Stereotypes abound in the new West

Few issues have ignited such fierce argument in the West as the recent reintroduction of wolves in central Idaho. People often get lost in the storm of accusations, distortions and media simplifications--people like Phil Nisbet and Helen Ulmschneider.

Both live in eastern Idaho's Lemhi County, where the wolf debate has burned angrily in recent months. Like most real people living in the midst of a complex drama, they defy the stereotypes cast upon them by the media and their opponents.

Take Nisbet, local representative for Alliance for America, one of the successful, low-budget Wise Use groups that has ambushed the more established environmentalists from the grassroots. He thinks wolf reintroduction is just more nonsense unwanted by the people it affects most.

By all stereotypes, he should be just the kind of bogeyman urban liberals loathe.

But Nisbet, with loud red hair and a voice to match, is no agribusiness thug. He's not bankrolled by the dark forces of open-pit mines and welfare ranches.

Nisbet is a local guy in a baseball cap who works for a local drilling company. He loves the quirky folks in his county because they genuinely prefer to earn their living with their hands. He wears a broad smile and says "hi" to everyone he passes. This man has a boy's uncontainable enthusiasm for life in Salmon.

"In Salmon, you're an individual," he says. "How many times have you felt faceless living in Seattle? How many times each day?"

He genuinely believes the wolves will threaten local business--that they will prey on stock, that protection programs will interfere with commercial outfitters and mine locations. He wants to keep things as they are in Salmon, just because he thinks the way of life here is great as it is.

He gestures to the homes nearby, houses that in a wealthier city would be in the "bad" part of town. Here, Nisbet believes, people think these houses are enough. It's not that folks in Salmon are too backward to have a taste for bigger, fancier houses. They just don't feel they need them. Nisbet's deep voice nearly roars with conviction when he explains these facts.

Nisbet believes the federal government, at the behest of its elitist urban masters, have determined they can shove policies like wolf reintroduction down the throats of rural people like the folks in Salmon. It's a belief that fills him with frustration.

Nisbet believes people who think that way can never understand what makes life in Salmon fulfilling.

Helen Ulmschneider also lives in Lemhi County, but in some ways she's an outsider. Her tastes run decidedly against the local grain: She hasn't eaten meat since the '70s. She loves classical music, and is a pianist herself. There is more than a little of the back-to-the-land movement preserved in her home, dress and words.

Ulmschneider is an ecologist with the Bureau of Land Management. She works with ranchers and other BLM employees to help formulate grazing plans, monitor stream conditions and work with endangered species.

She moved here less than a year ago from Boise, where she worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her home is a modestly decorated guest house on a small horse ranch. It is filled with books, a piano and the smell of coffee made in a French press--possibly the only one in Salmon.

Many conservatives would love to cast her as a career liberal that lives off the fat of taxes, while callously burdening working folks with regulations.

In reality, Ulmschneider is as empathic about the local way of life as she is soft-spoken and reasonable.

She has mostly kind things to say about local ranchers and congratulates the majority of them for their cooperation and willingness to lessen their impact on the federal lands over which their livestock roam. Ulmschneider even compliments Eugene Hussey--the rancher who became a lightning rod in the wolf debate after one of the reintroduced wolves was shot on his land.

"As far how he treats his allotment, he's good," she says. She believes whoever pulled the trigger on the wolf on Hussey's land "probably just thought it was a coyote. It's kind of immaterial how it happened, anyway."

Hussey, like many ranchers, baits the edges of his property with dead calves as a way to attract coyotes, shooting them and thereby thinning out the predator population, she says. If someone--almost anyone in the county--saw a dog-like animal feeding on a dead calf, they would shoot it immediately from whatever distance they saw it.

Sounding remarkably unlike the bureaucrat she's supposed to be, Ulmschneider also emphasizes that public land belongs to everyone--not the government. "I think it's one of the most advanced things about this country that we have these large quantities of public land that really anyone can go on."

When it comes to wolf reintroduction she is circumspect, but positive. She acknowledges the fear and loss locals will face, but to her it's worth it. "I think we accept all kinds of risks in our lives, but I'm willing to accept the risk that the wolf poses," she says.

Ironically, her cat--which is fat enough to appear pregnant--rubs against her legs as she says this. Neither the cat or her dog would be much of a match for a wolf.

Though cover photos of angry men in straw hats might sell magazines, and talk-radio invective about jackboot federal agencies might draw listeners, the reality is much less marketable.

Folks in Lemhi County are still just folks. Unfortunately, their inconveniently complicated motives don't make good copy or serve Washington's political ends.