Raising Wild
Page 15
I pour another tumbler of bourbon and look again at Caroline’s sweet little handprint turkey. Then I look at Hannah’s beaming face, which so clearly registers her innocent excitement that President Obama—with his own two daughters by his side—has made it possible for these otherwise doomed gobblers to go free. I think about that mythic first Thanksgiving that we describe to our children, even as a long shadow of violence threatens constantly to reduce it to historical insignificance. I think of the presidential turkey pardoning being performed in a world so replete with greed and conflict, suffering and injustice. I think of the fact that the ratio of turkeys annually pardoned and given free gin and tonics to those raised under horrendous conditions and unceremoniously decapitated is approximately 1:125,000,000.
“Girls!” I suddenly hear myself exclaim. “This is the best day ever! The president has made sure that the turkeys will be set free, and now they get to fly in a plane to Disney World, and they even get to be the stars in the big parade! And today you girls have learned all about how Thanksgiving is a holiday of peace and forgiveness, and soon we’ll have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner of our own. This is truly a day to count our blessings!”
Eryn instantly furrows her brow, as if contemplating whether to take my Wild Turkey away. Then Caroline starts counting aloud, “One, two, free, four!” and Hannah claps her hands and chants, “The birds are free! The birds are free!” I glance at Eryn, who is looking at me as if I’ve once again started something she will have to finish. It is a difficult moment, I admit. And so I do the only thing I can. I do what I think any father would do under the circumstances. I set my whiskey down slowly. Then I begin jumping up and down, clapping and shouting along with Hannah, and then Caroline follows suit, and, at last, even Eryn joins in: “The birds are free! The birds are free! The birds are free!” Before our celebration reaches its breathless finish, we have segued from our avian freedom chant into “Turkey in the Straw,” “Five Fat Turkeys Are We,” and, for our big closer, “Free Bird.” There is much jamming on air guitar, and when we finish singing we all stand panting, heads bowed, holding our imaginary lighters ceremoniously above our heads.
All too soon my daughters’ veneration of the first Thanksgiving will give way to a painful awareness of the Mystic River massacre. In the meantime we will celebrate, not history, which is so often a monument to human failure, but rather myth, which is the necessary dream that a better future might redeem the errors of our past. Perhaps we each deserve a pardon. Maybe, whether we are doomed prisoner or executioner, we each need to receive that last-minute phone call in what would otherwise be our death chamber. We forgive the birds, and in so doing, we hope desperately that they might forgive us.
PART THREE
Humbling
Two conditions—gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling—have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The “place” (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature’s stricter lessons with some grace.
—GARY SNYDER, The Practice of the Wild
Chapter 9
9. Finding the Future Forest
I find it easy to praise the high desert, because it is a landscape so open, wild, and resistant to human inhabitation that it speaks simultaneously to my love of nature, my longing for challenge, and my desire to get in touch with my Inner Curmudgeon. But there are two weeks each July when my idealization of this arid land is tested by the scorching high-elevation sun, and I begin to wonder how anything besides leopard lizards and Great Basin rattlers could make a home in this withering heat. During this period I avoid reading anything I’ve ever written about the desert, because it invariably strikes me as fluffy pastoral crap. If Wordsworth were here now, he’d lay down his glowing pen and take up a shotgun and a fifth of tequila and head for the shade of a juniper. During these two weeks I have no choice but to relinquish my lyricism and admit the obvious: this place is a baking hell, and I was insane for building a house without air conditioning. This time of year it is easy to understand why the old miners who passed through this area named local landscape features things like Hell’s Furnace Hill, Devil Canyon, and Inferno Ridge.
