The Last Empty Places (46 page)

No one—at least no modern researcher—knows with certainty. But the tiny, dried corncobs scattered about the earthen floor under the arching cavern roof seemed a symbol of the answer.

I wondered if they had learned, seven hundred years ago, what we’re still learning today. I wondered if they had learned—so very long ago, in this fragile, arid environment, so easily depleted by too many people or too many animals using it too hard—what Aldo Leopold had learned here, too. That the natural world is so intimately interconnected. That you can’t change, or exploit, or deplete, or destroy one part of it without affecting the whole.

Not far from this spot, as a young man “full of trigger-itch,” Leopold shot wildly into the wolf pack and hit the mother, approaching
her in time to see the “fierce green fire” die in her eyes. He described, years later in the essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” just what he’d come to understand since that moment.

No one that I know of, before or since, has expressed so vividly and so gracefully and so succinctly as Leopold does in this passage the complex interrelatedness of the natural world and the all-too-common human ignorance of it. Here, in this passage, lay the seeds for Leopold’s final and most powerful rationale to explain the importance of wild places.

The Mogollon had carved thirteen moons at the cliff dwellings’ entrance. Seventy-five miles due north of this ancient Mogollon lunar calendar sat another kind of celestial observatory: the VLA. Twenty-seven radio telescope dishes, each weighing 230 tons, or about the weight of ten fully loaded semitrailers, were arrayed in a “Y” pattern on the Plains of San Agostin just north of the Gila Wilderness. The “Y” itself was twenty-six miles long, which is how it got the initials VLA—Very Large Array. It listens to the very farthest reaches of the universe.

It took us most of the day to drive there. Starting from Silver City, where we’d supped the night before on an exquisite posthike dinner at a restaurant called Shevek & Co. (Kobe tips, calamari piccata, veal scaloppine, lamb tagine), we looped far to the west and north on deserted Highway 180 to skirt the great roadless heart of the Gila Wilderness and Forest. Big, big empty country greeted us the whole way, rolling grasslands and dry hills, and in the distance on both sides, sometimes near, sometimes far, rose empty, bluish mountains. We were in Catron County—the largest and least populated in New Mexico.

I felt that sense of discovery again—that far beyond the homogeneous nodes and exit ramps and strip malls, lay this other life in America, one tied closely to our national identity, of America as a collection of self-possessed individuals creating an individual destiny in this vast land.

We had a late Sunday lunch at a roadside café in the tiny (population 387) county seat of Reserve, where the green chili stew sprang sweat from my forehead and sent tears rolling down my cheeks. The women at the family table next to ours were dark-haired and wore elegant
Sunday dresses. They carried themselves almost aristocratically, as if of old Spanish descent. Their men wore huge silver belt buckles.

Eventually the smaller highway joined U.S. 60 and we swung east, over the top of the big emptiness. A few cars and pickups passed us now. Suddenly the highway spilled out of low hills onto the Plains of San Agostin.

“There it is!” someone said.

The brownish high desert of the plain spread before us about twenty-five miles across. In the distance it finally washed against a breaking wave of scrambled mountains. But strung across that huge flat expanse was a perfectly symmetrical row of what looked like perfect half eggshells, spaced about a mile apart, each one in the row appearing smaller in the distance until they were so tiny and far away they disappeared, as if over the horizon. They pointed expectantly up to the northeast quadrant of the late-afternoon blue sky, all in precisely the same direction with a kind of surreal symmetry, as if they were some kind of alien beings taking orders from somewhere far beyond this world.

We drove a spur road a few miles to a cluster of hangars and headquarters buildings. The place felt deserted.
Twilight Zone
territory. A tame antelope stood passively beside the empty parking lot of the little visitors’ center. Inside, we gave ourselves the self-guided tour—a video, the exhibit room. It explained that the VLA, built in the late 1970s by the National Science Foundation and a consortium of universities, is far more powerful than normal optical telescopes because it listens to the broader spectrum of radio waves emitted from distant objects. With the dishes spread out as far as they are across the Plains of San Agostin, it is the equivalent of one giant dish twenty miles across. Here before us stood one of the most powerful listening tools on Earth.

We exited through the rear door and walked down a graveled path several hundred yards to the nearest dish itself. It was beautiful, in its own way, standing there in the last of the low, golden sunlight, this giant, cream-colored, perfect eggshell—as large as a baseball diamond, the exhibit inside had noted—propped high up on its spidery white scaffolding. A soft whirring emitted from electronic components suspended beneath the dish, where supercooled fluids kept their temperature at minus 427 degrees Fahrenheit. Faint radio waves emitted by objects in distant outer space hit the dish’s curve and bounced up to the
listening device suspended on a kind of tripod projecting from the center of the dish. They were amplified, and then processed in banks of computers in a two-story building a few hundred yards away. It had a balcony and large blank windows that overlooked the site. It looked deserted, too.

