The Last Empty Places (30 page)

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.”

H
IGHWAY 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.”

A
N 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?

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.

J
OHN
M
UIR 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.

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.

A
T 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
.

S
OMEONE 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.