Cry Wilderness

by Frank Capra

  And speaking of paradoxes, there are rock glaciers in this area. Yes, rock! In Bishop Creek, one finds solid rivers of loose rock, each moving downhill as a mass, lubricated by ice as they slide over solid granite.

  The Mono (Piutes), who had lived around Mono Lake for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before they saw their first white man, must have been as wacky as their environment. The word “Mono” (short for Monache) was pinned on them by the Yokuts from across the Sierra (Yosemite). It means “fly” people, which aptly describes them for their happy-go-lucky living habits as well as for one of their main sources of food and trade—the Mono Lake fly pupae, a small white worm that surfaces, then turns into a fly. What was wacky about them? Well, those Mono, so lowly they slept mostly in the open, so lethargic they lived on Mono flies, pinon nuts, lizards, and Jeffrey pine caterpillars, and so backward they never discovered how to make pottery, domesticate an animal, or plant a seed—yet, paradoxically, those primitives had discovered and perfected an art form incredibly intricate, unbelievably beautiful, and amazingly utilitarian: basket weaving.

  Baskets were not only vital to the very existence of the Mono; they were also their literature, their music, their “soul” art. No two designs were the same; they followed no drawn sketches, but created the patterns as they wove. Baskets were their all; they used them as dishes, for carrying burdens, winnowing seeds, scooping flies, cradling babies, for headgear, and, most importantly, for carrying and storing water (when pitched) and for cooking. As creative basket weavers, the “fly” people were unsurpassed among all other Native Americans. Another paradox is that these “primitives” had invented a picture-writing code that is still unbroken. On the trails between Mono Lake and Owens Valley, they carved the soft “tufa” rocks with petraglyphs—circles, symbols, and arcane designs whose meanings are as yet a mystery. Present-day Piutes disclaim any knowledge of them, and present-day jokesters say the “scratchings” are but the Piute equivalents of “Gilroy was here!”

  And if one thinks the first white men to rush into Mono to moil for gold were less kooky than the Mono, this should dispel that illusion. When, in the early 1860s, they established and surveyed the county, the county capitol they selected (Aurora) was not in the county. It wasn’t even in the state. It was in Nevada! When the mistake was discovered—and Mono moved its county seat back into California (Bodie, then Bridgeport)—the rights to previously collected tax money ended in a mish-mash that is still as unresolved as the Piutes’ petroglyphs.

  But the grandest paradox of all—a millennium-old saga that pales the tales of Scheherazade—is still taking place on the lonely, twelve-thousand-foot plateaus on top of the White Mountains. For on these great heights, where only naked crags should exist, live and flourish the oldest living things! Bristlecone Pines. Two thousand years old when Christ walked in Galilee; one thousand years older than the oldest Giant Sequoia!

  Scrawny, less than thirty feet high, starving for soil and water, wind-scarred, ice-cracked, gnarled, and twisted beyond all belief, the Bristlecones survive high above the timberline for all other trees—survive alone with Homeric courage against impossible odds. The discoverer of Bristlecones, Dr. Edmund Schulman, found old “Methuselah,” 4,600 years old (perhaps 7,000 years old if a San Diego scientist, Dr. Hans E. Suess, is right in contending that Carbon-14 underestimates ages), still defying starvation, bitter gales, and disease. For again paradoxically, and unlike other forms of life, Bristlecones survive not in spite of adversity, but because of it. The oldest trees are found in the poorest soil (dolomite rock) and in areas least protected from icy winter gales. Rugged individuals they are, fiercely challenging all that nature can throw at them and actually prospering on the catastrophic. They remind me of one of the Biblical Patriarchs who grew in stature by defying, railing, and thundering against La Dolce Vita.

  But not all is bizarre in Mono County. Most of it is beauty, the pure, wild, pristine beauty of nature’s wilderness. The kind of beauty that inspired John Muir to cry out as he stood one morning on a rocky ledge and viewed the magnificence of Vernal and Nevada Falls in Yosemite Valley: “This is the morning of creation, the whole thing is beginning now. The mountains are singing together!”

