Exactly. With the recent release of ChatGPT, immediately followed by variants from Google (Bard) and Microsoft (Bing), the world is abuzz with fears that such AIs may pose existential threat to humanity, even when they haven’t been given warbots to call home. How likely is that? Hint: the developers of the most advanced programs has asked the government to regulate AI companies before their creations go off the rails.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the United States (and the rest of the world) have confronted the availability of a new and terrible technology. President Yazzi is all too aware of the choices president Truman made at the end of World War II and the terrifying nuclear arms race that followed. Yazzi confronts the challenge head on, and recruits our hero to support an effort to avert an arms race with the Chinese that could have potentially catastrophic results. But unknown to both, another force to be reckoned with has plans of its own.

Soon, the world’s leading artificial intelligence and robotics experts find themselves in a dire situation that none could have imagined and perhaps no one can control. But then again, you’d expect nothing less.

Faithful Friends of Frank will recognize some old friends from prior books, as well as all the features you’ve come to expect if you’ve been paying attention (what type of pet will figure in the plot this time?) as well as plenty of Easter eggs (Spoiler Alert: what exactly is it about the names of the Cabinet members that sounds so familiar?)

So why wait any longer? The fun is waiting for you at Amazon, Apple, B&N, Google, Kobo, Smashwords, and wherever else eBooks are sold (paperbacks versions can be purchased at Amazon and ordered through your local bookstore). For a limited time, the eBook versions at all sites can be downloaded for free.

If you decide to give my newest book a read, please be a good Friend of Frank and post a review where you downloaded your copy (or at least give it a star rating). And while you’re at it, why don’t you recommend it to your 500 closest friends and colleagues as well. If you do, I’ll thank you – and so will Frank.

While definitions may seem simple, they beome powerful when used as instruments of public policy. In the legislative game, she who controls a definition has already won the first battle, and sometimes the war as well.

Here’s an example: what does (or should) the word “wilderness” mean?

Most of us would likely nod affirmatively at what the lexicographers at McGraw-Hill settled onwhen they added this entry to their dictionary:

Wilderness: An area of undeveloped land affected primarily by the forces of nature; an area where humans are visitors who do not remain. 

This is a contemporary definition, though, reflecting a modern appreciation of nature and a belief that such wilds as remain need protection if they are to continue to exist. A thousand years ago, perceptions were very different. Back then, wolves and bears roamed the breadth of Europe, and almost everyone there or anywhere else you might have in mind lived in isolated communities. In between were dark, forbidding forests. A wilderness then was a place of danger and fear, an area to be avoided if possible and passed through swiftly if not. In those times, the definition would look something like this:

Wilderness: An area between towns, usually uninhabited; a region devoid of humans and inhabited by wild beasts. Also called the Wilds.

As I write this, I am on a hiking and camping vacation in northwestern Nevada, one of the emptiest parts of the United States. Here the land is wide, windy and starkly beautiful, with much wildlife, no cultivation, and on any given day, only a handful of people present across hundreds of thousands of acres. The silence is enduring, unmarred even by the sound of a plane. But does that make it wilderness?

The answer depends, of course, on the definition. There may be precious few human beings here, but over a hundred years of white settler interventions, from overgrazing by sheep and cattle to the near eradication of the buffalo, have profoundly altered the terrain. Today this is as much a controlled landscape as is any farmland on the other side of the Mississippi. And, to be fair, Native Americans managed their environment as well, using fire to clear terrain and maintain it in ways favoring and attracting the game they relied on to survive.

Are these almost entirely empty lands then necessarily not wilderness? Again, it depends on who decides what that word means. I found a more accommodating definition that predates our modern usage of the word by more than two millennia:

Wilderness: (1.) Heb. midhbar, denoting not a barren desert but a district or region suitable for pasturing sheep and cattle (Psalms 65:12; Isaiah 42:11; Jeremiah. 23:10; Joel 1:19; 2:22)

For some, that definition might represent revealed truth. Bring on the herds!

But there are many other opinions, and gradations and distinctions within those opinions. This was brought home to me when I happened on one of the few ranchers that live here, the enlightened owner of twenty thousand acres of high, rugged mountains and broad, empty valleys. We had quite an interesting conversation and touched on several things that might be relevant to “wilderness-ness,” depending upon your point of view. I learned, for example, that sixteen of his bulls were shot dead this year and left where they fell, presumably by ecoterrorists bent on returning the land to its original state. Clearly, their definition would run something more like this:

Wilderness: Land that, together with its plant and animal communities, is in a state that has not been substantially modified by, and is remote from, the influences of European settlement or is capable of being restored to such a state, and is of sufficient size to make its maintenance in such a state feasible.

Whoever wantonly slaughtered those bulls had targeted their wrath inefficiently, though, as the rancher also informed me that he intends to spray his entire ranch with an herbicide to kill off the sage brush, after which he will burn his land every five years to keep that underbrush at bay. The goal? To revert his holdings to as close to their original state as possible. Further to the same end, he plans to fence in a large area of his ranch to keep his cattle out rather than in.

Even before this intervention, state wildlife officials estimate his land supports about seventy-five antelope, twenty-five mountain sheep and several mountain lions (all animals with little tolerance for human presence, and ones we normally associate with wild, isolated, natural habitats), not to mention lots of deer and many other types of wildlife as well. Most unusually for these parts, he hopes to share his land with more people, inviting them in as visitors. Clearly, to him, “wilderness” (assuming that’s a word he would use at all) has a more nuanced meaning, perhaps as follows:

Wilderness: An area of land that has been least modified by modern technological society; the most intact and undisturbed expanses of our remaining natural landscapes. 

Later I moved on to the Charles Sheldon Antelope Range, which has been closed to grazing for many decades. There I hoped to see something closer to the land as the first Mountain Men found it when they spread out across the west on the heels of Lewis and Clark. Instead, I saw more sage brush than ever, as well as countless juniper trees cut down and left to decay.

