Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  The nature writer, whether Mark Twain at his self-deprecating best in the Sierra, or John Muir at his mystical peak, rarely gets much credit for altering the course of events. Western historians, new and old schools, dismiss the romanticizing, the anthropomorphizing, the exaggeration. When Terry Tempest Williams went to Congress to rhapsodize about the red rock country of Utah not long ago, she was snubbed by her state congressional delegation. Nature poet—what the hell does she know. Thomas McGuane is rarely listened to by anyone with tax money to spend in his home state of Montana. Muir, at least, was given a camping trip with Teddy Roosevelt; but T.R. was already sold on saving Yosemite. Yellowstone National Park, the creation of which was unprecedented, the idea of which was an American gift to the world, owes It’s foundation to storytellers with pen, ink, and silver oxide. When the stories about Yellowstone ceased to be disregarded as yarns, America realized it had a treasure and it had a culture that would be linked to the wild. All of this evolved over time. And some of it was simple nationalism. The British had dismissed reports of megaflora and towering geysers as “Yankee inventions.” Well. Bring Mr. Kipling over here, and we’ll show him a thing or two.

  Rumors of Yellowstone grew and multiplied throughout the nineteenth century, long after Colter’s wanderings. It was the Loch Ness monster of the West: a lot of people claimed to have seen some parts of it, but almost all of the descriptions were reality-challenged. By 1871, Congress had decided to send a formal expedition out to map, sketch, and photograph the rumors. A similar thing had been done with the Grand Canyon two years earlier, with John Wesley Powell at the head. For all the government support of industries that worked to kill the better parts of the West, from bison to wild rivers, there has always been another tradition: subsidized serendipity. Of course the explorers with presidential seals on their compasses were directed to specific ends. But they were paid to wander, roam, sniff, sketch, listen, take a close look at the country, and try to grasp it in all It’s dimensions. A Pennsylvania geologist, Ferdinand Hayden, was put in charge of the Yellowstone trip, financed to the tune of forty thousand dollars. He was well supplied with food, horses, mapping equipment, a platoon of soldiers and assistants, scientists, and, most importantly, a painter, a photographer, and a writer. The landscape painters Karl Bodmer and Albert Bierstadt had already captured some of the essence of the West that had escaped other travelers. Religious zealots, prospectors, homesteaders, city builders, railroad surveyors, Indian killers—they had been widely promoted and were ubiquitous. The painters were more interested in light, color, the contours of the land and It’s inhabitants. John James Audubon spent more than half a year at the headwaters of the Missouri in 1843, sketching drafts for what would become Birds of America. Bierstadt painted the Rockies on his first Western trip in 1859, and then on a second trip in 1863, one that took him to Yosemite. Some or his paintings did give an undue glow to the otherwise harsh and killing walk across the continent by emigrants. But his best work captured the West of grandeur.

  In Yellowstone, Hayden’s survey found the headwaters of the Snake River, the geyser that would later be known as Old Faithful, and the extraordinary stair-steps of white at the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, formed by calcium carbonate. Hayden, short and full of bounce, was called “Man Who Picks Up Stones Running,” by the Indians. He was a geologist in rock heaven. Yellowstone has the highest concentration of active geothermal features in the world and the largest geyser. Three times in the last two million years, Yellowstone had experienced a monumental eruption, reshaping much of the West. The core of Yellowstone is a collapsed volcano; all around are windows into the molten interior of the earth—mud pots and geysers, hot springs and fumaroles. Hayden’s expedition was in a land that seemed to be still forming, alive, and was overrun with bison, antelope, wolves, bighorn sheep, elk, pikas, grizzly and black bears, trumpeter swans, and osprey. Colter had told no lies; he simply never had anything to back up his claims.

