This week I lost a dear friend. A man who some thirty years ago became one of the most important mentors of my life - sparking much of my work as a nature writer, helping me set the rhythm for this long waltz through the world's last wild places. I was twenty-one when I first met Chuck Ebersole, in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, where he spent four years tutoring me in the arts of the interpretive naturalist. It was from him I learned to assemble stories from stray marks left in wet ground by claws and pads and hooves. It was from him I came to know the homes and habits of trees and rocks and plants. How life rises again in the wake of fire. How mountains are broken to bits and carried to sea by little more than drops of water turning into wedges of ice.  

Beyond all that, though, what Chuck did most for me was to confirm my fledgling notion that passion was a virtue. I'll never forget how, while in his late 50's, he'd stomp on the brakes of his 1977 government green Chevy Vega, swerve to the edge of the ditch and fling the car door open, then run off to pluck a seed head of some grass, or a flower blossom, or maybe a pine cone. Then, literally spitting with excitement, he'd set about describing some ingenious aspect of natural design: how the single, hairy stamen of a penstemon encouraged visiting bees to leave extra pollen on the flower's stigma; or maybe how certain lodgepole cones opened only in the presence of fire, thus laying down seeds of the future forest. At the end of such lessons he'd slap his knee with the palm of his hand, quite beside himself with how incredible it all was.

Where I grew up, in the corn and rust of the Midwest, my own enthusiasm for the natural world seemed to many odd at best, accepted as valuable only in the context of scientific pursuit. But although Chuck was all for science - was in fact quite driven by it - it was his unfettered sense of wonder that made him exceptional. His peculiar, and at times nearly delirious enthusiasm is what gave me the courage to keep feeding and watering my own sense of wonder, what kept me working to unearth a clearer understanding of what it means to live well in the world. 

Goodbye, old friend. I'll think of you often. Whenever the deep lavender of a penstemon catches my eye. Whenever a bluebird fluffs his feathers from the top rail of a log worm fence. And on those timeless summer afternoons in the wilderness when, rounding some nondescript stretch of trail in the dark of a lodgepole forest, I find myself grinning like a lunatic for no reason at all.

It's the first day of September, and I'm near the top of the high pass just south of home, on the road to Yellowstone. It's 33 degrees and snowing. Snowing fiercely, in fact - big sheets of hard flakes snapping back and forth in the wind. Of course whatever falls will melt away soon enough; autumn, after all, has plenty of warm breath still in its chest. Even so, standing here in this little blizzard I'm reminded how satisfying it is to have big sweeps of land like this that close down for much of the year, soon to be shut fast until the end of May to all but a few handfuls of hardy skiers.

In the New York Times this week was an op-ed titled Aw, Wilderness, in which writer Ted Stroll laments federal agencies not expanding access to wilderness, arguing that the ban on "mechanical transport" was never meant to stop people "from using light mechanical assistance [such as mountain biking and wind-powered skiing] that leaves no lasting trace." In addition, he scolds the Forest Service for not being more faithful at erecting signs in the backcountry, claiming it a major safety issue.

With regard to his first point, as much as I love to mountain bike, the truth is that it's not uncommon on shared trails to have ill-timed meetings on blind corners with horses (this is especially dangerous), not to mention surprise run-ins with day hikers and backpackers. But my objections go beyond that. The term "mechanical assistance" means devices created to propel us more effortlessly and/or more quickly across the landscape. Very handy, very fun. Yet both that lessening of effort, as well as the quickening of speed, have absolutely nothing to with the ninety year-long long flowering of heritage, ecology and desire that in 1964 gave birth to the Wilderness Act.

As for the issue of signage, across the thousands of miles of trails I've hiked there have certainly been times when I was frustrated by a missing or neglected sign. But wilderness was never supposed to be about having someone else keep me found. In most dictionaries the word "wilderness" has as one of its meanings "something bewildering," such as a landscape overwhelmingly vast. And let's face it. Signs can't get us even an inch closer to feelings like that.  

Here in the foothills of the northern Rockies, summer - while far from over - is beginning to wind down. Wild roses along the creek have hung their seeds. Along the edges of the woods harebell blooms are beginning to fade, leaving only the goldenweed to muster any sort of flash, its small, daisy-like flower heads looking fiercely yellow.

Just to the south, higher in the mountains, it's less a matter of summer slowing down than of coming to a screeching halt. On two different days last week, it snowed. Frequently, dawn now breaks over a tundra covered in frost - miles and miles of pincushion plants and loose scatters of arctic willow, wearing thin tissues of ice.