I learned the reason for these anomalies from the only people I met during the several days I hiked and camped in the Range: a fire marshal parked with his rig and crew on a bluff overlooking a wide valley, pre-positioned above the area an approaching thunderstorm was most likely to ignite with its lightning strikes. He told me that sagebrush provides excellent cover for sage grouse, deer and antelope (he was right – I repeatedly flushed deer and grouse as I hiked), as do felled trees, which also open up more area for the grasses that antelope graze upon. The Range, you see, is managed to maximize game production for hunters, as its name – not “Refuge” but “Range” – suggests with more than usual candor. As a result, the fires that would otherwise maintain a mix of plant (and therefore animal) life native to this location are suppressed so that only a more limited variety of (literally) targeted species can flourish.

Naturally, the wild horses that roam this state in their thousands are also unwelcome competitors for grass that could otherwise increase the antelope count. More than a third of the herd in the Range, some eight hundred sixty animals, are culled each year.

Doubtless, the wide and empty Range looks and feels very much like a wilderness to hunters, as in their lifetimes they will have witnessed nothing different in these parts. In other words, a place to make you feel like a good steward of our common natural heritage, provided you define a wilderness a bit more like this:

Wilderness: Land remaining in basically wild (i.e., undisturbed) condition, with few if any traces of human activities.

True, I expect you could count the structures on one hand that interrupt the five hundred seventy thousand haunting, empty acres of the Range. But the reality is still that this vast tract of land is being managed as deliberately as any pasture, albeit one almost as big as the State of Rhode Island.

So much for definitions of preference. On now to a definition with teeth and consequences.

In the United States there has been a legal definition of wilderness since 1964, and this formulation controls what types of most-wild landscapes will survive for us and our children to enjoy. It is with this statutory usage that the exact definition of “wilderness” becomes truly critical. And, inevitably, contentious as well. Sometimes bitterly so.

Definitions created for statutory and regulatory purposes rightly reflect the public goals they serve. For example, if preservation of natural species is the desired goal, criteria like sustainability become important, since islands of habitat must be of sufficient size to support the full complement of species that are historically native to the locale. Make a preserve too small, and the very plants and animals you most wish to protect may go locally extinct, no matter how scrupulously you protect that habitat. Here is one non-government definition that incorporates this concern in at least a general way (general, in that many species – such as panthers in Florida or jaguars in Arizona – may require a refuge orders of magnitude larger):

Wilderness: An area of land generally greater than 1000 hectares that predominantly retains its natural character and on which the impact of man is transitory and, in the long run, substantially unnoticeable.

On the other hand, if human enjoyment of wilderness is a goal, or if making critical decisions about what terrain is preserved and what is not, then these criteria must be included as well. Here is an example:

Wilderness: A part of our natural landscape that is sufficiently large and varied to constitute a more or less self-regulatory ecological unit, where human interference with the land, plants and animals is minimal, and where the beauty and character of the landscape has aesthetic, cultural or scientific significance.

What Congress adopted as a definition of wilderness, as with any other piece of legislation, represented a balancing of the demands of competing interest groups. Most difficult to reconcile was the ongoing struggle between those that wish to make economic use of public lands (typically people that live in proximity to the lands in question, but also global corporations) and those who wish to enjoy the same lands first-hand while on vacation, or who simply take comfort in knowing they are there, or vicariously appreciate them through books and documentaries (in the same way fans of space exploration follow missions avidly, but do not expect ever to board a space ship). As fate would have it, most public lands, and therefore the people who live near them, are mostly located in “Red” states, while the majority of the nature voyeurs and occasional visitors inhabit “Blue” ones, making the debate even more difficult and spirited than might otherwise be the case.

One source summarizes the definition eventually included in the Wilderness Act of 1964 as follows:

Wilderness: Areas designated by Congressional action under the 1964 Wilderness Act. Wilderness is defined as undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation. Wilderness areas are protected and managed to preserve their natural conditions, which generally appear to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature with the imprint of human activity substantially unnoticeable; have outstanding opportunities for solitude or for a primitive and confined type of recreation; including at least 5,000 acres or are of sufficient size to make practical their preservation, enjoyment, and use in an unimpaired condition; and may contain features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historic value as well as an ecological and geologic interest.

The Wilderness Act was indeed a great accomplishment, leading to the preservation of many priceless landscapes. But one (to me) regrettable result of the compromises required to achieve its passage is that federally protected wilderness land is very frequently leased for grazing purposes. Of all categories of public land, only national parks and monuments are off limits for leasing – national forests and all other types of federal land are fair game (with a few specific exceptions made for particular pieces of land) for grazing, logging and mining, subject to compliance with other relevant laws and regulations. As administrations change, wilderness areas and the extractive rights in them are added and subtracted, depending on the goals of the then-current administration. The Clinton administration, for example, barred construction of new access roads for logging and other purposes on certain lands. The George W. Bush reversed that rule, and the see-saw process of preservation and withdrawal of preservation continues unabated.

Given the profound effect grazing can have on ecosystems (and especially so in the dry areas where most federal land is found), this means even areas designated as wilderness will never look as they did in their original state, nor will they ever sustain the full richness of biodiversity that once existed but could otherwise often be restored today. Only in a national park or national monument may you see that type of landscape beginning to reemerge (Sequoia National Park is a splendid example).

But solitude is harder to achieve in many national parks, given the heavy usage most of these preserves receive and the non-wilderness infrastructure of roads, campgrounds and interpretive facilities constructed to support such heavy visitation. In other words, much of the landscape may be more faithful to the original ecosystem, but it is in other ways less truly wild.

So how much do definitions matter? At times, a great deal, because definitions are the essential and dispositive foundations upon which laws and regulations are based, determining (in this case) which precious resources will be preserved, and how, and what we and our children will be able to experience and enjoy throughout our lives.

August 23, 2005

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John McPhee (one of my favorite authors) once wrote a book called The Control of Nature. In this triptych portrayal of human folly, he recounts three attempts to contain overwhelming natural forces, highlighting our hubris in believing we are up to the challenge. One example he presents underscores the heroic character of the quest when a new volcano emerges on an isolated, Icelandic island. Rather than evacuate in despair, the inhabitants fight back, turning fire hoses on the advancing lava in an attempt to solidify it before it overwhelms their homes and the harbor essential to their survival. In another, he demonstrates the foolhardiness of those that build houses in California canyons periodically swept by flash floods hurling bus-sized boulders through whatever stands in their path. In the last, the mighty Mississippi bides its time, waiting for the rains that will once again allow it to chart its own course to the sea.

