Wandering Home (10 page)

Wilderness defenders, predictably, reacted badly to this news. Partly they thought: Damn, this is all we need. Having soldiered on through Ronald Reagan and James Watt, through the attacks (literal attacks, often) of the Western antienvironmental “sagebrush rebellion,” and the billions of dollars thrown against them by timber and mining interests, now we have to contend with a bunch of professors (who had held their key conference in Irvine, California, a place about as spiritually far removed from the wild as it is possible to get) telling us not to bother? Cronon was seen to be giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but in a particularly sneaky way. He’d quoted the poet Gary Snyder (along with Abbey and Berry the third star by which I navigated) as saying “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness.” But Snyder—in a special issue of
Wild Earth
, edited by John Davis—said he’d been quoted out of context. “I must confess I’m getting a bit grumpy about the dumb arguments being put forth by high-paid intellectual types in which they are trying to knock Nature, knock the people who value nature, and still come out smart and progressive,” he wrote. In general, then, environmentalist sentiment was: Give us a break. Call it what
you will, we’re out here protecting landscapes big enough for animals to flourish and for people to occasionally get a little lost in, and that’s a good thing, not a bad one.

To his credit, I think Cronon recognized that truth largely from the start. “It is not the things we label as wilderness that are the problem—for nonhuman nature and large tracts of the natural world do deserve protection—but rather what we ourselves mean when we used that label,” he wrote. And he’s gone on to write wonderful and sensitive investigations of both the human and the natural meaning of particular places. In general, the controversy died away. We could still stand here on Owl’s Head in midsummer 2003 and say, “This is a wild place.”

But I don’t think the questions about wilderness and its meaning will in fact stay tamped down for long. A few years before Cronon, I wrote a book called
The End of Nature
that grew in part from my years in the Adirondacks and that raised a somewhat similar challenge to the idea of the wild. It was the first book for a general audience about global warming, and half of it was pretty much straight science reporting: here’s how much the temperature is going to go up, here’s how we might rein it in a little. But the other half explored the reasons that the prospect of massive climate change made me so sad—basically because it threatened my newfound love affair with the wild world. I had found the place I belonged, I knew that in my bones. But suddenly the meaning of that place was in question. Say people, in their carelessness,
pushed the temperature up four or five degrees this century, which is the current middle-of-the-road prediction. In that case, Owl’s Head might never overlook another real winter, just one long mud season. In the fall, instead of the birch and beech turning yellow and orange in this vast wood, those trees would be dead, replaced if at all by the drab brown of oak and hickory. In the first warm days of March, there’d be no maples left to bleed their sweet sap. Since it’s already started getting warmer, is this still the Adirondacks, still the Champlain Valley? Was our place wild, or natural, anymore? For that matter, was
any
place? The peculiar physics of global warming mean, in fact, that the North and South Poles will be hardest hit—that is, the places that really are free of any other human history, really are wild if any place is wild, might just as well be in the middle of the eastern megalopolis or the SoCal suburbs.

I got in less trouble from wilderness advocates than Cronon did,
²
in part because I was clearly one of them, and in part because I was catching so much hell from oil
companies for suggesting that we needed to overhaul industrial civilization. But the argument persists. It’s not easy to see what the idea of something apart from man, something untrammeled, will amount to in a globally warmed, genetically engineered world, a world totally reshaped by our recklessness and our shortsighted desire. Mightn’t we just give up on the whole thing and go play video games?

For me, though, the idea that there’s no such thing as pure wilderness has made the
relative wild
all the more precious. Yes, Cronon’s right, and so was I—there’s no place that isn’t touched by man. I have a friend, Curt Stager, who teaches biology at Paul Smith’s College, the only four-year school in the Adirondacks. Curt spent years out with his students looking for a pristine Adirondack Lake, one that hadn’t been sterilized by acid rain, one whose sediment cores didn’t show telltale signs of logging or roadbuilding in the watershed. He never found one, and he had three thousand to choose from. And now it rains or snows or doesn’t on those lakes in some small measure because of the kind of cars we drive or the ways we heat our homes. In 2003, scientists summed up a review of many different studies—studies of leaf-out in the spring, of migration dates, of hibernation patterns—and concluded that because of global warming, spring was coming seven days earlier at this latitude than just a few decades before.

