Read The Last Empty Places Online
Authors: Peter Stark
The path wound down, down, down, crossed the ravine’s bottom, and began to ascend the other side. Instead of following the path up
again, I left the trail and struck off on my own still deeper into the ravine, which ran several more miles down to the Susquehanna River.
While on the path my mind wandered, but once I stepped off the trodden path, I concentrated exactly on what I was doing. I stepped carefully across the forest floor, over fallen logs and across carpets of leafy ground cover. I looked behind me periodically to identify landmarks and side gullies to mentally mark my return route. Crossing the little creek on boulders and logs, I left footprints in the mud in the event I got lost and searchers needed clues—or I needed clues. I crossed the fresh trail of a bear—I was quite sure it was bear—that had crushed large, broken-stemmed steps through the leafy patches.
As I had in Burns Run, I thought again of the acute awareness a young Indian hunter would bring to this spot, right here, three hundred years ago. But now I asked myself a different question. What was I hunting for down in this deep, obscure ravine? I wasn’t looking to kill a bear or deer, or to gather plants, as an Indian hunter might have been. Nor, unlike an early American Puritan, was I alarmed at the devilish quality of these gloomy deep woods. Nor did I seek to clear a farm and build a homestead, nor chop down the forest and sell the timber. I didn’t seek any practical use for this wilderness. I searched solely for the experience of wilderness. I hunted for the transporting aspect of wilderness. I hoped to experience some grand emotion here, to experience it and take it back with me. I sought the
romance
of wilderness.
For this notion I had Billy Bartram to thank. And channeled through Bartram, I had Rousseau to thank and Edmund Burke, and Denis Diderot and Lord Shaftesbury, and the Deists, and before them, way before, the Greeks and the Romans whose paeans to Arcadia—to the idealized rural life away from cities (which also may have been the source of the name Acadia
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given to that bountiful region those early French settled)—were read avidly by these eighteenth-century writers.
After traveling with the surveying party divvying up Indian lands, Bartram and young M’Intosh returned to the coastal lowlands of Georgia, borrowed a canoe carved from cypress, and paddled up the Altamaha River—one of the largest rivers on the East Coast, flowing from the Appalachian highlands to lowland coastal swamps and then out to sea. Here’s how Bartram would come to describe the Altamaha.
I ASCENDED this beautiful river,
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on whose fruitful banks the generous and true sons of liberty securely dwell, fifty miles above the white settlements. HOW gently flow thy peaceful floods, O Alatamaha! How sublimely rise to view, on thy elevated shores, yon Magnolian groves, from whose tops the surrounding expanse is perfumed, by clouds of incense, blended with the exhaling balm of the Liquid-amber, and odours continually arising from circumambient aromatic groves of Illicium, Myrica, Laurus, and Bignonia. WHEN wearied…I resigned my bark to the friendly current…THUS secure and tranquil, and meditating on the marvellous scenes of primitive nature, as yet unmodified by the hand of man, I gently descended the peaceful stream, on whose polished surface were depicted the mutable shadows from its pensile banks; whilst myriads of finny inhabitants sported in its pellucid floods.
This is just one typical passage in his book, based on what would become a four-year wilderness expedition, titled
Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, etc
. by William Bartram.
In this Altamaha passage the word
sublime
appears twice—a word that puckers the lips before sliding so liquidly off the tongue like Billy’s cypress canoe down the river’s waters. It appears with remarkable frequency throughout the
Travels
. It was a word—a broad concept, really—that finally defined an inchoate feeling about the glories of nature that had swirled in the minds of early and mid-eighteenth-century European thinkers—thinkers who had ventured into the Swiss Alps, the English hill country, as well as into the woody British clubs and trendy, glittering salons of Paris amid the rustling silks and tinkling china and witty conversation of the philosophes. Bartram was one of the first—if not the first—to apply this concept
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to the American wilderness, and did so with long-lasting impact.
