Appalachia Journal "A Wrong Turn"

88 Appalachia

A Wrong Turn

Lost in the dark, step by step
Benjamin Alva Polley

SUMMER/FALL 2019 89


I inch along slowly , with my hands and feet feeling out
in front of me like giant antennas. I am stumbling along, mostly blind.
Coming out of the trees into more darkness, I trip and fall. I catch myself
on the ground and strain my wrist and scrape my hands. I lift myself up and
begin to second guess. I backtrack. It seems like the trail. I ask myself.
Again, I turn around and walk some more downhill. The canyon drops
off in front of me, so I move toward the creek. Sagebrush and ponderosa
pine trees crowd me. Small rocks protrude from the uneven ground. Again, I
stumble. The trail is here one minute and gone the next. Again, I backtrack.
Again, it seems like the trail. I turn back around and follow. Is it the humanconstructed
trail or just an animal trail?

My breath shallows as my heart quickens. My palms sweat as my mind
races. I feel my way toward the creek. Trees grow denser and water seeps
into the edge of my boots. Do I charge headstrong ahead? The typical profile
of a lost person is a man between the ages of 25 and 50, because we charge
headstrong ahead. I back up. I have lost the trail, I admit. I must have missed
a switchback or something. I need to get to the other side of this creek. Do I wade
across? Do I jump? How deep and fast is the creek moving? I ask myself, Why do
people get lost and then die?

I take three deep breaths, which calms me down and helps me think. I slip
off my pack and put on all my underlayers: fleece, wool pants, down coat,
mittens, and a wool beanie. I sit down and lean against a giant ponderosa
pine. Wolves chorus in the distance, sending shivers trotting along my spine.
Moments later, my friend Jami’s words crash into my mind like a ten-car
pileup: Watch out for karmic retribution. Three friends and I conducted a
wildlife study weeks before and came across the arm of a mountain lion lying
on a frozen lake, near where wolves were basking in the sun the previous
day.

Alone and lost, I start fretting. I think about moisture rising into my
bones and envision hypothermia. I laugh at the irony because I was on my
way to a ten-day, silent Vipassana meditation retreat in the hills of northern
California. I realize that it’s going to be a long night battling my thoughts.


I have five chicken and steak tacos with cilantro, cheese, and onions left
in my pack. I ate the other five earlier. Black bears could be stirring out of
hibernation anytime and ravenous. I decide to stand up. I elect to find a tree
Gold Creek in Idaho, seen here on a clear, frigid winter morning, moves beneath lowlying
willows as it creases the open landscape.

Near here, the author found himself lost
one day. BENJAMIN ALVA POLLEY

90 Appalachia

to climb. I pick a juniper shaped like a hammock with a long, outstretched
trunk. I lean back against my pack and close my eyes and start to doze off for
about 15 minutes. Some leaves rustle across the ground. My heart quickens,
and I rise to attention. Realizing it’s just the wind, I watch the leaves dance
and then fall. I choose to hang my pack higher and away from me. I lie back a
little longer, but my mind is active now. My legs are falling asleep as I straddle
the trunk.

I eat my tacos so I don’t have to worry about bears. I know my tent and
the parking lot are both downstream, but I cannot see in the dark. I decide to
find another tree that I can climb higher. I feel my way closer to the creek and
locate a tall, straight juniper with secure hand- and footholds. I monkey up,
lock my legs around branches, and lean against the tree. I try to sleep again.
Darkness surrounds me. Stars pierce the black canopy and twinkle like
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

It is the end of winter and bone-cold.
A creek sings below me. Chimes of ice dangle from winter-brown-colored
blades of grass along the bank, like bells. It is the 10th of March. I am alone in
the Idaho wilderness, 25 feet off the ground, in a juniper tree that I climbed
for safety, like our ancestors. The tree sways back and forth: “Rock-a-bye
Benny in the treetop.”

