The Last Empty Places Read online

  ALSO BY PETER STARK

  At the Mercy of the River

  Last Breath

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  WHERE THE ACADIANS DISAPPEARED IN

  NORTHERN MAINE

  PART II

  THE WILD LANDS OF WESTERN

  PENNSYLVANIA

  PART III

  THE LOST COUNTRY OF SOUTHEAST

  OREGON

  PART IV

  THE HIGH, HAUNTED DESERT OF

  NEW MEXICO

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PROLOGUE

  On cold January mornings, we four children would sit down to cornbread and bacon on the warmed plates my mother handed out while a frigid draft—a thin wafer of stiff breeze—sliced at my chest. From my bench at the kitchen table, I would lean back against the thick, bare logs of the house—roughly squared, still showing the chip marks of the hand adze that shaped them 110 years earlier. Between the logs protruded globs of chinking—a tacky slew of horsehair and putty—packed not quite tight enough, in my corner of the kitchen, to block Wisconsin’s bitter winter winds.

  This rough-hewn cabin was my romantic father’s idea of the perfect home for his young family, one my mother had warmly retrofitted with rag rugs, blue print curtains, a big stone fireplace. He loved the stories of the Scandinavian pioneers who penetrated the great forests of the Upper Midwest to build a new life from the wilderness, and told us of the Potawatomi Indians for whom this “wilderness” was home. A man named John Rudberg, one of the first Swedes to immigrate to Wisconsin Territory,1 had hewn these logs with his own hands in 1849 near the shores of a beautiful lake known to the Indians as Chenequa, or Pine Lake.

  My parents had discovered the old cabin inside an abandoned resort hotel on the shore of the lake. A house had eventually been built using Rudberg’s original cabin as its core, and then the resort hotel around the house. As the hotel was torn down, revealing the cabin, my parents marked each log, extracted them, and reassembled them on a nearby piece of land they had purchased. This is where I grew up—in Rudberg’s rebuilt old pioneer cabin surrounded by oak forest, with our nearest neighbor an old dairy farmer, who, still running a team of workhorses, lived a quarter mile away through forest and pasture.

  As a boy, I spent hours searching for arrowheads buried in our log walls. I loved to think of our cabin as a lonely bastion in the vast Wisconsin wilderness of the 1840s, the young Swedish pioneers spending their days swinging axes to finish their dwellings or clear their fields, chased indoors by the occasional Indian attack. I roamed the oak forests, the hills and valleys around our cabin, searching out the wildest spot, loving it best in a howling blizzard when the wind moaned through the bare oak branches and the deep, soft snow muted my bundled movements.

  In some subconscious nine-year-old’s way, I understood that as an American, I had inherited this legacy of wilderness, that it shaped my forebears, and me, and all those who immigrated to this country, as the continent had shaped those Native Americans who were already here. I sensed, too, that it didn’t lie so very far away. Only three generations, more or less, had passed since John Rudberg lived out his elemental drama within these same log walls.

  Every day, along with my two sisters and my brother, I attended the country grade school two miles away. Many of my classmates, with their Scandinavian or German last names, had young hands tough as cowhide from their daily chores on dairy farms that their great-grandparents had cleared like Rudberg. I doubt that any of the farm boys read the copy of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir that sat on our classroom bookshelf, but I did—several times.

  I felt a deep boyhood bond with young John Muir. In 1849, just when Rudberg was finishing his cabin, the ten-year-old Muir emigrated with his family from Scotland to Wisconsin and purchased a piece of wilderness forest at Fountain Lake, about fifty miles from where I grew up. Young John had loved to explore the Wisconsin woods and rivers and lakes, as I loved to do, too. But when he grew old enough to help with the crushingly heavy work of clearing the farm from the wilderness, his idyll ended.