  Hayden returned with proof. His expedition painter, Thomas Moran, recorded some of the color and detail of Yellowstone. Moran was the son of immigrant handweavers, and he was self-trained. He captured the spray and energy of the waterfalls, the way the rivers pushed through the yellow-colored rock, the breadth of valleys grazed by thousands of bison, the mountains at sunset. Later critics called his work, and that of Bierstadt and others, the propaganda arm of monumentalism—landscape as power. Which meant that landscapes without big central monuments, be it prairie grass or old-growth forest, were inferior by comparison. The argument has merit, but the academics who ruminate on this topic miss a point: people do not make intellectual attachments to land. They become passionate because something clicks, some esthetic connection. They get a dose of religion, sometimes from a monument, sometimes from the angle of light at dawn, but it is seldom rational in It’s origin. John Steinbeck toured the country for Travels with Charley: In Search of America in 1962 and sounded like a schoolboy trying to explain what happened to him after going through the Big Sky country. “I am in love with Montana,” he wrote. “For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love, and it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.” Yes, but would it love him back?

  Moran’s painting of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, depicting the waterfall that plunges a thousand feet over brightly colored rock, dazzled Washington. It was the first American landscape, by an American artist, to be purchased by the government. Equally convincing were William Henry Jackson’s black-and-white photographs, most of which were later destroyed in Chicago’s Great Fire. Hayden added his own words from his diary, appealing to nationalism. “We pass with rapid transition from one remarkable vision to another, each unique in It’s kind and surpassing all others in the known world,” he wrote.

  The national park idea was formalized the next year, 1872, when President Grant signed the law establishing a sanctuary of more than two million acres. It was termed “a pleasuring ground for all the people.” But it started something. Instead of the government giving away the West, or trying to remake it, or disparaging it, the land was cherished for simply what it was— America in the raw. To protect the new reserve, the army was sent in, and for better than thirty years, they were the first national park rangers, chasing poachers, shooing out prospectors, giving directions to women in corsets and men in suits who had taken the railroad down Paradise Valley to experience something akin to the American version of the grand tour. There may have been no better use for the cavalry in the West. The British, snubbers and disbelievers early on, were among the first to show gratitude and to realize the significance of what had happened in the American West. “All honor to the United States for having bequeathed as a free gift to man the beauties and curiosities of this wonderland,” said the Earl of Duneaven on a visit to Yellowstone in 1874. More than 120 years later, in the mid-1990s, members of a strident new Congress proposed closing some national parks, and getting rid of all public art—in a single legislative bill. They derided park advocates as nature freaks and elites who wanted to lock up the land. “Waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating idiots,” was the phrase used by Congressman Don Young, head of the House committee that oversees most public land issues. The promoters of wilderness and parks, cast as somehow un-American, out of sync with Western tradition, were defensive. They should have boasted of their lineage. Yellowstone owes It’s existence to a mountain man, a geologist who could write, and a painter. None of them went to Harvard.

  I TRY to dash through the Lamar Valley. I’ve been there a dozen times, but I can never pull myself away. In early evening all manner of creatures great and small come together in this banquet hall of nature. Trout rise for bugs. Osprey and eagles swoop for trout. Pronghorns bounce, as if on springs. Hundreds of buffalo graze along the valley, joined by their calves. Unlike cattle, bison know how to drink from a stream without destroying it; their hooves are thin, and they don’t lie around in turd-covered mudflats, aswarm wit
h flies, waiting to be herded off to the next meal. But they have to be on their toes; the weaker ones do, at least. The new Yellowstone wolves have discovered, like their predecessors of a hundred years ago, that Lamar Valley is a good place to hunt. A healthy bison can run just under forty miles an hour, at top speed. Wolves have to lie low, watch and wait for a tired old buffalo to stumble. There are plenty of wolves in crowded Italy, including some in the Abruzzi forests not more than an hour from Rome. But trying to bring them back to the original national park took more tax money, caused more litigation, and produced more political obstructionism than anything the government has ever done with endangered species. None of the arguments put forth by wolf opponents have been borne out: the cattle and sheep industries have not been hurt, no private land owners have suffered an egregious breach of property rights, no children have been snatched by fairy tale predators. All of this was part of a phony debate. The big issue—what the West should be like and who would control it—was never brought out into the open. Some people are afraid of wolves, even in a huge national park, because it means they no longer control the plot line from which flows public policy.

  With the return of bison and wolves, the century-long era of the sterile West, drained of certain wild animals and dominated by domestic stock, may be down to It’s last days.

