The Last Empty Places (14 page)

A giddy sense of relief overcame us at simply escaping the bugs. I’d read that in June, the height of the season for bugs, an average of 450 moose are killed per month by cars on Maine’s roads. The moose emerge from the forest to escape the insects and to lounge on the relatively bug-free road openings. That statistic now made perfect sense. Likewise, it made perfect sense that the Micmac set up their camps along the bug-free coasts during the summer, and, when the bugs had died off, returned to the forests to hunt in fall and winter.

As we paddled along, Skyler made up a song:

We laughed and sang, steering easily through a few sets of small but lively rapids. We heard motors in the distance on the sunny, still air. We now could see clear-cuts on the hills back from the river where logging companies had sawed whole tracts from the forest’s thick nap. I sensed that the end of the trip drew near. Soon we were pushing each other out of the canoes into the warm river, splashing wildly, laughing. Simply to have warm sun, and no rain, and no bugs, and a beautiful river with the bluish-green hills, even logged-off ones, rising around—suddenly it all seemed so plentiful.

We’d planned to camp that night, our seventh, on the river, but by mid-afternoon, we had covered far more miles on the swift current than we’d anticipated. We were in striking distance of Allagash. Molly asked
again if it had nice motels. I tried to quiet her expectations, but I was ready for a nice motel myself.

“Let’s see how it goes,” I said.

“Please, let’s not camp out again,” Skyler pleaded from within his galaxy of bug bites.

I sensed our family beginning to lose its determination, exhausted from paddling for a week straight, battered by bugs. The four or five days of rain hadn’t bothered them; but they couldn’t take the bugs much longer.

We saw a house on the left bank—a strange occurrence, after so many days without spotting any dwellings except a few cabins. So square and solid-looking, a neat piece of geometry and bright paint in a land of tall, dark trees and twisting, dark water. Past the house we approached the largest rapid on the river, Big Rapid, a long fallaway that swept around a broad bend to the right. The canoeing guidebook recommended unloading your gear, running it in empty canoes, and portaging the gear around on a road that now came close to the river.

But Big Rapid tumbled at least a mile in length and, without a vehicle of some sort to carry the gear, portaging it presented a major problem. Instead, we stopped, scouted it as best we could from the top—it looked straightforward enough—and battened down our canoes. We then ran the rapids in our loaded canoes, our bows splashing through the big waves without mishap, though shipping water.

Spinning out into the sunlit eddies at the bottom, we gave a whoop. I was proud of our little family.

Now the St. John opened wide, the hills pulling back. It felt as if we were exiting the North Woods into a broader agricultural valley. A hamlet of a few houses appeared on the left bank. Then a bridge suddenly spanned the river, and we paddled beneath it.

The river had become almost a lake now. Cottages lined the high right bank—vacation cabins and small homes of local residents. The Allagash River—designated one of America’s Wild and Scenic Rivers—flowed in from the right. We steered our canoes up the Allagash, paddling and pushing for several hundred yards, until we reached a bridge at Allagash village, which was really just a few houses.

T
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OLLY’S DISMAY
—to all of ours—there were no nice motels in Allagash. There were a few cabins, and a kind of bunkhouse where we
ended up staying, after being recruited by eighty-eight-year-old Evelyn McBrearity, who, moments after our canoes crunched to a stop in the gravel of the landing, showed up with a cane in her hand and a small cloud of flies swarming around her head (“After a while you get used to them.”). She pointed out her big old frame house, just up the hill from the landing. She was a Pelletier, she told us proudly, who married a McBrearity. Her father had run the ferry across the river—she owned the landing itself where our canoes sat—for thirty-six years before the highway bridge was built in the 1940s. He was also a boatbuilder and crafted the towboats that horses hauled up the Allagash and St. John to supply the logging camps.

“Do you speak French?” Amy asked.

“Oh yes, of course. That’s what I miss, is the French.”

“Is your father’s family Acadian?” I asked.

“No, not Acadian,” she replied, saying her father’s family had come from other parts of Canada.