Nature isn’t always so powerful, though. Sometimes as docile a device as a cow can tame it.

This reality is driven home almost anywhere you travel out west. Consider my current location in Nevada, which may be the least inhabited part of the lower forty-eight states. In an area one hundred sixty by one hundred twenty miles can be found a total of twelve ranches. Period. No towns, nor even an intersection with a gas station. For that matter, not many crossroads at all, and those tracks that do intersect are dirt. Surely, this must be, by some definition, wilderness?

And yet not in any classic sense, nor even consistently within this same area. In the middle of those ranchlands  is the five hundred seventy-five thousand-acre Sheldon Antelope Refuge. But all this terrain is actively managed, starkly beautiful though it may seem.

This land is dry, lying as it does in the rain shadow of the Sierras. But when Charles Freemont traveled this on horseback on his journey of (white) discovery, the flowers and grass reached up to his knees. Today, it’s an arid expanse of sagebrush and cheat grass, with widely spaced juniper trees appearing only at the higher elevations. It’s still rich in some types of wildlife (on which more later) in current if not historical terms, and perhaps no more sparsely populated now than in the days before Columbus. But as with virtually every other acre of land in the West that doesn’t have crops or houses on it, these are grazed by cattle.

Seriously? Yes, and even where you might least expect it. I once wound my way up a mountain range in Colorado from the plains below, crossing to the other side above ten thousand five hundred feet. At the very apex of the pass, after climbing through thick trees for over 2,000 feet, I crossed a cattle grate.

A forest can tolerate the occasional browsing cow, but not so easily more arid landscapes. Much of the unfarmed, non-urban or suburban land in the western half of the country bears only such ground cover as cattle will not eat, with just enough grass in between to sustain the sparse herds. The result is that the American West today supports only those species that can survive on what cattle leave behind, or on a carnivorous diet. Ifthey are too successful, like wild horses, they are culled to leave more forage for livestock.

Human impact over the last hundred and fifty years has even affected its climate of these parts. The scrubby vegetation that survives transpires far less moisture into the atmosphere, and the bare earth spaces in between convert more solar energy into heat. So also, with the land itself, much of it no longer protected by grasses. Rains washed away soils that were meager to start with, and winds blew off much of the rest. Subsurface waters are in retreat, as more rain runs off than sinks in. And vast aquifers of “fossil” water, relics of the last ice age, are being pumped down to sustain distant cities.

Even where cattle do not graze, the terrain is often managed to maximize the number of “desirable” animals (e.g., antelope and sage hen, for hunting) and minimize the “undesirable” ones (e.g., wild horses) to improve hunting. As I hiked through the Sheldon Refuge, I passed hundreds of juniper trees cut not for firewood (they lay where they fell) but to make way for the sagebrush game birds favor as cover. And though there were no buildings to protect, I met a fire crew pre-positioned in the center of the Refuge because a thunderstorm was on the way. Why, I asked? Because burned over sagebrush takes a long time to recover. Without such management, the range might revert to a state more natural but less tailored to the needs of the handful of sportsmen that visit this remote place each year.

So if wilderness means, as the dictionaries tell us, “an area essentially undisturbed by human activity together with its naturally developed life community,” then little more wilderness remains in the western half of the country than there is virgin forest surviving in the eastern states. Which is to say, not much, because any area grazed before the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 by law remains open to grazing today. Thus it is that areas legally off limits to recreational vehicles remain riddled with dirt roads traveled by ranchers’ pickup trucks.

What of the rest of the hundreds of millions of acres of public land? By far and away the largest amount is owned by the Bureau of Land Management, the Forestry Service, and other government agencies, each of which officially or analogously operates under the slogan “Land of Many Uses.” Only National Parks, by law, are immune from grazing. Virtually all of what’s left is used, or potentially available, for ranching, mining, drilling and logging. The percentage of federal, state and privately conserved property not open to grazing is woefully small in contrast to public lands available for commercial use.

Of course, let him who abstains from eating meat cast the first stone, and that person is not me, although I rarely eat red meat. If we bar grazing from our own public lands but insist on still enjoying our burgers and steaks, we will only increase the despoliation of some other country’s landscape. All of which leaves us with choices to make, and very difficult ones, when Easterners (like me) want to walk in wilderness that others (the people who live here) want to graze or timber. The latter have little interest in being told where and how to do that, either, especially by folks back East.

Sadly, as with so many important issues today, what should be a subject for rational discussion has descended into a red state/blue state issue, with each successive administration pushing the laws in the direction it favors, and often reversing the initiatives of its predecessor. But if nature is defenseless, it is also patient. In the fullness of time, it will doubtless win the game. When it does, the definition of “wilderness” will become meaningless, with no other type of terrain to reference by comparison.

August 20, 2005

Since I wrote this piece, the issue of land use rights in the West has become more heated, leading even to armed clashes between local ranchers and federal marshals. Successive administrations of opposing views have reversed the actions of their predecessors, and a national consensus on this topic – as on so many others – appears more unreachable than ever before.

You can find the first post in this series here

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Native Americans roamed the Southwest for at least fourteen thousand years, and likely much longer. They were skilled at utilizing almost every natural resource at hand, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. They were particularly talented at creating flaked stone implements – spear points, knives, scrapers, and eventually arrowheads. In this part of the country, the most available and appropriate materials were usually also the most attractive. The archaeological record tells us that Native Americans visited the sources of the best materials for thousands of years and often traded what they collected there. But as they hunted and gathered their way across these arid landscapes, they also kept an eye out for good quality stone wherever it might be found. The result is that in most places you’d be hard pressed to find a square mile that isn’t graced by these elegant remnants of ancient workmanship.

The number of lithic scatters (the name used by archaeologists) in the Southwest must certainly be in the millions; I’ve personally found hundreds. Similar scatters exist throughout the country, but only in the Southwest, with its sparse vegetation, are so many in plain view. If you know what to look for, you’ll find them everywhere, reminders that what seems deserted today has been the home of countless inhabitants since long before the age of the pyramids.