  This is not to say that nature-balancing has been an easy task. Playing God, as Yellowstone biologists have done since some of the last grizzly bears and bison were given a home in the park, has been fraught with problems. Tourists used to file into grandstands to watch the rangers feed garbage to grizzly bears; this produced a generation of welfare-dependent big animals, who didn’t smell all that good either. Weaning them of dump scraps was an epic fight. There are far too many elk in the park, but until wolves were brought back, there was no predator. In hard winters, thousands of elk died of starvation; I saw them pawing the doors of houses in Gardiner and staggering around Main Street looking for handouts. Nonnative trout are crowding out the homegrown cutthroat in Yellowstone Lake. And what about humans, long a part of the Yellowstone ecosystem? The Indians set fires and chased bison off cliffs. Now, snowmobiles make convenient paths in the snow for bison to exit the park, at which point they are shot dead by the long arm of the cattle industry.

  “GOD DAMN! That is just the goddamndest thing I’ve seen!” The man next to me has an accent from someplace warm, and he’s blue with chill. He can’t take his eyes off the Lamar Valley, him and about twenty-five other people gathered to watch the evening animal frolics. He has his binoculars trained on a flock of pronghorns, which seem to be dancing around a big bull buffalo.

  “Take a look.” He hands me the binoculars. His fingers are drained of blood. The guy is about six feet five inches tall, with another six inches of cowboy hat. He seems hypothermic. He needs a sleeping bag, a car heater, or at least a coat. He tells me he’s from Houston. “Wife and two of the kids are back at the hotel,” he says. “In the hot tub is where I left ’em. That’s my boy over there.” He points to a surly teen, also freezing.

  “You better do something about that chill,” I say.

  “I got some or this.” He shows me a half-empty pint of Yukon Jack, the black sheep of liquors, as their slogan says.

  “Sip?”

  I demur, with miles still to go in the twilight of the longest day.

  “When we left Houston it was a hundred and five degrees, I shit you not,” he says. “Been hot and humid for months. We’d had enough. Had to get somewhere cool. We just threw a bunch of T-shirts and jeans together and got in the car. Ever been to Houston in the summer? Humidity is one hundred percent.”

  They looked at a map and decided: why not see Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier, the crown jewels, and do it all in a couple of days? At worst, they thought, it might get down to seventy degrees at night—relief. When they they arrived in Yellowstone, yesterday, they ran into snow outside Canyon Village, where the elevation is just under nine thousand feet.

  “Shit my pants,” he says. “Car nearly went off the road. The kid, that one over there, is laughing. What’s the deal here with this weather?”

  The cold talk has focused my mind, anew, on the primary goal: to find the light. I move through Lamar Valley, up to Mammoth Hot Springs, park headquarters. Fort Yellowstone, where the cavalry was based until 1916, is still intact. Elk lounge on manicured grass and prune trees that look as if they don’t need it. The road winds down to a warmer climate, the driest part of Yellowstone, the edge of Paradise Valley. The grass is amber, the sky mostly clear. Perhaps two hours of daylight are left. I exit the park under Roosevelt Arch, the big stone monument named for T.R. “For the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” the inscription on the arch reads.

  Gardiner, the Montana town that borders the park at the north entrance, is jumping. Heavy with fresh runoff, the Yellowstone River roars under a bridge in town. The sound would cure any insomniac. It is the longest free-flowing river in the West, picking up all of that Yellowstone Park high plateau snow, water from the Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness, and swooshing through the grand canyon dropoff that so impressed the Senate in the nineteenth century. It tumbles down roche jaune flanks, then forms the main valley of Paradise before it scoots half the length of Montana and empties into the Missouri. There are hot springs and religious wackos and a string of mildly bashful Hollywood heavies hidden throughout Paradise. A number of horse ranchers, river-raft expeditioners, fishing and hunting guides, and writers live there as well. It’s a good mix. Not that they get along. But at any time of the day you can look up at the sky and feel there’s enough room to disagree.