I start to chuckle. Days before, I was in Illinois visiting my parents. I had
two duffel bags packed for the next 27 months of my life. I was going to
Morocco with the Peace Corps to teach environmental education. The first
full day I was home, I received a phone call from the private investigators of
the Peace Corps world, who said my application was under review because
I hadn’t disclosed a DUI I earned more than a decade ago. They said they
would call me back in a few hours. Hours later, they revoked my application.
Here I am, putting my life back together.

My parents had worried about my going to the Middle East, the land of
more frequent violence, but I could die right here in the Idaho wilderness.
Then reality sinks in. Nobody knows I’m here.
Giant erratic boulders lie across the stream. A four-legged
creature slithers toward me, like an apparition out of the
shadows. At first, I think it is a coyote.


SUMMER/FALL 2019 91

My senses are uberaware. I feel so alive. It is terribly cold. My scalp hurts
under my beanie. My fingers and toes throb. The cold air stings my lungs as
I inhale, and my cheeks are rosy red. When it is this cold, wilderness begins
right outside the skin. I am waiting out the darkness and anticipating the full
moon. I watch shooting stars and make wishes. Although there is no “lastminute
escape hatch into religion,” as the climber David Roberts once said, I
pray to whatever gods may be.1


Hours later, long after my legs fall asleep, the light reflecting off the moon
begins to light up the top of the hillside behind me. I still can’t see it directly.
The forest and the ground are still pitch black. I wait longer.
Why are some of us drawn to the places where existence is a
struggle? Is it some kind of search for clarity? Authenticity?


Hours before, I had pulled into the parking lot at Goldbug Hot Springs.
One other car was there. I raced the setting sun. I stuffed everything I thought
I needed for the night into my backpack: beanie, down coat, fleece, long
johns, wool pants, mittens, a couple of polypropylene shirts, sleeping bag,
sleeping pad, tent, towel, water, and the Mexican food I just bought. I can’t
forget that. I filled my pack as fast as I could. I pulled my bike off the rack and
locked it to a jackleg wooden fence. I tapped my car’s power lock button and
glanced quickly at the sign that points toward camping then took off hiking
through the dun-brown grasses of the high Palouse prairie. Giant sagebrush
peppered the landscape and Gold Creek creased the swollen, rippling land.


The day was relatively warm for mid-March. I trudged up the trail, crossing
two bridges without studying the water depth, the flow, or the speed. About
a mile in, I set up my tent, blew up my sleeping pad, laid out my sleeping
bag, and continued 2 more miles up the trail with my pack up toward the
hot springs.

The reddish-orange sun glowed like a hot coal and sank rapidly.
Vegetation was sparse along the toe slope of the foothills, but Douglas
firs, junipers, and ponderosa pines grew dense, lining the edges of the vodkaclear
stream. As I climbed higher up the switchbacks, the canyon walls were
whittled away by the creek.

Night didn’t fall but pooled in shadows behind rocks and trees, creases
and folds where it hid from the light all day. Shadows lengthened and gained
strength and slowly filled open meadows and the night sky last. I crossed


1 See “Rebelling Against the Void,” a piece about David Roberts by Brad Rassler,
outsideonline.com, October 24, 2016.

92 Appalachia


the few remaining switchbacks in the dark woods and went across the two
remaining footbridges. The air had a hint of sulfur. I was getting close.
Giant erratic boulders lay across the stream. A four-legged creature
slithered toward me, like an apparition out of the shadows. At first, I thought
it was a coyote. Then I realized it was a dog, with a man basking in a pool. A
waterfall gushed over him—Goldbug Hot Springs.


“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked. He nodded. I got the sense I had intruded
on this person’s solitary paradise. Jean-Paul Sartre’s words rang true: “Hell
is other people.” I undressed. I wadded up my clothes next to my backpack
and stepped naked down into the steamy pool that rose from the creek bed.
The sun dropped behind the horizon of a distant mountain range. Bright,
beautiful colors of mauve, peach, pink, and tangerine lit up the evening sky.
I tried to calm my anxiety after the seven-hour drive and all the stress from
the past week.

