Saturday, July 18, 2009

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Capitol Reef

I have a day off from farm work, and I drive to Capitol Reef.

Capitol Reef is Utah’s unfairly forgotten National Park, not as famous as Arches or Zion but just as spectacular. Jagged spines of rock (the titular reefs) abut and collide; monoliths and spires tower over lofty mesas; the rocks glow a Martian red. There’s a darkness, though, a sinister quality to Capitol Reef’s grandeur – like the place is trying to lure tourists into its lovely recesses, only to leave them dead of thirst in a remote canyon.

I get there at the worst imaginable time: noon. A thermometer at the ranger station tells me the temperature’s 102 degrees. That sounds conservative. When I get out I can almost feel the desert drawing my bodily fluids from me, greedily drinking my evaporating insides. A small refugee camp of motorcyclists sprawls in the shade beneath the ranger station’s awning, gulping sodas desperately.

Right now all the scenic hikes are out of the question – no way am I tackling anything involving an elevation gain. I consult my map. Only one hike seems tenable: Sulfur Creek, a sinuous canyon with a stream coursing along its bottom. The map forecasts constant fresh water (potable, despite the creek’s ominous name), shade from the canyon walls, and a downhill pitch. What could be more perfect? I park my car at the Chimney Rock trailhead, where the stream originates, and plunge into the canyon.

It’s a great hike, everything I dreamed of and more. Unfortunately my camera has developed some focus issues and is in the untrustworthy hands of a Panasonic repairman, so there’s no photo documentation, but rest assured the canyon is beautiful, a maze of orange sandstone walls and wild rock formations. I take my shoes off and walk in the streambed. It’s at least twenty degrees cooler down here, and I hardly break a sweat. In a couple of places the canyon walls narrow into a kind of chute, and the only way to proceed is to slide down a short waterfall into a pool below. At one of these falls I encounter the only human I meet on the hike: a stout German man walking upstream. He’s hurling himself against the face of the waterfall like a crippled salmon, in desperate search of a foothold with which to climb the falls. I ask him how long he’s been trying to climb and he tells me twenty minutes with a sad shake of his head. I ask him how much longer he plans on keeping it up and he shrugs – discouraged but unbroken.

***

The stream eventually peters out in a culvert beneath the highway, about six miles from the trailhead. Now what? I don’t feel like walking upstream to my car, and those falls seem impassable anyway. I pause to assess my options, then clamber out of the streambed, cross the highway, and stick out my thumb.

***

A steady trickle of cars rolls past me, about a vehicle a minute. None of them stop. The asphalt is sticky with heat – if it was 102 at the ranger station, it’s 110 here. Not a chance I’m walking six miles over this desiccated, deadly road. Unremitting slickrock flats peel away from the highway and stretch into the distance – there’s not enough shade to shelter a lizard. Sweat dries as soon as it appears on my arms, leaving behind a white skein of salt. Minutes tick by – ten, fifteen, twenty.

I grow accustomed to the different forms of rejection. Most common are the SUV-encased Midwestern families whose burly, mustached fathers give me apologetic waves as they pass: I’d like to pick you up, but, you know, we’ve got five tons of luggage and two sleeping kids in the backseat, and besides, my wife, well, she’d never have it. There are worse ways to get shot down. Some cars accelerate when they see me, cross the meridian to give me a wide berth, their drivers doggedly avoiding acknowledgment of me behind their mirrored sunglasses. Others slow down as if mulling it over, cruelly raising my hopes before dashing them by cruising past. I’m not the ideal hitcher, I know: I’m too big, too unkempt, too male. Hell, I wouldn’t pick me up.

Rarely in my life have I wished I were a petite girl. Now is one of those occasions. I throw down my pack and sit on it. I’m destined to be here a while.

***

I stick out a disconsolate thumb, more out of habit than hope, at the next car that comes growling up the hill. And, holy shit, miracle of miracles, the right turn signal flashes and the car pulls to the shoulder. I’m saved.

I spring to my feet and reach for the passenger’s door but the driver, his face obscured by tinted glass, waves me to the back. Fair enough. I toss my pack onto the backseat and slide in after it, babbling my thanks.

Where are you going? asks the driver in a clipped Japanese accent over the roar of the air conditioner. The car is freezing, maybe sixty degrees. The man doesn’t turn around, but I can see dark hair gone gray at the temples above a stiff white collar.

Only going a couple miles, I assure him, and explain my situation. Just a few miles, the man repeats, and he sounds relieved that he won’t be saddled with me for too long, though maybe a little regretful too – as though picking up a hitcher frightens and intrigues him at the same time.
Too hot to walk, he adds, turning around to give me a sympathetic half-smile. I take stock of my Japanese benefactor. He’s wearing a freshly starched shirt tucked into slacks flawlessly pressed, and not a hair is askew on his neatly waved head. He looks like he’s just emerged from a business lunch.; there’s no way he’s stepped outside of his car today. He looks sixty years old, but thin as a fence post, and, from the ungainly way his legs are folded beneath the steering wheel, very tall. His watch glitters.

This man and his ensemble couldn’t be more out of place here, in this land of beefy, rumpled Americans sporting sweat beads on their bald spots and chocolate stains on their cargo shorts. My driver is the Ted Williams of tourism, cryogenically preserved by his humming air conditioner, perpetually immune to the desert’s powers of dishevelment.

Way too hot, I agree, and launch into a spirited discussion of the weather – how it’s hotter down here than it is up in Boulder, and how it’s hotter today than it was yesterday, and how it’s hotter on the road than in the canyon. If I’ve gained no other skill from my month of farming, I’ve mastered the art of banal weather-related chatter. For the farmer the weather is life and livelihood, and every staffer at Hell’s Backbone – me included, now – monitors its fluctuations obsessively. We spend our mornings analyzing the meteorological implications of every flock of clouds scudding across the eastern sky, and our afternoons in meta-analysis: how we thought those clouds portended rain, but, wouldn’t you know, they just missed us to the south, and, well, you never can tell with weather, can you?