  An old stone-block building that looks like a jailhouse but is now a theater, is playing Tombstone. Much as I like the story in all It’s incarnations, I decide to skip the movie and walk the myth. But the cowboy and sourdough story of the West is not selling well along the wood-planked main tourist street of big-buckled Gardiner. Shops are crowded with people buying wolf pictures, wolf tapes, wolf books. The other big sellers are landscape paintings—jut-jawed mountains and noble ungulates posing in good weather. Just once, I’d like to see a picture of a hyperkinetic pronghorn with froth mouth, or maybe a postprandial griz. Russell Chatham, who lives up the road in Livingstone, is big in Paradise. You look at his series of paintings, The Montana Suite, and realize he’s got the same sense of the Big Sky country in his bones as had those Butte miners who had the mountains chiseled on their tombstones. Another painting, Paradise Valley in August, is the opposite of monumentalist sentiment: the land is hazy, inglorious, and looks hot. In prison with a such a painting, a lifer would not feel confined, Chatham is self-taught, just like Charley Russell of Great Falls and Thomas Moran. How did they learn? You can see a lot by watching, as Yogi Berra said.

  I order a buffaloburger and fries, to go. The meat is sweet and juicy. I watch the swollen thunderclouds break up in the Beartooth Range, a great show of energy and drama. Afterward, I stroll along the river, Electric Peak in the near distance, aglow with solstice light at 9:30 P.M. I know a place in the other direction, a river that runs bathtub-hot year-round, with natural pools set in big rocks and a view facing a thick flank of mountain. I have sat in those waters and listened to elk during the fall rut, at a time when fire was still moving across much of Yellowstone, and the skies were full of smoke. This evening, I just want to hear the river in Paradise Valley and move fast enough to keep warm.

  I feel about Montana now the way you feel about good friends at the end of a lengthy dinner. Of course, I’ve been walking at a good clip at the end of the longest day, with a buffaloburger inside of me, my pulse up, so it could be the endorphins talking. But I think not. What happens here, and in the other best places of the West, is subtle persuasion—the land as lobbyist. It worked It’s wonders with that garden-variety life-form of politician, state legislators, in 1972, when they rewrote the Montana Constitution. “We the people of Montana, grateful to God for the quiet beauty of our state, the gra
ndeur of It’s mountains, the vastness of It’s rolling plains…,” it begins. This is a boast, by way of stating the primary values—the grand, the vast, quiet, and God—at a time when Anaconda Copper’s grip on the state was in It’s last days. And it worked time and again with Wallace Stegner; at his most pessimistic, he could always find a Paradise Valley, and so he never gave up on the West. It snagged Steinbeck and Thomas Moran and that Texan slipping into hypothermia while he sipped Yukon Jack and watched buffalo do nothing more than chew grass on the longest day of the year.

  CHAPTER 11

  Top of the Food Chain

  Highlands Ranch, Colorado

  Articles of adventure: neoprene waders and a Gore-Tex coat, a half dozen bagels and a reading light with extra batteries, a dome-shaped tent and a sitting chair that collapses. Polarizing sunglasses that allow us to see through water and a purification pump that lets the water go through us without leaving a trace. Juice to make mosquitoes wince and horseflies think twice. More than twenty-five square feet of Forest Service map, representing about nine million acres. A Swiss Army knife that holds a fork, a saw, scissors, three blades, a screwdriver, a corkscrew, a toothpick, and a firestarter of dubious utility. Never go into the back country without the ten essentials, they say in those places where they sell the ten essentials. We have the basic ten and then the worthwhile stuff-garlic, sweet onions, red peppers, a marinade mix, meat, apples, eggs in an unbreakable container, whiskey, red wine, beer. Our shirts are made of a substance unknown to nature, but they keep water off the skin, and—in a pinch—can be torched to induce damp kindling to flame. We have an inflatable pillow, a mattress of foam and air pockets, a sleeping bag for three seasons, good to twenty degrees. And what happens below that threshold? We have light reading, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, weighing barely more than a folded T-shirt, and heavy reading for a tent-lashing-storm, A Soldier of the Great War, a book that will take us through a three-day blow but will double in size with moisture. All of this must fit into what we can put on our backs. We have made some sacrifices, trying to keep the Information Age at home. No cell phones. No radios. No portable global positioning systems to bounce off the satellite when lost. We’re packing a compass.