Friday, 17 Jan 2003

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Writing for Grist about what I do on a daily basis has lead me to consider how different my life is from what I expected when I was a young, budding conservationist. I thought eventually my work would entail something like Marlin Perkins telling me to jump out of a boat and into the Amazon to wrestle a swimming anaconda. Nothing could be further from my current reality. Sometimes I look around, here in Washington, D.C., and ask myself (or anyone who will listen), “What am I doing here?”

My day begins on a train platform in suburban Virginia. During the 40-minute ride to Washington, I edit and revise work I did the night before. I don’t smell pine trees scenting the air at dawn, or hear the cry of the loon wavering among shadowed woods. I hear a man snoring and snorting in the seat next to me as he wheezes his way through a few more winks. I look around the crowded train — no elbowroom for Daniel Boone or any outdoorsman here.

At Union Station I catch a stream of humanity clop-clopping to their connections, briefcases slung over sagging shoulders. The subway platform is jammed shoulder to shoulder, the Red Line running late. As I ride down the escalator, the sight of all the disgruntled travelers reminds me of an 1890s-era photo I have at home of women in long dresses and men in black derbies waiting for a train. I see the subway platform as a photo viewed a hundred years from now. We are all the ghosts of the future, passing on minute by minute. The escalator dumps me among them.

Once I arrive at the National Parks Conservation Association headquarters, I drop off my coat and briefcase in my cube. No wafting breezes; the windows are sealed. No chatter of birds — just the chatter of other staffers. To escape, I have recourse to earphones, a computer that plays CDs, and the Meat Puppets, who will pretty much drown out anything.

At work, I attend a regular weekly meeting. We talk about upcoming projects. We discuss the ordering and buying of new NPCA lapel pins and who will get them. Minutiae, but someone has to do it; those lapel pins don’t create themselves. We talk about messaging, and how to express our concerns about parks more clearly to the public.

Later, I rush through lunch in the limited time between one meeting and another. Next comes an hour of discussion with board members about a potentially upcoming but maybe dead-in-the-water project. Too controversial. Maybe. Maybe not. Decision delayed. We think things through carefully because, as one of our mottoes says, there’s just too much to lose.

A phone call comes in for Communications Analyst Kate and me. Seems that someone in Congress is thinking about attacking the National Parks Conservation Association’s “Ten Most Endangered National Parks” program. Ah yes, the loyal opposition. My pulse quickens. Excitement. Challenge. Then an email arrives saying that another person in Congress, having seen our “Ten Most” list, is thinking about drafting a letter asking the appropriate people in the Bush administration why something isn’t being done to better protect national parks. One more level on which we’re making a difference. Terrific.

Then I go shopping for a cake. Who would have thought a zoology degree would lead to a cake hunt? But there is good reason. Kate, the “Ten Most” godmother, has put so much work into the project that I must reward her. Flowers won’t do the trick; she’s allergic. A potted plant? But that’s a gift that puts the recipient to work — watering, repotting, all that. A cake, just for Kate and her husband, seems the thing. Chocolate cake. Chocolate richer than J.P. Morgan. I hope she likes it, small token of appreciation that it is.

Walking back from the bakery I nearly get run over by a car at rush hour. Drivers are responding to traffic lights with a certain, shall we say, creativity. So much for youthful visions of drifting among bison herds and encountering grizzlies on mountain trails. I stop off at a drugstore to look for a copy of Outside magazine featuring a great article on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to caribou and grizzlies and, if the Bush administration gets its way, home-to-be of oil wells. I look all over the newsstand. Seems every magazine has a scantily clad woman on the cover. I don’t find Outside. So I go outside.

The air reeks of traffic fumes. I see a book in a store window, a photo collection with mountains on the cover. I stop to look. Imagining mountain air, I glance around the street. What a contrast there is between desire and reality: people clopping by, flaccid faces, gray buildings above, patch of gray sky.

How did I, a sincere conservationist, come to a daily diet of cubes, crowds, and air pollution? I think of Mount Logan in Glacier National Park, on a September day, snow in the air, no one around but my girlfriend and me, the mountain imperturbable and mysterious as it watches the world from the lofty height of the ages. I think of Olympic National Park: rain-dripping ferns crowding the forest floor, velvet mosses covering rock and fallen tree. These mosses and the dense undergrowth hush my footsteps, giving me a strange sense of invisibility, of being witness to a world that existed before humankind. The trees all around soar so high that, standing at the foot of a typical giant, I have to put my head back and back and back to see to the top. Ed Abbey once suggested that our forests are holier than our churches and should be treated accordingly. In Olympic, you can’t dispute that. There you see the handiwork of the force that created the universe, be it by chance or holy plan.

Thinking about the beautiful places preserved by national parks, what springs to my mind is a quote from Edith Wharton that I used as the epigraph for my first nonfiction book, The Endangered Kingdom. “What did it all mean,” she wrote, “that there should be this beauty, so ever-varying, so soul-sufficing, so complete, and face to face with it these people who one and all would gladly have exchanged it for any one of a hundred other things.” Such as an oil well.

Which tells me exactly why I am here in D.C., in a cube, in a sealed building — tells me so clearly that it doesn’t matter to me if I ever again wander a national park, lost among centuries-old trees, or if I ever see the Arctic coastal plain dense with caribou in summer coats. I am here so that those things will be there.

Still, I half-hope that when death comes for me I will be at some wild place that we who care have saved from those who would exchange it for any one of a hundred other things — that I will be far, far away, where no human will find me, crumpled and silent and still, and wolves will pick my bones clean.