The Last Empty Places (45 page)

It always felt as if I were training a dog, dangling out some little reward, some immediate goal, some distraction or entertainment, to keep everybody—and especially a ten-year-old boy—moving down the trail. For twenty minutes we sprawled on the soft, dry ground under the shade of the junipers and ate, hungrily, spicy tuna and peanut butter on tortillas. We poured down water. Our canteens were almost empty, although we’d started the morning with them full, and our food bags limp, our packs noticeably lighter.

“We’d better go,” I said.

Like a hard-run dog after a half-hour’s rest, Skyler bounced back.

“I was hurting there for a while,” he said. “But I’m fine now.”

And so we hefted our packs, and kept going.

S
TARTING IN THE EARLY
1930s, Leopold pointed out big choices facing American consumer culture. His favorite metaphor for consumerism was “the Ford”—and by implication the roads it created into the few remaining wild places.

“But what is the good life?…Man cannot live by bread, or Fords, alone.”

So he asked in the introduction to his 1933 book,
Game Management
. He concluded the volume on an even stronger note:

Frustrated with the administrative work, he’d by then quit his job at the Forest Products Lab. He struck out on his own as a forestry consultant, conducting game surveys for hunters’ groups, writing his book, and barely scraping by during the Depression with a wife and five children to support, his income supplemented by dividends from the Leopold Desk Co.

Still a classic in the field today,
Game Management
was far more practical than philosophical.

“[G]ame can be restored,”
⁵²
he wrote, “by the creative use of the
same tools which have heretofore destroyed it—axe, plow, cow, fire, and gun.”

It helped convince the University of Wisconsin to establish a professorship in game management—the first of its kind anywhere—and to choose Aldo Leopold to fill it.

The new job as a professor, which he began in 1933 right after the book’s publication, allowed Leopold the intellectual freedom to roam in ways as never before under the bureaucracies where he’d spent the first half of his career. The advances in ecology by scientists such as Elton and Tansley had enlarged his perspective. Then three personal events in the mid-1930s conspired to change how he viewed intensive human management of the natural world—which is what he had strongly advocated thus far.

He toured the forests of Germany and—with deep dismay—observed how heavily managed they were. While they produced a good yield of spruce wood and deer, in other respects they were nearly biological deserts—essentially tree farms swept clean of their once-rich variety of flora and fauna. After the German experience, the idea of pure management of the forest for maximum yield of game animals and timber looked a lot less appealing. Leopold began to rethink his former advocacy of killing predators to increase game. Meanwhile, reports had filtered back to him of the Gila Forest and certain other areas of the Southwest where predators had been killed. They had now become utterly overrun by deer.

He addressed the issue after his return from Germany:

That same year, the drought year of 1935, while Dust Bowl storms blew away Oklahoma’s prairie soil, Leopold and family purchased an abandoned farm along the sandy Wisconsin River bottomlands outside Madison, not far from where John Muir had grown up at Fountain Lake. With its forest cut and soil exhausted, all that remained, besides blowing sand and ruts, was an old chicken coop that the Leopolds happily
fixed up and dubbed “The Shack.” On their weekend treks to the Shack, Aldo Leopold laid down a Thoreau-like dictum to the family, that they could take along only the “absolute essentials.”

He aimed to restore the barren, abused land to its native condition. He soon discovered, however, the difficulties and intricacies of the task. The family planted thousands of trees. Many of them died. They had to decide what species to plant. They had to decide where to plant them. There were constant choices to be made that would have long-term consequences. The choices that the previous owners had made were painfully obvious in the results. The experience brought home to Leopold the profound necessity for an “ethic” to guide how humans treated the land.

But the truly life-changing experience for Leopold during the mid-1930s was a hunting trip in the fall of 1936 to the Rio Gavilan in the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Its pristine, wild quality amazed and delighted him. The river’s waters ran clear between uneroded, mossy banks
⁵⁴
and under overhanging trees, periodic fires had worked healthily through the landscape, and predators like wolves and mountains lions lived—and preyed on—thriving deer herds.

“It was here that I first clearly realized that land is an organism, that all my life I had only seen sick land, whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health.”

T
HE TRAIL STILL DIDN’T DROP
. It had climbed steeply from our camp at the Meadows out of the Gila’s Middle Fork canyon. Now we followed it along the high, wooded ridgetop separating the Middle Fork canyon from the canyon of the West Fork. We expected the trail to sheer off the ridge at any moment and drop down into the West Fork, but it stubbornly clung to the heights.

I checked the map. I checked my watch. This would be the only day we could see the Gila Cliff Dwellings, which were in the West Fork canyon, and we needed to arrive by 4:00 p.m. I hated schedules and I hated deadlines, and I especially hated them when in the wilderness—these artificial, iron-claw constraints reaching out from a distant, alien world of cityscapes to grab you. It was hot now, and we were tired, and we’d been going hard since 9:00 a.m. and all needed distraction.

“Let’s come up with a new verse about our hike for ‘My Favorite Things,’” Amy suggested.

It was her old standby song to lull Molly and Skyler to sleep at night. She’d added extra verses over the years, reciting our family’s favorite things. As we traipsed along the ridge’s spine, waiting for it to start dropping into the West Fork canyon, we started to call out lines and rhymes to one another.

“What rhymes with
city?”

“How about
mitty?”

“What rhymes with
river?”

“Quiver!”

We worked the composition as we strode along the trail, until we pieced it all together.

