Wild thoughts from wild.., p.1
Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, page 1
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Contents
Introduction
Part I: THE RIVER
Synecdoche and the Trout
Time and Tide on the Ocoee River
Vortex
Only Connect
Grabbing the Loop
Part II: THE CITY
The White Tigers of Cincinnati
To Live and Die in L.A.
Reaction Wood
Superdove on 46th Street
Before the Fall
Part III: THE MOUNTAINS
Pinhead Secrets
The Keys to Kingdom Come
Karl’s Sense of Snow
The Trees Cry Out on Currawong Moor
The Big Turn
Eat of This Flesh
Part IV: THE HEART
The Swallow That Hibernates Underwater
Trinket from Aru
Bagpipes for Ed
Point of Attachment
Voice Part for a Duet
Love in the Age of Relativity
Strawberries Under Ice
About David Quamen
Notes and Provenance
Bibliography
Index
Endnotes
TO KAY AND SALLIE
Introduction
The title of this book alludes to a scarce resource. Wild places, in the ordinary sense of that phrase, are in preciously short supply on planet Earth at the end of the twentieth century.
The great zones of forest and swamp have been reduced to small, tattered remnants of what they once were. The fiercest deserts have been split by roads and planted with artificial oases. The widest seas have been effectively narrowed, the highest mountains effectively lowered, the coldest polar regions made effectively warmer and more hospitable, not simply by adventurous human visitors but by the cultural and technological trappings that modern humans bring. For instance, nowadays you might step out of a dugout canoe at the Amazon headwaters and meet an Indian man wearing a red feather through his nose and a gimme cap reading OKLAHOMA SOONERS. You might gaze into the sky over the highlands of New Guinea and see a helicopter, bringing in two oil geologists along with their wall tent, their survey equipment, their Macintosh, and their food, including a two-month supply of Pringles. You might enter a little village café on the island of Kosrae, in the southwestern Pacific, and find several local children watching the Three Stooges on a VCR. To a considerable degree, these and other wild places have been tamed.
Some people celebrate that fact—Hooray, humanity conquers the wilderness, making life safer and more comfortable for everybody. Other people, including me, regret it. I suppose you could say: We have the luxury of regretting it. But that’s a complicated argument, and not one I want to pursue here. My purpose at the moment is more modest: to welcome you to this book of ruminations, and to intimate a definition of “wild places” that’s a little more stretchy and inclusive.
Wildness, in this broader sense, inheres in any geographical or emotional context that remains unpolluted by absolute safety and certainty. Take the foothills of Burbank, with their coyote population—as described in the essay here titled “To Live and Die in L.A.” Or the peculiar canyon ecology of midtown Manhattan, fostering evolutionary adaptations in the postmodern pigeon—as described in “Superdove on 46th Street.” Or the death of a beloved curmudgeon named Edward Abbey—as described in “Bagpipes for Ed.” I can report finding a certain richly threatening wildness in each of those contexts, those geographical and emotional places, which I’ve tried to share.
My own discovery of wildness, in the most discomfitingly personal sense, dates back about twenty-five years to an episode in the mountains of north-central Wyoming. The memory of that episode is indelible to me, though the story isn’t especially dramatic. I had driven out west just after graduate school, in quest of purgation and a new life and trout. I was alone in my Volkswagen bus, carrying almost everything I owned, which consisted mostly of paperback books, a skillet, a pair of waders, and a fly rod, the last of which I was just learning to use. My life stretched before me as a mysterious, undifferentiated vista, like the plains of Nebraska at sunset, vacant of plan or intention except that I knew I wanted to write novels. I was reading War and Peace, in a two-volume Penguin edition, and my submersion in that book reflects the fact that for the first time since boyhood I had an abundance of free time. I was nearly broke, but my prospects and my liberty seemed boundless.
I camped for a week in the Bighorn Mountains, above Sheridan, living out of the bus and fishing a fork of the Tongue River that meandered past my campground. Since the stream was tiny and I’d been sharing it with other fishermen, one day I decided to hike downstream a few miles to where it converged with another fork, far from any campground or road. (Consulting a map now, half a lifetime later, I see that those tributaries must have been the North Tongue and Fool’s Creek, the second of which seems apropos, in light of my behavior.) I jammed my waders into a day pack along with a canteen, matches, and a box of raisins, and carried my fly rod in my hand. Within a mile the trail evaporated and I found myself bushwhacking along the stream. Within two miles the route had become clotted with thick timber, underbrush, and deadfalls, interrupted occasionally by barricades of scree. The going had gotten slow, but I plodded on.
In midafternoon I passed an old derelict cabin and made a mental note of it. In late afternoon, fighting through brush, I reached the little confluence—which turned out, disappointingly, despite the doubled volume of water, to offer no particularly good fishing spots. Trying a Black Gnat pattern and a few other flies, I caught nothing. The sun was now low and I was hungry. So I impaled a live grasshopper on a hook, dangled it into a pool too obstructed for me to hit with a cast, and landed a single small trout. Then I started walking out. Dusk caught me in the vicinity of the derelict cabin. By this time it was clear that I’d better stay here for the night. I knew that busting the thickets and crossing the scree piles in darkness would be ugly work, and foolhardy; one bad step, one wet rock, and I could break a leg. And I realized, rather belatedly, that a broken leg under these circumstances could be fatal, since no one in the world knew within five hundred miles or three weeks where I might be. I had made no local friends; I had designed no fallback scenario. I was only a half dozen miles from a road, but I had never been more alone. Although I’d been too stupid to think of that earlier, now I could think of nothing else. I had put myself into a context that, narrow as it was, trivial as its dangers might be, seemed as wild as any I’ve ever known.
