The Last Empty Places

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

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 fire 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.