When my monologue – punctuated by my driver’s bewildered nods – has run its course, I ask him where he’s from, where he’s going, how long he’s in the States. All the relevant particulars. He grips the steering wheel with two hands and answers tersely. He’s from Tokyo, here on vacation. He doesn’t know where he’s going, maybe Salt Lake. And how long is he in the States? He tilts his head. Until I leave, he says.

I get the impression that he doesn’t feel comfortable speaking about himself, and as soon as he’s answered my questions he asks me where I’m from.

New York! he exclaims, turning suddenly voluble, after I tell him. New York man! You must be very rich man, from New York. He’s mocking me a little, but good-naturedly.

If I was rich I wouldn’t need to hitch rides, I say.

Maybe you lose all your money on Wall Street. Economy very bad here. Very bad.

That’s why I’m in Utah, I say. And not New York.

You travel alone? he asks me. You have no wife?

Me? Ha. No.

That’s good, he says. He nods solemnly, at the sagacity of bachelorhood. You are free agent.

I laugh. That’s right, I say. A free agent.

Lock up daughters, he says, chuckling at himself, and he glances at me in the rearview mirror to see if I appreciate the colloquialism. I do, and laugh and nod. He grins back.

And what is your career? he asks me.

My career? I barely have a job, I say. No career.

He looks at me in the mirror again. What you doing out here? he asks. He adjusts his glasses on his nose, and says, with incredible perspicacity, You are walking around all day and thinking about your future.

I laugh and look out the window, the aloof slickrock flats whizzing past, almost too bright to stare at without sunglasses. Walking around all day and thinking about my future. Man, I say, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

***

We crest a hill and the valley unfurls below us, scarred with canyons that twist and writhe their way toward an orange horizon. An immense fang of blood-red sandstone juts from the earth a mile down the road: Chimney Rock, where my car is parked. In a minute I’ll be back in my own iron capsule, and my mysterious patron will vanish into the desert in his.

What about you? I say. You have a job? Family?

We plunge into the valley, the car gathering momentum and speed, and the driver doesn’t say anything. I’m not sure if he’s heard me over the AC, and I’m about to repeat the question, when he draws a weary breath. I wait for him to speak; I realize I'm holding my breath.

I am finished, he says at last, and the exhaustion and melancholy in that finished is tragic – a quiet, dignified, Willy Loman brand of tragedy. An ultimate finish. A finished that implies that everything, everything, is behind him.

Two kids, he says. We’re getting close to the Chimney Rock turn-off; he shows no signs of slowing down. All grown up, he says. I retired job two months ago.

I almost say congratulations but the word dies in my throat.

Wife, he says… and then he doesn’t say anything. I wonder if they’re divorced, or something worse. I do not ask.

And that, maybe, is what he's doing here, incongruously dressed in the American West - all those things that have provided his life meaning for the last sixty years are defunct, expired, depleted. He needs, I think, a new reason to live. And this trip is a (perhaps desperate) attempt to find one. My driver stares blankly out the windshield and the car thunders downhill.

The turnoff is fast approaching, but he shows no signs of seeing it – he’s in some sort of trance, some blind reverie. At the last second, when we’re almost past it, I blurt out, Here it is, and he comes to and jerks the wheel and swerves into the parking lot, trailing a plume of dust. I see my car, and it’s strangely comforting to find it so unchanged: tattered road maps on the rear window ledge, stalactites of dried mud hanging from the wheel wells.

I thank him for the ride and jump out, my keys already in my hand, pack again on my shoulder. Then I glance back, I don’t know why, and he rolls down the passenger’s window.

Can you hike up there? he asks. He’s pointing at the ridge, sheer and exposed, that runs up the fins adjacent to Chimney Rock. A narrow ribbon of trail switchbacks up those rocky spires and vanishes around their side. Beyond the fins lies wilderness, stark and murderous. Hot, barren, unforgivingly dry wilderness.

Looks like it, I say. If you wanted to.

The driver stares past me at the perilous, strenuous trail. Maybe I do, he says, and rests his fingers on the door handle, about to disembark. I imagine him climbing those spires, his collared shirt and pressed slacks gathering red powder and turning shapeless. I picture him alone at the summit as dusk gathers, his gangly frame silhouetted against a fat yellow moon like Ichabod Crane, blundering cavalierly into the night with a whole troop of Headless Horsemen – his obsolescence, his loneliness, his ghosts – in close pursuit. If he goes up that trail, I think – and I’m not being melodramatic – he doesn’t come back.

He hesitates a moment longer, and then takes his hand off the handle, stays in the car. Take care, he tells me, and swings out of the parking lot back onto the highway, disappears over the next rise. The miasma of grit kicked up by his tires hangs in the lot.

***

Whatever he’s looking for, I hope he finds. Maybe, too, he’s wishing similar luck for the not-so-rich New York man walking around, thinking about his future. I have more confidence in my own soul-searching than I do in his, though.

End.

Monday, July 13, 2009

The Farm Report, Part 1: The Lay of the Land

I'm penning this post by candlelight, the first time in a long time I've written without electricity. I feel suddenly, thrillingly authentic: connected by tendrils of dripping wax to Thoreau in his cabin above Walden Pond, to Tolstoy in his country estate. And, though my work will eventually be transmitted to you through electronic pathways those writers could not have imagined, it’s fitting that this post originates with such a time-honored light source. Fitting, because I’m writing about agriculture – man’s earliest profession and the root of all culture; the institution that made us recognizably human.