  To better understand the grandeur of it all, the reader should be given a simple thumbnail sketch of how the grand forces created the great Sierra Nevada mountains. Imagine, if you will, a huge, flat, solid block of granite—one mile thick, four hundred miles long, and two hundred fifty miles wide—extending from what is now Central California to Central Nevada in width, and in length, from the Mojave Desert in the South to Mount Lassen in the North. Now cover this granite block with several thousand feet of softer sedimentary rock deposited by oceans that had overlaid the granite several times in the past millions of years. And then imagine that underneath our block of granite, the hot molten magma was roiling and boiling under heavy pressure.

  So we have a geologic layer cake: the bottom layer—hot, liquid rocks; the middle layer—a block of solid granite half as big as the state of California; the top layer—softer sediments deposited by oceans. This nicely arranged layer cake would have been content to stay as it was—but it couldn’t. The earth’s skin was cooling and shrinking, and the enormous pressure of this shrinking was forcing the granite block to occupy less and less of its share of the shrinking skin. To do this, the block (like a dieting fat man’s face) had to wrinkle, fold, tilt up, break, or do something. With contracting pressures pushing in from its sides, and hot gaseous pressures pushing up from below, the least pressure was from on top. So the great granite block bent upward into a dome, like the top of a Quonset hut.

  But granite, like a piece of hard toast, cannot be bent much without cracking. And that’s exactly what happened to the arching granite block. Two large irregular cracks opened up along its full length (north and south). These cracks, or faults, divided the granite dome into roughly three equal segments: West section, Middle section (top of the dome), and East section; each section approximately four hundred miles long and seventy-five wide. Then a curious thing happened. The Middle section (top of dome), being under the greatest bending stress, began cracking here and there within itself. Hot gases, superheated steam, and molten rock from below began escaping up through the local cracks, relieving pressure from underneath the Middle section. And lo! The Middle section began to sink, tearing itself away from the West and East sections along the two original fault lines, while the side sections (East and West), still under compression pressure from the earth’s shrinking skin, kept being pushed inward and upward. For over a million years, the Middle section sank in small drops—five feet here, twenty there—each drop creating a tremendous earthquake. And all the while, through its own small cracks, hot lava and pent-up gases roared up and covered the Middle section’s top with lava flows thousands of feet thick.

  Today, the Middle section—once the top of the granite dome—has sunk some three miles below the tops of the East and West sections, forming a deep canyon between almost vertical walls of granite—the exposed faces of the two faults along which the Middle section sank. That Middle section is now the Owens Valley; the Western section is the Sierra Nevada Range, rising gently from the San Joaquin Valley up to the crest, then dropping almost straight down along the fault where the Middle section broke away and slipped; and the Eastern section is now the Inyo-White Range, which forms the eastern wall of the deep canyon.

  One might naturally ask: Why don’t the White Mountains look as sheer and jagged as the Sierra range? Because nature’s master sculptor, Mr. Weather, got into the act, with his winds, rain, snow, ice, and his headliner, the great glaciers. The reader will recall that the huge granite block that domed up was covered with layers and layers of sedimentary material left by oceans that came and went. These sedimentary rocks, of course, rose with—and still covered—the arching granite.

  Now Mr. Weather filled his clouds with Pacific moisture and blew them in fr
om west to east. As the clouds climbed the Sierra wall, they dumped most of their rain and snow on the gently rising western slope, leaving Owens Valley and the White Mountains to the east in the rain shadow or, as author Mary Austin called it: “Land of Little Rain.”

  Now we can answer the question, why don’t the White Mountains look as sheer and jagged as the Sierra range? Rain, snow, and the great glaciers eroded and gouged out most of the original covering sedimentary layer from the Sierra crest and peaks, exposing the great granite layer. The White Mountains, however, with much less rain and snow, and practically no glaciers to contend with, are still covered by the original sedimentary layer. Whatever little erosion took place has only served to round the peaks without as yet exposing the hard granite that lies beneath.

  And so, out of the cataclysmic forces of fire and ice, the wild pristine beauty of the Sierra wilderness was born. And many of those who have experienced it can exalt with John Muir: “This is the morning of creation, the whole thing is beginning now. The mountains are singing together!”

