Wilderness: A Celebration of the Useless

Charlie McPherson
Aug 31, 2018 · 13 min read

Wilderness: A Celebration of the Useless

“When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? Or of myself? Is the mountain useful, or the open sea?…To hear, one must be silent”.

-Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Thirty spokes

Meet in the hub.

Where the wheel isn’t

Is where it’s useful.

Hollowed out,

Clay makes a pot.

Where the pot’s not

Is where it’s useful.

Cut doors and windows

To make a room.

Where the room isn’t,

There’s room for you.

So the profit in what is

Is in the use of what isn’t.

-Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

I visited a dating website the other day, only to find it had been monetized to the tune of roughly $30 per month. While I understood that the company had to charge to place profiles, maintain its server, and pay overhead costs, the assumption seemed flawed to me. The idea that human companionship and romance are now a commodity to be charged for, or at least more than usual, ignores the fact that these are human needs: you can lose your mind from isolation and sexual frustration. Just look at the news, with all the isolated and sexually frustrated men committing mass shootings in San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Denver, Texas, Orlando and many other places. We have sites like Meetup, OKCupid, Zoosk and Match charging money for possible friendship or romance. Apparently, the ways we’ve made friends or lovers for, let us say the last ten thousand years, are becoming obsolete as people become more isolated. These companies value friendship and romance extrinsically, only insofar as it generates profit. If people meet, become friends or date outside of these sites, it is of no use to them. Looked at from this perspective, friendship and romance are useless, though they are two sources of solace and happiness in life.

But this isn’t even the half of it. Even more basic needs are now commodities. Multinationals like Coca-Cola and Nestlé are busily buying up the world’s dwindling fresh water supplies and selling it to communities like Flint, Michigan, where the municipal water supply is contaminated with lead and other heavy metals. Children get sick and adults get cancer from drinking this water, but the only remedy is to buy it from Nestlé at a jacked-up price. This is not to mention the kind of abuse that happens in North Africa, the Middle East, and the deserts of Latin America. The assumption, once again, is faulty. Water, something formerly taken as a basic necessity of life, is now just another consumer product to be exploited, with no intrinsic value. Even the recently popularized phrase, “water is life”, is such an obvious truth that it scarcely needs to be pointed out. Not so in late capitalism. The new line of logic goes something like this: wanna stay alive? It’ll cost ya!

We know of other examples, like life-saving drugs and medical procedures commanding exorbitant prices, derelict buildings decaying on city blocks where homelessness abounds, prisons making money locking people up, and even some schools and churches running at a profit. One can only expect privatization of the sidewalks and a surcharge on breathable air to come next.

And this is not just a “what the hell’s the matter with us?” kind of situation here. The consequences are all too real for more and more of us. Cancer patients live on the street because of crippling medical debt. Recent and not-so-recent graduates flounder in a stagnant economy with massive student loans to pay back, and no way to pay. Public, private and parochial high schools and universities are slashing arts and humanities programs and professorships because they are deemed less useful than degrees in science, engineering and technology. While there may be some truth to this if getting a job is the only goal of education, is there not intrinsic value in an educated populace and electorate? Certainly we are seeing now just how much damage a lack of education can cause in the political sphere and in daily life, yet teaching the literary canon and the history of thought is somehow not useful? I’d follow this up with a detailed dialectic and philosophical analysis demonstrating just how wrongheaded and logically inconsistent this thinking is, but my school cut its humanities program and fired the professors, so I don’t know how to do that. Oh, well.

Too much these days is defined strictly by use and its ability to make a profit. This attitude has brought us the point of environmental collapse, massive worldwide inequality, possible nuclear war, and the worst kind of shortsighted greed, narcissism and nihilism imaginable. So I’d like to get off the depressing stuff for a moment and talk about something completely and totally useless: wilderness.

In the United States, there are some 123,014,008 acres of wilderness, discounting the 43,890,500 acres overseen by the National Park Service (NPS). California alone holds wildlands larger than Iraq, and Alaska is home to more than 57 million acres of wilderness, nearly half the nation’s wildlands. I discount the land the NPS manages because in our capitalist market, national parks have use. They attract millions of visitors, generate revenue and support the service industry around them. Tourists need drippy ice cream cones and inexpensive hotels to stay in, and the market is delighted to provide. For a price, that is.

No, real wilderness is what I want to talk about, land that lies fallow and free, untouched and unexploited, of no benefit to anyone in particular, but to all of us collectively. Land that literally just sits around doing nothing, the way it should be.

