The Last Empty Places (4 page)

De Monts and Poutrincourt landed their expedition in the New World and then Poutrincourt returned to France for more supplies and men. Those who stayed built a small settlement on an island at the mouth of the St. Croix River (today’s Maine–New Brunswick border). They found it a lonely, windswept, hard-luck outpost.

“From the Spanish settlements northward
⁸
to the pole,” wrote the
historian Francis Parkman a century and a half ago in
Pioneers of France in the New World
, “there was no domestic hearth, no lodgements of civilized men, save one weak band of Frenchmen, clinging, as it were for life, to the fringe of the vast and savage continent.”

The northern winds blasted down the frozen river and through their crude dwellings. Thirty-five of the seventy-nine members of the “weak band” perished of scurvy that first winter. While de Monts sailed back to France that spring, the remaining survivors decamped from their exposed island and sailed across the Bay of Fundy, to that great protrusion of land that would soon become known as the Acadian Peninsula and, later, Nova Scotia. There they built a fort on a beautiful harbor, sheltered on virtually all sides from the winds and heavy seas and rich in marine life and pasturelands. They named this idyllic harbor Port-Royal.

The following spring, in May of 1606, the expedition’s other aristocratic leader, Poutrincourt, departed France with a fresh contingent of forty men and supplies aboard a ship named
Jonas
to restock his and de Monts’s enterprise in La Cadie, or Acadia. On board were not only the senior Poutrincourt, but also his adolescent son, Charles Biencourt, aged fifteen, and his fourteen-year-old nephew, Charles de La Tour. One wonders how the two cousins’ aristocratic mothers greeted the proposal that they should leave home on a colonizing expedition to the New World. It’s not difficult, however, to imagine a teenaged boy’s excitement at joining this great enterprise of men in a largely unknown continent.

After a rough crossing of two months, the joy of arrival was captured by the passenger Marc Lescarbot, the forty-year-old Parisian lawyer of M. de Poutrincourt. Lescarbot had recently lost a major lawsuit and decided that the New World offered the chance to “fly from a corrupt world”
⁹
and the opportunity to exercise his flair for poetry.

Fogs kept the
Jonas
tacking off the Acadian coast for a week. Then, on July 15, after a thunderstorm, the skies cleared and the sun came out, the coastline appeared, and they spied the sails of two longboats approaching from shore. The Frenchmen and young Biencourt and La Tour were crowded at the rail and, at this moment, Lescarbot writes, “…there came from the land odors
¹⁰
incomparable for sweetness, brought with a warm wind so abundantly that all the Orient parts could not produce greater abundance. We did stretch out our hands as
it were to take them, so palpable were they, which I have admired a thousand times since.”

From that first visceral taste, the new land captivated the two boys. Uninterested in clearing farms and building rigorous Christian communities, unlike their British counterparts to the south, they would range these wilds in their quest for furs and enthusiastically embrace the Indian life. They would become what Henry David Thoreau, growing up two centuries later in the green-manicured, white-clapboard, God-fearing town of Concord, Massachusetts, wanted to be. They were children of the wilderness.

The two young Charleses represented a new environmental consciousness for Europeans, whether the boys were aware of it or not. They understood the wilds as a place benign rather than hostile, uplifting rather than evil, generous rather than depriving. Two centuries or more would pass, however, before this wilderness consciousness gained broader currency among most other Europeans who had come to America. That wilderness consciousness had to be mightily helped along by writers and thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Bartram, Emerson and Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold, by the women who shaped their ideas, and by others whose names will never be known.

I
WONDERED HOW MANY TIMES
young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour had paddled this same stretch of the St. John River,
¹¹
which from Baker Lake flowed four hundred miles down to the Atlantic’s Bay of Fundy. It was a well-known route through the forest, then, in the early 1600s. Many of my “blank spots,” I would discover, had been far less “blank” in centuries past than now, like northern Maine.

In the gusty downpour, we waved goodbye to David at the Baker Lake campground and, digging our paddle blades rhythmically into the rain-pocked river, we twisted into the spongy forest. Shallow and rocky and maybe three or four canoe lengths wide, the river gurgled swiftly through bends, slacked in flat, marshy sections, dropped gently, bubbling over boulders. Clear but slightly tea-colored, the water had been stained by vegetation. It was a nice-sized little river, a kind of cozy river.

