The Last Empty Places (9 page)

They spent two years here in the isolation of Nine-Mile Bridge on the Upper St. John, where Helen learned to drive a dog team, hunt for deer, snowshoe, and live snowbound for months, eagerly awaiting winter to lift and the river to thaw.

On April 27, Helen and Curly were sitting lazily on the front porch of their cabin as the snow dripped from the roof in the warm spring sun when they heard a sound like a distant but large motor that brought them to their feet. In her book, she describes the scene as it unfolded.

“It’s the river!” she shouted to Curly.

Hamlin captured the old way of logging just as it was ending, with the big lumber camps, the French Canadians with their axes, the horse-drawn sleds hauling the logs over the frozen roads, and the spring river drives to send the logs downstream to the mills. With the end of the river drives, motor-powered logging arrived, and logging roads and large trucks began to crisscross the Maine Woods.

Hamlin left the woods with the birth of their daughter and Curly’s illness, and wrote
Nine Mile Bridge
, which fascinated readers with the exploits of a woman in the wilderness. After the book spent several weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list in 1945, Helen used the proceeds from its publisher, W. W. Norton, to help buy an outfitter’s camp on a Maine lake, soon divorced Curly, and married a young graduate student in ichthyology who worked for a summer at a timber company in the Maine Woods. Curly died two years later at age forty. Thus began a second life for Helen Hamlin—and three more children—far from the Nine-Mile Bridge as she accompanied her husband, Robert Lennon, in his work as a fisheries researcher in various posts throughout the United States and the world, as if she were making up for the isolation of her early life.

When Lennon worked in the Midwest, she returned to school, now at the University of Wisconsin, to reaccredit herself as a teacher of French. She taught on and off throughout the rest of her life, at both high school and college level. When Lennon’s job took them to West Africa for six years on a UN mission to prevent river blindness, Helen worked as a French translator for the State Department. Through the years, she also developed a love of painting, and took commissions to paint portraits. While she took her children on regular visits to northern Maine to make sure they understood their heritage, Helen and Robert Lennon finally retired to Minnesota.

Now the Nine-Mile Bridge, where she had once lived, was no more—not even pilings in the river. The ice had taken it all away. Helen had died in Minnesota in 2004. In the course of two years, she had managed to preserve an entire bookful of stories that happened right here—in this spot in northern Maine I called “blank.” How
many thousands of other stories had occurred here that I would never know?

H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU ILLUMINATED
another corner of this blank spot. If Thoreau hadn’t tried to climb Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak, in 1846 and described his attempt in intimate psychic detail, we might think of wilderness in an entirely different way today. Our idea of “wilderness” might include people, for it was on that climb up Mount Katahdin that Thoreau tossed out humans from his vision of “wild.”

He temporarily closed up his cabin at Walden Pond in the last days of August 1846, having lived there just over a year, tending to his bean field and filling his journals with nature observations. A combination of factors probably beckoned him to the north. During this first part of his two-year stint at Walden, he’d immersed himself ever deeper in the notion of “wild.” The woodlots and farmers’ fields around Concord might have been wearing a little thin in their tameness, despite his ardent proclamations of love for them. Northern Maine represented a very large chunk of wilderness, not far away. Conveniently, Thoreau had a relative who lived in Bangor, then the hub of Maine’s lumber mills. This unnamed relative was making a trip up to northern Maine, scouting lands for lumbering, and invited Thoreau along.

Leaving Walden, Thoreau traveled by steamship
⁴⁰
up the New England coast and Penobscot River to Bangor. Met by his relative, the two rode by buggy up the Penobscot riverbank until Mattawamkeag, where they stayed at a public house and where two other acquaintances from Bangor joined the Thoreau party. Here the buggy road ended. Jumping a settler’s fence, the foursome tramped along a dim footpath that led upriver. In thirty miles, they passed only a half dozen cabins.

