ponderosa pine

This is from last summer on a hike up Kootenai Canyon in the Bitterroot Mountains back in Montana.

I was struck by this ponderosa pine growing at the foot of this wildly colored rock face. Thought I’d pass it along.

Here’s another post that I originally published on my other blog a few years ago. I dusted it off, edited it a bit, and am re-posting it here. It fits in pretty well with things I’ve pondering lately.

lick creek -- sapphire mountains, montana

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There was a poet of the far north years back named Robert Service. You’ve no doubt heard of him. He was, and still is, popular with some folks. Others consider his work little more than doggerel. I was never a great fan myself.

I’m not much for poetry anyway. Don’t get me wrong — I respect the artistry, but I don’t enjoy reading it, and to my notion sitting and listening to others read it is even worse. It may be that I’ve never listened to a good reader, but in my experience it’s always seemed that those who read poetry think they need to assume the most monotonous, droning voices they can possibly muster. I’ve always needed to hold my eyelids open with the ends of pencils (the eraser end) to keep from slipping into a poetry induced coma.

Years back I ran a darkroom and small photo gallery with some friends up the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. Every few months, or whenever we figured we had enough new work to show, we’d send out a few invites for a showing complete with the obligatory wine and cheese. None of us had any money to speak of, so we’d head for the store to find whatever cheese was on sale and pick up the cheapest penny-a-gallon wine we could find. People would show up at about 7:00 in the evening and about ten minutes later the wine and cheese would be gone. They’d look around at the pictures for a while and then, seeing as there was inevitably a budding poet or two in the bunch,  someone would invariably ask if anyone had any new poetry to read. The ordeal would begin. Being the only one who didn’t drink, I had to suffer being surrounded by a small crowd who was half-blasted on cheap wine and sit through an hour or so of the most gawdawful droning imaginable. There wasn’t much I could do but find a couple of pencils and tough it out. I finally quit participating in those.

Before I moved to Montana a good friend and I would go on regular hiking and canoe trips up in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. He happened to be a fan of Robert Service, and every evening in camp he’d pull out a battered copy of Service’s poems and read them. Every damn night. Thank god he finally quit reading them out loud.

But this post isn’t intended to be a critique of Robert Service. Or of poetry. I bring it up because one line of his has stuck with me throughout the years. The last line of one of his verses reads ‘…the wild must win in the end.’ I may be taking that a little out of context here, but I don’t know… I think it’s a simple truth, a profound one, that we can’t seem to grasp in our zealous efforts to maintain an ever expanding economy at all costs.

Listening to the  talk coming out of DC one is led to believe that the economy is our number one priority. The same phrases are always trotted out. We need to get the economy moving forward. We need to get the economy growing again. We need to get the economy back on it’s feet. We need to cut back our spending to reduce the debt. Little of any significance is being done, or even proposed, to safeguard our planet from continued plunder.  In our minds the economy trumps the environment and that’s not likely to change. Am I saying that the economy isn’t important? No. Of course not. But I am saying that we’d better re-think the idea of growth for growth’s sake and build an economy that fits.

By ‘wild’ I don’t simply mean wilderness, as worthy a notion as wilderness is. The concept of a wilderness separate from and secondary to real life is pretty recent in human history. The wild is far more than that. It is the whole of what we call nature. It is our life-support system. It is the air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we eat and the open spaces our spirits need to grow and develop and be free. It is all the other species that depend on these things the same as we do, and it is our place in this whole wild and glorious thing we call life on earth. It’s irreplaceable. Money can’t buy it back once the threads that hold it together have been severed. No — the economy doesn’t trump the environment. Never has, never will, never can.

The wild must win in the end. The wild will win in the end, with or without us. That’s not negotiable. The question is which side of that outcome we will be on. We’re at a crossroads. The way we choose to go from here on out remains to be seen.