~BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN 
Requiem to the Frontier
Requiem to the Frontier | Requiem to the Frontier |
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I'd always entertained the notion I'd just fade into the sunset, repentant for my sins, yet glad I chased my dream, followed my heart--truly lived. I'd be far and away, high in the mountains, watching with peaceful eyes my last days pass before me. As the relentless encroachment of civilization approached, the Great Spirit would take me, mounted on my medicine horse, across--over to the other side, to the buffalo grounds, forever... ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The incessant drone rose up around me like the birthing of swamp fog in the still of night. It suddenly was--the halo of a million blurred, sparkly wings choking the air. Feeling almost mystical in its effect, I flinched as a spear of panic shot through me, thinning my blood--almost faint, making me high. For as far as I could see rippling up the canyon floor, the dark cloud hovered above the sphagnum mat of muskeg and alder hell. There it was--moving--yet standing still--like the shifting aura of a shaman's dream. Within its spell, I tugged my head-net from my hat brim and down to cinch at the neck, already claustrophobic as it pulled me into the drainage--the primal world so vast and unrestricted there's simply no escape. Engulfed within the mosquito's ravenous taunt, with only the thin layer between me and madness, I let go--let their howling, shrieking blood dance lift away any remaining touch with reality as I started across the valley. I had begun that morning from my guide camp, miles down river in a lonesome corner of Interior Alaska, and was still tracking as the Arctic sun burned low in the northwest, starting its brief dip below the jagged Northern horizon. This time of year there's only nineteen hours of sunlight, and we're losing seven minutes a day of that, it being well after Solstice, but I wasn’t sweating it. There was the long alpenglow of the Arctic sunset ... twilight … and then the slow rise of a new day--no worries-- Just over the divide, tucked into a south-facing bowl was a spring, and some decent graze under a thin stand of mountain birch. My errant ponies would be there (at least that's what I hoped), all fat and sassy, acting totally guilty, trying to pull off their favorite ruse. Nodding they'd snort to get a fresh scent and paw the ground, putting on acting all wild and prehistoric. Then they'd come and nuzzle, sniff me, see if I had any grain, trying the innocent act. Whinnying they'd nod their big bony heads, as if to say: "Hey Boss! Man, great to see you, what ya doing out in these parts, we were just thinking 'bout you." Yeah, you got to love 'em. The night before had been restless, two packs of wolves were working the area, along with a grizzly sow and cubs. I'd drifted into sleep disquieted with the clang, clong, clang of belled ponies pacing the dense willow sand bar, snatching nervous mouthfuls of river grass. The sickly sweet smell of dead and dying summer-run salmon had my predatory brothers running the banks in a feeding frenzy, feasting on the bloated, spawned out "dog fish". Well fed, chances were the lobos wouldn't run the cayuses. The trouble was the horses didn't know that. All they were sure of was a lot of bear spoor and wolf pee now scented every bend of the upper river, and it hadn't been there the week before-- By morning they'd all headed for parts unknown. The unknown. Seems the longer one lives the more a riddle it turns. Years earlier cool folks and youthful circumstance had unwittingly conspired--irrevocably committing my life to a path that for the most part had become strange … like fiction. Childhood does that you know, setting the plot without giving denouement-- From my earliest days it has always seemed so-- I'd played out a couple hours earlier on the near vertical climb out of the snake infested canyon, swooning from the sweltering sun and scant shade. My Dad was carrying me along with the hunting gear, our throats choked and raw constricted on the dust and sage that hung suspended in the breathless Oregon air, the two shotguns, twenty chukkar and me dragging him down. I clung to his back listening to him pant laboring up the steep rugged hogback, my flushed cheek rocking on his shoulder cooled by his sweat-- In the back room of this trance I tasted the dampness first--you feel it in your nose, in the hollow of your throat--then with the jolt of an ancient aphrodisiac, the smell of water overpowers your reason. As I catapulted from his back, I heard my Dad shout and remember him trying to catch me as I dashed toward the thick, sucking quagmire. In a flash, before he could nab me, I was at the geyser gulping from the icy plume. Hidden from the