Well, that was a grandiose prelude to a banal job. I’ve been working at Hell’s Backbone Grill, an organic restaurant in the Middle of Nowhere (aka Boulder), Utah, for about ten days now, with three weeks to go. I work not at the restaurant, but on the farm that supplies it, a job (rather, a volunteer position with all-you-can-eat compensation) that entails harvesting, planting, and yanking up clusters - no, thickets - no, forests of weeds.


Hell's Backbone Grill: where the epicurean magic happens.

We weed, literally, until our hands bleed. Every once in a while this tedium is punctuated by a thrilling interregnum like, say, chicken coop maintenance. These diversions are few and far between, though, and if we’re on the job, odds are we’re tugging dandelions. That’s not to say it’s bad work – there’s ample time and space to think, and talk, and listen to the whir of grasshoppers as they flee from the trowel. But scintillating labor, it’s not.

***

Farm work is monotonous, and it’s tackled by millions – safe to say billions? – of people on this planet. Why, then, does it feel so exotic to me? To begin, it’s simply not something that a person of my situation would ordinarily pursue (or so go the stereotypes). And what’s my situation? Over-educated, urban, coastal, and, why not, Jewish: not too many Chosen People davening in the Corn Belt. Not that any of those descriptors are inherently obstacles or aids to the farmer, just that they’re not often associated with the agricultural arts. How many Amherst graduates go into farming? Well, about as many as go into professional bowling, or trapeze artistry, or blacksmithing (smithery?). The waters I’m swimming in may be familiar to most of the world, but within my societal cabal, they’re pretty uncharted.

***

Thoreau may have written by candlelight, but he sure didn’t ply his quill within an aluminum-sided, bullet-shaped Airstream trailer.

I couldn’t imagine a better living situation than my Airstream. The trailer’s interior looks as though a bed-and-breakfast owner had been hired to spruce up the cockpit of a space shuttle: every displeasing steel and plastic surface is adorned by throw pillows, prayer flags (the restaurant's owner is a Tibetan Buddhist), and candles.

And candles, and candles. On my window ledge alone there are eight, stout green ones and thin red ones and white ones in little brass holders caked in wax. (For some reason I can’t help thinking of a pajama-clad, wizened old Englishman using that brass holder to investigate the many chambers of his Victorian mansion late at night, in search of a prowler or a midnight snack.) The other countertops are likewise festooned, and necessarily there are matchbooks everywhere. The trailer, in short, is the most flammable object this side of the Cuyahoga, and before I go to bed I check and double-check the wicks for even the faintest glow of orange life. Trapped in a stainless steel broiler isn’t the way I want to go, thanks.


My metallic, candle-lit sanctuary, as seen at 7 am.

As homey as the belly of the trailer is, its interior can’t rival its location. The farm is three miles from the restaurant, and situated at the culmination of a dead-end dirt road wending through a labyrinth of fields that sustain every crop from alfalfa to llama. (The Red Rockin' Llama Farm uses them as sherpas on canyoneering trips, and they're purportedly excellent pack animals. No matter how many times I pass them, though, these camelids always seem misfits – escapees from a petting zoo, sick of five-year-olds whacking them in their muzzles.)

In the morning I wake by 6:45 and, as often as my habitually cramped hamstrings allow, run up the dirt road to the restaurant for breakfast (saluting llamas along the way), as the sun breaks orange over the eastern mesas and floods our green little valley with pale light. The huge Belgian horses in the Ryans’ paddock have begun to stir and the air breathes with manure, and I’ll tell you, cow shit has never smelled sweeter.

The other farm workers are scattered amongst houses and campsites along this rutted stretch of road, making me the only farmer who actually lives on the farm; my trailer, then, is the only regularly occupied human habitation for half a mile. This has many benefits, chief among them being that I can swim in my pond naked.

Did I mention I have a pond? I do – a small one, used for irrigation by the farmers, and spawning grounds by the desert toads, whose tadpoles, by now sprouting nascent hind legs, teem in the shallows. The water’s cold, perfect for a dip after my fellow farmers have stumbled back to their own houses and tents to clean tumbleweed spores out of their hair. I stay behind and sit in waist-deep water, scooping up tadpoles to monitor the progress of their metamorphosis, until the hills cast shadows over the pond and the wind wrinkles its surface, and it’s time for dinner.

***

Farming is probably the worst imaginable application of the liberal arts education.

To beat a dead horse: The liberal arts education is, by teaching its students how to think instead of filling their heads with reams of technical minutia pertaining to a single field, molding an adaptable if unspecialized workforce, one prepared for whatever unforeseeable new jobs the capricious global marketplace prizes in the future.

Farming does not fit within the liberal arts model, for two reasons.

The good farmer, first, must have an incredible command of the technical minutia that lib-arts frowns upon. The good farmer must know how which variety of onion is adapted to his latitude’s allotment of daylight; which species of weed provide beneficial shade and which run too rampant; which crops prefer nitrogen-rich soil and which prefer poor. The good farmer must have proficiency with the entire John Deere catalog: the tractor, the tiller, the baler. The good farmer must know how to react to a cold April, a dry July, an early frost. The farmer must possess an immense body of knowledge (one far greater than any, say, consultant's) to keep his patch of land afloat. No matter how intelligent a person is, no matter how dynamic his systems-based thinking skills, he is a worthless farmer if he has not ingested this mountain of information.


I may know jack shit about the growing cycles of the Purple Top White Ball Turnip,
but that didn't stop me from being proud as hell of this beaut.

It is incredibly difficult to glean all this knowledge without growing up on a farm, which brings me to the second reason that the liberal arts education is nearly useless to the farmer: it is not a hot profession; in fact, it is ice-cold. I hate statistics as much as the next English major, but here are two telling ones:

1) The average American farmer is age 55.
2) 300 farms have gone out of business per week for the last decade. No wonder freshly-minted Ivy League grads aren’t exactly knocking down the barn door.