To understand where the concept originated, it’s helpful to return to Europe—the other half of this intellectual rally across the Atlantic—and especially to the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
A great con man, passionate writer, and adventurer rolled into one, Rousseau imparted the spirit of “wild nature” and the “natural man” to a whole generation in Europe. After his mother’s early death, Rousseau ran away from his home in Geneva, drifted south over the Alps to Savoy, and, at age sixteen, was taken in by a twenty-eight-year-old
baroness, Madame de Warens, who had a penchant for collecting young men. It was from Madame de Warens that Rousseau got his first education in the natural world, and, as result, we have been handed down part of ours.
Despite ties to the Catholic Church, Madame de Warens was a committed Deist. She believed in the spiritual goodness of all humans and put great faith in the power of the natural world, as well as dabbled in herbalism and alchemy. Over the course of several years in residence at her estate at Annecy—the most delightful period of his life, he described it—Madame de Warens introduced Rousseau to great works of literature and philosophy, refined his manners, his conversation, his ways in the arts of love, and imbued in him a sense of the power of the natural world.
Eventually Rousseau showed up in Paris in the city’s exploding literary scene of the mid-1700s, at the height of the Enlightenment, as French thinkers leveled the weapon of reason against king and church. It was while walking to Vincennes prison one hot summer day to visit his friend the philosophe Denis Diderot, who had offended the church with his proto-evolutionary theories, that Rousseau had his central inspiration about man and nature.
Lying under a shade tree to rest and read a newspaper,
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his eye fell on a notice that the Academy of Dijon was offering a prize to the best essay addressing whether advances in the sciences and arts had helped to refine or corrupt morals. Like all great con men, Rousseau possessed a remarkable talent for sniffing out the spirit of the moment and making it his own. Hot, agitated, en route to visit his imprisoned friend who’d spoken out, he embraced a spirit of the age that was much alive in Paris intellectual circles—a rising, radical voice against the oppression of church and state—and melded it with a new, and equally heretical, belief in the inherent goodness of “natural” man. Rousseau’s short answer to the essay question was that advances in “civilization”
hadn’t
helped purify morals.
When Rousseau arrived at the Vincennes dungeon, the incarcerated Diderot helped him shape his ideas about man and nature. Diderot knew well the work of the English philosopher Lord Shaftesbury, whom he’d translated into French, and who strongly believed in the inherent goodness of “primitive” man—a goodness that could be perverted by exposure to poor morals, religious fanaticism, and other
supposed “civilized” influences. For these observations, Shaftesbury drew on reports coming into London from sailing expeditions all over the world in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
“Turn [your] Eye toward remote Countrys,” Shaftesbury wrote in his
Advice to an Author
. “[S]earch for that simplicity of manners, and innocence of behaviour, which has often been known among mere savages; ere they were corrupted by our commerce, and, by sad Example, instructed in all kinds of Treachery and Inhumanity.”
The notion of the goodness of the primitive man and the simplicity of nature resonated with Rousseau. He’d witnessed firsthand the artificiality and intrigues of the “civilized” life in Italian noble houses and Parisian salons. He fondly remembered his simple days of wandering through Savoy and the Alps, subsisting only on a sturdy chunk of bread and a bit of wine. The natural and uncorrupted man in the natural and unurbanized landscape now became for Rousseau an icon of goodness—and of freedom.
Sending off his impassioned essay, Rousseau, to his great surprise, won the Dijon Prize, and instant and widespread acclaim.
Always quick to seize the moment, Rousseau then personally resolved to strive for the simplicity and goodness he believed lay within all men. Growing a beard, and selling off his lace shirts and white stockings, he cut a wild and celebrated figure in the Parisian salons—a kind of French intellectual proto-hippie. Finally Rousseau retreated to the French countryside and to his native republic of Geneva to write, including his book
The Social Contract
, which helped trigger the American and French revolutions. But it was his novel
Julie, or The New Heloise
, published in 1761 and a resounding bestseller throughout Europe, that helped trigger the Romantic movement and captured a new passion between Man and Nature.
