This creates a fair amount of confusion and astonishment, which I’m sure is one of the reasons why periodicals will periodically run pieces about the genders. If the things we have been told about the genders are false – and I believe they are – then what is true? More and more we look to science to give us answers on this, but it is always difficult to draw conclusions from scientific studies. One famous example tried to study casual sex by having people proposition random passers-by; many more men were willing to have sex in this casual way than women. But studies like this have been proven to be too simplistic: women can be proven to respond to a propositioner who is a celebrity, for instance, or to someone who is known as a good lover.

All of this is of particular interest to all those who find themselves frustrated by dating, marriage, or parenting – which is, I suppose, just about everybody. And I will say for myself and for a number of the people around me, that we find many men whom we feel to be deficient as men, and women who appear to be deficient as women, though it is not clear that we know exactly what we mean by this and whether we have any right to make such judgements; and further so many men who appear to unhappy as men and (especially) women who seem to be unhappy as women. It all seems very confusing – and interesting.

Into this modern miasma is thrown a little book by Alice von Hildebrand, The Privilege of Being a Woman. It is meant to restore women’s satisfaction in being women, while defending Christianity against the charge of being “sexist.” And precisely as you would (unfortunately) expect from a conservative Catholic, it addresses none of the relevant data. The experience of the past two generations is ignored; science is ignored; the possible presence of human instincts shaped by evolutionary experience is ignored; Von Hildebrand’s personal experiences are never mentioned; and the conclusions hence are risible.

Let’s offer a little catalogue of risibility, to get this out of the way. Women can’t wear shorts – “shorts, although acceptable for the male sex, are likely to undermine the female respect for the mystery of her body.” Women should not “cross their legs in a manner which can be offensive” (to whom? God?). Men never proposition “modest” women (“men are talented at reading women’s body language, and they are not likely to risk being humiliated when a refusal is certain… if little girls were made aware of the great mystery confided to them, their purity would be guaranteed”). Sex is always “deep and serious” (has she never seen a naked person? Has she never had beans before sex and unleashed a massive fart in the moment of passion? Sex is so often funny. Imagine G.K. Chesterton having sex. C.S. Lewis writes about this, and of course we have Rabelais, Balzac, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, etc. – Catholics all – to remind us). She adds elsewhere, “to view the sexual sphere as ‘fun’ is a desecration.” Good Lord. Can’t we say the opposite? If you don’t have fun while having sex – or while living, in general – isn’t it possible you’re doing something wrong? Does God want us to be happy or doesn’t He?

Some of Von Hildebrand’s claims are risible but also awful. Women should be punished for adultery more than men: “When a particular mission is confided to some persons, and these persons fail to respond to its demands, it creates greater metaphysical disharmony [whatever that is] than when the same failure is found in someone who has not received this special calling.” Some claims are partial and hence bigoted: “The make-up of women indicates that their reproductive organs are stamped by sacredness and belong to God in a special sense.” (How about men’s reproductive organs? Who do they belong to? How about the entire human body? How about the entire creation? “The earth is the LORD’s, and all the things therein.” God is not just for pussies.) Some is just flat assertion of ecclesiastical power to run as a for-profit licensing operation for sex: “This self-revelation [of sex] can only take place with God’s express permission, for we belong to Him…. one cannot ‘reveal’ oneself to more than one person.” (What does “can” mean here? How is it affected by the death of a spouse? How does one get “God’s express permission,” since the Church obviously is no effective indicator of God’s will?)

The worst howler of all – which is excommunicable – is this tripe:

Throughout her autobiography, Saint Theresa of Avila repeatedly refers to the dangers menacing the spiritual life of “the weak sex”: emotionalism, dreaming, illusions, self-centeredness. She repeatedly stresses how much they are in need of guidance. Two great spiritual directors, Saint Francis de Sales and Dom Columba Marmion, emphasize the fact that “however intellectual or enlightened a woman may be, God, according to the ordinary rulings of His providence, wills her to be directed by a man who is His minister.” This is a theme which keeps recurring in his spiritual letters. Women need men whose mission is to help them to channel their emotions, to distinguish between those that are valid and those that are tainted by irrationality, those which are legitimate and those which are illegitimate. (38)

She elaborates on women’s need for guidance and their inability to steer themselves through the emotional mess known as themselves. In other words, this book is precisely what one might fear it would be: a call for women to shut up and be happy letting men run their lives, while they should go home and cry about the thorns in the Sacred Heart of Jesus who is weeping about women leading men astray.  Reactionary claptrap.

This makes me so sad. I don’t deny the importance of guidance, of taking advice, of listening to other people. But I know from experience – as do all the people whose minds are not closed – that this advice becomes good and healthy when it comes from a place of wisdom (or inspired folly), not from a source who happens to have a Roman collar on. And gender has absolutely nothing to do with it. I – along with many modern men – hope for some kind equality to be realized, because we know that we do not know everything: we are aware of the partiality of our viewpoints, and we hope for spouses who are counsellors and sources of wisdom, and we hope also to benefit from the wisdom of elders, both male and female. We know from actual experience that wisdom is not lodged entirely in men, and what is sad is seeing someone like Von Hildebrand actively teaching women to take no role as leaders and counsellors. Her advice is precisely the advice that will drown the ship in the modern sea: listen to the men with the collars on, let them do the thinking for you, let them tell you which feelings you have are “legitimate” and “illegitimate.” I can speak for American Catholics who know better: the corporation of these men, known as “the Church,” is literally not to be trusted with a little-league baseball team, much less the governance of an important worldly mission or the spiritual direction of an honest person striving to live as a full human being. Even the few good priests – the ones who are worth listening to – know that this is true.

Von Hildebrand is a sad indication – as they all are, it seems – of the state of Catholic higher learning. She has a Ph.D. She is the author of at least half a dozen books. She has taught at “Hunter College of the City University of New York, the Catechitical Institude in Dunwoodie, New York, the Catechetical Institute in Arlington, Virginia, the Thomas More College in Rome, Italy, Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan.” That she found employment with them does not reflect well on any of these institutions. And her lightweight piffle of misogynistic retread – I mean this book of hers – went through five editions between 2002 and 2005 (probably more since then – it has dozens of 5-star reviews on Amazon), showing that there is a market for this kind of barbarism. That is the sad part always, is it not? Religion is profitable always insofar as it is bad. There is more money in heroin than in potatoes. Out of all the apostles, Judas cleared the best margins.