“Marm Howard’s,” which the outfitter Galen Hale had mentioned to me as the place Thoreau stayed, was a public house near the confluence of the Penobscot’s East and West Branches—what the Indians called Nicatou and today is Medway. Here Thoreau detected the beginnings of a village. He imagined that in a thousand years some poet would come here and write his version of the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” proclaiming all the unsung local heroes who had lived and died in this
spot. But here at Nicatou, the seed of what would become Galen and Betsy Hale’s hometown, the unsung heroes were “yet unborn.”

A short way past Nicatou, the party stopped at the farm homestead of “Uncle George” McCauslin—a veteran logger and boatman on the Penobscot. Living off Uncle George’s generous hospitality and farm-raised hams, eggs, and butter for two days, the foursome finally gave up waiting for the Abenaki Indian guides who were supposed to meet them here. Thoreau’s party then persuaded Uncle George—“a man of dry wit and shrewdness”—to carry them in his
batteau
up the West Branch to Mount Katahdin, which Thoreau aimed to climb. For their second boatman they engaged Young Tom Fowler—son of the oldest settler in these parts, Old Thomas Fowler—while he sawed the window openings in his cabin.

Using twelve-foot-long spruce poles tipped with iron with which they pushed against the river’s bottom, Young Tom in the bow and Uncle George in the stern poled the
batteau
—a kind of large, flat-bottomed canoe—so deftly into the current that they “shot up the rapids like a salmon.” The party of six soon reached the last human habitation along the river—a crude logging camp with a simple cabin. Beds of cedar boughs lay under its low eaves, and its cook fed them pancakes and tea. The crew was out in the forest cutting the giant white pines that were the choice timber trees of northern New England; in places, they had once been marked with the king’s sign
⁴¹
to reserve as tall, straight masts for the British Royal Navy. After their repast, the Thoreau party pushed upriver and into a lake just as a nearly full moon rose. Crossing the lake four miles by moonlight, they took turns at the paddles while singing the Canadian voyageurs’ boat songs:

They paused paddling at moments to listen for the howling of wolves. In his prose Thoreau’s joyful exuberance at being truly in the wilds is palpable. He seems eager to
embrace
the wilds, to wrap his arms around this green forested world he had entered, to, as he would say, “suck the essence out of it.” Concord’s gentle woodlots and meadows and ponds were a tame paramour by comparison to the passions promised by
this
.

The party slept restlessly on the shore of a lake under their propped-up
batteau
—sparks from their overenthusiastic bonfire having torched their cotton tent—and the next day worked their way farther upstream and through more lakes. Bald eagles and fish hawks screamed. Though loggers had culled out the white pines from the forested lakeshore, notes Thoreau, the traveler couldn’t detect the difference. From one lake, they caught a good view of several lesser peaks and the great, mesalike mass of Katahdin itself, standing above the surrounding landscape.

“The summit,” Thoreau enthused, “had a singularly flat tableland appearance, like a short highway, where a demigod might be let down to take a turn or two in an afternoon, to settle his dinner.”

Katahdin is a great knob of granite.
⁴²
Over the last 350 million years, geologists believe, streams and rivers eroded away a layer of softer surrounding rock that was thousands of feet thick. This left Katahdin projecting above all else, its summit one mile above sea level. The more recent sculpting of Katahdin started about 1 million years ago, when the great glacial sheets of the Ice Age flowed over its crest, carving its ridges and cirques, and finally melting away to leave the shape that Thoreau described, which, viewed from the west as he saw it, looks flat on top.

That day the party made fifteen miles before camping at the mouth of Murch Brook and the Aboljacknagesic, both streams which drained off Mount Katahdin into the Penobscot’s West Branch. The foot of the mountain lay several miles away through dense forest. That evening, using birch poles and pork-baited hooks, they caught a mess of trout for supper from the creeks, tossing the wriggling, rainbow-colored fish up onto shore. Thoreau stood over them in starry-eyed wonder “that these jewels should have swum away in that Aboljacknagesic water for so long, so many dark ages;—these bright fluviatile flowers, seen of Indians only, made beautiful, the Lord only knows why, to swim there!”

