The Last Empty Places (2 page)

The geographical search, however, accounts for only one part of the overall endeavor. Just as compelling—perhaps more so—is the quest to discover why places like this are important. Reading these wilderness philosophers, Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, I’m left with a deep sense that this is what drove them, too. From the time they were young, they felt an urge to seek out these wild places, to explore them, to ramble through them, to love them. In some ways, it was a search—as it’s been for me—for a childhood paradise lost, to recapture those exciting jaunts through woods and fields and streams. As they grew older, however, these writers each tried to understand
why
these wild places were important—to each of them, and to all of us.

Thus, in this book, in the course of these journeys, I want to explore not only the blank spots themselves, but also to write about those who spent their lives thinking about these wild places and exploring them and what they had to say about why these blank spots, these wild areas, were important.

There is no one answer. The various answers put forth by these thinkers all build on one another, however, and each has a common theme. It has to do with understanding our own place, as a species on this planet. It has to do with understanding our insignificance, as individuals.
Although he found writing excruciatingly difficult, John Muir was nonetheless a catchy phrasemaker who pointed the direction: “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

W
HILE
I’
VE TRAVELED
all over the world in the last forty years seeking out the empty, wild places—first as a lone traveler, then as a writer, finally as the husband of a ready-to-go-at-any-moment vagabond—I’ve largely ignored my own country. Too settled, I’ve thought. Too civilized. Too
developed
.

But is it really?

Has wilderness been wiped off the face of America? Have all the empty places been blanketed with roads, with farmers’ fields, with subdivisions, shopping malls, and the sprawling cities themselves? In my eagerness to find the truly remote spots of the world, had I too hastily dismissed my own country?

You could pick up any
Rand McNally Road Atlas
and see the vast highway system thrown like a giant fishnet over the entire United States. Thick ribbons of red and blue, black and yellow, wrapped nearly every corner of every state. What empty places could survive this onslaught of asphalt?

Yet I’d flown over a good deal of the country since I’d left Wisconsin, two and a half decades ago, and, lured by the emptier spaces of the Northern Rockies, moved to the small university town of Missoula, Montana. Especially in the West—but in certain parts of the East, also—you could look down from an airplane window at thirty thousand feet and spot what appeared to be vast, roadless stretches—miles upon miles of mountains or forests or badlands that, as far as I could tell, were largely untracked.

What were these?

I
SET UP A
lunch date with my friend Alex Philp. A specialist in both historical geography and geographic information systems, Philp works, among other things, with images of Earth from outer space. He quickly became my guru of blank spots.

“What you want to do is find the nighttime image of the U.S. taken from NASA’s satellites,” he told me over the phone. “Look where
the lights are. Then look at the places where they are not—the black holes. I think you’ll be surprised at how many you’ll find even near the large urban centers in the East.”

When we met a few days later, I unfurled what’s known as the “Nighttime Map of the United States” on the café table between us. Scruffily bearded, fortyish, Jesuit-educated, and the father of two young girls, Philp half closed his eyes behind his glasses, almost as if meditating over the satellite image on the table.

He swept his hand across it. Like an image of the starry sky, the page was mostly black except for a pattern of dots and swirls and clustered nodes of lights.

“See how this image is not rectilinear—not Cartesian. It’s not based on grids and lines—the kind of map a land surveyor would make. It’s much more of a viral pattern, a biological expression. Now, I don’t mean to compare humans to viruses, but viruses need certain things to survive and so do humans. For instance, water.”

Philp gestured to the image’s left half—the West. Here the dots and clusters of light lay much more sparsely scattered. You could almost draw a line down the center of the map, dividing the thick lights of the East from the sparse lights of the West.

“This is roughly where the hundredth meridian runs,” said Philp. He was referring to one of the lines of longitude inscribed on the globe from pole to pole. The hundredth meridian runs down the center of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, through Kansas and Texas, and on south into Mexico. “West of the hundredth meridian it becomes too dry to grow crops easily,” Philp said. “Very few people live there.”

