John Muir's Last Journey
South To The Amazon And East To Africa: Unpublished Journals And Selected Correspondence
400 pages
6 x 9
400 pages
6 x 9
"I am now writing up some notes, but when they will be ready for publication I do not know... It will be a long time before anything is arranged in book form." These words of John Muir, written in June 1912 to a friend, proved prophetic. The journals and notes to which the great naturalist and environmental figure was referring have languished, unpublished and virtually untouched, for nearly a century. Until now. Here edited and published for the first time, John Muir's travel journals from 1911-12, along with his associated correspondence, finally allow us to read in his own words the remarkable story of John Muir's last great journey.
Leaving from Brooklyn, New York, in August 1911, John Muir, at the age of seventy-three and traveling alone, embarked on an eight-month, 40,000-mile voyage to South America and Africa. The 1911-12 journals and correspondence reproduced in this volume allow us to travel with him up the great Amazon, into the jungles of southern Brazil, to snowline in the Andes, through southern and central Africa to the headwaters of the Nile, and across six oceans and seas in order to reach the rare forests he had so long wished to study. Although this epic journey has received almost no attention from the many commentators on Muir's work, Muir himself considered it among the most important of his life and the fulfillment of a decades-long dream.
John Muir's Last Journey provides a rare glimpse of a Muir whose interests as a naturalist, traveler, and conservationist extended well beyond the mountains of California. It also helps us to see John Muir as a different kind of hero, one whose endurance and intellectual curiosity carried him into far fields of adventure even as he aged, and as a private person and family man with genuine affections, ambitions, and fears, not just an iconic representative of American wilderness.
With an introduction that sets Muir's trip in the context of his life and work, along with chapter introductions and a wealth of explanatory notes, the book adds important dimensions to our appreciation of one of America's greatest environmentalists. John Muir's Last Journey is a must reading for students and scholars of environmental history, American literature, natural history, and related fields, as well as for naturalists and armchair travelers everywhere.
"With previously unpublished journal entries and letters, this volume captures the original mountain man's final trek."
Outside
"With previously unpublished journal entries and letters, this volume captures the original mountain man's final trek."
Outside
List of Maps and Illustrations
Foreword \ Robert Michael Pyle
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Preparing for the Last Journey: California, New York, and Boston (26 January 1911–12 August 1911)
Chapter 2. Southbound and up the Great Amazon (12 August 1911–25 September 1911)
Chapter 3. Coastal Brazil and up the Iguacu River into the Araucaria braziliensis Forests (26 September 1911–8 November 1911)
Chapter 4. Southern Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and into the Araucaria imbricata Forests of the Andes (9 November 1911–10 December 1911)
Chapter 5. At Sea, South Africa, the Zambezi River, and to the Baobab Trees (11 December 1911–6 February 1912)
Chapter 6. East Africa, Lake Victoria, the Headwaters of the Nile, and Homeward Bound (7 February 1912–27 March 1912)
Chapter 7. Home to America, California, and Writing: The Fate of John Muir and His South America and Africa Journals (28 March 1912–29 December 1912)
Appendix A: Timeline/Locator
Appendix B: Editorial Methods
Appendix C: John Muir's Reading and Botanical Notes
Appendix D: South America and Africa Books Owned by Muir
Appendix E: Annotated List of Selected Archival Materials
Appendix F: Table of Emendations
Notes to Editor's Introductions
Textual Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Credits
Index
A few months ago I offered a Rant celebrating a single juniper tree that stands alone in an open, windswept valley out here in the high desert. Why then am I, a confirmed desert rat, about to offer a paean to cutting trees—to cutting them first down and then up? The answer may be found in the intimate relationship between this desiccated, largely treeless arid landscape and the nearby Sierra Nevada, whose eastern slope is carpeted with conifer forests comprised of a variety of lovely tree species including white, red, and Douglas fir; incense cedar and western juniper; and, ponderosa, Jeffrey, lodgepole, and sugar pine. One of the many advantages of our proximity to the Sierra is that it makes it possible for us to augment the warmth produced by our highly-efficient passive solar home with heat generated by burning wood.
I’ve always loved to fell, limb, buck, split, haul, and stack wood, and I’ve been heating with wood most of my adult life. There’s something deeply satisfying about making a pilgrimage into the forest and returning with a fruit so precious that it flowers a year later in the gentle, lapping flames that warm my little daughters as they play or read by the hearth. Think of it as the thermal equivalent of preparing and eating vegetables that you’ve grown in your own garden. Of course that’s a pretty sentimental take on a backbreaking form of work that is done amid the roar of a chainsaw and the smell of diesel fuel and sawdust. But I truly love cutting, so much so that I do it not only to heat our home but also to avoid doing pretty much anything else that I really ought to be doing. The expansive woodpiles strewn along the half-mile-long driveway to the Ranting Hill provide clear evidence of how wonderfully I’ve succeeded in using cutting to evade the pesky, endless round of adult responsibilities.