Some of my neighbors are feeling a little cheated by the fact that the last few months have been often wet and cool. Living this far north, it's hard to be robbed of the one time of year when you get to walk out into the afternoon and feel the sun deep in your bones. As for me I'm not so much bothered by it, happy to have dodged (at least so far) what earlier in the year had all the makings of a brutal fire season. If I do complain now and then it's only on certain mornings, when the temperature gets stuck in the lower 40's. Mornings when autumn seems impatient. When you can feel it out there somewhere, agitated, like somebody pacing. Like somebody on the shoulder of the road, anxious for a ride.

The news worth noting is that it's news at all. On Monday of this week, the main front page story of the New York Times focused on a team of scientists researching the idea that being outdoors, completely unplugged for a time, may have profound benefits for cultivating both attentiveness and creativity.

What they don't say is that the basic wisdom of disconnecting from excessive activity was planted long before cell phones and IPods, in the wake of the industrial era of the late nineteenth century. By the early 1900's such thinking had become part and parcel of a number of growing psychological and educational traditions, touted by academics from G. Stanley Hall to John Dewey. Later still, in the early 1990's, wilderness therapy researchers began documenting the striking benefits of quiet time in the outdoors for helping teens struggling with, among other things, attention deficit disorder.

True, we now have shiny new instruments with which we can see such shifts, tracking them as expressions of electrical activity in the brain. But beyond such whistles and bells, the thing most worth noting is that a major American newspaper has chosen as breaking news the merits of unplugging life now and then to head outside. Poet Robert Frost, it turns out, had it right: Most of the changes we think we see in society, he once remarked, are in fact just old truths, coming in and out of favor.

While the vast majority of my writing is meant as a celebration of the earth's last wild places, as I mentioned in my post of July 25^th - The Lessons of Loss - life on this planet simply can't be segregated into "things wild and safe," and "things at risk." Much of nature will not survive a careless society. And at the same time, much of humanity cannot survive in a severely compromised natural world.

Which brings me once again back to the topic of food. This time, to the rampant use of antibiotics in industrial livestock production. Many years ago producers discovered that adding small amounts of antibiotics to the food or water of confined sheep, cattle, chickens and hogs promoted faster growth. The practice seemed to offer the added benefit of protecting against many of the illnesses so easily spread in crowded confinement operations. But now we have a problem. By all indications, this heavy use of antibiotics (over half the antibiotics sold in America are used for livestock), is prompting the rapid evolution of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. What's more, the resistant strains that are appearing first in animals are likely connected to the growing problem of drug-resistant bacterial strains in humans. For example, recent studies of large hog confinement operations in Iowa found that not only more than 70% of the pigs, but over half the workers tested positive for a powerful staph infection known as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), currently responsible for more than 17,000 human deaths annually.

There are alternatives. Denmark, for instance, banned antibiotics to promote growth in livestock some twelve years ago, instead allowing their use only in treating animals that are actually sick. Use of the drugs has dropped more than 40%, while the industry seems to be doing just fine.

It's just one more opportunity to think about the notion of interdependence. One more chance to understand that what we do to the least things of this earth, we do to ourselves.

August slipped into Greater Yellowstone last night under a waning gibbous moon - the final act of full-blown summer in the high country. A time of blue sky mornings, heartbreakingly beautiful, pushing from the earth paintbrush and harebell blooms, turning the lupine flowers to seed. And on a great many afternoons, a time of spectacular thunderstorms, full of wonder and violence: Sheets of hail ripping through the aspen leaves. Creeks turning to mud. And high above the valley, spears of lightning poking at the long fingers of the tundra, sending hikers running for their lives.

Most of the elk are in the nosebleed seats now, feeding in the alpine meadows. Wolf pups, meanwhile, are no longer tucked away in so-called rendezvous sites, protected by relatives while the other adults are out hunting, but are instead starting to travel with the packs. Bears are one step closer to hyperphagia - a kind of eating frenzy that will begin in a few weeks, part of a frantic attempt to put on as much fat as possible before the onset of denning.  

Just last week, on hot days I was prone to cowering in the woods, hiding under the branches of the lodgepole and Douglas-fir. But in August, knowing that a far different season is just around the corner, I'm walking as much as possible in the full light of the sun. And when my muscles and bones feel warm and long and loose I head to a certain mountain spring I'm fond of, get on my knees and cup my hands and drink. I know the taste by heart. It will be with me for months to come, even as the mountains are again buried in snow.

