The Last Empty Places (43 page)

Wrote Teddy Roosevelt in a letter to Leopold,
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with characteristic gusto, “I think your platform simply capital. It seems your association in New Mexico is setting an example to the whole country.”

Nor did his energy and eloquence go unnoticed among Forest Service higher-ups in Washington, who offered him a job in public relations in the nation’s capital. Leopold declined it.

“I do not know whether I have twenty days or twenty years
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ahead of me,” he wrote to Arthur Ringland. “Whatever time I have, I wish to accomplish something definite…This ‘one thing’ for me is obviously game protection.”

The coming of the Great War, with its need for timber and beef for the troops, severely strained the cause of game protection on the national forest lands. After a brief stint at the Albuquerque chamber of commerce—where he came to descry “boosterism”—Leopold rejoined the Forest Service after the war as second-in-command for all 20 million acres of National Forests in the Southwest.

He was shocked by what he saw. When he personally toured the forests, he observed how overgrazing and destructive logging had triggered massive erosion. Roughly ten years earlier, when he’d first arrived in the Southwest, he had ridden through the Blue River country of the Apache Forest. A mere decade later 90 percent of the arable soil along the Blue had washed away or blown away because of overgrazing of the grasses and overcutting of timber.

“One day,” he wrote to his mother back in Iowa, as he did regularly throughout her life, “we came home with cakes of mud a quarter of an inch thick surrounding our eyes—stuff that had blown into our eyes and ‘teared’ out so you had to pull off the lumps every few minutes.”

Leopold’s focus began to shift—from single-minded game protection and the elimination of game-killing predators like wolves, it broadened to include the condition of the soil, and thus of the land itself. He wrote passionately about the soil, and how earlier peoples of the Southwest had managed to use it for centuries without destroying it, until the settlers of the last few decades:

W
HEN WE GOT BACK
on the trail after the lizardlike lunch on the sun-warmed log, Molly and Skyler marveled at the number of crossings ahead for us to reach the Meadows—twenty-six, the couple had reported.

“The map said it was, like, fifteen,” said Skyler, “and today we’ll cross the river forty-one times.”

But the crossings came quickly. It was pleasant hiking in the sunny canyon and shady forest. I’d chosen walking sticks for Molly and Skyler from a pile of driftwood branches near our lunch log. Skyler used his with great determination, swinging it along the trail, going out front to measure the depth of the river crossings with it, and giving us a report. If it was deep, he hurled his walking stick like a spear to the far bank so he could free both hands to hike up his shorts to his hips.

We sang the beer-bottle song—once, which was enough. I realized why the infantry sings as it marches—to occupy the mind, to bond the marchers in rhythm, and thus in a single body. A corps.

We chatted amiably, the four of us, about the sycamores and oaks. In the deepest, most twisty bends of the canyon, we admired the forests of the Elf-Kings that we crept through.

Finally, an hour before dusk, as the crack of clear blue sky deepened
toward a shade of purple, the canyon’s high rock walls meandered apart from each other. Between the tawny cliffs lay a wide meadow, through which the river ran. Open groves of Ponderosa pines studded the meadow, rising like giant columns.

It was a perfect camping spot.

Then, under the perfect grove, we spotted two tents, sitting side by side.

Shit!
I thought.

I knew Amy was thinking the same.

There’s a palpable tension—almost a ritual—to finding a camping spot in the wilderness, one that I feel quite intensely and have since my first wilderness trips as a child. I’ve wondered if this tension is genetically coded, recalling our hundreds of thousands of years as a species of nomadic hunter-gatherers. The right—or wrong—choice of a camping site could mean security, or encounters with predators or enemies, it could bring abundant food or starvation, water or thirst, warmth or debilitating cold. The two tents sitting off there in the perfect grove could signify friends or rivals. In any case, we felt they were crowding “our” space in the wilderness—and they probably felt the same to see us coming down the trail.

“Look! More humans!” a woman’s voice called out.

It was a surprise, for all parties, to see anyone after the silence of the canyons.