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Consisting of a series of letters between a young tutor and the daughter of a nobleman in the Alps who are in love but forbidden to marry, it brimmed with soulful emotion instead of cool reason. Instead of the bright city life—Paris was portrayed as an endless desert
—The New Heloise
celebrated the pastoral villages and wild mountain landscapes of the Alps. It spoke of nature—and of wildness—as exerting a transformative effect on the human soul. An emotionally confused St. Preux, in love with Julie, now a wife and mother, describes how he found hope by climbing a peak in Switzerland’s Upper Valais:
Meditations there take on an indescribably grand and sublime character.
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…It seems by rising above the habitations of men one leaves all base and earthly sentiments behind, and in proportion as one approaches ethereal spaces the soul contracts something of their inalterable purity.
Here in Rousseau’s description of the Alps appears that word
sublime
—which would become a touchstone in Billy Bartram’s writings about the wilderness. The word itself was philosophically explicated a few years before Rousseau’s novel by a young Edmund Burke, who later gained renown for his political essays: Explained Burke in his early treatise,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible…is a source of the
sublime
…”
Small, smooth objects fell in the realm of the beautiful, while wild, craggy mountain landscapes gave rise to these feelings of the sublime—that sense of being overwhelmed by vastness, by power, by infinity. Beyond raw terror, the sublime, according to Burke, provokes a certain
delight
. But it isn’t found simply anywhere in the presence of power or terror or danger. The tremendous power of a draft horse, for example, doesn’t inspire the sublime.
“[I]t comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros.”
It was all of a piece—a crystallized moment when the Western outlook on Wild Nature started a dramatic transformation. For so long the concept of “Wilderness” and “the Wilds” had, in Western eyes, been viewed through the lens of the Old Testament. It was either a Paradise or a Hell. But Burke, Rousseau, and their contemporaries finally saw in Wild Nature a world that had its own spiritual value and transformative power. Burke succeeded in putting a name and definition to it—the “sublime.” In a way, it acknowledged the presence of God in the power and infinity of those towering mountains, those turbulent seas, those depthless heavens.
When you read Burke’s essay, and you read Rousseau, and then you read Bartram’s
Travels
, you realize that Billy Bartram saw his four years in the American wilderness as a kind of grand quest for the sublime. He
knew botany. He’d read British poets like Mark Akenside, whose
The Pleasures of the Imagination
celebrated Nature as a touchstone of the imagination. Surely he’d read Burke on the sublime, and probably Rousseau on the natural man. Now Billy Bartram—or William, this “son of Pennsylvania”—would “glow with the raptures of the sacred nine,” as his yearning classmate had once written. Billy would write his own epic poetic account of his travels in the American wilderness in search of those wild animals, those strange plants, those exotic tribes whose inherent goodness should be the envy of civilized man, those grand emotions.
[We] enjoyed a most enchanting view;
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a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields; a meandering river gliding through, saluting in its various turnings the swelling, green, turfy knolls, embellished with parterres of flowers and fruitful strawberry beds, flocks of turkies strolling about them; herds of deer prancing in the meads or bounding over the hills; companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich, fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of the floriferous and fragrant native bowers…disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with rich fruit.
Just as Bartram had embarked on a grand quest for the sublime and the inherent goodness of “natural man,” the deeper I hiked into the pathless ravine of Fish Dam Run that rainy late afternoon and the denser the ravine grew with fallen logs, mossy rocks, rhododendron bushes, undergrowth, the more I considered my travels to this “blank spot.” I jumped back and forth across the little stream, seeking the easiest way. The whole concept of “blank spots” implied a romance in these wild places. It implied that in the spaces left undescribed by the map I would discover something extraordinary, something powerful, something that would transport me, as the wild places had transported Rousseau and other eighteenth-century European urban sophisticates who climbed in the Alps. For much of my life, I realized, I had been searching, in one way or another, for those blank spots on the map, for
those places Billy Bartram discovered for himself, while Cherokee maidens frolicked in the strawberry fields.