The Last Empty Places (11 page)

One of the most profound qualities of the wilderness—to me, at least—is that it constantly forces you to assess your strengths and your weaknesses. What are the dangers? What are the risks? What are the chances? These decisions greet you at every bend. The Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the New Englanders detested this calculation. They wanted certainty, predictability, they wanted to exert
control
over the forces of nature. They framed their world in absolute terms—there was God’s way, and there was Satan’s way. You chose one or the other. They strove to abolish gray areas. The forest, in effect, represented a giant gray area, a realm of uncertainty and unpredictability. It had to be eradicated, the evil rooted out. They busily cleared the forests and planted their farms, settled into the predictability of the seasons, the rain and sun, the warmth and cold, the sprouting and harvesting of the crops.

In sharp contrast, the French in Acadia, by adopting Micmac ways, also learned to adapt to this constant calculation of risk in the wilds. The predictability lay in its very unpredictability. Were there animals to contend with? Were there rapids? Was the river high or low? They moved through an uncontrolled landscape, improvising as they went. Along with the techniques of crafting snowshoes and birch-bark canoes, they also adopted Indian legends associated with the forest and the wilds. Like the Indians, the French learned to imagine the forces of nature in animal or spirit form. They learned to accommodate this spirit world of nature, to live with it. Unlike the New Englanders, they learned to thrive on ambiguity.

It was that sort of ambiguity I had to contend with as we approached Big Black Rapids with eight-year-old Skyler in the bow. The current picked up. We heard the rushing of tumbling water ahead and detected the river’s downhill slant, the trees lining the bank a few hundred yards ahead appearing a good deal lower down than the trees on the bank nearby. Paddling to the left bank, we swung our bows upstream and nosed them into the woody shore to scout. Clambering out, we traced a faint path into dense groves of fir and spruce until the path faded. We climbed over fallen logs, through sun-dappled carpets of fern and moss, blooming patches of a five-petaled trillium-like flower that I couldn’t identify. It was quite beautiful, and, right here, in this mossy,
ferny, flowering patch, I could see how the very earliest French and then Jamestown colonists had been tempted to write home to Europe, at the height of the springtime bloom, about the giant Eden they had discovered in the form of the New World. Of course, when winter arrived, they would suffer greatly from famine and scurvy. Eden vanished.

We climbed out on a large log cantilevered over the river to get a good view of the rapids. They looked manageable, if we stuck to the right side of the river and maneuvered between a few big, foaming boulders. I mentally marked some low cliffs on the opposite bank to know where to begin our moves between the boulders, and explained to Amy, who would be following, what to look for.

“Okay, does everyone know what to do if one of us tips over?” I asked.

We rehearsed the safety drill. Molly and Skyler had rafted on Montana whitewater rivers and knew the basic techniques of swimming in rapids in the event of a flip. The difference was that our open canoes, heavily loaded with gear, couldn’t absorb nearly the size waves that a buoyant rubber raft could. And we were a long, long way from any help here. We were totally on our own.

Our route chosen, we hiked back through the forest to the canoes. Skyler and Molly took turns leading the way, searching excitedly for faint traces of path. I showed them how to retrace our footsteps, pointing out the crushed leaves of a plant. We lived in a small city—a very controlled environment—and although it
was
in Montana and we had mountains rising up at the end of our street, it wasn’t quite the same as a log cabin in the woods, where I’d grown up, or the wild Acadia of the young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour.

I wondered how the Micmac fathers and mothers, the grandparents and elders, taught their children about the forest, showing them how it is a place of sustenance and familiarity. We associate darkness with lack of learning—as in the Dark Ages—and knowledge with light, as in the Enlightenment. The New England woods were “dark” and “gloomy” to the Puritans in part because they knew so little about the forest.

Henry Thoreau possessed a vast body of knowledge about the natural world. Like the Indians, he could identify many of the plants and trees and animals of this and other forests. But Thoreau, for all his time spent strolling through the woods and fields of Concord, for all his
time studying botany, entered the Maine Woods largely ignorant of the profound unpredictability of the wilds. The “Nature” he and Emerson knew had been settled by the Puritan farmers two hundred years before—since September 12, 1635, to be exact, as I’d read on a marker on the Concord village green. On that day Major Simon Willard bought “6 myles of land square” from the Indians in a deal transacted under an ancient oak known as “Jethro’s Tree” for the future site of Concord “plantation.”

For two centuries that “plantation” land had been worked by the Bible-toting New England farmers, its animal spirits eradicated, its “evil” exterminated, the Devil and his heathen minions banished. Sculpted into a gentle landscape of woodlots, fields, and streams, it had been cleared of its ambiguity and unpredictability. When Thoreau headed north to Maine in search of “Indian wisdom,” he sought what Concord lacked—the untrammeled wilds, with all its ambiguity and unpredictability still intact. But nature’s pure, passionate embrace in the Maine Woods ended up being too much even for Henry Thoreau.