Suitable materials for knapping (fabrication of stone tools) most often occur in the Southwest in the form of heavy cobbles the size of your fist or larger. On the outside, they look like avocadoes. But beneath this dull, weathered rind lies a shiny volcanic rock formed when silicate-rich magma cooled quickly, producing lithic material with an extremely fine-grained crystalline structure. It it is this feature that makes the cobbles so well suited for tool manufacture. Striking a cobble at just the right angle with another rock produces smaller pieces of stone with very sharp edges. So sharp, in fact, that obsidian flakes have been used as scalpels in surgery.

The reason for the ubiquity of these scatters is practical. Native Americans had no beasts of burden until the re-introduction of the horse by the Spanish. Depending on its interior structure, any cobble might yield many, a few, or perhaps no usable tools at all, providing ample incentive to turn large lumps of stone into smaller, lighter sizes and shapes able to be turned with assurance into a variety of tools.

If camp was nearby, a cobble might be reduced to a “core” by knocking off the weathered exterior to confirm quality and reduce bulk. Or the tool maker might go farther, striking off large, thin sections and then further reducing them to create oval shapes archaeologists call preforms. These much lighter elements were easily transported, either for trade, or for later transformation into tools.

When you discover broken chunks of smooth, colorful stone, you’ve discovered a quarry site where cores were mined. If instead it’s a feast of fine flakes you’ve round, it’s a campsite you’ve stumbled upon. Look carefully and you’ll often find a hammer stone as well: a dense round or oval stone with one end scarred and flattened by turning cobbles into more usable pieces of stone.

Still, you might ask, do you really mean millions of lithic scatters? Absolutely. Consider that at first hundreds, then thousands, and ultimately tens of thousands of individuals roamed the Southwest over for more than a hundred and forty centuries. Until a few millennia ago, all were hunter-gatherers (and many remained so), roaming across large areas of varying elevation to exploit sparse, seasonal resources. Each time a band camped, new tools were likely made, old ones sharpened, and broken ones turned into smaller tools. If you do the math – fourteen thousand years times tens of thousands of individuals times perhaps thirty campsites a year – it becomes clear the number of scatters to be found is enormous. And this leaves out one-night hunting party campsites and the quarry sites themselves.

I expect another factor explains why lithic scatter sites are so numerous. I call it the “knitting effect.”

Often enough, you may find a scatter of flakes that covers only a few square feet rather than a large area. My guess is that someone stopping for a rest might have opened up his leather pouch of preforms and knocked out a finished tool or two to while away the time, much as a knitter pulls out her needles and yarn when chatting with a friend. Several times I’ve sat on the only conveniently sized rock around, confident my hiking shoes were resting in the same exact spots as the sandaled feet of the ancient knapper responsible for the brilliant display of flakes surrounding my feet.

If you find pieces of stone (archaeologists call such lithic waste debitage) across a larger area, the likely interpretation is you’ve discovered a camp.

Quarry sites can be small or very large indeed, sometimes many acres in size. Often this occurs where erosion uncovered thousands, or even tens of thousands of cobbles, spread widely across a plain, perhaps the remnants of a long-evaporated lakebed. In such a place you’ll find almost endless amounts of shattered, multicolored stone, most pieces from a half to a couple to four inches in length. But few or no small flakes. You would search in vain for completed artifacts, because the task at hand in locations like these was to create cores and preforms. If some pieces of broken stone appear bright and fresh and others dull and blotchy, you’ve stumbled on a quarry site utilized over many thousands of years.

If you look carefully at the squared off end of a large flake, you will often see a bulge on the long side just below the break. It’s called a “bulb of percussion,” and marks the place where the energy imparted by a hand-held hammer stone dissipated. Look more closely and you might observe fine, concentric circular lines emanating from the top of the bulge, together resembling the striations on a seashell. Archaeologists call this a conchoidal fracture (deriving from the Greek word for a mussel shell). It’s the tell-tale sign of a knapping flake, as the same pattern almost never occurs naturally.

Where you find smaller bits of debitage you are looking at reduction flakes, removed from a larger piece to create a preform, or to turn a perform into a tool.

Flakes the size of your thumbnail are often produced by a different process, using a heavy billet cut from the base of an elk or mule deer antler rather than a stone. This softer material provides a greater degree of control as the delicacy of the process increases. Like the larger pieces of debitage, these are called percussion flakes, as they are struck off by forceful blows.

The tiniest bits of stone – the size of your little fingernail or smaller – you may find were likely derived through a different technique. They were again produced using a softer tool, like an antler tine, to press rather than strike small flakes off the cutting edge of the tool. If you look at a finely created artifact edge-on, you will see a barely zigzagging line created as a just such a minute flake was removed from first one side, and then the other. The broad faces of the finest and oldest artifacts display a pattern of tiny flake scars that evidences very fine and meticulous work indeed.

Figuring out where to hunt for quarry and habitation sites can provide an interesting focus when choosing a hiking route in the Southwest. And there’s more to find than flakes. I’ve discovered the ruins of many small pueblos and pit houses, and the closer you get to the Four Corners intersection of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, the more frequent, diverse and colorful the pieces of ancient, broken pottery become. You may also find broken basaltic manos and metates (used to grind corn and seeds into flour), beads, shell bracelets, and more.

But before you become too interested in that pursuit, know that almost all of the Southwest is “catch and release” territory: it’s perfectly acceptable to look for habitation sites, but keeping anything you find there is illegal almost everywhere. If you violate the rules, you run the risk of being caught (and not released).

The moral of the story is that, unless you’re willing to take nothing more than pictures of what you find, you might want to take up bird watching instead.

Which, by the way, is also great out here.

August 27, 2005

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Yesterday, I drove the hundred eighteen miles from Battle Mountain south to Austin, Nevada. Why? Because Austin (elevation 6,575, population 192) boasts its self-proclaimed status as the most isolated town in the lower forty-eight states. And indeed, a hundred miles, more or less, separates it from the closest towns at each of the cardinal points of the compass. In almost all that distance, I saw only an endless expanse of cheatgrass filling the wide valleys bisected by the gravel road I traveled. From inside the car on such a brilliant, blue-sky day, it looked beautiful, not unlike the proverbial amber waves of grain nodding in a lively breeze sweeping the valley. But I wasn’t  fooled.