outside world in some nameless ravine on a forgotten sagebrush plateau, what once had been civilized, the hopeful dream of a pioneer, had devolved back to the wild. The twisted broken pipe piercing the high desert aquifer had for countless years bubbled its sweet artesian liquid just waiting for us to arrive. In what had become a large bog encircling the ruptured spigot were huge luscious blackberries their thick, thorny bush consuming a hand-hewn picket fence now rotted and going back to the earth. Deer tracks were everywhere, and that of skunk, and bobcat, fox and coyote. An old, overgrown truck patch, crabapples and big juicy pears no longer tended, flourished behind the faded turn-of-the-century homestead shack. Already by this point in my life this all seemed such a natural thing--the gift of the water along with the partridge we'd taken that morning as if given from the hand of God. Shoot, I'd been hunting since I was four, it was more normal than going to school--I could think no other way. When my Pa laid back for a siesta, with the boundless energy of a seven year-old I wandered in the midst of the Garden, and did eat. From my perspective in my earliest memory I always knew I wanted to live wild and free. Though bored to the point of tears with book learning … I still managed to graduate high school when seventeen--and then began my real education. Don't get me wrong, I know the worth a foundation of formal education imparts. I don't regret any of the keys it gives to glean more knowledge. I just didn't care for the ideological Laundromat. Yet, for the sake of my folks, I gave college "the old college try", several times actually, and found it to be more distasteful than the previous eleven and a half years of brainwashing. The next several years were interesting times, as was the era: the last days of the insatiable draft siphoning young and brave American blood, only to sprinkle it senselessly in the torn jungle forests of South East Asia; the increasing protests; flower power; Kent State, the country awakening to its confusion. Oddly, for the most part they're good memories. The heady passion of young love filled my life-- But before long the dream deep within began to stir--my spirit rattling its chains. By the time I was twenty-one I had my bellyful in spite of being in love the most I'm sure I'll ever be, so learned horse-shoeing hoping it would satisfy my soul, and took up with cowboys and Indians, rodeos and barebacks--scarcely realizing the storm I'd finally jumped into--within another year I'd left my new family and cut for the Rockies to live there, my wife too afraid to follow-- Fuck! Snap out of it man-- With a start, I realized I'd been daydreaming, drifting, staring at the ground for I didn't know how long--Grizzly tracks. And further-on a still warm pile of scat. Stumbling, busting brush, wading swamps I worked upstream through the "skeet" (mosquito) infested tangle of overgrown creek bottom trying to cut fresh sign of my horses. As I broke into the spindle-tree taiga of the headwaters, I remembered an old mountain man saying, "Better to count ribs than tracks". Dammit--I should have brought them into camp and tied them up short last night. Yet, you try to do the right thing, they're grazers, so instead of the hobble or picket, I'd told my crew, "Let 'em graze." Now I was using up time we didn't have--clients were arriving in less than 36 hrs. I was cutting it way too close, even for the sharp edge I usually danced. We were running so far behind on account of moving camp the week before from down on the Yukon River. I'd left the crew back at the new outpost to finish setting up the client and crew wall tents, cook shack, two-holer, shower, sweat lodge and fire circle. Trouble had been brewing for months, my camp permit not in order, a requirement for guide operations implemented for the first time that year. Unfortunately, there wasn't a chance of a snowball in hell of me getting a permit for that spot on the mighty River. The Indian Tribal Corporation claimed I was on land that was theirs (even though it wasn't yet), but the State had also selected it, in which case the U.S. Bureau of Land Management oversees all paper, till one or the other applicant gets the deed-- Dealing with one bureaucracy is way bad enough--I was having to negotiate with three--all of them now pissed off-- Troopers finally flew in-- Yet rather than tucking tail and quitting the country (what everyone was hoping I'd do), after yet another trip to Fairbanks (to deal with the State's contingent of paper pushing pisswillies) I had the equipment and crew on the Yukon flown to a lake on a smaller river way deep in the country, and with land use permits in order (more or less), me and one of the best guides I ever hired rode the ponies north over the mountains. I wasn't about to