Recently, my work with Montana Conservation Corps has taken me deep into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, 1.3 million acres of mountain and forest along the rugged line between Montana and Idaho. Within its boundaries, there are no roads, mechanized or motorized equipment. If you want in, you either walk or ride a horse in. The nearest gas station is over sixty miles away, along with the nearest grocery store. Here you will find no muffler shops, car lots, convenience stores or pharmacies. It’s bereft of liquor stores, payday loan centers, barbershops, dry cleaners and accounting firms. You’ll find nary a Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Barnes and Noble, ACE or Target, and it’s devoid of Jiffy Lubes, Verizon stores, Cabela’s and REI. Even the road running between the Selway-Bitterroot and its southern neighbor, the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, is unpaved and only occasionally maintained. Thus, it’s a good idea to take a spare tire and some extra gas with you if you’re driving up here.

Even the road itself, the Magruder Corridor, is a joy in its uselessness. The Maguder Corridor is a 120-mile stretch of unpaved road that winds and wends its way westward through Montana and Idaho’s rough-hewn Bitterroot Range, straddling the boundary between two immense wilderness areas. From Darby, Montana to Elk City, Idaho, it is the only overland route, meandering through dense forests, beetling mountains, broad valleys, meadows bedecked with wildflowers, and shaded groves of Douglas fir, cedar, larch and lodgepole pine. Here there is the palpable air of ancient, savage mystery of a land few visit. Enormous stands of charred, blackened trees exist alongside lush, verdant streambeds and river marshes. Here, dense curtains of fog reminiscent of Wuthering Heights shroud the morning woods, only to be burned off by a merciless sun a few hours later. Here, wildlife abounds, if prints and scat are read correctly, yet it only appears in the smallest, unexpected increments: a garter snake racing across a trail, an osprey’s shriek from on high, the distant pounding of elk hooves. Here, time is measured only by the moving of the clouds. All else melds into nature’s benign indifference, both October morning chill and the lull of an August afternoon.

All faux-poetic aspirations aside, the Magruder Corridor travels over a hundred miles to connect two small towns. Darby is home to less than eight hundred souls, while the bustling metropolis of Elk City boasts just over two hundred. The last anyone heard of Elk City was during a gold strike in the 1860s and it’s reveled in obscurity ever since. One can’t be sure, but maybe Elk City got its name because elk surpass the human population by a considerable degree; it might be a city for elk, but definitely not for people. Darby’s known for its annual Logger Days competition and as something of a tourist attraction in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, but Midtown Manhattan it’s not. This apparent uselessness is almost quaint in today’s get-rich-or-die-trying atmosphere (sorry, 50 Cent) obsessed with usefulness and profit. You half expect to see Old Man Higgins on his porch, overall-clad and idly smoking a pipe, giving roundabout directions from the general store to the old fishing hole just up yonder road a piece, but keep a weather eye out for bull elk and grizzlies up there. To me, the elegance is almost painful to look at: two towns not doing much, connected by a road not doing much, between two huge chunks of land not doing much. Even for restless, busy types like me, this inactivity is magical.

Now on to the work, which is of equal indifference to the global economy and the frenetic drive for profit and practicality over all else. My five fellow crew members and I have been assigned a couple of trails to “cut out” with crosscut saws and clear for potential users after decades of severe fires and more than thirty years of neglect. We hike seven miles northeast along the Salamander Ridge, carrying all our gear, tools and personal effects on our backs, to a remote backcountry camp by Boulder Creek.

Bear in mind, please, that there are no arresting peaks to hike to here. Most of the popular hikes in the Bitterroot will be found along the Continental Divide between Montana and Idaho. This is not a trail frequented by hikers, but rather by the occasional outfitter taking a hunting party out into untrammeled wilderness. And by occasional, I mean occasional. The trail is barely visible as we climb the contour lines up the mountainside. We have to stop work regularly to scout out where the trail might have been, choked as it is with ceanothus bushes and jammed with fallen and burnt trees. Our crew leaders Cat and Mike regularly joke as we cut through the logs that we should post a trail guard to make sure none of our logs hit the nonexistent hikers coming up the scarcely-defined trail we’re working on. One thing is clear: not too many folks are coming here anytime soon. The Forest Service had money in their budget this year to clear the trail, but not enough to send a Forest Service crew out to do it, which is where we come in.

It should be noted that this place is all the more magical because it’s so far-flung and apparently useless. The more popular hikes in the Bitterroot, like Lolo Pass, Blodgett Canyon, or Canyon Creek, offer commanding views, but carry the air of heavy use and abuse. Day hikers and backpackers are common on these trails, Forest Service crews are out there on the regular to rebuild tread, construct retaining walls and water bars, and brush out overgrown sections of trail. Somehow the allure is lost when you know thousands of feet have beaten these paths. In a place leading to no place in particular, where hearing an airplane overhead is practically an event, and you bumble up the mountain on a trail not maintained since the Reagan administration, the soil and sky seem to swallow you up. The peaks and ridges seem larger than life because nobody else is going to see them. With relatively little noise, you can hear the steady hum of life on the mountainsides, valleys and meadows The beauty of the wilderness is in its impracticality.

