The Ragged Edge of the World (27 page)

Yellowstone is a place where you feel nature close at hand, its terrain as extreme as the weather. The park has recorded some of the coldest temperatures in the lower forty-eight states. Up on the Two Ocean Plateau, probably the highest plain in the United States, the snow was already several inches deep even though it was only October. Wolves thrive in the snow. Their big feet distribute weight so that they can run on crusted snow without breaking through, giving them an advantage over more heavy-footed prey.

We saw a good deal of wolf food in the form of elk, but the wolves themselves remained elusive—if they were there at all. Among the strongest arguments that proponents of reintroduction had was that, by 1992, Yellowstone had near-historic high populations of elk, mule deer and other ungulates. Wolves could happily eat their way through ungulate populations for a long time, and with elk and mule deer as their food imprint, it was unlikely that they would cast a wandering eye on cattle or sheep. Meanwhile, no other top predator had emerged (there are mountain lions in the park, but not enough of them to have an impact on the browsers) to replace the missing wolves and restore the balance of the ecosystem. Yellowstone, like virtually every other part of the United States, has paid a price for the extermination of large predators. Until the coyote recently colonized the Northeast, white-tailed deer populations were exploding. With unchecked population growth comes crowding, and with crowding come epidemics of new diseases, some of which, like Lyme disease, can jump to humans.

This factor may be the last and best hope for large predators. Once the public recognizes that we actually need wolves, or grizzlies, or big cats, ordinary people might be more willing to tolerate the tiny but real risks that come with living in propinquity to big animals that hunt for a living. Unfortunately, this realization—one that is fundamental to protecting ecosystems—requires that Americans abandon their assumption that a risk-free life is a God-given right.

On that first day, riding through snow on the verge of patchy forest, we saw our first teasing, ambiguous sign of the presence of wolves. It was at 5:00 p.m. at Mile 26 on the trail when Dan spotted a large canine footprint. “That's too big for a coyote,” he remarked as he dismounted. It measured 2.75 inches by 2.75 inches, and Dan said that it was fresh since a snowfall yesterday. We couldn't tell, however, if it had been made by a wolf, or whether a smaller animal had left the print, which had then expanded because of melting. Still, the sighting was enough to lift our spirits (mine anyway—finding wolves would spell nothing but trouble for Dan).

As it grew toward dusk, we stopped for the night at the Heart Lake patrol cabin, one of the ranger cabins scattered through the backcountry of Yellowstone. The cabins are simple gable-roofed log structures with a tiny covered porch at their entrance. In front was a small meadow, bounded by lodgepole pines, Engelmann spruces and other firs.

When we entered, our first sight was of the propane lantern and cooking stove, both festooned with wooden matches stuck in every conceivable place. The cooking stove was prepped with wood, tinder and paper, as was the wood stove. The bunk beds were neatly made with six blankets on each, fold facing the door. Dan explained that the rationale behind the provisioning was that a snow-blind ranger should be able to stumble into the cabin when it was 30 below zero and a full-on blizzard, and still be able to find matches and start a fire simply by touch. The blankets were laid with fold toward the door so that the ranger could still get warm in a dry blanket even if the wind or a bear had knocked the door open and snow had blown into the cabin.

The cabins were an exemplar of minimum-impact design. We found matchboxes, jars and cans that had been reused since the 1920s. The next morning we spent an efficient hour restocking the stoves, planting the matches, sweeping the floors, remaking the beds and otherwise making preparations to welcome the next itinerant ranger, just as the cabin had welcomed us. So it had been in this cabin for the better part of a century.

Bill and I felt privileged to be a part of this continuum. Never have I more gladly swept a floor, and indeed, the eye-opening discovery of this expedition was the esprit de corps and quality of life of these rangers. Most of them made less than $30,000 a year, but those who chose this life did so as a calling. Apart from frustrations with budgets and parks bureaucracy, job satisfaction was and is off the charts. Dan and the other rangers we encountered spent their days amid nature at its most glorious and dramatic . . .