***

But, though farming is hardly taking off (not even the organic kind, which is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance), it’s not going anywhere, either. (At least until some worshipper at the Altar of Convenience invents a pill that supplies all the body’s nutritional demands at once – not a world that I expect to see, or would wish to live in.) It’s the world’s oldest profession – sorry, prostitutes – and easily its most important: sorry, financial (dis)services sector. Absent those pioneers who decided to settle down and raise food, we’d still be nomads throwing sharp sticks at wild boars, waiting futilely for the dawn of something resembling civilization. What job could be nobler than farming: agriculture has birthed society, settlement, Culture.

In the minds of many, however, this venerability is a strike against farming, not a point in its favor. One of the attendant pressures that comes with being society’s Best, Brightest, and Most Creative Minds is the pressure to innovate, to get in at the ground floor of some burgeoning industry and blaze trails. Hard to trailblaze an industry that’s existed for some 15,000 years. Most of the technological advancements in farming have been detrimental – think feedlots, pesticides, genetic modification – meaning that socially conscious farming hasn’t advanced all that much from its primitive origins. 98% of the labor at Hell’s Backbone is conducted with no more than a shovel, a trowel, and two very blistered hands. We’ve got a couple of old pickup trucks, maybe, but the work’s not all too exciting despite those machines. The job might be hot, literally (Utah in the summer must be like working in the engine room of the Queen Mary), but nothing about it is new.

***

I’m not urging you to drop your future and become a farmer – heck, I’m not going to, even after 1500 laudatory words on the subject. Merely, I write in defense of farming, a call for respect on its behalf. We, America’s present and future seekers of elite jobs, tend to disparage professions that don't involve keyboards and weren't created from thin air within the last two years. But farming is no provincial anachronism - it's every society's most vital pillar, and it's in desperate need of young and skilled workers. I may not be asking you personally to milk goats or sow radishes, but I do wish farming was considered a viable, respected profession for our country's upper tier of college graduates. Tom Vilsack, get on that!

End.

Monday, July 6, 2009

On Clocks and Cameras, Arches and Attractive Archaeologists

Moab, UT (July 2nd)

“Those were all good times, especially the first two seasons when the tourist business was poor and the time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious, and free as the summers of childhood. There was time enough for once to do nothing, or next to nothing…”

--Edward Abbey on life as a ranger in Arches National Park, from the author’s introduction to Desert Solitaire.

***

Reading E.A. in his natural habitat, atop Whale Rock at sunset.
Not depicted: an exquisite swiss cheese, turkey, and avocado sandwich.



Arches National Park, for the unfamiliar, is the most aptly named park in the country. Its defining features are, yes, arches: natural sandstone structures, over 2,000 in all and no two alike, ranging from the slender, majestic Landscape Arch to portals that stare like eyeless sockets from red stone. The Park’s most famous construction is Delicate Arch, the Rock That Launched A Billion Postcards, and which now graces Utah’s license plates.

Each arch, though, offers unique aesthetic pleasures. A few I encountered while hiking the trail called Devil’s Garden:


Landscape Arch, which could fall at any time. Holy crap that would be cool.


Double-O Arch.

Broken Arch


And for good measure, a different flavor of geologic oddity, Balanced Rock:


Crazy place, eh?

***

Most tourists (including yours truly) arrive at Arches believing that its topography was carved by water, but pamphlets at the park’s gate quickly disabuse visitors of that notion. Although wind and water did (and do) contribute to some erosion, the park’s iconic structures were formed by the pressure of heavy sandstone upon the less stable, underlying salt bed, which buckled, shifted, and thrust up those notorious totems. (There’s the ex-Geology TA in me.) Wait long enough and, even in the absence of other elements, time will forge strange beauty in Arches.

A few thousand years is nothing to ANP, of course, and so it’s a place meant to be absorbed as Abbey did: at leisure. Only by watching the unchanging arches for six months at a time, several years in a row – like Abbey – can one begin to appreciate the infinitude and inexorability of geologic time. To comprehend the place, one must defy any impulse toward haste.

But the hordes of tourists aren’t interested in unhurried observation. All visitors to ANP, in fact, act like they’d rather be anyplace else – logical, considering that Arches is not their destination, but a mere detour in a two-week RV expedition making stops at Zion, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, etc. These people are busy: if they don’t make Bryce by sundown the itinerary is shot, and by God they’d better not hafta skip Lake Powell - you can rent speedboats there, and how sweet is that?!

And so they scamper from arch to arch, two panicky minutes at each, documenting their pilgrimage with point-and-shoots, their bleary kids dragging feet through the sand.

***

I’m throwing stones from within a glass house, I’m ashamed to admit: I spend a day and a half at Arches, and the same embarrassingly brief interlude at Canyonlands. Hell, in Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey spends that long observing the courtship rituals of two gopher snakes (incidentally the most enthralling depiction of bestial romance this side of Lady and the Tramp.)

My own gopher snake, evidently enjoying bachelorhood.

Still, my stay feels interminable compared to the sojourns of other tourists. An unwritten social contract does not allow visitors to remain for more than ten minutes at any given site within ANP. After those ten minutes – during which sitting, relaxing, and silence are not permitted – it’s time to move on, to check another icon off the National Parks scavenger hunt list.

I violate that contract a few times, most memorably at Navajo Arch, a crescent doorway in the rock that shelters a snug, weather-proof grotto, complete with fine-grained sand floor and stunted, Banzai-esque pines. Nature has never created a more perfect hideaway, and I make myself at home: the boots and socks come off, the peanut butter and jelly come out, a book (Desert Solitaire, as if you had to ask) unfurls itself on my lap. Of all the regionally specific experiences I’ve had on this trip – listening to Buddy Holly in Texas, drinking Keystone in Colorado – reading Abbey in Arches is the most authentic, and evocative.


