[at-l] Not with a bang [was: Stop Nominee Gale Norton's...]

[rhymworm@mindspring.com (rhymworm@mindspring.com)]

Okay, apologies for waxing philosophical, but I'm good and depressed today, and that always makes me start rereading my favorite poets. The recent rants against Clinton and the Sierra Club made me think of W.B. Yeats, who wrote:

We have fed the heart on fantasies
The heart's grown brutal on the fare.
More substance in our emnities
Than in our loves . . .

It always amazes me how so many hikers who will give you the shirt off their back and the gorp from their food bag when you meet them on the trail somehow transform themselves, when the conversation turns to something big-picture like Bush's environmental policies, into beings of pure vitriol--rhetorical Unibombers who want to hike off to their isolated cabins and blow up all the people and systems they feel have aggrieved them. It's as if the mere mention of a political world impinges on the one where their heart is. I guess I understand it: when I went to the trail I too felt alienated from the world, from my job, from people I knew, from a system that rewarded people with values and attitudes I despised. But I found that the trail went a long way toward restoring my faith--that people can be good, and that they do care, and that people of good will can accomplish good things, such as bulding a 2,000-mile footpath where you can chase a dream, and doing their part to make s!
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e it isn't taken away. The trail is there now, and by and large it is a good thing; when I feel angry and alienated I can go back to it and heal some more. For me, at least, the trail was about connection--to people, to the wild country, to my own heart.   

Another poet, W.H. Auden, wrote:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
>From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns we believe and die in...

Auden is talking about how the world sees poets as irrelevant. (He does not believe they are.) We sometimes think about the trail and our hiking selves in that same way, buying into the notion that we're irrelevant, part of an isolated, protected community where we can be ignored by the executives of the world; from there we feel we can rage against that world with impunity. But it's kind of scary to wake up and realize that, no, our little wild cocoon world is connected with the larger world of economies, and policies, and interest groups. We are not safe in it. And if we buy the lie, grin at the spin, close our eyes and let other people do the driving--people who don't care about what we care about--pretty soon the only ones we're going to be important to are the ones who have something to sell us to feed our fantasies.    

A third poet, T.S. Eliot, wrote:

This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper . . .

What is the whimper? It's our whimper, a belated realization that we could have changed things, but it's too damn late. 

I have come to believe that what really counts is deeds. That is my lesson from the Trail: helping fellow hikers, walking the walk rather than talking the talk. Deeds count on the Trail.  

The Trail is there only because of deeds: people acted to put it there and they thought it important enough to compromise for. Benton MacKaye, who imagined the whole thing, was ultimately not enough of a pragmatist to get the thing built. If he'd had his way, the A.T. would be a scattered collection of segments of wild country, slowly vanishing as suburbs and ski resorts replaced the woodlands. It was only because enough hardheaded pragmatists believed in his original vision of a continuous trail that he was unceremoniously booted out on his butt, and the leadership of the A.T. given over to people who would make the necessary deals--with the government, with landowners, with politicians--to put a continuous trail on the ground. Now 99 percent of it is protected, owned by the government. That was a compromise, of course--it has a lot of unpleasant consequences of regulation, restriction, Big Brotherism, and official oversight--but the fact is that the Trail is there, and wil!
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be there, which is better than if it were not there.

And I can't understand how so many of us can buy into the spinmeisters' lie that because politicians have personal failings, and are political creatures, that their actions and deeds are somehow illegitimate. Sure, Clinton was a creep, but so too have been a lot of presidents. And, the fact is, his actions and those of Bruce Babbitt, while far from praiseworthy on many counts, were actual deeds, not mere spin--they stopped bulldozers, fenced out developers, stopped chainsaws, increased budgets for teaching about and preserving the wild places. At least for a while. They made it harder for the big boys with their fat wallets to go in and strip away what they wanted from the landscape, and leave the rest of us to clean up the mess and make what we can of the leftovers.    I'm sorry, but I'm glad they did it, because I believe wild places are good things, and when they are gone, a part of what makes the world worth living in will be gone, too.

Actions and deeds. Remember--that's what counts. Our new president knows that. What has he done? What are his first deeds? He's put a fox in charge of the henhouse, because the foxes did something--they acted, donating money and time and sweat to getting what they wanted. Our boy may be no James Watt, but the James Watts of the world put him where he is, and unless people who love wild places act--unless they do more than hike off to their Ted Kaczynski worlds and rage--it is the oilmen and timber harvesters and miners who will be paying little people poor wages to go in and strip the value out of the wilderness. Those of us who go looking in the wild places to find healing and connection will find more and more logging roads and clearcuts and streams fouled with mine tailings. The places we love will be fewer. Those will be the deeds of this president, no matter the spin about moral character and smaller government.

I do not buy the spin. If a flawed president does a good thing, it is still a good thing. If a robber baron donates money to feed the hungry, the hungry get fed. If someone with a gas-guzzling SUV contributes money to the Wilderness society, so that it can protect an old-growth forest, the old growth forest is not logged. What counts is the deed, walking the walk. If gas prices keep rising, pretty soon that SUV will be traded in on a new status symbol that's more environmentally friendly. The old-growth forest will still be there.

Do I agree with the Sierra Club on all counts? Heck no. They are extremists, but that's the way the game gets played out: the extremists push from both sides, and a balance is found somewhere in the middle. All or nothing isn't the way to accomplish anything. I will sign on with the side that is pushing in the right direction, even if I don't agree with all its stated goals. If we can't have Benton MacKaye's wilderness utopia, I would rather have today's flawed government-protected A.T. than the alternative. Some part of the wild is still there. It still speaks to me. I do not intend to let it end with a whimper.

--Rhymin' Worm