The Last Empty Places by Peter Stark Page A

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 thisspot. 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:
    Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The Rapids are near and the daylight’s past!
    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