We saw neither person nor dwelling, but within a half hour of leaving
Baker Lake encountered our first moose. A yearling, it stood in shallow water along the brushy left bank on stilty legs, dipping its head to pull up mouthfuls of vegetation with its big dripping lips. Paddling side by side, we all shouted excitedly to one another—“Look! There’s a moose!”—and of course the moose swung its head toward us in alarm, turned, trotted up the bank, and disappeared into the forest.

I’d been surprised by Molly’s and Skyler’s cheeriness from the start, despite the steady rain. After that first encounter, they eagerly looked for more moose. Around a few woody bends we encountered more—a mother and calf. We shushed one another and, paddles stilled, drifted quietly toward them on the smooth, rainy surface. The mother was enormous, her shoulders looming taller than my head, and probably weighing close to a ton. Where squirrels and songbirds speak to the daintiness of lawns and parks, a moose is a
presence
. She stood in the river, silently staring at us drifting closer, little eddies of current gently spinning around her legs, unyielding and vast and mysterious as the forest itself.

Eventually she, too, turned and lumbered up the bank with her calf in tow.

Around seven, as the wet daylight began to fade, we spotted the cabin’s grayed logs. It sat in a grassy clearing against a backdrop of dark spires of spruce trees—like a classic woodcut engraving of a cabin in the forest. We beached the canoes and clambered up the steep cut bank. With a swaybacked roof and low to the ground, it looked like it could have been built by young Biencourt or La Tour themselves in 1606. Unlike the horizontally laid logs of the pioneer cabins I knew, the logs of its walls were planted vertically to the earth in a style that appeared Abenaki Indian in origin.

The elaborately carved latch testified to long winter nights spent in front of a fire while the snow piled up deep outside, passing the time with a whittling knife.

Amy pushed open the heavy door. Low windows admitted a dusky light to reveal a table sprouting drip-waxed candles, a cast-iron woodstove, a crude counter holding an enameled washbasin, log roof beams varnished with a patina of woodsmoke. A partitioned nook at the rear enclosed a few old bedsprings padded with slabs of ragged cardboard and thin foam.

“This is great!” she said.

The children poked around, exploring. Amy found a note hanging on a nail near the door.

“It’s in French,” she said, studying it. “It’s the score of a whist game.”

I was checking the kindling box near the stove. The old newspapers inside it were in French, too, papers from small towns somewhere across the border. It felt as if we’d suddenly slipped beyond the United States, and had entered a vast, ambiguous swath of territory—the North—and slid hundreds of years back in time. Since the arrival of the first few Europeans four centuries ago, this region had been neither really French nor really British but a borderlands whose contours shifted with the waxing and waning of the two great empires an ocean away.

Rough, rocky, and forested, it was nearly useless as farmland. European settlers didn’t stampede in to stake land claims and grow crops, as they did in many parts of America. Rather it served as wildlands, a buffer between empires. Biencourt and, especially, La Tour lived their lives almost entirely within this enormous region, within this blank spot. This is the life they chose, not seeking to create the careful settlements of farmers, but living instead on the wild, ragged edge of the known. What was it about this region that attracted them so, I wondered, and attracted Thoreau much later?

Amy and I watched, shivering, as the children swam contentedly in a clear pool of the river, just in front of the cabin. Soon they were bundled up and sitting before the popping woodstove, sipping hot chocolate. Candles guttered on the table. Glowing headlamps shone cheerily from the dark-smoked roof beams where Molly had decorously hung them from nails amid our drying clothes.

“Can we sleep in tomorrow?” she asked, liking the look of the place.

Amy tended to a makeshift pizza baking under a foil tent on our camp stove. I sat beside the woodstove with a camping cup full of wine. Scribbling the occasional note by candlelight, I read from Thoreau’s essay about these same wild regions, titled “Ktaadn” and written in the 1840s—more than two centuries after the French arrival.