In addition to offering an escape from the scurrying of grown-up life, woodcutting also has the advantage of being ridiculously gear-intensive. It isn’t just the pickup truck, dump trailer, chainsaws, bars, chains, gas, oil, screnches, wedges, and files that I’m talking about, but also the stylish safety apparel. To begin with, there’s the standard-issue head-to-toe Carhartt in the classic olive-drab green and monkey-poop brown. I’ve graduated from ordinary work gloves to gel-palmed saw gloves with wrap-around Velcro wrist straps; whenever I put them on I feel like I’m about to win the Indy 500. I’ve also traded in my steel-toed work boots for titanium-toed boots, which provide the same protection but are lighter and, more importantly, sound really cool. In fact, I’m considering “Titanium Toed” for my next band name.
In the area of eye protection, I’ve improved my look over time, from the boxy safety goggles of a high-school chemistry student to the reflector shades of an undercover cop to the tinted wraparounds of the professional bass fisherman. My final step has been to go for the full headgear: a bright orange hardhat with attached ear protection and stylish nylon mesh visor, which makes me look like an extremely orange medieval knight. Whenever I’m wearing this helmet I am transformed into Sir Rantsalot, the brave, saw-wielding knight-errant who can flip his visor up and deliver a cool, witty line every time. Unfortunately, I sometimes forget that I have it on and spit heartily without first raising the visor, a bush-league move that makes a guy hope the other knights weren’t looking.
Of course the pièce de résistance of any chainsawing getup is the chaps. You can’t help but feel studly as a bronc buster once you’ve strapped these bad boys on, and I speak from experience when I say that being wrapped in Kevlar is a good idea when wielding a tool with razor-sharp teeth that are moving inches from your body at 60 m.p.h. (around 90 feet per second). That valorization notwithstanding, chaps are essentially assless pants.
Several years ago on Christmas Eve, my wife Eryn let slip that Santa had brought me a new pair of chaps. (I had nicked the old ones, which, like a climbing rope that has sustained a fall, may have saved your life but should not be reused.) I was so excited that I snuck to the Christmas tree later that night—wearing only green, elf-themed boxer shorts—just to try on the new gear. The chaps fit so perfectly that I decided to treat myself to a celebratory nightcap. I was bent over, reaching into the fridge for an IPA, when I heard someone approaching behind me. I spun around to see my father-in-law, who was then visiting from California for the holidays. This guy is an ex-cop, and he has always seemed to me like he’s eight feet tall. There he stood, towering silently over me. I had to think fast, so I opened the beer, extended it toward him, and said, “Remember how you felled a tree in the wrong direction and knocked out power to half of Oakland during a Raiders game? I won’t mention that if you won’t mention this.” He took the beer and went back to bed with nothing more said, either then or since.
I do most of my woodcutting with my buddy Steve, who is so good that when we cut I call him “the good feller” and he just refers to me as “the other feller.” Steve will take on trees twice the size I’d be willing to wrangle, and he’ll do it even in rough terrain or in situations where the drop has to be perfect. Before Steve fells a tree he engages in a mysterious, elaborate ritual that appears entirely unscientific. He first breaks a branch, measures it against the length of his arm, and then backs away from the tree that is to be cut, holding the branch up in the air like a witchdoctor and squinting at it with his head cocked to one side. Then he stares around the canopy of the forest, as if searching for signs. After a period of inscrutable meditation, he sticks the branch into the ground and pronounces calmly that this is the exact spot where the tip of the tree’s crown will strike on the drop. This is a little like Babe Ruth pointing to the spot in the bleachers where he’ll smack the dinger, and about as difficult to make good on.
Once Steve begins to wedge the bole and then notch the hinge—which, on a big tree, he does using a massive Stihl with a 42” bar (take a moment to visualize this)—it is impossible not to admire the guy’s sheer gumption. But when he cuts the engine on his saw and begins driving wedges into the notch with the head of his field axe, that’s my cue to spring into action. First I coolly raise the visor on my helmet and holler “I’m here for you if you need anything, buddy!” Then I hastily retreat until I’m about a half mile from the tree, perfectly safe and of no possible use to anyone save my bartender, who cannot afford to lose me. Steve’s hammering echoes through the forest, and is followed by the slow-motion sound of the holding wood cracking, the tree crashing through the canopy, and then the resounding thud as it meets the earth—a heavy vibration that I feel in my boots, despite my cowardly distance from the site. Reapproaching, I inevitably find that the tree has been dropped on a dime, with Steve’s stick accurately marking the crown’s position on the ground.