View from within Navajo Arch grotto, world's greatest lunchbreak


***

No sooner have I made myself comfortable, prepared to drink in whatever inchoate wisdom Navajo Arch cares to impart, than I’m joined by an insufferable family. A loud and adenoidal wife, a rude and overbearing husband, god knows how many destructive little kids looking to yank the legs off some hapless whiptail lizard. Immediately – before even exploring this idyllic harbor – they begin arranging themselves for the photos. The father’s camera whirs to life, and the rest of the clan assembles itself in every conceivable permutation of siblings: Okay, Alex, stand next to your sister – no, dammit, your other sister – and Louise, why don’t you switch places with Kristin, and now let’s get one of just the girls, and how about one where you’re all making funny faces, and Perry, you’d better stop screwing around because we still have eight arches to see and it’s already

“Four-thirty,” I say, checking my watch, and they all notice my presence and stare at me, palpably mistrustful of the strange man with his shoes off and a book out in the middle of the desert. They find my nonchalance bizarre, even unnerving – my breaching of aforementioned social contract must hint at sociopathy. What kind of idler would dare relax during his vacation?

***

The car may be the piece of machinery that has most harmed the way Americans interact with nature, but in the wrong hands the camera is deleterious in its own right. Abbey’s essay, “Industrial Tourism and the National Parks,” details the automobile’s damage so perfectly that anything I add would be redundant (amazing how prescient that piece feels, thirty years after its penning). So, confident that Ed has eviscerated the car, I’ll say a word about the camera.

This trip has been my first experience traveling with a camera, and I'm thrilled to have it. The pictures have turned out beautifully, although the scenery gets more credit for that success than any latent talent I might possess. There’s no question that taking pictures, and later reviewing and editing them, has been pleasurable; furthermore, pictures tend to appreciate in (sentimental) value, so I view my shooting as an investment.

But I’ve noticed, too, that my interactions with my surroundings have become slightly less contemplative. Too often on this trip, when I come across a gorgeously backlit rock formation, is my first thought not “How does this make me feel?” or “What incredible geologic process created this?” but rather “What’s the best angle to photograph this thing?” I’ve had this camera for barely a week, and already I’ve begun to see the world through its tiny window, at the possible expense of my own senses.

Other tourists are infinitely worse. It often seems – forget seems, is the case – that the sole reason many people travel is to prove to other people that they travel. “Wish you were here” is both an expression of longing and a subtle rubbing-it-in. Photographs, along with postcards, drive this culture: tourists come to National Parks so they can show off their snapshots to jealous relatives who haven’t so carefully hoarded their vacation time. They’re also documenting their trip for their future selves, in expectation of sitting around in their dotage and remind themselves that they weren’t always sticks in the mud.

The result is maniacal, ceaseless, artistically void picture-taking: photo albums that are nothing but the same five people lined up shoulder to shoulder, grimacing into the sun, as iconic backdrops flicker behind them. See? Look where we were! Such photography also dampens experience. When the cameraman is pondering how best to preserve a moment for posterity, he is not enjoying and fully processing that moment. Contemplation in the present is sacrificed for reminiscing in the future; thus tourists cheapen their emotional connection with, and intellectual understanding of, the places they visit. (The digital camera, by the way, has made all this worse, since it has allowed amateur shooters to spend more time screwing around behind the lens, and also sucked out much of the artistry that made photography so worthwhile in the first place.)

Many people, of course, possess no appreciation for the intrinsic value of nature; nature exists for them only so that they can experience it. I may have caught a mild case of Photo Fever, but I, at least, have the good sense not to pose in front of every landscape I see. When you visit a National Park, or any beautiful place, by all means take many, many pictures – I don’t intend this post to be a polemic against cameras as Abbey’s essay was against cars. Simply, allow nature to be the subject of your pictures, and not their object.


This picture of Partition Arch might just look better without me in it.

***

Thankfully, there are people in this world who are still pressing upstream against modern tourism’s trends, and I am fortunate enough to be joined by two of them in my Navajo Arch haven (after the abrasive family has made its ungracious departure). Two good-looking women in their late twenties wander into the grotto and set their packs down, and it’s clear from their reverent murmurs that they’re tourists of a different, more thoughtful breed. (While they’re pondering cosmic time or the existence of a divine creator or whatever, my mind plummets, inevitably, into the gutter. Two girls, one guy, a secluded grotto in Arches National Park: if the Outdoor Life Network showed late-night adult entertainment, this could be the premise for a pretty sweet movie.)

Alas, nothing so dramatic transpires: they lean against their rock wall, and I lean against mine, fifteen feet away. Still, I’m glad to meet them. It turns out they’re vacationing archaeologists working over the summer in the Grand Canyon, studying the Pueblos. Could any gig be cooler?

“Are you sure you’re not arch-eologists?” I blurt. No reaction. “Because, you know, of the arches,” I add lamely, in vain hope that they’d missed the joke.

“No, we gotcha,” says the taller of the two. They smile patiently.

“So have you guys, uh, discovered anything yet this summer?” I ask, trying to salvage this interaction.

“Not much,” says the other girl from behind chunky sunglasses. “Just an eight-room.”

“Eight-room?”

“An eight-room house,” she explains. I must look impressed, because she adds, “It’s not that a
big a deal. People have found twenty-rooms.”

I don’t know about you, but I want a job where finding an ancient eight-room Pueblo house is considered just another day at the office.

The conversation turns somehow to our mutual hatred of the tourism paradigm, and they feel much as I do. “Yeah, it’s shitty,” the sunglass-wearer says. She’s the more voluble of the two.

