The survivor looked around and called out and sat on the old nest site. And then it left alone. It would pass through solo for a couple of seasons afterward.
Turner honestly believed that his union with Fonda would last. “Jane helped me learn some things about myself and opened me up more than I had been. But you can’t go back. You can only move on. If you dwell on what might have been, you can drive yourself crazy.”
Fonda wrote in her memoir that she believed Turner felt threatened by her adoption of Christianity, the seeds of which were planted when she was in Atlanta. She spent time with black ministers in neighborhoods once frequented by Martin Luther King, and she got together regularly with former president Jimmy Carter and wife, Rosalyn, both born-again Christians. Her conversion happened when Fonda and Turner were apart.
“Of the three men I’ve been married to, Ted is my favorite husband. I still love Ted. Very much. But I’m not in love with him anymore. What I need is to have absolute intimacy with a man, where emotional vulnerabilities can become strengths in a relationship. It is about knowing another person at the deepest level. I had wanted to accompany Ted on the journey to reach that place, but we couldn’t get there.”
Turner says he was never dismissive of Fonda for finding religion. “I’m happy for her, but it’s not my way. And I guess I was surprised because I didn’t see it coming, and I probably should have.”
“I found a place that works for me,” Fonda says. “I don’t think the inability to reconcile the difference between physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, and spiritual intimacy is unique to Ted. A lot of men who grew up during the time Ted did had distant relationships with their fathers, and they had mothers who wilted in the presence of their domineering husbands. It’s a pain not only of sons, but wives and daughters.”
She adds, “The spiritual journey is an individual one. Ted may not be profoundly introspective about himself, but his soul is attached to nature in a very interesting way. He has been skeptical of Christianity because he didn’t feel it was there for him in his struggles as a child. And people therefore say it means he’s not a spiritual person. But he is. For him, he finds meaning in nature. I don’t know—I doubt it—if organized religion will ever fit back in his life. Each of us needs to realize that it’s okay to search. That’s really the point, isn’t it?”
In an interview with writer Ken Auletta in the New Yorker, Fonda said, “For some reason, he has a guilty conscience. He went much further than his father thought he would. So what’s left? To be a good guy. He knows he will go down in history. He won’t go down as a greedy corporate mogul. Although he claims to be an atheist, at the end of every speech he says, ‘God bless you.’ He wants to get into heaven.”
Since his divorce from Fonda, Turner has enjoyed the company of a few different girlfriends, all of whom know and are aware of the others. He makes it clear that he probably will never marry again. The arrangement seems to work because he is open about his dating and his companions are free to accept it, or not. Some have not. Those who do are not threatened by the reality that he doesn’t hide his continuing affection for Fonda.
In 2012, while appearing on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN, the host asked Turner if he still loved Fonda. He had been somewhat coy in earlier TV interviews, though always smiling and exuding his fondness. This time, he said, unequivocally, “Yes.” He didn’t make the acknowledgment with a swooning sense of loss. It was a recognition, he noted later, of what she had brought to his life.
Despite what’s been written about him, Turner says he doesn’t reject mainstream religions but he’s not pining to reach the hereafter. He believes in the notion of heaven on Earth and says that too much of humanity lives in hell.
It is a hot summer afternoon in Montana years after Turner’s marriage to Fonda ended. Thunder reverberates, shaking the glass in the Flying D ranch house. Turner sits on a couch, staring meditatively out a window. “All that any of us have, that we can control, is now,” he says. “And the only thing separating us between today and the future is a series of nows. On the other hand, I can’t see how a loving and forgiving God would want to let you into the heaven of an afterlife if you trashed this world and didn’t bother to help other people the best you could. This is the message in every holy book that’s ever been written. I don’t care how much praying and preaching and pointing fingers at other people that goes on by televangelists. I think a person has to demonstrate true religious values through actions. Otherwise, what good is religion?”
He walks to the window and peers into the old spotting scope. A new crane pair has made a nest, and a chick with primary feathers is in view. “A lot of my friends remain active members of established churches and they read the Bible, as I still occasionally do. But you don’t have to have organized religion to be a good person. And I don’t believe you should pursue charity only if your motivation is that it will get you through the gates. Do good because it’s in your heart.”
Turner squints through the scope. “Where do I put my faith? In the common sense in all of us, in the courage of other people. We need to stave off Armageddon, not welcome the end time. What kind of religion would want a prophecy fulfilled by destruction?”
PART II:
THE GREEN CAPITALIST AT WORK
CHAPTER FIVE
Ted’s Side of the Mountain
(A Tale of Two Modern Barons)
“Ted reminded us all, using CNN, that apart from politics, there are far more inspiring things that unite us. After I stepped down [following the breakup of the Soviet Union] and became a free man, my relationship with Ted blossomed. We found that we were linked by our enormous interest in nature and the environment. At that time, and with time, I came to understand the most important thing about Ted: He is a person who is not seeking personal gain, who is not trying to seek profit at every opportunity.”
—MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
Just inside the mouth of the Gallatin Canyon, Mark Kossler, a senior Turner ranch manager with a rodeo athlete’s build, climbs into a bush plane. Goosing the throttle, his Cessna rumbles down a bumpy horse pasture on the Flying D. Soon, he is airborne above the Gallatin River, tracing the watercourse north until it enters the Gallatin Valley.
Gaining altitude, Kossler points to the modern sprawl on the outskirts of Bozeman. Metal roofs and windows glint in the sun. A maze of roadways covers former wheat fields. “Not much of this was here thirty years ago,” he yells over the sound of the engine, making the point that Turner’s arrival in the late 1980s coincided with Bozeman being inundated by a migration of “lifestyle pilgrims.” To Indians, the Gallatin was known as “the valley of flowers.” Now, thousands of homes have sprouted across what used to be the richest agricultural soil in Montana.
Kossler banks left, leaving subdivisions behind, crossing westward over the outer perimeter of the Flying D. His mission today is surveying the ranch at the peak of green-up and then predicting which vast carpets of grassland will appeal to cow bison and newborn calves in the months ahead.
The heights of the ride soon expose something else: two different kinds of wealth expressed by two different “New West” billionaires—one who held onto his ten-figure fortune, the other who bet and lost on real estate. Both have big egos. Both believed what they were doing was virtuous. One’s record is etched indelibly into the landscape; the other’s is aimed at achieving an opposite effect. Both are playing out rather spectacularly on different sides of the same mountain range.
Peer at the contrast closer and, no matter where one resides in America, it’s a divide that is universally shaping the direction of the world.
The Flying D is a blank natural canvas. Ten Manhattan Islands would fit inside the ranch’s rectangle. “When I first went to the Flying D and drove into that huge beautiful complex,” reflects former US senator Tim Wirth, “I had the feeling that something was missing
—something was wrong. Then I realized that there just weren’t any fences or telephone poles or wires—no big manifestations of infrastructure. All my life I have driven through land that had the wired stamp of man. This was different—it was the way the land originally looked, and it was so . . . well, striking.”
Geographers express amazement that a piece of raw, undeveloped land this size still exists next to a booming small city and between two famous blue ribbon trout streams, the Gallatin and Madison. When Turner’s friend in philanthropy, nuclear disarmament, and capitalism, Warren Buffett, shows guests around Omaha, eighteen hundred miles downstream (where Buffett’s company, Berkshire-Hathaway, is headquartered), he and Turner share a liquid connection to the latter’s stewardship practices high in the basin of the Mighty Missouri. The rain and snow that flows off Turner’s ranch is headed in Buffett’s direction. The cleaner the water being passed along, the less that it needs to be treated by municipalities before reaching the tap, and thus the safer to drink for tens of millions. Omahans, Kansas Citians, and folk in New Orleans can trace their headwaters here.
Kossler is in the cockpit, and today Turner is on the ground riding horseback with friends, showing off a cranny in the ranch interior that he fondly calls “the Enchanted Forest.” It’s a pocket of massive Douglas firs a couple of hundred years old—their thick columnar trunks coated in jackets of moss that glow neon when struck by falling shafts of sunshine. “I love going there,” Turner says. “It reminds me of the woods I would escape to as a boy. Listening to the birds, breathing in the smells of the forest. Maybe seeing an animal. I still get as much of a thrill being in a place like that as I did when I was ten years old.”
When Turner first came to the West, his objective was simply to have a few recreational retreats where he could catch some fish, maybe hunt a large wapiti or bird. “But the more that you become familiar with the land at river level, and contemplate all of the things that go into creating a healthy trout stream, your thinking naturally expands. Then it’s your choice to act on it, or not.”
On foot, the Flying D could take days to cross. Turner has thought of having some of his ashes spread at his favorite haunts. Aldo Leopold writes of the psychological transformation that people go through, reflecting on the places where their bodies might one day be repatriated. It is an impulse to go back to nature. People seek a nourishment they can’t find anywhere else. The reasons that a young person goes wandering can be very different from the impulses summoning an adult in midlife. Leopold, as so many others still do, went west as a young man and then retired to a farm in rural Wisconsin; Turner planted stakes in Montana just shy of his fiftieth year, with a different reason for his perambulation.
By any standard, the Flying D is a “trophy property,” harboring big game species and scenery to match any national park. In the first few years that Turner owned the ranch, he stalked some of the biggest elk and deer with a gun in his hands. At the edge of the property, his youngest son, Beau, has a log home, its walls covered with the heads of animals, many of them qualifying for inclusion in the Boone & Crockett record books. Turner the elder will always call himself a sportsman, he says, but he no longer harvests anything larger than a pheasant or quail. His time for killing has past.
When Turner arrived in Montana, rumors were rife that he would leverage his purchase of the Flying D into a massive real estate play, keeping the best for himself and carving the rest, lucratively, into forty-acre “ranchettes.” But he notes that he never had an interest in coming as a conqueror; in fact, he feels personally insulted that the speculation was even made.
At the Flying D, he has dozens of personal Leopoldian “blank spaces” he seeks out—hideaways like the Enchanted Forest. “The map for reaching them I keep up here,” he says, tapping his temple. As a septuagenarian, he still tries to walk and ride as much of his ranches as possible, though he has resigned himself to the fact that he will not cover them all. “I’m leaving the rest for my kids and grandkids to explore.”
