The Last Empty Places by Peter Stark

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.” Howmany 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