The protection of owls in Montana
March 2017
Somewhere along the Redwood Scenic Highway, a tall red Conoco sign competed with the ancient giants for human attention. It worked well enough; we pulled in for gas and groceries, half tempted and half disgusted by the big blue Chester’s Chicken advertisement out front. I pulled the car up to the pump while my boyfriend braved the aisles of the corndog-scented complex.
I pumped the gas, then pulled the car around and waited. It was March in Northern California, and we had chanced upon a rare day without rain in this notoriously drizzly region. The air was mild and soft, and a light breeze shook yesterday’s droplets from the treetops. I opened my door, leaned my seat back and closed my eyes. When I opened them, a tall elderly man sporting a red checked flannel was intently examining my front license plate. He had a long, grizzled grey beard and equally grizzled eyebrows furrowed over wide grey eyes. I poked my head out of the door.
“Hiiii,” I ventured, in a high pitched, inviting voice.
He looked up, slowly. His voice was raspy and low. “You’re from Montana?”
I laughed politely, “Yes, indeed.”
“What part?”
“I grew up in Missoula.”
He shook his head in quick jerky motions and his eyes got grew even wider. “Now, tell me something. Why the hell would you leave Missoula, Montana to come to the State of California??”
I laughed for real this time. “You know, that’s a pretty good question! Looking for a bit of adventure I suppose.” Silence. “Uh, have you been?”
His eyes bore into my license plate. “Yeah, I’ve been to Montana. I used to live in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.”
“Oh nice, what were you doing there?”
“I was hunting grizzly bears.”
“Oh…”
His voice got louder and throatier, like a revving engine. “Not all of ‘em. The bad ones. The man eaters.”
I cocked my head to one side. “Ah.” He continued.
“I did some lumber work out there. And in Idaho. Until the goddamn environmentalists came. They wanted to save the…” – his eyes got wide again and he started flapping his arms – “OWLS. But I’ll tell you what,” he leaned toward me, “If god the father wanted all the trees cut down, he’d have done it already. But now President Trump is going to fix all that. Thank god the father for President Trump.” I tried not to visibly recoil. I could hear him muttering something about environmentalists and owls under his breath.
I braced myself for an abstract conversation for which each statement would probably need to be taken with an entire shaker of salt. As a teenage asshole, I used to approach these conversations with a somewhat haughty condescension; these days I try to genuinely seek the kernels of underlying truths. I’ve learned that such abstractions or misgivings often result from the lived experience of injustice that needs to be explained somehow, or else everything is patternless and meaningless. And that’s a hard truth for our order-seeking species to accept. This will to ascribe reason and order to the unfolding of events, even if we must accept abstract premises – which we do, more often than not—is something we all share, and there’s something profound in that.
I was admittedly thankful when, at that moment, my boyfriend appeared through the doors of the gas station, grocery bag in hand, corndog scent wafting behind him. He slowed his pace when he saw my bearded visitor.
“Hello!” he said in the same high pitched, inviting voice I’d greeted the visitor with five minutes ago.
The visitor turned to me, as if to ask do you know this guy?
“This is my boyfriend, Lukas. Lukas, this is… sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Jeb. Hi.” They shook hands across the car hood. Lukas tossed the groceries in the backseat then circled around to lean on his elbows over the hood. The two of them were now perfectly framed by the windshield, from my perspective. Jeb’s grey beard and Lukas’s blonde moustache were backlit by the sun.
“We were just discussing Jeb’s time in Montana. He used to live in the Bob Marshall and also worked in the timber industry for a while. He’s been to Missoula.”
Lukas cheerily replied, “Oh really! Nice. Beautiful country out there.”
“Yeah, until the environmentalists came to save the…OWL,” Jeb replied, arms flapping. He repeated his adage about god the father’s will and the forest with even more fervor, now that another listener was on the scene.
Lukas said evenly, “But someone has to be responsible for cutting down the trees. Wouldn’t it be the fault of humans if all the trees got cut down?”
