The Last Empty Places (21 page)

And so it went with the French and Indians’ War of Terror—and the Americans’ first War
on
Terror—in that autumn of 1756.

“W
HAT’S THE WILDEST
, emptiest, blankest spot you know of around here?” I asked Richard Kugel.

I tried to phrase my question simply. I didn’t go into all the reasons
why
I wanted to find this wildest, blankest place. But I asked the question with a certain excitement that no doubt grew from those long-ago jaunts into the secret places of the Wisconsin woods around my home, from my love of them and the perpetual wish to find more.

Kugel seemed to understand without my explaining further. He was the assistant forester at Sproul State Forest, one of the state-owned preserves that surround the town of Renovo like the Pacific Ocean surrounds Hawaii. Kugel wore his hair in a long red ponytail that looked improbable against the corporate-style conference room at the modern
Sproul Forest headquarters just outside town. He’d been telling me that when people don’t manage to shoot a deer during hunting season here they’ll call their state representative to complain about forest management causing the deer to go extinct. In answer to my question about blank spots, he now pointed to a certain place on the big forest map spread out on the conference table. I could see tight, spaghetti-like whorls of topographic lines that indicated extreme relief in the terrain.

“Fish Dam Run,” he said, with his finger on the whorls. “There’s no trail down there and it’s rough going but it’s plenty wild.”

T
HERE WERE NO BOX STORES
in Renovo. I bought some dry flies at an old-fashioned sporting goods place, a few snacks at the small supermarket, and drove across the Susquehanna River on the Highway 144 bridge. The two-lane road snaked briefly along the river past some old railroad workers’ houses, then, springing out of the river bottomlands, suddenly curled up a steep draw. It entered a pretty forest, quite open underneath.

After climbing a long way, the road finally reached the top of a miles-long rolling ridge that trended northeast like so many of the Allegheny ridges, and traced the crest. I was far above the surrounding countryside. The ridge’s northwestern edge was scalloped with steep gullies—as if a great cantaloupe scoop had sliced away giant balls from the ridge. The gullies dropped away on my right, deepening and lengthening, the forest within them thickening as it spilled down the ravines’ sides, until they fell into the Susquehanna some five miles away and nearly two thousand feet below.

The clerk at the sporting goods store, who’d moved here from what Renovo residents call “the flatlands,” had described to me the first time she’d driven this ridgetop road in winter.

“I said, ‘God, just get me off this mountain.’”

I stopped at a scenic pullout along the highway that perched on the edge of one great ravine. I looked out over miles of hazy ridgeline cut by other deep ravines. The ridgetops were the ancient folds
³⁸
of mountains—the Appalachians and its Allegheny chain—forced up 250 million years ago when the rock plate now holding Africa shoved inexorably into the North American plate. These mountains were once joined to Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Some of the hazy, rounded ridges
I could see, now about 2,200 feet above sea level, once stood at least another ten thousand feet higher—and perhaps taller than Everest—worn down just as inexorably by water and wind and ice in those hundreds of millions of years since. What was once these Himalaya-like mountaintops has washed away as silt and rock to form the Eastern Seaboard of North America, where major cities sit.

A sign explained that, due to the lack of city lights here at night, it was possible from this point to see six thousand objects in space—planets, stars, supernovae, distant galaxies. Here, I thought, was yet another measure of “blank spot”—a place on this heavily wired Earth where you could clearly see the clouds of brilliant stars. Ten thousand years ago—even a mere thousand years ago, before lamplighters walked the growing cities with their torches at dusk—that particular blank spot existed virtually everywhere on Earth. It dismayed me that it had vanished from so much of the planet. How psychologically healthy it would be for all of us to live in it—to be reminded, with a casual glance up at the clouds of stars, of our own insignificance.

Turning off the pavement, I followed a gravelly road called Jews Run along an outlying ridge defined by a deep ravine on each side. To my left dropped away Burns Run and to my right Fish Dam Run. Both were marked “wild areas” on my Sproul State Forest map. I parked alongside a trail marker for the Chuck Keiper Trail, named after a well-known wildlife conservation officer. This inscribes a huge loop through the state forest, and drops into and then climbs out of both ravines. I couldn’t decide which ravine looked more promising—richer in its “blankness,” its “wildness,” in those elusive qualities I sought. It was late in the day—after 2 p.m. I decided to hike down into Burns Run today, and come back tomorrow, with an earlier start, and try Fish Dam Run.

From an open, meadowy area on the ridgetop, the trail plunged quickly over the edge, switchbacking downward. The deeper I went, the tighter the forest canopy closed overhead. The forest felt damp and twilighty, the air moist and fragrant, the leaves broad and soft and still, the floor damp and spongy, so unlike the bone-dry, crackling, wind-sighing Montana forests I’d hiked for years. I recognized some tree species, like maples, from my Wisconsin upbringing but not all. Unlike dense Wisconsin, however, little undergrowth appeared here, except occasional leafy carpets over the floor. In places, the naked, columnlike
tree boles and thick overarching canopy lent the forest a hushed, cathedral feeling.

After perhaps a half-hour’s descent, I reached the ravine’s bottom, where a small stream trickled over mossy rocks in little rills. I followed the trail along the rills as the ravine deepened, swishing through ferny patches and mossy evergreen groves. Then, on the left wall of the ravine, I spotted something shimmering through the tree trunks. As I drew nearer, I realized it was a clump of giant rhododendron bushes, way taller than I could reach, with big pink and white blossoms the size of my hand that glistened in a single beam of sun penetrating the thick forest canopy. I noticed other clumps of big pink and white rhododendrons dotting the steep, woody hillside farther up. In dozens of years hiking forests, mostly northern ones, I’d never before walked a flowering woods.