let them squash me like a bug after all the years I'd sacrificed to the wilderness--but then, ignorance is bliss they say. Little did I realize how big the stakes. One can not even imagine how formidable, unless you find yourself in the game-- The players: the Alaskan Native corporations, the Alaska State Government and the Federals. Hell, it wasn't even about me, only about getting me out--puts one to mind of kids shooting marbles. It's a long story of how it all came to be, but here's the quick sketch: The U.S. Government bought Alaska, "The Great Land," from Russia in 1867 (although the Czar didn't have a deed or the right to sell it). Imperial Russia merely had a few fur trapping and trading outposts on the Pacific Coast and Islands, and even after a hundred and fifty years of settlement weren't in much of a position to do anything other than broker a price for making Alaska desirable to Anglo-culture. Regardless, the deal was struck for a cool $7.2 mil. The Czar apparently feeling quite magnanimous even included Fort Yukon, the most remote anglo trading post in the North, in spite of it being a Hudson's Bay Company Post that had opened 20 years earlier in the deep, wild Interior of the Upper Yukon Drainage when Alexander Murray and his men came overland down the Porcupine River from Yukon Territory Canada . Also included in the Czar's generosity, The Panhandle of Southeast Alaska, the Aleutian chain, the Pribilofs and the two Sainted Islands above, Lawrence and Matthew-- A country so vast, from furthest point to furthest point it could stretch from New York City to Los Angeles, California and cover fully one-fifth of the continental United States in-between. And so began the Territory that became the Forty-ninth State. But it had started much earlier than that. Decades before The U.S. officially bought "The Great Land," American trappers and frontiersmen had already scattered in small number throughout the Territory (the last remnants of the Mountain Men from the Rockies), they being the true trail blazers. By the 1870's, after the sale, full-fledged traders came, along with the gold seekers--yet no one (other than at first the Natives) worried much about who did what, as long as you stayed off a man's mining prospects, trapline, or woman if he had one. As usual, the Natives were shit on, the increasing tide rushing over them like a wave, their ancient ways polluted in a few short years, yet, although things were changing, bureaucracy and anglo-civilization was still infant and far away--Alaska truly a frontier in every sense of the word. With the arrival of the air pioneers, the Wien Brothers, White and Eielson, among other notables, progress began its flight in earnest. The big shiny birds diminishing the vastness, making it possible for pilgrims to invade the wild with their changes, but still it stayed a savage land. The old timers used to tell me, even in spite of the new fangled aero-plane it was a great place up until World War II--nothing more than a distant U.S. Territory, little more than fable in most American minds. The turbulent war era brought Alaska into the public mind set with a supply road to get there, the Army blazing it through in an incredible nine months, the need for more military bases paramount, the Japanese Imperial Army having already invaded Attu and Kiska. The major legacies of this continuation of the, "War to end all Wars": The ALCAN (Alaska-Canada) Highway (now the Alaska Highway); assorted big money government projects, e.g., further military bases, the DEW line and White Alice cold war projects (hey, I thought the First One was suppose to end all wars?); numerous surplus bush capable aircraft and plenty of pilots that stayed in the Northland; a significantly larger and more dissimilar population; and an interest in development of what used to be called NPR--(and that doesn't stand for National Public Radio)-- Nope--Naval Petroleum Reserve # 4, set aside by President Harding February 27, 1923. Now referred to as National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Known within the state as "The North Slope," and to the east ANWR, i.e., the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. From offshore in the Arctic Ocean, to the Brooks Range on the South, from the Bering Sea on the West, to the Canadian border on the East and beyond. About 50,000 square miles of treeless tundra and muskeg floating atop a high-octane puddle of what they claim is decomposed dinosaurs and jungle--the elixir and narcosis of modern life--Oil-- When technology caught up with the problems facing extraction and transport of North Slope crude, comprehensive exploration, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline project were finally launched (mid 60's). With a little economic manipulation (the first of the contrived oil shortages) in