July 1971, or thereabouts. I was working for the Forest Service as a wilderness ranger, assigned to the Iron Creek, Stanley Lake Creek, and Goat Creek drainages in the Sawtooth Primitive Area. One of my jobs was to pack out the accumulated trash that generations of campers and outfitters had left at Sawtooth and Alpine Lakes.
A new camping ethic was beginning to prevail, spread by Forest Service brochures and wilderness rangers like me. Campers were advised to pack out what they had packed in instead of throwing it in the nearest ravine or into the scrub lodgepole between campsites. The previous summer I had worn out a mule and a saddle horse packing cans, bottles, used diapers, and half-burned tents out of what would be declared untouched wilderness by the bill establishing the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. This year, I had traded my horse and mule for a large backpack and was slowly packing out what garbage I could still find.
Once an area was cleaned, it tended to stay that way. We didn’t call it a broken-windows policy, because there weren’t any windows in the Sawtooths, but the principle was the same.
One morning, I hiked up from my tent on Iron Creek to Sawtooth Lake, talking to 70 or 80 people on the way, asking them to keep the place clean for the next people who visited, and answering questions about the fishing and bear and mountain lion fatalities.
If they had guns, I told them that firing guns around the lakes made other people nervous, especially if the other people also had guns and—who knows?—maybe a history of paranoid schizophrenia.
It was a way of making people think twice before shooting cans or bottles or fish, which was what they tended to do if they had packed a heavy revolver or long gun for five miles without seeing a bear or mountain lion.
When I reached the lake, I saw two men—young, confident, cowboys on a picnic—next to grazing horses in the thin strip of green grass that surrounded the lake. I walked up to them and delivered my standard spiel. Then I asked them if they could tie their horses in a place where they wouldn’t poop in the lake.
My request was not well received. One of the men looked at me, grinned, and said, “One of these years we’re not going to put up with you sons-of-bitches telling us what to do.”
“I asked you not to let your horses poop in the lake,” I said. “That seems reasonable, doesn’t it? People swim in that water.”
“If they’re idiots,” he said. “It’s got ice floating in it. That’s the kind of bureaucratic stupidity that drives me insane.” The grin wasn’t going away.
“I don’t mean to be bureaucratically stupid,” I said. “But it’s my job to keep the place clean for the next guy. A beautiful mountain lake is less beautiful when a horse takes a dump next to it.”
“A little horse shit never hurt a thing,” he said.
The conversation wasn’t going well, and my next move, according to the people who had trained me for my job, was to write a citation. I wasn’t going to do that, because I was 20 years old, newly hired, outnumbered, and had a vague idea that giving anyone a ticket when they were out in the wilderness enjoying themselves was about the most anti-wilderness thing you could do. To do our job, we needed people on our side.
It would be a while before these two were on my side. I told them I was asking, not ordering, and I left them grinning at each other, with their horses still grazing the grassy hummocks on the lakeshore.
________
I wouldn’t remember this incident after 55 years except that a couple of years later, the guy who had called me a son-of-a-bitch became a public servant too. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and then to the U.S. Senate. Then he started making real money. He became a lobbyist, notably a lobbyist for a corrupt and murderous African military dictator who ruled from 1993 to 1998.
That dictator was notable for imprisoning, torturing, and assassinating political opponents and environmental activists. He has the distinction of being one of the few men, and the only dictator, assassinated by someone poisoning his Viagra supply.
I mention the dictator’s death not because I believe in karma—otherwise a lot of morally defective old men would have perished from poison in their cheesecake, cabernet, breakfast cereal, or breakfast Viagra—but because becoming a dictator removes the normal constraints we have on our behavior. If you’re a person tired of people telling you what to do, becoming a dictator is a good way to never again be told what to do. If someone hits you with the dubious morality of destroying an ecosystem for your own profit, or if it looks like they might win an election against you, or if they’re spotlighting your mistreatment of women, you can just pick up your phone and order up a murder. It’s a variation on the concept of take-out.
If karma comes into play, all it means is that when you die, a lot of people are glad you’re dead. If you’ve retained a reasonable amount of guilt for what you’ve done, you’ll be one of them.
________
Fifty-five years bring perspective. You learn a few things as you go through life, mostly after the fact. I spend a lot of my time thinking of what I might have done differently if I knew then what I know now. One of those different things is that I could have handled the horse-poop incident at Sawtooth Lake better.
I would have known, for instance, that there’s a special place in Hell for people who abuse low-level public servants, especially ones who began their jobs under the impression that they were going to make the world a better, cleaner, and safer place. I would have known that low-level public servants have a lot of constraints on their free will, but high-level public servants—congressmen and senators, for instance—face few consequences for their behavior in most situations, which means that they can act like an African military dictator if their conscience will let them. I would have known that helping a dictator do anything makes you complicit in all of their crimes, not just the one you’re helping them with.
Most importantly, I would have known that if you’re 20 years old, and you’re sitting on the shore of Sawtooth Lake on a warm and sunny and windless summer day, you’re a lot luckier than you think, no matter how much trash you’re packing out and no matter who is calling you a son-of-a-bitch because of your uniform.
________
Here’s the way that long ago day would have gone, if I had known then what I know now, starting with, “A little horse shit never hurt a thing.”
“Actually, horse shit hurts a lot of people,” I would have said. “It can be terribly harmful to the people who swallow it. You may be talking about real horses and real horse shit but I’m talking about telling people lies. Repeat horse shit often enough, and you’ll start believing it yourself, just enough to overrule the small part of you that still knows the truth. That’s how you end up just as stupid as the people you’re lying to.”
