Between two basins...north slope...black timber. The horses' hooves raised puffs of dust in the trickle-down pools of filtered sun. In an electric green swale, a moose paused in his feeding and watched us watch him.
It had been a simple wish: break routines, leave the watches behind, ride the high country. And only a few hours out we had already reduced our lives to what we could carry in our panniers, time measured in days and nights--a week of riding--instead of hours.
Somewhere--below, to the left, at the bottom of a steep ravine--Cub Creek. Almost a sound, the presence of water. Ahead, through the tops of the conifers, a glimpse of bold plateau and sky: puma yellow, faithful blue, the mountains still corniced with snow: Absarokas: Wyoming. Roof of the world...heart of home.
We rode toward the sky, rode through the musky trail of horse scent--hay, methane--and the evanescent drift...there, gone ...of balsam. So heady, it was like riding through liquor.
The sun pulled its way west behind us and pushed us forward toward the Continental Divide--Benj on Whisk, I on Tinker, Gringo, the pack horse, walking free; Merle, the yellow Lab, on point, chasing squirrels. Chest-deep in lupine, the color of honey, he looked over his shoulder, panting his laugh and thrashing his tail, saying what everyone was feeling: How good to be moving.
Barred by the long tree shadows, we crossed a wide meadow descending to the creek, found the old hitching post and fire circle, left by those who had camped here before us--riders for several hundred summers, those on foot for thousands of years before that. No surprise. The meadow held last sun, caught first light, and had good grass with water nearby.
WE STACKED THE TACK and curried the horses, picketing them in the hock-high grass. Starting the stove, setting the pot to boil, we sat on our pads with the saddles for backrests and a bag of nuts between us, our legs stretched out like kings--like first kings, like when there were so few people on earth that everyone felt the grace of space surround them.
Then the stars appeared in the deepening blue--one, two, four, the Dipper taking shape. And nothing to do except eat and watch the horses. The sky so clear between the mountain walls, the night so mild, that we lay right where we were, pulling our bags over us...the heaven so dense with stars that the horses appeared like ancient white ghosts grazing on a field of silk.
Not a bad way to spend some reflective time, I thought, in a time when the Grand Old Party, the party of my father and his father before him, had been trying to reshape how all these federal lands through which we were riding, and what many of us have considered public ground, the commons, should be managed.
Watching a shooting star, I remembered the warm spring days just past in Washington, D.C. when I had watched the angry floor debate in the House and Senate, more like the Barnum and Bailey circus that was in town than the supposedly august body known as Congress. I had listened to the scolding the chief of the Forest Service had received from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee for allowing conservation organizations and the courts to dictate his annual cut. The senators felt that he had been remiss in not asking Congress to pass legislation which would make it more difficult for citizens to sue his agency. In the House Appropriations Subcommittee for the Interior the tone had been more moderate but the intent the same.
From committee to committee, and agency to agency, the agenda was clear: streamline the planning process; deregulate; amend the Endangered Species Act so as to minimize court challenges that had stymied development on private lands and resource extraction on public ones. Ideas about selling off federally owned buildings, refuges, and parks also flew around the capital. In short, the evolving Contract With America, created by the Republican Party to reform government after the 1994 mid-term election, made one of its goal giving back power to individuals and localities. Power to decide what to do with land.
Some of the Contract--overhauling our taxation and welfare systems, making government more accountable, smaller, and less intrusive, and compensating property owners who lose a significant part of their land's value because of environmental restrictions--is welcome. You only have to try to build a house, as I've been doing, to realize the stupidity, waste, and utter unreasonableness of some regulations, such as mandatory installation of radon mitigation devices before the house can be closed in and tested for radon. If no radon is present, a thousand dollars has been wasted on labor and materials for a device that can be easily retrofitted. Or requiring smoke detectors to be installed exactly in the near-ceiling locations stipulated by the building code, even though in some parts of a high-ceiling house this will mean that they cannot be easily serviced, insuring that the first time they ring a false alarm they will be disconnected. Or having a countywide percolation rate that is slower than the perc rate in several parts of the county, mine included. This means that homeowners with well-drained ground must install a more extensive and expensive septic system--the baseline of the rest of the county--wasting resources, material, and human labor.
YOU CAN BE A LIFELONG CONSERVATIONIST and environmentalist, and when you run into these inanities, you realize that isn't regulation that's the culprit, leading to the Sagebrush Rebellion and the so-called Wise Use Movement, it's regulation that is badly written and administered inflexibly. Unfortunately, being a reactive lot, we humans tend to overfix or sweep away what needs merely modification and tinkering, and that's what's happening now.
Some of this "fixing" has serious and potentially unfriendly consequences for wildlife, ranging from the clearly awful, such as scrapping totally the Endangered Species Act and suspending protective fish and wildlife laws to expedite salvage logging in the national forests under the smoke screen of "fire protection," to the possibly damaging, like President Clinton's offering management of 2.2 million acres of federal Waterfowl Production Areas, bought with Duck Stamp money, to the states. Such moves are only the tip of the iceberg. On Capitol Hill, and in conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, some are talking seriously about selling our national lands.