And besides being bad religion, Von Hildebrand sells bad thinking. She decries people who have pursued sexual pleasure: “They have tasted the poisonous violence of passion and an intensity of pleasure which, as Plato wrote centuries ago, nails the soul to the body” (95). Plato might have written this, but Plato was not a Christian – in many ways, Plato was precisely what Christ came to deliver us from. Incarnational theology is incompatible with a body/soul divide. And sure enough, the Gospels have no word for soul as opposed to biological life. The word used – psyche – means “life,” which by Biblical thinking has the idea of “soul” in it. But it is not an individual existence – it is something we all participate in. Just as there is one Spirit – God’s – which we all have. “And God breathed his Spirit into the dust, and it became a living soul.” That’s what we are – dust + spirit = living soul. You cannot “nail the soul to the body.” God did that ages ago. Von Hildebrand is just another fearful prissy little Catholic girl, legs tightly closed, sitting at the edge of the pew so no one will sit next to her, and terrified that her whole Platonic mental apparatus will crumble at the approach of a single real feeling, much less a full-blown orgasm. I don’t know what they are teaching at the Catechetical schools, but it’s not Christianity. This is the kind of fear which gives religion a bad name.

She talks about the vagina as the hortus conclusus. I like metaphors, so let’s let her have at it:

The very structure of her body symbolizes a garden that should be carefully guarded, for the keys of this garden belong to God. It is His property in a special sense and is to be kept untouched until He allows the bride-to-be to give the keys to her husband-to-be of what is called, in the Canticle of Canticles, a hortus conclusus (“a closed garden”). How beautiful when, on the night of her wedding, the young bride can say to the bridegroom: “I have kept this garden unsullied for you; now that God has received our pledge to live our married life in His sight (in conspectu Dei), I am granted the permission to give you the keys to this garden, and I trust that you will approach it with fear and trembling.” How very sad when this garden has already been trampled upon by impure feet and ravaged by lust. (82)

But how sad when the garden has been neglected and absolutely nothing done in it for years and years on end. What kind of garden thrives with neglect? I spoke not long ago with an American Catholic woman who had been married and divorced without ever knowing of the existence of the clitoris. I am not making this up. And it makes sense given the conservative Catholic picture: after all, how would Von Hildebrand explain this organ (if she knows of its existence)? It’s not necessary for baby-making, or for male pleasure. It is there merely to make sex “fun” (what a desecration!). Perhaps this organ was not created by God but put there by the Devil to tempt women to bad behavior.

In short, I accept her metaphor, but I am a gardener and I know what gardening is like. A garden is something that requires maintenance, affection, love, and effort. It is something that needs to be thoroughly known, and every inch of which cared for. It requires experience, trial and error, and wisdom gained from others. And even when known, it remains unknown. It is a rich metaphor for the sexual experience. But it is not “sullied” by the presence of people. Promiscuity is no virtue, and some degree of exclusion is necessary for an intense relationship, but in actual fact virginity is rarely a good starting-point for a relationship. And the fact that an enclosed garden is private is only the beginning of the metaphor’s applicability. Sexuality is not just privacy, as it is not just fertility – just as gardens cannot be measured by the effectiveness of their fences or their production in pounds. The pleasure, the intoxication, the addiction, the attachment, the comfort, and the new life sexuality creates – and I mean this not just in a biological sense – are as important and as transcendent as anything else about it, and are a strange indication of the mind of God. Sexuality is also probably the only area of life in which I have truly envied women the privilege of being women – I will never ever forget the first time I experienced a woman having an orgasm under me, and I will say that nothing in male sexual experience seems even remotely comparable. But Von Hildebrand – and conservative Catholic culture generally – offers no guidance in such matters, which they think should be passed over in absolute silence. They are afraid that to love the blossoms of the garden too much might “nail the soul to the body.” Von Hildebrand is not teaching anything true – true Catholicism preaches the love of the body, since it teaches its resurrection. The hope of the religion is to be able to stay in the body forever, not a fear of being attached to it.

Similarly she speaks often about “specialness,” which is one of the key Catholic words indicating “b.s.” When women’s sexual organs, for instance, bear God’s impress “in a special way” than you know that she is saying that the argument is false but useful to her. I was keyed in to this Catholic approach in a sermon where the priest said that God was present on the altar – he then corrected himself to note that God was actually present everywhere, but was present in the eucharist “in a special way.” Every thing Von Hildebrand says about female virtues – humility, receptivity, fidelity – she admits are male virtues also, but female virtues “in a special way.” This kind of argument never stands up to scrutiny. I admit that the body is holy, and sexuality is holy, and receptivity is holy, but that is just as true for me as it is for any woman. She says nothing that is convincingly gender-specific.

Most of Von Hildebrand’s book is complaint, but she does cast one approving glance at the status of women elsewhere, which is revealing: “Deep sadness is called for when one watches Western girls running around practically naked and then compare them with how the Hindu or Moslem women are clothed with modesty, grace, and dignity.” I have heard her say that she considers Hindu and Moslem women to be more or less the only “real” women left. I must say this makes my blood boil a little bit. I remember being in Turkey, on hundred-degree days when I would soak my white shirts in water every hour to keep myself cool, watching the farm laborers – all women, attired head to toe in black – stooped over in the fields with looks of the greatest suffering on their faces, watching rich Westerners like myself zip on past to sites like Troy or Ephesus. It was not modesty, grace, or dignity. It is not what I would want for my daughter or my wife or my mother, nor for myself if I were a woman. Her admiration of it strikes me as comfortable self-indulgence of the typical revolting type (I will note that she is wealthy, and has spoken in the past against the Gospel having anything to say against riches).

As for traditional gender roles, the evidence seems to suggest that women remain in them more or less according to their personalities, and almost always step out of them a little if they have any options. I understand that there are pressures on all of us from the consumerist state which contort our natures, but still it is striking to me that traditionalist roles for women seem to be maintained by force and shaming, not pleasure and freedom. What this means about the true nature of women I do not know – I don’t think anyone knows. But I know many women whom Von Hildebrand would probably despise: women who wear glamorous clothes which are sometimes tight, sometimes brief, sometimes form-revealing; women who hold powerful jobs; women who never listen to men; women who cohabit with men without marrying them; women who put their children in daycare as soon as they can; women who want to limit the number of children they have – and yet I do not despise them the way Von Hildebrand does. I find they remain unmistakably women. I find myself still mesmerized by them, still amazed and charmed by the difference and the beauty. I find them still utterly lovable, and often excellent companions – “help meets” – for men.  The essential is still there, though so many of the “accidents” have changed.

I remember going back to Rome not long ago, and thinking how horrible the city was now – it was so much more expensive now that the euro was there, and none of the students could afford three-hour dinners in the restaurants every night the way we used to; and there were supermarkets which were forcing all the little tiny specialty shops to close; and there were bars in the city now, catering to tourists (Italians don’t do bars); and in general there were many more tourists and far fewer Romans, and the whole place was not the way it was when I first came to Rome. But then I heard some young people talking about the city – which they were experiencing for the first time – and it seemed like I was hearing myself talk about the place twenty years ago.

True wisdom is the gradual process of finally paying attention to the essence, and learning to let go of the superficies. This is the way I feel about men and women. I wish there were good guidance out there to help men and women find happiness in ourselves and with each other – and I acknowledge this may require some changes,  just as I think perhaps Italy may find its culture of craftsmanship and hospitality would be better served by a currency policy encouraging exports.  One way or another, retreads and reactionaries like Von Hildebrand offer no help whatsoever. Separate the grain from the husk, Thoreau says, and people will run after the husk and pay their respects to that. This is what Von Hildebrand does with womanhood: it is all about crossing your legs and never wearing shorts. It is a shame that American Catholic culture cannot do better than this.