Cheatgrass is anything but a welcome ground cover. It sprouts early in the year, sucking up all the moisture before browning out in early summer. In the process, it drives out the native grasses and forms vast, sterile monocultural deserts where little wildlife can survive, or livestock thrive.

Long before the monsoon rains of late summer arrive, these savannahs turn bone-dry, becoming fire hazards that ignite like a match at the touch of any random lighting strike. By the end of the modest thunderstorm I drove through on my way to Austin, I could make out five range fires spewing angry clouds of roiling, opalescent smoke skywards.

Encountered in person, cheatgrass is best understood in religious terms. If you are a Christian, think hair shirts and the mortification of the flesh by hermitic monks. If you are a Shiite, recall self-flagellation to commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali. If Buddhism is your creed, then cheatgrass is the very personification of Karma at work, since cheatgrass is an over-achieving invasive species of no discernible value that seized control after over-grazing left traditional grasslands vulnerable to usurpation.

Cheatgrass does not overtly resemble an infernal invention of the devil, but if there is a Satan, then cheatgrass is his work at its diabolical best: its simple design is excruciatingly effective at invoking words that must bring a smile to the Dark Lord’s lips.

To be more specific, a stem of cheatgrass looks much like a stunted stalk of wheat, culminating in a sparse spray of seeds, each with a fine strand at its end. If you look closely, you’ll discover that each seed ends in a tiny but wicked barb. Its purpose, as with many other types of seeds, is to attach itself to a passing animal (such as you), able to carry it to an appropriate place to germinate and perpetuate the species.

But these harmless-appearing ovules possess several unique characteristics that outclass the most noxious features of other barbed plant seeds, like cockleburs. True, cockleburs exhibit an almost magnetic attraction to the ears of cocker spaniels and possess a dervish-like power to twirl themselves into impenetrable cocoons of dog hair. But most hitchhiking seeds with an affinity for long-haired dogs and wool hiking socks generally travel peacefully and surrender gracefully when detected.

Not so with cheatgrass. It has achieved an almost parasitic ability to burrow, not unlike a shipworm, in a direction parallel to, rather than into, the surface of its victim. Once the slender shaft of a seed threads (and hides) itself between the inner and the outer layer of your sock, it works its sharp and painful tip deep into the tender flesh of your ankle.

Cheatgrass is insidious as well as diabolical. Even a short walk leaves your ankles a-fuzz with the tips of embedded cheatgrass seeds and afire with their mischief. Nothing to do then but sit down, take off your shoes and socks, turn the latter inside out and pluck your adversaries out one by one. And yet – and yet – when you lace up and resume your trek again, you will always find that the one seed that was making you most miserable is still there and hard at work.

The malign spirit of cheatgrass will also follow you home. Invariably there will be a few seeds still lurking in your socks like members of an Al Qaeda terror sleeper cell. Even after wearing those hose many times, some mysterious signal will activate one of these tiny terrorists, inspiring it to grimly emerge and gleefully implant itself in your ankle with evil zeal.

All in all, burning your socks after a trip to the Southwest is not an unreasonable idea. Besides protecting your ankles from further attack, the act might provide a certain catharsis, particularly if you believe, as some do, that plants have senses, perhaps (in this case) even the ability to feel agony equal to your own.

So it is that cowboy boots have a very serious purpose. If you don’t happen to own a pair of such manly footwear, then a cheaper alternative is to purchase a set of gaiters. Outfitters sell them for cross-country skiing to keep snow from accumulating on, and melting into, your lower legs. But they’re tough enough to foil cheatgrass as well. Basically, gaiters are an ankle wrap, with Velcro or snaps where their edges meet and a bit of bungee cord to pass under your boot ahead of the heel to prevent the sheath from hiking upwards, leaving your vulnerable legs defenseless.

I highly recommend you purchase a pair of gaiters if you plan to hike in the Southwest. In a pinch, aluminum foil and duct tape can provide equal, if somewhat bizarre looking, protection. That is, unless you’ve personally been guilty of introducing an invasive, foreign species. If that’s the case, you’ve got some serious atonement to do, and cheatgrass would serve that purpose nicely.

August 26, 2005

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August 25, 2005

In such a landscape, individual bristle cone pines less than fifteen feet tall stand out as sculpture, their wonderfully convoluted shapes bearing witness to centuries and even millennia of hardship and perseverance; bold rock faces challenge the best work of modern artists with multi-colored displays of lichens, patiently assembled and subtly metamorphosing over the decades; and ephemeral pools of limpid water hide below pour-offs in empty canyons, remnant memories of sudden storms, surrounded by the tracks of the wildlife they sustain.

Many years ago, when I briefly made stained glass windows for a living, I built quite a large commission depicting a Japanese garden. Before going to work on the design, I spent the better part of a week in the library (remember libraries?) absorbing the principles on which such works of landscape art are based. I’ve forgotten most of what I learned then but recall that classical Japanese gardens employ only a few stone shapes, pagoda designs, tree types, and gravel patterns, each of which has its own associated symbolism and all of which together inspire calm and contemplation. The results can be stunningly successful.

Happily, anyone can appreciate the exquisite beauty of each element of a Japanese garden, as well as the serenity and appeal of the whole with no knowledge of the symbolic meanings that lie behind the design.

I find the comparison to a Japanese garden to be inescapable wherever I travel in the Southwest. The landscape is a kaleidoscope of settings of charm and beauty not only in the broad sweep, but also in the finest details. I am camping as I write this at about 7000 feet, in one of the juniper/pinyon pine “pygmy forests” that are common at that altitude. Each tree stands at a respectful distance from its neighbors, and gnarled, twisted roots extend, octopus-like amid outcroppings of volcanic rock, pocked and contorted from erosion and graced by a perfect camouflage pattern of gray-green lichens. Occasionally, brilliant splashes of orange-red fire dot lichens electrify the somber faces of outcrops. Some species of lichens can live for 4,000 years. How old are these?

My campsite is on one of the innumerable sloping lifts that together comprise the Nevadan Basin and Range. Each is a plate of crust broken free from its neighbors, Western edge weighted down with accumulating sediments and Eastern aspect a bold, raised escarpment greeting the rising sun. The result is so pervasive that Clarence Dutton, a pioneering geologist of the Southwest, likened the myriad ranges to “an army of caterpillars marching towards Mexico.”

