The Last Empty Places (7 page)

I swore.

“It’ll be okay, Dad,” Skyler said. “Just be patient.”

Where had I heard that before?

After fifteen minutes of dragging and pushing, paddle blades crunching against rocky bottom, we shoved our way past a rock ledge protruding from the left bank. Only a trickle of water spilled over it. I checked the river map.

“Hey, this must be Ledge Rapids,” I said.

“You mean this is a Class Two rapid?” asked Skyler in dismay. He thought for a moment. “Will the rapids get bigger than this?”

“Probably. A lot depends on how much rain we have and how much water is in the river. Do you want them to get bigger?”

“A lot bigger.”

We swung around a bend and came to a rickety bridge sagging across the river on spindly, fractured concrete pilings, like some drooping
Jacob’s ladder. One piling had toppled into a heap in the river, no doubt knocked down by an ice jam. These occur on the St. John and similar rivers in early spring when the frozen river suddenly thaws and a huge pile of ice sweeps down like an avalanche rumbling down a mountain slope. I could see “scour lines” along the riverbank where ice jams had scraped away all vegetation for about ten feet up the steep banks, like the mown strip on the shoulder of a highway. Later I would learn that certain plant species unique to the St. John grow only on this scour line.

We raced under the bridge on a fast current, and swung the canoe hard toward the left bank where we spotted a grassy campsite. Two picnic tables sat under a mossy log-and-shingle shelter roof. Any reservations I felt about a sheltered picnic table marring my “wilderness” experience disappeared as the rain intensified into a downpour, blurring the river into a fuzzy, pebbled gray sheet. It was already beginning to rise. Amy and Molly quickly fitted together poles to erect our big tent—the “family tent,” we called it, as opposed to the small ones we used in the mountains—while Skyler and I set off down a two-track dirt road for firewood. It led back to the bridge. A sign in bold letters posted at the entrance to the sagging span warned of a load limit of 6,000 pounds, a speed limit of 5 mph, and a maximum of one vehicle at a time. It was easy to see why.

“Pass At Your Own Risk,” it cautioned.

Surprisingly, next to it was another sign, “The Nature Conservancy.”
²³
I would eventually hear the story of how the Nature Conservancy, the quiet, far-reaching nonprofit that preserves land from development, had several years earlier acquired land along eighty miles of the Upper St. John from huge paper companies. At the time, it was the largest project the group had ever undertaken. They’d targeted the St. John because it was one of the wildest remaining rivers in the Lower 48 states and they wanted it to stay that way. The sign on the bridge indicated we’d now entered the stretch protected by the organization.

Skyler and I plunged into the forest, climbing over fallen trees, trying to find dry wood beneath the dripping evergreen canopy on the mossy forest floor. We dragged a few downed limbs back to the campsite but it was now raining so hard I didn’t even try to kindle a fire, even with the dry birch bark I’d stashed in my bags. Molly and Skyler pulled off their wet clothes and retired into the tent and its warm nest of sleeping
bags. Amy and I hunkered under the picnic shelter and opened cans of corned-beef hash—the fastest dinner we had—frying them in skillets on our two-burner camping stove. We could hear Molly’s and Skyler’s soft voices as they happily played cat’s cradle. String games were an ancient pastime of Inuit children, too. It made perfect sense—something engrossing that keeps the hands and mind moving, something totally portable to occupy children during long, long waits for the weather to change. In a nomadic society, movement depended on weather.

Frying hash and sipping sherry with Amy under the picnic shelter while the rain poured around us, listening to the children playing in the warm tent, it seemed as if our little band of humans had struck some primordial note of harmony in the wilds.

S
OMETIMES
I
WONDER
if I would have any interest in wilderness at all—and if the Nature Conservancy, and groups like it, would even exist—if Henry David Thoreau hadn’t been so ardently rejected by conventional society back in the late 1830s and early 1840s, or if he had not so ardently rejected it.