The other man dried off, gathered his things, and left with his dog. I was
left with myself and my mind.

Why do I feel the need to experience the world the way I do? I have
climbed some of the highest mountains—Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro. I didn’t
seek them out; the opportunities just arose, and I couldn’t pass them up. For
thirteen years, I camped out, as long as six months at a time, working on
backcountry trail crews in national parks and wilderness areas. I have skied
across frozen lakes, 15 miles back, carrying deer hindquarters for wolverine
studies. I lived in a remote ranger station, 4 miles from the Canadian border
in Glacier National Park for eight autumns to keep an eye out for poachers
during hunting season. There I chopped wood for heat, carried water from a
half-mile away, with grizzlies, mountain lions, and wolves right outside my
door. I sat in a fire lookout for more than 70 days in Montana’s Bob Marshall
Wilderness. I have fasted from food for days and gone on vision quests. What
am I seeking? Where is there meaning in all of this?

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to “live deliberately,” to find the
essential facts of life, and to see what he might find there. He did this to assure
himself that, when it came time to die, he would know he had lived life to
its fullest. He sought a Spartan life, one reduced to its lowest denomination.
What does that look like for me?

An hour has passed . I sit nestled in this pool, cupped and bathed
in darkness. The beauty is sublime—both terrifying and amazing. I once

SUMMER/FALL 2019 93

joked with trail crews I supervised that if I ever found myself fretting so
much about some worry on the trail that I could not pause in awe for beauty,
I might as well not be alive. But now, I cannot sit still, for my worrying. My
mind rushes with the stream. I think, I should grab my headlamp and get my
things ready. I crawl out of the pool. I pull out my towel and search for my
light, but I can’t find it. I find my lighter, set it on my towel, and go back into
the warm pools. I sit a while longer and try to relax. My mind can’t. I crawl
back out. I grab the lighter and look some more for my headlamp. My hands
come up with nothing. I set down my lighter. I look downstream where the
wall of trees is blackening like a dark alley in a city with no name. I get back
into the pools one last time, but only for a few minutes. My mind can’t take
it, and I climb back out. I dry off. My hand reaches down trying to find
purchase on my lighter—nothing.

As darkness gathers, cold air sinks. I dress. I cross the bridge and head
down the trail.

Robert Koester was largely responsible for framing the science
of understanding and predicting what people do when they get lost. He spent
a lifetime organizing search-and-rescue missions, often to locate people with
Alzheimer’s disease. Eventually, he started developing an intuitive sense of
where they likely would be found. I imagine older people walking around
their neighborhoods, their minds confused and disoriented. Is this place new
or something they see every day? The answer never comes; the lines between
ordinary and extraordinary blur. The lost people are usually found within
blocks of their daily routines, but they are profoundly lost.
He says that hikers lost in the desert act differently than do those lost in
the woods.

Why? The desert is so much more inhospitable, offering somewhere to
go but hard to navigate and nowhere to hide. In the heat of the day, mirages
haunt and taunt the mind, and logic becomes jumbled. People lost here
think, “If I abandon my clothes and extra weight, I won’t drink my water so
fast. I can go farther and faster.” They forget that night gets bitterly cold and
the days get swelteringly hot.

People who have children with them act differently than those wandering
solo. I wonder why this is so. I guess if I had children or companions with me,
I would worry about their comfort and safety, keeping them warm and alive.
Perhaps I would be quicker to find shelter or build a fire.

94 Appalachia

Most hikers fear the wrong things. People are terrified of bears, mountain
lions, rattlesnakes, scorpions, spiders, and wolves, yet the probability of
encountering one, let alone getting attacked, is minuscule. Dramatic,
unexpected changes in the weather and water crossings are much bigger
dangers. Getting lost in the mountains is where people get in the most
trouble, because finding the route is complicated by the rippling landscape.
The best thing to do, according to Koester, is to backtrack until you know
where you are. Follow a creek downstream.