There is, however, summer consolation nearby. From my sweltering perch I can see the distant Sierra Nevada crest, and I don’t need John Muir’s ghost to tell me how cool and lovely it is up there right now. Fifty miles south of our desert home is one of the most beautiful alpine lakes on earth. Lake Tahoe is often described as a gem, a translucent blue jewel set among the snowcapped peaks that ring its spectacular basin. But this gemlike image of Tahoe as static and isolated disconnects the celebrated lake from the watershed that not only encircles it but also extends downstream from it into the desert below. It might be better to say of Tahoe, as Thoreau said of Walden Pond, that it is not a jewel but rather an eye: something deep, clear, reflective, but also intimately related to a larger living body through a complex arterial system. The Tahoe watershed is spectacular not only for the gem lake at its fountainhead but also for the life it brings to the western Great Basin, these beautiful, blazing landscapes where the snowmelt of the mountains becomes the lifeblood of the desert.
Five rivers drain eastward from the northern Sierra into the Great Basin. From south to north they are the Owens, Walker, Carson, Truckee, and Susan. Each terminates in a lake, marsh, or sink from which it never escapes. This is the origin of the term Great Basin: we live on the extreme western edge of a vast desert from which no water ever reaches the sea. Of these five rivers, our home river is the Truckee, which winds 121 miles from Tahoe to its terminus in Pyramid Lake, the eye of the desert and the final home of that shimmering alpine water. Among the most magnificent desert terminus lakes in the world, Pyramid is a twenty-six-mile-long azure expanse cradled among the bare, glowing hills of the desert and surrounded by formations of tufa—towers of calcium carbonate that stand in surreal poses along the shores of the lake. Pyramid is as ancient as it is beautiful; it is one of the few surviving remnants of Pleistocene-era Lake Lahontan, which at its height thirteen thousand years ago covered more than 8,000 square miles of what is now Nevada. Although Tahoe and Pyramid are in starkly different ecosystems and are separated by 2,400 vertical feet, they are linked by the flowing bridge of the Truckee River. They are sister lakes that share the same origin in Sierra snow and whose fates remain intimately intertwined.
Of the river systems along the eastern flank of the Sierra, none has escaped severe damage, and several are critically endangered. Beginning with the federal Reclamation Act in 1902, enterprising westerners tried to make the desert bloom by replumbing Sierra watersheds in the vain hope that the vast, arid expanses of the Great Basin might be converted through irrigation into a prosperous agricultural empire. The Newlands Reclamation Project resulted in the construction of Derby Dam, which diverted much of the Truckee’s flow into the Carson River watershed, where it could be put to use in commercial agriculture instead of “going to waste” out in the desert. This is why Fallon, Nevada, which receives an average of five inches of rain each year, is now known for its trademark Hearts of Gold cantaloupes.
But while the Truckee was being diverted to grow cantaloupes in the desert, the magnificent terminal lakes it fed began to die. Starting in the early twentieth century, water levels at Pyramid and Winnemucca went into freefall, and by 1939 Winnemucca Lake had simply vanished. Once a twenty-eight-mile-long, tule-filled, wildlife-rich lake, today it is an immense stretch of bare alkali flat, a white ghost lake rippled only by wind and sand. Soon after the diversion of Truckee water the native Pyramid Lake Lahontan cutthroat trout—the largest cutthroat in the world, which weighed up to forty pounds and which at one time was shipped to mining camps at the rate of one million pounds per ye
ar—could no longer reach its spawning grounds and began to go extinct. So too the now-endangered Pyramid Lake cui-ui fish, whose critical importance to local Native American culture is reflected in the ancestral name of the Pyramid Lake Paiute people: Kuyuidokado, or “cui-ui eaters.” As the marshes and lakes of the region dried up and their fisheries collapsed, the great eastern Sierra flyway also began to collapse, with the result that the millions of migrating eagles, ibis, loons, dowitchers, plovers, phalaropes, and other migratory birds that depended on their waters were reduced to a trickle.
The Lahontan cutthroat, Nevada’s state fish, provides an inspiring example of the fall and rise of some desert species over the past century. At Pyramid Lake, the triple threat of introduced non-native fish, overfishing, and plummeting water levels posed a severe threat to these fish. During the 1920s, anglers were landing monster cutthroat here, but by the 1930s this native fish had begun to disappear. Their last river spawn was in 1938, and less than a decade later the Lahontan cutthroat had vanished from Pyramid. The species was federally listed as endangered in 1970. The mistakes we made in managing the liquid gold that is the lifeline of this watershed had resulted in the loss of one of the most remarkable fish species in the West, and now the desert lake was teeming with swimming ghosts.
