Rants from the Hill

by Michael P. Branch

  To get to Lester’s desert you roll east from Carson out on “The Loneliest Road in America” (the official designation of US 50), past the Moonlite Bunny Ranch brothel, and, eventually, turn onto the aptly named Breakaheart Road. After bouncing and weaving the truck through potholes, washboard, and frozen mud, we at last came to Lester’s gate. After parking the truck there, Cheryll and I hiked through the snow and sage and onto a knoll. From there we had a good view of the expansive playa where the film’s indelible mustanging scenes were shot.

  Looking out across that snow-dusted alkali flat to the jigsawcut mountains beyond, I had an eerie feeling that I had been to this remote place before. And I had, but only because a band of misfit writers and actors were here more than half a century before me. To the west I picked out the pointed peak against which I could picture a particular moment in the film, one in which a roped stallion rears, tethered to and towering over two doomed cowboys who are bracing themselves on their own long shadows. To the east I saw the double-knolled ridge beneath which so much of the picture’s final scene was shot—and it had to be shot eastward, because these were afternoon shoots, and they had to be afternoon shoots because the deeply troubled Monroe routinely arrived on the set hours behind schedule. I also made out the gently sweeping desert ridgeline that served as the backdrop for the most dramatic shot in the film: an unforgettable long shot in which the emotionally brittle Roslyn, played by a Monroe who was at least as emotionally brittle as her character, is a tiny speck of dust completely alone out on the playa, shrieking hysterically into space. I re-create the camera position for the shot while Cheryll, in her bright red snowsuit, jogs out onto the snowy playa to the spot where the long dead, eternally youthful Norma Jeane Mortenson once stood, screaming her beautiful blonde head off.

  Arthur Miller claimed that we rural Great Basinians are driven into these unpeopled desert expanses by an unnamable and unrequited longing, that we are trying to “escape something somewhere.” Maybe this is the same longing that drives a kid from the suburbs to hit the streets of Haight-Ashbury and scale the walls of Yosemite and tack the swells off Santa Cruz and buy his own desert so he will not have to see it posted with No Trespassing signs. Maybe it is the longing that drew me into the beautiful desolation of the western desert, where I can rant in solitude and freedom, screaming my damned head off, like Marilyn Monroe with whiskey and a beard. But if Miller was right that we are the misfits who have washed up on the barren shores of these dry lakes, he missed the most important part of the story, which is that this self-imposed exile is our refuge. To us, these high, dry wilds are home.

  Miller and Huston tried to script and shoot the death of the Old West out here on Misfits Flat, but to be in this place is to experience an expansiveness and light that does not give a damn about any of that. Even the poignant loss dramatized in the film is a human-scale emotion that the immensity of the land will not abide. I am reminded of a key moment in The Misfits, when Roslyn is asked if she’s ever been outside of Reno. “Once I went to the edge of town,” she replies. “Doesn’t look like there’s much out there.” To which Gay Langland, the free-spirited old cowboy played so perfectly by Clark Gable, replies with a simple insight that any misfit desert Ranter can understand: “Everything’s there.”

  Bouncing out Breakaheart Road at dusk, we spot six wild horses threading their way slowly through the snowy sage.

  I HAVE NEVER BEEN A FAN of bumper stickers, though I have always thought the idea had potential. Done properly, you would think a bumper sticker could be a sort of ideological haiku, an elegant little distillation of a person’s unique perception of the world; or, alternatively, that it could express genuine wit by being a decent joke that doesn’t take too long to tell. And even if a bumper sticker is unlikely to prompt people to act, it should at least make them imagine—as in the classic “Visualize Whirled Peas.”

  Unfortunately, the problems with bumper stickers outweigh their benefits, and so the immense potential of this unique genre remains unrealized. The first problem with bumper stickers is that they are not site specific. Maybe that is a good thing, if the point of the sticker is to demonstrate your commitment. So if your bumper sticker says “How Can You Be Pro-Life and Eat Dead Animals?” and your car breaks down in front of a cattle ranch, you’ll just have to stick to your values during the six days it will take for the local tow-truck driver to agree to help you out. Second, bumper stickers are usually so polemical as to be rhetorically ineffective. Time never moves more slowly than when we are being preached at by somebody’s bumper at the First Church of the Red Light.