  Here is the beauty of still undiscovered lakes and creeks, unnamed peaks, and untrodden meadows. Here is the longest mountain wilderness trail in the world—the John Muir Trail—that winds among the monarch peaks of the Sierra Crest from Yosemite to Mount Whitney, passing no settlement, nor crossing a paved road along its two-hundred-mile length. Here hikers—secure from all intrusion, secure from self, free in the universal beauty—may look up into the pink shining faces of the Sierra peaks, all scrubbed clean and bright by their glacial sculptors, and all fringed with the Sierra’s pine-green beards—the forests. Here, in nature’s bosom, one may wander, look, touch, see, hear, and imagine; with no aim but to wonder: What kind of Men to Match My Mountains were the first who saw and sealed this mighty unbreachable wall of jagged granite, four hundred miles long and two miles high? Whose tracks made these delicate patterns on the sand? What caused those concentric, crescent-shaped great mounds of rounded boulders and gravel that guard the entrance to the great canyons? Who nibbled the leaves off this bush? Why does that very high and very long cigar-shaped cloud stand motionless in the sky, while other clouds sail swiftly by on the Pacific winds?

  What can match the spine-tingling beauty of gale-driven snow streamers that festoon the mountaintops in the spangled sunlight? “Snow-banners the wild winds hang on peaks,” John Muir called them. Or the ineffable beauty of the Alpenglow—that predawn Alpine burst of rosy light that heralds Aurora’s entrance with a fanfare of color; and in the evening says “sleep well” to the peaks with a fleeting pastel echo of the sunset colors that have just faded? “…One of the most impressive of all terrestrial manifestations of God,” wrote John Muir, Sierra botanist and poet. “At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed and waiting like devout worshippers. Just before the Alpenglow began to fade, two crimson clouds came streaming across the summit like wings of flame…then came darkness and the stars.”

  If it is remotely possible—and scientists cannot affirm or deny it—that life and man and beauty (and the eyes to behold it and the souls to hunger for it) are uniquely limited to planet Earth, then how much more rare, more beautiful, and more sacred is a lily, a chipmunk, a fir tree, or a whale?

  And if God gave man dominion over all the earth, how great, how special, is man’s duty to preserve, cherish, and love the miracle of each blade of grass, of each fish that swims, or bird that flies and creature that runs? For this is our Eden in which all life is One and all is Divine. When man pollutes or destroys its pristine beauty, man is polluting and destroying himself.

  Yes, it was pleasant driving through this magnificent country, daydreaming about its primitive wilderness. And somehow Deputy Sheriff Lefty Wakefield kept intruding into my musings. Was I equating Lefty with the country’s primitive strength?

  Had Mono’s primeval beauty—in which there is no evil, no hypocrisy, no envy, greed, or hate; no ghettos, no discrimination, no wealth, no poverty; where there is only grandeur, awe, and wonder as mountains, sky, water, snow, forests, flowers, birds, and animals live in joy and harmony obeying the immutable laws of nature—had this beauty and goodness of nature suffused into Lefty’s mighty hulk and lodged in his soul as a rock of faith?

  Could be. He, his father, and his grandfather had all been born in Mono County. His grandfather, a gold seeker, must have belonged to what Mark Twain called that “driving, vigorous, restless population…the only population of its kind that the world has ever seen…an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men—not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves…no women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans—none but erect, quick-moving, strong-handed giants—the finest population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land…”

  I drove through the narrow gap where, in a short fifty yards, rushing, rollicking, singing Rush Creek, bursting out of its cool tree-lined banks, suddenly put on its brakes in terror. Ahead was a bleak, shocking sight—hot, treeless, deserty, sagebrush-rimmed Grant Lake. And I know what Lefty feels like shouting to Rush Creek each time he drives by here: “Turn back, fool, turn back! The bastards will murder you. Stay outta Grant Lake! Flow back up to Silver…leap back up the falls to Agnew, Gem, and Alger… And get lost in that snow pack! Know what those rich bastards got waitin’ for you at the other end of Grant Lake? A tunnel! An eleven-mile black tunnel to deport you to the Owens Valley, where they’ll shove you through four hundred miles of slimy ditches and lakes and pipes and tunnels to Los Angeles, where the bastards will store you, douse you with chlorine, and squeeze you through millions of pipes and into millions of dishwashers and stinking toilets, and you’ll become another river—a putrid, stinking sewer river carrying civilization’s putrid, stinking pollutions out to what will soon be a putrid, stinking ocean. So turn back, you fool creek, turn back!”