Upstate New York is sprinkled with little towns named after famous Greeks and Romans. I know, in general, that the names are just that – names – and there is not much that can be described as Homeric in Homer, New York, or Vergilian in Vergil, or Fabian in Fabius. But since I love the Classics so, I can’t help but think, when I see these hallowed names on the map – Cincinnatus, Marcellus, Cicero, Manlius – that if I just could be there I would fall in love, perhaps with the towns themselves, perhaps with the special people who would be lured to Ovid or Vergil or Pharsalia. It never ends this way, of course. A friend of mine had a keychain from Ovid, New York, and the thing that amazed me was that it featured a picture of a hummingbird, which I’m sure was a generic image which was paired with hundreds of town names and sold all over the country the same way you can buy a keychain with your own name and a picture of a beach. The town of Ovid had a natural image – Ovid, the man himself – but instead it used a hummingbird. It had no particular connection to its namesake. I had a similar experience in Rome, New York. I was mightily entertained by finding out that its very humble Catholic church was named “St. Peter’s.” But when I expressed my joy in this fact to a clerk at a Seven-Eleven there he stared dumbly at me for about fifteens seconds and then asked, “Are you here for the Woodstock Festival?”

The incongruity is pleasingly pleasant in itself, however, and on a recent trip through the area I went to every classically named town I could and tried to get some local souvenirs. Most places had none at all, unfortunately, but I did find some Christmas tree ornaments from Fabius which said, “Township of Fabulous Fabius.” In the center was a smiling cow equipped with skis and ski-poles. I thought Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Roman tactician who fought Hannibal to a stalemate over the astonishing ten years the Carthaginian devastated Italy, might get a chuckle out of the absurdity.

But when I came to Marcellus, New York – named after the Roman general whose army destroyed Syracuse, then considered the most beautiful city of the ancient world (and how odd that Marcellus New York should be just outside Syracuse) – I had more in mind than my quest for incongruous classicisms. I asked in town for any notable outcroppings of rock. And I was directed to the southwestern part of town, where the main road hemmed a round hill. The road cut slightly into the slope, and in the cut were thousands of black rock-flakes. This was what I was looking for.

Rock formations can stretch for hundreds of miles under the earth, but they are generally named for the places where they come to the surface. The Rondout Limestone, which built so many nice houses in the Hudson Valley, is present under Slide Mountain, but beneath thousands of feet of shales and sandstones. The Hudson River had eroded away those shales and sandstones, however, exposing the older limestone near the mouth of the Rondout in Kingston, where it was quarried and whence it takes its name. The formation I was looking for, which stretches clear across New York State into Pennsylvania and Ohio, comes to the surface at Marcellus, New York and hence is known as the Marcellus Shale.

Marcellus Shale is an oil shale, a highly carboniferous rock formation which probably derives its carbon content from organic deposits – fossilized vegetation. It is not the richest oil shale in the country – that honor goes to Wyoming, whose oil shales – “one and a half trillion barrels… the world’s largest deposit of hydrocarbons… nine times the amount of crude oil under Saudi Arabia” – were featured in John McPhee’s 1986 book Rising from the Plains:

Distinct in the long suite of cuts at Green River were the so-called mahogany ledges, where oil shale is particularly rich. They looked less like wood than like bluish-white slabs of thinly bedded slate. Oil shale always weathers bluish white but is dark inside, and grainy like wood. The thinner the laminae the higher the ratio of organic material. The richest of the dark oleaginous flakes – each representing the sedimentation of a year – were fifteen-thousandths of a millimeter thick. [Wyoming geologist David] Love dropped some hydrochloric acid on the rock, and the acid beaded up like an arching cat. “It’s actually kerogen,” he said. “It converts to high-paraffin oil. It’s not like Pennsylvania crude.”

To mining engineers, oil shale had presented an as yet unsolved and completely unambiguous problem: how to remove the shale without destroying the face of the earth. So far, three principal methods had been considered. One was to strip-mine it, crush it, separate the oil, then smooth out the tailings – a process that could result in the absolute rearrangement of twenty-five thousand square miles. Another was to go under the ground, excavate a percentage of the rock, and refill the caverns with tailings. That was known as the “modified in situ” approach. And finally someone thought of drilling a hole, pumping in propane, and starting a fire. The heat would cause liquid oil to run out of the shale. The oil could be forced up through another well before the fire destroyed it. A burn would not, like a clinker fire, continue indefinitely. If oxygen was not fed to the flames, they would die. This was known as “true in situ mining,” and there in White Mountain, a few miles away, the federal government had been perfecting the technique. The experiments thus far had brought down the recovery cost to a million dollars a barrel. (193-4)

That was written in 1986, before fracking made recovery of the energy economically possible. McPhee knew, however, that fracking – or something – would be invented to get at the energy:

The one-and-a-half-trillion-barrel estimate was somewhat extravagant, because it included every last drop – referring, as it did, to all shale with any content of kerogen. In the richer rock – in the shales that contained from twenty-five to sixty-five gallons of oil per ton – were no more than six hundred billion barrels. That wuld do. That was more petroleum in place than all the petroleum produced in the world to date. Love remarked that oil shale had been “trumpeted to the skies” but, with the energy crisis in perigee, both government and industry were losing interest and pulling out. Temporarily pulling out. Sooner or later, people were going to want that shale. (194)

Fracking would come to Wyoming after the book was written, but it would be just another chapter in the brief but eventful history of energy extraction in the state. There was coal, which had dictated the train routes through Cheyenne; there was oil; there were “the Gas Hills;” and there were some of the world’s most impressive deposits of uranium. When we think of Wyoming, we are liable to think of ranches and cowboys, but honestly, they were important to the economy of the state for perhaps two or three decades, over a century ago; energy extraction, however, has powered Wyoming’s fortune for a hundred years. The type of the modern Wyoming power broker is Dick Cheney, not Butch Cassidy.

The genius of McPhee’s book is that it is centered around a single individual who was a kind of bridge between Butch Cassidy and Dick Cheney: David Love, the head of the United States Geological Survey in Wyoming for several decades. Love’s parents were pioneers – his father John, when he staked his claim on Love Ranch in the nineteenth century, slept out in the open for seven years before having enough money to build a cabin, and knew Butch Cassidy. As a child around the time of World War I, David remembers oil explorers coming through the area. When Love worked for the USGS, the government put high priority – as you might imagine – on such questions as where uranium deposits might be found (as well as oil). The government would do the research, map the formations, search for important deposits, and make the research public – in essence, an encouragement for energy companies to “have at it.” For reasons of temperament and perhaps character, Love remained at the USGS when he could have made the ever-so-common government-to-industry transition and made millions as an oil company geologist. Something in me almost wishes he had. The money went elsewhere. What little Love had left over is to some extent the subtext of Rising from the Plains, which remains the only truly disturbing McPhee book I have ever read. McPhee is an excellente but dry and scientific writer; drama and tragedy are not for him. But the tragedy of David Love, and Wyoming generally, comes through even in a book supposedly about geology. It is well worth reading for anyone who cares about the future of all those places unfortunate enough to have been blessed to sit on top of the energy-rich deposits – places such as Marcellus, New York.

