The Last Empty Places (47 page)

You don’t learn the lesson standing in the big-shouldered Loop of Chicago, or in the man-made canyons of Manhattan, or in the sinuous sprawl of LA, or in the long corridors of the Pentagon. You don’t learn it with a cell phone in your hand standing in line at the ATM or supermarket checkout. You do learn it in the middle of a wilderness during a
blizzard, or on foot in a desert, or alone on a mountaintop. The astrophysicist on the Plains of San Agostin surely knows. If you’re peering up with a giant radiotelescope from a high-desert plain seeking the ends of the universe, finding energy sources countless times more powerful than our own staggeringly powerful sun and discovering blank spots a billion light-years across…the truth is clear.

Creation is enormous and infinitely complex. Man is only the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest part of all Creation. And you—yes,
you—
are even tinier than that.

That’s what blank spots tell us.

In the Prologue, I’ve told the story of how I came to love the wild, empty places of the world, the blank spots on the map. There are many people who made this book possible, but in a deeper, familial sense, my first debt goes to my grandfather, who papered the walls of his upstairs hallways with maps from all over the world, and whose fire-lit library shelves groaned under the weight of bound leather volumes of
National Geographic;
and also to my late father, William F. Stark, who had a passion for the early history of the North American continent and wrote local history books on the settlement of Wisconsin.

This book had its most immediate inception during an editorial meeting with Nancy Miller, then editor in chief of Ballantine Books, as I described my fascination with wild, empty places.

“My son and I like to study maps together and search out the blankest spots,” she remarked.

“Blank spots!” I replied. “I love blank spots!”

And so this book was born.

Right at the outset, I contacted my friend Alex Philp, a historical geographer and partner in GCS Research in Missoula, Montana, which produces sophisticated map-based data systems. Philp, as I recount in the Prologue, showed me the way to find the blankest of the blank spots and different ways to think about them.

Philp’s partner at GCS, Michael Beltz, spent many hours designing the engrossing maps that appear in this book. It amazed me with what ease—and geniality—he could include whatever I wanted in the maps, change it in countless different ways, add or subtract “layers” of data to
accentuate the information that we wished to highlight as effectively as possible.

In each of the “empty places” I visited—despite, or perhaps because of, their lack of population—I found people who were very hospitable and willing to help bring this project along.

These include several “blank spots” I investigated in person but, for one reason or another, don’t appear in this book. In the East Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, Fred Willard of the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research graciously invited me on an archaeological excavation searching for traces of the “lost colony” of Roanoke Island. The colony disappeared in the late 1580s, and its settlers—including Virginia Dare, the first known British child born in North America—may have retreated to the fastness of the swamp. Phil McMullan Jr. also helped me with background during the excavation.

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Neal and Ruth Beaver of Grand Marais told me vivid anecdotes of life on this remote stretch of the Lake Superior shoreline, known as the “Shipwreck Coast.”

Our canoe trip down the St. John River of Northern Maine was greatly helped by Betsy and Galen Hale, who not only supplied us with canoes and shuttling from their outfitting business, Nicatou Outfitters, but whose ancestral roots in the northern Maine area are fascinating and deep and connect to Henry David Thoreau’s visits there. David Shipper, as shuttle driver with the Hales, provided us good company on the road and an endless supply of local information. At Camden on Maine’s Penobscot Bay, Capt. Al Philbrick, who took us out on his lobster boat, was a useful source of information about coastal life and anecdotes of the Acadian migrations.

In Pennsylvania, Kim Mattern, amateur archaeologist and lifetime resident of the Penns Creek area, is an authority on the Le Roy Massacre. He personally guided me to the places where significant events occurred, shared his artifact collection, and provided me with a paper he has produced from his research on the Le Roy Massacre. Likewise, Bill Mattern provided information about the area. In Renovo and Tamarack, Richard Kugel, assistant district forester at the Sproul State Forest, and Doug D’Amore, district forester, took time out to speak with me about the forest and early land-use history. Eric and Peggy Lucas of Tamarack provided a great deal of local history, much of it compiled by Peggy’s late mother, Dorothy M. Bailey, a respected historian
of the area. Nancy and David Swanson helped sketch out the history of the Warren area, and their son, Carl, a friend of mine in Missoula, gave me an overview of Pennsylvania geography (especially advice on choice fly-fishing spots). Les McComber and Dennis Lytel showed me their hospitality on the Seneca Reservation and told me about the history of the Seneca people.

