by George Sibley
I’m writing this column from a cabin on the bank of the Wisconsin River, again. A lazy, lovely river, attractive to big gaggles of geese, a snag across the way in which a eagle often sits, occasional resting place for a sandhill crane or two, a couple egrets, and a daily parade of turkeys down by the beach. A beautiful place in which everything and nothing dependably happens daily.
We are in Wisconsin this October and every October, because Wisconsin is the home state of my partner, Maryo, and we agreed that once we retired, we would spend a month here every year because, despite her many years in Colorado, Wisconsin is still “her place.” We spend a fair amount of time, these Octobers, beer in hand by the river, talking about “what makes a place your place.”
Why, for example (she asks), am I so attached to the Upper Gunnison valley? Why have I decided that that’s where I’ll be till they plant me? But this year, for a change, I’m not really sure.
Truth to tell, I’ve been looking forward to this month away from the valley since early summer. After spending most of the past 40 or so years in Central Colorado, is my love of the place beginning to cool? Yes and no. Mostly, I think I am beginning to become really aware what an expensive love it has been, and how badly I have failed to hold up my end of the affair.
Typically, it was mostly the beauty of the valley that captured me when I arrived back in the mid-sixties. The mountains impressive but not imposing, not overbearing like the San Juans. The natural world right out the back door (sort of). The broad green floodplains and the way the rivers meandered and lazed through them, as if the water were doing all it could to stay here as long as it could. Me too.
My romantic soul was also captured then by the remoteness of the place. I was, at that time, out of love with the imperial bully America was becoming, and the Upper Gunnison seemed about as far away from that as you could get without the hassle of a passport and emigration. It was a Shangri-La type place, a place where it seemed like anything and everything was possible in a utopian kind of way. (Note all the “seems” there.)
And – in a semi-conscious kind of way – I loved the fact that you could have all this remote end-of-the-earth beauty without really sacrificing any of the conveniences of modern civilization. We had modern highways over which big trucks brought cheap food, cheap fuel, cheap everything – and I took it all for granted, a birthright even. We were all still anticipating, then, the long-promised “energy too cheap to meter.”
That was my early, naïve love affair with the valley – until the wakeup call in the mid-70s, when the oil-producing nations got up on their hindlegs and challenged our birthright to cheap energy! We watched helplessly as the price doubled, then tripled from the 20-30 cents a gallon we’d been paying for as long as I’d been driving. We sank into a virtual depression.
Many were reassured in 1980, when then-president Ronald Reagan told us we could just go back to that cheap and easy American dreaming, stop worrying our pretty little heads; he had it all under control. But some of us, me among them, would never again blithely take cheap energy for granted. While we had never been encouraged to think of such things before, it made perfect sense that, on a finite planet, resources like petroleum would be finite.
It also made perfect sense later, when climate scientists started telling us that if we pumped all that carbon “fossilized” back in the Carboniferous Era back into the carbon cycle, we would start working toward a hothouse carboniferous kind of climate. Of course, how could it be otherwise? And it also made perfect sense to me when the scientists said such a climate change would logically result in intensification and expansion of the subtropical desert regions north and south of the Tropics. The current Colorado River Water Availability Study predicts that this will probably result in about a 20 percent reduction in the Colorado River water supply by 2030.
So I’ve learned that I’ve been living a naively unsustainable life in the valley – and probably damaging the valley in the process. How does that make a lover feel? Stupid, guilty, and humbled – destructive feelings for a relationship. So I am spending quite a lot of my retirement engaged in what often feels like a piss-in-the-ocean local effort to reduce our use of carbon energy and begin a transition to renewable and sustainable energy resources. I won’t bore you with details – I don’t even want to think of all that this month. But it’s certainly affecting the love relationship. Forty years ago the valley “made” me think everything was possible. Today – with more experience and less energy – I am hoping that just this one big change is even possible.
How big is it? I look at how much civilization in the valley has lost in the name of what passed for progress last century. Seventy, eighty years ago here, trains carried people into and up and down the valley. Today we do the same trips in individual vehicles at roughly a pound of carbon emissions per mile. Until World War II, the people of the valley were growing most of their own food, with butcher shops, creameries, and mills for processing what needed to be processed. Today almost everything we need to survive comes from elsewhere in trucks – including most of what is sold at our Farmers’ Markets. Sixty years ago the people of the valley were getting ready to build a state-of-the-art hydropower plant to generate their own sustainable electricity. Today we get most of our electricity inefficiently from big coal-burning plants elsewhere. Back then, life was more difficult, but it was a lot closer to being a sustainable, intelligent society than what we do today. We’ve gone backwards in Stegner’s challenge to create “a society to match our scenery.” We have to redefine “the good life” in the valley to become even partially sustainable.
Meanwhile, I realized just before we left for Wisconsin that I had only managed to get out into the less civilized parts of the Upper Gunnison half a dozen times this summer. Never getting out into the mountains around here in the summer is like having a lover with whom you never find time for love. It’s hard to be spurned by a lover – but it’s worse to realize the relationship is falling apart because of your own (in)actions.
These are things that roil around in my mind here along the Wisconsin River, sort of flirting with another seriously, seductively beautiful place. I am a little ashamed of how glad I am to be away, for a whole month, from the valley that has begun to feel more like an overwhelming set of challenges than a lifelong love.
In our conversations in Wisconsin about “place,” my partner and I talk often about her father whose life work was all about the importance of place here. He was a “circuit-riding professor” teaching playwriting for the University of Wisconsin – as part of the College of Agriculture. At that time, UW still believed that farming was a culture, agri-culture, rather than just another industrial occupation, agri-business. And under the slogan “the borders of the campus are the borders of the state,” Maryo’s father’s “classroom” was anywhere in the state where a group of farmers or farmwives wanted to tell the story of their lives. He was on the road a lot, and summers he took Maryo to those places with him.
But that was in the 1950s and 60s, a time of economic centralization globally, and his work for Wisconsin’s agrarian places was countercyclical. The world was going the other way, toward centralized industrialization – the same “tide in the affairs of man” that was undermining intelligent society in the Upper Gunnison. Trying to keep agriculture alive, he was fighting that strong tide – those of us fighting for more intelligent society today at least have an ebbing “centralization” tide on our side. (Did her father ever feel a desire, or need, to just go somewhere else for a month, or for another life?)
What am I trying to say? Be careful of the seductions of “place.” Love of a place becomes a demanding love, the more you learn about the place and its needs. And until you know about the place and its needs, and how to meet your own needs with some consideration of the place, your alleged love of the place is probably just a romantic infatuation. Real love means usually having to say you’re sorry about something sometimes.
George Sibley was born is Western Pennsylvania, but was conceived in Colorado, by Colorado natives, and thus considers himself to be a native Coloradan.