McPhee brings out the tragedy of Wyoming by creating an alternate focus in his book: not only is the book about the geology of Wyoming, it is also about the Love family, and their pioneer story. He includes copious amounts of material from the journal of Ethel Love, David’s mother, who came to Wyoming in 1905, fresh out of Wellesley College, to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. She ended up marrying a particularly hard-working and almost-successful local rancher. The life was hard. Each year it would be forty degrees below zero for several weeks, and keeping cattle alive in such conditions was a horror. There was no running water, no indoor toilet, and not much rain either.

There were periods of drought, and more floods, and long, killing winters, but John Love never sold out. He contracted and survived Rocky Mountain spotted fever. One year, after he shipped cattle to Omaha he got back a bill for twenty-seven dollars, the amount by which the cost of shipment exceeded the sale price of the cattle. One spring, after a winter that killed many sheep, the boys and their father plucked good wool off the bloated and stinking corpses, sold the wool, and deposited the money in a bank in Shoshoni, where the words “STRENGTH,” “SAFETY,” and “SECURITY” made an arc above the door. The bank failed, and they lost the money. Of many bad winters, the worst began in 1919. Both David and his father nearly died of Spanish influenza, and were slow to recuperate, spending months in bed. There were no ranch hands. At the point when the patients seemed most in danger, his mother in her desperation decided to try to have them moved to a hospital (a hundred miles away), and prepared to ride for help. She had the Hobson’s choice of a large, rebellious horse. She stood on a bench and tried to harness him. He kicked the bench from under her, and stepped on her feet. She gave up her plan. [From her journal:] “The bull broke into the high granary. Our only, and small, supply of horse and chicken feed was there. Foolishly, I went in after him and drove him out down the step. Cows began to die, one here, one there. Every morning some were unable to rise. By day, one walking would fall suddenly, as if it had no more life than a paper animal, blown over by a gust of wind.” [McPhee:] The bull actually charged her in the granary and came close to crushing her against the back wall. She confused it, sweeping its eyes with a broom. It would probably have killed her, though, had it not stepped on a weak plank, which snapped. The animal panicked and turned for the door. (In decades to follow, John Love never fixed the plank.) [Her journal:] “Snow hissed around the buildings, wind blew some snow into every room of the closed house, down the chimney, between window sashes, even in a straight shaft through a keyhole. The wood pile was buried in snow. The small heap of coal was frozen into an almost solid chunk of coal and ice. In the numbing cold, it took me five hours a day to bring in fuel, to carry water and feed to the chickens, to put out hay and cottonseed cake for the cattle and horses.

McPhee adds, “Somewhere among her possessions was a letter written to her by a Wellesley friend asking, ‘What do you do with your spare time?’”

Even acquiring the simplest supplies and materials was a serious struggle. Wood was needed for all building and most heat, but there were no trees:

To cut cedar fence posts, they went with a wagon to Green Mountain, near Crooks Gap – a round trip of two weeks. In early fall, each year, they spent ten days going back and forth to the Rattlesnake Hills for stove wood. They took two wagons – four horses pulling each wagon – and they filled them with limber pine. They used axes, a two-handled saw…. For its [the cabin’s] twenty tiers of logs, John [Love, David’s father] had journeyed a hundred miles to the lodgepole-pine groves of the Wind River Range, returning with ten logs at a time, each round trip requiring two weeks. He collected a hundred fifty logs. [79-80, 83]

Ethel was the only woman in the area – she would go six months without seeing another female – and because she could sew she became the local surgeon. We like to think of the pioneer life as being wholesome and healthy, but of course it was in many ways horrible. David Love described the cowboys he knew as a child – “hard-muscled, taciturn bachelors” – thus:

Many were already stooped from chronic saddle-weariness, bowlegged, hip-sprung, with unrepaired hernias that required trusses, and spinal injuries that required a “hanging pole” in the bunkhouse. This was a horizontal bar from which the cowboys would hang by their hands for 5-10 minutes to relieve pressure on ruptured spinal disks that came from too much bronc-fighting. Some wore eight-inch-wide heavy leather belts to keep their kidneys in place during prolonged hard rides. (89)

There were hard times. One winter where the Loves very nearly lost everything: the bankers came and made off with all the remaining animals and everything liquid. The only remedy was more labor: and here nature came to the family’s assistance, as there were wild horses out on the range which could be trapped and sold. Each improvement to Love Ranch was hard-fought-for and bought with tribulation. These tribulations are chronicled in detail by McPhee, which is why the end of the book, which describes Love Ranch today, is so disturbing. Love Ranch happened to be on top of a uranium formation.

In the autumn of 1953, he [Love] and two amateurs, all working independently, found uranium in the Gas Hills – in the Wind River Basin, twelve miles from Love Ranch. By his description: “Gas Hills attracted everybody and his dog. It was Mecca for weekend prospectors. They swarmed like maggots on a carcass. There was claim-jumping. There were fistfights, shootouts. Mechanics and clothing salesmen were instant millionaires.”
As it happened, he made those remarks one summery afternoon on the crest of the Gas Hills, where fifty open-pit uranium mines were round about us, and in the low middle ground of the view to the north were Muskrat Creek and Love Ranch. The pits were roughly circular, generally half a mile in diameter, and five hundred feet deep. Some four hundred feet of overburden had been stripped off to get to the ore horizons. The place was an unearthly mess. War damage could not look worse, and in a sense that is what it was. “If you had to do this with a pick and shovel, it would take you quite a while,” Love said. The pits were scattered across a hundred square miles.
We picked up some sooty black uraninite. It crumbled easily in the hand. I asked him if it was dangerously radioactive.
“What is ‘dangerously radioactive’?” he said. “We have no real standards. We don’t know. All I can say is the cancer rate here is very high. There are four synergistic elements in the Gas Hills: uranium, molybdenum, selenium, and arsenic. They are more toxic together than individually. You can’t just cover the tailings and forget about it. Those things are bad for the environment. They get into groundwater, surface water. The mines are below the water table, so they’re pumping water from the uranium horizon to the surface. There has been a seven-hundred-percent increase of uranium in Muskrat Creek at our ranch.”
We could see in a sweeping glance – from the ranch southwest to Green Mountain – the whole of the route he had taken as a boy to cut pine and cedar for corral poles and fence posts. An hour before, we had looked in at the ranch, where most of the posts were still in use – gnarled and twisted, but standing and not rotted. (210-11)

Besides the fact that Love Ranch had been turned into a uranium-pit wasteland, the book details other notable features of Wyoming’s unfortunate wealth of energy:

We left the interstate there and went north on a five-mile road with no outlet, which followed the flank of the Rock Springs Uplift and soon curved into a sweeping view: east over pastel buttes into the sheep country of the Great Divide Basin, and north to the white Wind Rivers over Steamboat Mountain and the Leucite Hills (magmatic flows and intrusions, of Pleistocene time), across sixty miles of barchan dunes, and, in the foreground – in isolation in the desert – the tallest building in Wyoming. This was Jim Bridger, a coal-fired steam electric plant, build in the middle nineteen-seventies, with a generating capacity of two million kilowatts – four times what is needed to meet the demands of Wyoming. Twenty-four stories high, the big building was more than twice as tall as Federal Center in Cheyenne, which is higher than Wyoming’s capitol dome. Rising beside the generating plant were four freestanding columnar chimneys so tall that they were obscured in cumulus from the cooling towers, which swirled and billowed and from time to time parted to reveal the summits of chimneys, five hundred feet in the air. “This place is smoking the hell out of the country,” Love said. “The wind blows a plume of corruption. In cold weather, sulphuric acid precipitates as a yellow cloud. It’s not so good for people, or for vegetation. Whenever I think of this plant, I feel sadness and frustration. We could have got baseline data on air and water quality before the plant was built, and we muffed it. He blames himself, although at that time he had arsenic poisoning from springwater in the backcountry and was sick for many months.

“The idea behind Jim Bridger,” McPhee explains, “was to ship energy out of Wyoming in wires instead of railway gondolas.” The plant was built in the middle of a coal seam, which was mined by a single massive machine called the Marion 8200.

The machine was so big it had to be assembled on the site – a procedure that required fourteen months. Now working within a mile or two of the generating plant, it could swing its four-chord deep-section boom and touch any spot in six acres, its bucket biting, typically, a hundred tons of rock, and dumping it to one side…. Although the chassis was nine stories high, it could not begin to contain enough diesels to make the machine work. Only electric motors are compact enough. Out of the back of the machine, like the tail of a four-thousand-ton rat, ran a huge black cable, through gully and gulch, over hill and draw, to the generating plant – whose No. 1 customer was the big machine. Once every couple of hours, the 8200 walked – raised itself up on pontoonlike shoes and awkwardly lurched backward seven feet, so traumatically compressing the dirt it landed on that smoke squirted out the sides and the ground became instant slate….
For a steam-driven water-cooled power plant, this one seemed to have a remarkably absent feature. It seemed to be missing a river. The brown surrounding landscape was a craquelure of dry gulches. In one of them, though – a desiccated arroyo called Dead Man Draw – was a seventy-five acre lake, fringed with life rings, boats, and barbecue grills. At a rate of twenty-one thousand gallons a minute, Jim Bridger was sucking water from the Green River, forty miles to the west. To cool an even drier power station, some hundreds of miles away in northeast Wyoming, a proposal had been made to pump Green River water [a notable tributary of the Colorado] over the Continental Divide to the Sweetwater River, which runs into the North Platte, from which the water would be pumped over a lesser divide and into the Powder River Basin. Love said, “That would destroy the whole Sweetwater regimen, destroy the Platte, and destroy the Powder River, all for coal in the Powder River Basin – a slurry pipeline or something of the sort. It’s very much on the books. If they go in for the gasification of coal they’re going to need it. It’s known as the trans-basin diversion of the Green River. The water has fluorine in it. Wherever it gets into the ground, it can pollute the water table in ten to fifteen years. The river also picks up sodium from trona…. If they decide to pipe the water over the Continental Divide, water quality could be lowered in the Powder River Basin to the point of needing a desalinization plant.” [186-8]

Trona, another important Wyoming industry – sodium sesquicarbonate, used in “ceramics and textiles, pulp and paper, iron and steel, and most importantly, glass” – was another source of environmental degradation. It was mined and shipped off in railcars, the sodium on which would be washed off, putting “two tons of sodium into the Green River every day.” Lake Powell, the fifty-mile-long dammed section of the Green River, brought the water level into a trona deposit, which was largely responsible for putting salt into the Colorado River.

Love said that Lake Powell and Lake Mead – reservoirs downstream – were turning into chemical lakes as a result. “And a lot of it winds up with the poor farmers in Mexico,” he said. “We are going to have to desalinate their water.” Some miles along the interstate, when we crossed the Black Forks River, we would see alkali deposits lying the floodplain like dried white scum. On both sides of the road were abandoned farmhouses, abandoned barns, their darkly weathered boards warping away from empty structures out of plumb. The river precipitates and the abandoned farms were not unrelated. This was the Lyman irrigation project, Love explain – a conception of the Bureau of Reclamation, an attempt to make southwestern Wyoming competitive with Wisconsin. The Black Forks River was dammed in 1971, and its waters were used to soak the land. The land became whiter than a bleached femur. It still appeared to be covered with light snow. “Alkali sours the land,” Love said. “The drainage here is just too poor to flush it out. Imagine the sodium those farmers drank in their water.”
Meanwhile, west of Green River, a tall incongruous chimney seemed to rise up out of the range, streaming a white plume downwind. Below the chimney, but hidden by the roll of the land, was a trona refinery, and, below the refinery, a mine. I had gone down into it one winter day half a dozen months before, and I now remarked that the people there had told me that the white cloud issuing from the chimney was pure steam.
“It goes clear across the state,” Love said. “That’s pretty durable for steam.”
He said that fluorine, among other things, was coming out of the refinery with the steam. Settling downwind, it could cause fluorosis. He thought it might be damaging forests in the Wind River Range. The afternoon sky was cloudless but not exactly clear. “The haze you see is the trona haze that goes across Wyoming,” he continued. “We never used to have this. You could clearly see distant mountains on any average day.” (195-7)

Extraction industries of these sorts were first placed in Wyoming because they were easy to access and because there were few people in Wyoming to complain. But it is important to remember one thing about such industries: our society has found as of yet no way to make these industries compatible with traditional human life: farming, husbandry, living off the land and with nature. Where these industries move in, they poison the land, and make living with nature impossible. This is obviously true of fracking as well. If fracking could be done without poisoning the water – essentially turning arable land into desert – then it would need no exemption from the Clean Water Act. The businessmen were unwilling to frack without that exemption.

I do not wish to dispute the importance of energy extraction. I live off the grid, but do use a gas generator, and the feeling I have when it is running must resemble what the cave man felt about his fire: it is security and comfort in the wilderness. I have a propane stove as well, and I drive. All these things require energy, and it must come from somewhere. Even a person like me, who lives an extremely simple and frugal life, cannot imagine living comfortably without extraction industries. But I also know that we can do much more to reduce their impact. Wyoming could easily – easily – be powered by wind energy, entirely. Its wind energy is astonishing. The reason why it has not already happened is that extraction energy sources are so cheap – Jim Bridger is already there. Arizona, which has no energy deposits at all, could easily be run on solar power. But nothing is being done on that score. Countless housing-development covenants prohibit solar panels, just as they prohibit clotheslines (everyone uses electric-powered driers – in the desert). This kind of waste is criminal, and it scars the land – and scars it in a way which in human terms may as well be called permanent.

