We Got It All

Winter Solstice, 2008, 6:30 AM

    First thing I did was admire Venus rising to the east over the Sapphires, and give a nod to my man, Scorpio, on the far-eastern edge of the still-starlit sky, ready to fade with the coming sunrise, because it was winter and his time was still yet to come. Then, as Herman Melville would say, I fell to, chipping the ice off my son’s windshield out in the barnyard with a dull scraper so he could drive to school. The moon was a night away from being full and the snowy mountains around us were shining, huge and quiet. That’s not unusual, although our local pack of wolves sang to them last night up the canyon, a master choir singing from the gut of the Earth. But other than that, we were enjoying not paying attention.

    So we weren’t looking up, but suddenly from directly above us there was a bright flash, just out of Scorpio’s clawed reach. Lightning is the usual suspect around here, since such Big-Picture luminescence in the Northern Rockies is common in summer. But this was Winter.

    I thought of Pakistan and India, nuclear-tipped nations currently at each others' throats, of our voracious, never-ending wars in Iraq and Afganistan. I thought of Iran, nuclear-curious, and of George W. Bush and of the upcoming elections that would probably oust him if something really scary didn’t happen first, like planes crashing into tall buildings. Or something like that. Trust, it's hard to argue, is in short supply these days.

    Standing out there in the snowy barnyard in the exquisite dawn with my teenage son who would soon inherit this goddam mess we have bequethed, trying to explain a flash of light above us, I resisted, but the thought leapt forward anyways. 

    Nuclear war. 

    Of course I dialed it down a notch and thought that maybe it was just something gone haywire. Maybe just Global Warming. 

 “Did you see that?” I asked Daniel, who had been busy stuffing his guitar into the cold back seat.

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought it was lightning. I looked up and it was just like when lightning is flashing from behind a cloud at night. That bright and big.”

“Was there any red in it?” I asked incongruously. Daniel, being a kind person from the time he was a baby, considered this for a moment.

“No,” he said honestly. “I just saw bright. I was waiting for a boom. What do you think?”

I owe my son an answer to anything. That’s the deal I made him when he surprised us with his birth on the eve of the first Gulf War in 1990. So I considered the thing. The Kmart scraper hung idle in my numbing fist. Scorpio waited patiently, not quite ready to fade into morning. Global Warming? Wolves? Nuclear war? Certainly that last one should be the last for a father to mouth because if it's that, why bother? And once again, in the instant it took my synapses to jolt enough neurons with the information that I had actually had that thought, my synapses reversed course and passed back a new bit of information, a reasonable answer. 

“Star Wars.”

“Huh?”

“They were going shoot down a spy satellite,” I riffed. “Sometime soon, I think. I read it in the paper.”

“Oh,” Daniel, my teenager, said, and that was all he said. 

We stood another moment in the moonlight together, considering this. I purposefully lingered. Nothing happened. Nothing bad, anyways. I went back to scraping the windshield. 

“This scraper sucks,” I finally said. “You need a new one.”

“I didn’t know they could be better,” he said. 

I hugged him, told him to drive carefully and that I loved him, because that's always the least you can do for your kids.

Right now, 45% of my fellow citizens believe the Earth was created less than 10,000 years ago. An equal number don’t believe in Global Warming. This at a time when there is no serious disagreement within the scientific community about either evolution or human-caused climate change. The subject of peer-reviewed science--and not the peer-reviewed science itself--has devolved before my eyes to the level of partisan politics and, like Galileo, Copernicus or the vast multitude of historical unknowns who have known bullshit when they saw it, I haven’t been able to do a thing about it. Just like the Popes of Old, corporations who profit from unregulated greed define the subject of Science--not the Science itself--and a few hundred years is nothing in the big scheme of the evolution of human consciousness. It’s pretty simple then. We’re fucked.