Read the rest at High Country News
Photo by Steve Dunleavy (cc) Flickr.com
“Rants from the Hill” is cross-posted from High Country News
Now that Chautauqua season is nearly upon us I feel compelled to rant about this bizarre cultural practice, which Teddy Roosevelt once called “the most American thing in America”—never mind that this honor obviously deserves to be shared by baseball, blues, and bourbon. Chautauqua is defined by its practitioners as “a public humanities educational event in which scholars portray historical characters.” A more helpful definition was offered by our seven-year-old daughter, Caroline: “it’s when grownups play dress-up and act like dead people they really like in a tent.” It remains unclear to me why a form of education intended to be accessible to the entire community was given a name that even sober people can’t pronounce, much less spell. I am also troubled that Chautauqua is described as “living history,” a term every bit as logical as “congressional action,” “industrial park,” “clean coal,” “serious comic,” “adult male,” “true story,” and, in honor of this Rant, “act naturally.”
I am uncomfortable with Civil War reenactors, department store Santas, and Chautauquans, all of whom I suspect of being not only impostors, but also drunkards and pedophiles. That said, I agree with Chautauqua’s core presumption, which is that anything is better than reading a history textbook. Given the choice between a scholarly tome and a lawn chair and a cooler of IPAs, the decision to support Chautauqua isn’t so difficult after all. And if the concept is, as I understand it, to trick benighted Americans into learning something meaningful about our country’s past by seating us in the shade of a tent in a park and letting us drink beer, well then I’m all in.
My favorite thing about Chautauqua is that, like other entertaining spectator sports, it can go off the rails in a heartbeat. The source of this peril is the fact that folks in attendance at the event are permitted to ask questions of the performers, who are obliged to answer while remaining in character. I once saw a Chautauqua performance of Henry David Thoreau in which the would-be Transcendentalist was excoriated by an older woman for supposedly failing to do his own laundry. “Get a job, you bum!” she yelled at the hapless Thoreau. I’ve seen FDR interrogated about repealing Obamacare, Harriet Tubman asked when the Underground Railroad to California was completed, Christopher Columbus exhorted to condemn the team name “Redskins,” and Mae West called out on her claim to have been Snow White before she drifted (“That just seems confusing,” observed the earnest young woman from the audience). I’ve even seen Will Rogers verbally abused because of his “obviously entirely super false claim” to have never met a man he didn’t like. I should add that the inquisitor in this case was such a bloviating asshat that his behavior went a fair piece toward making his point.
My buddy David Fenimore, who is the most gifted of the one Chautauquans ever to visit the Ranting Hill, has stories that last until the last bottle is empty. Once, while portraying gold baron John Sutter, David’s audience included a drunk guy dressed up like a Forty-Niner—a “One-Eyed Snaggle-Toothed Shaggy-Haired Hillbilly” who pulled a wagonload of pickaxes and gunny sacks behind him and shouted “Kick mah mule!” throughout the performance. On another occasion David was playing Woody Guthrie to an appreciative crowd when a lady in a wheelchair rolled herself up to the stage and began loudly accusing him of being “a damned communist!” Imagine spending months studying every detail of a fascinating life—David preps by memorizing 1,000 5x7 cards with facts related to his character—and then being hollered at by a drunk miner and a handicapped libertarian. Now that is public education in the New West.
In some instances the folks doing the portraying are every bit as batty as those on the receiving end of the performance. David related a wonderful story of a local mountain man who was a self-appointed Chautauquateer. “During the week he made these giant, crappy chainsaw sculptures of bears, but every Saturday he’d come to town wearing a leather do-rag and claim to be Benjamin Franklin,” David explained. “He really looked like Franklin, too—long stockings down below, long grey hair up top, big forehead, round specs—only everything he said was pure anti-federalist tirade. No more taxation of kites, that kind of thing. Sort of a Joe Chainsaw portraying Donald Trump portraying Rush Limbaugh portraying Ben Franklin. You shoulda heard him when he got going on getting rid of the postal service.”