I heard someone describe the trick of being able to hold two
opposing thoughts at once as being like an epistemological car crash. To give
texture and definition to life, you must embrace death. So, if heaven is here
now, then perhaps hell is here too?

I want to transcend the formulaic ideals and eclipse the romantic dream
of living close to nature. If I am searching, it’s for what is hidden and just
beyond reach. Within, they say, is where you will find answers to what this is
all about. But first I must go outside, must become lost.

I slowly climb down from my perch in the juniper, and my legs hit the
ground like a sack of bricks. I hold on to the tree for support until the blood
returns and I can stand again. I walk, mostly blind, with my arms out in front
of me. I still can’t see how deep, fast, or wide the stream is moving. But I hear
the creek’s music rushing along.

Finally, after what feels like eternity passes, the marigold moon rises high
enough to see. I shake my head and walk to the creek. It’s literally a hop, skip,
and a jump across. I pick up the trail on the other side and follow it down
a mile to my tent. For the last few remaining hours of the night, I lie there
thinking and listening to the solace outside.

Benjamin Alva Polley lives in Whitefish, Montana. He worked for more than a
decade as a trail worker, fire lookout, wildlife observer, and ranger for the National
Park Service, mostly in Glacier National Park. His writing has appeared in Esquire,
Sierra, Bugle, Canoe & Kayak, and other publications. He is senior editor of the
Whitefish Review and is writing a book about the sense of place.

Appalachia Journal:

https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/appalachia/vol70/iss1/10/

A few famous people came up to the lookout over the summer

One day my friend Sabine came up with her childhood friend Annette. Annette said she was a musician but I had no idea she was this talented. Click on the video link and watch her sing with the Blue Man Group.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vBKI3ya-l0

Another day the legendary seasonal worker Bill Hutchinson "Hutch", that worked seasonally in the park for `55 years. He came up with his friend Jeffrey LeMair. LeMair fought Sugar Ray Leonard  in 1974 and even knocked him down. In the end, he lost in a split decision.

http://www.sdshof.com/inductees/jeffrey-lemair/

My good friend Aaron Teasdale also came up and visited me for the weekend. He has somewhere around 300 publications both in writing and photography. He just won a Lowell Thomas adventure writer of the year award.

http://aaronteasdale.blogspot.com/

The summer of 2018 Greatest Photos from Scalplock Lookout.

The summer of 2018, I was fortunate enough to be stationed at Scalplock Fire Lookout in Glacier National Park. A dream of sorts following in the footsteps of many of my literary heroes including Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Doug Peacock, Edward Abbey, among many others. It was a special summer filled with magic in the air, rainbows arcing skywards, snowstorms, rainstorms, and firestorms. I spotted and called in two fires this summer.


Although, it was not my first summer working in Glacier National Park. I have been working here off and on since 2002. I worked on backcountry trail crews for 10 years in the park, with 13 years total on trail crews, I have helped with numerous wildlife studies including harlequin ducks, lynx, wolverine, mountain goat, pika, fisher and northern hawk owls. I have also volunteered at a remote ranger station for 9 falls being a presence to keep an eye out for poachers and smugglers. I have also helped map out soils in the park for Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS).

This particular lookout is not only a repeater for radio communications for the National Park but also for Montana Department of Transportation and the Forest Service and that is the reason for all of the solar panels. Scalplock Mountain is situated at a very strategic location along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, along highway 2, the railroad tracks and borders Glacier National Park and the Great Bear Wilderness.


The inside of this lookout is 17 ft x 17 ft. The lookout is used as a duty station and is not rented out to the public, although, the public can hike the 4.7 miles and climb 3,000 ft. from Walton Ranger Station to it. The views are spectacular when the haze doesn't block the viewshed.

On my first hitch starting back on June 26, there were many rainstorms and even snow falling. Fire season seemed like it wouldn't even happen with all the greenery around. The morning after precipitation fog vapor rose from the valley floor. It looks like a long slender glacier or ice field in the valley showing and reminding me what it looked like thousands of years ago when valley glaciers were forming these U-shaped valley bottoms.

