A Future Forgotten

For some reason, I want to believe that I once heard it said that before the Japanese plant a tree, they carefully consider how its placement will affect the landscape over the course of the next one hundred years. Now this precept may be true, or it could just as easily be something I made up, a product of the same romantic Western notions of Oriental wisdom as Sobe and the Karate Kid. I’m not really sure. What I am sure of is just how much better the world would be given even a fraction of that foresight.

Towering cottonwoods crisscross the Bitterroot between Corvallis and Hamilton in neatly ordered rows. Valley lore maintains that famed Gilded Age industrialist Marcus Daly lined the avenues with these trees so that his carriage would travel in shade everywhere it went. The fact that the Anaconda Copper King passed long before the trees realized their full potential lends credence to more philanthropic motivations than that, but even if the original impetus for their planting was less than altruistic I believe that whoever put them there would be pretty disappointed by our failure to safeguard their legacy.

The trees are all dying. Whole lanes are being stripped as the giant cottonwoods become nothing more than hazards. The avenues, once so elegantly defined, a touch of cultivated formality and order in an otherwise uncivilized landscape, are being denuded. The sentinels, grown old and weary, are falling down. No juveniles stand ready to replace them. Generations have passed yet no generation rises beneath them. In the one hundred years since they were planted, no one has given them much more than cursory consideration.

I find this lack of forethought, this failure to account for the future, this inability to consider the whole rather than the part or the moment, this disavowal of any sort of planned progression indicative of America. Such manner pervades our culture, our economy, our manner and our mode. We are reactive, not proactive. We do not build upon the foundations of the past. We do not invest capital in the future. Ours is a society disposable. This is our zeitgeist.

We have been working on acquiring a foreclosed property from Fannie Mae. Unoccupied for only a short period, it is already quite literally falling to pieces. Owing to a broken hanger, a gutter that listed only slightly on our first visit has since collapsed completely. To the megalithic lien holder the value of this real estate is defined by a set of numbers on a balance sheet. For us, the home has a worth that is a bit more intrinsic.

If not simply to further our own interests, out of respect for Marcus Daly we should have preserved his legacy. We should have accounted for the inevitable demise of one generation and secured the naissance of the next. We should have planted young trees between the mature ones, so that through succession the prescience of Marcus Daly would endure, alive in perpetuity, shading future lanes and carriages for years to come.

On a bench above Corvallis, along the course of Summerdale Lane, there are planted ordered rows of cottonwood trees. How long they will remain is anyone’s guess, but let it be known that, should the Williamsons take up residence upon this path, their numbers shall surely increase.

Leave it better than you found it.

Why did the Skunk cross the road?

I was fortunate enough to get out of the office the other day and accompany my boss on a field trip. Much as the land administered by the US Forest Service is broken into National Forests and Ranger Districts, state and private ground overseen by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation is organized into Land Offices and Units. Southwestern Land Office, for whom I now work, is headquartered in Missoula, Montana and consists of Hamilton, Clearwater, Anaconda, and Missoula Units. Since I had come on board in May, Mike and I had already made visits to the other three. Anaconda Unit was last on our list.

At Drummond we turned south off I-90 onto MT Highway 1, otherwise known as the Anaconda-Pintler Scenic Route, and passed quickly through a section of pastoral looking ranchlands before beginning the climb to Philipsburg. Around a bend in the road, we happened upon an SUV parked haphazardly along the guardrail. Heads and cameras protruded from its open windows, focused on the highway ahead.

“Little black bear,” Mike said.

As we closed the gap, I too caught sight of the bruin’s shuffling form. It was a young male, probably three years old and just now finding his way on his own. He darted one direction and then another, uncertain as to which was the safer path.

We continued past the parked SUV, closing to within twenty yards before the bear vaulted the guard rail and rumbled down the slope, effectively spoiling the tourists’ photo op. I turned to Mike and gave him as much grief as one can safely give their boss before settling back to appreciate the fact that I live in a place where such titillating sights are a regular occurrence.

By contrast, the appearance of wildlife during my daily commute has a much more somber tone. Instead of a thrill, it is rather a constant reminder of the price the local fauna pays for our 60 mile per hour lifestyle. My count so far is 3 foxes, 2 raccoons, one magpie, numerous house cats and ground squirrels, an elk, and countless deer. That in only six weeks of driving 47 miles each way. I fully accept that it is only a matter of time before I add my contribution to those statistics, but so far I’ve been lucky.

Passing through 88 feet each second, I wonder how many of my fellow commuters even notice these unfortunate figures. Are they as affected as I am by this wanton bloodshed? The skunks must certainly arouse some attention but what about the rest? I can only assume that since these motorists live in Montana they have an appreciation for wildlife, but such constant carnage makes me skeptical. Too many of us are obviously unwilling or unable to make the sacrifices necessary to bring down the body count. What, I wonder, will it take before we realize the value of protecting the quadrapedestrian’s right to cross the road?

Sitting in my car, watching the gas needle plummet and the corpses pile up, this predicament becomes a source of gnawing frustration. How did we come to this, I ask?

Without much planning, is the answer that comes to mind. And in way too big a hurry.

I am sure, as the miles rack up and I surrender more irretrievable minutes of my life to this enterprise, I will too often return to this theme. Our current model for living is seriously flawed. It places value on things that have none and cheapens that which is most precious on Earth. All creatures, great and small.

My mind wandered a mere moment, but that was all it took. I saw a flash of color in the headlights and exclaimed “oh, damn it!” in the instant before the little scurrying creature disappeared beneath the Honda’s tires with an ugly thump.

“What?!” cried Brandi.

Her voice was tinged with panic, more than I expected. A bit further down the road she revealed that for some reason she’d conjured up the thought that I’d hit a person. I hadn’t, but as bad as I felt, I might as well have.

“Skunk,” I replied.

Between a Rock and a Long Drive

No sooner had I finished penning my last post when my cell phone rang with a job offer from Mike Kopitzke, Fire Program Manager for the Southwest Land Office of the State of Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. I had interviewed for the position of Assistant Center Manager at Missoula Interagency Dispatch Center on Wednesday, and, although I felt I had a better than average shot at getting it, I wasn’t completely certain how I felt about taking the job.

Ever since I began working in dispatch, my goal has been an assistant manager position at one of the zone dispatch centers in Montana. I had basically circumvented that goal in 2008 by taking the position of dispatch coordinator in Tok, working for the Alaska Division of Forestry, and had personal considerations been different (i.e. Brandi had gone with me), I would have been perfectly content with that. However, given that Brandi’s career path had led her to Rocky Mountain Laboratory and that a series of fortunate events had determined that we would live in Hamilton, I was back to square one. A job at the U.S. Forest Service’s Bitterroot center would be ideal, but any opportunity there wouldn’t manifest itself until sometime in the future. That left Missoula.

Taking a job in Missoula meant partaking of two activities in which I would rather not participate: commuting and daycare. Door to door, it is 46.59 miles from our house in Hamilton to the dispatch center in Missoula. So not only does that mean devoting two extra hours a day to work, but, depending on which vehicle I drive, it also entails burning between 15 and 30 gallons of gas a week. That is definitely not my idea of living simply.

After interviewing several of the local day care providers recommended by our friends, we were fortunate enough to secure a spot for Keegan at the one we liked the most. Even so, the whole concept still bothered me. What did we gain, and at what cost? On balance, I wasn’t sold on the premise that taking a full-time job put us in the black.

I have always had difficulty with the fact that, at least in America, what is ideal and what is practicable usually end up being at odds. In the modern era, simple is not easy. Obviously, the beauty of this country is that you can do whatever you choose. But it doesn’t always leave you standing on high ground.

Brandi’s research position at the lab is a term appointment, which for those unfamiliar with federal employment means it has a finite duration, in this case, three years. With that in mind, there was no way I could pass up a permanent position with the State of Montana, even if it meant missing out on ten hours a week of family time or personally assuring scenarios like the Horizon oil well disaster. Most likely, Brandi will get on permanently at the lab. But should she not, we now have a safety net that will keep us living in Western Montana.

Everything comes at a sacrifice. What I have oft wondered is, does it have to? Certainly, we could stick with the status quo and take our chances. Keegan benefits from being with his parents and Brandi can see our house from her office window. No one knows what the future holds, and it might work out beautifully. That is the paradox of human existence; each decision opens some doors while closing others. But here I am not really referring to such abstractions. I am talking about more concrete matters.

There isn’t any reason why we couldn’t have the best of both worlds. Why aren’t there day care centers at every workplace, so parents can be with their children during lunchtime and at breaks? Why haven’t we invested in an infrastructure that cultivates harmony and cooperation instead of one that promotes isolation and discord? If America had sunk half as much capital into developing a rail-based transportation system as it has squandered building cars and roads, I would be able to hop aboard a high-speed commuter train and be in Missoula in half the time I will spend driving there. A reasonable amount of time, not a ridiculous one.

Taming the natural world in such a manner as we have has created a geography that leaves us in the exact same predicament as before. A massive amount of resources, in particular fossil fuels whose true value and benefit we little understand and will never again realize, have been wasted, and we are no more in command of our circumstances now than when we started. In the past our lives were dictated by forces of nature such as weather and topography. Today we are beholden to obligations necessitated by an environment we ourselves have created.

For better or worse, we have arrived at the ends of the Earth. Its entire extent has been inventoried, mapped, and catalogued. There is no hidden wealth waiting to be discovered, no New World left to exploit. What we have is all we’ve got. Yet we continue on blindly, indiscriminately allocating capital as if we did not know this. It seems we could do better.

The world has grown so small that we no longer have the luxury of boundless expansion. The huge herds, the great forests are all gone. It is time we came to grips with the finite nature of the Earth’s resources and began operating accordingly. How we do this while maintaining our identity as the Land of Opportunity is a question that doesn’t have a ready answer. But one thing is certain. To continue on the path of the locust, consuming everything in our path, without consideration for the consequences of such action, is neither ideal nor practical.

But for now, that is exactly where I am.

Fire, Oil, or Ice

Tok is cold, and there is no reason it should be inhabited. Surrounding lands don’t contain any economically extractable resources. The Coast Guard maintains a soaring antenna array here, but otherwise Tok exists as a junction of Alaska’s two most notable highways. Coming from Canada on the Alaska Highway, Tok is the place where you can either turn left and go to Anchorage or continue on to Fairbanks. Subsistence living and road kill keeps its thousand odd residents alive. Several nearby native communities contribute a few more souls to the census. Moose is common on menus, as is minus seventy on thermometers. Cut wood all winter through, and your house will still be cold in Tok.

Oil flows through Tok’s heart. Town smells of it. The oil burning furnace that heats my cabin spews exhaust fumes. All my clothes reek of burnt fuel. A carbon monoxide detector is requisite. I haven’t felt good since I got here, and I fear a minor case of monoxide poisoning. Not acute; just enough to give me symptoms enjoyably akin to dysentery. Still, it’s been negative twenty five most mornings when I drive to work. Poisoned has to be better than frozen solid.

Steamy exhaust pours from everything. A dirty pall drifts overhead. It isn’t as bitter cold as minus twenty five could feel, but standing around for long simply begins to freeze you. Burning oil holds the chill at bay. A scent of petroleum surrounds everything human. The electricity plant runs on it. Without it, little of Tok would remain.

Jeff Hermanns at Tok Forestry looks at countless acres of burnt spruce forest north of the Tanana River and sees another fuel source with which to satiate Tok’s appetite for combustibles. A massive fire scar, what remains of 2004’s Taylor Complex blaze, spans vast lands across the Tanana Valley State Forest. It is filled with standing dead wood, kiln dried by the fire’s intense heat. Jeff’s aim is to get Tok off North Slope oil and onto Tanana Valley biomass.

Biomass is not going to save western civilization. It would take many times the amount of arable land available in America to grow enough soybeans to fully replace diesel in the United States. All current biowaste production can account for only a fraction of what is necessary to keep us operating at existing capacities. Even if every possible acre of productive land in the world grew crops for energy, it wouldn’t be enough to power the grid.

Not so in Tok.

Tok, Alaska, is off the grid; its electricity comes from a diesel fueled generator at the AP&T power station downtown. Alaska Power and Telephone, who is significantly vested in oil futures I must assume, provides electricity to town and several native villages by burning petroleum. Jeff looks at the millions of board feet around him, considers the amount of electricity used by the local community currently, factors in the generation capacity of modern technologies and the cost of infrastructure, and still believes he can cut the price of electricity in half by fueling Tok’s power plant with biomass.

Because population is low in Tok, Hermanns believes Alaska’s state forest can sustain the local community’s fuel needs using just the timber harvest currently allowed. In theory, the allowable cut should leave forest reserves in quantities ample enough that at no time will another cut be precluded. A biomass fueled power plant in Tok would be capable of providing for all of town’s electrical needs while providing cheap district heat to entities such as the library, university extension, and emergency services.

Forest literally carpets Tok. It continues unbroken in all directions like a blanket. Spruce as thick as dog hair comes up nearly to my doorstep. Fire has threatened to raze town on several occasions, and potential exists for exactly such an event at any time. In defense, Jeff’s fire crew at Tok Area Office, funded by National Fire Plan money, treats hundreds of acres of urban forest, reducing fuels and creating fuel breaks along roads. Around Tok School, biomass from treated acreage is piled and left to dry. It awaits the chipper and biomass boiler Hermanns and Tok School’s grant writer, Scott McManus, intend to purchase with funds they have been granted.

It all makes great sense. Oil delivers more bang for the buck than biomass and is more easily transported. Despite AP&T’s resultant loss of revenue within the local market, biomass power in Tok frees up oil that could be sold elsewhere or, better yet, saved for future generations. An added benefit is timber industry in Tok, employing local workers to provide for local needs.

Tok School biomass project is smart and progressive. It lowers the threat that Tok School will be destroyed by wildfire and essentially guarantees the facility will be heated for the foreseeable future, oil or no. After the fuel reduction wood is consumed, chip wood will be purchased from local vendors.

The problem with Jeff Hermanns’ vision is that this is America. We’re not socialists. Education is about the only thing we are guaranteed, other than death and taxes. In theory, State of Alaska can’t develop infrastructure. That’s a service provided by private sector, for profit.

One might hope that native corporations in Tanana Valley would see the opportunity to invest in themselves by both funding and constructing infrastructure that benefits their own communities, but so far that appears unlikely. Subsidies foot much of residents’ heating and power bills, so most Alaskans simply continue status quo. Every tax dollar Alaskans give Washington is returned to the state twice fold in the form of federal funding, which minimizes the impetus to change. The constant flow of North Slope oil south is worth that much.

What Jeff in his role as Area Forester and the State of Alaska can do is continue to develop the potential for sustainable biomass harvest and extraction from the Tanana Valley State Forest and promote biomass industry within the local community. Someday rising oil prices will force Alaska to look to its forest resources for light and heat. For now, Jeff is running ahead of the curve, which is the definition of progressive.

The handyman called today to report what he found wrong at the cabin. I have no experience with oil furnaces, but my gut feeling that it was pumping exhaust gases into my living space was confirmed. Bad layout had caused the outlet pipe to collapse where it made a right angle. Fumes were backing up into the house, a potentially fatal situation. Pretty bad air, was how he described it.

Don’t Be Scared, Cobe

I’ve been hanging out in Hamilton with Brandi. We met this past summer while we were both working wildland fire in Kootenai Country. She is pretty amazing. When I first met her, she was quite the conservationist, but I’ve been doing a real good job breaking her of such sensible habits as only driving when she has to, walking to the store, not buying things she doesn’t need, and turning off lights when she leaves a room. We have been getting along very well, and I have high hopes for us, if we can only get past Alaska.

As I mentioned, I was working on the Kootenai when I met Brandi. I’ve been working in fire management since 2000, and one day I had an opportunity to take a new position within the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, working dispatch in Lincoln County where I grew up. At the time I took the job, I was working in Missoula and getting awful tired of that town. The job on the Koot seemed like just the ticket; I could stay at my pop’s cabin for minimal rent and get the dogs out of the city. Besides all that, I had planned on moving back to Troy anyway, to research and write a novel. This was perfect.

That attitude didn’t last too long. A funny thing about hometowns; no matter how much you change while you’re away, or think you do, they always seem to bring you back around to who you were. By the time fire season 2008 was getting started on the Kootenai, I was looking for a way out. One day at the office, my buddy Slick Rick and I got talking about Alaska. Working in a dispatch office, you’re always trying to find something new to Google. That’s what I should do, I said. I’m gonna Google jobs in Alaska.

One Google search and two emails later, I was filling out an application for a new dispatch job with the State of AK Division of Forestry in Tok, Alaska. If I thought the job on the Kootenai was good, this was great. The job announcement was for the position of lead dispatcher, which meant I would get the supervisory experience I hadn’t been getting a chance at here in the Northern Rockies region. And talk about peace and quiet to write; Tok was literally in the middle of f’n nowhere, despite its dubious distinction of being the first Alaskan town after Canada along the Alcan. I’d already gotten all I needed out of Troy as far as research for the novel. When they offered me the job, I was on top of the world.

Not because of the job, however. The job offer had taken on a rather bittersweet flavor, actually. No, the reason I was on top of the world, as I told my pops the afternoon it happened, was because Brandi McCoy called me. Sure, I’d been subtly pursuing her, but it was more due to the fact that I couldn’t NOT pursue her than through any belief that it would truly amount to anything. Still, it had amounted to something, and that something has turned out to be much more worthwhile than I could ever have imagined.

So now we’re preparing to say our goodbyes. The ferry to Alaska pulls out of Bellingham, Washington, on February 20th, and the dogs and I will be on it. How’s that going to work out, you ask. I don’t know. Brandi is an absolute beauty, in every sense of the word, so I’m feeling a bit insecure about the situation, as you might imagine. We have been at each other’s throats lately, to be perfectly honest. We’re both just scared, I guess. It’s been pretty good, this thing we’ve found, and we’re worried we might lose it. And we might.

Brandi is going to get her own dog. I’ve been fighting it tooth and nail, but I couldn’t tell you why if you asked. I would give you a lot of reasons, but I couldn’t really tell you why. My best guess goes something like this: Siberian huskies were what I brought to the table; if she has one of her own, where does that leave me?

In Alaska, I guess, but there will be plenty more on that later. Check back.