“Have you been to Delicate?”

I tell her I haven’t. She says she’s been many times, and that the place is always packed, noisy, and generally spoiled.

“That sucks,” I say, eloquently.

“It does,” she agrees. Then she leans in conspiratorially, and, as though imparting a secret pertaining to national security, hisses, “Get there for sunrise.”

“For sunrise?”

“Yep. All these people, they’re lazy. Nobody gets up early enough for sunrise. If you’re there by seven you’ll be the only person there. Guaranteed.”

I’m skeptical. My informant turns to her friend for confirmation. The taller girl gives a laconic nod. “There before sunrise,” she confirms.

We chat a little while longer, but they grow less talkative and more attentive to their sandwiches, and I start to wonder if I’m an irritant, much as that family was to me – through no fault of my own, perhaps; merely by being a desecrating human presence in an otherwise untouched place. I can’t stand the thought and I leave, thanking them for the tip on my way back out through the arch.

***

I dutifully hike the two miles to Delicate Arch before sunrise the next morning. Sure enough nobody's there, with the exception of a few giddy swallows cartwheeling through the open sky between the arch’s legs. And I guess as an aspiring writer I should try to articulate the experience as best I can, but somehow I don’t feel up to that task, to doing justice to that strange cocktail of beauty – equal parts alien, eerie, sublime, even sinister. It’s ironic, given the content of this post, that all I can offer are, yes, pictures. Thank god I have my camera.




After I take a few photos, though, I put the camera away and watch the swallows, watch the sun creeping higher along those red rock legs. Not for another fifteen minutes does the first tourist, panting with altitude and the day's burgeoning heat, poke his head over the slickrock behind me.

End.

Friday, July 3, 2009

How to Feel About Boulder?

Note: I began this entry several days ago, but didn't get a chance to finish and post until now. I've since moved from Boulder to rockier pastures (namely southern Utah), and should be posting about said pastures shortly. In the meantime, enjoy this very lengthy analysis of an interesting place.

***

Boulder: Part 1

Boulder, CO (June 29):

I'm writing this post from Trident, a used bookstore and coffee shop on Pearl Street, the hub of capitalism around which this strange city revolves. Trident's the kind of folksy establishment whose menu of offbeat caffeinated beverages (mate is a popular item) targets students, and whose prices target the yuppies who make up the bulk of Boulder's population. I'm drinking a $2.75 Arnold Palmer (half of which, to my disappointment but not surprise, is ice), after an irate barista informed me that, if I wished to avail myself of the free wireless, I'd better throw them some business. Who knows how many students have been seduced by the twin seductions of free internet and pricey caffeine, account funds worn away by an erosive trickle of iced coffee?

***

Boulder, according to our nation's publications, is the best place to live in America. If your favorite magazine, be it Forbes or Backpacker, has published any sort of urban rankings recently, odds are that Boulder is at or near the top. In the last couple of years it's been named the Most Educated City in America, Best City for Singles, Top Place to Retire, Best Place to Raise an Active Child, and, by Outdoors Magazine, America's ultimate Dream Town. It's been placed in the top ten Healthiest Cities and Greenest Cities and Artistic Communities and Jewish Neighborhoods. (For a complete list of its accolades, which could take a while to read, click here.)

And, for the most part, my brief experience has corroborated that. Boulder's the most beautiful American city I've ever visited. It's situated in a gorgeous valley, the hollow where the Great Plains and the Rockies collide, and above the city loom the Flatirons, spectacular sandstone promontories that serve as harbingers to the country's greatest mountain range. Beyond the Flats begin the mountains in earnest, snow-topped, toothed behemoths that put New England's Whites, my previous gold standard for montane environments, to shame.


The Royal Arch, a rock formation found at the Flatirons


To the east lies an almost immaculate swath of meadow called the Green Belt: with brilliant foresight, the city of Boulder purchased miles of land between itself and Denver, to prevent the encroachment of its larger sister's suburban sprawl. Thus, although Boulder is blighted by the occasional strip mall, they aren't nearly as pernicious or pervasive as other cities'. Certainly there's nothing as ghastly and soul-sucking as Yonkers' Central Avenue, or Amherst's Route 9.

Eli surveys his domain from atop Flatirons;
Denver and Green Belt are out of frame to the right.



Consequently the city, especially around the University, is incredibly walkable and bikeable (and yes, it's America's second-most bike-friendly city, according to no less an authority than Bicycling Magazine); although Boulder resembles a large suburb more than a city, it hasn't fallen prey to the car culture that has come to define the 'burbs and degrade America. The cars that exist, it almost goes without saying, are Priuses, and for good reason: the city's government has reserved prime parking spaces solely for Hybrids (perhaps made possible the dearth of handicapped people in America's Outdoorsiest City), and Boulder's Rec Center even has spaces for plug-in cars.

***

On my second day in town, my friend/guide Eli and I venture up to Indian Peaks, a stunning national forest barely an hour out of town. Eli, a backpacking, climbing, and skiing fanatic, is the kind of ecstatic outdoorsman who says things like “Topo maps are my guilty pleasure,” and bemoans the sad fact that his UC classmates would rather spend their Sunday mornings hung over than on an alpine slope. (He’s also from Amherst, which means we’re able to make plenty of jokes about Indian Peaks’ inferiority to the Pioneer Valley’s own humble Seven Sisters Range.)

The hike takes us through a series of still-thick snowfields, though they're disintegrating rapidly - only a week of skiing these perfect chutes remains. Cliffs and promontories rise on either side as we scramble over snowmelt, scree, and pockets of wildflowers; eventually we wind our way into a sheer-walled basin impassable without climbing gear. The barista is again giving me the stink-eye (my Arnold Palmer is now a slushpile), so I won't rhapsodize about the scenery for too long; suffice to say that it is visceral and overwhelming in a way that New England's charms - rolling hills, thick greenery - are too subtle to match. There's something both gorgeous and sinister about exposed rock, its spectacular rawness. Here are a few pictures (more on Facebook).



