The Carry Home (12 page)

So another notebook was added to the road notes and the trail journals, this one to chronicle the cold, bright days at Lockett Ranch. We would stay there from the fall of 1980 to the spring of 1981. As I read the pages today, they seem over-played, loaded with all the gush and giddy-up that comes from being in your twenties out living under open skies: Describing long ski treks at midnight through the aspen woods, the white trunks of the trees shimmering in the moonlight. Or cooking cornbread and beans and potato soup and chili and pots of spaghetti on top of a sheet-iron woodstove. Being under the blankets
on an old wrought-iron bed from 1936 and listening to Bruce Williams from Talknet Radio on KOMA—eight hundred miles to the east, in Oklahoma City—with a battery-powered radio. There are even notes about the outhouse, covered floor to ceiling with horse pictures from a 1950 issue of
The Quarter Horse Journal
—35¢ a copy, three bucks a year.

Just before the snows came, while out on a morning walk near the cabin, a beautiful little calico Manx cat wandered up out of nowhere, apparently abandoned by her owners. By the end of the day she'd decided to move in, trading nights in the woods, which were growing colder by the week, for a little company, a down quilt, and the occasional bite of cheese. For her part she sent the cabin's rats packing, flushing them from the attic in a single day, when I'd been trying and failing to scare them out for weeks. One morning, long after winter came in, for some reason she started shaking, trembling. Not knowing what to do, we decided to seek help from a vet. So we carefully wrapped her in a laundry bag and climbed on the snow machine, only to have her at the end of the first mile let go a pint of piss all over Jane's lap, which in little time turned to yellow ice. The vet said the cat was fine.

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
.

I
N
M
AY OF 1981, WE LEFT
L
OCKETT
R
ANCH 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 of 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.