The Last Empty Places (5 page)

M
Y HEAD NODDED
as I read Thoreau that first evening before the whispering orange embers of the woodstove. We went to bed, and rose late in our trapper’s cabin on the banks of the St. John, lulled by morning rain pattering on the shake roof. We were exhausted by the several days of travel simply to reach this spot, still at the start of our wilderness journey. We’d driven a frantic eight hours from our home in Missoula across two states to catch our flight in Seattle, flown through the night across the entire country, and landed in Boston at dawn. Jamming gear bags into the rental car, we’d driven into Cambridge, where Amy wanted to show the children her old house at Harvard. Silvery-haired alums in their blue reunion blazers tottered to breakfast across the shady green lawns of Harvard Yard. I had thought of Thoreau, cutting down these very footpaths with, as one classmate later described it, “his grave Indian stride.”
¹⁷

Then we’d headed north to Medway and the St. John.

No one was in a hurry to leave the dim, calm hush of the cabin. I recorded yesterday’s events in a notebook, lying in my bag on the sagging bedsprings, while Amy and the children flipped pancakes. It was a pleasant, lazy morning—a sleep-in morning. It took several hours to repack our gear, which we’d hastily stuffed in the canoes in the gusty rain at Baker Lake.

We finally got back on the river in mid-afternoon. As we pushed out from the bank, the rain touched the surface with a tinkling sound.

“Can leeches kill you?” Skyler asked thoughtfully.

He and Molly had spotted them crawling in the muddy shallows. He’d seen giant leeches in the movie
King Kong
. I’d noticed before how he constantly assessed threats to himself—the distances of falls out of trees, the possible attacks of wild animals, the power of a tornado—and wondered if this were an instinctive male trait, especially when in unfamiliar territory, with all his senses attuned, as I knew mine were.

Molly’s was a more scientific curiosity about the leeches.

I made the children practice their draw strokes again. I was surprised how easily they could both pull the bows of their canoes to one side or the other, a crucial maneuver for the rapids that lay ahead, and one that I’d taught them before leaving Montana. The map showed the first rapids four miles downstream from our campsite, and both Molly and Skyler were eager for them to arrive. I was more anxious, wondering how powerful they’d be for our little party.

A young male moose with antlers held his ground—or his patch of water—in the middle of the river. As the distance closed between us from three hundred feet, to two hundred, to one hundred and fifty, he still didn’t move, staring us down.

“I’m getting scared,” Molly said.

“Let’s paddle gently to the right bank,” I ordered quietly.

I knew moose could make lethal charges when challenged, and I didn’t want to test this one. I’d been on a kayak expedition to an African river—Rio Lugenda in remote northern Mozambique—where we faced highly territorial male hippos in similar circumstances. Our guide gave them a very wide berth.

With the river running low, rocks protruded in shallow sections. The St. John headwaters drain a relatively small area of rocky terrain, and so the water levels of the upper river fluctuate dramatically—running very high during spring’s heavy snowmelt and after big rains, but dropping rapidly after that. We’d arrived just as the Upper St. John fell toward its low summer levels. It offered just enough depth to float the canoes through the rocky sections, although if the rains continued the level surely would rise. It wasn’t a total surprise, then, that when we reached the first rapids marked on the map, they amounted to little more than riffles trickling between a shallow scattering of boulders.

We careened from one rock to another, the plastic-hulled whitewater canoes easily ricocheting off them. Skyler stood in the bow of our
canoe to scout the way ahead, like George Washington crossing the Delaware, as Amy remarked. He shouted out directions to me.

“Go right! Now left!”

The rapids emptied into a flat, quiet section of river and we drifted along, hanging on to the gunnels of each other’s canoe, eating a river lunch of crackers and a French cheese spread, apples, and granola bars. Everyone seemed happy enough, drifting down the river in the rain.

It wasn’t until seven o’clock and the light was beginning to fade again that we stopped to camp, where the Southwest Branch tumbled out of the forest on the left and joined our stem of the river, known as the Baker Branch. A beautiful campsite at the confluence centered on a big white pine, with a grove of spruces behind it providing a kind of canopy for a tent site. As Amy and Molly pitched our big tent, Skyler and I collected dry wood from under sheltered trees and built a fire using birch bark as tinder, to cook a steak dinner over the coals.