Cloud vapor like this evaporating into the air can resemble smoke and is called a rain dog. This has fooled many lookouts. Watching it over time it disappears into the ether, but if it is smoke, it will continue putting off grayish color and grow or change in size.

Winter and early spring storms adorned the mountains in a tapestry of white but vanished in the short summer season. Summer temperatures grew warmer as the hours of light waxed towards solstice with longer days. This picture is looking into the Great Bear Wilderness at Grant Peak and the Great Northern mountain. The peak or ridge in the front left of the photo is Paola Ridge which on August 11 had a lightning strike that became a fire.

Meanwhile, back to the lookout life. Everything is about timing; the perfect photo, meeting a woman, working on a book, reading the right book at the right time, watching a lightning strike or looking up from reading and writing and seeing a golden eagle or peregrine falcon soar by the lookout or seeing a cow elk stroll across a meadow a mile away.

The writers Greg Peters and Aaron Teasdale came up to visit me one night. That night after dinner and drinks, we each headed to bed and Greg and Aaron were sleeping outside on the catwalk.

This photo was taken by looking at my friend Aaron Teasdale's camera. Minutes after falling asleep, Aaron said, "Hey Ben, wake up!" I looked out the window behind me and seconds after a lightning strike and the fire was already expanding up the hillside. This photo was taken later in the night after much spread. The hillsides were ripe and dry after a drought of several weeks. The snow vanished from the slopes even after a big snow year, a decent spring but wind, sun and lack of precip led to this. Many fires including Howe Ridge, Coal Creek, Numa, Heavensake and Paola all started this night.

This is looking again at the Great Northern Mountain with Grant Glacier on the left and trees torching and spotting.

Two days later, my cousins Lindsay King and her husband Hunter Kennedy hiked up to the lookout. I haven't seen Lindsay in 20 years. It was great to see them and share my little sanctuary of solitude with them even though that day the views weren't great but hazy. They came up for lunch and hung out for several hours.

In the middle of the next hitch, I was pulled from my lookout and closed it down for the year not thinking I would return. My boss prematurely ejaculated me from the lookout thinking that the Paola Ridge Fire, which was 4 miles due west could rush across the railroad tracks, Highway 2 and the Middle Fork of the Flathead River and blaze up the Scalplock Mountain and threaten my safety. It could have. He is right with the right wind, fuel type and crazy extreme red flag warning, but I was pissed. I didn't want to be put on fire and stand around for days on end and do busy work. I still had 2.7 hitches left which equal 27 days.

My fire duty assignment wasn't a terrible spot though. Matt Kennedy, Jeremy Grizz and Nate were sent on the Howe Ridge Incident. We guarded the water pumps and made sure the sprinklers kept running to protect Lake McDonald Campground. We made sure the water pump continued to run and didn't get clogged up from larch needles in the lake.

 We took boat rides each of the three days to get to and from work. Burning snags were falling all around the campground. We heard ones fall every few minutes. We protected the campground, but the whole ridge behind it and north was charred. The strange thing was this area burned during the Roberts Fire in 2003. Open flame was everywhere, but the campground was wet and moist from the sprinklers.


Meanwhile, I spent the remainder of my ten-day hitch working 3 days on Howe Ridge Incident or at the fire cache, which was a joke being on initial attack and acting busy for 3 days. That was hell. Luckily, my boss allowed me to go back up to my station after this 10-day shift. I spent 3 days at the lookout, then 3 days on Howe Ridge, then 2 days at fire cache, then went with Buck, and Katie up to Apgar Lookout to "winterize it," then went out with Scott Lang and Katie to do Burn Plot surveys in the north fork. Then got lucky and was sent up to my lookout for one last 10-day stint.

Here I am with Buck Hasson up at Apgar Lookout. He saved me. I was feeling like a caged animal, sitting around, getting depressed, being of no use at the cache and then we went hiking up to the lookout to "winterize it." Katie from fire effects felt the same way. I was unleashed and motored up to the lookout in a little over an hour and wasn't even moving that fast but it felt so freeing.