 I wanted to write a book once about how weird the beginning of the 21^st Century was, how beautiful it was, how beautiful I hope it will be for those who stumble upon it in the future, how beautiful I know it is and still can be. I’ve been lucky, I would tell those future readers. Through circumstance I’ve been given the opportunity to tell you that luck is where you find it, and please don’t take this as trite. All I really want to say is that I hope you’re finding your luck, like I did mine.

The human brain is, if nothing else, a fascinating example of how nature can take a chain of anything—in our case the junction point of two neurons across which nerve impulses pass the news of the instant, be it pain or unexplained event—pour it into a dirty bag like the the one holding my rusty tire chains that live in the back of my pickup all Winter to honor a lifelong struggle to be impulsively adventurous, and create from the nondescript heap of crap the infinite patterns that, taken together, represent Life.

 There had just been a lightning flash in Scorpio's bedroom, a winter sky unimaginably-depthless and dark above my me and my teenage son that, without stretching possibilities too much, could have been the start of a nuclear war, and we had looked up.

Maybe times have always been this precarious for humans. It certainly seems so now. 

Steal This Song.........Jimmy Driftwood Did!

St. George and the Dragon

 

First of all, let's get one thing clear: Nobody can steal "The 8th of January". It's a fiddle tune that's been around since God invented spare ribs and is Public Domain even by the crooked rules of our crooked corporate music industry. I only posted this under that provocative title so that the ASCAP and BMI bots assigned to scanning social media in search of songsters to strong-arm protection money from (And believe me, they actually do exactly that with your Spotify fees!) would trip over it a few hundred times and increase my click-count. Sadly, I'm no Taylor Swift (see photo) and have no discernible fanbase that even a vigilant bot could discern. Therefore I predict that I will be ignored, never to be contacted by the bot bosses who use your music money (!#?) to send sugar-coated letters threatening legal action unless I knuckle under and pay their "modest" copyright fees. This turnip is not worth squeezing, they'll assess, because I'd only benefit if they reconsidered. My fame (or infamy in the case of politicians and other entertainers who use similar attention-getting methods) would soar and I'd get even more clicks. So I'm safe but, really, who knows? I may get enough recognition to actually make some money off Spotify and Pandora. So yes, it's a twisted, paranoia-based strategy I'm gaming, which, in the present state of the world, makes it Kafka-esque and therefore almost viable, if only in my own dreams, which suits me.

Speaking of "twisted", have you been lucky enough to have had your head in the sand this last month or have you, like the whole rest of the Human Race, been inflicted with the latest news from the Middle East? If you're one of the latter, and you're actually curious enough to crave a little context, you might appreciate this little rhyming history lesson (below) from someone who lived through it (me) written over 30 years ago about the first Gulf War in 1991. I know many of you had not even been born yet, so when words or phrases like "Iraq" or "Saddam Hussein" are mentioned your thoughts and prayers go straight to the second debacle perpetrated on the Cradle of Civilization by the Home of the Brave. Nobody talks about Desert Storm anymore, except the Dude, who inhabits a cult film that most of you who stumble on it will be Watching While Stoned (WWS) with no sense of context, nor any desire for one. Never mind then, Dudes, I'm gonna school you anyways, so your choices now are to quit reading or remain curious.

The first Gulf War was a big deal in relation to the perpetration of the current mess playing out before our eyes in Gaza and Israel. It was the first time the U.S. felt bully enough to kick it's "Vietnam Syndrome" in the pants (or some equally-sexy body part) and send hundreds of thousands of ground troops to invade another country...again. The Soviet Union had just disintegrated, which meant that corrupt corporate entities (see rant above😁) like the arms industry, needed new horizons to sell product. Sand dunes overseen by despots loomed large as attractive targets, and so it was that Iraq--located right next door to arch-enemy, Iran, as a bonus--was chosen for the roll-out. Dick (Darth) Cheney, Bush Sr.'s Secretary of Defense, hung catchy names on each phase of the "operation" to describe what U.S. forces would do to the people of the region: Desert Shield for the build-up in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, Desert Storm for the actual bloodletting, and Desert Penis (not its real name) for what the US did for the next decade to those poor folks in terms of tens of thousands of kids dying due to various blockades and punitive raids etc. etc. until the 2nd Iraq War. It's not much of a stretch to posit that most policy and conflict coming from the Mideast since 1991 have genetic markers dating their origins, mutations or re-occurances back to that Big Mistake. 

