I’ve been struggling to write about the U.S. Forest Service for three weeks now, and I’ve given it up as a bad idea. I was attempting to trace the devolution of that organization from an agency whose stewardship of public property mutated into protecting the public’s property from the public.
Service turned into regulation. Stewardship turned into ownership. Education turned into authoritarianism.
Or, as Mrs. LaPere, my government teacher at Wood River High School, who also turned education into authoritarianism, advised, “Yours is not to question why, yours is but to do and die.” Mrs. LaPere was ahead of her time.
She did teach me that when you can’t do your job any longer, authoritarianism can keep the paychecks coming until retirement.
Back to the Forest Service: over time, in district ranger stations, the public came to be seen as an enemy that had to be denied territory. For people who pursued administrative careers, reaching retirement age became their number one career goal. Careful policy turned into expedient remedies and exclusionary decisions. Forest Service labs, consciously or not, designed scientific studies to produce a litany of preconceived regulatory strictures.
An incomplete list, obviously. Unfair in its particulars but in the big picture not as unfair as you might think. Nobody joining a system thinks of becoming its creature, but the process looks like fate in retrospect.
By the time Elon Musk took his wrecking ball to what had begun as one of the most honorable, useful, and virtuous departments of the federal government, honor and virtue and the concept of multiple use had given way to crowd control, a scorched-earth fire policy, and a system of arbitrary fines and prohibitions. Worst of all, monied interest groups noticed that the USFS had become a nice little regulatory agency and decided it would be a shame if somebody besides themselves captured it.
Those of us who mourned the USFS of our youth turned our decent faces away from Musk’s destruction and the agency’s regulatory capture. We didn’t want to get involved, because we had run up against the fine-tuned combination of arrogance and ignorance displayed by its recent managers. We had witnessed the blind obedience to fire protocols that ignored climate change. We had seen the end of free public access to forest camping areas and resources, and the funneling of tourists into mindless crowds in sacrifice areas. The public was no longer being educated and enlisted to care for its own property.
Musk’s DOGE was an ugly spectacle, full of betrayals and the wrecked careers of decent, well-meaning people, and when it was done there wasn’t a lot left to care about anyway.
________
I’ve just written a lot of words for a topic I’d given up on. But there are some things left to care about in this world, even in Sawtooth Valley, where the USFS is the closest thing we have to a local government.
You can care about a man-made beaver dam, for instance. I’ve been building one in the overflow channel that serves us as a back yard.
Right now, the water in the Salmon River is high enough to have subbed up a few inches of water in the overflow channel. I’ve been picking rocks off a high, coarse gravel bar between our house and the river and have been constructing a low dam out of them just downstream from the house.
By July the subwater will be gone, but I’m hoping the dam will one day extend the spring flood of our wetlands for a week or two, and trap sediment if we ever have real high water again. We’ve had long-ago years when high water deposited a foot of muddy topsoil in other gravel-lined overflow channels. It only took a year or two for them to start growing thick grass and being home to deer and coyotes and sandhill cranes. We’re hoping that it happens again.
It sounds strange to say we’re hoping for anything, given the uncertainty of 21st-century climate chaos, but the alternative is no hope at all. In the absence of accurate prophecy, a tolerable future comes from picking small blessings out of the wreckage of big curses.
________
My dam should slow the water enough for organic material to settle out of the flood waters and renew the fertility of the soil. It’s the Nile Delta theory of farming, even if what we’re farming is just the local grasses and weeds. If the climate warms enough to grow tomatoes, beans, and squash, we’ll make the effort. Insects, rabbits, ground squirrels and hungry tourists will complicate matters, but we’ll deal with them when we’ve established proof of concept.
Proof of concept isn’t easy with dams. I’m picking rock in a field where rocks routinely measure four or five inches in diameter. It takes me fifteen or twenty minutes of bending and lifting to fill my wheelbarrow with them. It weighs over 200 pounds when full, and thus far I’ve put 75 full wheelbarrows of rocks into my dam.
I’m coming up on 15,000 pounds of rock moved. Part of the journey has been uphill. The dam is six feet wide and six inches high and 75 feet long, but so far isn’t holding any water back because the spaces between the boulders are too big. Those spaces are also why, if you’ve been a proper engineer and calculated dam volume at 225 cubic feet and the weight of granite at 168/cu. ft., the dam doesn’t weigh the 37,800 pounds it would weigh if it were solid rock.
Over time, the dam will moss over, grow willows and pine trees, and high water will flow gently over its top. When the back lawn emerges from the waters later in the summers, we’ll see what will grow in the newly deposited sediment.