I built a fire. I cooked the trout on a stick, and it tasted delicious. The raisins were good too. I lay down on a plank bunk inside the cabin until the pack rats, crawling over my legs, spooked me. Then I went back outside and tried to sleep in my waders, thinking they would insulate me like a sleeping bag, but they were too wet and clammy. So I rebuilt the fire and curled up near it, scorching the elbow out of my dirty wool sweater. While I hunkered and shivered, the pack rats chewed sections from my fly line and hauled them away. In the morning, the glorious morning, I hiked out, placing each footstep with extraordinary care. Safely back at the trailhead, I was so giddy with relief that I let my fly rod fall in front of the Volkswagen bus and then drove over it.
This was my little baptism into a new life, a new set of perspectives, in the Wild West. The whole conversion experience is mentioned passingly in “Synecdoche and the Trout,” the first piece in this collection, and again in “Strawberries Under Ice,” the last. It’s no coincidence that those two essays, concerning my own most beloved wild place, bracket the rest.
Between them lies a sampler of other travels, misadventures, small insights, research efforts, exercises in scientific explication and unscientific noodling, portraits of people who have fascinated and impressed me, sporting narratives, eulogies, reminiscences, valentines, warnings, second thoughts, and willful provocations, all of which have been previously published, mostly in magazines. The order in which they’re presented here—within four loose wild-place rubrics, the River, the City, the Mountains, the Heart—is not chronological, nor necessarily the order in which you should read them. Although there’s a certain logical progression among some of the essays as arranged (familiarizing you with whitewater terminology from one essay to another within the River section, for instance, or with the peculiar character of telemark skiing from one essay to another within the Mountains), I invite you to jump around, dipping into the various sections as your tastes or your mood might dictate. The real point of even those river-washed and mountain-hung stories, after all, is not to convey athletic information but to offer some observations and thoughts about interesting people in intense situations.
The majority of these pieces appeared originally as installments of the column I wrote for fifteen years, under the title “Natural Acts,” for Outside magazine. (One of them, “Superdove on 46th Street,” is my final “Natural Acts” column, which ran in the March 1996 issue.) Most of the rest were done as feature assignments, either for Outside or for other magazines, such as Rolling Stone or Powder. I list all the details of first publication in “Notes and Provenance,” at the back. Before leaving this subject,
Magazines, and especially the “slick” magazines that safely tenured academics and high-minded literati sometimes scorn, offer a vast richness of opportunity to imaginative nonfiction writers—and therefore also to imaginative nonfiction readers. These magazines get a bad rap. The sharp criticisms and easy condescension leveled against them are generally unconsidered, supercilious, blindered to the tricky relations between writer and audience, also to those between writer and creditors, and no more than about half accurate. Because they print on glossy paper, carry advertisements for fancy sunglasses and Rollerblades and miracle-fiber underwear, and devote a portion of their pages to items and stories that might politely be called fatuous junk, magazines such as Outside are too often dismissed as intellectually or literarily negligible. But stop and think about it, and you’ll remember that the New York Times also devotes a sizable portion of its pages to fatuous junk. My point is that magazines, like newspapers, should be judged by the best and most substantial of what they offer, not by the worst and most trivial stuff that serves toward helping them meet the payroll. The world is big and wondrous, full of odd sights and strange beasts and weird noises and charmingly demented people with great stories to tell and (despite the increasing scarcity) more than a few wild places—wild places to which the sainted editors of Outside and certain other slick magazines are forever sending writers, often with little more instruction than to observe carefully, think hard, and then put something honest on paper. Furthermore, these magazines reward their writers with decent, life-sustaining payment. (I’m not being metaphorical here; I mean money.) This is not negligible. This is a service that delivers meat—thinly sliced meat that’s there for whoever cares to find it, like kosher pastrami hidden in a Wonder bread sandwich.
One of those lucky, trusted writers has been me. If it wasn’t so, I would have missed the chance to risk drowning myself on the Futaleufu River—as described in “Grabbing the Loop”—or to find meaning over a plate of stir-fried mountain lion—as described in “Eat of This Flesh.” I would have missed seeing Hell’s Hole on the Ocoee River during a whitewater world championship, missed hearing currawongs caw on a high moor in northwestern Tasmania, missed getting snowbound with a crew of ICBM launch officers, and missed the avalanche triggered by Karl Birkeland near Lionhead Peak. I would have missed aspects of the world that libraries and telephones and highbrow journals could never show me. I would have missed the chance of offering you this collection of far-flung reports and reckless notions. I might have had to stay home, God forbid, and look for a steady job.
