Since the early 2000s, I largely shifted away from writing my own work and toward helping others with their work as an editor and ghostwriter. Consequently, my writing samples are from my younger days.
The Deadly Bells
This is the first draft of an article I wrote for National Geographic Adventure, which published it in the late 1990s. Although it is dated, I include it as an example of how I write drama.
I flashed my headlamp on the two climbers. The pretty blond girl sat in her partner's lap. He restrained her as she kicked and struggled, shouting and mumbling gibberish.
One thought, one terrible, dominant thought: Shit. Brain injury. This girl is going to die on me.
I could hear Scott Vold slowly ascending the couloir below me in the dark, his climbing hardware clinking and the muffled "chunk" of his ice ax slamming into the wet, rotten snow. We had climbed through the evening and into the August night. Eleven years earlier, Greg Mace -- president of our team, Mountain Rescue-Aspen -- had died from a fall just like the one this girl had taken. Had died right about here, in fact. His partner told me how he had felt when he reached the dying man: "I was filled with dread and foreboding."
Yeah. Me too.
These kids were in their early 20s, and until a few hours ago they'd had their whole, glittering lives to look forward to. "Hi, Eric," I said.
"Oh, man," replied Eric Schmela, shivering uncontrollably. "Am I glad to see you."
"I'm glad to see you, too."
I worked my way across the couloir to the bergschrund, a muddy gash 12,900 feet up the east face of South Maroon Peak. A few miles away the rich and anonymous were pushing back from Aspen's best restaurant tables and ordering an after dinner Armagnac.
Eric sat on a small, mud ledge, his hands clasped around Hillary's waist. Over the course of the summer the snow had melted away from this ledge; I stood on old snow five feet above them. Between us was a gap that dropped a dozen feet into a narrow snow and rock crevice that curled under the ice. For nearly seven hours Eric had sat here with Hillary in his lap. The semi-conscious girl struggled like an angry drunk against her swollen brain and against Eric, who fought to keep her from sliding into that hungry, waiting hole.
With a clatter of gear I leapt the crack and landed heavily next to them. We shared a wet, sloping space the size of a large couch: the bergschrund and a snow wall on one side, a loose rock cliff on the other. We perched on a vertical mile of rock as loose as broken crockery. Soon the temperature would drop below freezing.
I keyed the radio in my chest pack, calling Mountain Rescue-Aspen's radio room a dozen miles away. I couldn't keep the fear out of my voice. "We're with two hypothermic subjects," I said. "One apparent head injury. Stand by for a medical.
In the crowded radio room, MRA president Scott Messina acknowledged and released the microphone key. Hillary's father stood beside him, his face hard with fear. None of the other rescuers listening in the radio room said much. Everyone now was afraid.
+++
Zack Merritt, Hillary Trish and Eric Schmela had departed on a crystalline dawn and hiked three miles to the base of South Maroon Peak, a mountain considered (along with adjacent North Maroon) among Colorado's most dangerous summits. Peak baggers, determined to climb all 54 of Colorado's Fourteeners, assault the Bells by the hundreds each summer. They expose themselves to rotten, untrustworthy rock and steep, icy slopes where one misstep can be fatal. Sometimes it is. Over the decades a score of mountaineers have died on what a trailhead sign labelled "the deadly Bells," victims of avalanches or rockfall or of simply peeling off the mountain.
At the base of the Southeast Couloir snowfield the trio encountered a problem: Hillary's borrowed crampons kept falling off her soft boots.
Eric had climbed on Denali in Alaska; Zack had summitted many of the area's Fourteeners. Hillary's climbing experience on snow was limited to an expedition two years earlier on the lower-angle slopes of nearby Castle Peak. Among them, only Zack had done the Southeast Couloir.
High school sweethearts, Zack and Hillary were among Aspen's golden children. They were not rich kids, but they were raised in gloriously privileged environs, tilling the gilded Aspen lives of the white, youthful and athletic. They were tall and young and terribly beautiful in a heart-breaking way that makes older generations understand the inexorable ascendancy of those who come behind.
They were not foolhardy. They were confident, for their lives had been an exercise in confidence, in the firm handshake, the well-placed hold, the fall line. They believed in themselves.
