While Jane continued to work on still more kids’ books, I composed queries for magazine stories—sitting under a chest-high bank of east-facing windows, plucking at an old Remington manual typewriter on a plank table. Once a week we’d load manuscripts, shopping lists, and laundry onto a wooden sled cobbled together from stray boards found around the cookhouse, then ride off by snowmobile seven miles through the frozen forest to the van, which we then had to dig out with shovels. In Flagstaff I’d found an elderly lady willing to rent us a room with an electric outlet for forty dollars a month, and there I re-typed every query letter and article on a spiffy blue Royal electric typewriter my parents had given me the previous Christmas. At the end of the day we dropped the queries and manuscripts off at the post office and went to do the laundry and drink beer at the Flagstaff Suds and Duds, grab a Mexican meal at Poncho’s. Finally, long after dark, we drove back to the parking lot and fired up the snowmobile, then rumbled through the woods, making for home.
Before the storm cleared, I wrote after one such trip, eighteen inches of sticky white snow was pillowed on every post, pine, rail, roof, stump, and aspen. The world tonight is soundless. No whining of wheels on a nearby highway. No shouts, barks, or banging doors—no squeaks or grunts from machines. Across the room is a faint twitch of burning embers in the woodstove. Beside me, Jane’s slow and rhythmic breathing, an occasional rustle of bedcovers as the cat gets still more comfortable. And that’s all. Outside are seven miles of timber and waist-deep snow.
The gusto ran unchecked in us all that fall and through the winter at Lockett Ranch, not crumbling until the late spring of 1981 with the arrival of mud season: too much snow on the roads to drive, not enough for travel by snow machine. Hellish transportation problems have walled us in, we noted on April 3. Consumed by a severe case of cabin fever. Little things have become big: The damn leaky drain. Ashes floating around from our cast iron smudge pot called a stove. The water line breaks, forcing us to melt snow. We bitch, and on some days don’t find a damn bit of comfort from being in this together. Need to escape, but can’t afford to.
Three weeks later is a one-line entry from Jane, every word in capital letters: TODAY WE DROVE IN ALL THE WAY.
IN MAY OF 1981, WE LEFT LOCKETT RANCH FOR GOOD. Rolling out of the aspen woods of northern Arizona for the last time, we surfaced to find a wave of dark fantasies taking hold of the mountain west, spreading up and down the Rockies like so much blister rust, courtesy of a radically conservative group called the Sagebrush Rebellion. In the process, they were unwittingly helping to lay the groundwork for a new brand of gunslinger greed. Sagebrush Rebels were rough-hewn, angry, sometimes-violent white men, many having come to the West fairly recently, hoping to grasp some imagined glory from the good old days. Rather than seeing themselves as outcasts, they were the chosen ones. And as such, they wasted no time wrapping themselves in God and flag.
Their first priority was to declare war on evil. On one hand, evil in the form of the federal government (in particular, land management agencies like the Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency), and on the other, environmentalists. While the movement was never large, its effect was greatly amplified by a piling on of wealthy industrialists and their attending politicians, well aware that fueling a populist-looking war against evil government workers and environmentalists was great for keeping the West friendly to corporate profits. By the mid-1980s, extractive industry had become the main funder of the Wise Use movement, each year pouring millions into the cause.
Among other things, the Sagebrush Rebels demanded that federal lands in the West be given back to the states for development. Never mind that the states not only never owned those lands, but as a condition of statehood agreed to make no claim on them. Soon afterward came a much-publicized manifesto calling for mining and oil development in all national parks and wilderness areas, for logging old-growth forests and replanting them with species better suited to commercial harvest. And our personal favorite: eliminating protection under the Endangered Species Act for any plant or animal “lacking vigor to spread in range.”
Meanwhile, their funding partners in extractive industry were sending millions of dollars to the Rebels through groups with names like Environmentalists for Jobs, founded by the Chicago Mining Corporation. In 1989, seven employees from Chicago Mining would force their way into a private home in Pony, Montana, harassing a group of locals meeting to discuss a proposed gold mine. Future meetings were held with a sheriff posted at the door.
Their message was as soulless as a Mad Max movie: Get rid of environmentalists. Weaken mine-reclamation standards and timber-cutting rules. Scrap the Endangered Species Act. Then America will be okay.
Twenty years later, during a project for National Geographic, I ended up getting a smaller, more personal version of such rusty bravado. The work involved walking 140 miles from my front door to the so-called most remote location left in the lower 48, there to spend three months in what I thought would be the modern equivalent of contemplating my navel. What I found instead was a handful of thug-like outfitters, illegally drawing elk out of Yellowstone National Park for their hunting clients to shoot by laying salt blocks just outside the border. They were also wasting the carcasses of the animals they killed, taking only the antler racks. A few were even raiding archaeological sites in Yellowstone and then selling off the goods. In short, using the wilderness like the Sopranos used north Jersey. Among the hooligans was a Bible-thumping, gun-slinging outfitter—a dangerous, feral sort who even law enforcement didn’t want to touch. Going about the business of, as he put it, hunting for God. Still another outfitter discouraged private hunters from mucking about on “his turf” by secretly slipping pieces of elk carcasses under their tents when they weren’t around, hoping grizzlies would come by at night and shred their camps. Mostly not native to the West, they were nonetheless proud to don the uniform, from handlebar mustaches to leather vests. And guns, of course—most hard-pressed to take a dump without a .45 strapped to their waste. Needless to say, they missed no chance to remind me that wolves were the spawn of Satan.