By the spring of 1845, Thoreau, at twenty-seven, was beset by frustrations. Upon graduating from Harvard seven years earlier, Thoreau had been hired in the prestigious post of teacher at the Concord School, but quit abruptly after only two weeks. Deacon Ball, of the school committee,
²⁴
looked in on his classroom, judged it too noisy, pulled Thoreau out into the hallway, and told him he had to whip the students occasionally or “the school would be spoilt.” Thoreau thereupon arbitrarily pulled several students from class, beat them with a ruler, and resigned his teaching post that night. It was Thoreau’s first principled stand against convention. He may have absorbed that antiauthoritarian spirit he’d witnessed at Harvard during the Dunkin Rebellion.

On October 22, 1837, a month after the caning incident, Thoreau, unemployed, living with his parents, and hanging around Concord after offending much of the town by resigning his teaching post, wrote the first entry in his later famous
Journal
after a chance encounter with Ralph Waldo Emerson on the street:

“‘What are you doing now?’
²⁵
he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry today.”

Searching widely in New England but unable to find another teaching job, Henry, along with his brother John, founded an “alternative” school in Concord that, besides basic subjects, emphasized hands-on learning through field trips and boating expeditions on local rivers in the Thoreaus’ homemade craft. When, after three years, John fell ill and the school closed, Henry worked as a live-in handyman and gardener for the Emerson household. He also started to write seriously. He fell in love twice, once with a young woman he met through the Emersons. He wrote a poem about her, “To the Maiden in the East”
²⁶
:

Both young women rebuffed him. Rather, Ellen Sewall apparently accepted his marriage proposal but quickly reversed course after her father demanded that she write in a
“short, explicit
²⁷
and
cold
manner” to turn down Thoreau. Then Thoreau’s beloved brother John cut his finger while stropping his razor and died a few days later of lockjaw. Thoreau sunk into despondency, even displaying the paralyzing symptoms of lockjaw himself. After recovering and casting about again for teaching work, he took a job tutoring for Emerson’s brother’s family on Staten Island. He didn’t go with great enthusiasm, but with the hope to break into the New York City literary scene.

“It will be something to hate;—that’s the advantage [New York City] will be to me…the pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population. When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared to
one
man.”

Thoreau made no headway selling his essays to New York magazine publishers. He even failed at door-to-door selling magazine
subscriptions
. Desperately homesick for Concord and his family’s back porch looking out on the poplar tree, he returned home and went to work in his father’s small pencil-making factory, where he invented a new type of pencil that became popular with professional draftsmen, and spent his spare time writing and walking the woods and fields of Concord. The short-lived Transcendentalist magazine
The Dial
published some of his poems and a few of his natural history essays, which caught the attention of other intellectuals.

Like Rousseau nearly a century before in the Parisian salons,
Thoreau began fashioning himself as a kind of natural man among the Concord literati. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, a new resident of the growing literary community at Concord, described Thoreau as “a wild, irregular, Indian-like sort of character
²⁸
[who writes] very well indeed.”

Thoreau had tasted truly wild country—far wilder than Concord—during brief excursions to New Hampshire and looking for teaching jobs in southern Maine, where he met an old Indian who engrossed him with stories of the ways of the North Woods. As he was casting around for a purpose in his twenties, you sense that Thoreau’s inherent unconventionality and his love of nature were reinforced by the praise of older intellectuals like Emerson and Hawthorne—
here’s an Indian sort of character who can write very well indeed
—until he wholeheartedly embraced the role, his identity of nature-philosopher-wildman. He then began his pursuit of wilderness in earnest, first in the woods at Walden Pond and then in northern Maine.

Thoreau, for several years, had been talking about going off to live by himself—both to write a book about his and his late brother’s weeklong boating expedition on the Concord and Merrimack rivers that they’d taken back in 1839, and to come “face to face” with his own person. In the fall of 1844, Emerson purchased forty acres of woodlot on Walden Pond, to preserve it from being felled by loggers or as possible homesites for his extended family. Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing urged him to build a cabin at Walden and find the solitude and writing life he’d been talking about for so long. The following spring, 1845, at age twenty-seven, and still struggling to really start “living” his life, Thoreau borrowed an axe from Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father and a fellow Concord Transcendentalist, or, depending on the story, from Emerson, walked the two miles out to Walden Pond, and began to chop down pine trees for his cabin.