There was, as some of the earliest travelers to North America’s Middle Latitudes reported, an Edenesque quality to these woods. They were both wild and flowering at once, unfettered in their luxuriant growth yet somehow benign and welcoming in their carpets of moss and bright flower blooms. A sense of excitement sprung from the sheer
fecundity
of it, the richness and variety of life pushing up from the rich, black soil.

I knew well the gloom of northern forests—the dark fir and spruce boughs crowding against one another, the scaly barks, the mats of decaying needles underfoot. Those northern forests harbored so few tree species that even at their thickest and richest, even on a sunny day, they spoke of spareness. They spoke of a need to gird yourself, to prepare yourself, to be deprived.

John and William Bartram embraced the rich Middle Latitude forests like the one into which I descended in Burns Run. They’d traveled some of these same Pennsylvania forests. But for William, this was only an introduction. I could imagine William’s ecstasy, as an artistic and wandering and lovelorn young man, at first encountering the even more extreme blossoming fecundity of, say, a South Carolina wilds, or Florida’s.

D
ESPITE QUESTIONS ABOUT
B
ILLY’S CHARACTER
, the wealthy Dr. Fothergill of London offered to fund his botanical explorations to the Southeast and Florida to the tune of fifty pounds a year. At thirty-four
years old and having spent most of his adulthood at loose ends, Billy left Philadelphia in 1773 as if it were the husk of a former life. He sailed as far as Savannah, carrying letters of introduction to gain him entry to governors, prominent families, and planters, and promptly spent forty pounds to buy a good horse. On horseback, he set out south down the coastline, crossing the estuaries on small ferries and stopping by evenings at hospitable plantations, many of which grew rice in the coastal wetlands. Then he cut inland to meet the St. Mary’s River and trace it upstream to its source in the Okefenokee Swamp, which straddles today’s line between Georgia and Florida.

On his first day traveling up the St. Mary’s toward the swamp, Billy had one of his life’s most revelatory experiences. As he left the white settlements and headed into the blankness that lay beyond, he spotted a Seminole Indian armed with a rifle, riding his way.

Arriving at the trading post upstream by following the Seminole’s directions, Billy was warmly received and heard from the white traders that the Indian was “one of the greatest villains on earth.” The previous night the traders had broken his rifle and beaten him so severely that he left the post pledging to kill the first white man he saw.

“My friend, consider yourself a fortunate man,” they told him.

But Billy didn’t see the incident as an example of good luck. While his father, John, hated Indians, and called them “the most barbarous creatures in the universe,” Billy interpreted the encounter with the Seminole as an example of an inner goodness that inhabits all humans, whether “savage” or “civilized.”

“Can it be denied, but that the moral principle, which directs the savages to virtuous and praiseworthy actions, is natural or innate?”

Billy had grown up in an entirely different generation. He’d been exposed to the new ideas crossing the Atlantic from Europe about the arts, about human liberty, and about the natural goodness of man. During his time at the progressive-minded Philadelphia Academy, he’d been a protégé of the faculty member Charles Thomson. A professor of Latin and Greek, Thomson was also a student and a friend of the Delaware Indians during the turmoil of the French and Indian War. He spoke out boldly against unfair white treatment of the Delawares in land dealings and treaty-makings with the colonials. He condemned the way the whites had conspired to keep the Delaware chief Tedyuscung drunk during the entirety of a key treaty conference at Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1757 which Thomson personally attended as a Quaker observer. In that treaty conference, conducted at the height of the war, the Delawares had gained the promise from the colonials of a place in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley—land previously taken from them—where they could settle.

The Delawares called Thomson “the man who tells the truth.”
⁴⁰

Now Billy began to see firsthand what Thomson had spoken out against.

Continuing up the St. Mary’s, he noted in scientific detail the flowers and shrubs along the riverbanks and in the nearby savannas. When he arrived at the great Okefenokee Swamp with its labyrinth of waterways and islands of high ground, he doesn’t appear to have ventured into the swamp itself, but he was fascinated by the stories told about it. In particular, he related a legend told by the Creek Indians, that a band of their stray hunters venturing into the swamp once encountered a race of beautiful and generous women who lived deep within this “terrestrial paradise.” But the women could not tarry with the Creeks, as their jealous men would miss them. The Creek hunters had returned many times into the maze of waterways looking for them, and seen
footprints and traces of settlement, but after that first clandestine meeting never again had found the beautiful women.

Billy also heard from the Creeks that these people might be the remnants of an ancient Indian tribe, the Yamases, that the Creeks had conquered long ago and who took refuge deep in the swamp.

Heading back to the coast and the M’Intosh plantation, where he’d stayed earlier, Bartram took fifteen-year-old Jack M’Intosh on as a traveling companion—“a sensible and virtuous youth.” Together Billy and Jack then headed up the Savannah River, taking notes and gathering specimens for Dr. Fothergill, with their destination a congress—a large meeting—between white traders and Creek and Cherokee Indians.

The white traders were demanding two million acres of Indian lands. Presumably, this was to settle debts in trade goods that the Indians had run up at trading posts. The young Creek warriors wanted to fight instead of cede their lands, but, after days of negotiation, the older chiefs finally convinced the young warriors not to fight, and the tribes gave over the lands to the whites. Bartram and Jack M’Intosh then joined a ninety-man surveying party to stake out the two-million-acre claim, which pushed Billy’s sympathies further toward the Indians. After walking through the most magnificent forest he ever saw, in a fertile vale that hosted black oaks ten and eleven feet in diameter at breast height, he witnessed how a white surveyor standing on a hilltop misread a compass in order to cheat the Indians
⁴¹
out of more of these lands. Finally, a chief raised his arm, pointed toward the correct river confluence in the distance, and said that the “wicked little instrument was a liar.”