The example upon which I’ve made camp terminates in a sheer rock face a half a quarter mile away; its edge is gradually breaking away in great chunks, forming a boulder garden below. Approaching the edge requires a measure of mountain goat agility, deep fissures interrupting your path in the last hundred yards, and the surface weirdly eroded where weaker elements have been dissolved by rain.

On this irregular platform of rock, not only are lasting water and nutrients almost non-existent, but the winds of winter sweep with full, unbroken force as well. In the shallowest depressions and fissures grow miniature ferns and flowers; in those that are slightly larger, the most determined pinyon pines might attain a height of just five feet, though each will have a trunk more than ten inches thick at its base. Farther back, in a shallow pan of accumulated gravel and organic matter, an ancient juniper is a tangle of bleached-white, barkless trunks from which extends a single live branch, a narrow, sustaining band of living bark connecting it to the roots, and its flat, scaly greenery decorated with tiny teal-blue, berry-like cones.

Nighthawks, working overtime, swoop overhead in sharp, jaggy flights as they hunt insects. They are the arctic terns of arid places and make a frequent call that is something between a squeak and a beep! (The Audubon guide, trying its best, describes it as peet!) Platoons of pinyon jays play tag, flying from pine top to pine top, keeping in constant touch with their own indescribable call. Higher overhead, ravens fly past and vultures spiral high in the warm updrafts spawned by the dark, volcanic rock.

Places like these are a photographer’s paradise, as are millions of acres of desert, crag, canyon, and alpine meadow throughout the Southwest.

To me, the deeper meaning of these natural Japanese gardens is that they are precious, crying out to survive. If I were a writer of inspirational literature, I might strive to find more metaphors in the determined struggle of these ancient trees in the face of the unstoppable might of nature. But such window dressing should not be necessary. The importance of ensuring such scenes survive to sustain the lives of our grandchildren should be evident to anyone whose own existence has been enriched by their presence.

You can find the first post in this series here

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Each night of this trip I’ve picked up a book as twilight began to gather after a day of hiking, thinking I’d relax and read for an hour. And each time, within a few minutes I’ve invariably set the book aside, and simply watched and listened as the colors of the setting sun took control of the horizon and metamorphosed it through  subtly transposing changes as, all the while, the birds flew and called, the breeze faded, insects hummed and buzzed, the light faded, the planets and then the stars emerged, and finally the moon asserted its cool, white dominance over sky and earth alike.

It’s a performance that can’t be equaled by anything else on earth, until the same time the next day.

One night, I camped by a small lake in the Sheldon Antelope Range in Nevada. Although the landscape was arid and sere, it had been an unusually wet spring, and water was still draining out of the vast highlands into the handful of streams that remained. All was dry and brown to within inches of the water of the lake, but at intervals in the shallows were beds of tall, vividly green rushes. Waterfowl of many types splashed and called across the lake – moor hens, ruddy ducks, willets, yellow eyes, and others too far off to identify as they sailed in squadrons across the water. Overhead, nighthawks dived and squeaked their peculiar call while moor hens grunted in the rushes and huge thunderheads rose in the distance, catching the fire of the sunset, far enough away for me to appreciate their towering majesty, but not close enough for me to hear their thunder.

Another night, I camped by a tiny stream in a high meadow in one of the scores of mountain ranges that divide the broad valleys of Nevada from Northeast  to Southwest like the folds of a rumpled tablecloth. The stream was barely more than a foot wide at the riffles that separated its pools, which themselves were never broader than five feet, but the music of moving water in arid terrain has a magnified charm all its own. As the twilight gathered, I periodically heard the improbably loud splash of a trout taking a fly in the small pool a few feet from where I lay watching the stars emerge.

Two nights ago, I looked away from the sunset and saw orange and crimson draperies descending from the clouds, ending raggedly halfway to the ground. They looked for all the world like the northern lights, but in fact were virga – sheets of rain that fall towards earth but evaporate in the dry air before they reach their gravitational destination – their droplets prismatically capturing and transmitting the fire of the sunset.

Last night, the shooting stars came out early and often.

Now two weeks into this particular desert journey, I would have expected I would be returning to my book for diversion, but strangely that has not happened, perhaps because I know that all too soon, I will not be able to snap my fingers and return.

August 25, 2005

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All told, Nevada comprises more than seventy million acres, sixty million of which are federal, state or local public lands. Fifty million of those acres are owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management (the BLM).

All that emptiness draws me like a magnet.

“Public Land,” though, doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere. In Nevada, it means you’ve got almost all those millions of acres to choose from when you’re looking for a place to wander during the day and unroll your sleeping bag at night. The landscape may be a bit repetitive, it’s true, but on the other hand no one puts up signs that say they’ll shoot you if you set foot on the public land on which they’ve leased grazing rights, as they do a couple states over in New Mexico. Some of those renters probably even mean it. As one sign mockingly phrased it, “It’s not worth your life to find out what’s at the end of this road.”

True, the BLM land in Nevada, like BLM land everywhere, is mostly all rented out to ranchers (much of the rest has been leased to copper, lead, silver and gold mining operations, mostly now inoperative). But these arid lands can only support a few head of cattle per square mile, so you won’t see many of plodding devourers of sparse vegetation, though their impact on the habitat is harsh. What you will see are wild horses, pronghorn antelope, cotton tail and jack rabbits, vultures, magpies, ravens, golden eagles (if you’re lucky), shrikes, kites, hawks, and lots of Edward Abbey’s anonymous “little grey birds.”

About forty graveled miles north of Gerlach, I finally (remember? No jeep trails) saw a likely looking dirt track ducking across a ditch on the west side of the road. Not long after, it petered out in a small but welcoming patch of tall grass, centered by a rush-edged spring and surrounded by soaring sage and grass covered mountains. With no rain or bugs to worry about, making camp takes as long as unrolling your sleeping pad and bag.

It’s very easy to do nothing in a place like this except watch the light change as the day turns to night. The silence is palpable. For hours (and days, for that matter) you can hear nothing other than the chirp of an occasional bird. When there are no clouds at sunset to the west to turn crimson and purple, a performance of equal grandeur can be found in the opposite direction, where the enlivening alpenglow sets the mountains afire in yellow, tempering to gold on its way to lavender.