A middle-aged man bearing a droopy, graying handlebar mustache rose from where he was stooping over, staking down one of the tents. Near him stood a middle-aged woman, dark-haired and fit-looking, and a blond teenage girl lingered off in the grove, perhaps gathering firewood. I noted instantly that the couple wore the same style of hightech synthetic clothing we did—pile jackets, breathable waterproof fabrics—as if this signified they belonged to our own tribe.

A subtle unspoken dance began about what distance we’d maintain between our two parties and our campsites.

“Hike!…Hike!…Hike!” the woman sang, cheering on Molly and Skyler in their strides as we came down the trail past their camp.

We paused for a moment. We asked if they knew where the trail forked ahead. They hadn’t been there.

“But another fellow told us there’s another nice campsite a little ways on, under a big dead snag,” said the man. “You can’t miss it.”

“If you can’t find a spot to camp,” the woman added, “you can come back here.”

We thanked her, and kept hiking. It was a generous gesture on her part, a family willing to give up the solitude they’d presumably come for, in order to give us a space should we need it. We belonged to the same tribe—distantly related.

A half-mile on or less, we looked across a meadow of tall grass and spotted the big dead ponderosa. Beyond it the Gila wove between willowy banks, and the cliff wall of the canyon rose beyond that. Four or five towering ponderosas created a vaulted cathedral ceiling of pine and beneath it lay an old fire ring assembled of char-blackened stones. It was a beautiful place to camp. What’s odd is how there is a kind of universal agreement on what constitutes a beautiful campsite, which makes me think it is indeed a genetic impulse. I felt tucked in, secure in this spot—the meadow afforded a view, visibility for anyone approaching, the ponderosas gave shelter and wood, the cliff wall a kind of security at our backs, and the Gila coursing past offered a source of water, and, if I wished, a place to gather fish.

Soon we were sitting on logs and on the pine-needle-matted ground around a popping fire of fragrant pine logs, the children sipping hot mint tea and Amy and I mojitos made with a squeeze of lemon, rum, sugar, and the crushed bunch of mint I had plucked from the bank when we left our morning’s camp.

I
N THE LATE SUMMER
of 1919, Aldo Leopold took a Sunday off and went trout fishing. For his outing, he chose an area at the headwaters of the Gila River. He had a family connection here. Estella’s mother, a member of an old New Mexico family, had inherited a large sheep outfit, the N-Bar Ranch, whose grazing lands included parts of the Gila National Forest and its Gila River headwaters.

While fishing, Leopold admired the lack of telephone poles and automobile roads
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in the area. It got him thinking: Was there a way to preserve the pristine quality of the Gila River canyons before the inevitable roads and human structures invaded them?

The timing was crucial. The automobile had become a practical means of transportation in the decade since he’d first come to the
Southwest from Yale. The year before he’d arrived, in 1908, Henry Ford had introduced the first affordable and mass-produced automobile, the Model T—“the car that put America on wheels.” What had recently been “horse country”—accessible only on foot or by horse—was just a decade later opening up to the average citizen’s automobile. The federal government, meanwhile, was encouraging the settlement of unused lands in the West. Leopold had witnessed how a few years of heavy grazing and logging had wiped out the Blue River bottomlands,
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reducing its once-rich grasses, soils, and pine groves to a wide bed of stony cobbles washed by flash floods.

One option was to designate pristine wild areas on federal lands as national parks, such as Yellowstone or Yosemite. But Leopold had observed firsthand what national-park status brought to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon—glaring electric signs, ticky-tacky hotels, hawkers of tourist geegaws, rotting piles of garbage, and rivulets of raw sewage.

“To cherish we must see and fondle,”
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he later wrote about the mass tourism encouraged by national parks with their roads and hotels, “and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

About three months after that wonderful Sunday of trout fishing in the roadless, telephone-poleless solitude of the Gila headwaters, Leopold attended a meeting of foresters in Salt Lake City. It was here he first heard about an oddball young forester in Colorado whom colleagues called the “Beauty Engineer.” His real name was Arthur Carhart—the first landscape architect hired by the U.S. Forest Service. He had recently made the blasphemous proposal that a pristine wild lake, Trapper Lake in Colorado’s White River National Forest, be preserved just as it is, without roads, cottages, or other “improvements.”

