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TODAY Tuesday 20 May 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Shallow Backpackers

Thank God for Don, because if it weren't for him there would be no one left to go backpacking with. By "backpacking" I refer to the form of recreation where you strap the equivalent of a small anvil to your back and then walk twenty miles through the rain until your feet bleed.

Steve gave it up last July, right in front of Don and me. We were walking in the great Bob Marshall Wilderness of western Montana, on the third day of a weeklong jaunt. Steve was not feeling particularly jaunty, nor was The Bob so great that day.

Our route, east to west, had begun with the Front of the northern Rockies, abrupt, immense, thrusting up from the Great Plains. It would end with the Northern Wall, a vast, beautiful escarpment that marks the Continental Divide. In between sublimities, however, was some pretty underwhelming country, thick, wet forests with boggy ground that sucked your boots, all with vistas of about forty-five feet. It was here that Steve started having some bad moments.

He had already cached his books-on-tape after the climb of Day One. On Day Two we ate the heaviest of the foods he had packed in (salami and cheese). But on this third day no lightening of the load seemed to help. Steve started to describe a helicopter that would soon appear over the next clearing. The helicopter would hoist up our packs and fly them ahead to a lovely campground by an emerald stream. When, by early evening, we finally strolled into that campground, our tents would be pitched, a welcoming fire would blaze, dinner would be just a cocktail or two away, and a set of clean dry clothes would be laid out on our fluffed-up sleeping bags. He described all this while carrying about fifty pounds through a light but persistent rain, the monotony of the terrain relieved only by nettle stings or mosquito bites.

Don and I, in agony ourselves but compensating through the traditional technique of exchanging long and pointless anecdotes, started to worry about Steve's motivation level.

At that moment we heard the horses. A train of horses was coming down the trail from the opposite direction. Some of the horses were ridden by men who looked Montanan and some of the horse were ridden by men who looked Wall Streetean and then there were these other horses, quite a few actually, that carried great piles of equipment on their backs. We stepped to the side as the posh cavalry clopped by. Steve's eyes followed, his mouth open. You could see the realization form above his brain: The Horses Do The Work For You. We lost Steve right then. His fantasies shifted from helicopters to weighty delectables that his packhorse would carry for him. A barbecue grill, a small generator, CDs, lots of wine. Then he was quiet for a while before he said "This is absolutely the last time I will ever do this."

And so Steve finally penned his name to the long list of Henry, and Linda, and Judy, and Jim, and Sue and all the others who had turned sensible on poor Don and me. Something that we cling to as essential -- carrying on your back everything you want into a place where you see fewer than a half dozen humans per day -- has failed everyone else's cost/benefit analysis. Maybe Don and I will do the North Cascades this year.

It's bad enough to lose companions, but now we have to put up with a new intellectual fashion that patronizes us. Don and I, because we love wilderness and think the country should have more of it, are supposed to be clueless romantics who have an idea of "Nature" that is distinct from, and superior to, environments infected by our own dread kind. Read William Cronon or Simon Schama these days and you would think that wilderness defenders are haughty misanthropes who can't grasp the central point that humans are a dynamic part of the natural. Mark Dowie says we stand aloof from the concerns of working people. Building legal walls around nature preserves is all right in its place, they all say, but beware the elitist politics and shallow theology of worshipping the Earth with no one in it. And so forth.

That is mostly tommyrot, but only mostly. Anyone who looks can find snob environmentalists who regard wilderness as an asylum from people who live in trailer parks. People who fight for wilderness have more money and have spent more time in schools than people who don't; like almost all American reform movements, we are mostly upper middle-class, with some trust-funders thrown in. But to leap from that sociological fact to hypotheses about the essential anti-populism of what we believe in is stretching too far intellectually and, in my experience, is false.

Over the last couple of years, a number of foundations have commissioned surveys and focus groups to feel the pulse of American public opinion on environmental issues. The findings are summarized in our feature on Biodiversity in the In The Trenches section. Unsurprisingly, concerns about family health and pollution are the big items for most Americans. But there's also broad and strong support for national parks and wildernesses, support that stands even though most respondents would rather drink nail polish than strap on a backpack. People just like the idea that this nation has places that are still wild. Wilderness is part of an American sense of "rightness." Wilderness is a part of American patriotism. Anyone who has spent too much time in Europe knows about this; it's always great to return to a continent with some imbedded resistance to settlement.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

If you would like to hear from an out-of-doors addict a little less pugnacious than I'm feeling today, do click over to our High Fives section for Susan Alexander's recommendations on where to go for Websites about wilderness. Susan does it all: writing, activism, motherhood, hiking, the whole nine yards. She's a great and singular environmentalist.

 

5/19: Songbirds
5/16: Fat, Fat, Fat
5/15: Our Forthright Administration
5/14: Coral Reefs of the Sahara
5/13: (Life Before) Death and Taxes
5/12: Kids
5/09: Free Trade and Hormones
5/08: Sherry Boehlert, Republican
5/07: Fort Davis, West Texas
5/06: Europe (yawn)
5/05: Divorce, Mothers, Equality
5/02: Killer Grannies and the Highway Bill
5/01: China
4/30: Pity the Mangrove
4/29: Grizzlies off Battery Park
4/28: Mighty Monsanto
4/25: Growth
4/24: Refrigerator Wars
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway

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