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My dad parked the car on the shoulder of the washboard gravel road. We walked onto the wooden bridge over Redfish Lake Creek in the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho. We looked into a creek crammed with spawning redfish. The redfish–a type of sockeye salmon–had migrated 900 miles down the Columbia River system to the Pacific Ocean and back again, traveling more than 6,500 feet in elevation to do so, reaching the high lakes of the Salmon River watershed to spawn and die. The mountains that held the creek were carved from granite by the last Ice Age.
I witnessed this redfish migration many decades ago. In 1991 these fish were declared endangered. The next year only one male sockeye returned to Redfish Lake. Hearing of this, I despaired.
Sometimes it seems to me there are two kinds of people in the world: those for whom ‘the wild’ or simply other, non-human life forms are spiritually or emotionally necessary, and those for whom they are not. Well, maybe three – there is a group in between for whom non-human life forms are ‘resources’ whose main value is to sustain and enhance human life and economic activities. I am in the first category.
My parents were not environmentalists, nor were they rampaging exploiters. Nearly every summer vacation we took was in Idaho’s high mountain country. Both my parents had camped there as children – and they were of the World War II generation. What I learned from them in these places was to watch and enjoy, not to conquer or harvest. I learned to be quiet, to freeze when some animal – a lowly ‘fool hen’ or a deer or a snake – was nearby. My father often repeated two things: “The most dangerous animal in the forest is another human being,” and “the animals are more afraid of you than you are of them.”
When I grew up, I moved away, and I haven’t spent much time in the Idaho high country since, but it has remained my anchor – to use a cloying and tired cliché, my ‘happy place.’ When urban life, politics, career issues, health problems – whatever – became too much, I could always take my memory of that country out, hold it in my palm like a Faberge egg and be comforted by its beauty, saying to myself that as long as it was there, everything else would be alright. Not only for me, but for the planet. As long as there were places where trees and bears and badgers and salmon and bluebirds still existed, my world could be balanced.
In 2000 I wrote an article about the first federal report to predict the effects of climate change region by region in the United States. That report said the alpine ecosystems of the west, including the Sawtooths, would disappear, probably to be replaced by lower-elevation plants and animals adapted to the very dry conditions typical of the Northwest’s sagebrush deserts. Another blow.
For a long time news about the environmental has been dire, so my mental safety net has been fraying. It’s the price I pay for putting all my spiritual eggs in that one net, I guess. Yet I remain certain that any environmental salvation for the human species must also save our fellow creatures. I take comfort in the news that the redfish are being restored to the high Sawtooth lakes by a captive breeding program and the removal of small dams here and there, even if the efforts are slow and uncertain. And I know we can’t recapture the past. We can’t make things like they were before the human juggernaut grew big enough to affect global systems like climate. But we must do what we can. There may be billions of people for whom the loss of whole ecosystems matters only if supplies of their daily consumables are threatened.
But I am not one of them.
And as sad as I am to witness the passing of the post-glacial landscape that was the world when I was born, experiencing wild mountains and the creatures they sustain was a great gift, both from my parents and from the planet.
