by Kurt Caswell
So what or who was Grey Owl? He was a boy trapped inside an identity that did not agree with him, an identity he eventually threw off when he moved to Canada, the one place he could live out his best idea of himself. And I think we are all complicit in his transformation. If you want to condemn Grey Owl, perhaps you might condemn yourself as well, a member of the culture that helped create him. Grey Owl was the Indian we all wanted him to be, a spokesman and symbol for the North American wilderness we simultaneously love and destroy. Perhaps, too, what is so difficult to accept is that Grey Owl ventured out to live the life he imagined, while most of us stare out the front window or at the computer screen and only dream.
I approach the cabin, the door already ajar. I push it open. Before me is a wood cookstove, rusted by decades of disuse, and across on the opposite wall, a crude desk or table next to an even cruder split-log sleeping platform. The cabin is not a replica, as in the case of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. Grey Owl lived here. At the far end of the room is a space cut away from the floorboards with a collection of beaver sticks and mud, remnants of the famed beaver lodge built inside the cabin with access to the lake so his pet beavers could come and go as they pleased. On the desk is a drum propped against the wall, apparently a gift from the son Grey Owl had with Marie Girard, a Métis woman whom he abandoned when he was a young man. Girard died of consumption shortly after she gave birth in the winter of 1914–15. Written on the skin of the drum:
To: Grey Owl
& Anahareo
Rest in peace Dad
Your loving son #2
Todd—SK
I walk up the hill to another cabin, the place Anahareo had built just for her. Apparently she didn’t take to living with beaver; she wanted a space of her own. Next to that, the three graves: Grey Owl, Shirley Dawn, and Anahareo. I linger there for a time, linger near the gravestones in front of the depressions where they went in. I leave a quiet space for them, not moving or making noise at all, and then I move on.
There isn’t much else to see or do but for the sunlight streaming through the trees and the sparkling waters of Ajawaan. I wonder if the wind is getting up out on the lake, so I turn and make my way back down the trail.
I sing my way to my boat and find that the wind has indeed come up. The lake can look so small when it is calm, but when the waves are high it’s like the sea. Great rollers are washing down the shoreline of Kingsmere Lake. Off to the north and west, thunderheads build against the sky. I stow my pack and push off into the waves, which push my boat along. I don’t have to paddle very hard. My strokes keep the boat at a good angle, and I ride along with a happy heart.
Paddling, I begin to think of all the journeys I have made and how many of them likely had a much greater carbon footprint than this one. All you have to do is step onto an airplane. A round-trip flight from Houston to London, for example, comes in at about 1,700 kilograms of carbon for each person on the plane. The plane itself produces that sum multiplied by some four hundred seats: 680 cubic tons of carbon. But this is merely the plane’s emissions; it does not include all the other carbon sources that I so tediously considered for my truck. Air travel produces more carbon than any other sort of travel. And, to boot, air travel is fast, which means you can produce more carbon in far less time. My truck racked up a good carbon sum, but it did so over a period of two months. Let’s say you were to fly 1 million miles, as several of my friends have, as Hillary Clinton did in four years as secretary of state. If you never get off the plane, you can fly that million in 2,000 hours, the equivalent of just over 83 days. In my truck it would take 15,385 hours to make the same distance, an equivalent of 641 days. And of course, if you are doing the driving, you have to stop now and again to rest and drink beer, so it would take much, much longer. Not so with air travel; air travel allows you to drink beer and produce carbon at the same time.
So, what about the great travelers who roam the world? What about the immense journeys of the environmental writers and conservationists of our time, the women and men whose work has been my steady diet since I was a boy? What is the carbon footprint, for example, of a writer who travels to all the cold places in the world to bring back a story about melting glaciers or the decline of polar bears, writing that may help change public policy in order to curb the environmental pressures that are causing the melting and the decline to begin with? What is the carbon footprint of a writer who flies off to the site of some terrible disaster—Banda Aceh, Sendai, or the path of Hurricane Sandy? Or a writer who travels to a dozen landscapes in as many countries to consider the fate of humanity in relation to water? What is the carbon footprint of a UN conference on the environment? And how does the work of these writers and their carbon footprints compare to the work of writers who stay home, who inhabit one place, one landscape, for the whole of their life and so come to know it intimately and write from that intimacy? What are the impacts of those two bodies of work? The John Muirs of the world, who roam, and the John Burroughses of the world, who stay home?
The question I have to ask myself is this: is researching and writing a story on climate change worth its weight in carbon? Or are writers who travel extensively really just documenting the failure of our species, even as the process of documenting it hastens that failure? Perhaps you’ve asked these questions before. Eventually it becomes personal. I want to know how to justify my own journeys, those I’ve made and those I wish to make. How do I justify the carbon cost of my journey to Grey Owl’s cabin? Surely my seeing Grey Owl’s cabin will not help save the world. Of course it won’t.
