In other words, to save remnant wildness we are going to have to be calculating, the opposite of wild. The problem is further complicated by the fact that phenology—nature’s clock—is being thrown out of whack. A perfect example of this is the life of the lowly marmot. For millions of years marmots would crawl out of their dark winter dens to nibble on the green world outside. Their timing was exquisite, their internal clocks prodded by the warmth of spring.
“The salad bar was open,” is how Anthony Barnosky, a University of California paleoecologist (and Allison Stegner’s adviser), recently put it. “But now with warmer winters they wake early and stumble out into a still snow-covered world. They starve.”
Many species will not have the luxury of simply migrating northward. In extreme cases, when species are stranded in patches of habitat, translocation—the actual moving of the threatened animals—will be necessary. There are many experts, Dr. Barnosky included, who are sensitive to the fact that this overly managed world might seem “unnatural,” and he recommends that some wilderness lands simply be left as they are. But Barnosky also stresses something repeated by every scientist I have spoken to recently: this is a problem that we created and that we must help alleviate. This will require sharpening all of the tools we are already using, while at the same time creating new tools. In fact, in these uncertain times the art of preserving nature will have to become almost as adaptable as nature itself, as we, along with the golden-cheeked warbler and greater sage grouse, learn to move with a changing world.
To keep my own sense of hope, my own sense of wildness, alive, I like to return to imagining Foreman’s vision of a rewilded West. After all, it isn’t just pronghorns and wolves who evolved in nature. The animal we are did too, and almost everything we learned as a species, and that remains alive in our genes, was learned in the wilderness. It is both where we were built and what we were built for. Which invites the question: could it be possible that it is not wise to destroy the place where we were first created? If the answer is yes, then we must resist the desire to tear apart and develop our last wild lands.
Rewilding is a radical idea, but so was saving parkland when it was first proposed. With the creation of the parks we did something that no one expected, something no one had ever done. Now imagine if parks became not just museums of remnant ecosystems but beads on a much larger rosary, stopover points in a migratory corridor that runs up and down the continent’s spine. Anyone who looks too long at the environmental problems facing us can become overwhelmed and dispirited. But the thought of rewilding gives me hope. It is big. It is bold. It excites imaginations. And, as ideas go, it is wild.
AFTER SUNSET HADLEY spotted an osprey nest in a tree above a river. When we climbed out of the car to look and take pictures, we realized just how tired we were and decided it was time to grab a hotel for the night. The next morning we arrived in the Tetons, jagged and improbably high. I know that these mountains derive their name from the word for breasts, but they were too sharp for breasts, or rather the only breasts they resembled were Madonna’s from her conical-bra period. We drove through Yellowstone like the tourists—the wheeled people—we were. Hadley spotted a buffalo and we pulled over and soon enough another dozen cars were parked behind us. This, it turns out, is the primary way of spotting wildlife in the park: not so much looking for animals as looking for cars full of people looking for animals. In fact, in Yellowstone we hit the worst traffic we had encountered since Denver.
The reason we were hurtling through the park, barely stopping to take in the famous geysers, is that we had a date with the man who had lived with bears. Not the over-the-top, aspiring actor from L.A., Timothy Treadwell, who was the subject of the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man, and who was eventually killed with his girlfriend when he got too close to the bears he claimed to love. No, we were going to meet the real grizzly man, Doug Peacock.
For most people, Peacock is best known as the character, or caricature, that Edward Abbey created out of the raw materials of the man’s life. Peacock grew up in Alma, Michigan, but during his three tours as a Green Beret medic in Vietnam he dreamed of the American West, clinging to a map of Montana like a secret and a promise. When he finally got home, he headed out into the western backcountry to try to make something out of the remains of his life. Shaken by all he had seen, numb but at the same time full of unnamed rage, he turned to a new hobby, to monkeywrenching, and also met a new friend named Ed Abbey. Abbey would eventually transform Peacock into a fictional character, the heroic but primitive George Washington Hayduke, one of the central figures in The Monkey Wrench Gang. But Peacock’s own life would take a turn that Hayduke’s did not. He would come to spend time deep in the Wyoming and Montana wildernesses, passing months living with grizzly bears. He didn’t study them so much at first as get to know them, learning their ways. Meanwhile his fictional alter ego was growing into a legend around the West. And it still grows. When Hones and I were driving back from the river trip we’d stopped at the Muley Point overlook, and saw, painted in big black letters on the concrete barrier, the words HAYDUKE LIVES!
When I told Hadley that the man we were visiting once lived with bears, she thought about it for minute.
“If I were going to live with an animal it would be wolves,” she said.
For the last three years she had been wolf-obsessed, had had wolf-themed birthday parties, and three months before we had visited, and howled with, the last red wolves in the wild in North Carolina.
“That’s not exactly breaking news,” I told her.
