1 files changed, 32 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/leopold-essay.txt b/leopold-essay.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b17d619
--- /dev/null
+++ b/leopold-essay.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world. 
+
+One of Thoreau's most quoted phrases claims that "in wildness lies the preservation of the world". What fewer people know is the lives before it, which amount to little more than Thoreau embracing the westerward drive of empire so common in his day. "The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild", he writes, not too far off of Horace Greeley's more famous lines.  
+
+
+
+Aldo Leopold wrote to tell us what we were losing. The last grizzly killed in arizona, the jaguars disappearing from the banks of the grand canyon, the ways countelss birds clung to existance in the islands of native prarire in his farm speckled home country of Sand county.
+
+All that was gone long before I was born. Or mostly gone anyway. There were perhaps pockets you could find. buy enough 7.5 topo maps and you were bound to find some relatively blank spots. The superstition mountains. The choclolate mountains. The chiricauas, the Dragons. The sounter edge of arizona retained pockets of wildness here an there.
+
+my father and I made forays into such places. He always looking for snails. Me looking for something I could not put my finger on at the time. Some wildness that for a few moments here and there did not feel like it was missing.
+
+We called half a dozen or more car rental places, but each time the minute the words four wheel drive and Dragoon Mountains came together in the same breath the lin went dead suspriciously soon after. Finaly we stumbled upon roadrunner car rentals, which had an old Dodge truck we could use. Roadrunner proved to be little more than a single wide trailer in front of car wrecking lot, which did not inspire confidence, but did in fact have a dirt brown dodge truck that looked like it was probably held to gether with tin cans, bailing wire and a healthy amount of duct tape. There seemed to be a mutual don't ask don't tell policy at work in which if we didn't ask the owner about the condition of the truck he wouldn't ask what sort of roads we plannned to take it down.
+
+We brought the thing home amid belches of smoke and accidental peeling of the nearly bald rear tires. It was those tires we were worried about. The roads we planned to take were intended for four wheel drive jeeps, but all we had was a lightweight truck with bald tires. Sometimes when adventurous land is running low you have to create your own adventure.
+
+And so we did. 
+
+Grandpa eyeing the truck. My mom did not come. This was before cellphones when a modicum of danger still existed in travel.
+
+The drive in, building our own road over the ruts with split fire wood. Piling rock in the back of the truck to weigh it down so the rear wheel drive tires would have some bite/purchase in the rutted dirt. 
+
+the widlness of the west slope versus the tamed campgrounds of the east slope. The chiricuauas in the distance, the history of Cochice and jeffer's, cave creek, Jeffer's house, the dark roots of the blank walnut stump that had become a coffee table.
+
+The last grizzly in arisona.
+
+We did no so much reach a camp as reach a point at which we -- the truck my father and I -- seemed to wordlessly conclude that this is as far as we were going. We set up the tent amid fading light. It was far to dry and windy, to say nothing of the general treeless of the west slope of the mountains for a camp fire fire. We cooked over a Coleman stove borrowed from my grandfather
+
+Mysterious foot prints. There are plenty of possible explanations of the footprints, though they all stretch credulity enough that I don't quite believe any of them. It could have been a barefoot hiker with extrorinarily large feet. It could have been bigfoot, the ghost of cochise, geronimo, an entirely non-hominid source, a hominid stepping in the larger track of something else. Whatever it was though, the location it was in spoke of concealment. If it was a thing, the path it took was one you would take if you wished to stay hidden from view by anyone on the rock summit above or from the trail below. These were the footrpints of something that did not want to be seen and that realization only fueled the mystery over the years.
+
+It's been well over two decades now since I set foot in the Dragoons, but I still think about them. About those footprints. I think two about my dissatifaction with explanations and wonder if herpahs thsi isn't a defense against the lose of wildness. If I explain them away the wildness fades. With so much wildness already gone this feels like too great of a cost so I live with mystery.
+