  It is also problematic that so many otherwise promising sticker sound bites are already threadbare and clichéd. It is far too late now to tell folks to “Be the Change You Want to See in the World” (could I somehow be colder beer?), “Simplify” (incredibly complicated), or “Love Your Mother” (disturbingly ambiguous). As an environmentalist, I have observed that many “green” bumper stickers are factually incorrect (“Trees Are People Too”), unintentionally ironic (“Question Consumption” on a Lexus), incredibly corny (“May the Forest Be With You”), or intolerably sappy, of which the most egregious is “Keep All of Nature Special!!” This last one manages to be simultaneously saccharine and incomprehensible—never mind that if I used it, I would exhaust my personal annual quota of exclamation points. Finally, environmental stickers rarely respond to issues usefully, because they can’t afford to represent more than one point of view. You might see a bumper sticker that says “Save the Earth, Because You Can’t Eat Money,” but you won’t see one that says “You Can’t Eat Money, but If You’re Starving, You Can Use Money to Buy Food.” Once you get away from monolithic ideological pronouncements, bumperfied environmental sloganeering just loses its pop.

  I often leave my truck at remote trailheads in the Great Basin, so I have to be mighty careful about what opinions my bumper is blurting out while I am off in the backcountry. It just doesn’t pay to stay on your four-wheeled soapbox when you aren’t there to defend it. Years ago, I devised a solution that is as ingenious as it is cowardly. I keep a large collection of environmental bumper stickers in a big manila envelope behind the seat of my truck so I can pull out whatever message is called for by the site and occasion. I then temporarily Scotch-Tape the sticker to the inside of the window of the cap on the back of my truck. In this way, I customize my eco-editorializing, depending upon the circumstances and location in which I find myself.

  For example, in the parking lot of Reno’s Minor League Baseball park, I use “Nature Bats Last,” a sticker that has a very different meaning when I use it on spelunking trips. When I go to fetch a case of IPA at our rural liquor store, I put up the perennially popular “Environmental Drinking Team,” while at the feed store I use “My Other Car Is a Horse,” and at the native-plant nursery I go with the charmingly nerdy “I Brake for Milkweed.” At the church rummage sale, I use “Jesus Would Recycle.” For the annual fundraising BBQ at our volunteer fire station I break out this incendiary message: “Climate Change Is a Hoax. The Temperature Is Rising Because the Earth Is About to Explode.” For use at the university, where bloodless rationality is always at a premium, I actually have a sticker that reads, “The Benefits of Environmental Protection Measures Should Be Thoughtfully Weighed against Their Costs and the Sound Ones Enacted.” Professors routinely nod approvingly.

  To protect my truck at remote trailheads, I have found that antienvironmental bumper stickers are most effective. I usually go with relatively benign antigreen slogans that offer some sardonic insight (“Keep Environmentalism Pretentious”), or at least some wit (“Vegetarians Taste Better”). As I get farther out into the territory of the Sagebrush Rebels, I am compelled to escalate the rhetoric and shift it rightward. “EPA: Environmental Propaganda Agency” will keep your truck safe almost anywhere in the Great Basin. Also fairly reliable is “My Used Truck Is More Environmentally Responsible than Your New Prius.” In fact, any rag on hybrid cars will reduce the
chance of a truck break-in by approximately 90 percent. As I reach the remote hinterlands of the desert, extreme measures become necessary. In a few places in central Nevada, I have even posted blatantly irrational messages like “Green Is the New Red. Stop Environmental Communism,” though I prefer to stick with absurdity that is leavened by comedy, as in “I’ll Start Worrying About Global Warming When I’m Done Bigfoot-Proofing My House.” After all, if you are going to adopt an antiscientific worldview that is utterly devoid of logic and rationality, you shouldn’t also deprive yourself of humor.

