If you look out the first small window in the front bedroom of our house, you can catch glimpses of Mount Si and the foothills of the Cascade Range between the houses across the street. It is an odd view, similar to looking out at the Grand Canyon through missing boards on a fence. But still, there are hints of the spectacular. The green forested mountains rise four thousand feet above the valley floor, broken here and there with bands of grey and brown rock so large the Native Tribes believed the cliffs were a fallen moon. The forests themselves are broken here and there with clearcuts like chunks of fur shaved out of a dog’s side.

Mount Si above the Snoqualmie River with clear cuts
in the distance.
From the City of North Bend Website. 2006.

The new clearcuts are brown and tan, zig-zagged with the cuts made for the logging truck roads. In the course of a few years these bare spots turn progressively greener as the saplings planted for the next harvest being to branch out. But, away from the clearcuts, on the higher elevations and farther back from the open mouths of the valleys lay forests so green in the right light they appear black.

These dark patches are ancient forests that sit on the other side of a not so imaginary line called the Alpine Lake Wilderness boundary. On one side of the line, there are bulldozers, logging, roads, cell phone towers, dollar menus and other essential elements of our Dear Nation. On the other side sits a place where the federal government said:

” the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The Wilderness Act, 1964.
So while people can take their backpacks and horses up into the hills among the ancient trees and poke around for a few days, it will remain extremely difficult to find chainsaws, espresso stands and ATMs. We have decided we will not improve the land. We will let it alone.

Now, as a father two I have discovered slowly and painfully that sometimes the best way to allow a child to grow is to get out of the way. Our two year old is a climber. You can expend enormous volumes of energy trying to prevent a two year old from falling during the course of her indoor alpine excursions and never see a single positive result.

For legal reasons, the following example is hypothetical:

If, you let the child fall (Warning: Only under the correct circumstances! Please consult chapter 17a of the parenthood manual and do not try this at home) she will rapidly learn that gravity happens to us all and maybe climbing up the lamp and sitting on the shade is not something she will repeat. Thus, by leaving her alone from time to time she may develop more successfully than if she was constantly badgered by an overprotective father. Hypothetically.

Wilderness designation for areas “untrammeled by man” seem to work in a similar manner. Like most Americans I live in an area that is characterized by rapid population growth and urban development. Admittedly, I have benefited from this rapid growth.

However, I am aware that the biological systems that were in place before my neighborhood was built most certainly did not benefit from the intervention of various bulldozers and carpenters. The creatures that lived in the forest where our house now rests are gone, regardless of how we have improved the value of the property and expanded the tax base.

 

High density development with forest remnants.
Vantage Point Photgraphy. 2006.

What we have done here is the ecological equivalent of a heavy duty carpet bombing campaign. For an original resident of the woods, this neighborhood of houses, streets, and driveways would be as unrecognizable to survivors as the first days after Verdun, Dresden, or Hiroshima. Like the hypothetical child, it has not benefited from our intense activity.

And so in a world where land and place is intensely modified on an increasingly wider scale, maybe some of the best things are the places we have decided not to improve. And if I have a moment, I can look out the first small window in the front bedroom and catch glimpses of the edges of forests where people like me are visitors who do not remain.