I was nervous about meeting Doug Peacock. At that point in my life I was rarely star-struck, but Peacock was different. I didn’t have many living heroes left; Peacock was one. It wasn’t just his lofty place in the Abbey firmament. It was the fact that I was a great admirer of his book Grizzly Years, which was as packed full of wildness as any book I had ever read, Desert Solitaire included. Though Peacock was not primarily a writer, in some ways the disciple had outdone the master: there were scenes in Grizzly Years wilder than any Abbey ever wrote. In places it felt less like a literary work than the notes of a mountain man: Peacock almost freezing to death before dipping into one of Yellowstone’s thermal pools, Peacock returning the skull of a bear he knew from its place as a trophy in a bar back to its den, Peacock out watching the bears during a blizzard. The writing sometimes jump-cuts from these wild scenes to terse and direct descriptions of Vietnam, and the relative awkwardness of the jumps back and forth between the war and the bears is, for me, part of the book’s beauty. Peacock’s felt like a book more lived than written, a book that made you want to put it down and get right out into what was left of the wilderness.
Peacock got to know individual bears, like the Pelican Creek bear or Happy bear (check him out on YouTube and you’ll see the frolicking that gave him his name). He also spent countless hours observing and filming the bears, but it wasn’t just natural history that he was after. In his brilliant essay “The Importance of Peacock,” the writer and environmental thinker Jack Turner describes those years in the wilderness as something greater, no less than an “attempt to integrate the wild and self by myth.”
One other thing was established during those years. Peacock was no armchair environmentalist. He was the real deal, a brave man who would get out into it. “Peacock makes other environmentalists look like they are playing in an upper-class bridge tournament,” said the novelist Jim Harrison.
So you can see why I’d been nervous when I called him earlier that morning. All I had to go on at that point was a curt e-mail that read: “If you’re around come on by.” Well, I would be around, I’d make sure of it, even if it required driving eight hundred miles out of my way. He’d given me directions to his house in Emigrant, Montana, along the Yellowstone River about an hour north of the park, and we had agreed to meet at five. I looked at the map and figured the mileage, but what I hadn’t counted on was winding our way through Yellowstone and stopping every mile or two for an elk
or buffalo traffic jam. There was an irony, of course, in bombing through one of America’s most beautiful parks to go and meet a wild man.
But it wasn’t irony but anxiety that started to fill me as I realized just how late we were going to be. I called again, telling him where we were.
“All right, shit,” he said, and then paused. At that time I still took his swearing personally, not yet aware that for him it was simply punctuation.
“Well, you can’t come up here then,” he continued. “Andrea will be just home from work.”
I’d blown it, I thought. His tone was curt, brusque, definitely irritated.
“Maybe we can meet at the bar. Yeah, let’s do that. We’ll meet at the bar.”
He gave minimalist directions to the bar: you get into the town of Emigrant, cross the river, and you’ll see it, it’s called River’s Edge.
“Sounds good,” I said.
But by the time we crawled through Mammoth Hot Springs and escaped the park to the north we were even later, and Hadley sensed my uneasiness. She had been focusing on the checklist of animals she was given when we entered the park—buffalo, check, elk, check, no wolves yet—but now she turned her attention to me.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m worried about seeing this guy,” I said.
“Is he famous?” she asked.
“Pretty famous.”
Then I heard myself saying something my mother used to say to me but that I don’t think I’d ever said before in my nine years as a parent: “We have to make a good impression.”
“Okay,” she said.
Make a good impression. What exactly did that mean when you were talking about a man who had lived with bears?
I glanced down at my clothes, at my T-shirt and shorts and flip-flops.
“I can’t wear this,” I said.
“You can’t?” Hadley asked.
“I can’t.”
Even though we were late, I pulled over at a rest area and dug into my bag. I found some jeans and grabbed my hiking boots. I considered a flannel shirt but it was too hot so I opted for a rattier T-shirt than the one I had on. I felt a little better when I got back behind the wheel, costumed now more like someone who Doug Peacock might talk to.
“Why do we have to see this guy?” Hadley asked.
“Because we have to,” I snapped, though I’m not a snapper.
“I hope he doesn’t get angry like a bear.”
Of course I got lost, crossing the river but not seeing the bar, at least not at first pass, driving three miles down the road before doubling back and finding it.
We walked out of the sunlight and into the dark of River’s Edge, a plain, square room where the walls were decorated with antlers and the heads of animals. In the middle of the room sat Doug Peacock and a woman I assumed was Andrea. He was wearing a baseball cap, a gray sleeveless shirt that revealed muscled, freckled arms, and he squinted up at us. Andrea wore glasses and was younger than he was, prettier too, and she smiled kindly. I pushed Hadley in front of me like an offering. Then I began to babble about the traffic. I noticed a stuffed mountain lion nearby, and the skins of two baby bears on the wall.
Two things saved the day.
Before I’d visited Wendell Berry, a friend had told me that Wendell liked Maker’s Mark, so I’d brought a bottle of whiskey as a gift. That was the trip’s first interview, and since this would be the last there was some symmetry in presenting the same gift.
The bottle made Peacock smile, and he wasted no time popping it open, right there in the bar.
He took a slug.
“Good stuff,” he said. “Thanks.”
He handed it to me and I followed suit.