Fracking threatens to bring the first such industry to New York State. It is worth thinking about what will become of the farms and little towns that stretch between the Hudson and the Cuyahoga, where the Marcellus Shale is found. I feel that many will end up looking like Love Ranch, with its radioactive water and wilderness of pit mines in every direction.

I will close this essay with the last scene in McPhee’s book. The full emotional effect comes from knowing the full story of the family life that had sanctified every item in the below description, but I will provide it, presuming that the imagination can fill in the details. Many of the things we do in the attempt to improve our lives are the things we most regret later on.

Over the low and widespread house, John Love’s multilaminate roof was scarcely sagging. No one had lived there in nearly forty years. The bookcases and the rolltop desk had been removed by thieves, who had destroyed doorframes to get them out. The kitchen doorframe was intact, and nailed there still was the board that showed John Love’s marks recording his children’s height. The green-figured wallpaper that had been hung by the cowboys was long since totally gone, and much of what it had covered, but between the studs and against the pine siding were fragments of the newspapers pasted there as insulation.

POSSE AFTER FIVE BANDITS
BATTLE NEAR ROCK ISLAND TRAIN

Robbers Are Found in Haystack
and Chase Becomes Hot

BOTH SIDES ARE HEAVILY ARMED

Fugitives Are Desperate, but Running Fight
Is Expected to End in Their Capture

… The corrals had collapsed. The bunkhouse was gone. The cottonwood-log granary was gone, but not Joe Lacey’s Muskrat Saloon, which the Loves had used for storing hay. Its door was swinging in the wind. David found a plank and firmly propped the door shut. The freight wagon was there that he had used on trips for wood. It was missing its wheels, stolen as souvenirs of the Old West. We looked into a storage cellar that was covered with sod above hand-hewn eighteen-inch beams. He said that nothing ever froze in there and food stayed cold all summer. More recently, a mountain lion had lived there, but the cellar was vacant now.
In the house, while I became further absorbed by the insulation against the walls, Love walked silently from room to room.

Bizerta, Tunis, May 4 – At a reception tendered him by the municipality, M. Pelletan, French Minister of Marine, in a brief speech, declared that France no longer dreamed of conquests, and that her resources would hereafter be employed to fortify her present possessions.

Cattle chips and coyote scat were everywhere on the floors. The clothes cupboards and toy cupboards in the bedroom he had shared with Allan were two feet deep in pack-rat debris.

Have you lost a friend or relative in the Klondike or Alaska? If so, write to us and we will find them, quietly and quickly. Private information on all subjects. All correspondence strictly confidential. Enclose $1.00. Address the Klondike Information Bureau, Box 727, Dawson, Y.T.

David came back into the space that had been his schoolroom, saying, “I can’t stand this. Let’s get out of here.”
In the Gas Hills, as we traced with our eyes his journeys to Green Mountain, he said, “You can see it was quite a trek by wagon. Am I troubled? Yes. At places like this, we thought we were doing a great service to the nation. In hindsight, we do not know if we were performing a service or a disservice. Sometimes I think I might regret it. Yes. It’s close to home.”

But getting data on this is very difficult.  Hence the article notes that scientist Doug Tallamy was trying to find out how many insects it takes to raise a brood of chickadees – 4800 is his conclusion.  And he has good data that many of those insects absolutely require certain native plants in order to complete their life cycles.  But of course you can’t make people plant native plants by telling them they’ll have more bugs around the house if they do.  You have to put it in terms of charismatic megafauna.  But we apparently don’t really know what insect species even the common songbirds in our area consume – our knowledge of our own backyards is so scant.

But looking at those pictures from the nursery does give me hope.  We really can do something just with our backyards.  You don’t have to get elected senator or something impossible like that.  You just have to give the animals the plants they need to live.

By chance my entire trip ended up being relevant to this talk, as I will detail shortly. The lecture, delivered by Jim Vieira, did not impress me too much in the end. It is not difficult to sniff out something bogus, once you get into the habit. I used to listen at times to a late-night radio show called “Coast to Coast,” the topic of which was anything paranormal. The show was obviously entertainment and not science, though of course in order to keep it entertaining it had to pretend to be science. It had a host who managed – sort of like the first and third Indiana Jones movies – to be reasonable while talking about what was actually pretty goofy. That host retired and a new one took his place, and the man behind the curtain became a little more evident. Each guest who came on to present his “research” – about aliens, multiple universes, time travel (these some people take quite seriously as science), as well as yeti, the Loch Ness monster, extrasensory perception, ghosts, and all other sorts of things which are unfortunately just bogus – fell into the same pattern. They all leaned heavily on authorities and credentials – it was important to try to quote reseach from “Harvard” or “Cornell” or someone who had “a Ph.D.” The second thing they all did was use the word “documented.” You might not be able to replicate something in a lab, but it had been “documented,” which apparently meant “true.” This kind of reasoning is used, for instance, to support Joseph Smith’s claim to have found golden plates with several hundred pages’ worth of scriptures written in “reformed Egyptian”: he rounded up a group of men, all honorable men, we are told, who swore affidavits that they had seen the plates. It is, hence, documented. How can you not be convinced?

So I was not too impressed when Jim Vieira, giving his TED talk about eight-foot giants with double rows of teeth, after running quickly through several Moundbuilder sites in the United States – which are impressive, by the way, and real, though not technologically very complex – proceeded to provide screen shots of dozens of newspaper articles from the 19th century about the discovery of giants in these mounds – even from The New York Times!!! Needless to say, a million such articles would not make the “discovery” any more true – only more documented. What we require is for Mr. Vieira to follow through on at least one case. Of course what we really want are the bones. He notes that some of the bones were sent to the Smithsonian – well, it is his duty to find them, or find the report on them, or make sense of the institution’s official denial of their existence. And if the military-industrial complex is suppressing the information, then he will have to go outside the system to get his bones. Surely if there were hundreds of such discoveries, not all the bones have been locked away in the secret vault (with the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail and everything else the military-industrial complex has squirreled away). And if hundreds of discoveries have already been made, a talented archaeologist can probably find one more site to excavate.

Mr. Vieira has done none of this, and so I think he has earned himself an appearance on Coast to Coast but not any respect from the truth-seeking empiricists out there. Documents are not data, just as an I.D. doesn’t make you twenty-one.

But as I said before, my road trip, quite coincidentally, brought me to not just one but two sites of importance to Jim Vieira’s talk. My trip was bringing me through the Ohio Valley, which is famed for its Moundbuilder sites, and in particular near Moundsville, West Virginia, which I had wanted to see for years. This was my chance.

One of my first questions with these mounds was how we knew they were artificial as opposed to natural formations, but all doubt on that count is immediately dispelled when you see the mound. It does not look, at all, like a natural earth formation. It looks immediately different. That said, this difference has to be experienced in person, as the photograph I took (and other photos I saw) do not do the mound any justice at all. When you climb to the top it feels much, much larger than it looks in pictures, larger and steeper and more impressive.