They’d chosen this spot on the Plains of San Agostin, a sign explained, because it was so distant from cities and sheltered by mountains from man-made electrical signals. It occurred to me that this was another definition of a blank spot.

Suddenly there was a low hum, startling us.

“Look!” Amy called, pointing up. “It’s moving!”

The giant dish was, in fact, shifting, slowly upward and to the right. It moved a few inches, and then it stopped.

We watched it for a minute or two. Then the low hum began again and the dish shifted a few more inches.

I began to figure out what was happening. The dish—all twenty-seven of them across the plain were no doubt moving in unison—was shifting position slightly every few minutes to compensate for the rotation of the earth and the earth’s movement around the sun. The dish’s movement kept it fixed on whatever distant spot in the universe that particular experiment was exploring.

On the wall of the visitors’ center auditorium, I’d seen a poster trumpeting one of the VLA’s achievements: “Astronomers Find Enormous Hole in the Universe.”

Discovered by scientists at the University of Minnesota using the twenty-seven dishes of the VLA, the hole in the universe measures nearly 1 billion light-years across.

“[It is] empty of normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen ‘dark matter.’”

They’d stumbled on a blank spot, too.

I
T ALL MADE SENSE
, in a strange way. Seventy miles to the south, across the Gila Wilderness, at the Cliff Dwellings cavern, we’d run our fingers over the rock-inscribed thirteen moons of the lunar cycle. Nothing had changed, really. The power and the mystery still lay there—out, out, in the heavens.

It lay here, too, in the big empty spaces. It lay on the great, silent
plain, as the last rays of the sun illuminated the line of dishes extending to the mountains on the horizon, all pointing silently upward. It lay in the silence of the wilderness, or in the rush of the river in the canyon, or in the howl of the wolf.

Leopold fought hard to preserve the wilderness. Over the years his stated rationale shifted, or became deeper and more complex. He knew, all along, that there were very good reasons—or rather deep needs—for it. Finally he argued in favor of wilderness on the basis of what we now call biodiversity: that ecosystems are so rich, and so complex, we can’t possibly understand them entirely, or presume to manage them, without the danger of losing some of their precious complexity. Some had to remain intact. Otherwise, how would we ever know what these ecosystems were?

In the end, not long before he died in 1948 at the age of sixty-one while fighting a brush fire near the Shack, Leopold had arrived at a simple formulation, an “ethic” that he had strived for his whole life. He managed to phrase it in two short sentences. The concept still guides us today. It is found near the end of his essay “The Land Ethic”:

What wilderness does—these blank spots, these empty places—is help us grasp the point that Leopold tried to make his whole life. It tells us to listen, and to observe, and to be patient. It hints at the depth of complexity of the natural world…far more complexity and richness than we can know, or even guess.

Most profoundly, it points up our own place within that complexity. Man has long been under the impression he has dominion over the earth. It says so in the Old Testament. For a short time, in a particular place, perhaps he does. But in the long run, and over the entire planet, and certainly beyond it, he doesn’t. Not even close.

When you are standing alone in a blank spot you know this intuitively, as in no other place. Whether you are a young Mogollon man on a vision quest, fasting for four days on a lonely mesa top, or in the middle of the Gila Wilderness at the bottom of a canyon listening to the river flow, you know that you don’t have dominion. Maybe Coronado learned it out here, too, in the Unknown Lands, and that’s what
finally caused him to abandon his quest for gold and empire, and turn back, chastened by the endless grass and sky that revealed the sheer vanity of the human enterprise.

Thoreau learned his place well while on Maine’s Mount Katahdin amid the cold, blowing clouds and the barren, ghostly cliffs, where, to his considerable surprise, his ego was blithely repelled—flicked away—by the mountain’s power: “…inhuman Nature has got him at a disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty.” John and William Bartram glimpsed a spirit in all living things while roaming the forests of Pennsylvania and the wilderness of the Southeast, bending down to examine curious petal-closing species like the tipitiwitchet. “I have queried,” wrote the senior Bartram, “whether there is not a portion of universal intellect diffused in all life.” A century and a half later, John Muir saw the entire forest as a way to connect with the divine—“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness”
²
—while Aldo Leopold, nearly another century after Muir, and a scientist by training, was humbled as he began to fathom the incredible complexity of entire wild ecosystems and made it his life’s work to articulate their intangible value.

The thinking about the wilds had evolved so far since the first European arrivals in the New World that it had almost inverted. Wilderness had transformed from a dark, Satanic stronghold that had to be subdued—crushed—to less of an actual place than a medium through which to grasp the complexity of life and touch something that approached the divine.

I hoped that, during these travels to the wilds of Maine, New Mexico, and beyond, Molly and Skyler had picked up some of the lessons that wilderness imparts. Almost surely they would live most of their lives—as I had, as almost all of us do—in some sort of urban or semi-rural setting where “nature” has been gentrified and we are sustained and connected to one another by fossil fuels extracted from beneath the earth’s surface and delivered via a vast network of pipes, wires, and electromagnetic waves.