But it’s precisely
because
of such things that we badly need more wild, not less. For pragmatic reasons: if plants and animals are going to need to move north against the rising temperature, we have to give them as much room, and as many corridors, as we can carve out (assuming, that is, that you buy the basic conservationist argument that plants and animals are worth preserving). But beyond that, we need more wild for
human
reasons: we need to set aside land from our use simply to prove to ourselves that we can do it, that we don’t need to be in control of everything around us. The battle for the future is precisely between those who are willing to engineer every organism for our convenience, who will countenance the radical change of our climate rather than risk any damage to our cosseted and swaddled Economy, and those who are willing to say there is something other than us that counts. Wilderness and Gandhian nonviolence were the two most potentially revolutionary ideas of the twentieth century, precisely because they were the two most humble: they imagine a whole different possibility for people.

There’s another, less stern, reason we need the wild, too, of course, and that’s for sheer comfort. I’d hiked Giant several times in my life—the best was on the first anniversary of meeting my wife, Sue, when we walked up in a gray fog with a bottle of champagne, only to have the clouds instantly part as we sat on the summit, pulled away like stage curtains to reveal the late-September glory
below. Probably because of that good memory, I headed back on one of the darker days of my life, the morning after the elections of 1994, when Newt Gingrich swept into control of the House on the strength of his Contract with America. It seemed to me as if the nation I loved had finally gone totally crazy, that it had settled for the most gimcrack and transparent kind of fraud, and that a kind of intolerance was settling over the land that would eventually make life scary for people like myself, who seemed suddenly not critics of the ruling order, but
dissidents
. Anyway, a hard day’s solitary hike was enough to restore a bit of equilibrium, and Gingrich landed harder than I did in the end—but a world without Giant Mountain, or a Giant Mountain with a toll road on it, or a gondola, or an ATV mosh pit, seems more worth fighting against than ever. “Forever wild,” as the New York constitution puts it, even if “wild” means a little less than it used to, and if “forever” seems somewhat shorter.

T
HE GOOD THING
about philosophical speculation is that it can carry you right up a mountain, even a steep-sided, mossy-rocked one like this. We spilled out on the summit before I’d expected it, and now for the first time could see way south and west across the expanse of the High Peaks and the spread of the lower Adirondacks far beyond. Mount Marcy and the Algonquin ridge and the
Great Range beckoned across the valley of the Au Sable River; looking east, it was easy to trace the route I’d come right from the Breadloaf ridge of the Green Moun tains. And I could see the rest of my track laid out before me, too—Hunters Pass beneath the Dixes, and the Hoffman Notch wilderness beyond, and past that the deep and remote Adirondack forests of the Hudson head waters. I pulled last night’s storm-drenched tent from the pack and laid it across the rocks to dry, and ate my lunch, and congratulated myself on reaching the literal high point of the journey, 4,627 feet. It’s all downhill from here, I thought, which as it turned out was one of those brags you’re better off not making.

W
E SET OFF
on our descent, against a steady stream of hikers climbing up on the more usual route. Many were would-be 46ers, checking off another of the peaks on the list first compiled by Bob Marshall when he was a young man spending his summers in Saranac Lake. A staunch hiker, he and his friends tried to climb every high mountain in the park. Forty-six, he said, topped 4,000 feet, and these became the grail. (Better measurements showed he included four that didn’t belong, and missed one that did—but myth proved more rugged than mere measurement, and his list still holds.) Many of the peaks on the list, Giant included, are glorious; others are grim marches to flat-topped mountains with no views
that would never be climbed, were they not on the official itinerary. It’s simple to make a little sport of the 46ers, especially since some people, upon finishing the list the first time, set in trying to climb them all in the winter, or to stand on every peak at midnight, or to visit each in the rain. But the quest serves two purposes: by providing that American necessity, a goal, it gives people a good excuse to get out into wild country; and it makes sure that the other thousand or so mountains are almost totally ignored simply because they’re too low. If you know an Adirondack summit is 3,950 feet high, then you know you’ll have it all to yourself.