[I]
The RIVER
Synecdoche and the Trout
It’s a simple question with a seemingly simple answer: “Why do you live in Montana?”
Repeatedly over a span of some years you have heard this, asked most often by people who know you just well enough to be aware of the city where you grew up, the tony universities you attended, and a few other bits of biographical detail on the basis of which they harbor a notion that you should have taken your place in New York café society or, at least, an ivy-adorned department of English. They suspect you, these friends do, of hiding out. Maybe in a way they are right. But they have no clear sense of what you are hiding from, or why, let alone where. Hence their question.
“The trout,” you answer, and they gape back blankly.
“The trout,” they say after a moment. “That’s a fish.”
“Correct.”
“Like lox.”
“In some ways similar.”
“You like to go fishing. That’s why you live out there? That’s why you spend your life in a place without decent restaurants or bookstores or symphony orchestras, a place halfway between Death Valley and the North Pole? A place where there’s no espresso, and the Times comes in three days late by pontoon plane? Do I have this straight, now? It’s because you like to go fishing?”
“No,” you say. “Only partly. At the beginning, that was it, yes. But I’ve stayed all these years. No plans to leave.”
“You went for the fishing, but you stayed for something else. Aha.”
“Yes. The trout,” you say.
“This is confusing.”
“A person can get too much trout fishing. Then it cloys, becomes taken for granted. Meaningless.”
“Again like lox.”
“I don’t seem to fish nearly as much as I used to.”
“But you keep talking about the trout. You went, you stayed, the trout is your reason.”
“The trout is a synecdoche,” you say, because these friends are tough and verbal and they can take it.
• • •
A BIOLOGIST would use the term indicator species. Because I have the biases of a literary journalist, working that great gray zone between newspaper reporting and fiction, engaged every day in trying to make facts not just talk but yodel, I speak instead of synecdoche. We both mean that a trout represents more than itself—but that, importantly, it does also represent itself.
“A poem should not mean/But be,” wrote Archibald MacLeish, knowing undeniably in his heart that a good poem quite often does both. Likewise a trout.
The presence of trout in a body of water is a discrete ecological fact that nevertheless signifies certain things.
It signifies a particular complex of biotic and chemical and physical factors, a standard of richness and purity, without which that troutly presence is impossible. It signifies aquatic nutrients like calcium, potassium, nitrate, phosphate; signifies enough carbon dioxide to nourish meadows of algae and to keep calcium in solution as calcium bicarbonate; signifies a prolific invertebrate fauna (Plecoptera, Trichoptera, Diptera, Ephemeroptera), and a temperature regime confined within certain daily and annual extremes. It also signifies clear pools emptying down staircases of rounded boulders and dappled with patterns of late-afternoon shade cast by chrome yellow cottonwood leaves in September. It signifies solitude so sweet and pure as to bring an ache to the sinuses, a buzz to the ears. Loneliness and anomie of the most wholesome sort. It signifies dissolved oxygen to at least four or five parts per million. It signifies a good possibility of osprey, dippers, and kingfishers, otters and water shrews, heron; and it signifies Oncorhynchus clarki, Oncorhynchus mykiss, Salmo trutta. Like a well-chosen phrase in any poem, MacLeish’s included, the very presence of trout signifies at more than one level. Magically, these creatures are literal and real. They live in imagination, memory, and cold water.
For instance: I can remember the first trout I ever caught as an adult (which was also the first I ever caught on a fly), and precisely what the poor little fish represented to me at that moment. It represented (a) dinner and (b) a new beginning, with a new sense of self, in a new place. The matter of dinner was important, since I was a genuinely hungry young man living out of my road-weary Volkswagen bus with a meager supply of groceries. But the matter of selfhood and place, the matter of reinventing identity, was paramount. My hands trembled wildly as I took that fish off the hook. A rainbow, all of seven or eight inches long. Caught on a Black Gnat pattern, size 12, tied cheaply of poor materials somewhere in the Orient and picked up by me at Herter’s when I had passed through South Dakota. I killed the little trout before it could slip through my fingers and, heartbreakingly, disappear. This episode was for me equivalent to the one in Faulkner’s “Delta Autumn,” where blood from a fresh-killed buck is smeared on the face of the boy. I slew you, the boy thinks. My bearing must not shame your quitting life, he understands. My conduct for ever onward must become your death. In my own case, of course, there was no ancient Indian named Sam Fathers serving as mentor and baptist. I was alone and an autodidact. The blood of the little trout did not steam away its heat of life into the cold air, and I smeared none on my face. Nevertheless.
The fish came out of a creek in the Bighorn Mountains of north-central Wyoming, and I was on my way to Montana, though at that moment I didn’t yet know it.
Montana was the one place on Earth, as I thought of it, farthest in miles and spirit from Oxford University, yet where you could still get by with the English language, and the sun didn’t disappear below the horizon for days in a row during midwinter, and the prevailing notion of a fish dinner was not lutefisk. I had literally never set foot within the boundaries of the state. I had no friends there, no friends of friends, no contacts of any sort, which was fine. I looked at a map and saw jagged blue lines, denoting mountain rivers. All I knew was that, in Montana, there would be more trout.