the early 70's, the oil companies managed to raise the price of gas enough to make NPR crude economically viable. The scare also had the effect of shaking the byjeezus out of the easily led and TV fed dumbed-down American public, our panicked outcries helping to ooze the pipeline though the courts and Congress, and in so doing, making the continuing project legal. That's right... So sure approval would come, the project never stopped, even with court injunctions in place, (and that's from men that were there). By the time it was completed in 1977, as if symbolic of the great break in opinion and life-view that had brought enmity to paradise, it slithered as if a viper in the midst of the garden from North to South, across the entire State, coming up from the depths of the sea at Prudhoe Bay on the frozen Arctic Ocean to Valdez nestled in the verdant Alaskan Gulf. Now the much more far reaching changes began to occur-- The Feds had to live up to the various unconstitutional deals Congress had cooked up since statehood, i.e., convey 104 million acres to the State Government promised in the Alaska Statehood Compact of 1959; and sign off another 44 million acres to the Natives awarded in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. But not before stealing a huge amount of acreage for Parks, Preserves, Monuments and Refuges promised in the rhetoric and shell game of the preceding ten years of legislative battles with the D-2 accords. The "D-2" provision--so-called from section 17(d)(2) of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act--requiring up to 80,000,000 acres of land in Alaska identified by the Secretary of the Interior as having highest values for park, refuge and wilderness purposes be reserved and given interim protection until Congress could act on the findings of more detailed studies. In 1978 Jimmy Carter used one of the presidential cheat cards from the Fed's bag of tricks (dirty) called, The Antiquities Act of 1906, and stole away the first of the lands. In 1980, with the final passage of the ANILCA legislation, the game could be played in earnest. Since then the players have been elbowing for position, bickering over who gets what marbles--buying secret geology reports, timber harvest estimates, economic feasibility studies for tourism and development; and only then making their land selections. That's when the real deals start hatching, back room land swaps and partnerships, etc. Each player trying to get the shinier marbles. Greedy. Possessive. Hostile. Political posturing to the point of making one gag. With the Indians it's at least somewhat enlightening to see the irony-- The northern tribes now shareholders in huge land holding tribal corporations, the CEOs and directors cutting behind the scene deals with politicians for oil, land, timber and mineral rights, yet all the time screaming the land is sacred to them, (to many of the elders and a few of the young it is). With that, the American Government can nod happily at the greed and hypocrisy they have imparted to the natives, "Yes, my good fellow, we have finally integrated the aborigines into white ideology for they are as vile as we." But you know what, fuck it, it's kind of fitting in a twisted sort of way, some of the Native corporations now able to thumb their nose at the gussik (white-man) on the way to the bank, winning in a convoluted modern sense after Native Americans being screwed every which way for five-hundred friggin' years… At least owning some of the resources, a few of them can enjoy the ultimate revenge--got to love it when the Natives are makin' mo' dough then us Honkies. Is that karma or what? Yet at the same time it's so depressingly sad. Given the chance many natives would go back to the old ways and speak of it often, as some of us white boys do, yet they are slaves, addicted just as us to what our culture pushes. But regardless they're still very up front about not wanting whitemen (just their goods) in their country (can't blame 'em). That leaves Public lands for a Non-Native woodsman such as myself to subsist from, the two entities (State and Feds) allowing us to do so on our land, kind of--yearly diminishing our right to live in the Garden, increasing the regulations and restrictions, the permits needed, the fees required, along with the edging in of outright royalties paid to the Crown. Guide operations aren't known for making one rich (at least not since they did away with Exclusive Use Areas). Indeed it's hard to even stay on the black side of the ledger unless you run a big corporate outfit. Add the shitty politics, increasing logistics nightmare, continuing flood of Greenie city-slickers without a clue moving up and calling us ugly, and it makes a man wonder. This is what I was facing, as does any paleface wanting a wilderness life if he wants