After a burger at a roadside café and a night in the bunkhouse, we were met the next morning by David Skipper, sent by our outfitters, Galen and Betsy Hale, who arrived with the big van and hauled us and our gear back down to Medway. I succumbed to the pressure from within our family to escape for a few days down to the Maine coast, like the Indians making their summer camps, away from the insects. And so we decamped for a couple nights to the chic little port of Camden on beautiful Penobscot Bay, once heavily contested by British and French. After this interlude of lobster and seascapes, I delivered Amy, Molly, and Skyler to the airport at Bangor and they flew back to the West while I took our little rental car and headed back to the Maine Woods for a few more days.

I spent a Sunday morning riding beside Galen Hale in his big pickup truck, bouncing deep into the woods until we reached the cellar hole of Old Thomas Fowler’s first cabin. We saw the family graveyard, with Old Thomas’s grave, and nearby the grave of Aurora, daughter of Uncle George McCauslin, head boatman to Thoreau. She married Young Tom Fowler, explained Galen. Apparently Aurora died young and Tom remarried, because nearby, among this section of Fowlers, lay the grave of the infant Anna, who was the daughter of Young Tom Fowler and his second wife, Olive. In another row rested Galen’s immediate ancestors, the Hales—Albert, Tily, and Elmer. The
latter was a famous guide, explained Galen. And so the wheel slowly turns through the generations in northern Maine.

Galen pointed out to me the stones of Mom Howard’s chimney barely poking above the backed-up waters of the Penobscot River, where, decades ago, it had been dammed into a small reservoir for power and paper mills. We then laid out a map of Mount Katahdin and Baxter State Park on the hood of his pickup. With his finger he traced the Thoreau party’s route up the Penobscot West Branch and Thoreau’s ascent of Katahdin. I said goodbye to Galen and drove an hour to the park that hot, sunny, Sunday afternoon. Starting in mid-afternoon, I hiked hard and fast, jogging its gentler lower reaches, on Thoreau’s route up the mountain, following what today is called the Abol Trail. I panted and sweated as the mountainside tilted ever steeper, scrambling over the massive boulders that looked like they had rained from the sky, from some “unseen quarry.” As I climbed higher, the sun dropped lower to the hazy, blue-green horizon. About two thirds of the way up Katahdin, I stopped—tired, out of water, not wishing to be caught in darkness near the top. Thoreau, too, had turned back, but in the blowing clouds, the cold wind, among the dark crags.

Here occurred some of his most profound realizations about Nature, that not all Nature offered humans her warm embrace, that places existed on this earth where humans didn’t belong. High on the barren, boulder-strewn face of Katahdin, this was one such place.

I sat on a big, rounded, whitish boulder catching my breath, draining the last drops of water from my plastic bottle, and gazing off over the great northern forest extending toward the horizon in all directions. To the west, toward the lowering sun, it glinted silver with sunlight reflecting on jeweled lakes and sinewy rivers—a view that hadn’t changed all that much since Thoreau climbed over this same boulder slide 150 years ago. I waited for my own profound realization about Nature. Nothing happened. Sweat dripped off my chin and splashed in rough, grit-flecked droplets on the broad face of the boulder, the only evidence of human life in view. I waited. Still no epiphany. The boulder felt warm from the day’s sun, its low, golden ball casting its rich, summer-evening light—an almost buttery warmth—on my cheeks. Rather than overcome with thoughts about the inhospitality of Nature in this spot, as Thoreau had been in the cold and clouds, I wanted to lie down and take a nap.

After twenty minutes or so, I started down Mount Katahdin, lowering
myself through the steep clog of boulders. I realized that my most profound moments in the wilds of northern Maine had occurred not on the side of Katahdin but in the rapids of the St. John. There all my senses had been utterly attuned to nature in its minute and vivid detail—the curl of a wave, the undulating rush of the current, the boiling reflection of light, the swoop of a bird, the ripple of muscle on a child’s glistening arm. These were moments when I was most vulnerable to the unpredictability of nature, just as Thoreau’s greatest moments of vulnerability to nature’s unpredictability occurred not at Walden Pond or in the gentle woods and fields of his Concord, but alone in the cold wind and blowing clouds on rocky Katahdin, where he had some of his greatest insights. Likewise, the two young Charleses, Biencourt and La Tour. In the wilds of Acadia, traveling through the endless forest, living like the Micmac, they discovered for themselves this profound sense of Nature’s unpredictability. To live this way, they had to be utterly attuned to the natural world, far from the musty, worn, manorial life that awaited them should they return to Old France.