Put to the match, our birch bark flared up like it was soaked in kerosene. Skyler watched with fascination.

“That burns better than paper,” he remarked.

There was something inherently very satisfying in passing on to him these woods techniques that I’d learned over many years, something qualitatively different from, for instance, helping him learn to read, although that had its own satisfactions. Here, literally, was a skill for survival. How could a human be complete without understanding how to create and wield fire? I began to see that here was one reason Thoreau took to the woods.

A
S THE
I
NDUSTRIAL
R
EVOLUTION
in the early 1800s gathered steam and spun people off the land and into the cities, Thoreau viscerally understood that these basic skills for survival—to use one’s own hands to acquire food, fire, shelter—define what it is to be human, to have a higher consciousness and be an animal among animals.

As he expressed it in his famous explanation at the outset of
Walden
, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…”

This theme appears again and again in the writings of those seeking out the wilds. Marc Lescarbot, the French lawyer with a flair for poetry who’d just lost a big case, was disgusted with life in French society, with
its aristocratic hierarchies and rigged courts. Joining that 1606 expedition to Acadia allowed him to “fly from a corrupt world” to the purity of the New World, to life in the woods, where he, as Thoreau did much later, would front only the essentials. Rousseau, one hundred and fifty years after Lescarbot and nearly a century before Thoreau, likewise rejected the “artifice” of Parisian society, the gilded intellectual salons with their beautiful ladies and clever repartee among
philosophes
, the social posing, the currying for favor, the corruptness of it all. In solitude, in Nature, he could find his true self.

“Strip off the artificial habits of civilized man,” wrote Rousseau in his novel
Émile
, in 1761, “return to your own heart…permit yourself to be guided by the light of instinct and conscience; and you will rediscover that primitive Adam…long buried under a crust of mold and slime…”

In the wilderness—in Wild Nature—humans wearied by corrupt society, disillusioned men such as Lescarbot, Rousseau, and Thoreau, could find redemption and purity. It shimmered out there, beckoning them. It was a fantasy, a mirage, a promise hovering beyond the ocean or just over the woodsy horizon.

I know this mirage very well, for I’ve chased after it my whole life. The promise of something indefinable, ineffable, waits in those blank spots on the map—those wild places—as it did for these disillusioned men. What? What
is
it? I don’t know the answer. I don’t think they knew the answer. It’s less an answer than an expectation, a hope, or rather the hope of an answer. But an answer to
what?
To the ills of a corrupt society. To ennui. To disillusionment. To a sense of spiritual emptiness. It’s the answer to purposelessness. To rejection. To sadness. It somehow contains the answer to all these things. In the wild places, in the blank spots, what exists, we hope, is meaning.

M
ARC
L
ESCARBOT WAS JOYOUS
when the
Jonas
at last sailed into the huge natural harbor at Port-Royal in July 1606, after escaping the corrupt life in Paris and arriving in the pristine New World. Its sheer wildness and uncultivated aspect struck him forcefully: “…it was a wondrous sight
¹⁸
for us to see its fair extent and the mountains and hills which shut it in, and I wondered that so fair a spot remained desert, and all wooded, seeing that so many folk are ill-off in this world who
could make their profit of this land if they only had a leader to bring them thither.”

The
Jonas
approached a promontory deep within the harbor where the French had built a small wooden fortress the preceding year. The ship’s crew expected a party to rush out joyously to salute and greet their arrival. Nothing stirred. You imagine consternation rippling across the deck—what had gone so suddenly wrong with this shining adventure that was to be New France? You imagine the boys thinking not of the danger, but of the excitement. I could imagine Skyler there, fascinated by the quiet fort in the distance and the tension on the
Jonas
’s deck beneath the ship’s creaking rigging, by the swords now strapped on and cannons at the ready, by the armor quickly donned, to meet this first encounter with the unknown. Had the Frenchmen frozen during the winter? Had they perished of scurvy? Had the Indians killed them all?

