East and West
Emotionally, existentially, I count on the little canyons just outside of Salt Lake City where flocks of turkeys scratch around in the brown leaves beneath the oaks and herds of sleek, tawny elk dot the steep, green hillsides when you least expect them. As far as I can tell, these decently wild places aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Their apparent stability gives me a sense that things are alright. Or at least sort of alright. I look over my shoulder at the city at the edge of the wild and feel grateful that it only stretches so far. It’s easier to live in it knowing it has an edge to it. The wilderness beyond the edge helps me not to think about the ecological tragedies of the world all the time. So I can save that for times of reflection, for writing, and for travel.
And every time I leave home to see something else — usually to go backpacking in order to see new wildness of some sort — I inevitably encounter new-to-me human impacts, as well. We’re everywhere.
When the redeye plane leaves the outskirts of Salt Lake City, it’s mostly darkness outside the window. I think I can see campfires in the Uintas but I can’t be sure. There are distant and sparse lights of towns I could name if I worked at it, but there are no substantial human developments until Denver. This ratio, from the sky, is tolerable to me. Mostly darkness. Some city lights.
But after Denver, there are light lesions — sometimes small, sometimes large — just about everywhere you look. And the darkness between, I learn from the flight tracker screen imbedded in the seatback in front of me, is nearly 100% agriculture. There are exceptions here and there: some rivers and small forests, but mostly the world is gridded. It’s a land-quilt woven of brown and green strips. Or it’s been made digital, pixelated on some grand scale. Or it’s been made static by the frequency of a monoculture which seems to be scrubbing the physiography clean of its detail.