What was notable about the Sagebrush Rebels was their divisiveness. They struck with blunt anger, issuing death threats to federal employees, burning down Forest Service buildings, and later, in southern Utah, torching effigies of President Clinton, who had the audacity to create a new national monument there. If you weren’t on the team, you were an enemy. At one point I too started getting threats, one round of telephone trash lasting several days, the guy on the other end telling me over and over again to “Lock and load. We’re coming for you.”
The Rebels showed up in Jane’s and my road journals mostly as short notes about the bumper stickers they sported: Earth First! (We’ll log and mine the other planets later.) And Environmentalism—Just Another Doomsday Cult. And Going Green is the New Red (complete with the Communist hammer and sickle). And in later years, Reduce Carbon Emissions: Shoot an Environmentalist or Two.
To be fair, the boomers who actually loved and cared about these landscapes could themselves at times be hugely irritating. We fell easily into great bouts of preciousness, complete with an embarrassing tendency to want to shut the door to development as soon as we moved in. We struggled, and not always with grace, to figure out where communities fit into the grand scheme of the wilds, too often stuck on visions of nature where people are strangely absent. And in the end we became part of a growing gentrification in the West, one that sent some of the best characters of the mountain towns, practitioners of the fine art of barely getting by, down the road to lower, cheaper, less spectacular country. It was under our watch that many of the last best places in the West became what were essentially gated communities. Class with one-way glass—safety first, unmarred by the sad places of the earth or the sad people who live there.
And yet for a lot of years, the devotion boomers had for this wild country left them more than willing to go to the mat to protect pristine rivers, to stop dozens o
f ill-conceived oil-drilling schemes on the tundra, to keep grizzlies roaming the hills of greater Yellowstone. They showed up at mine-proposal meetings and oil-drilling hearings asking the sorts of thorny, well-informed questions that left city councilmen and county commissioners mumbling into their coffee cups. And on some nights that took guts, as big, surly men wearing yellow armbands arrived thirty, fifty, a hundred at a time, brought in from faraway places on company busses to give the thumbs-up to whatever extractive project was on the drawing board. But the boomers kept showing up. And in the process, they raised the quality of discussion about natural resources to the highest, most citizen-driven level the mountain West had ever seen.
But as the Sagebrush Rebels were growing stronger, the boomers were becoming thirty-somethings with spouses, kids, and full-time jobs. Day-to-day life was revving up, getting faster. Circles of attention were growing smaller. Bigger, less-personal concerns we were happy to leave to anonymous authorities: the protection of grizzlies and whales and black-footed ferrets to wildlife biologists, the care of the planet to climate scientists, the upkeep of democracy to the free market.
And yet the free market was hardly friendly toward grizzlies or ferrets or climate change. Extractive industry, which had more or less been licking its wounds since the mid-1960s, had mastered the fine art of spin. By the 1990s, televisions were beaming images of comely white women in pressed lab coats, proudly showing off Exxon’s or BP’s latest clean-drilling technology. In the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest, the message was more blunt and more sophisticated. Word spread fast that the thing to worry about wasn’t the loss of more than 60 percent of timber jobs due to mechanization, but rather radical environmentalists pushing to save the spotted owl. Likewise, it wasn’t corporate centralization of meat packing that had led to dwindling profits in ranching—forcing major increases in processing costs for rural cattlemen—but those fruity bastards who kept trying to protect the black-footed ferret, or the sage grouse, or worst of all, the damned wolves.
IN 1982, WHILE READYING FOR A BACKPACKING TRIP INTO THE San Juan Mountains, Jane and I got word that seventy-six-year-old Kenneth Rexroth had died. He would be buried in Santa Barbara Cemetery—his grave the only one to face not inland, but toward the sea. His own words were etched into the granite of his tombstone:
As the full moon rises
The swan sings in sleep
On the lake of the mind
So on the evening before departing on that backpacking trek, we paused long enough to read out loud to each other a little of his poetry. A small tribute to our fellow Hoosier. One verse especially, I still read every now and then:
Our campfire is a single light
Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls.
The manifold voices of falling water
Talk all night.
Wrapped in your down bag
Starlight on your cheeks and eyelids
Your breath comes and goes
In a tiny cloud in the frosty night.
Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise.
Ten thousand years revolve without change.
All this will never be again.
THE FIRST SCATTERING COMPLETE, I LEFT STANLEY HEADING north along the Salmon River, passing the site of that crooked little rust-red cabin that served as our first home after we married. I could almost see Jane walking out of the screen door across the sloping porch with a pan of blond brownies in her hand for the elderly landlords; how the first time she made them she forgot to consider the big lean of the floor, and so the batter slumped, making one side thicker than the other.