After leaving his cabin at Walden Pond, taking the steamer up to Bangor, traveling by buggy north along the Penobscot River until the road ended, and hiking to Uncle George’s homestead in the woods, Thoreau and his party rode in the
batteau
poled up the Penobscot’s West Branch by Uncle George and Young Tom Fowler. Nearing the flanks of Mount Katahdin, they camped where Aboljacknagesic Brook flowed into the West Branch. That evening, Thoreau marveled at the metaphorical mess of rainbow-colored trout they had hooked from the brook and, reminded of the shape-shifting god Proteus, thought how facts, by putting them to “celestial” instead of “terrestrial” use, can be forged into mythology. That high, anvil-flat summit of Mount Katahdin hovering a few miles off was exactly where Thoreau planned to do the forging of fact into myth.

On the morning of September 7, 1846,
⁵⁰
roughly a week since leaving Walden, Thoreau and his party departed their camp at the Aboljacknagesic and West Branch and struck out through the forest toward Katahdin. Neither of their guides, Uncle George nor Young Tom, had traveled beyond this point before. For them it was a blank spot, too. Though well known to the Penobscot Indians, Katahdin’s first recorded climb had occurred only forty years earlier, in 1804, by Charles Turner, Jr. Few whites had climbed it since, partly due to its remoteness and
partly to the fact that mountaineering was still in its infancy as a sport, not really existing in America, but being pioneered in Switzerland and France as the Romantic era brought emotional cachet to hands-on encounters with the fearsome Alps. Its great mass standing alone in this great expanse of wilds—its Penobscot name meant “the greatest mountain”—Katahdin, on this Maine sojourn, was a natural destination for Henry David Thoreau.

After following one of the streams away from their camp on the riverbank, the party cut through dense spruce and fir stands by compass bearing, occasionally tracing faint paths made by browsing moose. They paused to eat wild blueberries on ground that ascended gently to the mountain’s base, then sloped up more steeply. At 4 o’clock, partway up the mountain’s flank and still in forest, they chose a campsite along a brook rushing down from the summit. While the others set up camp, Thoreau took an exploratory jaunt higher up the mountainside, eventually finding himself climbing along a torrent at an angle of forty-five degrees, grasping roots and branches to pull himself up a “giant’s stairway” of great slabs of rock, and finally crawling on all fours over a dense, springy mat of black spruce trees that had been dwarfed by cold. He climbed until he reached a cloud layer that he couldn’t see beyond. Then he turned back to camp, planning to make his final ascent in the morning.

T
HE
M
AINE
W
OODS
was presenting us with our own challenges in the shape of the Big Black Rapids of the St. John River. After scouting from the big log, we climbed into the canoes, secured any loose ropes so they wouldn’t tangle us in the event of a capsize, tightened our life jackets, and pushed off. Skyler and I paddled out into the river until we were lined up near the right bank, Amy and Molly maneuvering their canoe behind us.

“Okay? Are you ready?” I called out.

“Okay,” he said.

We dug in our blades and paddled forward, downstream. The sky shone a deep blue that darkened the water to an almost black-blue between the high, forested banks. Boulders scattered across the river foamed bright white, like bleached bones hissing on the dark water. We could see the whole river dropping visibly downward and swinging to
the right around a bend, in a rambunctious slide of water that roared all around us, as the canoe suddenly accelerated and tilted forward over the smooth bulge of the first drop.

“Draw left!” I called out.

Skyler pulled hard on his paddle and we swiveled left, threading between two boulders and the surging wakes of foam cascading off them.

“Now right!”

He swung his paddle across the bow and drew on the right while I paddled and steered us between another set of foaming boulders. Waves slapped at the sides of the canoe, jolting us sideways. Spray broke over the bow, soaking Skyler. I could feel the breeze caused simply by our forward motion down the quickening river.

“Now straight ahead!” I called out.

We slid downward toward a set of large waves near the bottom of the rapids. The canoe was swinging toward the right. I straightened it out as much as I could.

Wham!
we hit the first wave. The canoe lurched, the wave breaking over the left side, water pouring over the gunnel. The upsurge held us in place, the craft trembling with the pressure of the current.

“Paddle!” I called out.

We both dug in hard, and the canoe popped out forward, straightened out, sliced through the next wave. We’d passed through the roughest stretch.

We paddled into a quiet eddy along the right shore, water sloshing in the canoe’s bottom among our bags, and turned upstream to watch Amy and Molly. The wave twisted their canoe the same way, dumping in water over the sides, but they managed to pop out, too, and paddle to the calm riverbank beside us. Canoe bottoms sloshing with water, we cheered and all high-fived one another.

T
HE THOREAU PARTY’S ATTEMPT
on Katahdin was not quite so harmonious. That night they camped on the mountain’s flanks, a strong wind roared through the trees and blew about the sparks of their campfire. In the morning, the party breakfasted on raw pork and hard bread and headed upward, on a slightly different route than Thoreau had chosen the evening before. Now, in the morning, the enthusiastic Thoreau soon had charged upward far ahead of the other five. You
sense their reluctance—these practical-minded boatmen and businessmen who had no Transcendentalist or Romantic agendas—to take part in Thoreau’s maniacal mountain-climbing scheme. He clambered upward for a mile or so over massive boulders toward the summit, which was still capped in cloud despite the blue skies around it. The mountain struck him as a huge pile of loose rock that had rained down from somewhere above—“the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry, which the vast chemistry of nature would anon work up, or work down, into the smiling and verdant plains and valleys of the earth.”

Henry David—he who sought to make
mythology
out of natural history—was now approaching the source of creation itself.

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: