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Dinty Ah, Wilderness! Humans, Hawks, and Environmental Correctness on the Muddy |
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“You can steer, can’t you?” The question comes from Annie, a wiry, energetic woman of about fifty, with graying hair, dark eyes, a craggy face that belies countless hours under the sun. She wears Teva water shoes, neoprene bike shorts, black rowing gloves. I am here to relax, but clearly she is all business. “Well, can you?” Thirteen of us—three guides and ten paying customers—stand on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, just east of Big Bend National Park, about to launch eight canoes. The canoes sit low in the water, laden with tents, poles, food, paddles, pots, pans, stoves, water jugs, and a cumbrous portable toilet we will come to call “The Groaner.” In their wisdom, the guides have paired Annie and me together, but having sized me up in my old tennis sneakers, cheap t-shirt, and denim shorts, she seems not so sure. Steering a canoe is a dicey prospect under any circumstance, given the vagaries of water and wind; but in whitewater, steering can be life or death. Annie has reason to be cautious. “You do have a draw stroke, right?” She is sensing my hesitation. “You do know how to read water?” The simple answer is “yes,” but the Rio Grande is capricious; a swirling mess of brown river, fast-moving and sided by high canyon and undercut rock. I do know a bit about steering a canoe, though not enough that Annie’s aggressive questioning doesn’t immediately make me forget it all. The pairing remains, because the guides don’t want to hear dissent. Worse yet, from Annie’s perspective, I am awarded the stern, where the course is set and corrections made. The canoe’s rear seat falls to me not because of gender or expertise, but because I outweigh Annie dramatically. She reluctantly takes the bow, and one by one, the guides push the eight canoes into the swift current. When it is our turn, Annie commences paddling, paddling with immense effort, paddling at a rate easily three-times more vigorous than the bow paddler in any of the other five tandem boats. She paddles as if her very life depends on it, as if I have already announced loudly my plans to steer the canoe into the first dangerous hole I can find.
* The evening before, thirteen of
us meet in a motel in Aside from Annie, the guests on this trip include a pair of retired Vermont schoolteachers; a Bermuda physician named Thomas and his birdwatching British wife, Lu; Fiona, a young pharmaceutical saleswoman; two other doctors, both traveling solo; Bill, a retired engineer; and me. Both of the American doctors are named Dave, and so earn the quick nicknames Tall Doctor Dave and Bearded Doctor Dave. To amuse ourselves during our
lengthy van ride to the put-in, we speculate on what the trip might bring.
Tall Doctor Dave can do better than speculate, however; he is a Sierra Club
member, and the environmentalist group’s magazine features an article on the
stretch of river we will soon be travelling. He has
brought the article, “ In the van, we wince. In another section, Solnit warns that we will be bobbing through “just about every type of pollution imaginable, including radioactive sediments, industrial toxins, mine wastes, agricultural runoff, erosion caused by mining and logging, and improperly treated sewage.” We wince again, more noticeably this time. Tall Doctor Dave confesses that he almost cancelled the trip and sacrificed his deposit when the magazine arrived in his mailbox, but he really needed a week away from the operating room. Finally, Solnit writes that the Rio Grande “annually dries up altogether at four points and runs perilously low elsewhere,” and details how, because of upstream agricultural diversion, there was barely even enough water for her raft trip to pass through the lower canyons, our destination. She eventually managed to drag her raft out, but leaves the distinct impression that the next party to boat through might get stuck for all time. The guides mumble something about Sierra Club negativity, but for the most part the van ride ends in silence.
*
Saturday afternoon, on the river, paddling like a demon just to keep up with Annie, I see no clots of foam, just lots of cool, quick, mud-colored water. The sky is glassy blue, the air sweet smelling, the cliffs gorgeous, and the Sierra article is forgotten. Our first campsite, We finish our evening meal and bed down, then brace for the arrival of the torrential rains that follow the lightning. The storm lasts only ten minutes, but for the duration my tent feels as if it might lift up into the sky. Morning, though, comes with sunshine, chirping birds, the sound of our lead guide, Fritz, shouting “Cawww-feeeee,” in a Southern drawl more like a yodel than a yell. Fritz, a woman despite her nickname, will spend the week keeping us alerted to meals, changes in plans, imminent dangers, and bathroom arrangements. The latter will become quite complicated. We stumble out of our various tents and take good-natured inventory of our aches and pains, and our survival. The brief encounter with nature’s fury seems to pick up everyone’s spirits. Except Tall Doctor Dave, who emerges sopping wet. His gear is already a running joke—he came on the trip equipped with more rigging than an astronaut, it seems, most of it fluorescent orange or yellow, all of it dramatic on his 6’4” frame. Though we are paddling in extreme heat, he wears enough layered capilene and spandex that he would not look so out of place at a toxic chemical spill. He is a walking advertisement for REI, the catalog outfitter. Despite his high-tech gear,
though, it turns out that he somehow left As most of us eat breakfast and remark on the beauty of the day, he morosely shoves his drenched equipment and saturated sleeping bag into his gear sack. “If we can get into camp early,” Fritz promises, “and if the sun is still out, and if we can find some trees, that stuff should dry out just fine.” It seems like a lot of ifs, but our first full day on the river is filled with such beauty and interest, that even the lanky physician soon forgets to worry. The immediate riverbank is overwhelmed with bamboo, but the hills on either side host a variety of desert flora—prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, mesquite, acacia, and ocotillo. The river is a migratory route for birds, since there is very little water elsewhere in this desert region, so we see abundant great blue heron, cliff swallows, black phoebes, Swainson hawks. Lu, the birdwatcher, calls out the names for us. The cliffs, and surrounding bluffs, grow more dramatic with each mile we cover. “Drink,” Fritz shouts at regular intervals. “Keep drinking.” Confined as we are between canyon walls, under a desert sun, we are baked goods—the real danger to our health and well being, given the gentleness of the rapids so far, is dehydration. Annie, like the tall doctor, comes well-equipped. She wears a nylon water bag on her back, and drinks constantly from a hose that runs to her mouth. I, on the other hand, come poorly equipped, and am constantly filling, refilling, and dropping my empty Gatorade bottle into the mud on the bottom of the canoe, which always sends us off course, and sends Annie into a short panic. In this fashion, we put seventeen miles behind us, then camp for our second night on a small, muddy ledge. The canyon walls cut us off from all but the faintest sunlight well before the sun actually sets, and since it is October, we light an early fire. Over a dinner of red beans and rice, we joke about Tall Doctor Dave’s wet gear, about which paddling duo is slowest, which the most inept, and which duo bickers most constantly—the two Doctor Daves, it turns out, not Annie and me.
*
Tall Doctor Dave gives me his copy of the Sierra article, and that night, in my tent, I underline passages, wondering whether Rebecca Solnit could possibly have been on the same river we now travel. Solnit bemoans “longhorn cattle grinding the riverbank into dust” and occasionally washing up dead, “further compromising the river.” She mentions possible “killer bees,” though she sees none, and “acrid, gritty dust that would blow into every crack in a tent and across every open dish, and onto our exposed skin.” Her raft washes aground every few paragraphs, something she blames on all the farmers upstream and their wanton irrigation. At Hot Springs Rapid, our destination for the next evening, she even manages to encounter armed men that she assumes are with the Mexican army. Solnit, it appears, feels threatened every step of the way; I have never seen such beauty in my life. The few longhorn cattle I see along the riverbank are handsome and welcome. To her, they are uninvited despoilers of the earth. The water on which we paddle is an opaque brown, from the mud, but I am nonetheless grateful for the water, for the heat, for the light dust, for all that I’ve seen on this first day. I worried in the van when Tall
Doctor Dave started reading the article, worried that the trip brochure
promising wild and scenic wilderness was some scam. Now I’m worried about Solnit and her readers, and am more than willing to side
with the guides and their terse dismissal of “Sierra negativism.” I’m not
sure what Solnit was looking for on her trip, but I
doubt she and I came looking for the same thing. This apparent contradiction in those most committed to environmentalism has been noted before—the very experience of nature, the deep calm and solid centeredness that comes from being in the desert, on the shore, in the forest, is often not available to them, because they are perpetually anxious. As stewards of our planetary survival, they sacrifice any opportunity they ever had of enjoying the nature they want to protect. At one point, Solnit worries in print about the Sierra Blanca
nuclear-waste dump. The proposed facility is not even open at the time she is
writing (nor is it now), and if it were to open, it would be several hundred
miles upstream, and sixteen miles from the river. But, Solnit
notes, the proximity of a possible earthquake fault line “would add to the
radioactive threats to the If they build it, and if some
waste escapes, and if there is an earthquake…well, it could happen. But I’m
thinking, no wonder Solnit’s raft kept running
aground—she came on her trip carrying a heavy load.
*
We enter the full force of the canyon on Monday, our third day on the river, and the view becomes truly breathtaking—one thousand foot sheer walls, castle-like bluffs, undercut canopies riddled with cliff swallow nests. Equally striking is the absence of civilization. One other party—a couple in a canoe accompanied by a kayaker—pass by early that morning, but otherwise we seem to be the only humans on the river. Nor is there anyone visible on the adjoining land. The canyon walls make the riverbank, what there is of it, nearly inaccessible for about a seventy-mile stretch; that limits foot-travel, and it limits the canoe and raft traffic as well. Once into the lower canyons, you are in for the duration. It takes a commitment. During the next few days, we will pass two, maybe three abandoned fishing camps, but see no one, just cows and birds. This remoteness from phones, e-mails, faxes, television, and other people, has a wonderfully calming effect. Even the guides eventually relax. We are, Fritz assures us, a “very low maintenance” group of guests. Tall Doctor Dave encounters a new problem with his size-13 water sandals, but solves it by wrapping the sandals onto his feet with duct tape—fluorescent yellow duct tape. Fiona can barely stifle her giggles. We stop around mid-day at a site the guides promise us is filled with fossils. “You can look at them, but you’ll have to leave them where they are,” Fritz instructs. A few trip members quote the ecologist’s motto, “Leave nothing but your footprints, take nothing but your memories.” Gary, one of the guides and a veteran of this canyon, lets us know that he has in fact seen the fossil field dwindle in the ten years or so that he has been making the trip. “They used to be everywhere,” he says. “Now you really have to look.” And so we do, baking under the desert sun, turning over countless small sand-colored rocks. We find a few trilobite impressions, one or two fossilized clams, and a living scorpion or two. We take nothing. Or if anyone does, no one’s telling. Gradually, we enter deeper into the high canyon, and the river narrows, squeezing more water through an ever-tighter funnel of rock. As a result, the rapids become more potent, more dangerous. And, as luck would have it, I am the first of the trip to be catapulted out of a boat. A miscalculation of mere inches and I shoot head over heels into Palmas Canyon rapid, a roiling mess of whitewater and rock. My boat, Annie at the bow, carries through the rapid without me. After feeling a blunt impact on my leg, I wash through as well, into a wide, shallow field of riffles and stone. The guides are quick to throw ropes and shout lifesaving directives that I can’t hear over the roar of the water, but none of this turns out to be necessary. Because the temporary widening has created a shallow area, I simply stand up and walk out. I earn a purple bruise the size of a bocce ball on my right thigh, but am otherwise unhurt. My baptism becomes the source of much merriment, and we stop for lunch right where I fell, to mark the occasion. The unpacking of our lunch stores results, however, in a swarm of large, hovering, brown insects known as tarantula hawks. They are wasps, actually, but very large wasps—roughly the size of small hummingbirds—and are given the striking name because their sting can paralyze a tarantula. The tarantula hawk will drag its immobilized victim away, then deposit its eggs in the body of the living spider. Later, the wasp larva will hatch, and eat their way out. Gruesome stuff, but they don’t sting us. What they desperately want, instead, are our slices of ham. The next twenty minutes consist of swatting and griping, until I distract the group by accidentally discovering a different sort of insect, a rainbow grasshopper. This one is shaped like the grasshopper most of us know, but instead of a dull green or brown, it is covered in bright orange and blue mosaic tiles. It does not seem real; the colors are far too spectacular. But it is. The eyes move cautiously back and forth. I bring the grasshopper into the group on the twig to which it has attached itself, and everyone crowds around. Solnit never mentioned this.
*
All of us on the trip have varying levels of experience—with rivers, and with wilderness. The guides, of course, have seen plenty, and many of the paying guests have taken two, even three trips a year for many years running. Often, during our meal breaks, they trade information on destinations and guide companies, thinking ahead to their next excursion. For me, though, this is a
first. I have never experienced so much wilderness
in my life, never been so removed from civilization, never been so aware of
my own smallness. I would often visit I know what Solnit would say! The canyon may look pristine, majestic, and intact, but all the while small pollutants we can’t see are destroying the delicate natural balance. Just because something looks magnificent, doesn’t mean it isn’t being destroyed. Look at that footprint, over there! It’s not just a footprint, it’s erosion. I appreciate her concern, but even a good thing can be carried too far. Solnit acknowledges at one point in her article, in fact, that her trip companions, most of them Canadians, seem to be having quite the good time. “But then they were on vacation and determined to enjoy themselves,” she writes. What she doesn’t seem to realize is that she seems just as determined not to enjoy herself. I find one passage from Solnit’s article almost laughable. “After passing a herd of goats,
I told my raft-mates the story of Esequiel
Hernandez, the teenage goatherd who was shot in the back by U.S. Marines in My God, I think—my last thought
before I fall asleep—she must have been a hell of a fellow paddler on her raft trip. A real barrel of fun.
*
Wednesday, our fifth day together, the air turns cold, misty, gray, and the paddling grows harder, thanks to a persistent upstream wind. The trip members grow silent; even the guides recede into their thoughts, right down to the vigilant Fritz, who for the first few days would ask “Is there anything you need?” every twenty minutes. The weather is surely a factor in our mood, but I think the “canyon effect” becomes part of it as well. None of us feels quite so significant as we did in our civilized lives. Our verbal cleverness doesn’t seem quite so important to share. Who we are, what we own, our job titles—all of these are fairly irrelevant. Our perspective on nature has shifted, but more significantly, so has our perspective on our selves. What we now see, I think, is closer to the truth of the matter. Only Thomas and Lu remain a team for the full seven days. The rest of us play musical canoes every day or so, switching paddling partners, trying out new seats, new chemistry. Annie paddles now with Gary, one of the guides, and they quickly push out to the lead. Bearded Doctor Dave and I team up, and I’m finally switched to the bow, which affords a nicer view. This day of dreary weather also brings a series of impassable rapids, or impassable at least in full boats with mid-level paddlers. To get by, we “line” the boats, which means we stretch out along the rocky bank, brace ourselves against boulders to resist the rushing current, and pull the canoes along one by one, passing them from hand to hand, sometimes hoisting them over rocks too narrow for them to pass through. This is the most dangerous work of the trip. We must take care that the canoes don’t come up the line too fast, pinning someone against the rocks, breaking a limb, or worse, forcing one of us underwater where the danger of becoming trapped by the current is great. After a bit more paddling, we knock off early at a spot called Burro Bluff, one of the highest points within a hundred mile range. Gunshot thunder is coming from somewhere. Deep as we are in the belly of the canyon, it is hard to tell from exactly where. After our tents are staked and gear stored away, we hike up to the Bluff, past creosote, prickly pear, all manner of thorny plant-life. It is a steep hike—better suited for burros, hence the name, than people—but we are promised a stunning vista. It takes a good 45 minutes to
pull ourselves up the crisscrossing trail, and the view down into the canyon
is, indeed, amazing. On a clear day, Fritz tells us, we could see deep into We are on the Bluff for no more than two minutes before Fritz realizes the thunder is not so distant, that the storm is close, and bearing right down upon us. “Get your asses down the hill,” she shouts, not needing to explain. We are standing on the highest point anywhere near, human lightning rods. The run back down is a comic
stumble, the small rocks catching under foot like
ball-bearings, the cacti snagging and scratching, the wonderful view
forgotten. The canyon rules all. * I do
love the planet, though if Solnit were reading this
essay as closely as I’ve read hers, I suspect she would not think so. I am
firmly against acid runoff, nuclear spillage, diverted rivers, and a host of
other ecological evils. I believe that men, and women, would do better to
cooperate with the Earth’s ecosystem rather than run it into the ground. I
think myself a reasonable man. But Solnit might lump
me in with the irrigators, the lumber harvesters, the cattlemen, and all the
others guilty of insensitive exploitation. After
all, I’m only human. Which
is precisely my problem with what she, and many of the eco-extremists—those
who seem to get the most notice and thus have the biggest voice in the
environmentalist movement—have to say. It too often sounds as if the
human species is the only thing separating a contaminated planet from What seems most pointless to me is the either/or nature of the argument. The Bible tells us that mankind has “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,” and some interpret this to mean we can do as we please, when we please, without thought or moral center. The ecological extremists, on the other hand, seem to see us as the only species not entitled to interact with the Earth at all. I don’t see much of a future in either position.