The huge empty spaces of Oregon proved to be populated, however thinly, with most welcoming people. At the enormous Roaring Springs Ranch, owner Rob Sanders graciously pointed the way to manager Stacy Davies, out in the desert at a branding, who, when I finally found him, was a fount of information and enthusiasm on ranch life and restoration of the rangelands and watersheds. His wife, Elaine, and sons, Erik, Jeff, and Scott, along with the other hands, all welcomed me at the branding and gave me a little hands-on experience, too. René Villagrana, at ranch headquarters, provided more background about seasonal ranch life.

Both the Frenchglen Hotel, and its manager, John Ross, and the Fields Station, and Sandy Downs and sister Gail, were hospitable, helpful and informative. At the Harney County Library, Karen Nitz of the Claire McGill Luce Western History Room extracted from various file drawers exactly the manuscripts and articles I needed to learn about the Lost Wagon Trains. The folks at the Alvord Ranch took time out from a busy day to talk to me, and John Wetzel, of Steens Mountain Outfitter and the Wildhorse Ranch, laid out the economics of ranching for me and, as an expert outfitter on the mountain, pointed the way to the summit of Steens Mountain. Gary Miller of the sprawling Rock Creek Ranch showed me a place that was still run in the old family way, while his young son rode by on horseback in the background, helping to round up bulls.

As Gary put it succinctly, which applies to so much of this arid region, “My grandfather witched for water and hit a well thirty-six-feet deep, and that’s the only reason the Millers survived, because we had water.”

In New Mexico and for help with our Gila Wilderness hike, thanks to Jay Hemphill at Gila Hike and Bike in Silver City for his route suggestions, Marcine Page for looking out for us, and to Matt Gardiner of the VLA (Very Large Array) for showing us around. Displayed in the hallway leading into the operators’ room was a poster that proclaimed
in large letters “VLA—Center of the Known Universe.” It felt that way. We stood surrounded by computers and looked out from the observation windows at sunset over the desert array of massive satellite dishes as they peered up through the twilight into deepest space.

While the Bibliography and Endnotes cite the many invaluable sources I used in my research for this book, I feel a particular debt to certain works that comprehensively made sense of difficult-to-follow periods of early North American history. These are especially
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America
by Fred Anderson, and
A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland
by John Mack Farragher. Without them, I would have spent a long time floundering in the complicated historical thickets of the French and Indian War, the web of European diplomatic alliances of the mid-eighteenth century, and the many threads of the Acadian settlement and expulsion from Nova Scotia.

Christopher Preston, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Montana, and William Bevis, retired professor of English at the University of Montana, read the manuscript and brought to it their own very substantial knowledge of the literature—and the actuality—of wild places.

It’s been nothing but pure pleasure to work with the editors at Random House and Ballantine who made this book possible and nurtured it to fruition. I can’t express enough gratitude to Jennifer Hershey, editorial director at Random House, and Courtney Moran, assistant editor, who worked together on the manuscript and whose editorial suggestions invariably were graceful, thoughtful, and wise. Allison Dickens, formerly of Ballantine Books, originally commissioned the book and played an instrumental role in its conception and overall shape. John McGhee copyedited the manuscript in meticulous detail and, with a firsthand knowledge of Nova Scotia, clarified some blurry geography. I owe a huge debt to my agent, Stuart Krichevsky, for so many things both literary and business that I don’t even know where to begin except to express my deep gratitude for his tremendous knowledge, judgment, and support.

Finally, my gratitude and love to Amy, Molly, and Skyler, who accompanied me every paddle stroke and footstep of the way, even when I was alone.