When at last the sun is ready to depart, the shadows of the mountains it has slipped behind chase the glow of their eastern companions higher and higher before extinguished them at last at their crests, like the flames of candles. The little grey birds twitter until the light goes, and then they stop.

The insects take over then, as the temperature drops swiftly from the nineties into the fifties, and the darkening sky comes alive once more. First, with nighthawks feasting on the insects, and then with all the glories of the celestial sphere. First the planets reveal themselves, ghosting mysteriously into view, followed by the stars, eventually filling the sky more fully than you can imagine until you’ve been far away from city lights on a clear night at a high altitude. At last, the trilling of the insects subsides, and the silence is complete.

You want to be a light sleeper on a night like this (helpful hint: drink a couple of beers before retiring), waking, as I did, every few hours to keep up with the show, watching as the big dipper and Venus set and were replaced by Orion and Saturn, each blazing like nothing you can imagine from within a city’s glow, wheeling majestically and timelessly overhead along the Milky Way.

On this crystalline night, nothing around me moved, and all was still except, towards dawn, for the gentle snort of a wild horse, come to drink at the spring a few yards away, and then catching my scent. But for that single note of surprise I would have been unaware of its visit. That, and the two hoofprints I found on rising, small saucers of shining water in the muddy margin of the spring.

August 18, 2005

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If you consult an on-line map of Nevada, you’ll see that its upper left quarter is bounded on the south by Interstate 80 and on the east by Route 140. And inside that box, nothing, unless you keep zooming in. Eventually, you’ll find just a few more roads. If you were to turn on to any of them you would almost certainly find yourself driving on gravel at best, and rutted clay or deep, car-trapping sand at worst.

Leaving aside for the moment why you might wish to, let’s assume you’ve arrived in Reno with the object of visiting this consummately empty landscape. Thirty-four miles east of the capital of Nevada, you’ll want to turn north on state route 447 at the town of Fernley; the road will be paved there but will eventually surrender that extravagance in favor of gravel. When it does, go light on the gas. Otherwise, one of those sharp pieces of crushed stonewill eventually work its way up between your tire treads, leaving you changing a tire by the side of the road. But never mind, in only seventy-eight more miles you’ll reach your destination, the only town within a similar distance in any direction.

Back in 2005, Gerlach boasted a cosmopolitan four hundred fifty citizens. Or, as one guide summarized it:

Welcome to Gerlach, Nevada (pop. 450). In this thriving metropolis you will find one elementary school, one high school, one post office, one propane distributor, one gas station, one motel, 3 bars and that’s it.

Since then, the population has dwindled to a mere hundred and seven. But that’s enough to make Gerlach the hub of an area the size of Connecticut with only a handful of isolated ranches scattered like buckshot across the arid terrain.

When you arrive, you’ll want to gas up, and (if you didn’t heed my hard-earned advice above) have that tire repaired. When I did the same back in 2005, that meant stopping at Bruno’s Texaco. Bruno is obviously the local commercial baron, with an empire that includes a multi-purpose emporium called Bruno’s Country Club. In the back of the gas station, I found a photo tacked to the wall. In that photo, the owner was holding up the head of a mountain sheep with more than a full 360-degree curl of horn. Far behind and below the pictured hunter I could see Gerlach. Probably Bruno’s Texaco as well, if I’d looked hard enough. You have to be pretty isolated to shoot a mountain sheep in your own extended back yard.

All that isolation changes once a year, when the Burning Man countercultural festival brings tens of thousands of folks out into Black Rock Desert, one of the endless alkali lake beds that firm up after the snow melt sinks into the playa and the temperatures climb through the roof, spinning dust devils aimlessly off into the middle distance. Once, these lakebeds were part of an enormous, post-glacial sea. Only Pyramid Lake remains today, fifty miles to the south, with its impossibly blue waters and surreal flocks of white pelicans interrupting the earth tones of the desert stretching away into infinite distance.

Although I was not aware of it at the time, the advent of the Burning Man festival was nigh, and the hustle and bustle that would attend that transformation was just kicking off. The way I described it in The Lafayette Campaign was pretty much what it looked like that day in August:

Temporarily there was more to Gerlach, because the Festival was about to begin. Spread along the roadside and in the parking lots of the few dusty buildings that together comprised downtown Gerlach was a line of brightly hued, open wall tents selling water, food, balloons, happy face condoms, mountain bicycles, and almost anything else that you might (or might not) expect a festival-goer to want or need. Colorful pennants fluttered in the breeze above a throng that would blend in well in Key West on New Year’s Eve, only wearing even fewer clothes.

Less frequently, Gerlach has garnered fleeting fame when new daredevils (for who knows what reason) set their sights on breaking the land speed record, hurtling in fighter jet engine-powered – and even rocket-powered – wheeled missiles across a landscape that must be pool-table smooth and devoid of the smallest stone to protect these gargantuan, screaming suicide sleds from cartwheeling into a disintegrating cloud of shrapnel. Decades ago, when Craig Breedlove was blowing out the old records, these time trails were held on the Bonneville Salt Flats. When unexpected rains rendered that site soggy, the effort was moved to Black Rock Desert and stayed there, culminating in the triumph of a British team in 1997, when, for the first time, a vehicle without wings broke the speed of sound, the driver strapped into a tiny cockpit dwarfed by the two enormous jet engines it was sandwiched between.

But the rocket racing days are gone, at least for now. In their place, there is Burning Man, and at the time of my arrival the big event was only a few days away; as I motored slowly along commercial advance teams were setting up their tents alongside of what passes in Gerlach for a main street. A few miles outside of town on my way north the road briefly touched on the edge of the great salt flat, silent and waiting for the emergence of a sprawling, ephemeral city that would disappear just as suddenly a week hence, leaving nothing behind but the ashes of a giant, wooden, conflagrated colossus.

Then, up ahead, I saw a pillar of dust climbing into the sky. At it’s base, the dust boiled up and sprayed off to the side. I slowed down to better see what might be speeding so forcefully towards Gerlach. Soon, the blunt muzzle of a tractor trailer became visible, and then not one but three juggernauts were upon me, each with a full load.