Leopold went out of his way to meet Carhart
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in Colorado, where, in their enthusiastic talk, each inspired the other to the wildlands cause and took their case to Forest Service higher-ups, Carhart arguing for the natural beauty of these pristine areas, and Leopold for their usefulness as recreation. The great boulder that lay in their path was the “wise use” dictum set down by the original head of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot. (This was the man whom John Muir, twenty years before, had told off in a Seattle hotel lobby over the issue of sheep-grazing on federal lands, with the rebuke, “I don’t want anything more to do with
you.”) Under the Pinchot philosophy, the National Forests were being managed for the “highest use” and “wise use,” which meant, first of all, a steady supply of harvested timber and grazing lands.

Leopold’s first shove at removing that boulder came in a 1921 article in the
Journal of Forestry
, in which he argued that preservation of their wilderness qualities ranked as the “highest use” for certain pristine national forest lands. Instead of invoking John Muir’s lofty temples of the spirit, Leopold cast his argument for the wilderness in hard, practical, even economic, terms: It provided a certain type of recreation unavailable anywhere else, and in ever-shorter supply, especially since the arrival of the Model T and mass tourism.

“Sporting magazines are groping toward some logical reconciliation
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between getting back to nature and preserving a little nature to get back to,” he wrote. “Lamentations over this or that favorite vacation ground being ‘spoiled by tourists’ are becoming more and more frequent.”

He argued for a large expanse of pristine wildland in order to pursue certain types of recreation, like hunting and fishing. Here he laid out his original definition of wilderness: “[A] continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”

Leopold now proposed the first wilderness area: nearly a million acres among the canyons at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico.

“It will be much easier and cheaper to preserve, by forethought,” he wrote, “than to create it after it is gone.”

“S
TOP LAUGHING
, you’re waking me up,” called Skyler sleepily from the next tent.

It was 6:30 a.m. It was still dark, and the temperature hovering around twenty degrees. Amy and I were lying inside our warm sleeping bags, joking laconically about the difficulty—the glaring lack of immediate reward—of getting out of bed. Awaiting us was an early-morning wade across the frigid river. This would be followed by a hard nine miles of hiking.

“That’s what we’re trying to do,” I called back to Skyler, as we laughed even harder, “wake you up!”

We aimed to hike to the Gila Cliff Dwellings this day. This would entail climbing out of the Gila River’s Middle Fork canyon, hiking over a mountain ridge, dropping into the Gila’s West Fork canyon, and following it downstream until we reached the Cliff Dwellings, at the wilderness edge. We’d have to arrive by four p.m., when they officially closed the site for the day. This meant an early start and an all-day, fast pace.

By seven o’clock I’d managed to drag myself out of the tent. Amy remained inside and stuffed our bags and rolled our pads. I fired up the stove, brewed hot chocolate and tea, and distributed them to the tents, along with a frozen granola bar for everyone to gnaw on. Molly eventually crawled out, began packing her backpack. She picked up one of her nurse’s shoes from where we’d set them near the fire to dry the previous night.

“Look at this! It’s frozen solid!”

The fake white leather and foam insole had, spongelike, absorbed so much water during the previous day’s river crossings that the entire shoe had literally frozen to a block of white ice. The shoelaces sprung out rigidly in all directions like pieces of frozen white spaghetti.

Amy’s shoes and laces were just as frozen, as were Skyler’s. With my Velcro straps and porous fabric, my uppers were slightly more flexible, but the insoles were as stiff as iced oak boards. The heavy, hard nurse’s shoes fascinated Skyler, who started throwing them around like rocks. He hurled one of the nurse’s shoes at a ponderosa tree where he and Molly had propped their walking sticks. The nurse’s shoe hit Molly’s stick, shattering it into multiple pieces.