As we finished, the trail dipped downward—first gently, then steeply. It switchbacked across a stony, open face that permitted a view.
Yes, there was a canyon below, with shady cliffs opposite. We spotted the yellowy-green tops of cottonwood trees in the cleft below us, in contrast to the darker-green shades of juniper and pine higher up the cliffs. Yes, cottonwoods meant water, which meant the West Fork of the Gila lay directly beneath us.

Soon we bottomed out in the canyon, walked through a patch of cottonwood shade, and out onto a sunny, stony bar, with the river lying just beyond. Here our trail dropping from the rim intersected the larger trail that ran along the West Fork. At the junction, it was odd to see standing there a fit-looking, middle-aged couple, with their day packs and sun hats and hiking shoes, holding a map between them and studying it intently. They looked so…touristy. So…clean.

By now it was nearly 2:30. An hour and a half left. A carved wooden sign pointed the way downstream. “Gila Cliff Dwellings—1¾.”

We waded the West Fork, this time barefoot, because the water had warmed under the afternoon sun and our feet were hot and sore and no one wanted to take the time to switch to river shoes. Down the trail we hustled. It was going to be close. We talked. We strode silently. We stumbled. We looked ahead for indications of anything that resembled cliff dwellings.

After an hour, and another few river crossings, the bottom of the canyon widened into grassy meadows ringed by lower cliffs. Plants that resembled squash grew from the meadow along the trail. I wondered, was this where, centuries ago, the cliff-dwelling peoples might have planted their corn and squash? Were these wild-looking squash plants the modern descendants?

I tried to imagine this enclosed valley seven hundred years ago—its own world, self-contained and secure, surrounded by the tawny cliffs, watered by the clear river full of trout, sustained by the meadow soils that sprouted corn and squash and beans, by the fat mule deer that roamed the forests, by the rabbits, by the delicious, fatty nuts of the piñon pine. It felt like a perfect place to live, seven centuries ago.

It was now 3:45. Fifteen minutes. We splashed across the West Fork one last time, followed the widening trail as it cut through a kind of wall of underbrush, and suddenly emerged…in a parking lot.

A small administrative building stood there, surrounded by a shady wooden porch. On the porch stood a tall plastic water cooler and cups,
and nearby, a man in a ranger’s outfit. I braced myself to be thwarted—the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument closed. Government overtime regulations, you know.

I was panting and sweating from the last sprint down the trail. Molly was with me, Amy and Skyler farther back

“Are the cliff dwellings still open?” I breathlessly asked the man in the uniform. “We’ve been hiking since nine this morning to get here by four.”

“Plenty of time, plenty of time,” he replied soothingly. “Help yourself to some cool water.”

W
HAT
I
REMEMBER MOST
distinctly are the corncobs. They were tiny little cobs, dried and brownish, missing their kernels. I knew that the corn plant had first been domesticated in Mexico eight or nine thousand years ago, but I’d never seen examples of that ancient genetic lineage, its cobs much smaller than today’s forearm-sized hybrids. Here they lay—scattered about the earthen floor of an ancient room under the cliff, just where the little cobs had been dropped, seven hundred years ago.

I remember the wonderful soft light, too. The opening of the cliff dwelling faced south. The late afternoon sun bounced upward off the rock floor at the entrance and illuminated deep into the entire cavern and its many stone structures. It was shaded from the direct sunlight, and the temperature inside the great hollow of rock held at a perfect coolness. In the midst of winter, we heard, the sun, then lower, entered the cavern directly and warmed it.

From the parking lot—an asphalt island at wilderness’s edge connected with faraway Silver City by that twisting, single-lane road—we’d hiked half a mile up a narrow canyon to these high cliff openings.

The Mogollon people had lived here, or rather used it as both a living and ceremonial center. No one knows why they came here, and then why they suddenly disappeared. To the north—where the ancient Anasazi people lived—the population had suddenly soared in the decades after A.D. 1050.
⁵⁵
Those were the big pueblo villages around Zuñi—what Coronado five centuries later called the Seven Cities or Cíbola. This Gila Canyon, however, was a very remote spot. It was sparsely populated or uninhabited. But suddenly people moved in here
in much greater numbers. They built these cliff dwellings, their stone walls still standing, between 1270 and 1290, based on tree-ring dates from the roof timbers. They crafted beautiful pottery with striking black-and-white geometric designs. They ground their corn into meal in still-visible hollows in these boulders at the caverns’ mouths. They followed the lunar year with calendars carved beside the grinding hollows—a circle of thirteen cups carved in the rock. Then, just as suddenly, a few decades later, they abandoned the spot, never to live here again.

Had warfare and enemies driven them here, to this remote sanctuary of a valley?

Or had they come to escape drought and overpopulation elsewhere? Much of the Southwest suffered a major drought during those same decades in the late 1200s. Those many large villages to the north simply couldn’t sustain themselves—too little water, too little soil, too little food?

People came here and found what they needed. Here they always had the Gila, flowing cold and clear from the high mountains through its deep canyons. Here they had the protected, secluded valley to guard them from enemies. They built irrigation canals and headgates—little dams to control the flow into the canals—to water their fields of corn, bean, squash. When the first known white—a prospector named H. B. Ailman
⁵⁶
—stumbled across this remote valley in 1878, the headgates were still visible, six hundred years after they’d been built.

What drove these people here, and what drove them away? Why would they abandon this perfect place?