In the morning we rode up a basin of subalpine grass, which merged into the high tundra at 12,000 feet. The distant mountains spired the horizon, and the Continental Divide stretched before us, great waves of undulating land cobbled with the gray rocks of ancient volcanoes. On north-facing slopes the snow drifts lay deep and tinged with pink, their odd shade caused by a nevephilic alga the color of roses.
BELOW US LAY FIVE NATIONAL FORESTS, two national parks, two national wildlife refuges--all the country of the Yellowstone and the nation's first national forest and park--as if viewed from an airplane. Except it was moving by in stately, horse-paced time, giving us an opportunity to scout what we had come to see.
Around us, within a hundred yards, herds of elk relaxed on the crescents of pink snow--cows with frisky calves and bulls in velvet. Here and there boulders had been uprooted, the ground around them excavated as if a fleet of backhoes had been at work. They had. The country's grizzlies had been digging ground squirrels. A pair of golden eagles soared on thermals and red-taileds dipped lower, skimming the tundra. Looking ahead, we searched for bighorns.
In the late afternoon we turned the horses loose. Nearly sitting on their tails, they found their own way down a steep scree slope and into a basin lush with grass and running with a freshet. On the USGS map the drainage was unnamed, but, geographically speaking, it was the East Fork of the South Fork of the Buffalo. An unwieldy name if there ever was one. So we called it Tinker's Basin, after the horse who had led us down.
The evening was so mild that we didn't bother with the tent. Sitting on the grass by our panniers we ate dinner and watched the moon rise over the Divide, its full gold disc skating over the peaks. And so quiet you could hear the horses rip grass from the earth.
Of all the many positive attributes of the pre-industrial world--space, quiet, clean air, and water--this kind of quiet has been disappearing the fastest. Its balm has vanished from the secluded parks that once provided privacy in urban places. It has almost disappeared from rural landscapes, which once surrounded cities and which are now interconnected suburbs. And it's no longer one of the defining attributes of our national parks and non-Wilderness, multiple-use public lands, where timber production, fossil fuel extraction, mining, and motorized recreation share the turf. In fact, the only place you can find such quiet is in the roadless backcountry.
Its possible elimination would be a major, twofold loss: such quiet country is synonymous with intact, healthy wildlife habitat; and it's also the place in which many of us find sustenance for our souls. They are the nation's sacred places, synonymous with houses of worship.
For the latter reason Congress passed the Wilderness Act of 1964. For the former, fish and game departments continue to set aside critical habitat, especially winter habitat, where wildlife is not to be disturbed by mechanized vehicles.
Of course, a few ATVs in all of Nevada or a few snow machines in all of Wyoming won't threaten the big banks of quiet, unless, that is, one goes by you when you're in the middle of talking with God, or, more prosaically, bugling to a bull elk. However, when mechanized vehicles number in the thousands, and people in the tens of thousands, as they do in some of our national forests, not only does each individual's experience deteriorate, but wildlife becomes stressed. Scale--the cumulative effect of many individuals or the more massive effects of industry--matters. It matters enormously.
TODAY, ABOUT 90 PERCENT OF THE U.S. IS ROADED, most of our rivers are dammed, and nearly all of our wetlands in some regions have been filled. Given the scale of how we've changed nature, do we want to transform the remaining small slice of the unaltered continental pie--the remnant "wildernesses" such as Benj and I were riding through--into what the other 90 percent looks and sounds like? This isn't merely an aesthetic question but a wildlife one. Put roads into unroaded country and you sign a warrant of ill health or even death for numerous species.
The following day found us on the Buffalo Plateau, straddling the headwaters of the continent. Far below and to our right the Shoshone River flowed toward the Atlantic. To the west the Snake curved toward the Pacific.
In 20 miles of riding we saw not another person, and at sunset we dropped into the South Fork of the Yellowstone River. Waterfalls, like white mare's tails, fell hundreds of feet to the valley floor. Leaving the trail behind, we rode deep into an amphitheater of tall grass. Above us, on the rim of the canyon, tiny pines were silhouetted against the violet sky.
We hobbled the horses, built a fire, and sat listening to the river flow out of time, meaning without any indication as to what century or even millennium we were riding through. Elk had left their hoof prints in the river gravel, and we decided that this would be our hunting valley for the fall. Then the moon rose over the Divide, turning the waterfalls into silver plumes. You could have thought, sitting by that fire in the silence of the world, that the forest and rivers went on forever.
Of course, they don't.
Which makes it imperative that those who act as their stewards be both competent and well intentioned.
For better and for worse (and we've had both for nearly a century), the federal government has been the steward of such lands in the shape of its agencies--the Forest Service, the BLM, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the EPA. These bureaucracies can be thought of as the Referees of the Commons, their charge being the health of people, wildlife, land, water, and air in those landscapes where no property rights exist and hence the temptation is large for each individual to use the commons for his short-term benefit while depreciating their value for the many.
