dark matter.’”
They’d stumbled on a blank spot, too.
IT ALL MADE SENSE, in a strange way. Seventy miles to the south, across the Gila Wilderness, at the Cliff Dwellings cavern, we’d run our fingers over the rock-inscribed thirteen moons of the lunar cycle. Nothing had changed, really. The power and the mystery still lay there—out, out, in the heavens.
It lay here, too, in the big empty spaces. It lay on the great, silent plain, as the last rays of the sun illuminated the line of dishes extending to the mountains on the horizon, all pointing silently upward. It lay in the silence of the wilderness, or in the rush of the river in the canyon, or in the howl of the wolf.
Leopold fought hard to preserve the wilderness. Over the years his stated rationale shifted, or became deeper and more complex. He knew, all along, that there were very good reasons—or rather deep needs—for it. Finally he argued in favor of wilderness on the basis of what we now call biodiversity: that ecosystems are so rich, and so complex, we can’t possibly understand them entirely, or presume to manage them, without the danger of losing some of their precious complexity. Some had to remain intact. Otherwise, how would we ever know what these ecosystems were?
In the end, not long before he died in 1948 at the age of sixty-one while fighting a brush fire near the Shack, Leopold had arrived at a simple formulation, an “ethic” that he had strived for his whole life. He managed to phrase it in two short sentences. The concept still guides us today. It is found near the end of his essay “The Land Ethic”:
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,1 stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
What wilderness does—these blank spots, these empty places—is help us grasp the point that Leopold tried to make his whole life. It tells us to listen, and to observe, and to be patient. It hints at the depth of complexity of the natural world…far more complexity and richness than we can know, or even guess.
Most profoundly, it points up our own place within that complexity. Man has long been under the impression he has dominion over the earth. It says so in the Old Testament. For a short time, in a particular place, perhaps he does. But in the long run, and over the entire planet, and certainly beyond it, he doesn’t. Not even close.
When you are standing alone in a blank spot you know this intuitively, as in no other place. Whether you are a young Mogollon man on a vision quest, fasting for four days on a lonely mesa top, or in the middle of the Gila Wilderness at the bottom of a canyon listening to the river flow, you know that you don’t have dominion. Maybe Coronado learned it out here, too, in the Unknown Lands, and that’s what finally caused him to abandon his quest for gold and empire, and turn back, chastened by the endless grass and sky that revealed the sheer vanity of the human enterprise.
Thoreau learned his place well while on Maine’s Mount Katahdin amid the cold, blowing clouds and the barren, ghostly cliffs, where, to his considerable surp
rise, his ego was blithely repelled—flicked away—by the mountain’s power: “…inhuman Nature has got him at a disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty.” John and William Bartram glimpsed a spirit in all living things while roaming the forests of Pennsylvania and the wilderness of the Southeast, bending down to examine curious petal-closing species like the tipitiwitchet. “I have queried,” wrote the senior Bartram, “whether there is not a portion of universal intellect diffused in all life.” A century and a half later, John Muir saw the entire forest as a way to connect with the divine—“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness”2—while Aldo Leopold, nearly another century after Muir, and a scientist by training, was humbled as he began to fathom the incredible complexity of entire wild ecosystems and made it his life’s work to articulate their intangible value.
The thinking about the wilds had evolved so far since the first European arrivals in the New World that it had almost inverted. Wilderness had transformed from a dark, Satanic stronghold that had to be subdued—crushed—to less of an actual place than a medium through which to grasp the complexity of life and touch something that approached the divine.
I hoped that, during these travels to the wilds of Maine, New Mexico, and beyond, Molly and Skyler had picked up some of the lessons that wilderness imparts. Almost surely they would live most of their lives—as I had, as almost all of us do—in some sort of urban or semi-rural setting where “nature” has been gentrified and we are sustained and connected to one another by fossil fuels extracted from beneath the earth’s surface and delivered via a vast network of pipes, wires, and electromagnetic waves.
You don’t learn the lesson standing in the big-shouldered Loop of Chicago, or in the man-made canyons of Manhattan, or in the sinuous sprawl of LA, or in the long corridors of the Pentagon. You don’t learn it with a cell phone in your hand standing in line at the ATM or supermarket checkout. You do learn it in the middle of a wilderness during a blizzard, or on foot in a desert, or alone on a mountaintop. The astrophysicist on the Plains of San Agostin surely knows. If you’re peering up with a giant radiotelescope from a high-desert plain seeking the ends of the universe, finding energy sources countless times more powerful than our own staggeringly powerful sun and discovering blank spots a billion light-years across…the truth is clear.
Creation is enormous and infinitely complex. Man is only the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest part of all Creation. And you—yes, you—are even tinier than that.
That’s what blank spots tell us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the Prologue, I’ve told the story of how I came to love the wild, empty places of the world, the blank spots on the map. There are many people who made this book possible, but in a deeper, familial sense, my first debt goes to my grandfather, who papered the walls of his upstairs hallways with maps from all over the world, and whose fire-lit library shelves groaned under the weight of bound leather volumes of National Geographic; and also to my late father, William F. Stark, who had a passion for the early history of the North American continent and wrote local history books on the settlement of Wisconsin.
This book had its most immediate inception during an editorial meeting with Nancy Miller, then editor in chief of Ballantine Books, as I described my fascination with wild, empty places.
“My son and I like to study maps together and search out the blankest spots,” she remarked.
“Blank spots!” I replied. “I love blank spots!”
And so this book was born.
