Writing Redux III: Wine as ink

Write on...                             (conawayjim@gmail.com)                                                                                            

       Wine is an accelerant. It lifts the spirit and loosens the tongue and at least in the beginning inspires and energizes. Wine provides human beings with a glimpse of the eternal for which we have yearned for from the beginning, and still do. On a more prosaic level, wine greases commerce and what’s now called social interaction - it makes business deals more palatable and occasionally gets you laid – but best is the exponential speeding up of social standing. Wine’s one of the best ways yet discovered to re-write one’s story, or to recreate an entirely different one. Money acquired in unremarkable or unsavory ways may be instantly laundered in stainless-steel tanks of chardonnay rapped with arteries of glycol and in pricy barrels of cabernet whose indelible stains cover a lot more than aging capacity.

      The idea that you can take two steps away from  destructive and enriching real estate development in a distant place and claim devotion to nature and “the land” in this one shows how easy this transformation is. Cooler clothes, a studied recitation of wine descriptors and cultivars, a pretended knowledge of and affinity with ageless European culture and, “Viola, I’m a vintner!”

We all know the tired cliché, “It takes a large fortune to make a small fortune in wine,” truer today than ever maybe, but if you believe it then why not back out of it with the Balzac-ian one: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime”? Not all are based in real crime, of course. That term can still be applied to bribing politicians, but what about just entertaining them lavishly and pouring money into their causes or their spouses’ “non-profits” that aren’t really?
      What about misrepresenting a pile of rocks to get a plot zoned for a house in a vineyard, or acquiring some of your neighbor’s land with an aggressive lot line adjustment? Are those crimes? Yes, if tacky ones. And what about getting tradesmen to effect a landscape adornment and then not paying? What about finessing effluent reports or, for that matter, technically disassembling an entire wine and putting back together minus the defects and calling it what you will?

     There’s more to wine writing than chronicling the seasons of the vine or Ridel-diving for exotic olfactory associations. However intriguing these subjects may be, some of the adverse public reaction to wine criticism in general – what’s perceived as its snobbishness and lack of utility - might derive from a widespread if subliminal adverse reaction to terms like “forward” and “plush” and other fatuous stand-bys.

     Wine writing can be a lot more than tasting notes and puff pieces about corporate chateaux and the cycles of the vine. The unhappy effects of monoculture are evident today and in evidence in much of California, better than houses and malls, granted, but with the ever-increasing effectiveness and cost of high-end trellising, thousands of miles of steel cables bind gorgeous landscapes from San Diego to British Columbia and, when concentrated in places like Napa and Sonoma, can be seen as figurative stays  keeping the lid on both development and the ever-expanding demands of big growers and corporations for water, tax advantages, and wine-related enterprises that can become poor substitutes for an uncluttered view and true nature’s casual, soul-healing variety.

     Indeed, the question of environmental impact of wine, including the fine sort, is inadequately – often never – addressed by professional critics and the journals they write for. Obviously those organs are for people hungry for quality, insight, and glimpses into the personalities of those who make the stuff and envision ways to push the limits of terroir and technical manipulation.

     But most such publications ignore the impact of what is a unique form of agriculture, at least in terms of making and marketing a beverage that has no real nutritional benefit for the imbiber, however gargantuan the temporary psychological one. Wine’s wonderful if ancillary enhancement of actual food is a value all its own. But the body does not in any medical sense actually depend upon wine, yet it is treated in many circles with an almost religious devotion, as if biblical transubstantiation no longer requires the blessing of the host.

     Those who fail to rave in print about the practices of wine are in turn raved against as blue-noses or ingrates, the point being that there is room for a holistic approach to wine, both its production and its imbibing, that some leaders in the industry embraced long ago and still do. Unfortunately they’ve inadvertently provided cover for big producers who feel no real devotion to the land beyond its service under the plow, most notably corporations making the usual green noises while seeking in every covert way imaginable to get around them.

     Aspiring wine writers should look at the whole glorious, imitable culture of wine, as seductive and often rewarding as it is, and at its human costs as well. Also the money tree that shades it all these days. There are the usual cliches, like “You need a large fortune to make a small one in wine.” Well, that’s often true, but not always. As relevant of course is old Balzac’s maxim: “Behind every great fortune is a crime.” This is true in spades if crime includes influencing politicians to approve potentially catastrophic development and subverting changes in product content and labeling that could extend or save human life and also maintain land that bears some resemblance to the America that formed us and our children. 

                                              (Next: That would make a good novel...)                                    

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

For newly released titles go to:

http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Writing Redux II: The back story...

                                                                           

 When Napa: The Story of an American Eden first came out, the members of the GONADS were among my many critics, particularly the vintner who told the joke and had to buy his wife a new Mercedes. (The punchline was, "You rarely get either at home.") Others belonged to established Napa families. I had committed an act of “faction” with Napa, according to the daughter of one revered valley clan writing in the San Francisco Examiner, after gaining admission “to peoples’ confidence” through my “serious, gentlemanly approach” and then producing “a misrepresentation and a betrayal.”

  I liked her and am sorry she felt that way. But I recognized something distinctly southern in her notion that one must be either a cultural acolyte, or a betrayer.