A great galaxy of light exploded at the image’s right side—New York City at its center, morphing into Boston and Washington. It looked a bit like a giant crab with legs radiating outward—millions upon millions of house lights, streetlights, headlights, apartment lights, fast-food joints, toll plazas, parking lots, sports stadiums, shopping malls, factory compounds. But between these radiant Eastern Seaboard crab legs lay a few patches of utter blackness. Some appeared surprisingly large.

O
VER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS
, I spent hours staring at the Nighttime Map of the United States, comparing it with my Rand
McNally and my
Times Atlas
. I discovered that some of the biggest black holes on the photo did, in fact, show on the map that they had a road or two running through them. The nighttime photo made it abundantly clear, however, that almost no one lived there.

To add more layers to my understanding of what I was seeing, I made trips to the university library and scoured through the “exploration and discovery” shelves, digging out the journals of early explorers of North America such as Henry Hudson, Jacques Cartier, and Samuel de Champlain. I cared less about the places they visited than the “Unknown Lands” they alluded to but never reached. I studied the brittle, sketchy maps folded among the leaves of the crumbling old accounts, tracing my finger over them for the empty spaces where there were no lines, no trails, no rivers, only phrases like “terra incognita” or “unmapped.”

I went through my own shelves for my frayed and marked-up copies of wilderness and nature philosophers such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Rousseau, and refreshed my reading of the classics in the field of wilderness studies, Roderick Nash’s
Wilderness and the American Mind
and
The Idea of Wilderness
by Max Oelschlaeger. These provide wide-ranging and incisive understanding of how our notion of “wilderness” has evolved over the centuries.

And yes, I surfed the Internet, although I found it less helpful than one might think in actually identifying blank spots, but very useful in digging out odd items of history. Generally, I avoided zooming in on places using Google Earth. It’s very difficult to identify from those aerial photos how truly “blank” an area is—there can be dozens of houses hidden under tree canopies that you simply can’t see from the aerial image—and I also didn’t want to detract from the excitement of seeing these places for the first time with my own eyes.

In narrowing my choices to five or six “blank spots” to explore, I followed some basic criteria:

1. I avoided U.S. National Parks and designated federal Wilderness Areas (although I eventually made one exception to the latter). I wanted wild, empty places that were also relatively unknown and obscure.
   

2. While the West has more and larger empty spaces, I wanted to
   explore some blank spots in the East also. I excluded Alaska, as it’s so well known for its wild areas.
   

3. I looked for compelling stories about the first European encounters with the American wilds and Native Americans.
   

4. Aware of the criticism that “once you write about these places they won’t be blank anymore,” I sought out wild areas that could use some help and attention to keep them wild.
   

5. Finally, I sought out places that have shaped America’s greatest thinkers and their ideas about wilderness. I wanted the places to help tell how, over the centuries, our American idea of “wilderness” has evolved from a kind of satanic hell to a place of spiritual inspiration.
   

And so off I went. Sometimes with family in tow, sometimes alone, over the course of two and a half years, I explored my chosen blank spots.

Photograph of lights of the United States at night from a satellite orbiting 800 kilometers (480 miles) above the Earth’s surface.

F
rom far off, it was said, you could hear the women and children screaming. If you’d been there, in Nova Scotia—they called it Acadia then—in September of 1755, you would have seen the women down on their knees along the dirt lane, pleading, praying, wailing, reaching up with extended arms as their men and boys were marched from the church at Grand Pré down to the British ships that waited with the high tide.

All men and “lads”
¹
over the age of ten had been summoned to meet at the church at this Nova Scotian port town at exactly 3:00 p.m. on September 5. When 418 of the Acadians were gathered within the church, British soldiers barred the doors and windows. Colonel Winslow, the British commander, in a powdered wig, sat at a table surrounded by soldiers and read aloud from a document containing orders that supposedly originated with the king. It detailed the fate of these French-descended inhabitants of Nova Scotia—the Acadians—as the British soldiers went from port to port to round them up.