Thirty years after the cutthroat’s disappearance we tried to correct our mistake by attempting an ambitious restoration effort—an example of the sort of creative rewilding upon which the environmental health of the Intermountain West will ultimately depend. During the 1970s, a transplanted population of Lahontan cutthroat was discovered in a remote stream up in the Pilot Mountains on the Nevada-Utah border. Using genetics from late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century museum mounts of the extirpated native trout, it was established that the Pilot Mountains population was indeed descended from the original Truckee Basin stock. A hatchery program was established here in northwestern Nevada, and genetically native Lahontan cutthroat trout were raised and, beginning in 2006, reintroduced to Pyramid Lake. In 2014 a long-awaited miracle occurred: the fish spawned in the Truckee River for the first time in seventy-six years. Fishermen are already catching twenty-pounders in the lake. Once vanished, the Lahontan cutthroat trout has become native here again.
“Keep Tahoe Blue” is the rallying cry of folks who care about the integrity of this alpine lake (though “Drink Tahoe Red,” which celebrates an excellent local beer, also has a place in our sloganeering lexicon). “Keep Tahoe Blue,” which we sometimes render “Mantenga Tahoe Azul,” refers not so much to the color of the lake’s water as to its clarity. Tahoe’s clarity is measured using a Secchi disk, a black-and-white platter, ten inches in diameter, which is lowered down into the water until it finally becomes invisible. Back in 1968, when clarity measurements began, the disk was visible more than a hundred feet below the surface of the water—a remarkable depth, but one that has been decreasing ever since. By 1997 average visibility was down to a mere sixty-four feet, and since then a lot of folks have been working to bring that number back up. It isn’t just that we want to be able to see kokanee salmon seventy-five feet down in the blue depths, though of course we do; we also realize that Tahoe’s clarity is a prime indicator of the health of our entire watershed.
Despite setbacks, the Tahoe-Pyramid watershed has many advocates who’ve worked, with some notable successes, to restore these great alpine and desert lakes and the spectacular river corridor connecting them. Activists in the Tahoe Basin are educating the public about the value of minimizing runoff, erosion, and pollution, and ambitious restoration efforts in the Truckee’s riparian zone have stabilized stream banks and improved fish spawning areas. One dramatic success story is Anaho Island in Pyramid Lake, which is now protected as a National Wildlife Refuge. Here breeding colonies of many species of gulls, terns, cormorants, herons, and egrets thrive. Anaho is also home to one of the West’s largest colonies of American white pelicans, majestic birds that soar above the lake on snow-white wings that span an incredible ten feet. The astonishing sight of a gyre of immense pelicans wheeling in the desert sky is a graceful reminder that the creatures of the Great Basin are utterly dependent upon the Tahoe Sierra waters that nourish them.
Although I’m a confirmed desert rat and would rather camp out in the bright dust of a remote alkali flat than spend a weekend in a chalet overlooking Lake Tahoe, I do know which side my bread is buttered on. The health of the Tahoe Basin and its watershed is our lifeline; if the chalet dwellers don’t send us enough water, or don’t send it at the right time, or don’t send it in decent condition, the ecosystem we inhabit is stressed—and the desert is a place where the margin of survival is razor thin to begin with. Because the closing of an upstream spigot can cause a magnificent desert lake to simply vanish, the stakes could hardly be higher. While I like cantaloupes as much as the next guy, lakes for ’lopes is not a trade-off I am prepared to make. This is why I ultimately decided that in order to help protect the desert I would have to start in the mountains. If forestry practices in the Tahoe Basin could be improved, so would the volume and quality of water we receive down here in the Great Basin. If we manage to “Keep Tahoe Blue,” we’ll also achieve something less visible but equally important: we’ll keep the lifeblood of the desert flowing. If I wanted to see white pelicans in desert skies, I would have to start by working high above me, up in the alpine forests.