The second thing that saved us were the dogs. River’s Edge allowed canine as well as human customers, and dogs roamed all over both the bar and the outdoor dining area, where we soon moved to. Hadley was ecstatic, chasing and hugging the slobbery Saint Bernard and cuddling the shy Doberman. Her delight seemed to delight Peacock, and certainly delighted Andrea, who followed Hadley around the grounds on a dog tour.
I drink fast when nervous and both Peacock and I were doing double duty, drinking our beers while sipping the whiskey from paper cups I had picked up at the bar on our way outside. I stared across the picnic table at him. He must have been close to seventy, but still looked strong. The squinting I noticed was apparently habitual, and he had more than a few other tics. I also noted that he said the word “fuck” a lot, and when I asked if I could use the tape recorder he said, simply, “No.” He didn’t say it in an unfriendly way, but he was the first person on the whole trip to refuse.
I asked him how he felt when The Monkey Wrench Gang came out.
“I was fucking furious,” he said. “Abbey’s publisher made him write me a letter. Assuring me that only the good parts of Hayduke were based on me.”
He laughed.
I understood why the character Abbey portrayed would have bothered Peacock, despite the fame it brought him. Hayduke was both a caricature and a caveman.
Then I told him about my project and about Terry Tempest Williams’s koan.
He said he loved Terry, but didn’t care for Stegner.
“He never wrote anything close to Desert Solitaire.”
He was opinionated; of course he was, he was Doug Peacock. But the conversation seemed to be going well, maybe due to the alcohol but maybe because we were actually somewhat hitting it off. He knew I had grown up in Massachusetts and suddenly we were talking about Cape Cod of all places. It turned out he had lived in the town of Brewster for a while, after chasing a woman to Boston. I was amused by the idea of Doug Peacock in Massachusetts, but of course he did it his way, living by hunting and scavenging, eating mostly quahogs, clams, and oysters.
“If you like, you can come up to the house and have a beer,” he said after a while. “And you could sleep in the trailer out behind the house.”
Hadley was about fifty yards away, shooting baskets on a court with a girl around her age. Three dogs chased the two girls as they played. When I gathered her up I saw her face was covered with dirt. It occurred to me, as we drove the mile or two across the river and up the hill, that this was exactly what her mother was worried about, and maybe expected, when she left her with me.
We pulled up at the house and headed inside. But first I noticed the doormat.
COME BACK WITH A WARRANT, it read.
Once inside, Doug and Hadley talked wolves for a while. Then he showed her his grizzly bear skull collection. Hadley asked what the bears up here ate and he said mostly grass, and ants. To demonstrate, Doug did a fine impression of a bear turning over a rock with its paw.
Andrea was tired and said good night, and we set Hadley up in the living room with a Disney DVD. Once she was settled, we sat at the kitchen table and drank beer and talked about Abbey for a while. They were friends, yes, but there was always a father-son thing going on. Peacock had written about the “patriarchal haze” that “sometimes clouded the friendship.” Though they camped, drank, and monkeywrenched together, Peacock was almost twenty years younger, and wrote that “there was a touch of old school paternalism to our brotherhood.” Abbey’s death in 1989 had rocked him.
Doug told me about Ed’s last hours, being with him as he died. In turn I told him about holding my father’s hand while he was dying, feeling the last pulsings of life, the final shallow breaths.
Hadley was happily absorbed in her movie, but her head popped up over the couch like a prairie dog whenever she heard Doug say the word fuck. Which meant her head popped up a lot.
He said it had been the same with his own kids. He had never been able to restrain himself when it came to that particular word. I mentioned that Abbey picked up on this in his portrait of Hayduke, and Peacock conceded that although Abbey exaggerated a lot, he had gotten that part right.
We talked for a while about the difficulty he and others had had trying to make a movie of The Monkey Wrench Gang. Part of the diff
iculty was that while Hollywood is fine with violence toward people and cars and buildings, they don’t want to make a movie where the principal and intended victims are private or industrial property. Peacock cursed the various producers and directors. He had written several drafts of scripts for the movie and even had one in his room at that moment. The movie had almost been made a dozen times, with actors from Jack Nicholson to Matthew McConaughey cast as Hayduke.
We talked about various things until, at one point, I asked, “Why grizzlies?”
He explained that after returning from the war he began doing a lot of camping in wild places. One of the those places was the backcountry of Yellowstone and it was there that he started finding himself in the company of bears. During one of his very first encounters he had been soaking in a thermal pool, where he was startled by a sow and her cub. The bear had treed him and Peacock had ended up naked and shivering up in the tree for more than an hour.
Gradually, grizzlies became not the natural by-product of his trips into the backcountry but the purpose. He loved guns and owned many, but he refused to bring them along when he knew he would encounter the bears.
DOUG PEACOCK’S DOORMAT.
“That would defeat the purpose,” he said.
And what was the purpose? The purpose was to feel real humility, to be taken off the usual human pedestal. Which was easy enough when you were in the presence of an animal that might suddenly decide to eat you. Humility, Peacock came to believe, was the proper emotional backdrop for reason, and in the wilderness he became at once more reasonable and more wild. He was always amazed at the way his senses grew sharper after only a few days out in it, the way he could see better and smell other animals. It was as if he clicked into being an older, more primal self.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 25
