Imagined Wilderness and Aldo Leopold

Posted on 20. Apr, 2010 by Bryan Coller in Blog, Opinion

On the island of Manhattan, it would be plausible to count out all of the trees one by one. Somewhere, filed in a cabinet at the Irvine Company’s headquarters, there is a manifest or a receipt for all of the trees planted along the medians of streets like University, Culver and Barranca. A scientist has probably already come up with a mathematical equation for quantifying the mass of trees growing in the Cleveland National Forest.

When I was 12 or so, we read a story in class about the last tree left in the world. I remember it growing in a city, by a street, on a sidewalk; whether or not that’s right I can’t say for sure. Anyways, it was a story about the too-late onset of guilt; a world in which people only realized the importance of trees when they were already on the doorstep of disappearance—hyperbole, no doubt. A children’s tale.

Yet, it’s somehow been easy for us to write off such a distilled, broken down message as that: that we—as Americans or as a species—are capable of shooting dead every single carrier pigeon, nearly every wolf, buffalo and grizzly bear; capable of stopping the river that carved and crafted the Grand Canyon from ever reaching the Gulf of California, sending it instead to places like Las Vegas, Tucson and Phoenix.

There are roads that go everywhere.

There are night skies with only a thousand stars.

Aldo Leopold wrote, not long enough ago, “I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in”. Would he laugh now at my sitting in the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park? facing the sea and ignoring my periphery, because to look to the right, at the sharp, angular edges of tight-packed homes on the ridgeline, my escape would be foiled? If he wouldn’t have died fighting his neighbor’s grass fire, if he were 123 years old, could I convince him that sitting on a huge slab of sandstone, amidst not even twenty-five hundred acres of sage and scrub oak, makes me feel the same way men used to when they took off on their horses for New Mexico or Colorado, times when they didn’t always come back?

I feel like I’d only make him cry.

Aldo Leopold had the same heart-dropping optimism that Lewis and Clark did almost a century earlier. The sort where they really believed they could stop the sky from falling. Clark became an official in charge of Indian affairs after he returned from the Pacific, on what had been the greatest American overland-journey to date. I can’t imagine what he felt as he was forced to watch Manifest Destiny break every promise he’d ever made in goodwill towards Indians across the plains.

Likewise, Leopold, who rose up along the U.S. Forest Service ladder (all the way to advising the UN on conservation) must have felt like the world was on fire when, by 1950, the road had become a web—automobiles and televisions a way of thinking.

On the rare days when I can see Catalina, San Clemente even, wedged between the green, chaparral hills of spring, hearing Bewick’s Wrens and Spotted Towhees, it is so easy to love the world. Stepping around a protrusion of prickly pear, a flushed covey of quail explode away from me and settle into the needlegrass. Scattered, they comeback together, slowly; finding one another again with a series of calls like turn-table scratches, ur-wrr-rr, ur-wrr-rr, ur-wrr-rr.

After the quail disappear into the laurel sumac and monkey flowers, it’s hard to ignore the tollroad on the other side of the barbed wire, the neighborhoods washing up against the hilltops, the fire-roads that might be all too easily paved.

It’s troubling, the idea of “wild country to be young in.” What if it’s gone? Or, if not gone, then all but gone? The farm and then the city and then the suburbs have added up and been linked up. If there isn’t a road on the ground there’s a plane in the sky. In grand acts of conservation, a developer will agree to set aside so many acres of open land for each housing development built. Until those reserved spaces are further refined, divided at the same ratio more minutely. Imagine a spiral, or an image within an image within an image within an image. . . .

Think of a park as a remainder. What you have left is what’s left of the Cherokee, the Arapaho, the Miwok or the Chumash: reservations and artifacts.

All I can think about, watching the sunlight pinkening the orange from behind the hills at dusk, is how this park used to go on forever. Picture elk here. Maybe even Pronghorn—American antelope. Grizzly bears might have pawed amongst the wet beach-stones at Pelican Point in Crystal Cove.

It used to be Federal policy to shoot predators on sight. Leopold tells a story in his Sand County Almanac wherein he and a partner unload their rifles into a pack of wolves somewhere in New Mexico. He admits to having trouble compensating for the drop of the rimrock he was shooting from; his bullets angling strangely towards the valley floor where the pack was socializing: a scrum of pups and adults rolling in the tallgrass near a clutch of willows.

In the end, he and his companion were only able to hit two. One limped off into the woods; the other, they went down to inspect. The old female was dying in the grass, heaving her last breaths. Leopold recalls looking into her eyes and seeing a “fierce green fire.”

When it went out, I don’t think he ever stopped paying penance. I believe that’s what drove him to write—that same fire transfigured.