The rainbow fish reminded him of Proteus, the shape-shifting, future-telling Greek god who rules over certain beautiful sea creatures. History, writes Thoreau—and by history he appears to be referring to “actual” facts and events, like the fish wriggling at his feet—“put to a terrestrial use, is mere history; but put to a celestial use is mythology always.”

Call it an act of genius, or, as Henry James, Sr. (father of the novelist
and the philosopher), did after meeting Thoreau, an act emanating from a personality that was “literally the most childlike, unconscious and unblushing egotist
⁴³
it has ever been my fortune to encounter in the ranks of mankind.” Here’s Henry David come along to take history—those wriggling rainbow fish at his feet—and make
mythology
out of it. Here’s Henry David come along to take the historical fact of
himself
and make mythology out of it. He aims to climb to the high, wild summit of Mount Katahdin, and there—almost as an equal, his tone implies, or at least an honored guest—consort with the gods themselves. On that high, wild summit would climax, like on some great altar, his passionate embrace of Nature.

M
OUNT
K
ATAHDIN
lay about sixty miles south of us. Thoreau had never made it as far north—as deep into the wilds—as the St. John. As we packed up that morning at Nine-Mile Bridge after the previous evening’s rainy encounter with Nine-Mile Mike, the heavy gray sky finally dissolved into fleecy clouds and patches of blue. It was the first we’d seen of the sun in five days on the St. John. It blinded us. We paddled down through quick water and bouncy little rapids in a perfect combination of cool breeze and warm patches of sun. We drifted along talking, then broke into canoe races. Molly and Skyler loved to steer the canoe bows so they would plow through the biggest waves they could find in these minor rapids. Drifting along midstream, we nibbled a lunch of goat cheese and smoked oysters on crackers. I’d gotten over my high pique from the previous day’s river lunch when I’d left a whole unopened salami—our only one—on a cooler lid while waiting to slice it. Skyler, amusing himself by making one of his pirate boardings, leaped from one canoe to the next. The canoe rocked, my precious salami rolled from the lid, dropped into the river, and sank from sight with me groping madly after it. My curses echoed from shore to shore.

Now Molly and Skyler decided they loved smoked oysters. I thought of the first French people in Acadia and how they picked shellfish off the mudflats at Port-Royal.

The river braided at Seven Islands downstream from Nine-Mile Bridge. The forest briefly opened here to the sky, leaving the islands beautiful and serene and airy. We paddled past grassy banks and wove through narrow channels. Birdsong drifted from the meadowy shores. I
heard the throaty melodious trill of a redwing blackbird, reminding me of my Wisconsin childhood and the little pothole swamps I loved to explore in the woods. More geese and their goslings paddled busily along shore, and ducks—mergansers, we thought—swam in the river. An occasional seagull swooped in the distance. Seven Islands projected a sense of fertility and peace.

What it didn’t give any sense of was human habitation, yet Seven Islands, a century ago, had been the center of logging on the St. John. We could see nothing left of the bunkhouses and hotel, or the skid roads where horse teams and sleds pulled the logs from the frozen forest to the river, waiting for the thunderous ice breakup of spring to carry the logs downstream.

We made twenty-five river miles by day’s end—by far our best mileage. The broadening river and the surge of rainwater sloshing down it had swept us along, over the rocky sections, through sunshine and bunching afternoon clouds, through an iridescent, sunlit cloudburst, and into blue sky again. Two helicopters flew in formation in the distance and disappeared. Homeland Security on the Canadian border? I wondered. We heard a distant motor briefly—probably a logging operation back from the river. We spun our canoes around in eddies, sang. At last, the rains seemed to have moved on. But by the time we camped in late afternoon, on a high bank in a dark patch of forest at Basford Rips, the many days of drenching rain followed by the sun’s warmth had hatched ferocious swarms of insects. Molly’s eyes were nearly swollen shut from countless blackfly bites. Swollen red mosquito welts pocked all over Skyler’s tender skin. Powerful mosquito lotion gave only a slight lull in the attacks. Even the headnets the children wore around camp didn’t entirely stop them until the bugs retreated at darkness and we had a pleasant evening sitting on the ground before the sparking campfire under the stars.