  I had simply wanted – and still do - to capture a unique part of the country, one with the most valuable legal crop anywhere and a product that embodies all the charms and excesses of making it in America. Here the sainted family farm had acquired hyperthyroid bells and whistles, but pointing that out wasn't comfortable, and still isn't.
    That same impulse inspired my novel, Nose, set in a valley much like Napa, one in the midst of the last recession when many of the shibboleths of California’s high-end wine trade were threatened. Maybe fiction's better suited to the imaginary exploration of greed and landed fealty, I had thought at one point. And it was less likely to produce literary casualties among the natives of broader Enotopia, which has increasingly come to resemble Napa Valley.
    There are two stark and instructive ways of looking at places like it, both a bit cliched at this point but still instructive. One version is as a giant hot tub full of naked little Jay Gatsbys standing up to shake it and be noticed. The other is as a veritable Eden at the outset of the nineteenth century, when grizzlies still dipped steelhead from the river and high on the Mayacamas range a raindrop needed a week to reach the earth, so thick was the canopy of redwoods and other trees.
    This was the southern tip of of the most extensive temperate rainforest on Earth, a domain starting way up in the southeast Alaska whose demise is one of the great tragedies of a dying planet. The tension between those two visions is what inspired me and is a fitting subject for any writer.
    Michael Pollan says that eating is an agricultural act. Well, so is drinking wine. It can also be an environmental one. In that possibility lie all sorts of stories that anyone interested in writing about wine can and should explore. All the awkward manifestations of industrial success of the last two centuries - disappearing water, particulate in the air, chemical penetration of the very mysteries of life, rising seas and temperatures - are reflected in the glass in your hand.
     Even the indirect environmental effects of wine should be inherent in writing about it, like an enduring light in the back of the writer’s mind. There’s also inspiration in the past lives of those involved in making and moving wine, as well as clues about what sort of wine they might make. I’ve found that people who destroy beautiful landscapes elsewhere to make enough money to construct their Edens in wine country are likely to behave just as ruthlessly in the wine business.
     It’s all grist for the writer’s mill anyway, and totally justified. It may not make you popular with some so-called “vintners” - usually a silly description since most of them aren’t really. They’re accustomed to perceptions of emerging from public relations campaigns, or from critics ignoring the foibles and often the desecrations of those behind the labels.
     The relevance of wine is broader than most people realize, or admit to. In our loud, exhaustively political era even becomes political. In part at least you can predict a person’s politics by the wine they’re associated with, not so much the varietal as the way its made and the claims made for it. To generalize a bit, you could say that big, jammy alcoholic cabernets are Republican, and restrained, classically-structured, food-friendly cabernets are Democrat. The former’s about power, individualism, exclusivity, the latter about balance, community, finesse. In that equation, Screaming Eagle’s a Romney and Frog’s Leap an Obama.
     Writing about all this matters, but learning how to do it isn’t easy, and young writers today face challenges that are doubly daunting.

                                                     (Next: Wine as ink)                                

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

For newly released titles go to:

http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

(Please remember when ordering directly from Amazon to choose the newly-released versions of Memphis Afternoons, The Big Easy, World's End and The Kingdom in the Country, which have been updated.)

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Writing Redux

                                 (Aging white male)
      The recent internet forum on craft that grew out of the wine bloggers' conference in Santa Barbara last month sent me back to remarks I made at the conference a year earlier. Then I cited wine blogging as one of the big developments in wine criticism over the last few decades (the other was the rise of the ridiculous 100-point scale: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-100-point-scales-dead-it-just.html). In view of the heat thrown off in the subsequent exchange about criticism and who's allowed to make it, I'm reminding writers that the evolution of writing itself is what really matters:                                 

   I grew up in Memphis, in the long shadow of bourbon about whose vast penumbra danced the lesser shades of gin and scotch. My father and uncles all drank bourbon, often at odd hours, Iand although there was beer, too, it was a far less significant phenomenon. Wine there wasn’t, unless you included a sweetly sour beverage characterized as “Sauterne,” that appeared only at Thanksgiving to test your sophistication.

Generally, wine was foreign, weird, and more or less useless except for that sub-category, Thunderbird, which was both cheap and instantly transformational. A fraternity brother of mine used Thunderbird to make Tom Collins instead of the standard mix and one night rendered insensate a whole roomful of Tau Delta Taus and their dates at the Peabody Hotel.

Today when I think of the raucous, intensely alive, often violent ‘Fifties, I’m struck by the unlikelihood that I would someday write a book about proper wine and its social manifestations on the far side of America, that it would get the attention of the New York Times’s wine critic, the late Frank Prial, and make it onto the best-seller list; and that I would be accused of unfairly enticing stories from valley vintners with southern charm.

Now you might think the South and the vernal creases of northern California have nothing in common. If so, you’re mistaken. For openers, viticulture was first envisioned as an American enterprise in the South, by Thomas Jefferson who rightly predicted that wine could positively affect the culture of the country. But first, the journey.

My wife, Penny, and I came to wine like many of our generation, the stations of the cross being Blue Nun, Lancer rose, and a desiccated red in the proverbial Chianti fiasco with the straw base, a built-in lagniappe because you could use the bottle later as a candle-holder. Also, of course, Gallo’s Paisano in a jug with a metaphorical handle that helped launch many a climb to more ambitious heights.

We lived in San Francisco and New Orleans for a couple of years, and a few more in Europe. I worked briefly for both the Times-Picayune and then the Rome Daily American, where I had our wine jug filled weekly from a spigot in the Roman equivalent of a 7-11 up the street. Then in London I wrote a novel about New Orleans while buying cheap claret in an intimidating wine shop on Kensington Church Street.

We eventually settled in Washington, D.C., where I wrote another novel and drank my way slowly upward, like most everybody vaguely interested in the essence of grape, unable to afford the really good stuff. Figuratively speaking, wine was a large, hoary cask into which much disposable income was poured. However, the subject itself seemed almost infinitely varied, the people involved in it interesting, the landscapes lovely, the pastime mellow. After consuming too much wine – unlike with bourbon – one retained some reason and ability to speak. But wine could also be a bottomless trough of seemingly arcane knowledge, sensual obsession, and penury; the only way for a freelance writer to really take that plunge was to find a figurative sugar-daddy.

I found the Washington Post. Hired by Ben Bradlee to write profiles for the magazine and then the Style section, I also became the default wine critic after the real one quit and the editors had to fill a column every week with words like “approachable” and “buttery.” Now, for any writer worth his or her salt, that’s not too difficult. But to avoid terminal phoniness one has to then actually learn something about the substance in question.

To my great surprise, I discovered that many of those associations have a basis in chemistry. A wine really can have a cigar-box nose and a spicy middle palate and even a long berryish finish; it can be both approachable, and buttery. The best examples of all this cost a small fortune. Bradlee couldn’t have cared less about the wine column but, hey, the Grahams were buying.

The next stage in the development of all oenophiles is insanity. Fortunately mine was temporary, a kind of vinous Tourette’s Syndrome in which you shout out wine descriptors at dinner parties and hang around stores in bad neighborhoods stacked with wine boxes and attend tastings of inky east European liquid in misshapen bottles. Enabled by the Post, I followed my insanity to Napa Valley, and things were never quite the same again.

There was a genuine sub-culture where smudge pots and wind machines were advertised in the newspaper and the entire civilization rocked to the diurnal rhythm of wine. Oh, and ate really well, too. The seed was planted for a book, not about wine but about the people involved in making and promoting it and the incredible beauty and fragility of the place.

First I had to finish a peripatetic book I was already writing about the inter-mountain West, which I mention because it was financed in part by the wine column I continued to write after leaving the Post. (I must be the only person ever to write a column about Arkansas Muscat on a battered Remington typewriter in the back of a Dodge van converted to a camper and parked outside Clovis, New Mexico.) Then I moved temporarily to Napa, whose phenomenal story had never been told because most wine writers were more interested in the substance than in the convoluted back stories of the families involved, and ordinary reporters were intimidated by wine.

Delving into Napa, I was reminded of the South: many in the valley were related, if not by blood then by experience; they shared equipment and sometimes spouses, a love of wine, and a willingness to help each other. People inter-married with slightly less alacrity than in east Tennessee and raised their children to take over what was an odd combination of farming, high craft, and an almost religious belief in the god-given rightness of the cause.

The more established families were primarily agricultural, but the scions were rocketed into a sudden celebrity for which they weren’t prepared, the gusher syndrome like that evinced by Jett Rink inGiant. The Mondavis, for instance, Italo-Central Valley émigrés to Napa who made it with hard work and the old man’s uncanny promotional abilities, were replete with conflicts befitting Absalom, Absalom, if not Genesis: brothers brawling over patrimony in the vineyard, the expulsion of the eldest son, multiple matrimonial trade-ins, spectacular dissolution. And the valley attracted a few sun-struck iterations of Faulkner’s Snopeses, although unlike the environs of Oxford they often hailed from LA’s real estate salons or mid-Peninsula dot-comery.

Some of those I interviewed were actual southerners, like the man who today owns more vineyards in northern California than most anyone and arrived in the valley a milk-drinker; his son, who grew up in Napa, has a wife nicknamed Boo, after the character in To Kill a Mockingbird, and sells a wine called Hogwash.

Another similarity with the South was, of course, drinking. Wine may lack the immediate, stunning clairvoyance of bourbon but it does, I will now reveal, make you drunk if you consume enough of it. More expensive wine is required to do this than is the case with bourbon; getting hammered on the good stuff may build fortunes, but not yours. I saw in the valley impressive displays of sobriety among heavily-engaged cognoscenti talking about assault, balance, finish, but behind the gorgeous backdrop of Douglas firs and designer stressed steel inebriation was not unknown.

This I discovered most forcefully when invited to a meeting of crypto-revelers known as the GONADS (Gastronomic Order of the Nonsensical and Dissipatory) who met once a month at a different member’s house, ate wonderful food and drank fabulous local wines pulled from some of the best cellars in the valley, all on a patio high on the east slope of the Mayacamas Mountains. There must have been thirty different bottles, including old, legendary Stony Hill chardonnays and vintage cabernets from Stag’s Leap to Spring Mountain; we ate cheese and fettucini and veal scallopini and osso bucco and fresh-baked bread.

Business and politics had been banned from discussion, so there were games involving funny hats, thrown firecrackers followed by thrown crusts, wrestling, spilled fine wine, and jokes that included one about oral sex and eggs Benedict. Shirts came off to let burgeoning stomachs breathe free, and napkins were draped over heads to ward off the sun - another southernism. I had agreed not to write a column about the GONADs’ lunch, but the book was another matter, and I periodically sat in the bathroom to take notes and avoid expulsion, torn between totally abandoning myself to the grape and retaining some semblance of mind, aware that Tau Delta Tau would be thoroughly at home here.                                   

For newly released titles go to:

http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Kindly put your nose in Nose

* The Tongass personal narrative (Reflections in Blue and Green) is a good beach read, if I say so myself, environmental journalism about a rare and little-known piece of America: (http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/07/theres-tongass-among-us.html)
* Likewise, my series on the American west, Lighting Out for the Territories, taken from The Kingdom in the Country, will interest you if you haven't seen it (promise):  http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-fastest-gun-in-west.html
* Other related posts - Assassination Louisiana Style, Letters from the Equator, Beasts of the Southern Wild - can be found in the table of contents at right by scrolling down.                                                                          

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

For newly released titles go to:

http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

Tempest in a wine glass

                                         

      The word storm generated by writing sessions at the national wine bloggers' conference in Santa Barbara this summer (https://grapecollective.com/articles/5-reactions-to-the-panel-of-professional-wine-writers-at-the-2014-wine-bloggers-conference, http://thedrunkencyclist.com/2014/07/22/wine-bloggers-conference-in-defense-of-old-white-men/, et al) is both unexpected, and unfortunate. Steve Heimoff, Mike Dunn and I were invited there to talk about writing, and consequently denounced by some bloggers as old, white, male and... short. Thus in one oft-repeated assertion the complainers revealed themselves to be sexist, agist, racist, and vertically discriminatory. That's quite a literary achievement.
      Well, I want everyone to know that I'm six feet tall. That's a couple of inches above the national average and I worked hard for every one of them. Not easy getting to six feet in Memphis: too many glasses of  milk to get down, reins on bourbon and Camels, standing up straight in endless heat and humidity. Yes, it's absolutely true that I'm a man, older than the average American, and pitifully Irish, Welsh, English, Dutch, and probably Cherokee (my grandmother, bless her heart, never really explained).
       Not much I can do about any of it, but I can say that good writing does not depend upon these things. It depends upon having a clear vision of what you want to say, an acceptance of what's good writing and what isn't, and an honest assessment of one's own work. All these things are missing in this fight, replaced by an insistence upon being praised for writing badly in a silo resounding with the complaints of the equally aggrieved.
       The truth is that writing well requires not just practice but also what Hemingway (yes, that ultimate old white male of indeterminate height) called a good, built-in shit detector. Most of the aggrieved lack one. My advice to them - and to any aspiring writer - is: "Develop a sense of humor. And look beyond yourself." 
                                                                             

      (http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose)

Reflections in Blue and Green, 9

                                                                         

                                                 The View from On High

          The Sikorsky Long Ranger's plastic bubble, high above the Honker Divide, trembled from the action of the rotors. Commentary was provided by the chief forester from the Ketchikan Pulp Company, owner of helicopter, using interlocking audio cables and headsets. "That canoe route down there is for the strong of back and weak of mind," he said, not knowing I had been down there the week before. "People say these vast lands should be saved. Saved for what?"
    Somewhere below was an island where afternoon sunlight cuts through trees at the shore to reveal faces carved in wood. You have to know where to look, and few do. Consequently the renditions of beaver, wolf and man have survived the century, unmolested by all but the weather, dumbly scrutinizing passing motor launches instead of the high-prowed canoes that once nuzzled the coast. Kneel there and you can still feel, beneath the pine needles, rows hoed long ago by the Haida for planting potatoes. Thank god these guys didn't know where that island was.

     The Long Ranger passed over the very spot in Thorne Lake where Susanna had cooked pesto with macaroni for our party, on the bottom of an overturned aluminum canoe and in glorious celebration of the last portage. That day we had all been proud of an accomplishment that could not be quantified nor explained to the chief forester: "People who aren't in shape aren't going to be able to get in there," he said. "We already have eight million acres like that. That's what really grinds us up here - it's saved for the environmental elite. I can't take my 66-year-old mother in there because there's no road."

     The paradox of the forester's words was apparent from the air: logging, and logging roads, meant access to what would no longer be there if his mother had arrived to see it. Wild places were too difficult for ordinary citizens, according to the former governor, Walter Hickle, who once pointed out that Alaska "can kill you." But wilderness remains a commodity in insufficient supply to meet demands, even in Alaska.                      

     Broderick Nash wrote in Wilderness and the American Mind, "Alaska represents inhospitable environmental qualities in extremes unprecedented in previous American experience." And, "powered by modern technology, dreams could become realities in Alaska." Projects that required a decade or more in the Old West can now be done here in a season. What KPC considered an aerial affirmation of plentiful timber on Prince of Wales demonstrated instead that only this corridor of old-growth remained between Sweetwater Lake and Thorne Bay.

     Meanwhile about 80 per cent of the trees cut on the Tongass were being shipped abroad, most of them to Japan, not transformed into pulp or otherwise into jobs for Alaskans but simply lost to the nation or their origin.

    The Forest Service's 100-year rotation plan presumed the forest would return in force after being clear-cut, but most biologists agreed that a 300-year rotation was more realistic. After the first few years, the regenerating forest constituted a dense, uniform, mostly sterile palisade; logging by small operators, slower, relatively benign, virtually eliminated by the long term timber contracts, would have produced a quite different landscape.

     People in Southeast, riven with transcendent notions of freedom and the natural beauty - Misty Fiord, Glacier Bay - were party to some spectacular ugliness as well: clear-cuts like patches of mange on the firred haunches of mountains, timber camps with the social problems associated with inner cities (substance, spouse, and child abuse), and the drizzling smokestacks of the Ketchikan Pulp mill, visible across Clarence Strait where most of the Prince of Wales timber was bound.

     KPC was operating its mill on an interim basis, all the while selling the Tongass timber abroad. Management claimed declining demand for pulp on the world market no longer made the business profitable, but there were bigger problems at the mill, much like those engendered at Sitka. Louisiana Pacific was considering selling that smelly industrial hulk, no doubt influenced by the two raids on the mill by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the last 18 months. Agents were searching for evidence of possible criminal violations of environmental laws; the federal government had also filed a civil suit alleging numerous violations of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts — the Sitka APC mess all over again.                    

     During a tour of the mill I saw firsthand the enormous amount of water required to wash pulp, felt the weight of the past in the decrepit equipment and saw it in the faces of the people working there, actors in a discredited drama that had begun at the time they were born. "Log the Earth First" advised the sign attached to the glass cubicle behind which sat the saw operator. "We'll log the other planets later."

     Outside the mill, the supervisor viewed industrial jet skis, called "log broncs," used to sort timber in the crowded bay. He acknowledged that most Alaskans are unhappy with the mill. "It was set up to make use of the forest and was too successful," he said bitterly, "Now people can't stand the sight of it," in large part because of the selfish decisions of those running it, and the venality of those politicians serving them.

                     Coda

     The Environmental Protection Agency would eventually determine that the land occupied by the Ketchikan Pulp Company  was contaminated with lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), arsenic, and petroleum compounds. Contaminated soils were removed and EPA placed long-term controls on the property to protect the cleanup. The bottom of Ward Cove was contaminated with ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and 4-methylphenol. EPA dredged about three acres of sediments in Ward Cove, capped about 27 acres with clean material, and left another 50 acres of contaminated sediments to recover naturally, if they could, all at huge cost to taxpayers. 
   KPC officially went out of business in 1997. The mill was later demolished by explosives and tickets sold to locals who wanted to watch.                   

   (This is the last post in the Tongass series, which started on July 2.)
           

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

For newly released titles go to:

http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Reflections in Blue and Green, 8

      (This series begins with http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/07/theres-tongass-among-us.html)                                                      

                             
       Prince of Wales Island, by water

     The trip, like most in the pelagic envelope of Southeast, involved aquatics. It was launched only after a careful vetting of water repellents: dry bags, rain gear, Juneau boots, tents, canoes. There were six of us who set out in the rain on Hatchery Creek, a clear muskeg stream on Prince of Wales Island tinged with what might have been molasses, a watery paradox of light and darkness leading south into the Honker Divide.

The Russians, masters of the readily available, cut some of these coastal forests for charcoal in the nineteenth century, after decimating the populations of sea otter, walrus and people in the Aleutians, but they shied away from Alaska's daunting interior. Not so the Americans, drawn to what became Alaska by its proximity to Asia and the prospects of trade there. The Western Union Telegraph Company envisioned an intercontinental telegraph line, the ongoing expansionist dream of the 1840s, running northwestward through Russian America and Siberia to St. Petersburg.

In 1857 Western Union financed an expedition, and although the project was cancelled after the laying of the trans-Atlantic cable, data amassed by the Alaskan venture were instrumental in persuading Congress to purchase Alaska in 1867. Secretary of State William H. Seward's "folly" was arguably the most valuable addition to the United States after the Louisiana Purchase, involving as it did a land mass of continental proportions that has become the earth's last such extensive, biologically rich and diverse, reasonably intact natural refuge of inestimable value to the planet.                      

The colors would have excited Monet, but not all the untidy botany: skunk cabbage blooming on the banks, big fallen timber cozening the bends, what Alaskans refer to affectionately as "the woody bushes." Prince of Wales, the third largest island in North America, has produced billions of board feet of timber in four decades, and the Forest Service wanted an additional 450 million. So did what was left of the Ketchikan Pulp Company, the governor, and Alaskan's congressional delegation.

The canoeists - including me and daughter Susanna - wanted this section preserved as a conduit for animals and the occasional human. One of them, a professional environmentalist in hip boots and an Anarack, said, "Fifty per cent of Tongass timber that has been cut has been cut on Prince of Wales. Now they want to clear-cut..." He paused, water dripping from his nose onto the map, "...right over there. They have to be stopped."

John Muir was his spiritual predecessor. Muir traveled the length of Southwest in a canoe and wrote about its "endless rhythm and beauty." He was a member of the last Alaskan expedition of the century, also inspired by the prospect of the Asia trade. Edward Henry Harriman, railroad tycoon, having recently merged the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, wanted a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait so he could send trains from New York to Paris.
   In 1899, under the banners of science and triumphant capitalism, he and 25 scientists, professors, photographers and artists steamed up the Alaskan coast aboard Harriman's George W. Elder with personal servants, two stenographers, a doctor, a nurse, a chaplain and 11 hunters. Nature was encountered, but no tunnel site.                     

(Members of the Harriman Expedition on the wharf at Dutch Harbor, 1899, photographed by Edward Curtis.)

I tried to imagine Muir coping with the current environmental debate, with its overlapping government hegemonies and proliferating, explosive acronyms - "T-LUMP," "C-POW, "V-POP". The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), passed in 1980, established 5 million acres of wilderness on the Tongass, relatively little of it old-growth, and promised 450 million board feet of timber annually to the two pulp mills in Southeast. This perpetuated the exclusion of smaller timber operators and kept the price paid by APC and KPC well below market value.

To assure that the cut was achieved, the Forest Service received $40 million a year from the U.S. Treasury, a bonanza to be spent on road building, studies and other enhancements important to the regional bureaucracy. A decade after passage of ANILCA, almost half the big trees on the Tongass had been cut, and the Forest Service had lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the below cost timber sales. Congress then pressured the Forest Service to revise its Tongass Land Management Plan (TLMP) to include some protection for old-growth and wildlife.

The service, in defense, used a working draft of the document to convince the Senate that it would manage the Tongass correctly, thereby getting the 1990 Tongass Timber Reform Act (TTRA) passed. The Forest Service was instructed by Congress to pay more attention to the real price of trees, and the demands of forest users other than timber companies, but it soon launched a revision of the revised Tongass Land Management Plan that essentially eliminated the strong provisions for preserving old-growth.          

The cabin on Galea Lake was a bare, one room structure with a viewshed full of cutthroat trout rising to mirrored old-growth. The cabin is maintained by the Forest Service, which by law has to provide for all users, hence the words on the rustic signs outside all national forests attest ("Land of many uses"). But parsimony was apparent in the scant accommodations and trail markers swallowed in the Honker's profusion.

The lake amplified the nasal insistence of Canada geese, replaced during the night by the calling of wolves, the most enduring cliche' of American wildness and a sound few Americans have actually heard, powerful and reverberant.

  Portages in ancient forests are complicated by roots the size of pythons. Unabashed photosynthesis produces a biomass here unmatched in other rain forests, including the Amazon's. The Tongass husbands distinctly visible organisms, too, among them black flies excited by the discovery of human beings hauling canoes over two miles of needle tamp and muskeg. Sweat mingled with some of the 200 inches of rain falling annually in Southeast. Whenever my toil ceases, the chill is there, to be combated with hard salami, raisins, peanut butter and iodized draughts of the Thorne River auger against hypothermia, or so I hope.               

That's Susanna (feralstudio.com) second from left, and me far right.
    Next and finally: A coda for all time

                                                

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Reflections in Blue and Green, 7

     (This series begins with the July 2 post: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/07/theres-tongass-among-us.html)                                    

                  
                   The Chief

     The Forest Service lives within Agriculture's accretion of Victorian and New Deal architecture near the corner of 14th Street and Independence Avenue, halfway down the Mall from Capitol Hill. The then-chief of the USFS, Jack Ward Thomas, slumped in a chair, his back to the Washington Monument, the classic field man saddled with duty in the imperial city. His pallor and width of beam testified to no great hardship, his open collar and turquoise bollo contrasting with the businessman's tack worn by most Washington bureaucrats. The farther one gets from the woods, the more he stresses affiliation with it.

The apprehension voiced by some of Thomas's colleagues when he was appointed suggested that he would be a different sort of chief, tough but enlightened, in the tradition of Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt's sylvan lama, of Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall. Thomas had worked his way up through the system and was not chosen by a cabal of top Forest Service brass and the outgoing chief, as was customary; he was expected to inspire timber beasts, stump-jumpers and the rest of the service's pantheon to bring about change.

Thomas was eager to dispel this notion. He had to deal with the Senator (Stevens) and others in Congress who wanted to eliminate all restrictions on logging in the national forests. Any actions perceived to be on behalf of wildlife reflected the desires of the Clinton White House, he says, and the momentary desires of "the democracy," but not necessarily his or those of his agency. Widespread charges of pressure put on Forest Service biologists to alter their science to allow larger cuts were worth pursuing, he agreed, but "I'm not running around looking for biologists."                   

  

(Aldo Leopold, about as far from what
the Forest Service has become as a
man could get)

     The list of honors awarded Thomas — the Aldo Leopold Medal, the Wildlife Society General Chuck Yeager Award — was long, but the suggestion that some consensus has evolved at his agency out of the disruption caused by the issues of old-growth and endangered species annoyed him. "The idea that there is a mentality within the service is erroneous. There are 30,000 individuals... I can't get consensus in my office about whether or not to go to lunch."

But there is a mentality and it remains a problem. The Service's legacy of working in difficult terrain when getting the cut out was the only concern produced a military cast of mind, a chain of command that punishes dissent and holds in contempt the views of civilians. Today the general and his lieutenants must deal with anyone in off the street, not just the timber industry, senators, and journalists.
    Thomas, rude as he was, sounded almost wistful when he spoke of the remove of southeastern Alaska, "where the distances are long, and time spent getting there much longer." Then schemes devised in Washington, and Tokyo, could be put into effect with the rigor and independence of a Roman governor overseeing the marauding Celts.
      (Next: wilderness by water)              

            

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(Please remember when ordering directly from Amazon to choose the newly-released versions of Memphis Afternoons, The Big Easy, World's End and The Kingdom in the Country, which have been updated.)

Reflections in Blue and Green, 6

 

                           

          The Goshawk Chronicles

Evolutionary development has been extraordinarily fast on the Tongass. Cut off from the continent by mountains and glaciers, protected from north and south by its unique insularity, the Alexander Archipelago has entertained no genetic dumping. Many bird subspecies are found only here and on the coast of British Columbia: the Swainson's thrush, the Prince of Wales river otter, the Coronation Island vole, the Wrangle Island red-backed vole, the Alexander Archipelago wolf, probably the only one in North America uncorrupted by coyote genes.

The study of island biogeographybiology as a distinct product of insularity—is fruitful on the Tongass. The natural isolation afforded by thousands of rocky up-thrusts in an inland sea increases the chances of extinction, since populations are small and more vulnerable to random, or "stochastic", events like all of one species being reduced to a single sex. The smaller the population, the greater the chances of extinction.

Conservation biology, concerned with the propagation of species, has taken the concept of island biogeography and applied it on dry land, where logging has isolated what forest there is and created unnatural insularity. The spotted owl in Washington state, from this perspective, lives in what are essentially islands of old growth in seas of clear-cuts. The problem is compounded on the Tongass because clear-cuts occur on real islands. Habitat conservation areas must therefore perform their function in the midst of cutover land masses already surrounded by deep Pacific waters.

Forest Service supervisors view conservation biology the way Latin American dictators view liberation theology. Forest Service employees, including biologists, are expected, in the lapidary phrase of the supervisor in Ketchikan, "to be constructive." If he thinks a proposed cut will be more detrimental to wildlife than is legal, he told me, "I can tweak it" © make minor alterations to conform to the technicality of the law.             

The Queen Charlotte goshawk (Accipiter gentilis laingi), is endemic to Southeast and the coast of British Columbia, a unique biome composed of islands and islands within islands. It is closely related to the northern goshawk found in much of the western United States, including the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, where a slight, bearded biologist named D. Coleman Crocker-Bedford used to work. There he conducted exhaustive studies of the acrobatic, finicky raptor that serves as a useful indicator species, and discovered that goshawks require extensive stands of densely canopied mature and old growth forests to prosper.

He advised his Forest Service supervisor in the late '80s that timber harvesting should be reduced in the Southwest to protect this and other species, and was advised by his FS superiors not to publish his findings. He did publish, and an independent scientist later praised the study as "one of the most extensive and rigorous investigations ever done into the habitat requirements of a raptorial bird." But Crocker-Bedford ended up in Ketchikan.

In 1990 he chaired an interagency group of biologists from the Forest Service and Alaska's Department of Fish and Game, the so-called "V-pop" committee, concerned with "viable populations" of wildlife. It sought to determine if requirements of the National Forest Management Act were being met on the Tongass, and the goshawk was just one of several species in doubt.

At the time a joint conference of the U.S. Congress was resolving differences over the Tongass Timber Reform Act. A draft environmental impact statement had called for a quarter of the Tongass' remaining old growth to be permanently side aside for wildlife, most of it in tracts of more than 1,000 acres and some as large as 40,000 acres, and the Forest Service wanted none of this. It lobbied individual members of Congress, informing them that wildlife could be protected while 450 million board feet were being cut every year, and Congress capitulated.

The committee on which Crocker©Bedford sat recommended maintaining old-growth "cores," wildlife transit corridors, and habitat conservation areas (HCAs) for several species. This would have curtailed, or eliminated, some logging. The regional forester in Juneau ordered a supplemental environmental impact statement prepared. (In the Forest Service, if a review displeases management, it is re©reviewed, sometimes indefinitely.) This time the committee's recommendations were rejected.                    

Crocker-Bedford resigned from the chairmanship but not from the Forest Service. In the fall of 1991 he was deposed in a suit brought by loggers in the Southwest, where his original goshawk study was being used to shut down timber sales under requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. The timber companies sought to discredit the study and its author.

Being deposed was not pleasant, Crocker-Bedford told me. He was advised that he could not have his own attorney and had to be represented by a political appointee from the U.S. Attorney's office. He was interrogated for fourteen hours by the timber company lawyers attempting to discredit him, before his own attorney weighed in. 
    "He was worse than they were," said Crocker-Bedford, of the representative from Justice during the Bush administration. When Crocker-Bedford asked this lawyer what effect he thought Crocker-Bedford's ordeal would have on other wildlife biologists, on soils people and hydrologists, the lawyer said, "We know what we're doing."

The Forest Service had let the spotted owl get away from it; that wasn't going to happen with the goshawk.

Crocker-Bedford was accused of negative networking and advised to stay out of discussions of goshawk management and conservation biology. He was ordered not to attend a goshawk seminar and not to defend his study or his reputation. A colleague told him he would get a raise and more influence within the service if he discovered that clear-cuts and small trees were beneficial to wildlife.                    

  In 1992, Crocker-Bedford wrote to the chief of the service, then F. Dale Robertson: "You stated there must be no retaliation against employees who discover problems or recommend new management practices... Because the results of my Forest Service approved, careful monitoring were used in appeals and litigation, I have been subjected to repeated retaliation."

