More Thoughts: On Wildness and the Bitterroots

We've passed through the range of the Rocky Mountains called the Bitterroots, crossing Lolo pass and descending to Missoula, then riding south along the Bitterroot river towards its headwaters and the continental divide. From the valley floor we could finally take in the grandeur of the mountains, their forested flanks rising steeply from the farmlands at their feet to startling and craggy peaks, beneath whose overhanging lees patches of snow still cling. We could see the forest for the trees then, the broad and fierce wilderness through which we'd passed along the Lochsa river, never seeing until now these broken-knife summits, and the deep canyons that divide them, blue with haze and distance.

The mountains, in their austerity and what they hold waiting to be explored, had me thinking on wildness, and particularly on wolves. Grey wolves seem to be back in force in Idaho and Montana, and have also been recently returned to the endangered species list. It's a contentious issue, especially here in the Bitterroot Valley, where wilderness abuts so directly cattle grazing lands. Already we've met two people who represent the opposing sides, as it were: one who was quite happy the wolves were protected, and felt ranchers' claims of livestock loss were exaggerated, or were at any rate a small price to pay to have these important predators returned to the landscape; the other believed the protections were misguided, based on the personal accounts of his rancher friends, who say the wolves are making a deep impact on their business.

The latter believed that those who sought to protect the wolves had an image in mind of something cuddly and cute. He wanted to assure me that wolves were in fact vicious, did not kill only what they could eat, and fought savagely among one another over their prey though they'd worked together to take it down. If wolves do hunt for sport, then they share that with Americans. If they have been portrayed as gentle then it is as much propaganda as the billboard reading 'Idaho's #1 Poacher' beneath a snarling wolf. What I thought when looking at those mountains was that nature is ferocious. Wolves, and waters that carve out mountains, all savage. In fact, it is often what we admire about wild places, great vistas. We long to go among those peaks, into their steep gorges. If the wild waters had not cut them, if the savage forces of plates and magma had not upthrust them, these mountains would not be mountains; they would be a blank slate. It is the death of the stone between the peaks we love to see.

And here our wolves, the very symbol of ferocity, of wildness. The argument goes that we have emptied their habitat of their natural prey; now they prey on our livestock, whose meat powers me as I pedal on. Some say shoot the wolves, at least a few of them; though that calls up images of government hunts that cleared the wilds of their great predators, their great prey. At once, leaving them be, if the ranchers are right, may make ranching unprofitable. Ranchers at least have a chance at stewardship; factory farms are the opposite of stewardship.

Is there a middle ground? I think of wolves and their ferocity and am not afraid. I see another animal being itself. I try to be a pragmatic pantheist and see reason in being; the mountains are there to be mountains, the wolves, wolves. All trying to make their way and live on. Humans the same; our trouble is we have created permeable bubbles that appear organized within, chaos and wildness without. We have placed our expectations of order cheek to cheek with wildness. Nature is a fluid conversation between order and disorder, integration and dissolution, conflict and cooperation. Wildness arises in that fluidity; it will not be held at bay. I don't know the answer to the question of wolves in our midst. But, for me, a world with diminishing wildness is a world less worth living in.

Neale