They decided Eric and Zack would kick steps in the snow with their hard alpine boots for Hillary. Everyone would use an ice ax for stability, and no one would wear crampons. If they felt they were getting over their heads, they'd back down. They began to ascend the snowfield at the base of the Southeast Couloir. The slope here lies at a gentle 18 degrees; it tops out 2,200 feet higher at a vertiginous 50 degree angle. "We were very cautious about it," insists Zack, who is thoughtful and unremittingly earnest but, months later, vague about many details. There were no mistakes, he insists. It was only an accident.
They reached the 13,500-foot saddle atop the Southeast Couloir and rested their aching calves. A scramble up the loose rock along the south ridge brought them to the 14,014-foot summit. Returning to the saddle around one, the trio ate lunch and discussed their descent.
"We wanted to finish the climb the way we went up," Eric says, explaining why they avoided a longer, less dangerous descent route. "To do it right."
On shallower snow slopes Zack had taught Hillary to roll atop her ax and get her weight over it, so that the pick would dig into the snow and arrest a fall. A falling climber on a steep slope has only a moment to self-arrest before the mountain owns him.
They descended as they had climbed, without crampons, but now they faced away from the mountain, plunging their heels stiff-legged into the mush of wet corn snow. Zack dropped quickly over the lip where the cornice rolls from 30 degrees to 50. Hillary and Eric proceeded more cautiously; despite her initial enthusiasm, Hillary was having second thoughts. But Zack was already 30 feet below them, trucking confidently down the chute
Without warning the soft snow gave out beneath Eric's feet. He dropped his body's length before he was able to self-arrest. He and Hillary were on the steepest pitch now. "I'm really, really scared," Hillary said. "I don't know if I can do this at all."
Just take it slowly, Eric replied. Then he heard her: "Oh, God, no, no, no!" He grabbed for her as she slid by. He yelled to Zack. She rolled onto her stomach, attempting a self-arrest.
"She was moving like a sled with weight in it," Eric said. Zack lunged for her. As he did, she began to cartwheel. She slammed into the rocks flanking the right side of the chute, just as Greg Mace had done 11 years before. "You could just hear her body thump on the rock," says Eric. After that, she didn't seem like a person. She flew through the air like a doll.
Hillary vanished around a corner. Screaming, risking the same fate, Zack glissaded after her. Eric, terrified, turned to face the mountain. He sank his own ax shaft deep into the snow and held on.
Everyone now was afraid.
+++
Across the valley on the flanks of Pyramid Peak, at 2:32 on the sunny afternoon of August 15, 1997, mountaineer Charlie Perkins lowered his binoculars, picked up his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1. The connection was bad; the dispatcher understood little, only the words "fallen climber" and "South Maroon Peak."
I met Scott Vold at the Mountain Rescue cabin on Aspen's Main Street. Maybe we had a fallen climber. Maybe we didn't. Bad communication and misinformation are standard in the rescue business. Our task was to keep our adrenaline in check and investigate while the ponderous rescue machine ground to life.
Mountain rescue in real life isn't like the movies. It takes hours. Or days. It depends on volunteers who have other lives and commitments. Decisions are made by the sheriff with an eye toward his budget. Scott and I took a hike that afternoon not because we were the best, or the most appropriate, but because we were available.
Scott was a good partner, on the team a couple of years then. He seemed to think I knew what I was doing even when I didn't. I appreciated that about him. As an Emergency Medical Technician, he'd handle the medical stuff. I appreciated that, too. I like the logistics of rescue, and the challenge, and I don't even mind finding dead people. But the kicking and screaming ones, they play with my head.
Rushing inevitably sets rescue work back, so we tried to go fast by going slow. At the trailhead we repacked. Scott grabbed a Whisperlite stove, a sleeping bag and a Thermarest pad. We had spent a miserable night on a cliff a few weeks earlier, trying to reach a climber with a broken leg. If we were going to spend another evening on the ground, he was determined to be comfortable.
As the last of the day's tourists trickled out of the trails around Maroon Lake, I stopped to snap a picture for a pair of Japanese students. We sat in the grass with binoculars and spotting scope, scanning the 2,200-foot Southeast Couloir, but saw nothing extraordinary.
Zack was exhausted and wild-eyed when he met us 10 minutes later, having slid, stumbled, run and cried almost to the trailhead. His girlfriend, he said, had taken a tumbling fall. She was spitting blood and seemed to be in shock. Their partner, an EMT, remained with her. Coincidentally, I knew Zack and Eric. As Zack spoke I could feel the adrenaline. The thrill was as palpable as a bungee jump, as addictive as heroin. You want an extreme sport? Try this, bub: Save the damsel in distress.
Scott and I climbed for four hours as evening filled the valley. At 11,300 feet I scouted a potential landing zone. The ground wasn't flat here, just less steep. Perhaps a pilot could set a helicopter down. Night gained on us. High in the Southeast Couloir, I could see the reflection of a headlamp.
When I reached Eric and Hillary they had been in the same position since mid-afternoon. "I started thinking that she wouldn't make it through to morning," Eric said later, "but I was convinced: I'm not going to let her die. I'll sit here until I freeze to death if that's going to help her. But after a while it kept going through my mind how I'd tell Zack, that, you know, I did everything."
Eric had made a critical decision. After convincing an argumentative Zack to seek help, Eric realized Hillary was having trouble breathing. He had no idea if she had broken her neck or back (in fact, she had broken both), but he couldn't wait to find out. "I knew the first thing I had to do was keep her alive, and I knew that may mean paralyzing her if I sat her up," he says. "It was hard, but it wasn't hard for very long. I pictured her years later being unable to walk. I said, 'Sorry,' and picked her up and put her in my lap.
Like an inmate counting the days, Eric poked a hole in the snow with his finger each time Hillary passed out. When I arrived there were 26 holes. When she was semi-conscious she had fought him, throwing her hat and helmet in the crevasse, screaming for her mother, for Zack, or just screaming. Knowing that the best thing he could do was keep her warm and breathing, Eric put all he had into it.
"Falling!"
I spun to see Scott sliding on his stomach. He threw himself on his ax and stopped. He began to climb again. I began to breathe again. The Cardinal Rescue Rule: Save me first, save my buddy second, save the victim third. That little slip scared me. Everything up here scared me: The shitty rock, the shitty snow, the struggling girl, the resident ghost, my own inadequacy in the face of this disaster. There was nothing to do except everything.
Scott is one of a class of rescuers who live for hands-on work with victims. He clattered onto our little ledge and turned his attentions to Hillary. "It never even crossed my mind that she could die," Scott recalled. "That didn't even occur to me." Like a man attending a birth, I began to heat water. Scott and Eric would take care of Hillary; I would take care of them and try to hold back the night.
Hillary was unresponsive. Her eyes did not track; her respirations were uneven. Scott struggled for a radial or carotid pulse, unable to ascertain much except that her injuries were multiple and bad. The one thing that would have done her head injury at least some good -- oxygen -- we had not brought. As it was, we carried 60 pounds each.
We knew Hillary fell between 400 and 600 feet. We did not know she suffered a broken skull, broken cervical vertebra, three broken thoracic vertebrae (and complete muscle separation from all of them), a broken clavicle, dislocated shoulder, broken hip, broken pelvis and a brain injury.
The balance of the mission now gained momentum. A second team, burdened by weight and darkness, was below us with the equipment we needed to lower Hillary down the snowfield.
We wrestled her into Scott's sleeping bag. She punched Scott in the head. "Fuckin' A," he murmured. She grabbed my neck, her grip scary and strong. Her bruised brain threw fists and curses; all we could do was take it. We got her on Scott's Thermarest pad and tucked Nalgene bottles of hot water in her clothes. She calmed, then slept. She even snored. The frigid sky enveloped us, clear and calm. Had it been raining or snowing, at least one of the golden children would be dead by now.
Team 2, unable to climb safely, bivouacked 1,700 feet below. At 1 a.m. I pulled my sleeping pad out of my pack and promptly fumbled it irretrievably into the hole at my feet. Eric and Scott huddled together beside Hillary, trying to share a foil space blanket. At the rescue cabin, Scott Messina lay down on the floor to sleep. A score of volunteers tossed and turned before a pre-dawn start.
I climbed inside my now-empty backpack. If I fell asleep I would pitch into the bergschrund. So I warmed the radio batteries against my skin and watched the cosmic parade around the polar star. I worried about my wife. Perhaps, once or twice, I heard the voice of Greg Mace. I expected him, after all. Or perhaps I only wanted to hear him, for the solace or the wisdom he might bring. In the abysses of the night the fears I had pushed away returned to nestle beside me on our muddy ledge. Scott cried quietly, not from fear, but frustration at the overwhelming inadequacy of our effort. Eric, a rescue veteran of another Colorado team, stoically felt his feet go numb. Each of us pulled a few demons from the grab bag of our souls and diddled with them in the night.
At 4:30 we began heating water bottles again for Hillary. At precisely 6 a.m. an Air National Guard Blackhawk Medevac helicopter lifted off from Aspen's airport. My wife, fitfully asleep four miles from the airport in our bed, sat bolt upright, her heart pounding in syncopation as the helicopter reverberated against the dawn. "It was the only sound," she said. "And I knew where it was going."
The bird came in at eye level, angry and terrible before the kindling east. The machine passed slowly before us, spewing wind and heat from its jet engines, then departed. The sun bruised the lip of the sky. Team 2 began slogging up the couloir. Additional teams started up the trail, bearing snow anchors, oxygen, Gatorade.
Working around helicopters -- "a 12,000 horsepower Cuisinart," someone once called them -- is exceedingly dangerous. Doing so in mountainous terrain with a pilot we don't know is triply so. I had requested the dawn fly-by include Bob Zook or Scott Messina on board, two experienced Mountain Rescue mountaineers who would understand the limitations of our situation when they saw it. But neither rode; instead a non-climber, Pitkin County emergency services coordinator Steve Crockett, made the flight.
We needed manpower and equipment. The men and women in the radio room decided at least to get us equipment, since Team 2 was moving very slowly. The Blackhawk returned, dangling a gear-filled haul bag from the winch boom.
"You've got to put it right in my hands," I radioed Crockett. "We can't take a step."
Rotorwash blew straight down upon us at 80 miles per hour; radio communication was impossible. Scott and I gripped the cliff and awaited the bag. Eric threw himself atop a screaming Hillary to protect her from rockfall. The descending bag began to swing in an increasing, horrifying arc. I tried to wave the bird off but the bag kept coming. Our bad situation was now deadly. The bag hit the cliff, bounced, swung, hit again. Rocks tumbled past us on either side. At last, the Blackhawk pulled slowly away. Crockett wanted to try again.
"Put it right on top of me," I reiterated. The screaming machine came to rest above us. The bag swung. Worse this time, it careened across the cliffs overhead, sweeping a pair of bowling-ball rocks down on us.
"Watch it!" I grabbed Scott's shoulder and swung behind him as one caromed past my hip. A second passed between Scott and Eric. Frantically, I waved the bird off.
Eric lay face down across Hillary. It was heroic, and I didn't want any heroes. Heroes die. Any of those rocks could have killed him; he never would have seen it coming. At last the Blackhawk pulled away, dangling the battered haul bag.
"Jesus fucking Christ," I said to nobody. Besides being scared, now I was pissed off, too. My voice was shaking. My whole body was shaking. The situation had gotten completely out of hand -- my fault, Crockett's fault, the fault of the people in the radio room. We were too goal-oriented, too willing to overlook the fact we could have killed somebody for a bag of rope. We'd nearly broken the Cardinal Rule again.
The radio crackled: "Get that thing out of here, and keep it away from us." It was the team leader below us. At least somebody out here was thinking
At 8 a.m. John Zell came over the snow wall and onto the mud couch. The last of my demons retreated into the crevice at my feet to join the hats, gloves, helmets, foam pad and cookstove we had lost in there. We wrestled Hillary into a neck brace, a back brace and a "human burrito" plastic sled. We heaved the whole rig -- tied to an uphill anchor system -- onto the snow. John clipped into the litter and began the slow process of lowering Hillary down the slope as his teammates paid out rope through a brake.
A rope shortage delayed everything; we needed almost four hours to descend 1,700 feet to the landing zone. On the last few yards, Scott and I, now helped by a dozen others, grabbed the litter and pulled it to the end of the snow field. A teammate hugged me and handed me a liter of Gatorade. Scott hugged me. The Blackhawk touched its nose wheels to the slanting ground. Hillary was gone in a diminishing thrum of rotors.
"I took my pack off and sat down," says Scott, "and I had this overwhelming sense of joy. At that point I knew I had done my job as a Mountain Rescue person. My proudest moment was to be part of that rescue."
***
Hillary Trish's rescue was accomplished by dozens of dedicated volunteers. She was hospitalized for two weeks and underwent extensive physical and mental therapy. She does not remember her fall or the 10 days following. Despite doctors' insistence that she would not be able to return to Skidmore College for her senior year, she was back at school in October. She graduated the spring of 1998 Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude.
Her brain injury, a frontal lobe contusion, changed her personality. "I let things roll off a lot better [before] than I can now," Hillary says of her newfound emotions. "It feels like somebody foreign is in my body and I do not know how to react."
When men or women do something good and right and pure, I choke up and turn away. Sitting with Hillary and Zack on a June Aspen evening, drinking iced tea and eating quesadillas, I remember what I have known, and will always know, and I get one of those throat-tightening moments. This is the best work I have ever done in my life. It may be the best I will ever do. That would be all right.
###
Saved by Wolves
This is an essay I wrote for the 2004 anthology Comeback Wolves: Western Writers Welcome the Wolf Home (Johnson Books). I include it as an example of how I write in a more thoughtful essayist’s voice.
On June 7, 2004, a two-year-old female gray wolf turned up dead in Colorado along the side of Interstate 70. The wolf, apparently killed by a speeding vehicle as she tried to cross the four lanes west of Idaho Springs, was simply doing what wolves do. She’d left her Yellowstone pack in January and headed south, seeking terrain, food, a mate. She found her end on a highway that biologists have called “a Berlin Wall for wildlife,” a deep incision across the central Rockies that creates extraordinary problems for migratory species that don’t possess wings. Her demise was an individual tragedy, but it represents hope for a species. Hope for wolves, yes, but the species I have in mind is human beings.
The unplanned return of the gray wolf to Colorado is a reminder—as if we needed another in this era of cracking droughts, vanishing pine forests, and billowing dust storms—that we don’t control nature to the degree we once thought we did. This dawning realization comes late, but perhaps not too late. Humility is a fine and necessary thing.
There was an era, its center of gravity situated in the 1950s, when Americans felt that technology was an unalloyed good, that our future would be one of technological triumph over the vicissitudes of messy, inefficient nature. In this naïve, halcyon time, we were as close in our minds to the world represented by Buck Rogers and George Jetson as we likely ever will be. As we’ve discovered in the intervening half-century, life didn’t quite turn out the way Madison Avenue promised during the Eisenhower administration. It is as complex, messy, and uncertain as it ever was—arguably more so.
Much of what passes for news these days dwells upon the Hobbesian elements of our present circumstances, the distracting but meaningless (at least to the larger society) car crashes and homicidal rampages; the perpetual war; the continuing assault on our planet’s life support systems. If any analysis is attempted of these disjointed events, it is a narrow interpretation that considers no more than the implications of a particular development on Our American Way of Life.
But there are other aspects to this world’s complexity, less likely to end up on the ten o’clock news but infinitely more worthy of our attention, and these cause me to be thrilled to be alive in this age of rediscovery. We live in a horrible, frightening time. But the Enlightenment probably was terrifying, too, at least when viewed from the cheap seats. You see, I am convinced, at least on my better days, that we are on the cusp of a second Renaissance.
It is probably impossible to understand the import of events, in particular those that shift the direction of history, while they are under way. Only in hindsight does what happened become clear. But I believe we are experiencing an extraordinary awakening. Beginning with the writings of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson in the mid-twentieth century, Americans have slowly embraced the complexity of the world around us. We have come to understand the ideas of ecology and ecosystems, and to see the wisdom in Leopold’s rephrasing of God’s instructions to Noah when he wrote that “the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the pieces.” Pieces, species—we’ve got a pretty good grip by now on what he (and He) were talking about.
“Ecology,” said Barry Lopez, “is the study of the coherence of community.” Our understanding of ecology has informed our understanding of the larger world—which, of course, has an ecology of its own. We have come to see on the geopolitical level that relationships matter. A lot. We have come to see on the molecular level that subatomic particles are defined by their relationships. We have learned that the genetic map of a genome turns out to be little more than a rough sketch of the profoundly mysterious skein of relationships between genes and the individuals they shape. We have come to embrace chaos theory, to understand—albeit very imperfectly—that the wings of a butterfly can, indeed, generate a hurricane.
I use the term “we” advisedly, for I know that I’m writing about only a portion of America, a portion of the world. The truth is, only some of the world accepts these facts, this zeitgeist. Even as millions of people are embracing the complexity of the world, millions more are pulling back into a hard place ramparted by human constructions of value. Theirs is a world of divisions and distinctions: black and white, man and nature, good and evil. It is a world defined not by relationships, but by separateness. It is an understandable world; who isn’t terrified on a daily basis by the complexity and entropy around us? Many people prefer the security of a rigid belief system that, like an ideological air purifier, filters out the ambiguity and challenges to our values and strictures. In an increasingly complex world, simplicity has great appeal.
America has been shaped by simple ideas, among them that the land was put here by God for us (that is, recent immigrants) to use for human benefit. And so those things that stood in our way—native peoples, wolves and bears, droughts and mountains—we overcame. This was a wonderfully simple approach, and it lent itself admirably to the creation of simple and powerful national myths of conquest. Lately, the facts have been intruding on these nice stories, as they are wont to do (just as a wolf can intrude upon a state’s inchoate plans to manage it). Drought—the sort of drought the West has seen before, albeit not for a long time—is reshaping the landscape. All the faith in Manifest Destiny and all the assertions that rain follows the plow couldn’t keep farmers on the High Plains. Those lands are going back to bison and prairie whether we like it or not. In retrospect, we might as well have had faith that the sky is green; it would have had about the same effect.
Yet still in the West there is a powerful, fundamentalist strain that battles nature (and what better foe than the big bad wolf?), that is committed to turning it to man’s will, that fails to see that for man to act against nature is to act against himself. Such a struggle is, for many, a biblically mandated one. It is a fight, and the language and symbolism and imagery, from the violence of children’s games of cowboys-and-Indians to the modern rodeo, is about that fighting. But nature is saying—not only through the thousand empty towns of the High Plains, not only in the dusty flanks of Lake Powell, but also in the tracks of a lone wolf that came sniffing down through Colorado not long ago—that I am here to be reckoned with on my own terms, and that you, Man, are part of me. You and I, we have a relationship.
The great struggle of our era is between fundamentalism and liberalism, meaning the Lockean-Jeffersonian sort of liberalism. This point is emphasized every day in the headline summaries of conflicts from the Bible Belt to Baghdad. A closely related, less remarked battle is being waged in the lands of the American West, and that is the struggle between simplicity and complexity. That’s not to say it is a struggle between simple worlds and complex ones, but between seeing the world as simple, and accepting that it is complex. We Americans, we want our world black-and-white. We grew on Bonanza and Shane and The Rifleman, and we liked what their comfortable parables told us: There was right and wrong, good and evil, crops and weeds, and it was both easy to tell the difference and moral to act upon it. Lately, though, we’ve been coming to understand that the reality is a more like that portrayed in Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s masterful evocation of gunslinger ambiguity.
+++
And so enter the lone gray wolf, harbinger of its kind. What are we to make of this? How are we to respond to it? The wolf is no harmless songbird. Even before the fabulist Brothers Grimm put quill to paper, the wolf has been crucified in our culture’s art and literature. Lately it has been reformed in some circles and given a new guise, championed as charismatic megafauna worthy of calendar photography. We have defined and redefined the wolf, but who owns the wolf? The question seems absurd, like asking who owns the wind or the river. Before the United States existed, the peoples who inhabited the American land didn’t even recognize the idea of land ownership. The wolf existed on its own terms, for its own reasons, as all things did. That era is long gone, though, replaced by one in which we have not only private property rights but the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and so the question must be asked and answered. And the answer is that the public owns the wind and the river, and the wolf. All of us own the wolf, just as all of us own the air we breathe and the water we drink. We depend on the air and water; that much we know. But we depend on the wolf, too, and we have a right and an obligation and a need to defend the wolf as we defend the air and water—for our own good, not simply for the wolf’s.