But I can’t worry about this right now because the wind is gusting harder, pushing my boat into the shore. I turn the bow out to face the waves. I paddle up and over them. Up and over them. This will go on for hours, I think, because the thunder boomers are building against the sky, and the wind is intensifying, the waves growing and pushing against the shoreline. I miss a few strokes to switch from my new wood paddle to my fiberglass whitewater paddle, and the waves slap my boat up onto the beach. I give in and leap out, pull the boat up on the finely sorted pebbles. It’s 1 p.m., and I’ve been moving and pushing the route pretty hard all day. I feel it now as I stand at the lake edge. I’m tired. I feel a little lost and deeply alone. I don’t have that vibrant presence with me anymore, the presence of that bear, the presence of Grey Owl. This emptiness passes in a moment, though, because I begin to line my boat up the beach. It’s not easy, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. The waves keep pushing the boat back onto the shore. I can’t go very far anyway because ahead of me the trees come right to the water and cut off my path. I need to get back out into the surf and ride the waves again. There is no better antidote for loneliness than going on, so I paddle out and take that good tack on the wind and ride the storm down the lake. I see an eagle on the wing, and I sheepishly hope it is a gift from Grey Owl showing me the way.
Perhaps you have heard that the modern environmental movement is dead, that environmental organizations have themselves become corporations, and corporations, despite the good intentions of their members, are self-sustaining and self-preserving. A corporation is an entity working for the good of itself, not the good of the world. Kenneth Brower, in his article on Grey Owl, remarks that
those old clarion voices in the wilderness and from the wilderness—Thoreau’s, Muir’s, Leopold’s, Grey Owl’s—have done their job in alerting mankind to the environmental threat. . . . The era of the “stars,” those seminal, charismatic, flawed, larger-than-life characters whose eloquence and example brought the natural world back into the world; is finished—or so the bureaucrats themselves assure us.
Brower argues that what we have now are the bureaucrats, the lawyers and lobbyists, people who “know the art of compromise and can work effectively with Congress and Parliament.” Certainly we need them, but we need Grey Owl too. Or at least I need Grey Owl.
My world and what I know about my world would be diminished if the writers whose work I admire stayed ho
me. Truth is, I want them to get on airplanes and fly about the world. I want them to bring back stories of places I’ve never been and may never go. The truth is I want to get on airplanes and fly about the world. I want to go find stories in places I’ve never been. I don’t know what to do about this, and I doubt they do either. Nobody knows what to do about it. And could we stop even if we were asked to, even if we wanted to?
A friend of mine has suggested (as others also have) that perhaps the adaptations that have allowed our species to take dominion over biological niches in virtually every climate on earth—our big brains, language, the opposable thumb—are maladaptations. Evolution is like that. A successful adaptation in one set of conditions may be or become a failed adaptation in another. I must confess that I no longer believe that we are going to get ahold of this thing called climate change. I no longer believe that we are going to exercise restraint and end or even curb our consumption of fossil fuels in order to make the world a better place for future generations, future generations of human beings and everything else. I don’t feel hopeless. I just believe we’re going to use it all up. What about you? There is no short-term incentive to stop mining the earth for resources. None. And for all our powers of imagination, we are still a species that functions better on brief time scales. We can hardly bother to imagine what’s going to happen next week, let alone in a hundred years. Or a thousand. I think it’s best for me, for my peace of mind, to plan for life in a hot future rather than try to stop that future from unfolding. I’ll still recycle and walk to work and do all those things a thinking person should do, but I just can’t allow myself to lay awake nights and worry anymore.
A few days before I wrote this essay, Al Gore made several hundred million dollars selling his “green” TV network, Current, to Al Jazeera, a fine news organization that is backed by big oil money from Qatar. After stating that he could see no hypocrisy here, he was asked if we still have time to save the earth from climate change. Yes, he answered, we still have time. I have nothing against Al Gore, but folks, he doesn’t know. While he is a fine spokesperson, he’s not a climate scientist. He’s not even a man with a reasonable carbon footprint. Besides, climate scientists don’t really know either. They work in probabilities, not in the absolute of yes or no. If the climate change spokesman of the world can’t get out from under oil, how can you? How can I?
When I reach Westwind Campground again, the shape of the lake and the shore is a shelter for me. I can see the big waves out in the middle, and I’m happy to be where I am doing what I’m doing. I’m happy I paddled so hard and consistently to arrive back here so early in the day (it’s 3:30 p.m.). I’ve not had any food since 5 a.m., and I feel worked. I relax for the first time on my trip, letting my boat drift into the weeds. I drag my hand in the water, and the sun is warm on my back. The thunder clouds are building still, wrapping the west and north shores of the lake. I’ve got beer and good food waiting for me back in my camper, and I’m eager now to paddle home.