to make a living and not suck the Government tit like most everyone does in the State. I couldn't believe anyone cared. I just wanted a place to live in peace (as do all the simple people scattered in the wild places of Mother Earth). The camp I'd been forced out of was perfect for that. It was seventy miles from the nearest village, far from anybody, no one seemed concerned--that is, till I moved in. I could use barge and boats for affordable logistics, there was tall grass for the ponies, and over the mountains to the North it was wild beyond belief. The spot itself was an old emergency airstrip and weather station from the 40's era B-17 Lend-Lease program with the Russians. No one had been there since it closed in the '50's. It was completely overgrown when I first pulled my canoe ashore during an exploratory trip, trees forty feet tall and ten inches round grew in the middle of the old airstrip, the concrete foundations of removed control buildings and generator shacks buried beneath a foot's worth of moss and humus. With the work my crew and I did, it became an excellent outpost--and damn near started a war. A few jealous locals from the village up river had me boycotted from the barge lines (screwed my logistics), and through an old Indian friend I was told on numerous occasions, "They saying, better get off the river, You. Otherwise maybe sometime there be trouble, they just come and shoot you and clients, burn camp!" When the threats got too bad I finally pulled stakes, (and one of the jealous took over my camp and moved in)--it was that, or risk a stupid gun fight--bodies floating face down in the Yukon, besides if I stayed I was about to be arrested for flipping off the King and all his piss-ant minions. Whoa. Let me back-trail a bit--I better try and fill-in some of the holes this tale's been weaving-- I had drifted through the Rocky Mountains on horseback, dressed in buckskins, refusing to even use any thing past the technology of the 1850's, trapping, living hard off the land when first cutting for the mountains back in 1974, and within a few years ended up in Alaska, living a subsistence lifestyle. Barely skinning by so to speak; trapping, selling some fur, along with a few of the handicrafts I was always making, fishing for my sled dogs, exploring the Northland--and on occasion I'd take a job for a while--if I had to. After a few more years, through another strange twist of fate I added guiding to my simple repertoire. The last of the good years with the Exclusive Use Areas still intact, the vast concessions managed by the guides that owned title like Lords with granted estates. In the Spring and Fall the old scoundrels would hire us young woodsmen to do the actual guiding so they could run the logistics and make it all work if they could. Wild times-- Jumping a flight to fly to some little village far into the bush, only to hop in a ratty old Piper Cub to go even further to hell and gone on some mountain top or valley to chase bears and moose, sheep and caribou with clients from all over the world. Savage bliss. Blood and death, close calls and danger so common it tends to make one reckless. After season, us modern day Bridgers would drift back into town before heading out to our traplines, and the times would get even wilder when we'd rendezvous, tree some bar in Squarebanks or Anchor Town, celebrating still being alive, smoking pot, doing drugs and buying drinks for whores 24/7 for a week at a time. It was in those days that I learned, if you chase it far enough over the edge, sometimes it does come down to "Just another word, for nothing left to lose." When I was finally eligible, I took the tests and became a registered guide as it was the best I could come up with to follow my spirit trail, yet reconcile the Whiteman's burden (that I couldn't seem to shake) of making something of myself, if nothing but for my kids. It's what I knew in life, my stock in trade, besides being the only show in town for a backwoodsmen needing more than just barely making a grub-stake every year. By then I'd accepted the fact that many guides didn't deserve to be using the resources God gave the world in the way they did, and it gave the whole profession a bad name, besides setting as bad medicine to my spirit. But I knew I'd operate toward the extreme and primal, those that did a trip with me would have to give blood and sweat, touch the earth, it wouldn't be a killing field. I felt fine about my decision. Before I knew what happened, my life became a boiling--a strange, simmering brew of buckskin, horseshit, mega-bytes and bureaucrats; throw in some dirty politics, a few lawmen, dust it with a little karma, and it's enough to drive you crazy. Now, two-hundred miles deep in the outback of Interior Alaska I was struggling to keep the outfit together, engaged in one of the