*
Annie has made it clear to us that she shares some of Solnit’s views, but with an added gender twist. “Back before the sky gods came, before history,” she tells us during one of our snack breaks, “the earth was a matriarchy. There was no question where the power was—women were the ones who gave birth, so they had all the authority. Men had no idea if they even played a part in the birth process, so they had no sense of their own importance. “But then women put men in charge of metallurgy, and everything changed,” she explains. “That’s why we’re destroying the planet. The patriarchy is only concerned with maximum production. Men have no interest in nurturing, in preserving anything. All the patriarchy wants to do is produce more, more, more.” I am more than a little chagrined, then, when it is Annie who later catches me in an act of environmental misconduct. So far we have camped on slabs of rock, on mud, on sand, once even on grass, but our Thursday evening campsite is a field of small stones. My ten-year-old daughter, Maria, collects stones, and when I wake up Friday, I can’t resist the urge to gather a few of the more uniquely colored or patterned ones to bring her as my return gift. I am aware that this violates the strict “take nothing but your memories” rule, but my love for my daughter overtakes my conscience. Annie, though, comes upon me as I collect a plastic baggie of pebbles. We are in a rock sea, billions of rocks washed down from the cliffs and unearthed by the river over thousands, maybe millions of years, but Annie catches on quickly to what I am doing, narrows her eyes. Futilely, I try to convince her of my position. “A few rocks aren’t going to make a difference,” I say, pointing to the small stones all around. That doesn’t seem to impress her, so I lamely play a gender card, “They’re for my daughter.” “You shouldn’t take a thing,” Annie answers with a chill. “Nothing.” This is the official position of the trip guides as well, but Fritz and her crew have no interest in policing our gear. Thomas and Lu, in fact, have for the last day or so been lifting rocks the size of footballs into their canoe. They are building a fireplace back home, and explain to me that they like to use rocks from each of their many adventure travel trips as architectural accents. Fritz says, “You really shouldn’t do that” at one point, but otherwise lets the infraction slide. I don’t know if Annie has said anything to them or not. Later, Bearded Doctor Dave shares his own views of nature. “Oh, these environmentalists are worrying for no reason,” he says cheerfully. “We aren’t going to destroy the planet. Nature always takes care of herself. When we get too many people around here, when things get too bad, nature will intervene.” “How?” I ask. “Plague,” he answers dispassionately. “It is only a matter of time before the planet is hit with its next widescale de-population. There are viruses out there we don’t know about yet. Nature cleans its own house.” He is a physician, so we listen closely. Moments later, Lu, reflecting on the imminent end of our trip, says, “My, we have been out of touch for so long. There are people out there wondering if we are still alive.” “We should be wondering if they are still alive,” Bearded Doctor Dave answers quickly. “It’s more dangerous in their world with all the car accidents, shootings, muggings, bombings, than it is out here. Why do you even assume at this point that your loved ones back home are still alive?” We paddle the rest of the day with little said between us. *
It has come down to this: Rebecca Solnit is convinced that we are marring the planet willfully and with malice. Bearded Doctor Dave, it turns out, shares her views in his own odd way, but is instead focused on the ecosystem’s coming revenge, the quiet shy planet striking back with a fury. Annie agrees with Solnit, and in addition, is pretty sure I’m one of the worst offenders. Thomas and Lu are collecting stones for their fireplace, and taking it all in stride. We are, all of us on the trip, dirty, tired, cold, scratched and bruised, and as best as I can tell, the river is doing just fine. No one has seen a single clot of toxic foam. We have met nature, debated our place in it, and found little common ground. As for me, I don’t object to using a big tin box for a toilet, and I even take my turn carrying the heavy receptacle on and off the canoe each day; and I don’t mind carrying away all of our trash, right down to straining out the few grains of rice that fall into our dishwater when we do the pots and pans; I even follow the rule to bag up my apple cores, though I still contend the wildlife would have been more grateful had we left them. I don’t mind any of it, really, but I object to the implication that we somehow don’t belong, that our every step is unnatural and unwelcome. As careful as we are, the fact remains that at each of our seven campsites we have squashed some bugs, flattened some plants, inadvertently knocked the needles off a few cacti, and eroded a bit of soil off the muddy banks as we scrambled up with our considerable gear. Do I have to feel horrible about this? A friend of mine, an Appalachian hiker, has explained to me that anti-environmentalists are guilty of exaggerating the environmentalist position, that the entire environmental movement is being tarred with an eco-extremist brush to make the environmentalists’ views easier to dismiss. This is an old tactic, and I’m sure he is right. I don’t mean to contribute to this distortion, but I have Solnit’s article in front of me; I’m not making it up. And Annie really said those things. And I gave those rocks to my daughter, and still feel vaguely uneasy about whether I did the right or wrong thing. My behavior has not been blameless, maybe, but it hasn’t been so bad. Yes, I believe in the beauty and importance of the environment, and I believe in protecting it. But I’d also like to be a part of it. Call it selfish if you will, but I’d be quicker to support the preservation of an ecosystem that includes me as a regular member. I didn’t visit the river in a bulldozer, after all. I came by canoe. |
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