Kossler eases the plane downward. Wings cast sun shadows over small rivulets, a few waterfalls. Below, trotting in single file between clusters of aspen and pine, are perhaps two hundred elk.
Swooping lower, he follows the wends of Cherry Creek, where Turner, the state of Montana, the US Forest Service, and Trout Unlimited have restored imperiled westslope cutthroat trout in an unprecedented project by first purging the waters of nonnative browns, rainbows, and brook trout. “It’s one thing to work to recover native species on publicly owned lands,” says Chris Wood, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited. “But when private landowners such as Turner embrace conservation and restoration, that’s when we really begin to see watershed-level recovery occurring.”
Westslopes swam in the melt of receding Pleistocene glaciers, but pure-strain examples of the species have suffered a precipitous decline caused by water quality impairment in the West and by transplanted, nonnative trout producing a hybridized species. Westslopes represent one of the last pieces in a puzzle of biological completeness Turner has been trying to assemble. Carter Kruse, Turner’s nationally acclaimed aquatic resources biologist who chaperoned it, calls the establishment of pure-strain westslope cutthroats a momentous achievement. Overall, it resulted in westslopes gaining sixty new river miles of habitat, among a much larger blueprint for fish restoration across the West Turner is taking on. These efforts have attracted national attention and rank as high in importance to his boss as allowing grizzlies and wolves to share the ranch premises, Kruse says. “Not all of these projects have been perfectly executed, but that’s expected. We’re doing things that were never attempted before. Ted knows that’s how innovation happens.”
Over the next thirty minutes, Kossler glides over moose, then a sow grizzly with two cubs. On the other side of the Madison River, he takes note of antelope and bison ambling over hillsides peppered with tepee rings thousands of years old. Then, in a kind of visual crescendo, he passes in front of the Spanish Peaks—the same chiseled summits that are part of the Madison cordillera rising in front of Turner’s living room window and extend southward for sixty rock-ribbed miles.
Those mountains are also visible from Main Street in Bozeman twenty miles distant—as are the treeless highlands of the Flying D. Like a giant wave curling on the western horizon, they are part of the visual commons that tens of thousands of denizens savor with their eyes, and they leave a resonant impression on millions of visitors passing through southwest Montana. They shape their experience and Turner owns them with a sense of obligation.
“I had no idea how special the Flying D was to so many other people until I had been here awhile,” he explains later.
Today, ecologists say, the Madison Range would be one of the wildest stretches of mountains in the entire, twenty-million-acre Greater Yellowstone region—were it not for scattershot development around the resort of Big Sky. The Spanish Peaks represent a point of demarcation between Ted Turner’s influence and that of another wealthy man, a developer and former billionaire named Tim Blixseth.
Joe Gutkoski is familiar with the contrast between Blixseth and Turner. He’s qualified to assess each man’s handiwork. He’s roamed the mountains dividing each man’s vision for more than half a century. Now in his eighties, Gutkoski was one of the first college-trained landscape architects to work for the Forest Service in the northern Rockies. His academic discipline involves the art and science of how human activities, including logging, ski development, and home building, blend with wildlife habitat and scenery.
Around the greater Yellowstone region—the wildest ecosystem in the Lower 48 states—the tops of many mountains have canisters with logbooks inside them. Gutkoski’s name appears in dozens, a testament to how much backcountry he’s scoured. A hunter and angler, a resident eco-historian, an oral keeper of battles won and lost, he is revered for his involvement in nearly every significant conservation issue in southwes
t Montana since the 1960s. He is also an advocate for free-ranging bison restoration on the open plains, and has recruited his own army of activists to make it happen.
“The Flying D, when I arrived in Montana in the 1960s, was focused on cattle production,” he said, “but the country south of it was wild. Wilder, I should say. There wasn’t much tolerance on the ranch, before Turner got here, for predators such as grizzly bears and mountain lions. Wolves had already been exterminated from the ecosystem. And if a coyote was spotted, it was shot by the ranch hands out of provincial habit.
“If you wanted a taste of wild Montana, you could start at the Spanish Peaks and keep walking southward for a couple of days toward the Yellow Mules and Lone Mountain and you would encounter few structures except for an old broken-down log cabin here or there.”
For work and pleasure, Gutkoski traipsed the entire wild gap between the Flying D and Lone Mountain, the centerpiece of the Big Sky resort community. He’s traversed it on foot, snowshoes, and backcountry skis, on one-hundred-degree days and in midwinter blizzards, with a hunting rifle in his hands and a backpacker’s topo map. He has encountered wolverines in the high alpine cirques, ambled into grizzlies, and harvested elk to fill his freezer. His first circumnavigation, he says, was in 1964.
“It’s hard to believe how much has changed,” he says.
Two generations ago, the flanks of Lone Peak and the Yellow Mules were summer cattle pastures connected to parcels deeded to the Burlington-Northern Railroad Company. These parcels were, in frontier times, set aside to provide wood for railroad ties. But the steep slopes were also perfectly suited for another purpose in the twentieth century—downhill skiing.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 16