In fact, it was the Indian leader, Membertou, who at that moment was rushing into the French fort and shouting “like a madman” to rouse the two French guards nodding off over their midday meal in the otherwise deserted structure.

“‘Wake up, there. You are dawdling over your dinner…and do not see a great ship which is arriving, and we know not who they are!’”

Thus reports Lescarbot. The others of the French party at Port-Royal had temporarily deserted the fort. After waiting for the
Jonas
and its supplies until this late in the season, they thought they’d been abandoned and finally set off in their longboat to look for French fishing vessels off the Grand Banks to hitch a ride back to France.

But the two sleepy guards were now roused, spotted the white ensign on the
Jonas
’s mast, jammed the cannons with charges, and let loose with a four-gun salute, which rolled and echoed among the low wooded hills, while the
Jonas
responded with cannon shots and trumpet blasts.

It was emblematic that the guards had been roused by Membertou. From the beginning, this Micmac chief, or “Sagamore,” kept careful watch over the French in Acadia—these innocents to the ways of the forests, to the hills and the rivers. Membertou and his people essentially taught the French how to survive in the New World.

After a happy reunion with the guards, the
Jonas
crew and passengers spent the day visiting the small, dark French “manor house.”
Membertou then led them to the temporary Indian summer village nearby, much larger than the tiny French outpost, and centered around large meeting halls made of carefully woven bark.

The party began a few days later, after the return of the group that had gone off in the longboat, which included the navigator Champlain. For the next month the French at Port-Royal, reports Lescarbot, “made very merry.” The openhanded M. de Poutrincourt, young Charles Biencourt’s father and the expedition leader who had gone back to France to fetch supplies and brought them to Port-Royal aboard the
Jonas
, set up a barrel of wine that was free to drink for all comers, “some of whom made gay dogs of themselves.”

Lescarbot rhapsodized about the beauty and richness of the new land. Exploring up the Dauphin River (now the Annapolis), which emptied into the big harbor, they found lush meadows bordering the banks where moose grazed, countless clear brooks flowing into it, and dense forests covering the hills. A waterfall cast rainbows of spray at the harbor’s mouth and young whales frolicked in the waters. The carpenters and stonecutters and other workmen labored only three hours each day constructing the settlement, and spent the rest of the time collecting mussels on the tidal flats, as well as crabs, cockles, and other delicacies. There was abundance and generosity everywhere. The Indians gave them salmon, sturgeon, beaver, moose meat and other game, or traded the hunted meats for the bread baked by the French.

That autumn unfolded in a kind of pleasant idyll at Port-Royal, but by November the situation grew tense. At the end of August, the
Jonas
had sailed back to France with the plan to resupply Port-Royal the following spring. At the same time, Champlain and Poutrincourt headed south in the longboat toward Cape Cod, seeking a still warmer spot than Port-Royal for France’s ultimate settlement in the New World. With them was Poutrincourt’s son, Charles Biencourt, and no doubt his cousin, Charles de La Tour, as well as another boy, Robert Gravé, son of Du Pont, the leader of the whole enterprise.

At first, on this journey south, the encounters with the Indians were friendly. Eager to trade for French knives, pots, and glass beads, flotillas of Indian canoes paddled out to greet them. Indians ran joyously along the shore to keep pace with the sailing longboat, carrying bows in hand, arrow quivers on their backs, and singing. Lescarbot wrote: “Oh, happy race! yea, a thousand-fold more happy than those
who here [in France] make us bow down to them, had [the Indians] but the knowledge of God and their salvation.”

The French liked the land’s fertility and abundant grapevines as they sailed south, but hostility from the Indians grew. Near present-day Chatham on Cape Cod, a party went ashore for several days to bake bread. When Indians stole a hatchet from them, a few of the younger, cockier French apparently fired at the thieves with muskets. Poutrincourt then noticed bands of Indians sneaking through the woods, and ordered the obstreperous young bakers into the longboat before nightfall, but they refused, insisting on remaining ashore to eat the bread they had baked.