In the name of Context, then, I offer up this serving of Crow which, as most songsters in my age group know, is best eaten warm, which this Crow wasn't, which is why this song is so bitter, and remains so. For you whippersnappers who actually care, a few reference pointers: Stormin' Norman was the war handle given to Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of Coalition forces during the 1991 Gulf War. "Canons" refers to the old-timey cameras that still had clicking shutters, but whose images could still be projected out to the Universe in e-seconds, and is used here for its double-entendre effect (if you like such things, and if you don't, apologies). For deeper context, remember that during the Vietnam War, which occurred during my own tender youth, real-time war footage was shot with reel-type movie cameras and then overnight-air-mailed overseas to be shown on Walter Cronkite news program the next evening. This was seen as almost a new-age advance in tele-communications compared to the news reels shown in movie theaters during World War II. So, although journalists were still using hard copy for some of there war-image work, Desert Storm was the first, huge American conflict beamed into citizens' living rooms in near-real time.That was a big deal, although now it's taken as much for granted as Climate Change baking your grandkids to the golden crispness of Tater-Tots. Thus my ranting in this song about the unnaturalness of such willful sleepwalkings. 

So, that's my story, I'm sticking to it, and without further ado I present to you, straight from the shelves of Inscrutable Obscurity:

The Sands of Araby

Sung to the tune of “8^th of January”

(or Jimmy Driftwood’s “Battle of New Orleans”)

In 1991 we took a little cruise

Along with Stormin’ Norman to the nightly evening news

I didn’t leave my couch

And I’m wondering what for

A rube would wanna join the Army just to see a war

Chorus:

They aimed their Canons and the shutters started clickin’

Hurrah for the troops and for Ameriky

They shot the boys live as they gave Saddam a lickin’

In a second to your TV from the Sands of Araby.

We---ll, the photogenic generals they learned their lesson well

You gotta practice up your smilin’ if you got a war to sell

It’s spendy but it’s worth it if your image needs a-fixin’

You can sell a war to anyone if you don’t look like Nixon.

Chorus

The smart bombs rained for 40 days and nights

While the smart image-makers told us we were in the right

And it’s smart not to question all those holes in the sand

In a world where the bombs are gettin’ smarter than the men.

Chorus

They sold that war like a tube of pepsodent

They sold it like a car or like they do a president

There might a been some news, I’m just not sure where they hid it

We’re supposed to have a free press

Do ya wonder why they did it?

                                                                                        Words by Bill LaCroix

Nixon Rock Redux

 

Nixon Rock

Red River, Idaho

In the summer of 1980 I was working on a trail crew for the Elk City Ranger District in Central Idaho. After four days out on a hitch we would often travel up the Red River to the hot springs resort for a soak and a beer (or two). The road ran right next to Red River and so, along the way, we would always see Nixon, immortalized by geological forces several million years previous. 

The summer of 1980 was the height of the presidential election season between Carter and Reagan, and "Social Media" had not been invented yet. In fact, televised debates between presidential candidates were still something relatively-new, and so we were still blessed with the innocence of judging politicians on their actual behavior combined with facts...and geology.

Nixon was the worst thing I'd ever seen up to that time. He was a crook. Simple. He was ousted from office because of that. Also simple. And this rock was funny because it reminded us that, although progress was geologically-slow, it was fact-based and...simple. President is caught being a crook. President is ousted. Simple. And solid. Like rocks. Ha ha.

Around August we came in from a hitch in the rolling mountain country behind Elk City that should have been designated wilderness but was left out (and still is), and we sat down in the bunkhouse in the back of the ranger station for a beer and a televised presidential debate. Anyone who has come in from a few days out in the woods, away from cars and other worries, knows that when you "hit the asphalt", your senses are sharpened in proportion to how many days you've spent "out", and you're a bit less prone to the bullshit thrown at you by such things that our hyped-up society loves to throw, like the ubiquitous visual imagery we seem to have grown more and more addicted to over time. It was mere TV in those good old days, the flickering blue light, and I honestly don't remember the substance of the debate, and furthermore refuse to "wikipedia" it up for a synopsis. Let's just agree that it was bad enough. 

What always did stand out in my memory, though, was how bad Reagan's "performance" was. He was a joke, especially compared to Jimmie Carter's even, relatively-honest cadence. Reagan appeared--at least to my wilderness-altered state--to be disjointed and dishonest, and on full display for a nation full of TV heads to see! He was obviously pandering to peoples' base instincts for the sake of power. He was a demagogue, a bigot, and not a very good one at that. He was, unlike most rocks I've come to know, transparent, and I remember thinking distinctly, that there was no problem here. People don't want a crook for a president again. Geology will prevail. People will see right through this guy for what he is, and we will go out for another hitch into the mountains that will someday be declared the wilderness that it deserves to be, with all due protections as per the laws of the the Land, the same laws that we use to oust crooks from office (at least when they've been caught) and at least allow us to get a good night's sleep sometimes. 

After resting up for the weekend, we went out for another four-day hitch, and I didn't think anymore about the news. Why should I? The world I had landed in was beautiful, I was healthy and we slept out on the ground where cares washed off our skin with every breath of a breeze that swayed the tops of lodgepole tracing shadows in the stars. I was duly appreciative. 

Then we came back, hit the blacktop, and what I viscerally remember about our re-entry was the news awaiting us. Reagan had "won" the debate, had in fact, cleaned Carter's clock and was on a roll. This, of course, came from an already-corrupt mass media that would benefit greatly from a divisive president who would simultaneously "sell product" as a direct result of his divisiveness while giving them giant tax cuts, which I kind of knew already, but this was not what I remember thinking when I learned, in my wilderness-altered state, what had occurred in crazy TV world during my brief sojourn into the actual, sane one.

My distinct memory of what I thought is only two words long, and for all you visual-imagery-crazed fellow travelers of mine who are equally wondering WTF is going on in the 21st Century, I will write them down for you here: 

"Uh-oh." 

And I was right.

I took the picture that opens this post with my cell phone when I was passing through the Clearwater country last weekend on a foray to collect some additional insights into my book-in-progress, "What's  Bigger than the Land? The Life and Times of Stewart M. Brandborg". To say that Nixon and Reagan had a huge, negative effect on Brandy and his life's passion of "making democracy work" is a gross understatement. Nixon and Agnew sicced the IRS on Brandy's Wilderness Society (TWS) during their running battle with Brandy over the Alaska Pipeline, and this was ultimately what scared TWS into firing him as executive director in 1976. Brandy saw--and contributed to--the Nixonites getting kicked out of the halls of power--for a bit at least--but he had no such luck with Reagan. After he and his wife, AnnaVee, returned to the Bitterroot Valley in 1986, they fought Reaganism hard and well, mostly in the realm of forest-use and planning issues, but they and their allies were constantly being vilified by the local wing nuts-du-jour, who seemed, like Reagan, less and less attached to facts and more and more attached to hate-enhanced talk-show radio and the ever-more virulent social media pseudo-reality. The Brandborgs never gave up. In fact, they never let it bother them overmuch. It was just part of what you put up with when you stood up and did and said what's right. People have always been...well...people, they believed, and you had to deal with them on that level. Simple.

Yeah, we were all young once, and Nixon was bad enough, but he's just a rock in a river now and so will all of them be someday. Yes, Reagan was worse, trump is over the cliff and five decades is long enough to be stumbling around in the Dark Ages waiting for things to get bad enough for enough people to rise up. In a sane world snake oil salesmen would go broke, and so, by definition, it's not a sane world yet. But Nixon Rock is still funny, just on the face of what's been possible in the past and will be possible again soon. Brandy and AnnaVee would be tickled to see all the kids who have had the truth thrust upon them and, far from shrinking from it, are willing to act. 

And that truth? Without democracy, and all its associated righteous corollaries, we will perish from the Earth.

Simple.

On Buffalo and Non-Linear Western Reality Challenges

“What’s all this nostalgia about bison?” Gilles Stockton of the Montana Cattle Association opined recently in response to public outrage over the slaughter of one out of every four wild buffalo still existing on the planet within the unnaturally linear boundaries of their high-elevation (read: no grass in winter), Yellowstone Park Res. “I find the advocates for that to be incredibly selfish. They want somebody else to raise these bison in order to fulfill their fantasy. If you love the bison, go buy some land and raise some bison.”

.......O......kay.....then.....what's all this nostalgia about cowboys? I find the advocates for that to be incredibly selfish....too ....right?.........

Your welcome.

CorporateSpeak

Let’s think on our feet here. This is the real world and we need a level playing field. We have a track record and can't be distracted with bumps in the road. We need bargaining chips to pad our portfolios so let’s roll up our sleeves and look at the big picture. At the end of the day, everyone at the table is a stakeholder and we can make this a win-win situation if we just get everybody on board. We have to make being a team player a plus because consumers consume, which means there's no silver bullet in the free market of ideas other than being on the same page. So heads up! Meaningful dialogue is our target market.

Environmentalist

 

Selway Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho             

If I were to define myself with a six-syllable insult to the English language, I would not choose a word invented fifty years ago by some well-meaning activists who didn't consider the fact that people are story-based critters who hate to be be bored with long, silly words. This modern noun: "Environmentalist". It was born to be misused and abused like those other unfortunates hastily-invented by clever wordsmiths to describe other factoids and truisms. "Politically-correct" and "woke" come to mind. Handy handles to beat people who annoy you over the head with, if you're into that sort of thing. You should know by now that if you're not one of those, there are plenty of people who are and there's nothing left of snaky words like "environmentalist" anymore except for the warm and fuzzy Earth Day banner it has become, whipping north and south like a wet noodle, right or left, whichever way the foundation-money winds happen to be blowing that day.

If I were to choose a six syllable phrase to define my concern for the Land, I'd choose the handle that Montana writer, Rick Bass gave himself. I'd call myself a "human-fucking being".

Olaus Murie and the Brandborgs

 

I've posted this "piece of book" before on this site, but I'm feeling impulsive tonight, wanting to amplify an insight Stewart and Anna Vee Brandborg shared with me about Olaus Murie that may be of interest to any scholars and students of conservation history still out there who have survived the flames of neoliberal scorched-earth corporate revisionism (Whew! Did I just write that?!).

Long before I met the Brandborgs or knew who Olaus was, I had Olaus' "Animal Tracks" imbedded within my favorite, beat-up books. "Life on the Mississippi", "Grapes of Wrath", "Winter Wheat", "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Not bad for a Peterson field guide, I figured, but I never figured out how--or questioned why--such an odd accident of a classic within a meat-and-potatoes publishing scheme could have come about until I was privileged to bear witness to the following. Brandy and Anna Vee were enlightening individuals, simply put an as we march like lemmings off the next cliff of horrible news that seem to confine our choices from bad to worse, it's worth remembering that there were better times not to long ago when transformative policy was not only possible, but achieved.

We can do it again. Don't let 'em tell you different.

Making Democracy Work

 

Summer, 2012

AnnaVee's Kitchen

 

Stewart M. Brandborg, the last true activist to lead The Wilderness Society, maybe the oldest activist still fighting the Wild West’s crazy resource wars, maybe the last old-time activist left in America, was sitting in his motorized wheelchair telling me a story.

It was the mid 1950s, and his friend, the wildlife biologist, Olaus Murie, had come to Washington D.C. on a Greyhound bus from his cabin in Moose, Wyoming to testify before Congress on behalf of some critical conservation issue or other. Olaus was president of The Wilderness Society, a small organization on the cusp of blooming into its name, and the late fifties was the golden age of massive federal projects that were by design and definition bigger and more durable than the pyramids of ancient Egypt. 

Congress, like all dynasties, is a rarified club that attracts vulnerable people who accumulate more power than is healthy for humans to handle, and so become prone to the sufferings of pharaohs. These are diagnosable diseases, a timeless itches that have everlastingly tanked societies grown top-heavy, of would-be gods who worship themselves and the big and durable things they could command to be built in their names and then have those big things named after them. So, although Brandy couldn’t recall the exact nature of his friend’s visit when he picked him up at the bus station that day, it was probably a federal dam that Olaus had come to town to school Congress about. 

A long trip on a bus back then took some wind out of your sails, even if you were young, and especially when you were in your sixties and dealing with health issues, as Olaus was. So when the bus pulled into the station, Olaus, who had logged thousands of miles on foot and dogsled in the mountains of Alaska and Wyoming, took a walk around the block to stretch his legs while waiting for his ride. 

Olaus and Brandy had a lot in common. Both were westerners, uncomfortable in cities and physically-acclimated to living outdoors. Both were wildlife biologists with extensive experience “in the field”. Finally, and maybe most importantly, both came from that pioneer strain of Scandinavian stock that still populates the North-Central Minnesota plains, the farmers and merchants who came to those plains after they were seized from the Dakota people during the violent early years of America’s Civil War. 

It’s ironic that those lands were taken during the watch of no less a politician than Abraham Lincoln, who would seek to secure the blessings of liberty for immigrants fleeing tyrants in Europe and for people from Africa whom those Europeans enslaved, but couldn’t seek the same courtesies for the original inhabitants of the Land. True, there were sentimentalists among the abolitionists who yearned to save the savage with Christianity, none of which were words used by the Dakota people to describe themselves or their predicament. For his part, Lincoln used words that were also alien to the Dakota, to describe what his administration took from them, words like “frontier” and "wilderness". Given the radical strain of Swedes and Norwegians who ended up springing from that virgin sod turned upside-down, that’s a pretty fair definition of irony. But what could late-19^thcentury Scandinavian farmers fleeing decrepit, autocratic monarchies have known about what the Dakota People thought of their dear, beloved Land, or how they described it? 

Not much really, and so the farmers and merchants didn’t think about it much, or at least not at first, and that was the lay of the land when Olaus was born in 1889 along the Red River that defines the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota, to Norwegian immigrants and, four years later, when Brandy’s father, Guy (Big Brandy in much of this narrative) was born in Ottertail County, the next one over from the Muries, to Swedish stock.

By the mid-1950s, Brandy and Olaus were fellow Wilderness Society board members. Brandy’s day-job was Project Director for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), whose director, George Callison, saw potential in bringing “westerners” into the simmering national conservation stewpot, a pot that included the NWF as well as The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club, whose cooks were about to serve up the country’s first watershed, environmental victory against, significantly, a federal dam. The monster was to be located in Dinosaur National Monument at a remote stretch of the Green River called Echo Park and, given the success ratio the Bureau of Reclamation had had with the building of dams in the arid West it seemed like just another slam-dunk for the Bureau. Until the conservationists won, and then started looking for their next tasty recipe, one whose ingredients included an overarching national policy to declare all such remaining intact ecosystems off-limits to human exploitation—and especially to dams—so they wouldn’t have to wage draining battles for each and every one of them—and lose most of them because, after all, there’s never been enough money in the world of kindness to match the wealth of pharaohs. 

Callison began looking for a western conservationist, one with experience “in the field”, who might like to help him fight a dam or two. It so happened that this was exactly what Brandy was doing at that exact moment in conservation history. He was a young wildlife biologist working for Idaho Fish and Game in central Idaho when Callison's friend, Durward Allen, a renowned biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, came upon him skinning a mountain lion and examining its viscera along the Paradise Road in the Upper Selway of Idaho. Allen had just written his pioneering book “Our Wildlife Legacy” that would define wildlife conservation in this country for generations when he and Brandy met, and they would have some stove-warmed conversations later at the Paradise Guard Station just downriver from the skinning. Allen already knew Brandy as a young,  fellow-wildlife-biologist who had recently published the first detailed study on Mountain Goats, but in the evening at the guard station Allen also got an earful about his inborn belief in democracy (which he inherited from his father) and about how he was using it to rally the local people in fighting two massive dam projects that had been recently proposed to drown out vast swaths of Central Idaho’s primitive areas. Penny Cliffs was on the Middle Fork of the Clearwater and Bruces Eddy (Dworshak Dam) would plug the Clearwater’s North Fork. In an impressive juggling act, Brandy was fighting both of them at once while simultaneously working for a state agency known more for nepotism than for conservation in those days. But Allen quickly deciphered that Brandy was not only thoroughly-grounded on the land he worked within but had been groomed and primed for the task of prompting anachronistic fish and game departments to evolve into something more than jobs programs. Maybe he’d be interested in tackling some bigger fish. Maybe pharaohs. 

Brandy grew up in Grangeville, Idaho, and Hamilton, Montana, small farming and ranching communities perched on opposite edges of the vast, mountainous, heart of Idaho, undeveloped then and now, within which Brandy had hunted and fished as a boy and where Allen met him as an adult. He’d been a Forest Service lookout in his teens, a smoke chaser, timber cruiser and range surveyor. He’d studied mountain goats for several years during and after college. He was at once a wildlife biologist, a conservation activist, and the son of a “social forester” of the Gifford Pinchot mold. Finally, he was a westerner, and so, at some point after Allen got back to D.C., he brought Brandy to Callison’s attention. 

It was a novel idea, this seeking out of those who lived in the “field” and who could speak in eloquent counter-arguments to nominally-elected potentates openly pining for their own monogramed Eighth Wonder. Callison set his sights on enticing the young Brandborg family to come to Washington. 

It wasn’t long after the Brandborgs, Stewart, AnnaVee and their baby, Becky, had settled into the rhythms of D.C. that Howard Zahnizer, executive director of The Wilderness Society, noted similar potential in this big, young, talkative westerner. “Zahnie” took Brandy under his wing, drove him around town in his Cadillac Convertible (which impressed the young Brandborg as “the bee’s knees”) and tapped him to serve as a board member of the Wilderness Society, as a protégé and also as a taxi-driver for fellow conservationists needing rides to and from bus stations. So Brandy was not surprised when he showed up at the bus station and found Olaus waiting for him, holding a leaf. 

“It’s amazing,” he recalled Olaus saying. “How fine-veined they are, how they blow down the sidewalk in the wind as they do. How perfectly designed for their purpose they are.” 

AnnaVee was listening to this story from the open kitchen. She had been tolerating Brandy’s telling of it until he came to the part about the leaf. Then she quietly sidled up, which was how they split the duties of lifelong activism all those years in D.C. and then in Montana--evenly. In addition to being a wildlife rehabilitator and education advocate, she was Brandy’s fact-checker, Brandy taking up the airspace, AnnaVee underlying his narrative with the critical combination of introspection and accurate memory. 

“There are some things that you should know about Olaus, Sigurd Olson and Zahniser” she advised me in her soft voice that was every bit as earnest as Brandy’s louder one. 

“Zahnie was somebody that you just immediately loved. You just felt good in his presence. The same was true for Sig. You were glad to be there, and glad to have him with you. 

“Olaus was a little different sort of person. To me, sitting with him was like sitting next to Christ.”

 

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