This all sounds tedious and pointless, but it’s a kind of Zen activity, so it has passed from tedium into a kind of amazed contemplation of all the shapes and sizes, colors and textures, of rocks. I’ve come to see rocks as a kind of shorthand for the sheer variety of the world, its bits and pieces and their infinite combinations. Tennyson wrote about the “flower in the crannied wall” as being the cosmos in itself. Start looking at flowers that way, and you’ll also see the cosmos in the wall, its crannies, and in each of its rocks.
I have added the beaver dam without a beaver to the list of things that I’ve touched that will outlast me.
Also I’ve added muscle, and stamina, and patience, and I’m hoping they make it to ski season. None of them come easy or last long at 75. I do look a little tired in the mirror, but I’m not planning on quitting until I hit the 100th wheelbarrow load. I’ll probably quit the mirror at the same time.
________
Other things I still care about: I care about our house and worry about fire season during an El Niño-caused drought. I’ve been cutting a firebreak, taking out a strip of willows between us and the deadwood-packed forest across the river. I’ve mowed the lawn as short as I can, and I’m trying to stay ahead of the coming dry months by running the sprinkler system a half-hour most days. The forest isn’t yet dry enough for a major fire to start, although that will change with a few more days of wind.
Life is conditional enough without fire season, but it’s easy to look at the wind and the dust that your shoes kick up from the dried mud of a hiking trail, and to know with a heavy heart that fire is the way our world will end.
A few years back I bought a new five-horsepower pump and a hundred feet of fire hose and all the fittings and nozzles to go with it. If the fire approaches from across the river, I’ll stay here and try to save the house with it. A fire crew assured us during the fires two years ago that they’d park an engine in our driveway and keep the house safe, but my level of trust in their priorities has fallen to the point that I’ll try to stay with the house until staying means a heart attack or a burn ward.
Then I’ll try to remember that even at my age, a loss of home and possessions will be the end of a world but not the end of me or Julie. We may use the insurance money (if insurance still exists) to buy a Sprinter Van and park it in our blackened driveway. Or we may choose to park it someplace where the climate is wetter and the forests a little less full of deadwood.
________
Julie and I have lost a lot of people we care about in the community over the last few years, not all of them to reductions in the federal workforce. Cancer and old age, or both, have taken a toll. The Stanley Library started a Live and Die Well Club, where those of us who have experienced loss got together monthly to talk about hospice training, caregiving, the endless knee-walk of grief, loneliness, and the insanity of a world where leaders can go to war due to whim or greed or personality disorder.
These are all big issues, and the Club didn’t solve any of them except on a personal basis, where we found individual solutions—talking with intelligent friends, skiing the backcountry with them, reading a book where psychopathic characters actually transform into decent human beings as they age, eating dinner with someone we haven’t talked to for a while, picking rocks and ordering a new wheelbarrow when the old one wears out.
Wheelbarrows are mortal, too. There’s a small moment of triumph when you outlast one.
________
When I taught short-story writing, I used to tell my students that in the middle of every story, you’ll write yourself to a point of despair, where nothing is working, where the next few pages turn into an impenetrable wall, where you hate this thing that suddenly commandeered your life and directed it toward the impossible.
“That’s when the story is about to give itself to you,” I told them. “It’s never the story you think it’ll be. It’s letting you know that you need to turn around and go back to where you saw that little path down off the lane you were stuck in. Look for that little downsloping path and take it. You’ll meet someone on it who will introduce you to a deeper world.”
I did teach writing as salvation. A lot of people do, mostly writing teachers who have backed up and found a different kind of writing career when all major thoroughfares were blocked.
I believe alternate routes will always offer a better way. Besides, the major thoroughfares don’t look that attractive once you’ve seen what happens to the people who succeed and succeed and succeed right to the bitter end.
Often enough I’ve discovered new characters who led me to places I never would have found on my own. For these and other unexpected reasons, I have prided myself on my ability to never give up on a story.
But I should have told my students never to write about a bureaucracy, no matter how much you want to tell—much less live—its story. There aren’t that many off-ramps. I studied Franz Kafka’s novels and short stories in college and learned that bureaucracies, no matter how well-conceived and well-meaning, eventually turn the human spirit to sludge. They don’t tell great stories, in the end, and if you write about them, neither do you.
If I’m going to pick a small blessing from this experience of failure, it is that if I had written the story I intended to, it would have had a karmic ending, showing the new owners of public lands succumbing to the nature of their ill-gotten possessions. That’s what happens when you’ve bought into a system: it will eventually dictate who you are.
Imagine, if you can, a life lived saying, “No, you can’t do that,” “No, that’s against regulations,” “No, that campsite is closed to public access,” “No, that area has already been assigned to special-use permittees,” “No, we have eliminated those positions,” then “No, if I’m not going to enjoy life, no one else can, either,” and, eventually, “No, I would prefer not to.”
This last statement comes from Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” about a clerk in a law office, who, after an initial period of enthusiasm, refuses to do any work whatsoever, and who, by the end of the story, has died of starvation, having refused even the effort of eating.