most misunderstood and maligned professions in the world, definitely one of the more underhanded and cut-throat, and without a doubt one of the most controversial and black-listed of all endeavors one could choose-- There I was, looking for my ponies, sweating bullets and blood, cussing myself for being such a damn fool. I could scream for help all day long, and still be alone and having to deal with it on those terms. To myself, I recited the law of the frontier: "Only the strong survive". Whew-boy, I hoped the Midnight Sun didn't exact its price this go'round. And for what seemed like the thousandth time picked myself up from yet another tumble on the taiga. "Stumble heads," the nemesis of the northland tundra, the grassy tussocks known in the villages and the bush as "niggerheads". Sorry for the N-word, but it's the truth--now fucking get over it. It wasn't said as a racial slur (to those upset, it's history you stupid pc brainwashed idiot--read some Bob Marshall if you don't believe me)-- These particular specimens being about two feet high or deep, depending on if your foot is on the unstable, rounded top, or the cold permafrost, sogged out trench in between the closely spaced, yet distinctly separate clods. There is no easy, or good way (for humans) to traverse them, just point forward and stay moving is the best bet. I thought of how a grizzly can run full bore across and even swap direction when running the caribou, incredible. Or, how a moose moves through with the grace of a ballet dancer. Meanwhile, I picked myself up yet again! It's days like these when one realizes with startling clarity, like that of the Aurora at fifty below, that you're living at peace with Mother Earth, at peace with your existence, (if not necessarily your life). When you feel humbled by a higher power, realizing we are all, each one, but a minuscule brush stroke on a larger canvas--a mere speck worming their way across the universe. No longer can one feel superior to any part of creation-- I recollect how it was to walk in that unpolluted haze of youthful innocence. That state of just being: not wanting anything more, nor any less, than what you can experience in the moment, no more questions about life, the playing field becomes level, everything and everybody is equal. Reality precariously perched upon the ragged edge of oblivion: no imminent outcome, no certain price; but hovering, swirling like the veil of skeets humming around my head is the haunting sharpness of playing on the knife point--no getting out of it, you’re in the game, win, lose or draw. No thought or room for whining, no right or wrong, just the existence of that exquisite moment. The time and circumstance just is, you just are! Breaking out on the low open finger of the divide the suffocating head-net was off in an instant. I breathed in the waxing twilit scene (in this case, literally), the tepid air feeling as if having been granted a reprieve, the slight breeze and stony ground ridding me of the hoard. On solid earth once again I'd be able to make good time. The next quarter of an hour was rewarded with cutting some fresh sign of the ponies, and within minutes I heard their bells. Boy, my body was beat. I didn't have a bedroll, traveling light with just some "possibles", viz., flint and steel, billycup, coffee and salt, my ol' '97 coach gun, and a few other essentials. Time to strike a fire, boil the billy, settle in-- Starving, it'd be good to eat the ptarmigan taken earlier, and dry my clothes while lounging by the fire. Replenished, I'd kick back, build a smoke, pray a little--and you know, ponder life. Hell, I’d make tracks for home in the morning. Sipping coffee--pondering life--drifting--climbing astral smoke tendrils trailing vagrant to the clouds. Swirling, my world cradled in untamed sounds of silence, a euphony, accented with peaceful bells and whinnies down-slope in a lush, veldt like swale. The colors surrounding … hypnotize, as the rising iridescence of the sun dances its slow circle ... smooth ... like Irish Creme swirled in Mexican coffee, another day fades into the next. I savor the vivid, tasty scene. It's times like these when I feel the painful squeeze of our changing world. Feel the weight of the times, of loving and being part of a last remnant of the primitive mind. Who could have imagined the mindset of this Blitzkrieg modern age, of how in our desperation to find solutions, we'd so divorce ourselves from the natural world. Increasingly coming to view ourselves merely as visitors and intruders in nature's realm. And of course, with the corresponding regulations and attitudes reflecting that ideology. Or, because of having become so alien to the wilderness, how we'd redefine our commune with Mother Earth, and in so doing, paradoxically change the scope and focus, along with the tolerance of