There is an interpretive museum next to the mound, with some information on the Native Americans who built it. The museum indicates that skeletons and artifacts, some displayed there, were found on the site, but there is no mention of giants or anything unusual besides a single, tiny (three-inch) piece of pottery with ciphers carved into it, which look like letters. The genuineness of this shard, discovered before systematic archeology, has been called into question. It certainly would not be difficult to fake. It resembles many dozens of other similar finds throughout North America, all of which were discovered about the same time as Joseph Smith’s plates, and all of which found dozens of people willing to translate them. They often were interpreted as testimonies to Jesus. None have been found since the Joseph Smith fad faded out of the American mainstream.

Similarly, no giants have been found since the late 19th century, a curious coincidence. Perhaps the military-industrial complex started getting good at suppression around then, and they just recently started faltering, and that would explain why the Biblical/Mormon Truth about giants has been covered up until now.

TED has of course gotten into some trouble for putting their name on this bunkum, and they have pulled the talk. This has made the conspiracy theorists go wild, of course. The thing that would be of most interest to the crazies – and actually the reason why I think this has emerged as part of the story, though no one has produced a skull as proof – is the double row of dentition. Dentition lasts, so it is especially important in paleontology, and it has proven to be a reliable indicator of species, and so it is a large part of the material evidence for evolution. A race of human beings with duplicated dentition would at least probe the evolutionary theory. And so to suggest such a thing to some religious Americans is like throwing fish to dolphins – they will jump through any number of intellectually degrading hoops to get it.

The fact that the skeletons are of giants, though, is important as well, because of the line in the Bible “there were giants in those days.” Bible-thumpers are always on the lookout for giants. Of course, Vieira (and TED) should know this, and should be looking for very solid evidence when dealing with something that people rather desperately want to believe. Desire is the mother of credulity, and credulity is the ore from which confidence men make gold.

And so it was with some satisfaction that my trip home, by chance, brought me to the area in New York state just south of Syracuse, on US-20, a beautiful old highway, where I passed the very spot, right there on the highway (convenient for visitors), where the Cardiff Giant was discovered. A sign indicated the site of the discovery. This was not a planned part of my itinerary, but it certainly was suggestive.

I had seen the Cardiff Giant as a child, when visiting Cooperstown, where it is now kept. My father knew the story of its discovery well, and regarded it with all the good-natured contempt that a born storyteller feels for some old-fashioned hokum. The hoax had been commissioned by a cynical skeptic, specifically to demonstrate how stupid the American religious mind was on the topic of giants, fossilization, the Bible, and the past. After having the giant carved by a sculptor, he had it buried on his property and then hired two men to dig a well a year later on the precise spot where the giant had been hidden. The discovery caused a sensation. It was documented in newspapers across the country. The owner erected a tent over the giant and charged people a quarter just to see it; the crowds were so vast, however, and the profits so tempting, that he doubled the price the next day. People trekked out to pay the fee for months. One local clergyman, a man of wealth and taste in town, after seeing the Giant, noted how hard-hearted the gentiles must be, to fly in the face of such evident Biblical truth. On the other hand, people with even average intelligence noted that the Giant was nothing but a bad statue and that there was no reason to be digging a well in the spot where it had been found.

The owner, having had about enough of the hoax, sold it to a group of entrepreneurs for $25,000, who immediately took the Giant on the road, heading south towards the Big Apple where they expected to mint a fortune. P.T. Barnum, coming a bit late to the party, offered to buy it off the entrepreneurs for $50,000, which they refused. ($50,000 at the time was 2500 ounces of gold, about $4 million today). Barnum having been frustrated came up with a scheme which revealed that as much as he was a scoundrel so much was he a genius: he sent a minion to get measurements of the Giant, then had a copy made of plaster, which he had aged appropriately and began showing in New York before the original fraud made it to town. When the owners of the Giant remonstrated, Barnum brazenly declared their Giant was a fraud and he had the real Giant. The reply of Barnum’s opponents (“there’s a sucker born every minute”) has gone down in history as a bit of American wisdom native-grown and ever-green. They sued, but since their Giant was a fraud, they lost the case in court, a hoax of a hoax being before the law as genuine as any other hoax, an undoubtedly important legal principle not satisfactorily appreciated today. This is Mark Twain material, and sure enough, he did not disappoint, writing a story about the ghost of the Cardiff Giant, who got a bit turned around in all the travelling and started haunting Barnum’s copy, and had to be told that he was haunting the wrong remains:

We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked tired, and spoke of it. “Tired?” he said. “Well, I should think so. And now I will tell you all about it, since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the Museum. I am the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial  again. Now what was the most natural thing for me to do, to make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it! — haunt the place where the body lay! So I haunted the museum night after night. I even got other spirits to help me. But it did no good, for nobody ever came to the museum at midnight. Then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this place a little. I felt that if I ever got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that perdition could furnish. Night after night we have shivered around through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering, tramping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost worn out. But when I saw a light in your room to-night I roused my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. But I am tired out — entirely fagged out. Give me, I beseech you, give me some hope!”
I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed:
“This transcends everything — everything that ever did occur! Why you poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing — you have been haunting a PLASTER CAST of your- self — the real Cardiff Giant is in Albany! Confound it, don’t you know your own remains?”

Since the business of giants was so good, the Cardiff Giant soon had other imitators besides Barnum. One, the Solid Muldoon, was apparently a more artful effort, involving real bones and flesh and dirt and plaster and sand and wax and other ingredients to create something that really looked like a petrified giant. (This is the proper context for the pictures Vieira shows). But of course the Cardiff Giant had proven that you didn’t need to go to great lengths to turn a profit in this business (for all its fame, it is nevertheless a ridiculous-looking, patent fraud). And newspaper editors could be counted on to document the whole thing, because stories like this got readers and weren’t bad for business in town either.

Mr. Vieira has yet to prove that he is talking about anything other than this massive 19th century humbug, and I’m not expecting anything scientifically promising to come out of his quarter. Because of the pertinacity of the printed and Biblical word (which, as the Scripture tells us, kills), people are still looking for precisely the same bunkum they were looking for a hundred fifty years ago, and they are still willing to pay cash. It is a curious religion, that insists that the only proof of God is to be had from the Bible; hence these people will trample on the goldenrods and fireflies of the field – which are great miracles of the Maker but unfortunately not the subject of any Bible-verses – to get a glimpse of a Biblically predicted fraud.

And a hundred years later, we can go through the same nonsense, but all from the comfort of our homes, on our computers, powered by fossil fuels. We don’t even have to visit the fields to show our stupidity. We can trample on the fireflies from afar: I mention this because the area around the Cardiff Giant is underlain by the famed Marcellus shale. People might be digging a large number of new wells in the area quite soon, in pursuit of more profitable hokum. It takes a lot of fossil fuels to power all our electric gew-gaws.

Route 55, which I drive daily to work, along the Rondout Reservoir, in evening light.