The approach of Chautauqua season and the fact that today is John Muir’s birthday (born in Dunbar, Scotland, April 21, 1838) remind me of a memorable run-in I once had with some fake John Muirs. Having some years ago written a book on Muir (John Muir’s Last Journey), I was making the lecture circuit, blathering at anybody who’d listen. At one point I was booked at a conference of hard-core Muirites, where I shared the program with Lee Stetson, an experienced Chautauquan who’d been commissioned to do his acclaimed performance of Muir that evening. Lee has been doing his fake Muir thing since about the time Muir died in 1914, and it is honed. He has quite simply out-Muired Muir. Lee looks like Muir, acts like Muir—he’s even got Muir’s mild Scottish brogue nailed. I’d believe him if he told me that he smells like Muir. And don’t make the mistake I made, of pulling on Lee’s long grey beard, because his face foliage is as real as Muir’s own.
Read the rest at High Country News
To say that conditions here in the western Great Basin are extreme hardly does justice to the apocalyptic weirdness we often experience out in this remote, high desert place. Since making our home on the Ranting Hill more than a decade ago, we've seen temperatures close to 110 degrees on the top end and 20 below at the bottom, while day-night swings of 40 degrees are not uncommon. We've had high winds blow up into impenetrable sandstorms of whipping alkali dust, while other periods have been so breathless and stultifying that it seemed the earth had ceased to turn on its axis. There have been wildfires on the nearby public lands almost every year, and we have twice been subject to fire evacuation. Earthquakes have on occasion rattled books off our shelves, and smaller tremors are fairly common. A number of blizzards have snowed us in up on our hill, with one memorable series of massive snowstorms forcing us to snowshoe up to our house during the better part of an entire January. One year hordes of shieldbacked katydids (a large, sagebrush country insect often called the "Mormon cricket") invaded, blanketing these hills so thickly that their mushed guts rendered the paved roads slick as ice, even causing some major thoroughfares to be temporarily closed.
As all Westerners know, the apocalypse du jour in our region is drought, and I confess that even in these extremely arid lands, where desiccation is a condition to which we're well accustomed, this drought has been especially severe and troubling. Recently, though, we've had the opposite problem: not too little water but far too much of it, and in too little time. A series of unusual summer thunderstorms has hammered our area, fueling flash floods. You might think that a lot of rain is a good thing in a place that receives so little of it, and perhaps an ennobling metaphor like "quenching the land's thirst" might come to your mind. Once you've seen a flood in the desert, however, a different metaphor suggests itself. Imagine being so parched that dehydration is a real threat, and then being offered a sip of water from a forestry hose blasting at 450 psi; you'll get your water, but it will likely take your face off with it. Needless to say, this choice may cause you to ask yourself: "Am I really that thirsty?" As fellow High Country News writer Craig Childs puts it in his book The Secret Knowledge of Water, "There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning." According to the USGS, in American deserts, more people drown than die of dehydration, which puts the immense power of flash floods in humbling perspective.
In weather nerd parlance, a "flash flood" is distinguished by speed as well as volume: it is an event in which geomorphic low-lying areas are inundated in less than six hours. This event can be triggered by torrential rains or accelerated snowmelt, or by the collapse of an ice dam—or an artificial dam, as when 2,200 people were swept to their deaths in the 1889 Jonestown Flood. While we don't tend to associate deserts with floods, flash flooding is not only surprisingly common but also especially dangerous in desert areas. The unstable temperature and pressure gradients that characterize weather patterns in arid lands can create a lot of water in a short time. Desert soils, both sand and clay, are ill-equipped to slow and absorb water, and in an open, mostly treeless landscape like ours there is little vegetation to help the cause. While heavy rain falling on a forest is much like water pouring onto a sponge, a torrent in the open desert is more like water dropping onto a rock.
Because this landscape does not have regular rains to help keep ditches, culverts, and drains clear, floods here tend to be heavily laden with debris, which creates blockages that exacerbate water damage. This effect is clearly visible on our rural road here in Silver Hills, where the recent flash floods uprooted sagebrush, Russian thistle, and tumble mustard, jamming them into the mouths of culverts, where they formed a mesh that captured mud, clogging the heads, impeding water flow, and causing the runoff to jump the ditch and rip across the road surface, where it sliced through the roadbed, rendering it impassable. Perhaps most surprising and hazardous, flash floods in the desert often occur beneath clear skies. Localized thunderstorms somewhere above release the water load, which gathers force as it tumbles downslope through canyons, arroyos, and washes, eventually blasting into areas where no rain may have fallen.
I had a memorable experience of this kind of flood twenty years ago while backpacking in the Escalante Canyons of southern Utah. If you've never seen this magnificent country, it is perhaps best imagined as an immense labyrinth of fissures carved into the exposed face of a vast tableland of mesas and plateaus. For the hiker, navigating these canyons means meandering through a maze of narrow slots, beneath sheer walls of Navajo sandstone painted with carbonate patina and streaked with desert varnish. The narrowness and depth of these sinuous canyons creates their undulating beauty, but also ensures that those of us walking within them have little idea what might be going on beyond the slice of sky we're able to see between the canyon walls.