A blank spot was not simply an unpopulated area on the map, as I’d started out believing, nor was it only a reflection of our own ignorance, as I’d later come to see it. Rather, what is compelling about blank spots—these wild places—is their unpredictability, and the uncertainty that it engenders, so unlike the safe, well-trodden paths most of us travel in our daily lives. The unpredictability provokes our awareness of the natural world, otherwise we won’t survive. Our awareness, if we’re open to it, pushes us toward insights that don’t occur in our routine lives.

F
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ATAHDIN
, I drove the next day northeastward to the middle reaches of the St. John Valley along the Maine–New Brunswick border, where small farming towns appear regularly on its broad banks. I crossed the border into Canada and stopped for a look at the thundering, misty Grand Falls of the St. John. The story that I had heard, from a Maine lobsterman down on the coast who had married a woman of Acadian descent, was that when the British finally expelled the Acadians a small group fled up the St. John River past the Grand Falls. They knew that British warships could never chase them above its drop.

Back on the Maine side, I drove a two-lane highway above the Grand Falls and through more small towns along the St. John for another
forty miles or so, each with a large church out of proportion to the size of the town, like a cathedral in a French village. We hadn’t canoed this stretch of the St. John, as we’d taken out at Allagash, another sixty or seventy miles upriver. Driving along, I spotted a massive white cross, known as the Cross of St. David, planted in a pasture beside the pastoral riverbanks. I drove down a lane to reach it. Beneath it lay a row of stone markers commemorating families that had staged reunions here—Thibodeau, Ouellette, Chasse, and on and on.

The original wooden cross had been erected on this spot by Joseph Daigle in June 1785 after a party of Acadians, fleeing the British, landed here.

After Charles de La Tour’s death in 1663, Acadia went on bouncing back and forth between the two empires, French and British, for the next forty years, until it was captured for good by the British in 1710. The Acadian population had soared,
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meanwhile, as each family had six to eight children, and more immigrants arrived from France. The old Poutrincourt and La Tour dream of an Acadian fur empire headed by an aristocratic leader was supplanted by small but very fertile farms the Acadians established in the tidal marshlands of the Acadian Peninsula that could support the large families, along with hunting and fishing.

Through the first half of the 1700s, the British merely tolerated the Acadian presence in the peninsula they called Nova Scotia, forcing the Acadians to take loyalty oaths to the British. They viewed the Acadian farmers as strategically necessary to raise food to supply the British forts, while disparaging the Acadian way of life.

“They Lavish, Eat, Drink, and Play
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all away as long as the Goods hold out,” wrote one colonial official, “and when these are gone, they e’en sell their Embroidery, their Lace, and their Clothes.” Instead of settling down on the farm, complained another, the young men head off to unsettled regions along the coast where they “do nothing but hunt or negotiate with the natives.” Another tried in vain to enforce a decree forbidding “licentiousness [with native women] and ranging in the woods.” The British even complained that the Acadians were too lazy to go out and clear some real forest for farms, the way they did it down in New England, but relied instead on the diking and draining of the tidal marshes for their fields.

L’Ordre de Bon Temps—“The Order of Good Times”—had set the tone in Acadia from the start, as did their intermingling with the Micmac
who lived in the forest, hunting, making war, living intensely in the moment. The party in Acadia ended, however, at 3:00 p.m. on the fifth of September in 1755. In the epic ongoing struggle between Britain and France for the North American continent, certain British generals, as tensions built and suspicions flared, unfairly decided that the Acadians could no longer be trusted to remain neutral. On that September day Colonel Winslow of the British summoned the Acadian men and boys of Grand Pré to meet at the church, and once inside had his soldiers bar the doors while an interpreter read aloud the eviction notice to the shock of those trapped within.

Six days later, on September 11, 1755,
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with bayonets fixed the British troops marched the Acadian men and boys out of the church, down the cart path a mile and a half to the harbor. Women and children lined the road, wailing and praying, singing religious dirges, never expecting to see their fathers and husbands, brothers and sons again. Soon the women and children were rounded up, too, and packed onto other cargo ships—two people to a cell four feet by four feet by six feet. Smoke rose from the hundreds of squared-log Acadian homesteads set afire by British troops—to destroy the incentive to return. By the end of October twenty-four ships had sailed away, dropping the fragmented Acadian families in ports up and down the East Coast—Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and the Carolinas, Bermuda.