I’d been at home in other forests: first in the mixed deciduous woods of my southern Appalachian boyhood and then in the tangled cypress strands and shaded mangrove hammocks of the Everglades detour my life took before I swooned for the high desert. But the stately coniferous forest of the Tahoe Basin looked to me like someone else’s woods, its picturesque slopes, open stands, and sculpted boulders too like an advertisement for property you couldn’t afford, a ski lodge waiting to be built, a place that only existed for two weeks in August. These are the limitations of vision we carry with us on our scattered voyages through new landscapes. If it bothered me that people so often failed to appreciate the skeletal beauty of the desert, it was equally true that as a desert rat I had failed not only to appreciate the beauty of Tahoe but also to acknowledge my dependence upon it.
I had also been a forest activist in other places, and I had always been especially devoted to watchdogging logging roads—those arteries of pain invading the healthy body of wild country—and helping to ensure road closures and obliteration in the interest of forest health. As an admirer of poetry as well as of forests, my motto had been, in the spirit of Robert Frost, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I . . . got them both closed.” Now it seemed time to get behind the postcard image and try to discover what might be missing from my own way of inhabiting the Truckee River watershed.
As a first step, I contacted a guy named Rich Kentz at the League to Save Lake Tahoe and volunteered to serve as a forest monitor up in the Tahoe Basin. Rich was a good guide and teacher as we took long hikes through forests that were slated to be logged. Like rafting a river just before it’s dammed, we walked in the shadow of the tractor and the saw—a long, chilling shadow you could feel falling across something that had reached evening before its time. On some days monitoring felt like little more than measuring the waning life of something inexorably doomed; on others, though, the woods still felt as restorative and quiet and endless as they had seemed when I was Hannah’s age.
The objective of the forest monitor is to compare the US Forest Service’s plan for logging (the “prescription”) to the ecological reality of the forest (“on the ground”). For example, a forest monitor might discover that a riparian zone (or SEZ: “stream environment zone”) has not been adequately protected by a logging prescription or might note that the removal of large trees would be inconsistent with the objectives of the forest management plan. A monitor may express concern that tractor logging in certain areas will create excessive soil compaction or erosion, threatening critical wildlife habitat or endangering watershed health. In other cases, a monito
r might note that the stated reason for logging an area—heavy fuel loading posing fire danger or die-off from insect kill, for example—isn’t justified by observable conditions in the forest. The monitor then communicates concerns to the Forest Service (whose employees are often nicknamed “Freddies” by forest activists). If all goes well, the prescription for logging that tract will be adjusted toward a more sustainable approach to harvesting timber.
One summer afternoon I had just hiked out of a timber sale unit on Tahoe’s North Shore with Rich. As we sat on the tailgate sweating, drinking Tahoe red, and looking out over the windy expanse of the sapphire lake, Rich offered a brief explanation of forest history in the basin. During the Comstock era of the mid-to late-nineteenth century, the basin’s forests had been severely cut. Ancient ponderosa and sugar pine were the first to go, providing the beams and braces that supported many miles of mineshafts beneath then-booming Virginia City. Almost overnight, a towering ancient forest in the mountains became the skeleton of a labyrinth of subterranean catacombs in the desert. A century later, the clear-cut basin forests have grown up into same-age stands of trees, rather than the mixed-age stands that would have prevailed under an undisturbed forest regime. Within these unnatural same-age forests there is fierce competition for the vital resources of sunlight, water, and soil nutrients—competition that often triggers die-off, especially in thick stands of fir. At the same time, increased human inhabitation of the basin has prompted ambitious fire-suppression efforts, and while a lot of oversized vacation homes have been spared, the forest has become loaded with an unnaturally high concentration of dead and downed trees, which intensifies the risk of catastrophic wildfire—a risk that is exacerbated by drought and by the long-term effects of climate change.