A Brother to Grizzlies Roams the Aspens

SAN JUAN MOUNTAINS, Colo. — There are two moments of satisfaction for true believers: when they are proven correct, or when, surprise, they come to learn they had it wrong all along.

Stacking wood in his mountain cabin for tonight’s fire, David Petersen is savoring one such moment. “I can’t tell you how I feel. . . . All these years. . . ,” he says, in the choke of first realization.

Petersen is a writer, a natural history writer, a hunter-conservationist writer of the outdoors West. He also is one of those helping fill the void left by the death of his old friend Ed Abbey--a stirring voice for open space and wildness. A true believer.

One of Petersen’s crusades has been to roam these mountains of southern Colorado and to prove to America that a remnant population of grizzly bears clings desperately on, despite official claims that the last was killed there in 1979.

By Petersen’s accounting, progress diminishes our lives. We are adrift from our long evolutionary ties to nature. So, he sees no choice but to argue for what’s left by telling stories of it. And what is a better story for our times than a holdout band of grizzlies, living nocturnally in the high country of the San Juans?

His search began six years ago. He hiked the remote reaches where he believed the bears were making their last stand. He wrote about them in the 1995 book “Ghost Grizzlies” (Henry Holt). He enlisted other people to the cause of finding, and protecting, the bears.

Now this: a single phone call, a few minutes’ meditation gathering wood, an epiphany. Petersen’s long crusade is over--or at least forever reconfigured.

The search has been a mistake, he realizes. It was a romantic idea to think that people could help bears by rediscovering them. But these are not romantic times. This is the era of bureaucratic science, of power politics, of traps and radio collars. Better to leave the bears alone. They must be left alone. For their sake. But, of course, that is a romantic idea too. Long live the bears.

It is a complex story, and Petersen decides he will explain himself in a new ending for a revised paperback of “Ghost Grizzlies” which is to be published next spring (Johnson Books).

Why should we care about these bears? Why should we willingly share more space in our crowded world with predators who kill our livestock and might menace us if we wander too far off the road? What about the elk and the aspen trees, both subjects of other Petersen books? How wild nature defines our humanity? How can a man be a hunter and also argue for the rights of animals?

These are the questions posed by Petersen, 51, ex-Marine, ex-motorcyclist, ex-California beachcomber and modern-day frontiersman. They are what brought me here, up a four-wheel-drive trail to a 500-square-foot cabin in the mountains, to inquire of the man.

He is lean, the muscles of a weightlifter receding but not gone. He has a stretchy, horizontal smile. But he doesn’t show it much. Lately, he’s feeling a little boxed in. His newest book, “The Nearby Faraway” (Johnson Books), published this autumn, explains:

Until a handful of years ago, the Animas River Valley, anchored dead center by Durango, remained blissfully undiscovered by ex-urban yupsters and the real estate whores who infest their ranks like fleas . . . but discovered it was. . . . The animals call it hard times. I call it heartbreaking.

Petersen wants his address divulged no more specifically than this. Gone are the days when one could write about a place and hope to make it better.

“This is the second time I’ve watched this happen,” he says, speaking of the rapid human sprawl hereabout, of which, yes, he is part. “Laguna Beach was a lovely town when I lived there, and then one day it went nuts. Now it’s happening here. Just look. . . .”

Indeed, the vacation homes are cropping up all around him. Elk no longer visit the nearby salt lick, although you can hear them bugle across the canyon during autumn mating season. There aren’t as many wild turkeys around anymore. Petersen waits for the snow to drive the seasonal human inhabitants away, to restore his serenity so he can write.

He has no complaint with those who want to live in the mountains. He knows the urge. He just wishes there were more mountains or fewer homesteaders at any given time.

“I don’t reach out much to my neighbors,” he concedes. They’re probably good people, for the most part, but they’re crowding him. If he gets to know them, he might come to like the whole bunch. Then what? A tranquil life in a woodsy suburb? No, better to remain standoffish and look beyond the roofs to the trees.

Petersen arrived in the San Juan mountains in 1980--an accidental writer and a conservationist by circumstance. After six years in the Marine Corps, as an officer and helicopter pilot, he took a job as a typesetter for a California motorcycle magazine. Living at the beach and lifting weights, he moved up to managing editor. Then he and Caroline, his wife-to-be, left. First to Montana and then Colorado. The Rockies put fire to a passion for wildness, and it boiled over.

The couple took up new jobs. He taught writing at a local college. Finally, they retreated to life in the aspen and ponderosa pine, with trout streams down in the valley and forest out the front door. There is a heap of firewood nearby and elk antlers on the wall for a man to hang his hat, game meat in the freezer and a little writing studio outside that he calls the outhouse. Statistically speaking, Petersen lives close to the poverty line some years, in between books. The price one pays to live right.

“Personal freedom--that’s the most valuable thing,” he says. “Here, I’ll show you. . . . “

*

His Montana friend, travel writer Tim Cahill, affectionately says of Petersen’s prose: “The truth, as often as not, arises out of landscape. And that’s the way it should be.”

The words not only compliment a single writer but describe the literary philosophy of a small band of Western writers-cum-characters who belong to the school of Ed Abbey, now dead eight years. “It’s a real land rush,” Petersen says of the many newcomers trying to lay claim to territory Abbey once held.

The author of “Desert Solitaire” and “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” Abbey accumulated a zealous following. He was a hero to environmentalists, a legend to writers. He inflamed the imaginations of daydreamers. Abbey was a curmudgeon, unsurpassed in his ability to convey the harsh glories of nature. Readers, or at least some readers, became devoted to the independent, grouchy character that Abbey revealed of himself. He offended almost everyone at least once, but you allow that in a friend.

