Home on the Range
I believe it’s an unacknowledged phenomenon that landscape shapes character, landscape shapes the individual, landscape shapes culture, landscape shapes all, and I wonder often if, as we lose so many of our various unique American landscapes, we are not also somehow losing sections and segments of our spirit, our identity. I fear increasingly that by the time we as a society make this connection, it will be too late; we’ll have lost those places and the collective contribution they make to our culture and, somewhere, in that vanishing, we will have become as tame and unimaginative and disconnected as any other “developed” nation.
As an editor and reporter with the Los Angeles Times for 20 years, Frank Clifford has had occasion to cross paths with a number of such places. In “The Backbone of the World: A Portrait of a Vanishing Way of Life Along the Continental Divide,” Clifford--the son of a gold miner--states that it’s his goal to capture and chronicle the tales of the disappearing, “the ones who shot their own meat, who made a living on horseback, who were still trying to adjust to the twentieth century on the verge of the twenty-first.” His vision and historical awareness are admirable, for to rural residents of the West, it sometimes seems that such individuals are still as common as pie. So much are they a part of the West’s culture and community that it’s almost inconceivable that their lives are, or will one day be, the stuff of documentary, the mortar of history--much less, occasionally, the stones, the essence, of history itself.
For the individual in the West has never been very large and grows tinier still. This is not so much the result of the onslaught of big government and its regulations, many of which, truth be told, help preserve these hanging-on cultures and the resources to which their fates are wedded; think of the salmon fishermen reliant upon the Endangered Species Act to protect their resource, the independent loggers dependent upon a 30% tariff on Canadian lumber imports, the rancher grazing his or her stock on federal lands at a fraction the cost per animal unit that the so-called “free market” would bear. Rather, it is big business, not government, that these last shoot-your-own-meaters should most be fearing.
Clifford has been motivated by the ambition to preserve vanishing stories, if not the landscape that gave birth to such stories, and that shaped such individuals. Starting at the southern end of the United States, in Hachita, N.M., he sets out along the spine of the Continental Divide, which divides the watersheds of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. To document the stories Clifford was looking for, he knew it was past time. The population of Texas is now 85% urban. Less than 5% of employment in the Rocky Mountain states is still in farming, ranching and mining. “Wyoming might have a cowboy on its license plate,” writes Clifford, “but [by 1995] barely 3 percent of its population made a living raising sheep and cows.”
The reporting found in “The Backbone of the World” is substantial and of the most wonderful kind, with the numbers, dates and statistics woven carefully into the stories. And the breadth of the book--profiles of a variety of land-use practitioners from south to north along the Continental Divide and the proposed Continental Divide Trail--is considerable. Throughout the book, Clifford listens, rather than talks, though occasionally his own perceptions and reminiscences of landscape appear, particularly near the end of the book, as if drawn out or even resurrected by both the experience and the writing.
Each essay has much to recommend it, though I find “The Bootheel” particularly interesting in that it chronicles an area and history that are largely underreported--the “bootheel” of New Mexico that juts down into Mexico, with all of the attendant border disputes. Here Clifford spends time with a family in Hidalgo County, where the value of drugs seized will soon exceed the assessed valuation of all personal property. The Bootheel’s curious white history is due in large part to U.S.-exiled Mormons who tried to settle in Chihuahua but who were driven back into the U.S. by the Mexican government and settled finally in this strange no man’s land of shifting disputed borders and very little water, and it’s here that the proposed Continental Divide Trail begins. There are some ranchers, Clifford discovers, who would prefer cocaine and marijuana smugglers to Lycra-clad recreationists.
In another essay, “The Badger,” Clifford spends time with members of the Blackfoot tribe in northern Montana, where he attends an annual summer powwow. Here he listens to tribal linguists “reacquaint the Blackfeet with the language their grandparents spoke. It seems to be a language grounded intensely in a specific, physical world--a world of landscape,” Clifford writes.
In the last chapter, “Oh, Canada,” Clifford writes: “Up here, the Continental Divide becomes the great wall of the imagination, crowned by crumbling domes and turrets as it zigzags its way north and disappears into the clouds.” Here, Clifford rides with pack horses “along the roof of the Divide” with a local rancher and hunting guide, Canadian Mike Judd, whom environmentalists call “a cowboy Cassandra, a prophet of ecological ruin, ignored in his own country.” Judd’s testimony helped protect a small part of the United States’ northern Rockies from oil and gas drilling in one of the most spectacular landscapes this country has to offer; across the border, there’s even less protection than in the U.S. “Eventually, Canada’s inaction on the environment is bound to have repercussions,” writes Clifford.
“‘It’ll affect you guys in the lower forty-eight,’ Mike says to me. ‘Our wildlife is your wildlife. They don’t stop at the border. A lot of them--the bears and the wolves, mainly--come from up here. If we stop growing them, you’ll stop seeing them.’”
In my opinion, it’s stories like Judd’s that capture this time--the turn of the century--as accurately as any and that make Clifford’s book valuable in the moment, as well as into the future, as history and documentary. All around the West, thoughtful rural residents who once relied directly upon the land for their livelihood--or who even still do, against the tide--are daring, finally, to speak up in the quiet little rural communities where there existed a 100-year shell of silence.
Brave ranchers and loggers are finally putting their history together--in a nutshell, 20 years of good times followed by 80 years of betrayal, paucity and despair--and are using one of the last things the West still has in plenty, imagination, to fashion alliances with old perceived enemies, each side daring courageously to listen to the other. It’s not a movement yet--such conversations, such courage, are still the exception. In the rural West, the burden of such a cultural myth--cowboy good-environmentalist bad--seems sometimes as dense as the reefs of old limestone that cap the Divide itself. And yes, an old West is dying. The big businesses that continue to work the public lands will see to that.
Mining companies, for instance, purchasing public wild lands for less than $5 an acre, under the archaic Mining Act of 1872 passed before women and minorities could vote, despoil the mountains and priceless water resources beneath these mountains, lacing the aquifers with toxic metals before declaring bankruptcy, once the ore is played out. They move on to another state, re-form as a new company with the same players and attack another mountain.
In the case of the proposed Rock Creek mine in Montana’s Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, Sterling Mining Co. plans to tunnel beneath one of the nation’s first 10 “flagship” wildernesses that Congress ever protected. What deadly irony that the real jobs in the new West are increasingly those of reclaiming Superfund sites--not that they can be exploited again but so that they can be “merely” inhabited.
In spite of this, as long as there is imagination, there can be hope. Despair runs deep in both camps in “The Backbone of the World”--so deep that it seems the divide that exists between them can no longer be sustained and that surely, any century now, solutions will be dreamed and forged. Clifford’s book captures the tenor and angst of the time, and the voices are reported and presented fairly, even in their desperation. Our desperation.