“It’s perfect!” she told me. “People who like chewy eat from this side. Those who like crunchy eat from the other.”
Five miles on, I pulled into a small turnout and walked down a steep bank to the edge of the river, to Cove Hot Springs, where I stripped naked and settled back into the steaming water, silky with minerals. Sitting in that hot pot, in a small way it felt like the scattering of Jane’s ashes had released the Sawtooths back to me. Of course there was a lot of stumbling and lurching and bleeding in the bushes still to come. But after Stanley, I could begin to see a few of those things that outlast even the longest life. Some indigenous cultures of the world hold sacred certain corners of the land—never going there casually, reserving visits only for rites of passage. From then on, the Sawtooths would be like that for me.
Downriver some 115 miles was the town of Salmon, for decades a redneck-meets-river-runner place, serving up a kindly if sharp-edged brand of hospitality. During our first summer together in Stanley, Jane and I ran shuttle for river-rafting parties, driving their rigs from Salmon to a takeout on the river at Corn Creek. Our second gig involved shuttling a pair of Olympic gymnastic coaches from Salt Lake City who each year ran the river, then spent a drunken night at the Owl Supper Club. Afterward, for reasons we never understood, they bedded down in sleeping bags for the night—as did we—on the fifty-yard line of the Salmon High School football field.
For old times’ sake, I parked the van and walked over to the Owl, sidled up to the bar, and ordered a beer. The place was quiet, just one other customer—a sixty-year-old man named George, sporting a gray ponytail down his back, humming to the country music feed on the television while flipping through a copy of the Salmon Recorder Herald. George wanted to talk. Before my glass was empty, he’d invited me to come back on Sunday to watch football.
“I cook up a bunch of chili—enough for everyone. People come and go all day, eleven in the morning till nine at night. You should check it out.”
Salmon was for a long time less gentrified than other mountain towns, having for years had the good fortune of ranking lower on the groovy scale. There’d been less of an onslaught by well-meaning folks who move to beautiful places and set about trying to make them a little “nicer”; maybe pushing to get rid of the trailer park at the edge of town, for example, never understanding that such housing is all some locals can afford. But then Salmon was also more than happy to irritate the refined by spitting and pulling out guns at the mere rumor of wolves. Or environmentalists. Or any other commie scum predator lurking at the edges of town.
When Bill the bartender heard what I’d been doing up in Stanley, he turned and poured himself a beer, pulled up a stool behind the bar, and sat down to face me. Five years ago yesterday, he told me, he had lost his own wife. Her name was Jamie.
“A vein ruptured near her heart. The medical team didn’t do the right diagnostics. Just never picked it up. She was forty-eight.”
He took a pull on his beer and turned his head, and the look of pain on his face seemed fresher than five years would allow. Sitting there, just me and Bill and George the chili cook, some dozen blocks from the football field where Jane and I and the gymnasts had fallen asleep after way too much tequila, I began to realize how long a man’s wounds can bleed.
The scattering journey in the Sawtooths was powerful, a right action of sorts, an honoring that suggested my life still mattered. But it wasn’t long before holes started showing up, letting in feelings that everything was still busted to pieces. One of those holes tore open during that encounter with Bill at the Owl Bar. Earlier in the day I’d been going along thinking I was getting back to some sort of mental fitness, reclaiming what I’d learned from storytellers, psychologists, seekers of one sort or another. I could see myself getting on with recovery, confident I was coming out of the ditch, steering back into life. But as I left the Owl Bar and was heading north on Highway 12, making for Lost Trail Pass, it seemed that was just wishful thinking. Mind play. And minds never could fathom the real consequences of a broken heart.
WATER TO STONE, THREE
I’m moving down the west bank of the Kopka again. Even with a bib wet suit on, I’m starting to chill; pulse and breath are getting faster, shallower, making me think about shock. The nearest highway is a long hike to the east, and reaching it will mean swimming the river. Yet in the canyon below the flush pond, the far bank
is almost vertical, impossible to navigate on two legs, let alone one. So I keep pushing downstream toward the mouth of the river, finally reaching the place where it empties into Obonga Lake. Slightly up from the mouth is a small island. After weighing the options, I decide to jump into the river upstream and float on my back to the island; from there I should be able to haul out and recover a bit, before tackling the second half of the channel. Everything goes well. Then, less than ten yards from the island, I’m sucked into a circling current. It carries me right back to where I started.
The shivering and shallow breathing are getting worse.
Resting a couple minutes to steel my courage, I jump this time into the river downstream from the island, which means making the entire crossing without a break. The water is fast and deep, the current much too strong for me to hold my place by swimming. Sure enough, even before the halfway point, the current catches like a train and hauls me far out into the lake. I’m exhausted. Just as that outbound journey comes to an end, a pair of loons surfaces not ten feet away. They eye me for a few seconds, then let loose with a brilliant run of yodels. Given how cautious loons are around humans, even in my troubled state it’s not lost on me how strange this is. What I do with it is set my jaw and take a couple fast breaths, blowing them out like a man angry, like a man trying to convince himself there’s still something left. I roll onto my back under the gray sky, lay the paddle on my chest, and start backstroking, pulling hard for shore.
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