Dear John:
Happy birthday!
I'll never meet you, but I feel I know you pretty well. I've followed you in your books up some of your trails. I've gone out of the city and up into the mountains and I've seen some of what you found up there.
Today especially I won't forget you. Sometimes you said you felt closer to absent friends when away even than when in your company, and sometimes I feel closer to you perhaps than I should.
I'm not alone, of course. Activists, botanists, conservationists, the makers of the national parks, nature lovers and poets and writers from around the world--everyone who knows the Sierras knows you, and many of them know the mountains because of you.
Even as a write, two more of your admirers are following your first great California walk, from San Francisco to the Sierras, the lucky bums.
I shall be quietly content for now to be what another of your admirers, Waldo Emerson, called "an unknown friend."
You always had a way of asking questions, John. Even before we had the words to describe some of your ideas, you asked us: why not?
"The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not compulsory recreation?" you wondered, back at the dawning of the age of the outdoor recreation industry. This concept has been translated, dully, into what American schoolkids call "p.e." but some traces of your insistence on beauty and health still remain, in our hikes and parks and wilderness parks. "How hard to pull or shake people out of town!" you reminded us, again and again, in a thousand ways. "Earthquakes cannot do it," nor even plagues."
It's no better now, John, I write this in a virtual reality almost complete devoid of matter, and yet it pulls us all out of the natural, indoors, away from what you loved most.
Most of all this past month, after reading a book by a mountain scientist, "The Weather Makers," I've been thinking about a question you asked about the moutanins that often has been raised by others again, from Michael Cohen in "The Pathless Way," to Frederick Turner in "Rediscovering America." First published in l938, in a notebook you wrote sixty years earlier, you asked:
"I often wonder what man will do with the mountains--that is, with their utilizable, destructible garments. Will he cut down all the trees to make ships and houses? If so, what will be the final and far upshot? Will human destructions like those of Nature--fire and flood and avalanche--work out a higher good, a finer beauty?"
You distinguish between the earth--the rocks--and the life upon the rocks (what scientists call the biosphere). Even at our worst, you remind us, we're not likely to greatly imperil the earth itself.
Touchingly, with an idealist's openness to fate, you assume that if we destroy a tree, we will get some use out of it.
John, I must tell you the truth. I believe you would want it. You always wanted to see everything possible to see; storms, the tops of mountains, trees waving wildly in the wind, oceans, bears, dead and alive--nothing terrestrial was ever foreign to you. You first great find was a rare lily in a Canadian swamp far far beyond the reach of the maps of the time. You would want to know.
"The final and far upshot" of the fate of the mountains at the moment is not good.
Somehow, I suspect this won't surprise you.
"That anyone would try to destroy such a place seems incredible," you wrote of the Hetch-Hetchy Valley, before San Francisco and the Congress drowned it under a reservoir. "but sad experience shows that there are people good enough and bad enough for anything."
Of mountains around the world today, Australian scientist Tim Flannery writes in The Weather Makers:
"Nothing in predictive climate science is more certain than the extinction of many of the world's mountain-dwelling species. We can even foretell which will be the first to go. This high degree of scientific certainty comes from three factors. First, the effect of rising temperatures on mountain habitats is easily calculated, and past adjustments in response to warming are well documented. Second, the conditions that many mountain-dwelling species can tolerate are known. And finally, as the climate warms, mountains species have nowhere to go but up, and the height of mountain peaks worldwide has been precisely ascertained. Given the rate of warming, we can calculate the time to extinction of most mountain-dwelling species." (Chapter 18)
Not only will we destroy the mortal "garments" of the mountains, John, but not for any reason, but out of sheer carelessness.
For example, the Canadian Forest Service reports that "the largest insect epidemic ever to infect North America" is devastating British Columbia and is expected to spread east and possibly south.
The Washington Post reports that lumber mills are running "flat-out" right now but as soon as the "beetlewood" runs out, the mills are expected to close, and the small towns around them degrade. The epidemic is firmly linked to what we call global warming.
We've put ourselves in the soup, John, and turned up the heat. The glaciers you found in California and Alaska; well, we've burned through a half-billion years of summers heating our houses and driving our smoky cars and trucks and busses and boats and planes. They're shrinking from our touch. We've changed the look of the earth, the magnitude of our forests, strewn lines of clouds in the sky and pollutants in the seas, and now, inevitably, we've changed our atmosphere too.
But as I say, perhaps you wouldn't be too surprised. Once, as a young man, your father had you chip a well through stone eighty feet down, only to have you hit a pocket of "choke-damp."
We call it carbon dioxide. It nearly killed you.
It's not doing us much good, even at a mere 380 parts per million, though I guess the plants like it.
But you always were one to look for practical solutions--even invented a bed that would put a late sleeper on his feet in the morning. We're inventing anew, as well, perhaps we'll be able to work it out. And certainly some people find ways to live in harmony with this earth for some of their lives.
But this much I know: As soon as you came out of that poisoned well, as soon as you got back on your feet, you set out walking and you didn't come back.
You wanted to see all you could see of this "grand show" of ours, and by God you did.
In your honor, I'm taking the dogs and anyone else around here who chooses to go, and I'm going out for a sunset walk, to see again the vast sweetness of this world.
"I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."
Happy 168th, John. I'll see you in the light between the mountains and the stars.