I enter the outlet that is the Kingsmere River, and it takes me down into its quiet waters. I like how it feels in me that I’ve been to Grey Owl’s cabin. I don’t know what that feeling is really. An expansion? A depth? A clarity? I feel like I’ve pushed out the boundaries of my world a bit and now have new space to breathe. I’ve made other literary pilgrimages: Thoreau’s Walden Pond; Hemingway’s Idaho and Paris and Spain; Frost’s cabin at Bread Loaf; Wordsworth’s Lake District. This pilgrimage to Grey Owl’s cabin won’t save the world, but it has enriched my life, and I will add my story to those others. And perhaps this is enough to justify the expense in carbon. Though I still don’t believe we’re going to stop or even slow climate change, I feel a bit more hopeful about something. I have to believe that to keep such hope alive is the single most important endeavor in a time of crisis. A story can do this. And so can a journey on a lake in a canoe.
The river takes me out of the lake and back to the boat landing where I began. I paddle up to find a man and a young woman loading to paddle out. We exchange greetings, and he asks if I need help with my boat. We can load it on his car and take it up to my truck, which is parked about a quarter mile away. All right, I say. His name is Howard, from Saskatoon, and he introduces me to his daughter. They’re headed up the west shore of the lake to camp for a few nights at Pease Point. He’s a retired teacher, he says, and used to run canoe trips for his students. I tell him some of my story, and we find we have a great deal in common.
“So, were you out soloing overnight, or just for the day?” he asks. “I see you don’t have much gear.”
“Just the day,” I say. “I made a trip up to Grey Owl’s cabin. Started early this morning.”
“Oh, Grey Owl’s cabin. Good for you,” he says. “Good for you.”
A SHORT WALK IN ANASAZI COUNTRY
Utah, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2006
In southeastern Utah, off the high plateau known as Cedar Mesa, an unassuming draw leads down from the highway’s edge. It leads to the west, gradually at first, and, after passing a copse of aspen just below the rim, plunges steeply through the sandstone layers and across broken scree fields of soft rock. Where it turns sharply south, the canyon meanders, this side and then that, like the slick body of a bull snake, down to the banks of the San Juan River. All told, the canyon stretches 52 miles from top to bottom and drops 2,500 vertical feet. Not overly dramatic as canyons go, but in those upper reaches, willing travelers can find a rich complex of ruins, the remnants of an ancient Puebloan culture known to most people as the Anasazi.
It’s a modest walk to make the circuit down Kane Gulch from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) station there and up Bullet Canyon, requiring just a few days under a light pack. At about 6,500 feet elevation at the highway, the country is not beyond average fitness. I have made the walk a half dozen times and passed other parties with small children, who seem to manage just fine. The trail is well worn, and with the canyon walls rising up around you, it’s difficult to become disoriented and get lost. You’d have to really fall asleep on the job. This Grand Gulch, as it is named, is a BLM primitive area. It gets steady use, with small parties leaving most days during the high season—the spring and early summer, and early to late fall—but it is still possible to make a private journey here, to tuck back against the rocks with a sleeping bag and cookstove, mostly unseen.
The Anasazi—who they were and what became of them—are not the great mystery too often purported in the literature of the American Southwest. In the late nineteenth century, when two cowboys, Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason, walked into the pueblos at Mesa Verde and found pottery and pitch-lined water baskets sitting around, sandals and jewelry and children’s toys, great panels of rock art, and great towers and dwellings constructed of mortar and stone, it did appear as though an entire people had stood up one day and walked off. Or that they were abducted before they had time to gather their things, by ships from the outer realms of space. But these people did not vanish without a trace. Archaeologists tell us that following thirteen hundred years of occupation, a combination of pressures over time—drought, depletion of resources, internal strife, and, likely, insurgent tribes like the Navajo and Apache—forced the people to move on. Some researchers argue that the threat of looting, warfare, and cannibalism pushed the Anasazi from the bottoms into rock shelters and crevices high in the canyon walls, and then eventually out of the canyons altogether. What happened next is more difficult to discern. Just as a modern traveler might slip from the world unseen by descending into the canyon, the Anasazi did so by ascending out of it. They reemerged as the Hopi, Zuni, and other Puebloan peoples. It’s no wonder, then, that the creation stories of the indigenous peoples of the Southwest center on migration and emergence from the lower worlds into this one.
In Grand Gulch, as in other places in the Southwest, much of the material culture of the Anasazi walked out of the canyons too, with archaeologists and amateur pot hunters. You can find beautiful pieces in various museum
s all over the world and possibly on black markets. Still, even today the average traveler will discover worthy treasures in these village ruins: dried corncob and pieces of gourd, pottery sherds, arrow points, brittle lengths of woven cord, and petroglyphs and pictographs in dizzying arrays. Most of it is relatively recent, perhaps seven hundred to a thousand years old, but the Anasazi occupied Grand Gulch for at least twice that long. Their economy and culture is classified into two major periods: the early Basketmakers, characterized by pit houses, woven baskets, and hunting and gathering; and the later Pueblo period, marked by the development of pottery, the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash, and the construction of mortar and stone villages. Anasazi cultural complexity reached its pinnacle at Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. Eighteen major villages—indeed, they might be called cities—supported a population of some five thousand people and were bound to cultures across the Southwest and deep into Mexico by a system of roads and waypoints.