  And that’s about what gross, inarticulate Lefty was trying to get across to Mono officials about Bear Bait and Dry Rot. To him, the clean fresh waters of Rush Creek, and those two peaceful hermits, were both part of the unspoiled, unpolluted wilderness scene.

  The groundwork for Lefty’s problem had been laid long ago, in the 1860s and ’70s, when newly discovered gold-and-silver ledges brought thousands of prospectors back from the depleted California mines, and Mono’s mining towns such as Dogtown, Monoville, Mammoth, Masonic, Aurora, and Bodie sprang up like mushrooms and died almost as fast. Cattle-raising, logging, and farming went up and down with the boom and bust of the mines. But cattle-raising and farming were well on the rise on their own in the early 1900s, when water-thirsty Los Angeles bought up, finagled, or stole practically all the freshwater rights in Inyo and Mono Counties. Ranches dried up. The sagebrush moved back in. The wilderness that was Mono was ready to be abandoned and handed back to the Piutes. But the paradox that was Mono was not to be denied. Few realized that Mono’s magnificent unspoiled wilderness was to be a greater bonanza than half a dozen Comstock Lodes.

  For, by an unpredictable turn of events, the city that had bought up and stolen Mono’s water so that it could grow and prosper now brought prosperity and lasting abundance back to the Mono area it had once impoverished. Smog-ridden Southern Californians seeking clean air and quiet solitude found their vacation paradise in the land whose waters they had “appropriated.” Fishermen, campers, hunters, skiers, artists, rock hounds, photographers, and lovers of mountain and desert turned Mono County into a year-round vacationland.

  Mono boomed again. The new gold rush was on. Millions were being spent for ski lifts, motels, trailer parks, restaurants. Fix the roads. Tear down unsightly shanties. Get rid of crotchety old-timers and dirty old “characters.” Spruce up; prepare the way for the great king, the VACATION DOLLAR!

  And, of course, getting rid of two unsavory hermits like Bear Bait and Dry Rot was part of the big clean
up. And Lefty burned with indignation. Deep down in his gross, material soul, he loved these two derelicts. He didn’t know who they were, why they holed up in the woods, what sins they were expiating, or what ideals they were trying to recapture, but he would fight for them. His weapons were hopelessly inadequate, almost ludicrous: righteous indignation and insubordination.

  I didn’t quite believe Lefty’s assertion that the community was in a tacit conspiracy to run Bear Bait and Dry Rot out of the county. So I had asked some casual questions here and there. Yes, the storekeepers had quit bartering for Dry Rot’s grubs. Resort owners admitted they warned all fishermen against letting old drunken Bear Bait clean their fish for whiskey, food, or change. “Starve them and they’ll get out” was the general idea.

  These thoughts seesawed in my head as I hurried along, hardly noticing the four-mile drabness of Grant Lake, now doubly drab since the autumn-hued aspen clustered around seepages (that only days ago suffused both lake and sky with auric tints, and ennobled the sage-covered hillsides with lightning flashes of frozen gold which revealed the zigzag courses of unseen rivulets) now had had their autumn cloak of gold ripped and weathered into a few faded tatters which, like hardy penitents, hung on to beg with their last quake and quiver for the white mantle of winter to cover their nakedness.

  But as I left Grant Lake and topped a crisscross of moraines, I saw a sight that, although I had seen it a thousand times, always emptied my mind of all thought. A sight that makes one rash enough to cry out, “This has to be one of the rarest, most dramatic, and most spectacular sights in all the world!” On the left of the highway is the inspiring beauty of Swiss Alps, on the right the repelling harshness of the trackless Sahara.