Nothing happened until after the election, when Jack Ward Thomas had been appointed and rumor had it that he would be coming to the Tongass. Service people began to say they were sorry that all those bad things had happened to Crocker-Bedford, but not that they had done them. This was not an isolated case. Many other wildlife biologists felt the chill of empirical objectives.
    One, Duane Fisher, a biologist in Juneau, had the unhappy task, in 1992, of incorporating the recommendations of the V-pop committee in the Forest Service's draft environmental impact study. Those recommendations included habitat conservation areas for the four most vulnerable species in the Tongass: bear, marten, wolf, and goshawk. If they had been adopted, the service would have been forced to set aside significantly more forest than it wished.

Fisher refused to reject the V-pop recommendations. "I came up with a high probability that a viability problem might occur in three ecological provinces out of 21," he said, in a mall outside of Juneau where I found him. "I didn't think it was that bad a risk assessment, "but my supervisor didn't like my conclusions."                  

    He wouldn't say so, but it seemed clear to me that the managers of the Tongass wanted an armor-plated forest plan, one without biological uncertainties. They had already tried to dilute the effects of logging on paper, known as "washing the data," by expanding the base under consideration to include the whole Tongass, most of which is rock, muskeg, ice and scrub, not old-growth. But mention of possible extinctions provided chinks that might later be attacked in court.

Fisher could have been ordered to change his conclusions, but that was legally risky for management. Instead, he was told to write more versions. He wrote four, and a Forest Service "writer-editor" wrote a fifth, but Fisher's boss, a road engineer, didn't like the conclusions. He rewrote the report himself, put in his own conclusions - that the forest didn't need additional wildlife habitat - and said they could cut 50 per cent of the old-growth left. So the Forest Service had two different recommendations, one tweaked on the drafting table to allow the cuts the service wanted, and another from the V-pop committee calling for big habitat conservation areas.

The V-pop committee report was again suppressed by the Forest Service. The service's second biologist in charge of the team of reviewing scientists quit in protest, as Crocker-Bedford had done, and Fisher ended up in the bureaucratic gulag with an unsatisfactory rating, pressured to take writing classes and an IQ test. He scored 122, near genius, an embarrassment for those claiming him mentally unequipped to write on the Forest Service's prescribed seventh grade level.

The real problem, of course, was what he was saying, not the way he said it. Yet another peer review was done, also by outside biologists. This one found that no recommendations so far for habitat preservation were sufficient to meet the requirements of the National Forest Management Act, an indication that Fisher's reports had in fact been thoroughly middle of the road. But Fisher was downgraded from GS12 to GS11; it was suggested that he might like to move to Yakitat, Southeast's equivalent of Omaha.                   

"I went through some rough times," he told me, without rancor. He started taking teenagers to Bible camp, umpiring at softball games after work. "That's how I coped."

  The road engineer in charge of the study of dwindling wildlife habitat on the Tongass was named Steven Brink. He was Duane Fisher's boss, and I met with him in the Juneau headquarters where the walls of the Forest Service conference room were covered with maps of the Tongass and charts of related activities and designations © prospective timber sales, set-asides, roads, wilderness, rivers, Tongass past, Tongass future. Logging was represented by black dots; much of the forest looked shot-gunned.          

"If the scientists had their way," said Brink, "we would stop logging and do a complete biological survey. That would kill the economic infrastructure in Southeast and cost $5 million a year for five years."

Better to continue to study the problem, in his view, and log at the same time. "Everything in life is a risk, including management of the forest... There is no evidence that we are having a substantial effect - threatening, or endangering - species."

As a GS14, Brink was one of the most powerful half dozen men on the Tongass, his attitude and appearance consonant with evolution within the Forest Service from the time when the long term timber contracts came into existence. Then the notion of wholesale development of America's national forests, including the building of roads into undisturbed areas, began to take on the glow of muscular philanthropy: engineers saw themselves aiding mankind, as well as harvesting a resource, producing wealth.
    They, not the foresters, rose in an agency that had previously thought of itself as primarily conservationist. But Brink's morphology was that of the hustling, midlevel corporate operative: bright paisley tie, aviator glasses, a touch of mousse, no chlorophyll tones long associated with the service. His words are chosen carefully. A scientist under his supervision was not pressured to take an IQ test and composition classes, he "was given the opportunity to improve his writing." As for the handling of the V-pop data, "if the decision makers felt I wasn't giving them all the information, they would replace me."

Brink worked for a time in Washington, D.C., learning the legal ways of the Forest Service. He was widely quoted in Alaska newspapers on the subject of habitat, using the perspective he gained in the capital: "Humans live in Northeast Washington... and survive and even reproduce, but that isn't their preferred habitat. They'd much rather live in Georgetown. Wildlife are much the same way." Brink and his colleagues had spent years building a defensible cut. Now the strategies reflected in the charts and maps around him were threatened by a bunch of biologists, and they weren't happy about it. "It's all politics," he said. "Maybe that's as it should be - politics is everything."                                                                      

The first Tongass timber sale after the APC contract cancellation totaled 61 million board feet and was 32 times the minimum bid set by the Forest Service. Senator Stevens wrote to the new forest supervisor there, urging him to continue the sizeable cut. "I appreciated our discussion on the recent petitions to list the goshawk and wolf as endangered or threatened in the Tongass. I conclude that very little study has been done related to these animals and sufficient baseline information is not yet available."
           (Next: The Chief)

My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

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