In 1996 I wrote a book called Shouting at the Sky: Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild, about a compassionate wilderness program for troubled 14 - 17 year-olds. Some struggled with drug and alcohol addictions. Others were brittle with anger. Still others wore on their faces what seemed a nearly fatal sadness. Several weeks into the therapy each teen went on "solo," spending two days and nights alone (discreetly watched over by staff), keeping a journal about the experience. I lost track of how many came back looking astonished, bewildered. "That's the first time I've ever known what I think," they often told me.

Knowing what you think seems harder now than ever. As I've noted on this site before, a group of researchers recently set out to estimate the number of years today's 14 year-old will, during her lifetime, be "plugged in" to some electronic device - computer, cell phone, television, etc. Their best guess was a staggering 28 years.

Concurrent with that trend we need doses of nature. Not just for entertainment. Not even solely for beauty. We need such medicine because quiet moments in the woods can also reveal nature as overwhelmingly complex. Utterly impossible to comprehend. And on the other side of that small confusion, that slight discomfort, is a powerful sense of the imagination being set free. A sense of the world no longer fully fixed, no longer already framed. Suddenly there's not just the woods, but the potential of the woods. Minds quiet down in such wordless places. And in that calm we come to know what we think. What we need. What we might do.

On two days this past week the temperature never made it out of the 50's. In the valleys a cold rain fell, while up in the mountains came snow - closing for a time the road to Yellowstone. The foothills are starting to turn brown, as they always do this time of year, but more slowly, reluctantly, as the cool, wet days keep spurring new flushes of green.

This is the time when the feet of the aspen are cradled by lavender-colored lupine flowers, as well as the scarlet blooms of paintbrush. The time when wild roses along the creek are fully open, their scent easy to detect in the cool hours of morning. The time when cottonwood seeds are floating everywhere, up and down and sideways, like a million feathers cast down from the clouds.

The sun is drifting south, of course, summer leaving us by degrees. By that's of no concern. Things are still being planted. Things are growing. The mountains are letting out breath.

I'm on the roof of my house, enjoying the view. To the north, about two miles away, I can hear the announcer's voice booming from a loudspeaker across the East Bench, as he calls the annual 4^th of July rodeo. In fact we've had three rodeos in three days. Three days of parades, too.

If I turn and face the other direction, to the south, I see almost nothing but the crumpled foothills of the Rockies, wrapped in blankets of Engelmann Spruce and lodgepole pine. On the high plateaus beyond, at over 10,000 feet, the snow has all but melted away, leaving thousands of acres of puddles across the tundra.

I think people who are fond of nature have reason to feel a little extra happy on patriotic holidays like this one. For well over half our nation's history, landscape was a big part of what shaped how we saw ourselves as a people. Pundits in the late 1700's predicted we would produce more artists than anywhere else in the world, simply because of the time we spent rubbing elbows with the woods. We had a national tree, and were awfully fond of it. (At the onset of the Civil War, some said we should prune it back to stubs to show our state of moral decline, having taken up arms against each other). In the early 1800's there was a great theological discussion going on in the East, involving orthodox and progressive clergy alike, centered on this question: Is nature the hand voice of God? Or is nature God Himself?

One of the most popular books of the 1880's was called Progress and Poverty, by Henry George. Like so many other authors of his time, he finds a strong link between patriotism and the preservation of unfettered land:

The free, independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness that have marked our people are not causes, but results. They have sprung from unfenced land. Public domain has given a consciousness of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been a well-spring of hope even to those who have never thought of taking refuge upon it.

                                                                                            Henry George, 1879

Chokecherry Moon

These are the days of the of wild chokecherry blossoms; a time when summer in the Rockies is full on, yet utterly fresh. Most weeks it's hard to even spot the head-high chokecherry shrubs along the deep green edges of the woods. But not now, when the tips of the branches are bursting with cylinders of tiny white blossoms. For me these flowers have always seemed a kind of bridge, carrying us across the ten or twelve day pause that happens each year between the opening blooms of spring, and the fiery shows of summer.

Human lives have long been tied to chokecherry. The Crow made tipi stakes from the branches, and used the bark to clean their wounds. Plains tribes harvested the fruit for "pemmican" - a kind of mince meat, if you will, that served as a critical food source during the long months of winter. Meriwether Lewis, while stuck with a fever and severe stomach cramps on the Upper Missouri, tossed back a tea of chokecherry twigs and reported soon being remarkably better. (Better enough to get up the next day and march 27 miles.) Pioneers gathered the firm, sour cherries and turned them into jams, even wine.