Scholars have suggested that man did not domesticate the wolf; the wolf may have chosen man as a companion and hunting mate, setting the genus Lupus on a course that culminated in the Westminster Dog Show. We and wolves enjoy the oldest of human-animal relationships, and it is mined with the pitfalls of vestigial memory. The wolf is not a simple thing—not in its needs or expressions, nor in its relationship to human culture. And so, again, how are we to react to its return to Colorado? The tide of history and our expanding knowledge offer only one honest and self-serving option: We must embrace the complexity the wolf represents. When I consider the wolf I see within it the apotheosis of an entire ecosystem, represented in a dark and elusive form on four swift paws—the expression of a full web of life, from the nematodes to the fungus to the vole, from the vulture to the pine beetle to the mule deer. The wolf’s thriving signals that much is right with the broader world upon which it depends.
But there is more to it than that. The wolf is good for us—good for human beings, and not simply in a squishy, feel-good way. Eric Freyfogle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, argues a compelling case for why a healthy land—by which he means healthy ecosystems—is good for people. First, we depend on it. All the fundamentalist and simplifying arguments in the world cannot contravene the fact that people depend on nature for their existence, and that the depth of the biotic composition and richness of ecological functions are directly related not only to our physical well-being but to our continuing economic success. Unbalanced ecosystems—signaled to us by poisoned topsoil on industrial farms, estuarine dead zones killed by runoff, lakes sterilized by acid rain—are more than biological tragedies. They are human tragedies, too. Such failures of our collective imagination and will (which is what pollution and land degradation represent) cost jobs, lives, and cold hard cash.
Second, there is a moral imperative to embrace and defend the health of the land and all its native species. Nature is intrinsically valuable. We are told this through our religious texts—Noah’s story is among the first we learn—through numberless scientific studies, and through what the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson has called our innate “biophilia,” or love of all things living. We depend on life. All life depends on life.
Third, all of nature is valuable, even to the most utilitarian among us, simply because we are not wise enough to understand what, if any, is expendable. There was a time less than a century ago when a conservationist as thoughtful as Aldo Leopold embraced the idea that eliminating predators would help deer populations in northern Arizona. The result was a nightmare—not only for the predators (including wolves), which were hunted ruthlessly, but for the deer and the forests upon which they depended. The deer quickly overpopulated their range, stripping the land of anything remotely edible, then died en masse of starvation. The less we understand (and we understand little), the more we must embrace the precautionary, quasi-religious strategy of proceeding with humility. We must keep all the pieces. The act of doing so is our best insurance that nature—including us first and foremost—will thrive.
+++
I have often envied the American men and women who fought World War II and rebuilt the world in its aftermath—not for their battlefield heroics or home-front privations, but for their vision and sense of possibility. They had saved the world, after all. In the quiet years following the war they lived, perhaps more than any other generation, in an era of seemingly unlimited possibility. The world of Buck Rogers and George Jetson seemed achievable, even inevitable. There was a can-do sense about them, and so they built the great dams and highways of the West, threw up cities in the desert, flew higher and faster than ever before. They even sent men to the moon.
Who would imagine doing such things now? President George W. Bush proposed a manned mission to Mars, but the idea had the feel of a throwaway line at a cocktail party. It got the obligatory day in the headlines, then vanished. We live now in a time of fear, of getting by, keeping our heads down and hoping for the best. Our expansive, inclusive national vision seems to have disintegrated into a landscape of gated communities, defensive driving, cultural balkanization, and mutual suspicion.
But I continue to think we live in a hopeful of time, and that the defining chance for greatness has been laid at our doorstep. I thrill at the idea of the wolf because it is a beckoning thing. Come, says the wolf. I am the totem of your calling, a summons to launch the ecological renaissance. Our grandparents rebuilt the post-war world as their era needed it to be. Now, we must rebuild it again, as we need it to be, not as the world of black-and-white concepts and separateness upon which so much American myth has been piled.
Wallace Stegner hoped the West would develop “a society to match its scenery.” The time has come finally to understand the land upon which we have made ourselves, and to throw ourselves into the work of creating a landscape worthy of the nation. They are the same, the society and the scenery, the pas de deux of the American West, indeed the American nation. The sooner we understand that, the sooner we will recognize that the wholeness of the land is the root upon which the richness of the people feeds.
This is the new renaissance, a renaissance of the land. The wolf sings it into being. The wolf is all the connections of the land, and that includes our connection, too. As we make room for the wolf we take another step toward embracing the complexity of the world—the glorious, magical complexity that is the expression of God in all things—and we begin to stitch ourselves into the fabric of place.
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