On the day I witnessed the surprise flood, bright sun illuminated the red cliffs of the canyon I was following, while the sliver of sky visible above me remained pure azure, save for an occasional, puffy cloud drifting innocently across it. Despite these ideal conditions, by mid-afternoon I heard the distant rumbling of thunder, which was my cue to peel a weather eye and devise contingency plans. After hiking for another hour I reached a bottleneck in the canyon, and I knew that in entering it I would risk being trapped without an escape route in the unlikely event there was water running somewhere above me and beyond my sight. Instead, I decided to wait it out, remaining in a wide amphitheater of the canyon bottom, through which the small creek slid first against one wall, then snaked gracefully across the cobble of the broad wash to run gently against the other. I sat down on a sandy bench that seemed safely elevated above the creek, leaned back against my pack, and enjoyed the beauty of the place.
After a half hour I noticed the little creek begin to rise, and rather quickly. Within minutes, water that had been only inches deep—so shallow that I had simply walked through it perhaps twenty times that day—rose to a foot deep, while also quickening its pace. Then, around the bend of the canyon, came the aptly-named "snout," the leading wave that is pushed before a flash flood. It was several feet high, viscous and brown, loaded with debris, and barreling into the canyon with a volume and force that far exceeded anything the little creek could contain.
I grabbed my pack and clambered up to a broad notch higher in the cliff side. From there I watched as the coffee-colored snout led a wave that swept the canyon bottom, overrunning the shallow creek bed and spreading out over rocks and sand, tearing through reeds and bushes, encircling boulders and swirling around the trunk of a cottonwood tree that had formerly stood thirty feet from the creek. I watched in amazement as the canyon of dry cobble became a cliff-to-cliff river, shallow but roiling, spitting brown foam and ploughing forward with a tumbling load of upcanyon debris.
In the next moment something equally remarkable and surprising occurred. The sky darkened as I heard the wind rise and felt the temperature begin to drop. And then the rain that had been heralded by the flood exploded above me in a cloudburst so sudden and intense that it hammered the cliffs in deafening sheets. Water also began to run down the canyon walls and spout from their tops. Within moments the canyon bottom was being pounded by a series of spontaneous waterfalls, as the mesa lands above gathered the runoff and shot it over the canyon's sandstone brow. Squinting through the blast I counted eleven simultaneous waterfalls, one of which was launching from the cliff beneath which I had taken shelter, catapulting itself over me and into the canyon-wide torrent below.
Read the rest at High Country News
When you look at a fence, you are seeing something more than a material object. You're seeing an idea—a form of symbolic communication that not only marks a boundary but also stakes a particular kind of claim about the land and its uses. In feudal England most land remained in the "commons," shared fields where even peasants were allowed to practice subsistence agriculture. By the sixteenth century, however, wealthy landowners began to fence off the commons for their own benefit, dispossessing poor laborers and farmers, and privatizing a natural resource that had long offered sustenance to the entire community. While we'll never know who raised the first fence, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a guy who thought harder about the social contract than I'm willing to, wrote that "The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine,' and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society." In establishing a new kind of relationship both with his neighbors and with the land, that first fence builder caused some problems we haven't yet solved.
Here in the American West we have long had a complicated relationship with fences. The "commons" of the frontier West was the open range that was used by Native American peoples, by wildlife, and, much later, by ranchers whose livelihood depended (and in many places still depends) upon the use of public lands. But legislation like the Homestead Act (1862) and the Desert Land Act (1877) granted legal possession of land to anyone who could "improve" it, and a fence was (and still is) considered an improvement to land. In other words, the fence functioned as the primary marker of possession and assertion of ownership. The Range Wars of the nineteenth-century West were feuds over the right to fence off parts of this open range commons—particularly the parts that contained the region's limited water sources. If skirmishes in those wars sometimes ended with six-guns, they usually began with barbed wire—a technology invented not long after the Civil War, and one that profoundly transformed the landscape of the American West.
Beneath the politics and economics of the Range Wars is a different kind of conflict, one that is more a battle of ideas than one of land use. It is a war we're still fighting in the West today. Two of the strongest human impulses are the desire for home and the yearning for freedom—two noble ideas that are sometimes at odds with each other. In erecting a fence between ourselves and the so-called "outside" world—a world that was rendered "outside" by the fence itself—we are defining our home ground. In the parlance of the cultural geographer, the fence converts "space" into "place" by declaring the occupant's intention to separate a piece of land from the commons and stay put on it. Seen in this valorizing light, a fence encloses and protects a place that we care for, improve, nurture, and treasure. A fence communicates, both to ourselves and to our neighbors, an ennobling concept of home.