On Independence Day that summer of 1845, he hauled his belongings out of his parents’ Concord house, loaded them into a wheelbarrow, and carted them out to the cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond. Henry David Thoreau then settled in to write, read, observe nature, and tend his bean field.

At last his life would begin—deliberately, or so he hoped. He sought many things: the essence of wildness that he believed lies within us all, a life stripped down to its barest essentials, and something he
called “Indian wisdom.” It was this latter wisdom in particular that, a year after moving into his cabin at Walden, he set off to find on a monthlong excursion to the Maine Woods.

I
N MANY WAYS
Thoreau hungered for the life young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour lived in Acadia two hundred years before. A Scottish Presbyterian visiting Acadia in 1629 pungently captured the lifestyle of La Tour, who “live[s] in the country a savage kind of life traveling, trucking, and marrying with the savages.”
²⁹

Insofar as someone born in Europe could learn to think like a Micmac, La Tour and Biencourt embodied Thoreau’s “Indian wisdom.” When the French venture in Acadia collapsed, they stayed, taking up the life of the Micmac.

The colony at Port-Royal had struggled for support from France for several years, starting about 1610. Its original leader, de Monts, quit the whole enterprise after King Henri IV pulled de Monts’s monopoly on the fur trade to give others a chance at it, too. In de Monts’s absence, young Charles Biencourt’s father, Poutrincourt, took over the venture. He sank deep into debt trying to keep supplies flowing from France. When an assassin killed King Henri, his widow, Marie de Médicis, complicated life for the Acadian colonists by demanding they bring along Jesuit priests to make devout Catholic converts among those known as the
sauvages
.

Upon the Jesuits’ arrival, they and Poutrincourt butted heads, with the Jesuits demanding half the fur-trading profits and a managing hand in the business.

“I pray to you leave me to do my duty, which I know very well,” Poutrincourt told off the arrogant Father Biard, as related by Lescarbot. “Show me the path to heaven—I will give you guidance on earth.”

When Poutrincourt returned to France to hustle up more funding, his son Charles Biencourt, now turning twenty, temporarily took over the Acadian colony’s leadership, and relations between Jesuits and colonists finally snapped. The Jesuits removed themselves to start a separate colony on Mount Desert Island (on today’s Maine coast), taking much of Port-Royal’s remaining supplies and tools. Lacking supplies, Charles Biencourt and his group of colonists took to the woods to live
with the Micmac in their hunting camps that winter of 1612–13. Back in France, Marie de Médicis, hearing the Jesuits’ version of the dispute at Port-Royal, threw Charles Biencourt’s father into debtors’ prison.

The death blow to the early French Acadian colony arrived in November 1613, when a Welsh privateer dropped anchor by moonlight off the fort—or “manor house”—at Port-Royal. The privateer, Samuel Argall, had been sent by the governor of the new British colony down at Jamestown in Virginia to wipe the French out of what Britain considered its New World holdings. Argall had first attacked the Jesuit outpost at Mount Desert Island and captured Father Biard, who now guided the enemy privateer—willingly or unwillingly is not clear—into the harbor at Port-Royal and to the fortified manor house, which stood on a promontory.

It was deserted. Charles Biencourt and his men were out hunting with the Micmac and working their crop fields in natural meadows two leagues off from the manor. The British raiders stripped the manor of everything of value, including its iron hinges and the pigs that roamed about, bashed into oblivion the fleur-de-lis the French had carved into a rock at the entrance, and burned it to the ground. Argall then sailed upriver to the meadows, hailed the French from his deck, and offered them a deal—one year’s servitude helping to start Jamestown, followed by free passage back to France.

“Get thee behind me, Satan!”
³⁰
shouted back a Frenchman, according to one French version of the incident.

The British sailed off. When Poutrincourt, released from prison and leaving France early the following spring with a supply ship, arrived at his colony in Acadia, he was shocked to discover only rubble remaining. The colonists, with little else to eat but lichen and seaweed, had spent another winter living with the Micmac. Most of them boarded the ship and, with the shattered Pountrincourt, returned to France for good.