what is considered acceptable activities, for that which has come to be called (in this age of consumerism), a "wilderness experience". In silence I think on a favorite quote from a great man--Sitting Bull, of the noble Teton Sioux, "If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man, he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows. Now we are poor, but we are free." To the wind, I voice a writing of my own to my shifting thoughts, "When my Mother gave me birth, the Great Mystery gave me life. My early years taught me the way of a free heart, and it was then, not knowing the path I would follow, I became forever a spirit lost in the Borderlands." My thoughts cloud and mist with the lives of the Indian, of the days of the first Europeans on the North American continent, of how close the two cultures were linked in action and ideology--at least at first. All just wanting to live on the Earth free and content, the Great Spirit their only overlord. Both having come to be in the same land, for the same reasons, the one having arrived millenniums before, the other poor, needful immigrants fresh to a brave new world. So close--yet so different. I have no answer why (except for a few) white people could not embrace the balanced life of the Indian, and within their heart say, "This is enough", of why they couldn't be like Sitting Bull in their thinking. I think of the horrid paradox of our fighting a "Revolution of Freedom", only to annihilate a whole culture that was closer to the truth than us. So has the same tale been written for thousands of years, and so it was. Perhaps it was written long before the stars were thrown by the hand of God. Who could have imagined the mindset of this dumbed-down yuppified America, of how in our desperation to find solutions, we'd so divorce ourselves from the natural world, viewing ourselves as intruders to the very wilderness from which we'd come--with a, Look, don't touch, Leave no trace, policy now enforced every step of the way. I shake my head at the foolishness of thinking we can manage the Earth better than the Great Spirit. As our world continues to seemingly get smaller, crazier, greedier, we in our collective paranoia hand over more and more land, along with our birth-right of freedom to the "Crown" for management. Given the crowded, crazy times in which we live, the intent (in theory) is noble (leaving land in its natural state, and putting order in a chaotic world), yet we lose the most vital part of wilderness in the process we are forced to choose, and that more than anything has closed the book on the wilderness-frontier. Wilderness isn’t about a controlled, or manicured environment encapsulating you. It's not about having an agency manage it, policing it, granting permission by decree to enter the "King's forest". It's not about changing it, "improving" it for multiple use and the ever hallowed maximum profit yield. It damn sure isn't about high-tech gadgets and satellite tracking making it safe, nor corporate-run luxury lodges and government funded rescues plucking a bunch of cellphone carrying idiots from the brink of disaster, or of city slicking pilgrims with brown shirts and badges supposedly protecting us from bears, weather, terrain, or whatever. Wilderness is about interacting with the real world. It's about taking an individual responsibility of action, about taking a chance, accepting what Mother Earth surrounds us with, and dealing with it--not insulating ourselves from it. If you get in a jam, so be it, a person shouldn't endeavor to do something they have no moxie to pull off. The natural world is about the nirvanic nature of living on a tenuous thread, of letting the foolish notion that we can make living risk free, fade away. It's about being hunters and gatherers, and of sometimes becoming the prey. The tamer we attempt to make Mother Earth, the more we lose the opportunity to experience the life-tempering events an uncertain and at times dangerous environment can give. It seems we no longer have the willingness to enter into the concinnity of this planet's medicine circle. Have we forgotten? This Earth does not belong to us. Yet we've disregarded paradise, trampling through the Garden, and taken every available spot and either paved it over, plowed it under, mowed it down, sucked it dry, damned it up, or dug it out. As a way of giving back to Mother Earth, we generate billions of tons of garbage a year, along with toxic and nuclear waste. If it'll reduce the bottom line, and the player can get away with it, it's simply dumped into the water (not to mention the daily load of toxins ending up there via rain and natural runoff). What little land remains relatively untouched we enshrine with names and special designation, hoping to preserve what many people can't even put a finger on, nor even recognize any longer from their subconscious, spiritual yearnings: a place where we can truly feel in place; and peaceful, with our place, within that place. A place:
To feel humble enough we take our spot within the medicine circle, content. To feel bodacious enough we meet what may come our way, confident. To walk as one with our surroundings. To win our right to life by the sacrifice of self to Mother Earth. To exist within the sacred hand of the Great Mystery. To live and die purely by the grace of God. Sorry, but this park, that Preserve and so and so refuge or use area, et al, doesn't provide that. What were once huge tracts of unnamed, unmarketed wilderness, in some cases just a decade or two ago, now because of being protected from ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves; suffer from blatant over use, and blatant over regulation, the manipulated, stifled ecology dying--Yellowstone and The Grand Canyon come to mind. As an added insult to the travesty, in many places human congestion and tacky tourist shops selling souvenirs made in China assault one's dignity. The "Experience" (wilderness if you insist), closely monitored and "interpreted" by those reading from the script. This all with the required concession and user fees paid to the "Crown". What were once true wild lands, pristine and untouched have through a slight of hand, with the people's consent, become profitable government amusement parks and increasingly restrictive reserves of the "King's Forest". Sadly, until we change our way of living, come back into the Circle, our environment, lives, and freedom will continue to be pillaged to pave our one-way linear road. Until we are content to live on the Earth in its naturally perilous state, we will be forced to violate the constitution and the rights of man to make laws and rules to protect the environment and ourselves, from ourselves; and all the while we travel our lost highway getting further from the truth as the last of, the last of, "The Last Frontier" dies … Blowing another trail of smoke to the heavens, I think of the hustle and bustle of civilized doin’s, of the comfort and ease of modern existence. I shutter at the spellbinding onslaught of technology coupled in its bizarre intercourse with the social engineering used to control our culture--the icons of our age hyped calliopes of sight, sound, and vicarious experience morphing self-expression into clone-like statements of individuality. I guess given long enough with a palette of brilliant colors, one always ends up with the same old dog-shit brown-- I think of how far I've slipped from my original medicine dream in trying to cope with what can only be classed a damn screwy life, engaged in an even screwier business, within an absolutely screwier world. I think of my trick little safari truck setting in town; of all the foofaraw (possessions) I've come to think I need over the years. Of my all too necessary computer and phone, of the web we've wove around ourselves… Startled ... a renegade wind rustles the airy birch branch shroud, wafting sweet willow bush musk--sensuous and intoxicating to my weary soul. I stare into the fire's smoldering inferno, knowing there'll be no fading into sunsets. The time for that has been lost. Shifting, my thoughts are carried to the heavens in an eruption of sparks and embers as I kick up the fire and rise to check the ponies, Overhead, a raven pounds the air with a strong drumming of wing beats, cawing its antediluvian plea to the earth down below. The dull spark of a phosphorescent sun diamonds as it ascends the northeast horizon, muted and veiled in mystic haze. I stare at the trailing fingers of shimmering, reflective drainage--at the glowing, incandescent ridge lines radiating from the high point that I'm on. I watch caribou cavort and pirouette in eurythmic undulations of shadow and silhouette atop a distant razorback. A wolf pack howls in ecstatic delight--the orgasmic staccato reverberating from the valley far below. No man's land (at least within my mind for yet a while longer.) Nuzzling my ponies, I sing my medicine song and move gently on, knowing this way is right. Here your life beats strong and true as you feel your thoughts clarify, finally in tune with your spirit after years of being led so far astray. You hear the ancient chant, it grabs you, mingles your blood with original man, with the spirit of the wind. You smell the pungent smoke of the fires from long ago. It makes you realize, that in accepting as undeniable the natural order of things, by being part of the bloody struggle within the medicine circle, you're truly set free. by W.J. Lynus O'Brien written in 1995 while incarcerated for guide related charges after finally being set upon by the Government and their minions
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