At the same time, however, we have always wanted the West to symbolize freedom, independence, and openness; we fantasize that it is a landscape perpetually free from constraints, whether geographical or social. In the back of our minds, where we keep the indelible images from old John Ford films, the West will always be a place with infinite room to roam. To move "out" West from "back" East has always implied a movement from bondage into freedom, and nothing is as powerful a symbol of that liberation as the sublime fencelessness of the iconic western landscape. This desire for liberty from constraint, which is expressed in so many western novels, films, and songs, is at the heart of the much-covered 1934 Cole Porter classic "Don't Fence Me In," which includes these lyrics:
Don't fence me in
Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies
On my cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise
I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in
Like Porter's crooning cowboy, we Westerners "can't stand fences." How, then, are we to reconcile our celebration of openness and freedom with the fact that we have run an inconceivable amount of fence—that our region is in fact an immense, tightly latticed grid of mesh and wire? While hard numbers on fencing seem impossible to come by, it has been estimated that the 350 million acres of western rangelands managed by the BLM and USFS contain over 100,000 miles of fence. Make that a five-strand fence, which it often is, and you'd have enough wire to get from anywhere in the West to the moon and back again (yes, literally). Does all this fence define our home, or limit our freedom? Does it protect us from the outside, or simply create more outside from which we then feel a need for protection?
Here on the Ranting Hill I too have a complicated relationship with fences, one brought to my attention recently when a new neighbor on our rural road had his property fully fenced before moving in. He chose a six-strand wire fence, 52" high with a bottom strand just a few inches above the ground. I should add that this approach of immediately fencing one's property with five- or six-strand barbed wire is the default approach here in Silver Hills, and that in choosing to leave our property unfenced I am expressing a dissenting opinion on the subject. I have done so because we are close to public lands that extend to California, and because our property is on pronghorn antelope routes and mule deer winter range. "Oh, give me a home . . . where the deer and the antelope play." It is an old idea, and still a good one. One of the pleasures of sitting at my writing desk gazing out over our property is seeing pronghorn and deer move freely across the land. After all, if they didn't I might have to quit looking out the window and actually work.
The negative impact of these kinds of fences on wildlife is very real. Although moose, bighorn sheep, elk, deer, and pronghorn can jump fences, fatal entanglement is disconcertingly common, with studies suggesting that each year one ungulate ensnarement death occurs for every 2.5 miles of fence. And fences present significant barriers to pregnant and young animals. The same study indicated that when ungulates were found dead near (but not entangled in) fences, there was one annual death per 1.2 miles of fence. 90% of these fatalities were fawns that were unable to cross the fence to follow their mothers. Multiply those casualty numbers by 100,000 miles of fence and that's a lot of carnage. Fences are also a serious hazard to low-flying birds such as swans, cranes, and geese, as well as the grouse, hawks, and owls that are native here in the sagebrush steppe. This is why northern Nevada’s 575,000-acre Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, established primarily to protect pronghorn, has removed almost 300 miles of interior fencing.
Like all landowners, I have firm ideas about what I do and do not want on my property. Although I do want pronghorn and do not want ORVs, I have plenty of rural neighbors who don't care about wildlife but choose to live in this remote area precisely because they enjoy their ORVs; other neighbors value both ORVs and wild animals, while a few don't seem to care about anything at all. But that's exactly my point. Each of us moved out here because we found town life too constraining, because we wanted to do what we damn well please with our own property and not have to conform to someone else's rules, or the values they codify. I am no different from my neighbors in this respect: I am here to indulge the fantasy that I can stake a claim to home without forfeiting any freedom in doing so.
Reno is a desert town with a river heart. The Sierra Nevada snow-fed Truckee River, which is the only outlet from nearby alpine Lake Tahoe, passes through the city on its 121-mile-long slide out to Pyramid Lake, which is among the most spectacular desert terminal lakes on the planet. Although the Truckee is the lifeline between these two gorgeous lakes, which are separated by 2,500 vertical feet, it has not generally received good treatment as it passes through the center of this western Great Basin city. Once an old cow town attempting to shift to a new resort economy, Reno turned its back on its river corridor, choosing instead to focus visitors’ attention on the impoverishing entertainments offered just around the corner, where casinos sprouted up along Virginia Street. The river, so nearby, was relegated to a concrete trough with few access points. Its riparian zone became home to hobo camps, while the Truckee itself was regarded primarily as something to be crossed on one of the city’s old bridges. For a long time our river gave sacred water but received profane treatment.