Abbey turned many Westerners into conservationists. Many but not enough, he might say. Some were so inspired they packed up and moved to Abbey’s canyon country of southern Utah and Arizona. He had lifted their hearts on behalf of the desert wild, and they came to tame it and build their vacation subdivisions. Oh well, Abbey relished irony too.

A lifetime ago, Petersen interviewed Abbey for a magazine. It was a providential encounter over breakfast and beer at a Tucson hotel. They became friends for life.

Abbey’s encouragement and support inspired Petersen to write for something more than money--to write from the heart. Abbey’s example showed him that wildness was not something merely to enjoy, but to defend. Not because nature needs people, but because people need nature.

“Edward Abbey is the single most important man in my life. Period,” Petersen says. When Abbey died, the task of editing his journals went to Petersen. The book was titled “Confessions of a Barbarian.” Likewise, Petersen edited “Earth Apples,” a collection of Abbey’s poetry. Now Petersen is assembling Abbey’s letters for publication. When? Well, someday.

No writer appreciates being characterized in the shadow of another. But for no more reason than to suggest Petersen’s place in the literary West, two similarities with Abbey can be noted. One, Petersen writes intimate nature essays in the first-person and brings to life not only the wonders of the mountain country around him but also the irascible, gray-bearded, likable loner who is himself. Second, Petersen takes on crusades that are almost certain to limit his likability. To wit, hunting.

“My feelings about hunting--that it’s morally right--are very high. My feelings about hunters are about 80% negative. I make a big distinction between hunters and hunting,” he says.

Petersen takes in stray dogs at his cabin, supports anti-vivisectionists and, then, each autumn hunts the mountain on which he lives to feed himself.

“I’m an elitist. I think if you’re going to kill something, it’s prettyserious business. And it should be done only by people who are serious about it.”

This is the subject of a 1996 anthology of essays on ethical hunting edited by Petersen. “A Hunter’s Heart” (Henry Holt) is an ambitious work that asked readers, both hunters and anti-hunters, to rethink the most primitive human connection to nature. Futile? Perhaps. But box canyons are futile too, but they can be nice places, and they keep down the crowds.

Petersen’s earlier books arose from Rocky Mountain themes: “Among the Elk” and “Among the Aspen” (both Northland Publishing). Then a natural history of antlers, called “Racks” (Capra Press). These are personalized accounts of a natural historian, philosopher and woodsman. The theme of his newest work is the most personal of all: Petersen himself. “The Nearby Faraway” is a collection of 20 shoe-leather essays, with the author as guide to Western wilds and some of the region’s memorable characters.

An essay entitled “Moonshine” begins:

Late August, late day, mid-life.

For the past half hour, a dozen Colorado pronghorns have been grazing carelessly in a grassy bowl a few hundred yards below me; courageously close by antelope standards. . . . I’m sitting in plain sight, binoculars in one hand, a cup in the other, next-to-nothing on my mind and fatigue in my bones from a long day adrift in nature.

Life is one long process of getting tired, whined that old pessimist Sammy Butler--and damned if he wasn’t right.

At only fifty, it’s painful to admit that I’m already slowing down . . . evermore content to just sit and watch and reflect. A young man fears that by going too slow he risks missing something. An older man knows that by going too fast he risks missing everything. . . . I’m content just to be here, right here, dead-center in this big, empty, high-rolling plain on this balmy August evening, alone but hardly lonely, watching a good day die.

*

We are tiptoeing up a gentle slope now, the two of us. Not far from his cabin, Petersen leads into a shadowland of pine, fir and aspen at about 8,500 feet up the mountain. A lovely hike through overgrown forest, along a game trail--but the scene does not explain his whispered enthusiasm, “Some of the most enjoyable hours of my life have happened up here.”

We arrive at a flattish spot on the flank of the mountain. Long ago, Petersen found the spring that nourishes this forest. It is an oblong pool, 5 feet at its widest. On the mud bottom are patterns of autumn leaves and oversize footprints of elk. Nearby aspen are scarred deep by bear claws.

Sacred ground. He has killed elk here. He spends a month of evenings right at this spot each autumn, hunting season and not. It’s the kind of place, as he puts it, where he can break a leg and die before anyone could find him. Some, like the sheep ranchers he wants off public lands in these mountains, wish he’d hurry up with it. But until then, only in settings like this does Petersen feel whole, his blood flush with the free-running, atavistic genes that humans spent 2 million or so years evolving.

We are wearing camouflage and move downwind to a tree fall only 10 yards away. We sit and wait silently.

Petersen is hoping that a herd of elk will wander over for a drink. He has seen groups of 20 or more at the little spring. But even this close, they rarely see him, roosted stone-still in the seedlings and branches, his face masked by netting. He thinks it would be a good ending for this story if the elk would come. I secretly hope they are drinking elsewhere. I think that would be a good ending too: a nature writer in nature, quiet, meditative, getting the best out of sundown’s soft light, knowing that something may happen but, unlike TV, doesn’t have to.

For two chilly evenings, for more than three hours, we sit at this spring, moving only our eyes, breathing the rich duff smell of the forest. Shadows grow long and disappear at twilight. We hear a distant elk bugle. Another approaches downwind, snapping fallen twigs as it moves. It catches our scent and retreats, unseen. Snap, crackle. A raven mutters something shrill. A shrew, small and quick as a moth, makes a dash over the log in front of us, squeaking so meekly it can hardly be heard.

That turns out to be all the wildlife. But in the last hour of our last evening, an explosion tears the quiet. Without foretelling groans or cracks, or any warning whatsoever, a full-grown aspen yields to the cycle of life and death and crashes to the ground nearby, throwing leaves into the air and rippling the spring water.

When the echoes die away, Petersen nods approvingly, as if to say, a tree needs no one to hear it fall in the forest, but isn’t it wondrous anyway?