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Quoting LA Times columnist Christopher Reynolds' parting words after writing his 70th "Wild West" report and before hanging up his spurs:
[Washington needs reminding that This Land Is Our Land. If citizens' groups don't rise up, the federal government is going to push ahead with plans to make us pay more and more for access to land we already own. Under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that was signed into law last year, the Forest Service and a handful of other agencies have a 10-year authorization to bill us for stepping into all sorts of priceless landscapes that used to be free.]
The federal government IS going to push ahead with plans to not only make us pay more to access our lands, the federal governments IS also going to push ahead with Disneyfying those priceless landscapes in an effort to increase the perceived recreational value of these lands so that access to them can be sold to paying customers at top-dollar prices. That must is certain.
What is still undetermined is whether the People of this nation will passively accept what their government is doing to them and to their public lands. What is yet to be determined is whether citizens groups will rise up in defense of preserving that which, until recently, was both Wild and Free.
To anyone and everyone who has even a passing interest in Americas' National Parks, forests, rivers, mountains, deserts and streams, PLEASE do not passively accept the Corporate Takeover of Nature and the Disneyfication of the Wild. That is what your government and their recreation/tourism industry partners are working to achieve. Whether they succeed is entirely dependent upon what you and I and our friends, neighbors and communities do in the next few months. If we do nothing, then we might as well all hang up our spurs and pack it in.
Scott
"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." -Dylan Thomas
--- begin quoted ---
February 1, 2005
Christopher Reynolds: Wild West
Six truths from the wild before packing it in After 17 months of
peregrinations around an incomparable landscape, it's time to make like
a city slicker again.
MAYBE YOU'VE KNOWN FOR years what the beach sand in Fort Bragg is made
of, and what they call Kareem Abdul Jabbar on the shooting range.
("Sir" is a good answer, but incorrect.)
Maybe you've long had a good idea what a speleologist means when he
says "moon milk," and what Mars Bonfire, composer of "Born to Be Wild,"
does over and over in his spare time. ("Cash royalty checks" may be a
correct answer, but it's not the one I'm looking for.)
Maybe you had all this in your memory banks, but until the last 17
months, I knew none of it. All these discoveries have come in the
course of feeding the weekly thousand-word beast that is this column.
The job has meant inspecting the raw and semi-raw West up close, and
listening to some of those who live closest to the dirt, stones, waters
and myths of California and environs: the career lifeguards, the desert
squatters, the compulsive rowers and indefatigable duners, the guys who
work all night to carpet Big Bear with fake snow when Mother Nature
withholds the real thing.
Sure, it's a letdown to descend upon some obscure spot, then find that
Mark Twain and Huell Howser have both been there ahead of me - yet
again - but I've come to consider them forces of nature in themselves.
A sane man can't complain about this job. It's put me in the forest at
midnight, on a Death Valley dune at dawn, in the Sonoran Desert under
wet thunder. The other day, up here in the Sierra, it put me in a
meadow amid a potent snowstorm: a billion flakes thickening the air,
flocking the pines and junipers, obscuring my fresh footprints. How do
they tell the difference up here between epic events and everyday
winter weather?
Anyway, I wouldn't be giving this gig up, except that you're probably
ready to hear some new voices on this page (that, for the record, was
the fifth time I've used the word "epic" in 17 months), and I'm ready
to stay a little closer to home, my home, where the population is
expected to rise significantly soon. So this will be my last Wild West
- I'll be sidling over to report for the Calendar pages in coming weeks
- and this is what I've learned:
I am apparently overpaid. The seasonal rangers who spend their summers
chasing and macing wayward bears in Sequoia National Park, occasionally
trailing 200-pound bruisers into the woods at midnight - they make $13
or $14 an hour.
Sometimes litter glitters. Those shiny pebbles on the shore at Fort
Bragg are sea-smoothed bits of broken glass, left over from the '50s
and '60s, when the local folk used the beach as their city dump. Now
the territory is a state park, and the philosophers in Sacramento will
have to decide whether it's forbidden, or just good hygiene, to carry
home a few gleaming bits.
People, placed in Western settings, will surprise you. When Jabbar
shows up for gatherings of the Single-Action Shooting Society, where
19th century attire is preferred, his handle is Trinidad Slim.
Meanwhile, since 1997, Bonfire, 61, has climbed each of the 276
Southern California mountains over 5,000 feet - not once, not twice,
but eight times.
For catchy phrases, you can't beat a geology textbook. For instance, if
you go looking for the steepest sand dune in Death Valley, you'll find
that it's right around 34 degrees, the "angle of repose" at which sand
slips downslope and finds a new equilibrium. And that calcified,
whitish-looking stone found on the walls of many caves - that's moon
milk. Drinking it is not recommended.
There's less real West out there than you think. In 70 or so years of
casting this territory into movie myth, film crews have abandoned props
left and right. That gorgeous old log cabin near the entrance to Ghost
Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico? Left over from a "City Slickers" shoot.
That handsome old Indian rock art near Barker Dam in Joshua Tree
National Park? Rangers say it's fake, put there more than 40 years ago
by Disney TV crew members who didn't think the original markings showed
up well enough. If we're not careful, our imagined history is going to
blot out the genuine article.
Washington needs reminding that This Land Is Our Land. If citizens'
groups don't rise up, the federal government is going to push ahead
with plans to make us pay more and more for access to land we already
own. Under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that was signed
into law last year, the Forest Service and a handful of other agencies
have a 10-year authorization to bill us for stepping into all sorts of
priceless landscapes that used to be free.
And speaking of priceless landscapes: Forty-four years a Californian,
and I never found my way to Lake Tahoe until now. I guess it's not as
clear as it used to be, and those cheesy hotels near the south shore
don't exactly make a perfect gem setting, but I can't stop looking at
that blue water under those white slopes. In fact, I'm packing up my
lately learned lessons right now and finding a path to the water's icy
edge. I hear there's a beautiful spot down there where Huell Howser
once quoted Mark Twain.
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- Activism 