. . . and dangerous, for Yellowstone is as harsh as it is beautiful. The next day we continued to make our way toward the Thorofare. After a day spent searching for wolves, we realized that dusk was falling and that we had better find a way down to the Thorofare if we were going to descend during daylight. This turned out to be not an easy thing to do. The plateau is a bit like a steep-sided mesa, and most of the ravines have pitches more suited to bungee jumping than horseback riding. Eventually Dan found a route that was navigable. We maneuvered our way down very steep slopes of loose shale, walking beside our horses rather than in front of them (so that if they fell, they wouldn't land on us), eventually emerging into the ancient and remote passageway of burn areas, wetlands and meadows, interspersed with scattered copses of evergreens.

It was dark by the time we got to the Thorofare patrol cabin, a slightly more elaborate version of the ranger cabin where we'd spent the previous night. In residence when we arrived were two rangers, Mary Taber and Bob Jackson, a veteran Yellowstone backcountry ranger who had made the patrol cabin his seasonal home since 1978. Mary, an attractive and wry young woman, was bemused by the furor about the possibility that wolves had made it back to Yellowstone.

She had her own wolf tale to tell. She and another ranger had spotted an animal that looked like a wolf a few weeks earlier up in the Hayden Valley to the north. Frustrated by their inability to keep the animal in sight, they tried howling to get it to reappear. Apparently they were quite good at it because another agent, Wayne Brewster, heard the howls and reported it as evidence. Somewhat ruefully Mary called in and said, “Umm, that was us.”

Bob Jackson was somewhat more detached from the wolf furor, though he did claim to have seen a wolf track in August, a week before the Hayden Valley sighting. His fervor for the Thorofare, however, verged on the rhapsodic. He liked nothing better than exploring its remote drainages, some of which, he believed, had never seen a white man. He spoke of coming upon undisturbed chip piles left by migratory Native Americans fashioning flint arrowheads hundreds of years ago, as well as wickiups—temporary dwellings made of brush and sticks—that were still intact after 400 years. If you were someone who wanted to drop out of the twentieth century, or for that matter the nineteenth and eighteenth as well, the Thorofare was just the place.

Bob's pet peeve was outfitters. While hunting was off-limits in the park, the southern part of the Thorofare bordered the Bridger-Teton National Forest, where outfitters could bring in hunters to shoot elk. “Outfitters fear no regulation,” Bob complained, and went on to share a theory he had about a noticeable decline in grizzly bear numbers in the 1990s. He believed that outfitters would encroach on the southern border of the park and lay out salt to attract elk, whose carcasses would attract grizzlies. Hunters would then shoot the bears and bury their carcasses to hide the evidence of poaching an endangered species. According to Bill, this became something of an obsession with Bob, who was outspoken on the subject and became a favorite of environmentalists and the press. His rising profile did not endear him to park service bureaucrats, however, and he eventually left in the late 1990s.

We didn't find wolves on that trip, but it left a profound impression on me, and made even more of an impression on Bill. He and his wife, the author Maryann Vollers, moved to the region in 1997, in large part to follow the wolf story as it unfolded in the years following reintroduction. Bill had enjoyed a career as a celebrated “bang bang” photographer, and had documented many conflicts in Africa. By the time he was in his late thirties, however, he had suffered through so many bouts of malaria and other tropical diseases that his doctor told him that he had the internal organs of a seventy-year-old man. He came back to the United States, his internal organs rejuvenated, and turned his attention to nature and environmental stories.

Moreover, he (and I) could see the writing on the wall.
Time
and other magazines were shrinking along with their budgets, and Bill began turning to producing and filming documentaries. His PBS documentary
Wolves in Paradise,
narrated by the folk singer Tom Rush (Renee's husband), explores, in a finely nuanced way, the tensions that have arisen due to the very success of the wolf reintroduction program, as the packs have ventured beyond the borders of the park and occasionally killed livestock.

What's wonderful about this film is that it does offer an answer to the dilemma of whether a modern society can live with big predators like wolves. The owners of the Sun Ranch, in the Madison Valley just north of the park, are trying to do just that, and in a most ingenious manner. When a wolf pack migrated out of the park and started to prey on livestock, it forced an anguished decision among the nature lovers who staffed the ranch to kill some of the members of the pack. But rather than continuing to exterminate raiding wolves, they are hoping to find a solution to such incursions by conditioning a pack to the notion that preying on livestock is a losing proposition for them. Their reasoning is that if a pack does get habituated to this idea, then they might pass it on to their offspring (just as the fear of humans gets passed on), and, even more important, they will defend their territory from invasion by new packs radiating out from the park, which might have other ideas about the wolf-livestock relationship.

Other ranchers, with far less sympathy for wolves, are working with wildlife authorities and environmentalists to find other nonlethal ways (such as rubber bullets or volunteer patrols) of letting these intelligent, social animals know that while humans will tolerate their presence outside the park, that toleration comes with rules. As someone who has spent a career studying animal intelligence, I've noticed that animals can be more punctilious about honoring human rules than humans themselves are. Whether or not any of these approaches ultimately bears fruit, it is an encouraging development that ranchers, whose antipathy to wolves and other predators runs deep, are trying to find a practical entente.

C
oloring many of my travels has been a sense of urgency to encounter cultures and places before they are lost or transformed by the grim cultural entropy of modernity. Tourism's hyperbole to the contrary, there are very few “timeless” places left on the planet. Almost any area with cultural, physical or natural significance that is lucky enough to have avoided the “extractive industries” still has a clock hovering over it, ticking out the days in an accelerating countdown before it is “discovered.” At that point the travel industry and assorted hangers-on will work their magic, until whatever charm the place once had exists only on postcards and in the tightly cropped images of tourist brochures, which leave out the high-rises and slums. When I first visited Tulum, it was an isolated Mayan ruin on a quiet Mexican coast. Now it's part of a marketing concept called the Costa Maya, essentially a theme-park version—“Hey, there's the sacred
sinote,
right by the Taco Bell!”—of its former self.

The countdown for Cuba can be measured by the remaining heartbeats of Fidel Castro, and this EEG has been registering tachycardia. Cuba is perhaps the most remarkable place remaining on the planet that has not yet suffered the deracinating makeover that heralds the arrival of the ragged edge of the world. Despite the fact that it lies closer to Miami than does Georgia, Cuba remains isolated by quirks of politics.

On the one hand, anti-Castro Cubans remain an important though rapidly aging constituency in Florida, and Florida remains crucial to the ambitions of American presidential candidates. On the other, Fidel Castro is (as of this writing) the only surviving unreconstructed, charismatic Communist revolutionary still influencing the fate of a nation. Thus, Cuba has been both victim and beneficiary of a fifty-year standoff that has starved the country of American investment and, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, of Russian subsidies as well. (Russian officials, however, have recently been making unwelcome statements about reestablishing ties—the Russians have a genius for doing the most irritating thing at the most inopportune time.) The result of this situation is that Cuba remains a living relic of times past, and, because it has had to sustain itself without access to fossil fuels or trade with its natural partner to the north, Cuba simultaneously offers a proleptic look at what the rest of the world may face as oil supplies dwindle. Sometimes it's good to have a superpower as an enemy.

There seems to be no end to the contradictions that characterize the island. While capitalist countries have wreaked havoc on their natural resources, communism has been far worse. Russia and China have so despoiled their landscapes that many generations will pass before they recover, if they do recover. Yet Cuba, perhaps one of the most repressive communist regimes of them all, has nearly 22 percent of its territory under some form of protection, and sports a proudly dedicated cadre of park professionals and biologists.

There are other places on the planet where development has yet to take hold, but almost all of them are failed states that have made no effort to devise a modern economy. Cuba represents a unique attempt to devise an economy based on extreme fossil fuel scarcity. Some might argue that Cuba is a failed state as well, but it has harnessed the ingenuity of its people and the formidable power of a first-rate education system to try to find a way to make do without money or oil. While stipulating that economic hardship and the rigors of a police state have inflicted untold hardship on Cubans, it remains the only geographically accessible tropical island in the world that has escaped the curse of ribbon development, with stores and homes strung alongside roads.