SOME FREE MARKET CHAMPIONS CLAIM that if we sell off these lands, "privatize" them and create defined property rights, we can improve their stewardship (since people care about their property) while simultaneously cutting the federal budget. The second premise, reducing governmental overhead, is probably true (though states will then have to bear some of the fiscal burdens the federal government now shoulders). The first, better stewardship because of well-defined property rights, bears scrutiny.
Individual property owners--conservation-minded ranchers, loggers, hunters, anglers, or just plain old landowners--do often make the best stewards. Their self-interest and attachment to wildlife is high, and they live with the consequences of their actions. It would take a leap of faith, however, to believe that these people will buy national forests, parks, and refuges if they go up for sale. As the political rhetoric would have us believe that we are still a nation of family farmers, so too would it have us believe that individual property owners will become the beneficiaries of a national lands selloff. This will not happen. As in the agribusiness industry, corporations will dominate the field. And the difference between an individual and a corporation is not only one of scale but of values.
Corporations, whose interests lie in accumulating capital and increasing profits so as to give investors a high return on their investment, do not have the same interest in land as do individuals. Nor do corporations live with the consequences of their actions to the same extent as do individuals. The individual, family, or community not only has a fiscal investment in a parcel of land, but also an emotional one. Individuals nurture land not only because they directly live with the results of their actions but because they also receive returns from their land other than money.
Consider this one example out of many. Huge areas of North America's boreal forest, mostly aspen, are now being cut for pulp, which is then turned into paper. The paper you holding in your hands when you read the evening's paper may very well have come from one of these giant clear-cuts and from a 75-year-old tree, which is old for an aspen. However, as debarking techniques have improved, the logging industry has been able to utilize 30-year-old aspen for pulp manufacture. Growing and cutting such young trees is literally "mowing" a forest, which can no longer, with any accuracy, be called a "forest," complete with old and young trees, decaying matter, and diverse wildlife. It has become a pasture.
HERE'S THE RUB. For global corporations interested in supplying pulp to paper factories, it makes no difference whether aspens are forests or pastures. In fact, forests hinder production and thus profits when compared to a pasture. However, if you are warbler, a caribou, a lynx, a bear, a person who lives and traps in that country, or a visiting wildlife photographer, hunter, or angler, it makes a great deal of difference to you whether you have a forest or a pasture.
Unfortunately, for wildlife and for people who like wildlife, if producing paper from pastures pays more than producing caribou and lynx from forests, it will be profit that dictates what the county looks like. This is how the market works. And it may well be that most of us prefer disposable plates and cups to caribou and lynx. Such is the nature of democracy and capitalism--they don't always produce healthy or fair results. In fact, the U.S. Constitution went out of its way to spell out rights--like freedom of speech and religion, and the right to bear arms--which the majority might someday want to eliminate and which the minority might want to hang on to.
Selling off our great public spaces may become a majority decision of the U.S. populace, but it will mean turning everyone's land--your land, my land, about whose fate we can at least vote--into private land over which we will have much less say. In the process, the average person will be disenfranchised from the type of democratic hiking, hunting, and angling (read access) that we now enjoy, making them the pastimes of the wealthy.
"Hold on there," replies the free market wisdom, "consumers will have a say about how land is managed through their buying power." True, consumers can express their wishes through their wallets. But national or global markets are not nearly as sensitive as local ones. If your local butcher replaces beef with rattlesnake meat, he will hear about it within a day. When Coca-Cola decided to change the flavor of its renown drink, it took enormous consumer pressure to reverse corporate policy.
Sadly, wildlife doesn't have nearly the popular following as do soft drinks. The majority of us--who don't travel much beyond the end of the road and don't have much investment in wildlife--may allow the public lands of America to become theme parks with fences, gates, and no trespassing signs. Hunters and anglers--who may be part of the conservative majority but who are in the minority on the issue of wildlife conservation--need to listen to their favorite spot of quiet and come back making some noise to those whom they elected.
There is a difference between reforming how federal agencies--the Referees of the Commons--operate, and getting rid of them entirely. Throwing our public lands open to development, or actually selling them off, won't be good for quiet and it won't be good for wildlife.
The point to remember is that the privatization of public lands is an ancient and ongoing battle. In Europe, from the 1100s on, the commons were enclosed, and access to wildlife and to open country disappeared for the average person and has not yet returned. If public land remains public in North America, the battle over its ownership will no doubt resurface in another generation. When it does, we need to be clearheaded. As we wouldn't sell our rights of free speech, assembly, and worship neither should we sell our right to wander freely over what is still a free land.
This essay appears in Ted Kerasote's forthcoming book, Heart of Home: Essays of People and Nature available in the fall from Random House. Copyright 1996 Ted Kerasote. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright (c) 1996 Philip Bourjaily. All Rights Reserved.