  As a result of my spineless, accommodationist bumper-stickering practices, I am well liked everywhere I go, despite the fact that I am a certified curmudgeon. And this, along with not having my tires slashed, seems like a pretty good payoff from a message that costs three bucks and takes three seconds to read. Recently, though, I’ve decided to take my bumper sticker game up a notch by using my messages not only to affirm bonds with particular audiences but also to get them thinking—if only about bumper stickers. I do this by putting slogans in conversation with one another through the simple but powerful technique of using multiple stickers simultaneously. So, for example, I sometimes display “Global Warming Is Uncool” right next to “Global Warming: The #1 Threat to Unicorns.” I especially like to use “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” along with “Save a Tree: Wipe with a Rabbit,” since both really help you to visualize their message.

  Sometimes my pairings reveal an organizing principle, like the interplanetary focus that emerges when I juxtapose “Earth First: We’ll Mine Other Planets Later” with “Keep Earth Clean: It’s Not Uranus.” I also enjoy the religious theme implied in the simultaneous posting of “Jesus Would Drive a Prius” and “Environmentalism Is Just Another Doomsday Cult.” For some perverse reason, I also like using “If You Aren’t an Environmentalist You’re Suicidal and Should Seek Therapy” next to “World’s Sexiest Environmental Psychologist.”

  You might observe that the “dialogue” my paired bumper stickers provokes is reductive, polemical, and extreme. Fair enough, but I would counter that my dueling messages are about as refined and intelligent as the current state of most environmental discourse, especially in the polarized political landscape of the Intermountain West. My dual pronouncements are not any worse than the toxic language employed by many media outlets, and they may be more nuanced than what we sometimes get from the US Congress. But I do wonder if I should just give up this environmental sloganeering and, since I’m a writer, revert to a single, innocuous bumper sticker that says something like “Supposably Is Still Not a Word,” or “Don’t Use a Multisyllabic Word Where a Diminutive One Will Suffice,” or even “My Life Is Based on a True Story.” It might be better, though, just to leave it at this: “I’d Rather Be Ranting.”

  BACK IN THE 1970S, when I was a little kid, my family had an artificial Christmas tree that I thought was incredibly cool. It was fun to put together, with a central “trunk” that resembled an oversize broomstick, full of downward-angled holes into which the “branches” were fitted. The “needles” were shiny silver strands of industrial-strength tinsel, and the whole thing was so perfectly symmetrical and so ridiculously garish that it was only a sort of notional Christmas tree, one that was vaguely reminiscent of treeness while making no real attempt to resemble anything found in nature. I also talked my mom into buying an electrical device that sat beneath the tree, slowly revolving an illuminated, multicolored wheel, which projected up into the silvery branches light that was by turns yellow, green, blue, and orange. It was the funkiest tree on our street—the disco ball of trees, the kind of Christmas tree Donna Summer or the Bee Gees probably had.

  While you might imagine that artificial Christmas trees may be traced back only as far as the glory days of plastic in the 1950s, people actually began making fake holiday trees in the mid-nineteenth century. The practice began in Germany, where extensive deforestation compelled folks to make “trees” out of goose feathers that were dyed green. I don’t know what it says about a culture’s environmental stewardship when its geese outnumber its trees, but if goose feathers seem like a weird thing to make a tree out of, try optical fiber or holographic Mylar, the latest trends in holiday-spirited arboreal fakery. Eleven million artificial Christmas trees are sold each year, and sales continue to rise in an industry that is worth eight hundred million real dollars annually. And this despite the fact that 80 percent of these fake trees are manufactured in China, where environmentally hazardous lead stabilizer was the chemical du jour in binding the PVC from which the trees are fabricated. Although the recipe has now been changed to tin stabilizer (which somehow doesn’t sound much better), the EPA estimates that twenty million artificial Christmas trees still in use in the United States are slowly detonating, toxic lead bombs.

  On the other hand, people who buy cut trees shouldn’t rush to any sanctimonious claim of superiority over the fake tree people. As it turns out, the farm-raised vs. artificial Christmas tree argument is about on par with paper vs. plastic bags at the grocery checkout. The live tree market is now worth more than a billion bucks annually and employs around a hundred thousand people. But the industry also occupies 350,000 acres of land with a monoculture crop that is not particularly good wildlife habitat and is often treated with pesticides. The spraying, cutting, and transportation of the twenty-five million farm-grown trees sold each year also generates almost two billion pounds of greenhouse gases. I get it that nobody wants to decorate their Christmas tree while pondering its contribution to global climate change, and I’m also aware that the acres not given to Christmas tree production are more likely to be planted in fertilizer-soaked GMO corn than protected as sanctuaries of wildness and biodiversity. Still, I don’t want you live tree folks to jump to the conclusion that you’re necessarily more righteous than your neighbors just because your tree arrived in an eighteen-wheeler instead of a cardboard box.