  He finally escaped when a talent for mechanical inventions gained him entrance to the University of Wisconsin. Here he was exposed not only to botany and geology but to the era’s great American thinkers on wilderness and Nature—Emerson and Thoreau. They changed his life, propelling him toward a passionate advocacy of the great, empty places—a Prophet of the Wilderness.

  Thoreau, likewise, figured in my own youth. I started high school in the late 1960s, at the height of the countercultural “back-to-the-land” movement that embraced Thoreau and his Walden as its gospel. During the first Earth Day ever held—1970—I was a sixteen-year-old sophomore helping to plant trees on our school grounds. I distinctly recall—in a kind of embarrassingly un-Thoreauvian irony—reading Walden that year while sitting in the orthodontist’s waiting room about to get my braces removed.

  “If you’re reading Thoreau,” said my mother, who had trained at the University of Wisconsin as a landscape architect, “you should also read Aldo Leopold. He was an environmentalist far ahead of his time, and lived in Wisconsin, too.”

  It would be years later that I read all the thinkers I address in this book, writers who, over the last three centuries, have transformed our ideas about wild nature—starting with Rousseau and William Bartram in the eighteenth century, then Coleridge and Wordsworth, Emerson and Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold. I’ve detected a common thread not only in the influence of Wisconsin’s landscapes, but also in the countryside around Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau pondered nature, and outside Philadelphia, where William Bartram came of age, and even in Rousseau’s home city of Geneva, Switzerland, sitting on its long lake at the foot of the Alps.

  It’s this: all these thinkers grew up in landscapes that were half cultivated, half wild.

  Wisconsin, to me, is the perfect example—its green, rolling farm fields, its knoblike glacial hills crowned with wild oak forests, its windy little streams leading through blackbird-trilling marshes, its blue pothole lakes spilling into gentle rivers. This patchwork of small-scale civilization and “Wild Nature” (as the Romantics came to call it) offers a fecund landscape for the imagination. I understand perfectly what John Muir or Henry Thoreau felt in their youthful ramblings through woods and fields. It’s exactly what I felt—the urge to explore, to travel to the next little valley hidden in the woods, see what’s back there, check it out. What’s going on today? A new pondful of snowmelt. A knee-high patch of mayapples, with their umbrella leaves and green fruit. A thick-limbed white oak to climb. A marsh of croaking frogs. A good, roaring storm.

  “For many years,”2 wrote Thoreau, “I was self-appointed inspector of rainstorms and snowstorms…”

  What’s in there? What’s out there? I sought the secret, hidden feel of the place. Something always pulled me farther, something hidden, something precious, something back in there. I always wanted more of it. These patches of wild intermixed with the cultivated landscape were never quite large—or wild—enough.

  Virtually every one of these writers shared another emotional bond, as I do. Ruin threatened their precious landscapes. In certain eras, the threats converged powerfully, undeniably. From the mid-1700s onward, the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum in Europe and its cities swelled and factories clanked into existence. It’s no coincidence that this is exactly when Rousseau first started to write lovingly of the emotional benefits to be gained in Wild Nature. The sentiment was soon embraced by the British Romantic poets in the 1790s and early 1800s, who watched their green isle’s patchwork of wild places chopped down and dug up to fir
e the steam engines that powered the Industrial Revolution.

  When the industrial onslaught landed in America in the New England of the 1840s, Henry David Thoreau watched as railroad tracks were laid through his precious Concord woods and fields, and along nearby Walden Pond. Emerson, his friend and mentor, bought forty acres along the pond to save it from being logged,3 and it was here on Emerson’s land that Henry Thoreau built his cabin. The tide of development surged all around him. Timber fellers cut the forest nearby, and work crews arrived at Walden in winter to saw out blocks of ice for Boston’s summer refrigeration. This sense of imminent threat and destruction made what remained of Wild Nature all the more precious for Thoreau.