Of course some people still harvest the fruits, still turn them into jams and wine. But I think most of us come to the plant in just this one week, in these days when it sits heavy with blossoms. The days when chokecherry makes us blink. The days when it pulls us out of our troubles and into the beautiful.

In my little corner of the Rockies, the past several weeks have been cold and wet. Most days we wake up to a world swallowed by clouds, then as likely as not, fall asleep to the sound of cold rain drumming against the shingles. Earlier today, June 17, I was south of town picking morel mushrooms and snowflakes were drifting through the pines. It should come as no surprise these days that when locals get together, as likely as not we'll spend time grousing about the weather - incredulous that our normal eleven weeks of honest-to-goodness summer is rapidly being pared down to a hiccup.

Yet privately, many of us are grateful. Thankful for the way this spring is unfolding across the foothills thick and slow, the land reeling with every shade of leaf and bloom: bluestem and Timothy, balsamroot and starflower and bluebells, fairy slippers and pasqueflowers and Oregon grape.

"Winter in June!" we say to each other at the Post Office or the grocery store, pretending amazement or gloom. Yet the very word "winter" comes from a Germanic word that roughly means "time of water." And in the American West, the time of water, no matter what month it happens to arrive, is surely among the finest of blessings.

Last week I had the pleasure of delivering a high school commencement address, speaking to a small group of young women and their families at a therapeutic boarding school for troubled girls. Located on the Canadian border, in the remote, pine-clad hills of the northern Rockies, the school is noted not just for academics, but for inspiring the kind of quiet confidence so often afforded those who keep the company of nature.

As I often do, at one point I asked the directors of the school if over time they'd seen any changes in the sorts of issues facing their students. Their response was one I've been hearing a lot as of late: that while today's teens are completely steeped in the virtual world of social networking, full of Facebook and texting and Twittering, increasingly they seem to be suffering from the ills of isolation. In particular, they routinely lack both confidence and social skills, which for some can dramatically increase the appeal of drugs and alcohol. But here at this small school in the woods, the girls had learned to play again. They'd come to know the pleasures of beauty and community. They'd found enough space to notice all the things emerging inside.

Outdoor schools and programs are sometimes dismissed as escapes from reality. In truth, of course, nature has no trouble laying claim to a full share of reality. But more to the point, in our time the natural world, be it the wilderness or the garden, is among the very few settings that are both enticing, yet free of spin. Places offering both the brand of contentment that slows the breath, as well as the brand that quickens it. Places where reality expands - reclaiming for us the delights of an inconceivable potential.

In the small mountain town where I live, sitting at an elevation of well over 5,000 feet, we're finally just days away from being able to plant seedlings in our produce gardens without the danger of a killing frost. As far as the world of gardening goes, this is either a land of perennially dashed hopes, or for the dedicated, a land of greenhouses and cold frames and strategic places along the south sides of buildings for the basil and the lemon grass and the dill.

Yet for all the struggle, what's pulled me into the spell of gardens as of late (besides the grand experience of eating food that tastes like food), is the intriguing history of our nation having long used them as outdoor classrooms for children. By 1910 school gardens were everywhere, in every state, championed by educators and pundits alike. Gardens were the way to teach math, said some, pointing to the calculations necessary to figure the size of plots and the number of seeds required, not to mention estimating profit after the expense of seeds and tools and fertilizer. No, said others, it was science that gardens offered up so well, pointing to elementary students investigating pollination, soil composition, aeration, germination, insect life cycles, water retention strategies. And on it went. Gardens to teach nutrition. Gardens to teach art and writing and cultural studies and critical thinking.

Even beyond all that, what impresses me most is the degree to which gardens have for a hundred years simply helped urban children access nature. Indeed, school gardens first caught fire in this country in the early 1890's - exactly the time when millions of Americans were growing anxious over the thought of the natural world disappearing from their daily lives. "School gardens should be maintained by the city," said Van Evrie Kilpatrick not long after the country's first school garden had been established in Massachusetts. "The city owes it to the children whom it has deprived of breathing places and beauty spots through want of foresight."

As a nature writer, I've long focused most of my work on sprawling wilderness areas - big animals running through big landscapes. But now I see school gardens coming back into fashion again, and it does my heart good. (Indeed, by some estimates over twenty percent of all American schools now have some sort of garden.) I know how important that kind of movement can be for our kids. And for us. And for this precious planet.