W
HEN THOREAU FIRST MET HIM
, as he recounts in “Ktaadn,” Young Tom Fowler—Galen Hale’s great-great-great-granduncle by marriage—was in the act of sawing through the two-foot-thick log
walls of the cabin he’d just built on a pond beyond Nicatou. These openings would be the holes for the cabin’s windows. Thoreau closely observed Fowler’s construction, for he’d recently completed his own cabin on the shore of Walden Pond. On the spot, Thoreau reports, Young Tom agreed to serve as boatman for Thoreau’s party for its expedition deeper into the Maine Woods. Tom dropped his tools and went to throw a few items in a pack, serving the waiting party drafts of his homemade spruce beer. This, Thoreau wrote with typical ardor, tasted as strong and stringent as cedar sap, and drinking it was “as if we sucked at the very teats
¹²
of Nature’s pine-clad bosom…”

Thoreau was a true oddball, a rebel against his time. He took to the woods so passionately because he’d been roundly rejected by conventional society generally, and by two young women in particular.

Thoreau had come of age at a moment of intellectual rebelliousness in the United States, when major change wafted in the air. I think of him breathing it in with the concentrated, lung-pumping vigor that marks his writing. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, and always loving its gentle woods and fields, he entered college at nearby Harvard—with considerable economic sacrifice from his family—just as the Romantic movement spread from Europe’s youth to the United States. Gone was the great faith in rationalism and classicism. Rather, passions and the senses ruled. Youth rejected the ossified authority of the musty old guard, nowhere more brazenly than among Thoreau’s schoolmates in the Harvard class of 1837—instigators in what became known as the Dunkin Rebellion, a1960s-style revolt that erupted in the 1830s.

It started the spring of Thoreau’s freshman year, on May 19, 1834, presumably one of those warm, sunny days when ebullience and revolution float in the air. A student who was reciting in Instructor Christopher Dunkin’s freshman Greek class abruptly stopped. When commanded by Instructor Dunkin to proceed, the student replied, “I do not recognize your authority,”
¹³
and shut his book.

That was all the spark it took. By nightfall students were destroying classrooms, smashing furniture, breaking out windows, and ripping the shutters off buildings and burning them in bonfires on the steps. The college set guards on a watch to quell the violence. Students attacked by pummeling the guards with stones. Fights broke out. One of the most shocking acts, in a college founded by Puritans two centuries before, was the disruption of the mandatory morning prayers by groans, whistles,
scrapings, and, according to the official report, various other “offensive noises” emitting from the chapel’s pews and by contemptuous latecomers bursting through the doors.

The immediate target of the rebellion was Harvard’s new president, Josiah Quincy,
¹⁴
a politician who’d recently served as a get-the-garbage-collected-on-time mayor of Boston. He had instituted an unpopular point system that rewarded the students for rote memorization and good attendance in classes and chapel and discouraged original thinking and discussion. Students petitioned the faculty—Thoreau being a signatory—and burned President Quincy in effigy. But still the point system had gone forward.

In the years preceding the Harvard uprising, starting about 1800, Europe’s intellectual youth had been set aflame with the Romantic cult of the individual, embracing the power of emotion, embarking on grand Byronic adventures, celebrating what came to be called Wild Nature. Rather than the stern Old Testament deity that prevailed at Harvard, imported by Puritans from a medieval Europe two hundred years before, God had become a creative and divine force embodied in both Art and in Nature. God had become a Bohemian.

The Romantic spirit was channeled
¹⁵
directly to Harvard by the preacher-turned-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Heir to a long line of those same stern New England Puritans and preachers dating back to
Mayflower
days, Emerson, in 1832, after his young wife died, had fled both the pulpit and Boston for Europe. He encountered Romantic writers and thinkers such as Coleridge who caused him to question his traditional religious beliefs. Adapting much from these Romantics, he began to formulate his own philosophy of the self and nature—what became known eventually as “Transcendentalism.”

Returning to Boston in 1833—the same year Thoreau started at Harvard—Emerson soon gained a wide following among youthful intelligentsia and was reviled by their conservative elders. He shocked Harvard with his “Address at Divinity College,” in which he spoke out against Jesus as the foundation of the Church’s divinity, advocating that man needs to look inward to find it instead. Thus man could “transcend” the material world—the concrete world defined by facts and the senses, which included the historical Jesus—by instead experiencing the divine that infused all parts of the universe, including the self and nature. He laid out his fundamental ideas in the essay “Nature,” which
Thoreau twice checked out from the Harvard library. At Thoreau’s graduation in 1837, Emerson gave his famous “American Scholar” address,
¹⁶
in which he rallied the graduates to create a literature and way of thinking that was American. In a way, the address could be viewed as a compass course that Thoreau followed the rest of his life: