Being excerpts from Rodney Miner’s travel journals.
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As promised, a few minutes after the citywide curfew lifted at 5 a.m., Zenon’s white Ford F-150 pickup pulled into our Miraflores driveway. I was anxious to go, packed and ready. I grabbed my toothbrush and bid farewell to the lifesize poster of the topless lady on the bathroom door, the señora’s gracious concession to the needs of the young men, who, like myself, spent a night or a week in her habitaciones. A fond besito on the cheek of the señora and we were on our way.
It was with a definite sense of relief that I watched dawn back-light the Andean foothills and gradually reveal the desert outskirts of Lima. The congestion, noise, brown air and electric energy of the giant city fell rapidly behind. The stress of having been a disoriented outsider wandering through a metropolis in turmoil started to ease.
Peru was suffering, Zenon told me, as we drove. The Sendero Luminoso guerrillas could threaten your life no matter where in the country you might be. He related then a story of the last time he had taken this same trip from Lima to Puno, and how he had come within a hair’s breadth of not surviving it.
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The locals called it el jet. It was no jet, though certainly reminiscent of one. A giant silver automobile, a 1970 Cadillac Eldorado, with ostentatious styling and tail fins. It was almost certainly the only one in El Salvador, and was absolutely incongruous in this impoverished setting.
The man who piloted el jet was equally notable. Randy-from-Texas was big, well over six feet, and he towered over the Salvadorans. His hat was tall and it was wide, a credit to cowboys everywhere. His voice was huge, cutting across the noise of San Salvador traffic from 100 feet away, and calling me over. His hands were meaty and callused, like those of a farmer, as he shook my hand and made the acquaintance of the only other obviously gringo person he had seen all week. He praised El Salvador, his newly adopted home, and spoke of the climate and the scenery, contrasting the warm greenery to the dry scrub of west Texas. He complemented the food. He evaluated the merits of women walking by and elbowed me with a guffaw. Oddly, he made no mention, and indeed, seemed somewhat less than fully aware that El Salvador was still in the throes of an unresolved civil war. Nor did he seem informed that travel outside the city was risky. But, before I managed to continue on my way he had wrung a promise from me that I would accompany him and his wife on a drive in the jet from the city to the beach the next day.
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The Black Mountain Range of western New Mexico is little visited. Few people know that an isolation created by sheer distance and very poor road access conceals from the wider public view a remarkable hidden world.
The interior of the Gila National Forest, which encompasses the Black Range, became in 1924 the world’s first officially designated “wilderness area”. This honor has not brought it fame. The Gila Wilderness hosts a few summer backpackers, a smattering of hunters in the fall and the occasional horse-packing string, but in numbers far below what would be encountered in any National Park of comparable size. Unsurprisingly, the majority of use is on the margins, with most visitors limiting their activity to the 25 campgrounds, recreation areas and picnic sites. For the adventurous few who shoulder their backpacks or straddle their horse and head out into the interior, however, ample award awaits.
Mile after mile, an amazing park-like landscape unfolds. It is a primeval forest of ponderosa pine, a climax forest, untouched by the hand of man, one that has come to long-term equilibrium with climate and natural forces such as fire and insects. Here, the forest is composed mostly of giant Pinus ponderosa, their boles rising smooth and branchless for a hundred feet, massive trunks glowing orange. Their green-needled canopies tower to a hundred and fifty feet and sometimes more. If you stick your nose up to the crevices in the bark of these golden giants and inhale deeply, the rich perfume of vanilla and butterscotch suffuses your senses.
These ‘pumpkins’, as the loggers call them, are “old growth”, most of them exceeding 300 years of age, predating the United States. It would make an ax-man cry to see them go unharvested. This amount of lumber on the landscape was not rare when the Europeans first came to these shores, but it is now virtually never seen, for the giant old growth trees are first to be cut. In the Gila, however, we can still see, touch and breathe what used to be.
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The men with the machine guns saw me the same moment that I noticed them. Even across the crowded chaos of the Bogota airport arrival, I, the lone blonde gringo, must have stood out to them, every bit as much as these armed soldados did to me. As I watched, they dismounted their lookout on the stairs and disappeared into the surging crowd. I returned my attention to baggage finding. Finally, my sole suitcase safely in hand, I turned to go. Armed men blocked my way. The automatic weapons were no longer slung across their shoulders, but were now on ‘low ready’, not exactly pointing at me, but not pointing away, either. “Venga usted”, they commanded, and motioned me toward a door in the back wall.
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The derailed train would not be back en operaciones for a week, we were told. Getting a public bus was our only affordable option for getting home to Puno from Cuzco. It would not be as cushy as el tren, but would get us back in time. As far as safety went, the route to Juliaca and Puno traversed none of the passes through the high Andes that regularly provided La Republica with copy for its sensationalist, brutal ‘Bus Plunge’ column, along with accompanying graphic photos. The geography was reassuring. What we didn’t know, though, when we bought our surprisingly cheap first class tickets, was the reason for their affordability. We soon learned.
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There is a reason that the Wind River Mountains are the least visited range in the 48 states, but you might not guess it.
Certainly, they are a long way from anywhere. Guarded to the north by the Absarokas, hemmed in to the west by Yellowstone, obscured to the southwest by the Gros Vent, and buffered to the southeast by the Red Desert of Wyoming, you won’t stumble over them; the Wind Rivers will only be encountered by those who go looking. Maybe, too, it could be that they don’t have the classic good looks of the pyramid-peaked rocky mountains of the artist, but instead possess blocky, flat-topped, unremarkable profiles—they don’t make great scenery.
These limitations on lovability are understandable, but there is another, more subtle reason these wild, rugged mountains are not enthusiastically embraced by humans. It was on a lovely summer’s day in early august that I learned the reason why.
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The Ozark hills still contain wildness. Surprisingly, some of the wildest areas are newly so.
Fifteen million acres of Missouri are forested. Eighty percent of this forest is privately owned and managed, while the Mark Twain National Forest manages in public trust about twenty percent of Missouri’s forests. The largest contiguous tracts of forest are in the Mark Twain, and included within its most extensive areas are seven designated wilderness areas. Wilderness areas are a federal designation, managed for non-commercial values, such as wildlife and water flows. Man’s machines do not enter.
Not anymore, anyway. None of these wilderness areas were “untouched by man” when first established. These are hardscrabble ridges and drainages in which settlers could not thrive, leading them eventually to abandon their homes and even entire communities, moving on to deep-soiled meadows and fertile floodplains elsewhere. Nature has reclaimed these areas over the last three quarters of a century; the action of erosion erasing roads, the force of roots and vines breaking apart foundations, and floods removing watermills and dams.
Today, citizens and the state of Missouri are willfully allowing nature to reassert itself in good measure, and not just in the designated wilderness areas. Black bears, once extirpated, again roam throughout the Ozarks, respecting no official boundaries. Mountain lions occasionally are sighted, as often on private land as public. Elk are reestablished after having been gone for a century. Wildness has been welcomed back to stay.