In fact, as is often the case, describing something turns it into a magnet. Marshall was a born salesman—on top of one Adirondack peak he came up with the idea for The Wilderness Society, which in turn led the drive for the 1964 federal statute, relying all the time on the inherent appeal of the word. The 3 million acres of “forever wild” land in the Adirondacks are divided into two main designations, “wild forest” and “wilderness.” The differences are very minor, having to do with grandfathered jeep trails and the like—but because wilderness sounds sexier, those areas almost invariably draw more hikers. Some conservationists worry that the High Peaks Wilderness in particular gets too much use, and there are periodic attempts to limit the number of hikers going up mountains like this one—require permits, some say, or
build more parking lots and facilities elsewhere in the park to disperse use. But in fact one of the glories of the Adirondacks is that the high granite vacuums up most of the visitors, leaving the rest of the park to the creatures.

There were more than enough visitors wandering up Giant today, including at least one group communicating very loudly over walkie-talkies with other members of their party who were roughly, oh, forty feet away. I fear I must have been thinking of some cutting remark to make to John, because bad karma grabbed me by the ankle and sent me down hard on a steep rock shelf. Actually, the first part of the fall wasn’t so bad—but a half-second later the full weight of my pack slammed into my back, sending me eight or ten feet farther down the slope and leaving me with blood streaming from both knees. No permanent damage, but I was sore and hot and grumpy as we plodded down the trail. I was, I think, feeling my age, which is the only bitter thing about hiking peaks you’ve hiked many times before. The trail never seemed this long before, and it didn’t help that granola-fed John was leaping lightly from rock to rock.

Thank heaven the path spills out on Route 73 right across from Chapel Pond, which is among the loveliest places in the park. In the nineteenth century, apparently, ranks of artists would stand by its shores almost every day, lined up behind their easels, trying to capture the rocky slides and steep, birchy draws above the pond itself. In
our time this spot speaks most loudly to rock climbers—whatever the season, there’s always a van or two alongside the road, and a few specks moving up the pitches. In winter, when a dozen waterfalls ice up, the crowds of climbers really gather. But today I wasn’t paying much attention. All I wanted was to take off my pack and go for a nice long swim in the pond, kicking just fast enough that the blood trailing off my knees wouldn’t attract too many leeches.

John had to be somewhere the next morning, so he actually allowed a friend to come pick him up in an automobile. I reminded him how such a contraption worked—the seat belt, the window crank—and then, feeling virtuous, gimped off to the east on the two-lane for half a mile till I came to the next trailhead. This one led south, and in less than a mile passed Round Pond, where I made camp for the night.

Round Pond is a lovely sheet of water set in a perfect forest bowl, and tonight it was graced by three loons, not to mention a small band of Christian college students. Nice as it is, however, it must be said that its name leaves a bit to be desired. I mean, come on, Round Pond. I’ve swum in at least four Round Ponds in the Adirondacks, and I bet there are fifty more. Not to mention dozens of Mud Ponds, and Loon Lakes in every direction. As a rule, Adirondack place names lack distinction. The problem, I think, is that there simply weren’t enough people
to create enough history; even the Indians mostly used the central Adirondacks as a hunting ground, preferring to site their villages in the warmer, more fertile land around Lake Champlain to the east, Lake Ontario to the West, the St. Lawrence to the north, and the Mohawk River to the south. They gave good names to some things—Tahawus, or Cloud Splitter, may have been their title for the Adirondacks’ loftiest peak (or it may have been dreamed up in the nineteenth century by some romantic writer). But the first white guys who climbed it didn’t bother with romance at all, naming it for the undistinguished governor William Marcy who had paid for their trip (and coined the phrase “spoils system”).