To my surprise, the trucks crossed my lane and hurtled out onto the playa, raising a storm of white alkali dust that mushroomed and swirled high up into the air. As the caravan thundered off into the heat-shimmering void of the salt flat, I craned my neck to see what it was that needed to be delivered to the middle of an alkali lake before a temporary city could rise.

The answer, of course, was obvious. Each truck was stacked five wide and two deep with Porta-Potties in most of the colors of the rainbow.

The time for Burning Man had clearly come again.

August 17, 2005

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Fifteen years ago, I started a series of essays I posted to my “daytime job” blog. Over the next four years, that series grew to a total of forty-three essays, each with a nature focus, and usually with a separate message as well. I called that series, Not Here but There: A Wilderness Journal, because the subject matter diverged significantly from the technology focus of my other blog. During those years I took great pleasure in conceiving and then executing those essays. Here, I thought, lay my future as an avocational author.

Then, one day while walking our dog in a sleet storm, an idea came to me that turned into The Alexandria Project, and my writing focus was hijacked by a conflicted but increasingly endearing companion named Frank.

With a few exceptions, those early essays were inspired by my solo, back country roaming across the American West, and particularly the Southwest. I’ve spent two to four weeks hiking and camping there every year for the last several decades. In other words, experiencing the same terrain Frank Adversego explored in the first two books, and returned to again in The Turing Test.

But even as Frank continued to monopolize by writing attention, I always thought that one day I should return to these essays, polish them up, and release them as a book. Not because they’re likely to attract much of a following, but because in these natural snapshots I sought to capture a landscape that is both vivid and subtle, magical and harsh, essential and endangered. And above all, profoundly meaningful to me.

As usual, I’ll post a new chapter each week. Loyal Friends of Frank will recognize several scenes they’ve read about before, like the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, where Frank had the good sense to camp in the same place I did when I was writing the chapter in which he was observed by a California Condor.

Assuming I follow this project through to completion, perhaps a few readers will be inspired to visit, and be similarly enchanted by, some of the wondrous places I’ve tried to capture and share. I’d like that.

So let’s get started, shall we?

*  *  *

Roots of Aimless Travel

August 16, 2005  This trip had its genesis four years ago, when I was flying home to Massachusetts from San Jose, California on a nearly empty flight in the wake of the collapse of the Internet bubble. Looking down half an hour into the flight, I saw the usual mountains and arid valleys of the southwest, but something was different: there were no jeep trails sketched across the vast landscape below. In most parts of the West, dusty, dirt tracks meander everywhere, snaking across deserts, zig-zagging up mountains and down. Braided scars that, once inscribed, persist for decades even in disuse.

For the next hundred miles, mountain range succeeded mountain range, like wind-blown waves angled southwest to northeast, almost unblemished by any evidence of human activity.

Wow, I thought, I’ve got to go there.

When I landed, I pulled out a map to trace the arc of the flight and saw I had transited Nevada: a state easy to forget because there is so little there most people experience beyond the city limits of Las Vegas. It’s one of the largest and emptiest places in the country, with an interior area larger than many Eastern states that is devoid of a single town. The great majority of the roads throughout the state are unpaved, and as often as not it’s a hundred miles or more between gas stations. Pro tip: whenever you see one, better fill up. Best to always keep at least ten gallons of water in your car as well in case you get stuck.

I’m a big fan of the West. I grew up in the camping, fishing and hiking back East, of necessity always following a path heading wherever the original bushwhacker thought I should want to go. Throughout most of the arid Southwest, that problem doesn’t exist. For as far as the eye can see in those parts, it’s treeless, and usually public land as well, although in some areas – like New Mexico – cattle ranching leaseholders don’t see it that way. In more enlightened areas, like Arizona, the more neighborly understanding is simply that you’ll remember to close the barbed wire fence gates behind you on your way through.

I distinctly remember when that revelation of limitless possibilities struck me during a month-long driving/camping trip I took with my brother in the summer of 1971, the year I graduated from high school. We flew to Denver, rented a car, and then roamed throughout Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California, stopping to camp and hike wherever we pleased, one day following the next without plan or purpose other than to see what we could see.

Partway through the journey we crossed the panhandle of Idaho, driving West across the Sawtooth Mountains, following the path of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Clearwater River on their joint path to the Pacific. I thought it was the most extravagantly beautiful place I’d ever seen: towering trees; cascading, impossibly clear water; and even more pristine air – a world in natural Technicolor. Of course, we stopped for the night to camp by the rollicking, crystalline river where it tumbled over boulders before gliding silently onward across honey-colored stones.

The next day we took a dirt road high up into the mountains the Clearwater divided, emerging at last above what we assumed was the altitude- induced tree line, but was instead the boundary of a vast, lethal fire some forty years before. When at last we reached the top, the mountains rose and fell in every direction, purpling as they marched off into the infinite distance, dotted with alpine lakes often fed by pocket glaciers surviving the short summer season.

Closer to hand, our surroundings resembled an endless Japanese garden: glacier-scoured, delicately lichened granite outcroppings contrasted pleasantly with the quilt of moss and wild flowers they interrupted; widely dispersed, spectral trunks of twisted trees rose up like the ghosts of lost Druids, sculpted across the decades by wind-driven snow and bleached to a clean, pure white by the harsh rays of the high-altitude sun, mute reminders of the forest fire that wiped the mountain tops clean.

That was when it struck me that from such a vantage point, I could take up my pack and walk for a week if I wished, anywhere I wanted to go, each direction as eligible and appealing as the next.

I promised myself there and then that one day I would return and do just that. Thirty years later I did come back. But by then the scene had vanished: the intervening years, perhaps accelerated by global warming, had been sufficient to permit the forest to reclaim the mountains. The endless alpine garden was gone.

By then, though, I had discovered the arid, trackless southwest, and already taken dozens of solitary journeys, short and long, each with no itinerary or destination to constrain me, and always with endless vistas of mountains, deserts, buttes and canyons to explore, making my own trails as I walked.

In this book I hope to share many of the wondrous places I have visited, together with some of the reflections they have inspired.

If you’d like to read future posts in this series, be sure to provide your email address in the upper right  corner of this page and check the “Email notice of blog entries” box.