I’m not sure how he would have reacted to a 20-year-old predicting his future that way, but since I knew would happen in the next 55 years, my words would have had the ring of conviction.
“I know you’re starting a political career. I know it will be fabulously successful. I know you’ll make it to the House of Representatives and the Senate. I know you’ll get rich beyond what you can imagine. I know my words sound like blessings, but they’re really curses. I’ve got three words for you: DON’T DO IT.”
This would have wiped the grin off his face. Not because I was predicting his success, but because he hadn’t run for Congress yet. He would have been wondering how I knew.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he would have asked.
“You’re an Idaho farm kid,” I’d have said. “You could live a life of hard work and simple pleasures. That’s not nearly as deprived as it sounds. You’ve got a wife and kids who love you, and a business that will make you a good living. You’ve got a good standing in the community. You’re a Rotary Club member. You’ll be asked to address high school graduating classes. People will laugh at your jokes even when they’re not funny.
“You’re going to give all that up and head for Washington, D.C., where there’s a thick, toxic miasma of power in the air. I suspect you’ve got a weakness for parties and beautiful women, if your time as a fraternity boy at the University of Idaho is any indication.
“You won’t be able to pass a crucial test of maturity, which is that you grow out of the fraternity mindset when you’re not a college boy any longer. You’ll be a powerful man in a city where beautiful women have a weakness for parties and powerful men. You won’t be able to resist. You’ll end up divorced. You’ll end up drinking too much. Cocaine might be a problem if you try it just once. Don’t do that, either.
“Your closest friends will be men who run in nostalgic packs and talk about how impossible it is to have relationships with women. Maybe that’s what you two are doing today.
“Eventually, all your relationships will be transactional—favors for favors, friends for favors, money for favors. You’ll end up one of those lonely old men who demands to be feared rather than liked because fear is the only thing that will work for you anymore. If you ever aspired to a trusting, deeply affectionate marriage that would last ’til death did you part, you can forget that right now.”
I wish I would have said that, but at 20, without the next 55 years of experience with human nature, there was no way I could have known any of that. And even if I had been able to say it, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.
Nothing was going to keep him down on the farm, not even a happier and much less sinful life. Contentment and virtue don’t have the appeal of prestige, pleasure, and money when you’re in your 20s and 30s. If you get deep enough in a corrupt zeitgeist, they never will.
________
It’s been 50 years since I was a wilderness ranger. It was a good job and a wonderful part of my life, and I like to think that most of the people I met on the trail went away from our encounters determined to pack out what they had packed in. In my seven years of being a Forest Service officer I never issued anyone a citation, although I did help a few adolescents walk their motorcycles back to the wilderness boundary when they had tried to ride them to Alpine Lake. I did catch people poaching fish, shooting rock chucks and chipmunks, vandalizing Forest Service signs, and leaving campfires full of smoking plastic in the middle of patches of dry timber. In all these cases I had another set speech, which was to say that I realized they didn’t care about me or my feelings, but they ought to care about the feelings of their fellow hikers and campers and maybe the feelings of the animals and plants they destroyed. And no, I wasn’t going to write them a ticket.
“I don’t want to ruin your day,” I said. “I tried that once, when I asked a guy not to let his horse poop in Sawtooth Lake, and it turned out to ruin my day instead. God knows what the consequences have been and will continue to be.
“But there are people who come here to get away from the sound of engines. A beer can in the bushes will take a bit of pleasure out of their day. A forest fire will destroy a bunch of places people would have liked to have camped. Their dog might roll in horse poop and then want kisses. You really need to think about the feelings of other people and critters when you go to the wilderness.”
________
One of the consequences of living to 75 is that a lot of people who bothered you are dead, and a lot of people you bothered will outlive you. There doesn’t seem to be any way around the Second Law of Thermodynamics if you’ve got a body that is a heat engine, busily converting concentrated energy into its diffuse byproducts. Things wear out and fall to pieces, and you’re one of them. Possibly living things can get around the Second Law by having a soul, but the jury is still out as to whether souls exist, particularly in the absence of its diffuse byproducts, such as conscience, empathy, mercy, and charity.
The famous French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is now mostly known for Pascal’s Wager, which simply states that if you believe in God and God doesn’t exist, it costs you nothing, whereas if you don’t believe in God and God does exist, it will cost your eternal soul an eternity of pain. So go, believe in God, and be happy.
Pascal may have known that believing in God wouldn’t make you happy, but he didn’t want to complicate his Wager beyond the limits of aphorism.
It’s sad but true. Believing in God doesn’t make you happy, mainly because it takes away any possibility of being your own agent of forgiveness. Part of the tiresome narcissism of old age comes from the realization that if you had known in your youth what you know now, you wouldn’t have done all the bad things you did.
You don’t have to be a lobbyist for a murderous and corrupt dictator to do bad things. Small sins can have big consequences, and sins of omission—like not telling a politician’s future on the shore of Sawtooth Lake—begin to generate guilt. The bad things you did will gradually lose their heft to the good things you didn’t do.
If you’re a thinking person, that’s your fate. You will spend a fair amount of your golden years searching for ways to forgive yourself and, no doubt, gathering up the diffuse and shameful byproducts you’ve tossed in the bushes or left in the smoking remains of campfires.