I wish we would hear more in our culture about great trees, and would make them places of pilgrimage and adoration; I have made special trips to see the Angel Oak and the Lone Oak and the sequoias, but I’m sure there are many more great trees I have never heard of. It is said that man is made in the image of God, but this does not rule out that trees (and mountains and stars and lakes and nature in general) are made in God’s image as well. Those who can feel reverence – not a majority, for sure, but the quality is not entirely absent in humans – will surely feel it for great trees. And not surprisingly, the golden spruce was regarded as sacred by the indigenous people where it grew: the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia, along the Inside Passage between Seattle and Alaska.

The tree no longer exists; it was cut down in 1997 by a somewhat mad logger from Vancouver named Grant Hadwin. He was an outdoorsman and loved the woods; and he found that the world would pay, and pay handsomely, for him to destroy them. It turns out that cutting down forests is one of the few jobs available for people who love to spend time in them. (Vaillant records a conversation between two loggers, one of whom picks a rare orchid in the woods; the other tells him he shouldn’t do that, but then yields when he is told that they are about to cut down the entire forest anyway, and orchids will not grow there for another hundred years or more). And so that was how Hadwin made his living, scouting out routes into remote areas of the woods of British Columbia and overseeing road-building and timber removal.

The tension between his love of life in the woods and his living destroying them eventually undid him: after quitting his job, he bounced around for several years, penning an environmental manifesto and in general getting nothing done whatsoever, until he decided to swim a river in the middle of a January night and work until dawn cutting down the Golden Spruce. In a psychic twist familiar to anyone who observes human behavior long enough, he cut the tree down to protest environmental destruction in the area. He called it the logging company’s “pet tree.” Vaillant imagines Hadwin’s feelings about the tree to be like a man who had seen the prairie full of buffalo being told how wonderful the lone pet buffalo grazing on the mini-golf course was. Hadwin had been felling ten- and fifteen-foot diameter trees which would be used to make skids – a much greater waste because it is so routine. Only some kind of symbolic destruction could move human beings, who did not care about the actual destruction of the woods. They would care less for the forest than for one tree.

There is human reason to this approach. If an American drone operator grew to hate America’s drone program, he could probably do more to stop it by using it against some symbolic target than by resigning, or going to the press, or writing a tell-all book. If a drone destroyed the Kaaba (for instance) more Muslims would be upset than if drones merely continued killing Muslims; and the outrage might stop the use of drones. A drone attack on the Statue of Liberty might work fairly well also. In Hadwin’s case the approach apparently worked, stirring up environmentalist feeling in the local press – for about two weeks. Then everybody resumed their normal lives. Hadwin decided to kayak across almost a hundred miles of open sea to get to the Queen Charlotte Islands for trial, and he was lost at sea and his wrecked kayak recovered. Some said he had merely vanished into the woods, but he has not turned up in the fifteen years since, and since the internet has not lured this manifesto-writer out of hiding I presume he is indeed dead.

The book itself is a long-form magazine article puffed up to 300 pages by the usual clunky machinery of nonfiction: when the indigenous people come up there is a long irrelevant digression on Haida culture; when logging comes up there are a lot of irrelevant gruesome logging stories; when discussions of restoring the spruce arise there is a digression on asexual reproduction in plants. Some people like this (“local color”) but to me it is just digression from the story, which is that people with consciences cannot bear to live in close proximity to the extraction industries on which our modern civilization depends, and yet modern civilization continues, not only unchanged but more wasteful by the year. I know of no solution but the one suggested by Voltaire, which is to participate less in the grand charades that cause great harm, and to cultivate the life that is in one’s own garden. It is probably not enough.

I will let Hadwin speak a bit for himself. He certainly had an unusual love of the comma, and his hatred of “university-trained professionals” probably stems from his apparently continually offering suggestions to spare certain trees and places in his logging work, places he felt were really worth keeping, and being continually overruled by his superiors. It certainly is true that our forests, which are now almost all managed to some extent by “university-trained professionals,” are as a rule managed very badly. Cornell recently did a study which indicated that 72% of New York’s state forests – this is about half the ground in the entire state – are not regenerating. They are terminal forests. Besides the fact that these are the cradles of almost all the indigenous life in the entire region, forests are also chemically speaking a layer of carbon extracted from the atmosphere. When they are gone, that carbon will all be in the air, which is not where we want it. The problem is not better in other areas of Eastern North America. The cause is mostly deer, which could be solved overnight if government stopped protecting these animals. If deer meat was allowed to be commercialized, the deer population would be decimated by capitalists in a year or so. It’s that simple.

Now for some Hadwin:

I didn’t enjoy butchering, this magnificent old plant, but you apparently need a message and wake-up call, that even a university-trained professional, should be able to understand. … I mean this action to be an expression, of my rage and hatred, towards university trained professionals and their extremist supporters, whose ideas, ethics, denials, part truths, attitudes, etc. appear to be responsible, for most of the abominations, towards “amateur” life on this planet.

And elsewhere:

If you had the power, to create all matter, including life, and you could synchronize, those creations perfectly, what would you do, if one life form, was apparently abusing, all other life, including themselves?

If the original “intent” of your creation had apprently been twisted, from respect, to hatred, from compassion, to oppression, form generosity, to greed, and from dignity, to defilement, what would you do?

How would you convince, people, that material temptations, social status, and education institutions, are used, to preserve and perpetuate, the status quo, with very little real consideration, for the future, of life, on earth?

 

Every day of good weather when I can work outdoors is precious now.  The plants are still all a bit stunned by the good weather, and it is easy to pull them up if you want to – they haven’t quite gotten themselves together enough to resist.  It’s a great time for weeding, and once I’m done with a bed I “bark” the results – meaning I put bark down around the desirable plants.  All winter I’ve been stripping firewood of its bark, both when I cut it and when it goes into the fire, and now I get to use it all.  It makes great mulch, and lasts for years.  It saves almost an infinite amount of later labor in weeding, and makes it possible to have a garden without supplemental water.  I can never quite get to all the weeding and barking that could be done, but knowing how efficient and effective it is makes me very happy to do whatever I can.

At this time of year the birds are the most noticeable feature of the forest.  Dozens of little passeriforms wander about all day, either in flocks or in pairs, pecking away at whatever small things they see on the ground.  They sing in the morning and browse away the remainder of the day.  My garden has been territory for a robin for the past few years, and his song charms me anew every spring evening.  And a pair of barred owls have been speaking to each other during the night, whether of love or war or both I know not.

This morning I came out and after investigating all the progress in my garden, I paused and saw all the little birds, dozens of them, and the chipmunks, four or five, all scouring the ground for little seeds and treats, and I was amazed at it all, taking place in something that felt like endlessness here on Wildcat Mountain.  It was a “peaceable kingdom” moment – we few, at least, could live together in some peace.

I set out my lettuce today – it has been incubating for the past few weeks in a seed flat – and I seeded some more directly into the bed.  It will have some frosts to deal with, but I have given it an opportunity.  And I feel about the same about myself.