The Last Empty Places Read Online Free

largely uncultivated continent thinly peopled by Indians, as cheap land to homestead. They saw nothing good—but rather evil—in the “wildness” of it. The value of blank spots, of wild places, lay only in their cultivation—in “civilizing” these spots and “taming” the natives. It was in good part Thoreau—and his trips to the Maine Woods—who changed all that.
    “Y OU’RE A BRAVE WOMAN , Amy,” remarked David Skipper as another gust of rain lashed the windshield of his van.
    A burly, friendly man, Skipper drove shuttles to the Maine rivers for Galen and Betsy Hale’s clients who wished to canoe. He now steered the big blue van—our rented canoes lashed on top, our mound of gear loaded in back—down a gloomy mud-and-gravel forest road. The wipers whipped back and forth. The rains had begun that morning, reaching from the coast up into the Maine Woods, when we woke up in the little motel across from the Hales’ shop in Medway. For nearly three hours since Medway, we’d been driving on these graveled roads through the soaking wet fir and spruce woods, through this great green sponge of evergreen trees, woody brush, dripping moss.
    “How much longer?” Skyler finally asked.
    “Five minutes,” Skipper said.
    Fifteen minutes later the gravel road curved right, and we barreled off it down into a low, grassy clearing with a small campground that opened onto the shore of a large gray lake.
    Gauzy gusts of rain blew across its surface, veiling and unveiling the low, darker gray bands of pointed spruce and fir that ringed the far shore. I spotted one other human presence in the campground, the first we’d seen for the last hour or so of driving—a pickup truck and camping trailer at the clearing’s far end, buttoned up tight against the weather. It was early June, but the gloom made it feel like late November.
    This was Baker Lake, and we were at its foot. Its outlet stream ran past the campground, about fifty or sixty feet wide, sliding past us before disappearing between the walls of forest. Here lay the headwaters of the St. John River. The village of Allagash, the first settlement downstream from this spot, sat a hundred miles away. Those hundred miles we’d paddle by canoe.
    We climbed out of the van into the downpour. Amy scrambled to help Skyler and Molly pull on rain pants, rain jackets, and rain hoods while David and I unstrapped the canoes and laid them on the wet gravel landing at the river’s edge. As quickly as I could, I nestled our ten or twelve waterproof dry sacks containing sleeping bags, clothes, tent, and two large coolers crammed with food into the canoe hulls. It was already three o’clock, and I was eager to make some distance before dark.
    Back in the Nicatou Outfitters shop at Medway that morning,Galen and David had mentioned that, along the right riverbank a few hours downstream from Baker Lake, sat an old trapper’s cabin.
    “Remember that cabin,” David now reminded us. “That would be a mighty nice place to spend the night in weather like this. It’s there for anybody who wants to use it.”
    Skyler abandoned his hunt for arrowheads along the shore and we climbed in—Skyler in the bow of one canoe and I in the stern, Molly in the bow of the other and Amy in the stern. David helped shove us out into the river.
    We four raised our paddles, swiveled the canoes to point downstream, and began stroking into the gusts of a stiff headwind, waving goodbye to David as we slipped into the rainy, gray-green forest.
    A CADIA, ONE MIGHT SAY , was born of indifference by rival empires, and was finally killed off by the same imperial rivalries.
    In 1541, Spanish spies, skulking around French ports, got wind of a French expedition, under Jacques Cartier, headed to North America to establish France’s claims to regions around the St. Lawrence, which Cartier had explored a few years earlier. Spain, of course, decades before in the wake of Columbus, had established American colonies