***

Boulder, then, is almost preposterously picturesque; its citizens are without fail environmentally conscious, well-educated, and liberal; its municipal policies are progressive; and, to boot, it boasts one of America's greatest party schools. (And, because alcohol tolerance decreases with elevation, it's even cheap to get drunk - a fortunate coincidence, considering Boulder's myriad microbreweries.) No city in the country, at least on paper, could play better host to my personality and values; for the last three days I've felt, well, like a fish very much in water.

Why, then, does something about this city make me feel profoundly uncomfortable? Why does its perfection seem so contrived?

***

Boulder: Part 2


The most obvious reason, and one that virtually every visitor remarks upon, is that it's so darn white. I worked last summer on Bald Head Island, a playground for rich crackers in North Carolina - not an environment, as you might surmise, that fostered much racial diversity. But BHI was Washington Heights compared to Boulder. University of Colorado seems especially homogenous: on Saturday night, Eli took me to a house party on The Hill, UC's social nexus. There were probably fifty kids at the party, and not a black or Hispanic attendee to be found. (To be fair, I did see one Asian.) The city's non-student populace seems no more diverse; to the best of my recollection, I've spotted two black people in three days. Rest assured, Boulder's unsavory status as one of America's whitest cities isn't advertised on the municipality's website.

Boulder’s racial homogeny isn’t so much an ailment as it is symptomatic of the city’s lack of socioeconomic diversity. Make no mistake: Boulder is a rich town. Perhaps there are bargain stores tucked away down some distant alley, but I never saw them. I never saw alleys, come to think of it. Pearl Street and the surrounding neighborhoods are chockablock (I knew I’d use that word some day!) with upscale retailers catering strictly to the bourgeoisie: there are more knick-knack and chazzurai peddlers, each claiming to be fun and funkier than the last, than you could shake a pair of jangly earrings at.

Every city has its pricey shopping districts, of course; but while 95% of New Yorkers will never buy so much as a sock on Madison Ave, I got the sense that everybody in Boulder frequents Pearl Street. Even the homeless people seemed to be doing well, at least compared with the wrecks who dwell in NYC subway stops: all of Boulder’s down-and-out play guitar, own Osprey backpacks, and bear funny signs like “Too young for Medicaid, too old to marry an heiress.” That slogan sure beats “Won’t spend your money on coke.”

Why is Boulder’s wealth a problem? Without getting too pedantic or sanctimonious, I'll elaborate.

***

First, Boulder’s bleeding-heart citizenry is, by virtue of its political leaning, ostensibly concerned with social justice and the plight of the poor… yet it never comes into contact with poor people. At best, there’s something paternalistic and condescending about Boulder’s wealthy advocating for, and making decisions regarding the governance of, other cities’ poor. At worst, they may be pushing bad policies out of ignorance. (Analogously, Americans have been following the lead of Saint Bono and throwing money indiscriminately at Africa, a route that has furthered corruption on that continent and has led to its dependence on Western aid.)

The second problem with Boulder’s wealth is that it reinforces the notions that liberalism, environmentalism, and outdoorsmanship are inherently the provinces of the rich. Nothing, of course, could be further from the case, yet somehow all three stereotypes persist – thanks in large part to places like Boulder, where everybody’s fridges are filled with Whole Foods and their basements with expensive climbing gear from R.E.I. (Hey, I love those stores too.)

Debunking the ridiculous claim that environmentalists must be rich will finish off my headlamp batteries (I’m now writing from a tent in Sylvan Lake State Park), so I won’t touch that one. I will say, though, that the commoditization of the outdoors – whereby one is perceived to need $1,000 worth of REI, or LL Bean, or what have you just to venture into the White Mountains – badly hinders our country’s attempts to preserve wilderness. Because the outdoors is perceived as prohibitively expensive thanks to the prices set by upscale gear companies, non-outdoorsmen are hesitant to venture into the woods – they believe they can neither afford, nor survive without, $70 moisture-wicking hiking shirts, so screw the camping trip! Thus we see the hastening, tragic development of wild spaces, and the continued penetration of cars into those National Parks that do exist - just so Delicate Arch can be made accessible to people who think they can’t afford a tent and boots.

Whew. If you’re still with me, your patience will be rewarded with the third (and final) deleterious aspect of Boulder’s homogeneity:

Harmony that does not arise from discord is meaningless.

The entire time I was in Boulder, I was struck by its cohesiveness and municipal ingenuity, the friendly people and the progressive policies. But it’s easy to love thine neighbor and to agree on parking spaces for Hybrids and to generally get things done when everybody thinks like everybody else. There’s a theory that attributes the peace and prosperity of the Scandinavian countries to their homogeny, and I’m afraid that something similar may be happening in Boulder. The city clearly wants to fill the role of urban exemplar; yet other cities are home to meddlesome demographics like poor people and immigrants and conservatives, demographics with different and often diametrically opposed concerns. Forging cooperation in such an atmosphere (New York, Atlanta, even Lubbock) is a true achievement. Boulder’s accomplishments, on the other hand, are nice, but they’re also illusory and largely useless: they are born of like-mindedness, instead of sacrifice and compromise. Other cities can learn nothing from them.

***

I hope I haven’t given the impression that I disliked Boulder, because in fact I loved it. My unease stems, actually, from Boulder's consummate awesomeness. I can see myself applying to graduate school there, living there, among people Just Like Me. But that prospect scares me, too: not only would living in such rarefied air cloister me from experience, but as an environmentalist, I’d be very much preaching to the choir. I don’t consider myself a missionary; nevertheless, I feel obliged to spread the good word. And Boulder’s about the last place that needs to hear it.