Back up at Scaplock Lookout, different insect hatches happen at different temperature gradients. Winged ants hatched whenever the temperature was in the 80s. They hatched, mated and died off. What a life. Where there is beauty there is always hardship, such is life.

Numerous helicopters flew up to the lookout throughout the summer. I still have never ridden on one, but the radio guy Jimmy came up multiple times to work on the Parkwide frequency at the lookout to no luck. He rode up at least 4 times in choppers. Speak about the easy way up instead of hiking like I did each time I came up. I would like to ride in one sometime but would rather hike up for the exercise and the ability to earn my way up to the lookout. Daytime temps were in the 80s at the beginning of the hitch and like summer, the nights were cold and in the 30s like winter and vegetation outside was playing Autumn's Symphony as far as colors. This hitch ended last Thursday on September 13.

Some days, the Paola Ridge put up plumes if it got enough direct sunlight and the right fuels.

My good friend Nate and his six-year-old son Lander hiked up to the mountain for a night. I am really proud of Lander because I don't think I climbed my first mountain until around the age of 19 or 20. This is us enjoying elk biscuits and gravy for breakfast at the picnic table.

Fire in the sky.A tequila sunrise. Looking towards Elk, Little Dog and Summit Mountains near Marias Pass.

 Lenticular clouds like sedimentary rock stacked upon each other.

Fire in the sky with fire on the mountain. Open flames with a tree torching.

A plume of smoke swirls with big cottony cumulous clouds.

A ruffed grouse sits perched on a rock overlooking the Autumn Symphony of color.

The final night at the lookout I received a trace of rain and snow above. The snowline was a 7500 ft. The lookout sits at 6919. The dramatic uplift of St. Nicholas stands in the background on the right. The lighting and colors were unbelievable and a grand season finale. Thank you Glacier National Park, Scalplock Mountain, Montana and life itself for another spectacular season of my life.

visual/audio tour of lookout

https://www.facebook.com/benjamin.polley.1/videos/10212084966459321/

FATAL BEAUTY

FATAL BEAUTY

Benjamin Alva Polley

©

 

 

The fatal beauty of Glacier National Park and other places of grandeur are places revered yet loved to death. Why do we kill that which we love? Why are these places just another place to check off of our lists? So we can say, “Hey, been there, done that. I slayed the Glac!”

In our ever-increasing bucket list of places to go and people to see, why does it always become more pertinent to look at those places that are disappearing and dying? Scientists predict the 22 remaining glaciers in the park to be gone by 2030. That gives us 12 years. “Must see the glaciers before they’re gone.” 

We are all guilty of these pleasures. We load up the kids and the gear in the car, hop a freight, jump on the next plane, in whatever gas-guzzling contraption that will get us there to the Going-to-the-Sun Road. So we can drive up the steep, serpentine, death-defying, engineering feat and say, “Hey, we did Glacier.” If we are lucky, we get out of the death contraption and smell the trees and flowers and hike the trails. But, let’s face it, folks, most people don’t.

How often do we stop and think in our must-see craze that we are all contributing to the death of beauty and glaciers? Too often, the thought comes too late in a reactive reminisce and longing for nostalgia and the good old days of what should have been and could have been.

We are all guilty of it — I am. I moved out here to Montana because of Glacier National Park and being offered a job building backcountry trails in 2002. I just find it interesting and especially now that the park is not only getting busier but the last three years all have had over 3 million visitors and is breaking visitation records from the previous year. Last July, Glacier had more visitors than Yellowstone did in the same month. In 2011, the park was barely getting a million tourists for a single season. Social media is the main contributor to the people flocking to national parks. Everybody including me is posting selfies in wild places next to wild animals. 