Signage discouraging use of the Truckee River. Photo Courtesy of Michael Branch
This denigrating view of the Truckee has mostly changed these days, with a series of ambitious and largely successful river core urban renewal projects. We now have a whitewater park, pedestrian bridges, improved access, and more greenspace along the floodplain. And while all this exists in the shadow of towering casinos, it offers a helpful reminder that we desert rats had better pay tribute to the Truckee, without which our survival in this arid place would be tenuous. Even in the desert, a city without a home river seems to me a lonely proposition. I’m grateful that we’ve begun to appreciate ours.
Twenty years ago, before the Truckee corridor through Reno had been revitalized, I used to hang out down by the river a lot. At that time I wasn’t married, didn’t have kids, and had not yet begun to build our home out on the Ranting Hill, far north of the city and up in the remote, high-elevation canyons and ridges along the California line. Back then I was a new arrival in the Great Basin. My desert rat whiskers had only just begun to sprout, and I still felt more comfortable keeping water in view.
It is with the bittersweet sensation of a lost place and time that I return two decades later to revisit well-worn memories of those old days and nights along the Truckee. One of my closest friends at that time was Brad, a guy whose aplomb and cool had earned him the nickname “Smoo B” (as in “Smooth Brad”). I had plenty in common with Smoo B, but perhaps most important was our love of playing music together, something we did at every opportunity. He picked guitar and I blew blues harp, and we bonded over the fact that neither of us had ever met a note we didn’t want to bend. As a little, two-man jam band we played out at cheap bars now and then—the kinds of dives that were adjacent to tattoo parlors, and once we even played in an acrid-smelling saloon that slung both rye and, in the back room, skin ink. One-shop stopping for Harley dudes. We never used the same band name twice, and I’ve forgotten all of them now, save “Jeebies and Stankeye.” I no longer recall how we came up with that name, or which one of us was which, or if we even stopped to ask such questions at the time.
Mural of Truckee River on old riverside cafe in the shadow of a casino hotel. Photo Courtesy of Michael Branch
Mostly, though, we played on our own, whenever we could and wherever we felt like it. One unexceptional summer day, we agreed to meet down by the river in the late afternoon, just to pick and bend a few tunes before dark. We sidled along the Truckee for a while before sitting down on an old concrete landing near the south buttress of the Virginia Street Bridge, in the heart of downtown Reno. A double-arch gem built back in 1905, this bridge became famous in legend as the place from which newly liberated women tossed their wedding rings after finalizing a divorce in the nearby courthouse. In The Misfits (1961), John Huston’s immortal cinematic tribute to the loss of the Old West, a fragile Marilyn Monroe contemplates doing just that.
Smoo B led, and I followed, as he unfolded a spontaneous set of river music: a relaxed take on Neil Young’s “Down By the River,” followed by a meander through Bob Dylan’s “Watching the River Flow,” which segued magically into B’s crazy, mellow cover of the Talking Heads’ cover of the Reverend Al Green’s classic “Take Me to the River”—a tune he strummed with a staccato rhythm that made it sound like it was being played by Bob Marley rather than David Byrne.
“Dip me in the river / Drop me in the water / Washing me down / Washing me down.” As Smoo B finished those lines and looked up, and I lowered my harp from my mouth and opened my eyes, we both noticed something curious. While we were jamming, three people had planted themselves on the landing not far from us. There was an older man, a middle-aged woman, and a very young man. They looked as if they knew each other, and yet they did not quite seem to be together. They appeared to have been attracted by the music, but despite a few furtive glances our way, they made no eye contact with us as they sat staring toward the afternoon light rippling on the river. All were shabbily dressed. The young man had a grimy backpack and bedroll, the woman a bulging, oversized canvas sack, the older man a plastic garbage bag half full of crumpled aluminum cans. It was clear enough that they were homeless. Here, in the shadow of the casinos, lived the river people whose luck had run dry.
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“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.
David Fenimore. That is the good name of a good man who has been a good friend to me for a quarter century. In fact, it is so good a name that I call David Fenimore “David Fenimore” rather than “David” or “Fenimore.” David Fenimore. It just has a nice ring to it. David Fenimore is also a good name in the sense that David Fenimore comes from a good family, a highly respectable family of noble Philadelphians whose pedigree dates to the Fenimores whose name is familiar from the name of well-heeled nineteenth-century American novelist James Fenimore Cooper. David Fenimore was among my first friends when I moved to Reno more than twenty years ago. David Fenimore officiated my wedding ceremony on a bright day up in the Sierra sixteen years ago. David Fenimore has been among my closest colleagues at the university where I teach. David Fenimore even subjected me to his legendary hot tub ordination ceremony, making me a perfectly legal mail-order minister and giving me the formal title Mystical Philosopher of Absolute Reality. In my world he’s as good as it gets: David Fenimore.