  While Thoreau scribbled away on his Walden manuscript (it took him many drafts and several years to write), John Muir and his family arrived at Fountain Lake in Wisconsin, in 1849. There wasn’t even a wagon track through the wilderness forest where they settled. A few years later, when Muir left the Fountain Lake farm to go off to the university, farms and wagon roads covered the landscape. That decade—the 1840s—was a pivotal period in how wilderness was perceived in America, mostly because it was disappearing so fast.

  I know how they felt—Thoreau, and Muir, and the others—because, in my teens, I watched subdivisions move out from the city and pave over my fields with cul-de-sacs and self-consciously curving roads. Bulldozers advanced into those precious valleys of mine hidden in the woods, and sprawling houses with three-car garages and rolled-out sod lawns replaced the mysterious patches of mayapples and my climbing oaks and my snowmelt ponds. For a time, it made me almost physically nauseated to see another new subdivision plowed into my landscapes. Finally I moved away—to Montana, where I didn’t have to watch it happen so fast, although it still goes on nevertheless. My soul mate in this escape, John Muir, fled to the Sierras almost exactly a century before.

  That compulsion to seek out the wild, secret places—the blank spots—never left me but has only grown stronger, and, with time and age and resources, extended over a greater geographical range, as it did for Muir, and Thoreau, and Bartram, and Leopold, too. The search has taken me over the decades to wild, empty regions of Africa and the hidden valleys of Tibet, to the ice fields of Greenland and forests of Manchuria, and many places between.

  The geographical search, however, accounts for only one part of the overall endeavor. Just as compelling—perhaps more so—is the quest to discover why places like this are important. Reading these wilderness philosophers, Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, I’m left with a deep sense that this is what drove them, too. From the time they were young, they felt an urge to seek out these wild places, to explore them, to ramble through them, to love them. In some ways, it was a search—as it’s been for me—for a childhood paradise lost, to recapture those exciting jaunts through woods and fields and streams. As they grew older, however, these writers each tried to understand why these wild places were important—to each of them, and to all of us.

  Thus, in this book, in the course of these journeys, I want to explore not only the blank spots themselves, but also to write about those who spent their lives thinking about these wild places and exploring them and what they had to say about why these blank spots, these wild areas, were important.

  There is no one answer. The various answers put forth by these thinkers all build on one another, however, and each has a common theme. It has to do with understanding our own place, as a species on this planet. It has to do with understanding our insignificance, as individuals. Although he found writing excruciatingly difficult, John Muir was nonetheless a catchy phrasemaker who pointed the direction: “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

  WHILE I’VE TRAVELED all over the world in the last forty years seeking out the empty, wild places—first as a lone traveler, then as a writer, finally as the husband of a ready-to-go-at-any-moment vagabond—I’ve largely ignored my own country. Too settled, I’ve thought. Too civilized. Too developed.

  But is it really?

  Has wilderness been wiped off the face of America? Have all the empty places been blanketed with roads, with farmers’ fields, with subdivisions, shopping malls, and the sprawling cities themselves? In my eagerness to find the truly remote spots of the world, had I too hastily dismissed my own country?

  You could pick up any Rand McNally Road Atlas and see the vast highway system thrown like a giant fishnet over the entire United States. Thick ribbons of red and blue, black and yellow, wrapped nearly every corner of every state. What empty places could survive this onslaught of asphalt?

  Yet I’d flown over a good deal of the country since I’d left Wisconsin, two and a half decades ago, and, lured by the emptier spaces of the Northern Rockies, moved to the small university town of Missoula, Montana. Especially in the West—but in certain parts of the East, also—you could look down from an airplane window at thirty thousand feet and spot what appeared to be vast, roadless stretches—miles upon miles of mountains or forests or badlands that, as far as I could tell, were largely untracked.

  What were these?

  I SET UP A lunch date with my friend Alex Philp. A specialist in both historical geography and geographic information systems, Philp works, among other things, with images of Earth from outer space. He quickly became my guru of blank spots.

