Wildwords

It's the first day of September, and I'm near the top of the high pass just south of home, on the road to Yellowstone. It's 33 degrees and snowing. Snowing fiercely, in fact - big sheets of hard flakes snapping back and forth in the wind. Of course whatever falls will melt away soon enough; autumn, after all, has plenty of warm breath still in its chest. Even so, standing here in this little blizzard I'm reminded how satisfying it is to have big sweeps of land like this that close down for much of the year, soon to be shut fast until the end of May to all but a few handfuls of hardy skiers.

In the New York Times this week was an op-ed titled Aw, Wilderness, in which writer Ted Stroll laments federal agencies not expanding access to wilderness, arguing that the ban on "mechanical transport" was never meant to stop people "from using light mechanical assistance [such as mountain biking and wind-powered skiing] that leaves no lasting trace." In addition, he scolds the Forest Service for not being more faithful at erecting signs in the backcountry, claiming it a major safety issue.

With regard to his first point, as much as I love to mountain bike, the truth is that it's not uncommon on shared trails to have ill-timed meetings on blind corners with horses (this is especially dangerous), not to mention surprise run-ins with day hikers and backpackers. But my objections go beyond that. The term "mechanical assistance" means devices created to propel us more effortlessly and/or more quickly across the landscape. Very handy, very fun. Yet both that lessening of effort, as well as the quickening of speed, have absolutely nothing to with the ninety year-long long flowering of heritage, ecology and desire that in 1964 gave birth to the Wilderness Act.

As for the issue of signage, across the thousands of miles of trails I've hiked there have certainly been times when I was frustrated by a missing or neglected sign. But wilderness was never supposed to be about having someone else keep me found. In most dictionaries the word "wilderness" has as one of its meanings "something bewildering," such as a landscape overwhelmingly vast. And let's face it. Signs can't get us even an inch closer to feelings like that.  

Here in the foothills of the northern Rockies, summer - while far from over - is beginning to wind down. Wild roses along the creek have hung their seeds. Along the edges of the woods harebell blooms are beginning to fade, leaving only the goldenweed to muster any sort of flash, its small, daisy-like flower heads looking fiercely yellow.

Just to the south, higher in the mountains, it's less a matter of summer slowing down than of coming to a screeching halt. On two different days last week, it snowed. Frequently, dawn now breaks over a tundra covered in frost - miles and miles of pincushion plants and loose scatters of arctic willow, wearing thin tissues of ice.

Some of my neighbors are feeling a little cheated by the fact that the last few months have been often wet and cool. Living this far north, it's hard to be robbed of the one time of year when you get to walk out into the afternoon and feel the sun deep in your bones. As for me I'm not so much bothered by it, happy to have dodged (at least so far) what earlier in the year had all the makings of a brutal fire season. If I do complain now and then it's only on certain mornings, when the temperature gets stuck in the lower 40's. Mornings when autumn seems impatient. When you can feel it out there somewhere, agitated, like somebody pacing. Like somebody on the shoulder of the road, anxious for a ride.

The news worth noting is that it's news at all. On Monday of this week, the main front page story of the New York Times focused on a team of scientists researching the idea that being outdoors, completely unplugged for a time, may have profound benefits for cultivating both attentiveness and creativity.

What they don't say is that the basic wisdom of disconnecting from excessive activity was planted long before cell phones and IPods, in the wake of the industrial era of the late nineteenth century. By the early 1900's such thinking had become part and parcel of a number of growing psychological and educational traditions, touted by academics from G. Stanley Hall to John Dewey. Later still, in the early 1990's, wilderness therapy researchers began documenting the striking benefits of quiet time in the outdoors for helping teens struggling with, among other things, attention deficit disorder.

True, we now have shiny new instruments with which we can see such shifts, tracking them as expressions of electrical activity in the brain. But beyond such whistles and bells, the thing most worth noting is that a major American newspaper has chosen as breaking news the merits of unplugging life now and then to head outside. Poet Robert Frost, it turns out, had it right: Most of the changes we think we see in society, he once remarked, are in fact just old truths, coming in and out of favor.

While the vast majority of my writing is meant as a celebration of the earth's last wild places, as I mentioned in my post of July 25^th - The Lessons of Loss - life on this planet simply can't be segregated into "things wild and safe," and "things at risk." Much of nature will not survive a careless society. And at the same time, much of humanity cannot survive in a severely compromised natural world.

Which brings me once again back to the topic of food. This time, to the rampant use of antibiotics in industrial livestock production. Many years ago producers discovered that adding small amounts of antibiotics to the food or water of confined sheep, cattle, chickens and hogs promoted faster growth. The practice seemed to offer the added benefit of protecting against many of the illnesses so easily spread in crowded confinement operations. But now we have a problem. By all indications, this heavy use of antibiotics (over half the antibiotics sold in America are used for livestock), is prompting the rapid evolution of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. What's more, the resistant strains that are appearing first in animals are likely connected to the growing problem of drug-resistant bacterial strains in humans. For example, recent studies of large hog confinement operations in Iowa found that not only more than 70% of the pigs, but over half the workers tested positive for a powerful staph infection known as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), currently responsible for more than 17,000 human deaths annually.

There are alternatives. Denmark, for instance, banned antibiotics to promote growth in livestock some twelve years ago, instead allowing their use only in treating animals that are actually sick. Use of the drugs has dropped more than 40%, while the industry seems to be doing just fine.

It's just one more opportunity to think about the notion of interdependence. One more chance to understand that what we do to the least things of this earth, we do to ourselves.