Still… those mountains…



Fin.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Having your pork and eating it too: The Wastivore's Manifesto

In February of this year, I became a vegetarian. This decision quite surprised my friends, who’d known me as an enthusiastic devourer of all things heterotrophic. They predicted that my new convictions would prove ephemeral; in defiance of their doubt, I vowed to stay strong, to unilaterally reject all things furred, feathered, finned, etc.

History vindicated the haters. Though I held out for the rest of the semester, my resolve weakened as soon as I returned home to a fridge perpetually stocked with delicious, fleshy leftovers. With no critics around to observe and comment upon my hypocrisy, I put the microwave through its paces; spaghetti bolognese, chicken tacos, and broiled salmon fell prey to my furtive cravings.

But though I violated my original principle, I began holding myself to a new one: the meat I ate had to have been prepared and purchased on someone else’s behalf, and, sans my intervention, be destined for the dumpster. In short, I ate only waste – a diet at once both narrowly specialized and all-encompassing. No meat was off limits, as long as it was at least a day old and congealed in a Tupperware.


Trying to decide how this wallaby would taste in a stale casserole.


I termed my new policy wasteatarianism, and nicknamed its practitioners (for, optimistically and/or arrogantly, I believe that there will eventually be more than one) wastivores**.

***

Perhaps oxymoronically, the central tenet of wasteatarianism is a hatred of waste.

The Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation is the most wasteful institution humanity has ever devised. I’ll leave the proselytizing and statistics-reciting to Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Eric Schlosser, and other great food industry writers (and I’ll leave, too, the animal rights arguments to Peter Singer – that’s a very different, though also critical, story). Suffice to say that industrial meat wastes water (by polluting and expending it); soil (by eroding it); forests (by clear-cutting them); arable land that could be used to feed humans; and fossil fuels. These modes of misuse – each a disaster unto itself – are together major contributors to climate change, the process that is rapidly laying, yes, waste to our planet. To this wastivore, it is apparent that to support industrial meat is to participate in the degradation of the earth.

But what does it mean to support the industry? A vegetarian would contend that it’s the eating that fuels the meat factories, and, insofar as the factories exist to feed us, that’s true. But that contention isn’t quite accurate: it’s the buying that powers the industry. CAFOs are sustained by the money you give them; once that money is in the industry pockets, whether the buyer actually consumes the meat is no longer germane to the industry’s success.

The scrupulous wastivore, then, never buys meat, a principle he shares with the vegetarian. Where their dogmas diverge is that the wastivore has no qualms about eating meat bought for another person’s benefit: the damage was done when the meat was purchased, and consuming it cannot possibly inflict further environmental harm. As long as the wastivore was not the original intended recipient of the meat, the remnants of that hapless chicken/cow/pig are fair game. The wastivore, in summation, neither buys meat in stores nor orders it in restaurants; but partakes freely in most other situations.


The true wastivore would never have helped prepare and eat this fresh chicken;
instead, he would have waited for it to be frozen, defrosted, and microwaved
up to six months after its creation.

Many critics of wasteatarianism have questioned whether eating leftovers merely rationalizes omnivory for persons too weak-willed for vegetarianism. To those people I say, guilty as charged. But the policy also confers a legitimate environmental benefit: by consuming leftovers otherwise destined for disposal, the wastivore is reducing his need to consume other, potentially wasteful goods. Although meat is the most prominently and disgustingly wasteful form of agriculture, industrial cropping isn’t much better. The epic transportation, petroleum-based pesticides, and habitat destruction associated with fruits, vegetables and grains are appalling; even tofu, that staple of vegetarianism, is culpable, guilty of Amazonian deforestation for sake of soy beans. Thus, when the wastivore fills his belly with a week-old Jamaican patty instead of a mango that has traveled 5000 miles, he has significantly minimized his footprint.

Just as the wastivore does not embrace all plant products, nor does he reject all fresh meats. Locally-grown, pasture-raised, non-modified meat is a perfectly acceptable and efficient form of nourishment (with the exception of cows, which will always be a poor use of resources). The wastivore, in fact, avails himself of local meat freely, secure in the knowledge that, by supporting a local farmer instead of a CAFO, he is contributing to America’s ultimate transition away from industrial livestock.

***

Although I am wasteatarianism’s inventor (sorry, freegans), I am hardly a devout practitioner. I am – as any refrigerator that has ever been blighted by my presence can attest – an avid consumer of all things aluminum foiled, Saran-wrapped, or Tupperwared. In my purchases, however, I fall short of the true wastivore’s standard: I order fish in restaurants; eat avocadoes and bananas with reckless abandon; and lately, have even been known to buy the occasional wad of turkey. (In my defense, my only source of protein for ten days has been peanut butter.)

Still, I’m trying to practice what I preach. Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has inspired to make more considered food choices, and I have no doubt that my upcoming time at Hell’s Backbone Grill will further propel me to expand upon, and maybe even adhere to, the wasteatarian doctrine. Until then, keep hitting those refrigerators.

And remember the wastivore’s mantra: When shit happens, eat it.


The sacred text of the wastivore.


** There’s an interesting, and substantial, semantic difference between wastivore and wasteatarian; if you don’t believe me, call a vegetarian an herbivore and prepare for the protest. The suffix -vore means “one that eats,” and typically refers to the uncalculated feeding ecology of animals. The suffix –arian, on the other hand, implies a doctrine or set of principles. Therefore, wasteatarian actually describes me with more precision than wastivore, though the latter is also apt. I’m a wastivore only because it’s easier to say and spell, and because it allows me the Michael Pollan pun that is the title of this blog.