  “What you want to do is find the nighttime image of the U.S. taken from NASA’s satellites,” he told me over the phone. “Look where the lights are. Then look at the places where they are not—the black holes. I think you’ll be surprised at how many you’ll find even near the large urban centers in the East.”

  When we met a few days later, I unfurled what’s known as the “Nighttime Map of the United States” on the café table between us. Scruffily bearded, fortyish, Jesuit-educated, and the father of two young girls, Philp half closed his eyes behind his glasses, almost as if meditating over the satellite image on the table.

  He swept his hand across it. Like an image of the starry sky, the page was mostly black except for a pattern of dots and swirls and clustered nodes of lights.

  “See how this image is not rectilinear—not Cartesian. It’s not based on grids and lines—the kind of map a land surveyor would make. It’s much more of a viral pattern, a biological expression. Now, I don’t mean to compare humans to viruses, but viruses need certain things to survive and so do humans. For instance, water.”

  Philp gestured to the image’s left half—the West. Here the dots and clusters of light lay much more sparsely scattered. You could almost draw a line down the center of the map, dividing the thick lights of the East from the sparse lights of the West.

  “This is roughly where the hundredth meridian runs,” said Philp. He was referring to one of the lines of longitude inscribed on the globe from pole to pole. The hundredth meridian runs down the center of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, through Kansas and Texas, and on south into Mexico. “West of the hundredth meridian it becomes too dry to grow crops easily,” Philp said. “Very few people live there.”

  A great galaxy of light exploded at the image’s right side—New York City at its center, morphing into Boston and Washington. It looked a bit like a giant crab with legs radiating outward—millions upon millions of house lights, streetlights, headlights, apartment lights, fast-food joints, toll plazas, parking lots, sports stadiums, shopping malls, factory compounds. But between these radiant Eastern Seaboard crab legs lay a few patches of utter blackness. Some appeared surprisingly large.

  OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, I spent hours staring at the Nighttime Map of the United States, comparing it with my Rand McNally and my Times Atlas. I discovered that some of the biggest black holes on the photo did, in fact, show on the map that they had a road or two running through them. The nighttime photo made it abundantly clear, however, that almost no one lived there.

  To add more layers to my understanding of what I was seeing, I made trips to the university library and scoured through the “exploration and disco
very” shelves, digging out the journals of early explorers of North America such as Henry Hudson, Jacques Cartier, and Samuel de Champlain. I cared less about the places they visited than the “Unknown Lands” they alluded to but never reached. I studied the brittle, sketchy maps folded among the leaves of the crumbling old accounts, tracing my finger over them for the empty spaces where there were no lines, no trails, no rivers, only phrases like “terra incognita” or “unmapped.”

  I went through my own shelves for my frayed and marked-up copies of wilderness and nature philosophers such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Rousseau, and refreshed my reading of the classics in the field of wilderness studies, Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind and The Idea of Wilderness by Max Oelschlaeger. These provide wide-ranging and incisive understanding of how our notion of “wilderness” has evolved over the centuries.

  And yes, I surfed the Internet, although I found it less helpful than one might think in actually identifying blank spots, but very useful in digging out odd items of history. Generally, I avoided zooming in on places using Google Earth. It’s very difficult to identify from those aerial photos how truly “blank” an area is—there can be dozens of houses hidden under tree canopies that you simply can’t see from the aerial image—and I also didn’t want to detract from the excitement of seeing these places for the first time with my own eyes.

  In narrowing my choices to five or six “blank spots” to explore, I followed some basic criteria:

  I avoided U.S. National Parks and designated federal Wilderness Areas (although I eventually made one exception to the latter). I wanted wild, empty places that were also relatively unknown and obscure.

  While the West has more and larger empty spaces, I wanted to explore some blank spots in the East also. I excluded Alaska, as it’s so well known for its wild areas.

  I looked for compelling stories about the first European encounters with the American wilds and Native Americans.