Right at the outset, I contacted my friend Alex Philp, a historical geographer and partner in GCS Research in Missoula, Montana, which produces sophisticated map-based data systems. Philp, as I recount in the Prologue, showed me the way to find the blankest of the blank spots and different ways to think about them.
Philp’s partner at GCS, Michael Beltz, spent many hours designing the engrossing maps that appear in this book. It amazed me with what ease—and geniality—he could include whatever I wanted in the maps, change it in countless different ways, add or subtract “layers” of data to accentuate the information that we wished to highlight as effectively as possible.
In each of the “empty places” I visited—despite, or perhaps because of, their lack of population—I found people who were very hospitable and willing to help bring this project along.
These include several “blank spots” I investigated in person but, for one reason or another, don’t appear in this book. In the East Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, Fred Willard of the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research graciously invited me on an archaeological excavation searching for traces of the “lost colony” of Roanoke Island. The colony disappeared in the late 1580s, and its settlers—including Virginia Dare, the first known British child born in North America—may have retreated to the fastness of the swamp. Phil McMullan Jr. also helped me with background during the excavation.
In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Neal and Ruth Beaver of Grand Marais told me vivid anecdotes of life on this remote stretch of the Lake Superior shoreline, known as the “Shipwreck Coast.”
Our canoe trip down the St. John River of Northern Maine was greatly helped by Betsy and Galen Hale, who not only supplied us with canoes and shuttling from their outfitting business, Nicatou Outfitters, but whose ancestral roots in the northern Maine area are fascinating and deep and connect to Henry David Thoreau’s visits there. David Shipper, as shuttle driver with the Hales, provided us good company on the road and an endless supply of local information. At Camden on Maine’s Penobscot Bay, Capt. Al Philbrick, who took us out on his lobster boat, was a useful source of information about coastal life and anecdotes of the Acadian migrations.
In Pennsylvania, Kim Mattern, amateur archaeologist and lifetime resident of the Penns Creek area, is an authority on the Le Roy Massacre. He personally guided me to the places where significant events occurred, shared his artifact collection, and provided me with a paper he has produced from his research on the Le Roy Massacre. Likewise, Bill Mattern provided information about the area. In Renovo and Tamarack, Richard Kugel, assistant district forester at the Sproul State Forest, and Doug D’Amore, district forester, took time out to speak with me about the forest and early land-use history. Eric and Peggy Lucas of Tamarack provided a great deal of local history, much of it compiled by Peggy’s late mother, Dorothy M. Bailey, a respected historian of the area. Nancy and David Swanson helped sketch out the history of the Warren area, and their son, Carl, a friend of mine in Missoula, gave me an overview of Pennsylvania geography (especially advice on choice fly-fishing spots). Les McComber and Dennis Lytel showed me their hospitality on the Seneca Reservation and told me about the history of the Seneca people.
The huge empty spaces of Oregon proved to be populated, however thinly, with most welcoming people. At the enormous Roaring Springs Ranch, owner Rob Sanders graciously pointed the way to manager Stacy Davies, out in the desert at a branding, who, when I finally found him, was a fount of information and enthusiasm on ranch life and restoration of the rangelands and watersheds. His wife, Elaine, and sons, Erik, Jeff, and Scott, along with the other hands, all welcomed me at the branding and gave me a little hands-on experience, too. René Villagrana, at ranch headquarters, provided more background about seasonal ranch life.
Both the Frenchglen Hotel, and its manager, John Ross, and the Fields Station, and Sandy Downs and sister Gail, were hospitable, helpful and informative. At the Harney County Library, Karen Nitz of the Claire McGill Luce Western History Room extracted from various file drawers exactly the manuscripts and articles I needed to learn about the Lost Wagon Trains. The folks at the Alvord Ranch took time out from a busy day to talk to me, and John Wetzel, of Steens Mountain Outfitter and the Wildhorse Ranch, laid out the economics of ranching for me and, as an expert outfitter on the mountain, pointed the way to the summit of Steens Mountain. Gary Miller of the sprawling Rock Creek Ranch showed me a place that was still run in th
e old family way, while his young son rode by on horseback in the background, helping to round up bulls.
As Gary put it succinctly, which applies to so much of this arid region, “My grandfather witched for water and hit a well thirty-six-feet deep, and that’s the only reason the Millers survived, because we had water.”
In New Mexico and for help with our Gila Wilderness hike, thanks to Jay Hemphill at Gila Hike and Bike in Silver City for his route suggestions, Marcine Page for looking out for us, and to Matt Gardiner of the VLA (Very Large Array) for showing us around. Displayed in the hallway leading into the operators’ room was a poster that proclaimed in large letters “VLA—Center of the Known Universe.” It felt that way. We stood surrounded by computers and looked out from the observation windows at sunset over the desert array of massive satellite dishes as they peered up through the twilight into deepest space.
While the Bibliography and Endnotes cite the many invaluable sources I used in my research for this book, I feel a particular debt to certain works that comprehensively made sense of difficult-to-follow periods of early North American history. These are especially Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America by Fred Anderson, and A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland by John Mack Farragher. Without them, I would have spent a long time floundering in the complicated historical thickets of the French and Indian War, the web of European diplomatic alliances of the mid-eighteenth century, and the many threads of the Acadian settlement and expulsion from Nova Scotia.
Christopher Preston, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Montana, and William Bevis, retired professor of English at the University of Montana, read the manuscript and brought to it their own very substantial knowledge of the literature—and the actuality—of wild places.