As I pointed out earlier, our crew is running with crosscuts, not chainsaws, which are prohibited in wilderness areas. To some, the crosscut saw is useless, or at the very least archaic. Now, the crosscut saw is an object of myth in the Northern Rockies. Here in the U.S., where so much is repackaged, modernized and generally made bigger, better, stronger and faster at a blinding speed, the crosscut saw is practically ancient and venerable. A hundred years ago, in Western Montana’s logging heyday, the crosscut was the exclusive tool of loggers for felling and bucking trees. Roughly six inches wide and six feet long, a crosscut saw has two detachable wooden handles, twelve sets of four teeth, one raker and two gullets to catch the sawdust. Two people, one on each side, operate the saw, or one can “single-buck” the tree, using the saw’s entire length by oneself. It’s a tool that requires finesse and skill rather than physical strength; clumsy or forceful use will damage either the blade or you. It is graceful and quiet, as opposed to the loud brute force of the chainsaw. Somebody who can use a crosscut saw properly can make the blade “sing” as it slides through the wood, a pleasant ring of steel like a sword out of its scabbard. Crosscut maintenance is undertaken only by experts who can pitch the saw’s teeth to the exact angle and temper the blade’s soft steel. Bendy and supple, it is an elegant tool from a more civilized time.

Sadly, the crosscut saw fell into disuse around 1920, when the first chainsaw made logging more efficient. However, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, numerous conservation corps and other agencies still make abundant use of the crosscut, especially for work in the deep wilderness where chainsaws are prohibited or inefficient. Chainsaws are essentially twenty pounds of grisly, violent death, and a real pain to hike with. They require myriad spare parts, gasoline, and bar oil, and have a pesky habit of malfunctioning at inopportune times. And God help you if you get hurt out in the backcountry with a chainsaw. If you hit your femoral artery with the chain, there’s not much anyone can do for you except light your final cigarette and say a quick Our Father for your immortal soul. The graceful, lightweight crosscut offers a distinct advantage on these backcountry cut-and-run projects. Often our obsession with speed and power robs us of it. Only in its perceived uselessness is our tool of choice truly useful to us.

Even some of the names in the Selway-Bitterroot evoke a certain impracticality. Our trail is the Salamander Ridge, which is all well and good, but just down the road is a place literally called Hell’s Half Acre. Farther down from there is Poet Creek (of what use are poets anyway?), Horse Heaven (not a trail I’d like to walk on four skinny legs), and in the extreme east of the wilderness, Overwhich (over which? Where the hell are we again?). Even when white settlers were coming through here and naming the land, they weren’t thinking of how to use the place to their benefit. Who wants to start homesteading in Hell’s Half Acre? I can’t imagine too many real estate agents making a lot of money in Lost Horse, either. Simply through our names, it’s clear we weren’t meant to stick around here very long. We can pass through or visit, but this land is of no use to us. And well that it isn’t, or we’d be seeing Dairy Queens and McDonald’s alongside this road to nowhere.

Many people, especially among environmentalists, might object to me calling wilderness useless. Wilderness is, after all, the home of plants and animals, so it’s useful to them. Nature as a whole isn’t useful, though. It doesn’t exist for any specific purpose; it simply exists for we don’t know what reason. It’s like trying to nail down the use of clouds or clams, the moon or mosquitoes. Does anyone know the ultimate use of the force of gravity? What’s the latest on why electricity exists? How about human life and intellect? The point is, ascribing a use to any of these things is the pinnacle of human arrogance and shortsightedness, and part of the mental sloppiness that got us into this jam in the first place. Nothing around us has any use. The absurd, dazzling miracle of its mere existence is enough.

I know I’m elucidating a point people much smarter and more talented than me have expressed before, but it bears repeating in these backward times. While we frantically, neurotically check Facebook status updates, shop, waste and consume, and stress about money in an increasingly exploitative and rigged economy, places like the Selway-Bitterroot hum along just fine without our interference. My crew and I don’t really need to be out here, but there’s a certain romance in being purveyors of the useless out here. We are members of an obscure monastic order, using outdated tools to do unnecessary work in a place very few will ever set foot. There is no “there” where we are, no well-recognized landmark or breathtaking vista. The beauty here is in the land’s mutedness and modesty, it silence and simplicity. With nothing to do, there is nothing the land has left undone, something we all could stand to learn.

A good eye to use and practicality is, of course, vital to survival. Equally important are places without use, where nature can simply take her course and the imagination can roll along the ridgeline. Being able to be silent, to recognize patterns in the smallest things, to come to the aid of the most vulnerable, to think of the importance of uselessness, will be our salvation from death by practicality.

Charlie McPherson

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