August slipped into Greater Yellowstone last night under a waning gibbous moon - the final act of full-blown summer in the high country. A time of blue sky mornings, heartbreakingly beautiful, pushing from the earth paintbrush and harebell blooms, turning the lupine flowers to seed. And on a great many afternoons, a time of spectacular thunderstorms, full of wonder and violence: Sheets of hail ripping through the aspen leaves. Creeks turning to mud. And high above the valley, spears of lightning poking at the long fingers of the tundra, sending hikers running for their lives.

Most of the elk are in the nosebleed seats now, feeding in the alpine meadows. Wolf pups, meanwhile, are no longer tucked away in so-called rendezvous sites, protected by relatives while the other adults are out hunting, but are instead starting to travel with the packs. Bears are one step closer to hyperphagia - a kind of eating frenzy that will begin in a few weeks, part of a frantic attempt to put on as much fat as possible before the onset of denning.  

Just last week, on hot days I was prone to cowering in the woods, hiding under the branches of the lodgepole and Douglas-fir. But in August, knowing that a far different season is just around the corner, I'm walking as much as possible in the full light of the sun. And when my muscles and bones feel warm and long and loose I head to a certain mountain spring I'm fond of, get on my knees and cup my hands and drink. I know the taste by heart. It will be with me for months to come, even as the mountains are again buried in snow.

As a teen growing up in the Midwest, I often dreamed of the big national parks and wilderness preserves far to the west. I took comfort in the notion that no matter what happened in the more civilized parts of the country, at least these places would remain pristine. A still point between the constant inhaling and exhaling of progress.

But of course that perspective missed entirely the intimate connections that define life on this planet. Global climate change has already resulted in key losses in those same places I used to dream about. Three out of four amphibian species in Yellowstone, for example, as well as trumpeter swan populations, are in severe decline. Unusually warm water temperatures in 2007 led to the largest die-off of cutthroat trout in Yellowstone history. Elsewhere, 90% of the pinion forests in Mesa Verde are gone. The beautiful white-tailed ptarmigan of Rocky Mountain National Park will likely be locally extinct in twenty years.

Yet held within the profound sadness of all this, inside the feeling many of us have of being totally overwhelmed, such conditions offer us another chance to get the lessons we missed earlier: That life is utterly interdependent. That what we do to one corner of the globe, we do to all of it. That, as popular social commentator Jim Hightower's father used to tell him: "Everybody does better when everybody does better."   

In 1996 I wrote a book called Shouting at the Sky: Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild, about a compassionate wilderness program for troubled 14 - 17 year-olds. Some struggled with drug and alcohol addictions. Others were brittle with anger. Still others wore on their faces what seemed a nearly fatal sadness. Several weeks into the therapy each teen went on "solo," spending two days and nights alone (discreetly watched over by staff), keeping a journal about the experience. I lost track of how many came back looking astonished, bewildered. "That's the first time I've ever known what I think," they often told me.

Knowing what you think seems harder now than ever. As I've noted on this site before, a group of researchers recently set out to estimate the number of years today's 14 year-old will, during her lifetime, be "plugged in" to some electronic device - computer, cell phone, television, etc. Their best guess was a staggering 28 years.

Concurrent with that trend we need doses of nature. Not just for entertainment. Not even solely for beauty. We need such medicine because quiet moments in the woods can also reveal nature as overwhelmingly complex. Utterly impossible to comprehend. And on the other side of that small confusion, that slight discomfort, is a powerful sense of the imagination being set free. A sense of the world no longer fully fixed, no longer already framed. Suddenly there's not just the woods, but the potential of the woods. Minds quiet down in such wordless places. And in that calm we come to know what we think. What we need. What we might do.

On two days this past week the temperature never made it out of the 50's. In the valleys a cold rain fell, while up in the mountains came snow - closing for a time the road to Yellowstone. The foothills are starting to turn brown, as they always do this time of year, but more slowly, reluctantly, as the cool, wet days keep spurring new flushes of green.

This is the time when the feet of the aspen are cradled by lavender-colored lupine flowers, as well as the scarlet blooms of paintbrush. The time when wild roses along the creek are fully open, their scent easy to detect in the cool hours of morning. The time when cottonwood seeds are floating everywhere, up and down and sideways, like a million feathers cast down from the clouds.

The sun is drifting south, of course, summer leaving us by degrees. By that's of no concern. Things are still being planted. Things are growing. The mountains are letting out breath.

I'm on the roof of my house, enjoying the view. To the north, about two miles away, I can hear the announcer's voice booming from a loudspeaker across the East Bench, as he calls the annual 4^th of July rodeo. In fact we've had three rodeos in three days. Three days of parades, too.

If I turn and face the other direction, to the south, I see almost nothing but the crumpled foothills of the Rockies, wrapped in blankets of Engelmann Spruce and lodgepole pine. On the high plateaus beyond, at over 10,000 feet, the snow has all but melted away, leaving thousands of acres of puddles across the tundra.

I think people who are fond of nature have reason to feel a little extra happy on patriotic holidays like this one. For well over half our nation's history, landscape was a big part of what shaped how we saw ourselves as a people. Pundits in the late 1700's predicted we would produce more artists than anywhere else in the world, simply because of the time we spent rubbing elbows with the woods. We had a national tree, and were awfully fond of it. (At the onset of the Civil War, some said we should prune it back to stubs to show our state of moral decline, having taken up arms against each other). In the early 1800's there was a great theological discussion going on in the East, involving orthodox and progressive clergy alike, centered on this question: Is nature the hand voice of God? Or is nature God Himself?

One of the most popular books of the 1880's was called Progress and Poverty, by Henry George. Like so many other authors of his time, he finds a strong link between patriotism and the preservation of unfettered land:

The free, independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness that have marked our people are not causes, but results. They have sprung from unfenced land. Public domain has given a consciousness of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been a well-spring of hope even to those who have never thought of taking refuge upon it.

                                                                                            Henry George, 1879