 

In our ever-growing need to see and conquer, we are also killing beauty. The other day, I heard an interesting study on Montana Public Radio that Joshua Tree National Park in California, is undergoing the same fate. People are flocking to see Joshua trees, but the Joshua trees are migrating north out of the park due to climate change, a warming planet and are getting too warm there for their liking just like the glaciers disappearing. Will future generations have to change the names of both parks; "The National Park formally known as Glacier" and "The National Park that formally had Joshua Trees"?

Meanwhile, on another note, most people in this country have heard of the famous naturalist, John Muir. He is considered by many the father and forebear of the National Park System. This essay is not about John Muir and his crusted bread in his pocket or about his sic beard, but about another naturalist that most people aren’t familiar with. His name was John Burroughs.

Burroughs was 20 years Muir’s senior, and in fact, he looked up to him. Burroughs was a naturalist, writer and conservationist and a dear friend of president Teddy Roosevelt. Side note, Burroughs was also good friends with Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau as well and actually wrote biographies about a few of them.

John Burroughs and John Muir butted heads and didn’t agree with the latter’s vision of setting aside and protecting National Parks. They argued with each other over this but more importantly listened to what the other person was saying. Burroughs warned Muir that if we partition off protected areas throughout the country that people will ignore the near-at-hand (their own backyards) for that which is far away and held on a pedestal. People will flock to these places and ignore their own towns, cities, counties, states, and regions in favor of the untamed West and places untrammeled.

Looking over the past century and at what is now happening, John Burroughs’ words resound true with a new clarion call. This is exactly where we find ourselves. We are loving places of beauty to death. I am not condemning John Muir or his vision, and in fact, I would have done the same thing, if given that opportunity to save them from industry and an economic system that believes in growth for the sake growth, which is similar to the philosophy of a cancer cell. We can't have infinite growth in a finite world. It's not possible and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you to fatten their pockets. I am very pleased that we have protected areas and public lands, but we also need to adhere to the wisdom of Burroughs by re-beautifying and re-wilding our cityscapes, our counties, our states and our regions. As a challenge I am asking Can We Genuinely Make America Great Again before the beautifully protected places are choked with smog, congestion, clogged with traffic jams, buried under asphalt, developed or slain to build more parking for the masses?

Together, we can beautify and rewild this lovely country and planet of ours. It is just too bad the beauty is a double-edged sword that helps our economy but also kills beauty and what we cherish most as a nation.

Boundaries

Holy Cow! Home Sweet Home! Look at this place.

 There are no lines drawn on this landscape. No boundaries separating the right from the left. Animals, birds, clouds, fish and insects move freely from one drainage valley to the next. The sun, the moon, the stars and even the rain shine or fall equally on this whole place. So why, all this division and hatred and infighting?

To borrow and alter a few words from the poet mystic Rumi, Out beyond good and evil or pointing fingers at the right or the left, there is a landscape. I will meet you there.

Out beyond the cavernous chasm called polarity separating and swallowing our country’s men and women, there is a place called ‘America’ that unifies us all. And who are we kidding, even beyond the idea of country, there is the world, the planet, the universe and life that really unifies us all even more beyond silly political affiliations.

Politicians benefit from dividing us and letting us fight. We fight so much amongst ourselves and are distracted by subtlest subtlety, while the 1% get away with billions and the rest of us, the 99% fight over their crumbs.

The only place I see lines drawn and grids mapped out are on physical maps drawn out by developers. This landscape has a few private inholdings but the majority of it is managed by two agencies who work for us. The National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. Although, they are managed differently. The first is managed for scenery, wildlife and the future generations. The other is managed for multiple use. Either way, “this land is our land, from the redwoods of California to the New York Island.” It doesn’t say only for the wealthy but for all of us.

Cheers to open spaces, public lands, places that unify us!

This land belongs to you and me. Public lands are such a great idea.

As Mark Twain said so long ago, “The land is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, the thing to watch over and care for.”
 

The government might manage these public lands differently but let us not forget the government is us and is made of people like us. Let’s not let the one percenters divy up, privatize, develop or sell these beautiful lands to industry. Future generations have a right to see, behold and cherish these places.

This land belongs to you and me.