I can’t help but laugh sometimes when I see the California flag. The grizzly bear over a red bar under a red star. The Bear Flag Republic. It reminds me of another quote of Aldo’s that he made when grizzly bears were teetering near extinction in the continental US; back in the middle of the last century when people thought that so long as some bears were left somewhere, that was good enough. But not so for Leopold, who lamented, “Relegating Grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness to heaven; one may never get there.”

At this point, I wonder if “wild country to be young in” isn’t so much a place that I may never get to as much as it is a place I can’t get to. There is an undeniable vitality in seeing a wild grizzly. At the basest level (the level that put them near extinction to begin with) a bear of that size is terrifying. We are compelled to acknowledge that animal’s elemental, Darwinistic perfection. Even if the more populous and smaller black bear is the greater threat of the two, it is the grizzly that we recognize as something extraordinary. How could anyone not notice a grizzly’s nonchalance, its not knowing what it is to be prey? A state of mind we recognize emphatically—spinners that we are of the food web. And yet, the grizzly and the great stretches of wild country necessary for its free roaming have been vanquished in California.

How do I get someplace that doesn’t exist anymore?

There are signs at the San Joaquin Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary warning about a recently spotted mountain lion. The sanctuary is run by the Irvine Ranch Water District; it’s surrounded by streets, a university, downtown Irvine, apartment complexes; and it only consists of about three hundred acres. Construction vehicles are constantly present, as are joggers and planes taking off from John Wayne Airport not even a mile away. Still, despite the far-fetched fantasy of the posting, I believe it.

Two years ago, not far from that spot, I came across a bobcat while I was riding along the bike path. I got off and followed it for at least half an hour through the dirty brush growing around a creek that leads out to the Back Bay. It was hard for me to believe what I was seeing in the broad daylight of a city whose motto is Innovation. Integrity. Professionalism. Flexibility. Responsiveness; so much so that I used the camera on my cellphone for later proof—knowing I’d need it.

Why not a mountain lion, then?

I wonder if being a son of suburbia has prepared me best for the death of “wild country to be young in.” It is a strange middle ground, caught even more in the crossfire between city and nature than agraria. When’s the last time a coyote ate up a cat in New York? How often does the smell of creosote get into the wind that whips through Chicago? Most farms lack a greenbelt-skyscraper dialectic.

I have not been young in wild country, except for certain moments too sporadic and not long enough to really count—vacations, road trips. It’s not because I’m getting older that I’ve come to the realization that it’s probably too late to really experience that condition of Leopold’s. Rather, the fleeting sense of wilderness that I have has a lot more to do with the canyon-edge that wilderness is balancing on today; similar to the Coyote right before he pulls out a sign that reads yikes!; before falling to the red-rock floor; the sound of a bomb falling and the anticlimactic puff of smoke.

This cultural reference, too, is something fast disappearing from collective memory.

It’s like that tree in the story I read so long ago. It’s like a national park. Something preserved because we know how rare it has become. The first parks were a matter of exceptionalism. Yellowstone. Yosemite. The Grand Canyon. What do we make, then, of the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, the San Joaquin Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary?

There is a difference of epic proportions between the acreage of these preserved spaces and the oceans of open land in which they were once embodied. Wilderness has always been an idea. Nonetheless, there are so few places left today that really give definition to that word. Parts of Alaska, most of the Amazon, the cold reaches of the Arctic Circle, all places that heretofore have been too difficult to efficiently cultivate into the civilized body.

Today’s small excuses for wilderness parks are a sign of what we already know: wilderness is near gone—the green fire dying. The poet Gary Young has a piece in which a mother starts wearing her dead daughter’s clothes in desperate commemoration. We have begun to do that same thing with “wild country.” There is so little that’s wild about the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park except for the word itself, its ability to bring out some notional connotation in any given visitor of vast, natural tracts of open land; of nostalgic frontier; of free space and its pathways to the numinous. The word possesses no more than a family heirloom’s ability to take the place of the deceased—but it is something.

Endangered v. Extinct.

If I could have that fantasy meeting with Aldo Leopold on my slab of sandstone, I wouldn’t be at all concerned that his weeping should come from pity or disgust. Any tears would be for the strange, beauteous capacity of people to hold on and pass on. Whatever the reason, however late, at least there is still an attempt to celebrate nature. That the natural world has become so much smaller, it has become all the more precious.

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Tags: aldo leopold, bear flag republic, bobcat, bryan coller, cleveland national forest, coyote, gary young, grizzly bear, irvine ranch water district, laguna coast wilderness park, lewis and clark, manifest destiny, san joaquin marsh and wildlife sanctuary, sand county almanac