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One of Thoreau's most quoted phrases claims that "in wildness lies the preservation of the world".
If that's true we're screwed.
Fellow conservationist Aldo Leopold seems to have written much of what he did to let us know not so much what we could save as what it was already too late to save, the wildness we had already lost. The last grizzly killed in Arizona. The jaguars disappearing from the banks of the Colorado as it snakes it's way through the Grand Canyon; the ways countless birds in Leopold's day still clung to existence in the islands of native prairie that speckled his home country of Sand County.
All that was gone long before I was born. Or mostly gone.
Wilderness
When I was young there were still small pockets of wildness to be found. Buy enough 7.5 topo sheets and you were bound to find some relatively blank spots. The Superstition mountains. The chocolate mountains. The Chihuahuas. The Dragoons. For a kid who grew up in the decidedly not wilds of southern California, the southern edge of Arizona, the borderlands in more ways than one, retained pockets of wildness here and there.
My father and I made frequent forays into such places. He always looking for snails. Me looking for something I could not put my finger on at the time. Some intangible thing that felt missing from the world. Adventure perhaps, connection perhaps. Whatever it was, all I knew back then was that it did not, for a few moments here and there, hiking the agave chocked hillsides of nameless mountains, tracing the delicate wisps of shade in the Palo Verde lined washes, sitting at the base of sheer buttes, back leaning against the warm sandstone, watching the shadows lengthen and the thunderheads roll in the from the south, it did not feel like anything was missing from the world.
It wasn't just wildness though. Or not wildness in the sense that we westerner's tend to think of it -- roadless natural areas that are inaccessible. Accessibility is after all, very relative. Could you have driving a 4x4 up the wash to the base of the butte where I sat? Possibly and that alone is enough to destroy the kind of wildness that Leopold wrote about. A kind of wildness that ceases to exist not so much through the loss of land -- though that certainly doesn't help -- but through the growth of technology.
Leopold writes when I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process of ordinarly referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adeults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
"When I first lived in Arizona the White Mountain was a horseman's world. Except along a few main routes, it was too rough for wagons. There were no cars. It was too big for foot travel; even sheepherders roade. Thus by elimination, the coutnry-sized plateau know as 'on top' was the exclusing domain of the mountaed man: mounted cowman, mounted sheepman, mounted forest officer, mounted trapper, and those unclassified mounted men of unknown origin and uncertain destination always found on frontiers. It is difficult of this generation to understand this aristocracy of space based upon transport."
These days we eschew aristocracy of space or otherwise. We want everyone to have equal access.:
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.
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