Tonya Harding. Now that is not a good name. You will recall this diva of American figure skating, spectacle, and scandal, whose very public rise and fall charted a peculiarly American trajectory. Born in 1970 to an abusive mother and her fifth husband, Tonya, who grew up in a trailer, began skating at age three. She dropped out of high school to commit herself to what was by then a meteoric rise to fame. By 1991 she had recorded a number of firsts, including becoming the first woman to land the triple axel jump in international competition. 1991 was also the year she won the U.S. Championships, receiving the first 6.0 ever given to a single female figure skater for technical merit.
Tonya’s precipitous fall from grace began on January 6, 1994, when Nancy Kerrigan—Harding’s skating rival—was attacked by unknown assailants, who used a police baton to brutally whack her leg. Severely injured, Kerrigan withdrew from competition, and Harding won the national championship that year. However, it was soon suggested that Tonya was behind the attack, and a uniquely American media frenzy ensued. In January, 1994, Tonya appeared on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, and her short program at the Olympics in Lillehammer in February was among the most-watched events in TV history. By March the jig was up. Harding accepted a plea bargain, three years’ probation, 500 hours of community service, and a whopping fine. She was stripped of all her medals and banned for life from professional figure skating.
Tonya would quickly rise again, although in a very different way. Within three months of being rung up, America’s former sweetheart appeared on a professional wrestling show as manager of the wrestling stable Los Gringos Locos. Before the year was out she and her then-husband had sold their home sex tape to Penthousefor $200,000 each, plus royalties. She would go on to a one-off with a crappy band called the Golden Blades, followed by a short, checkered career as a boxer, in which her most highly publicized bout was with Paula Jones—she of the pre-Monica Lewinsky Clinton sex scandals. Tonya had hit a new low among disgraced American celebrities. Tonya Harding. Not a good name.
It now seems inevitable that the spectacle of humiliation that tawdry Tonya had become would involve Reno, my hometown. Reno. That is not a good name either. My town has long been associated with unseemly activities, from heavy drinking and unfettered gambling to quickie divorce and legalized prostitution. We have a bad reputation, and we’ve earned it. That said, Reno has always been the land of the second chance, the place where the down and out come for a last shot at redemption. As Jill Stern wrote back in 1957, Reno is “a symbol of failure to some, of release to others, of despair to the unloved, of the promised land to the domestically trapped.” “Could be, might be, maybe this time, maybe next time,” wrote Stern, who described Reno as “a symbol of the second chance and the chance after that which every man always believed awaited him.”
This Rant tells the story of how David Fenimore and Tonya Harding came together here in Reno, the land of the second chance.
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This post originally appeared on High Country News and is reposted with permission.“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert.
The Rants from the Hill essay series has appeared in High Country News online every month, without fail, since July 2010. A lot has happened in those (almost) six years as we—my wife, Eryn, and our daughters, Hannah and Caroline—have lived as fully as possible our shared life here on a remote hill in western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. And now, with this farewell Rant, I draw the essay series to a close.
Occasionally I’m asked how I’ve managed to write 69 essays in a row about anything, let alone something as apparently mundane as daily life around my windy corner of the high desert. I like to answer this question with another question: Why would I spend a decade walking 13,000 miles within a ten-mile radius of my home? Both my writing and my walking recover (in both senses of that word) the same ground, circling it in all weathers and all seasons, turning this place over and over in my hands and in my imagination, appreciating each day anew that there is more to this wild desert and to our life within it than a lifetime of reflection and walking will ever reveal.
While it has often been difficult to choose from among the many things I wanted to write about each month, I have never lacked for ideas, even after so many years of exploring and celebrating this place in the Rants. Although we inhabit an arid, open landscape that many folks describe as empty, sparse, or bare, the fact that this place has been so fecund, so productive of fascinating topics for the essays, is a fitting testimonial to its richness. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Nature(1836), “The ruin or blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye.” In other words, if you look at the sagebrush steppe desert and see “nothing” there, that is not the desert’s problem; rather, it is yours. The challenge is to inform and sharpen our perception to make the land’s perpetual miracle visible. For me, that honing of perception is best achieved through a daily practice of writing and walking. I don’t intend to pontificate. I mean only to say that this stubborn recrossing of the local territory has opened a small door through which I’ve entered the unscalable immensity of this vast desert.
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