It Don't Come Easy

OK.  I admit it.  Sometime in the middle of my long stint on the road last month, I started to feel sorry for myself.  I’d made the mistake of taking the ’98 Buick we inherited from Laurie’s parents on this little 3000 mile jaunt because of the smooth ride and the great stereo and because I was thinking more about the cool stories I’d be chasing than about, say, the possibility that belts might fray and snap or that the water pump pulley might work loose and go bouncing down I-80 behind me.  Never even occurred to me.   Nor had I suspected how difficult interviews might be to schedule.  Or re-schedule.  Government officials needed permission from D.C.  (Huh? What country do we live in?)  Meeting locations and times were changed.  Or I changed them.  People got sick or forgot.   Then there was the weather.  Snow, rain, sleet, wind.  No fewer than six of the mountain passes I crossed required chains in last week in March. (I never put them on.  Don’t tell the CHP.)  And right about the time I was white-knuckling it over yet another one, Ringo Starr came on the radio: “It Don’t Come Easy.”  Damned straight, I thought.

Nope.  It didn’t come easy.  But it was worth it.

I talked with three amazing women in their eighties who have achieved great things.  Beverly Ogle of the Mountain Maidu tribe in Northeastern California has been working to reclaim ancestral land in Humbug Valley from Pacific Gas & Electric.  Phyllis Clausen helped lead the movement to remove the salmon-blocking Condit Dam from the White Salmon River.  Pauline Esteves chaired the committee that negotiated the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act to return land to her tribe in and around Death Valley.  Each of these women is sharp and gracious, humble and wise.   Each has a clear-eyed intelligent gaze.  You’d think they’d revel in retelling the stories of their triumphs.  But no. 

Each focused on the future and the new challenges that face the people and the places that they love. Beverly Ogle told me about how few speakers of the Maidu language remain.  Phyllis Clausen worries about the threat development now poses to the White Salmon River.  And near Pauline Esteves’ home on reclaimed land in Death Valley, the tribal offices have been locked and security cameras put in place by a rival faction in cahoots with the BIA.  At the heart of the problem: the politics of gaming.  When I tried to steer the conversation to the successful negotiations back in 2000, Pauline would have none of it.

“This is the present,” she said.  “I was taught: don’t always be talking about the past.  Sure, it’s a good foundation, but go forward.  You talk about the circle of life.  See, we’re not going through that circle at all.  We’re not moving.  We’re stuck.”

What doesn’t come easy?  Change. Reclamation. Making things right.

“We were told in one of the legends that we were going to be stuck sometimes,” Pauline continued, “but never to give up.  If you fall, get up, and if there’s something in your way go around it, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

I’m home in Stehekin now to sort through the hours of interviews, to think and write about the struggles and triumphs.  But if I’m prone to self-pity, I will think about these women and the many good people who have worked with them, and I’ll remember to stay focused.   Water pumps can get repaired.  So can rivers.  Doors can be unlocked.  Or so we hope.

Death Valley: Reclaimed Homeland

Last winter around this time my mom and I were trying to decide where to travel together. Some place sunny, some place we’d never been. Death Valley, she suggested. Perfect.

On the way north, from the eight-lane interstate to the two-lane highway, we marveled about how only a few years earlier, as she battled cancer, we thought she’d be gone. Now she’d get to see Death Valley before she died. We speculated about the wildflowers which might be great – or not – the wildflower watch on the Internet urged us not to get too excited. So there we were on the open road, not knowing what to expect or hope for.

Even before the trip I’d been thinking about reclamation, about hydropower and dams and how the combination of outsized vision and the communal will of New Deal America managed to reclaim so much. For better and for worse. When I was young, I harbored Ed Abbey fantasies of dams blasted to smithereens, and I am as happy as the next monkey-wrencher to see the Elwha come tumbling down. But lately I’ve grown a strange and desperate faith in reclamation in all its meanings:

To take back. To make right. To make useful.

So there we were in Lone Pine. We spent an afternoon at Manzanar, the former internment where Japanese-Americans have reclaimed their history. Then the next morning, we entered the park in all its stark grandeur, and we passed this sign:
Check out the phrase at the bottom: "Homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone." I was floored. I know enough of the sordid history of Indians in National Parks to know how uncommon such an acknowledgement is. When I opened the park map and saw that it was not merely a nice gesture, but reclamation at its most raw and right. The Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act in 2000 had granted 300 acres in the park and more than 7,000 in the surrounding lands back to the Indians.

Since then I’ve read everything I can find about the tribe’s history and their activists like Pauline Esteves and Barbara Durham, and I’ve interviewed several of those involved in the Homeland Act negotiations including Charles Wilkinson, author of a terrific history of modern Indian movements, Blood Struggle. My obsession with reclamation has grown even bigger and more unwieldy (outsized?) moving in several directions at once … like the very best projects. But despite my best efforts, I have yet to talk to the Timbisha. I have not given up hope.