Jeb recoiled. There was no reasoning with him regardin his belief that environmental damage was god’s will. He repeated: “IF god the father wanted to cut down all the trees, he’d have DONE IT by now.” He paused for a moment, searching our faces to see if this had sunk in. He seemed to get some kind of confirmation, so he changed the subject. “Say,” he said to Lukas, “you’re not from here. You have some kinda accent. Where are you from?”
“Poland.”
“I’m 75% Polish myself. My dad was from Chicago. Terrible place. I left when I was fifteen and never went back.”
“Oh really?” Lukas replied, “Where is your dad’s family from, then?”
Jeb wasn’t sure. A brief conversational interlude ensued, with Jeb hemming and hawing about the names and origins of his Polish ancestors and Lukas asking leading questions. I was glad Lukas was here to field this with me. A seasoned traveler, he has an uncanny ability to decipher and extract the raw ideas underlying whatever people say to him—no matter how outrageous it might seem –in any country, so long as they were speaking a language he understands, even if they speak it poorly. Where an American, wrapped up in his or her own frustrations that probably feel deeply personal, might lack the patience to listen to the gripes of an undereducated Trump supporter, Lukas was steadfast in his consideration and intellectual curiosity.
The conversation soon veered back to owls, environmentalists and Trump.
“I don’t know. I’m an outsider – I’m not from here. You have to tell me,” Lukas was saying.
Jeb jumped right in. “You wanna know something? Ninety-nine percent, at least! Just look on the internet, it’s all there. Everybody voted for Trump. Everybody.” He piped up, “This country needs to change when people care more about the god damn owls” (cue: flapping arms) “than they do about the people. The environmentalists have no idea what they’re talking about! Thank god for President Trump! Everybody voted for him because they know all this is bullshit!”
Lukas tilted his head and paused for a moment in consideration. I remained in the car, quiet, as the conversation had slipped into the tone of masculine camaraderie and I was an observing member, like Palestine in the United Nations, or a moon orbiting a planet. Usually this annoys me, but this time I was happy to sit out and listen.
Lukas said, “So you’re saying that you had a logging job in Montana, but environmentalists stopped the operation because they wanted to protect the owl?”
Jeb paused, leaning back from the car. “Something like that. But—”
Lukas cut him off. “And you think Trump will fix this by letting people log again?”
“Damn right! Trump is going to make this country great again!”
“But don’t you think it would be pretty bad for everyone if all the trees got cut down? If we don’t protect them from that, then who will?”
Jeb sighed loudly, his voice revving like an engine again. “I told you. If god wanted to cut down all the trees….”
Eventually my patience started to wear thin and I dove back into the conversation to politely excuse us, saying something benign like, “Well, let’s hope we can all come to a good solution. Time to head back on the road! Nice talking to you, Jeb. Good luck with things.” He muttered a goodbye and sauntered back towards his ancient beige Chevy with a half-detached bumper. Lukas cleared some road trip debris from the passenger seat and got in, I shut my door, slid my sunglasses from the top of my head to the bridge of my nose, revved up the engine, and pulled out of the lot.
Silence in the car on the highway. I felt that burning, bubbling sensation in my chest cavity of the rising vitriol I keep trying to redirect from individual upholders of a system I perceive to be wreaking planetary havoc to the less satisfying “powers that be”.
“Ugh! I can’t believe that the media and the churches have convinced people of such outrageous ideas!” I finally burst.
Lukas gave me a sidelong glance. “I think it’s a little more complicated than that. He had a job, and because people felt it more important to protect the owls than it was for him to have a job, he’s angry. That’s his experience. And yeah, if the environmentalists didn’t think about that before they implemented this program, then it is a shortcoming of environmentalism.”
I sighed and fell silent. I watched the Conoco sign recede and switched on the radio. I looked up at the Redwoods lining the highway, thinking about how, according to a plaque at the base of the biggest tree in the forest, settlers had attempted to cut it down in the 1890’s to create a dance floor. We failed, I thought. The trees, the people, the owls. One man’s success is another man’s failure, and yet, it’s all bound up together, like the fabulous, rich ecosystem of the old growth Redwood forest. If god the father wanted to protect the trees…