  But the fake vs. farm-raised fork in Christmas Tree Road (which reminds me of Yogi Berra’s sage advice that “when you come to a fork in the road, take it!”) leaves out a third route—a practice that was once ubiquitous but is now so statistically insignificant that the Christmas tree data nerds don’t even bother counting it: hoofing out into the wilds to cut your own tree. Our annual family tradition is to take Hannah and Caroline, join the family of our buddies Cheryll and Steve, and head out into the wilderness of central Nevada to cut our Christmas tree. You might think the Great Basin Desert, which is a vast sagebrush ocean dotted by glaring, white islands of salt-encrusted alkali flats, would be an uninviting place to hunt up a decent tree. Not so. Nevada, the most mountainous state in the lower forty-eight, has more than three hundred mountain ranges, most of which are home to “the PJs”: desert rat shorthand for a high-elevation desert forest consisting of dominant pinyon pine–juniper woodland.

  In our part of this big desert, the pinyon-juniper biome occurs above about 4,000 feet and below the alpine zone. It requires ten to twenty inches of annual precipitation (which falls mostly as snow), and so it exists in a band above the lower-elevation sagebrush steppe, which receives only four to eight inches of moisture. Although the PJs contain some scattered sage, rabbitbrush, and ephedra—even an occasional Jeffrey pine—this environment consists almost exclusively of pinyon pine and juniper trees. While many people picture our part of the West as a bleak, treeless desert, almost twenty million acres of the Great Basin (nearly a fifth of its total land area) is occupied by the PJs.

  In fact, these pinyon pine–juniper forests are colonizing more ground every year. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the PJs have expanded at least threefold, and perhaps as much as tenfold. This expansion and infill, which has been caused by a number of factors, including overgrazing and fire exclusion, is now encroaching on the sagebrush ecosystems that are home to threatened species such as the pygmy rabbit and greater sage grouse. Land managers here in the Great Basin are using fire—and fire surrogates like thinning—to check the expansi
on of the PJs and protect the sagebrush biome they are successfully invading from above.

  Our annual pilgrimage to find a wild Christmas tree takes us to almost 7,500 feet in the Desatoya Range, on BLM lands about 135 miles east of Ranting Hill. There we hike, search for fossils, play with the dogs, and scrape away enough snow to build a bonfire of dead sage, around which we gather to swap family stories, eat snacks, and drink warm “Abuelita” cocoa and chilled rye whiskey. The tree cutting is only a small part of a long, lovely day in the snowy, high desert mountains. Our BLM Christmas tree tag costs a whopping five bucks—about a tenth the average cost of a farm-raised, commercially sold tree—and while we burn plenty of gas in our pickup to get our tree, we’d be headed into the hinterlands to hike and snowshoe whether we were tree hunting or not.

  While slaying a wild tree for one’s own ritual purposes might appear environmentally destructive, by cutting in BLM-identified areas we’re functioning as members of a volunteer crew of stand thinners who work to reduce fire danger and stem the advance of the PJs on the fragile sagebrush biome below. I realize that this claim may sound suspiciously virtuous. The plain truth is that we love to be in the mountains in winter, sharing a family outing in a remote, spectacularly beautiful part of our home desert. If circumstances were reversed, and a farm-raised tree cost five bucks while the BLM tree tag cost fifty, we’d still be driving past the commercial tree lots in town on our way out to the desert to find a pinyon pine for our family’s holiday tree.

  The species of pine we cut is single-leaf pinyon (Pinus monophylla), the state tree of Nevada, although in the interest of full disclosure I should note that we have two state trees; the other is the bristlecone pine, which can reach ages upward of four thousand years. (The only other state to have two state trees is neighboring California, with whom we compete at every opportunity.) Pinus monophylla is a beautiful high desert tree: short-needled, gray-green, thirty or forty feet in height and about as wide as it is tall, gnarled, twisting, and wildly branching when mature, but when young, handsomely columnar.