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Outside Magazine January 2002

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Walking the Line
An ardent defender of wilderness reflects on the solace of the mountains—and reconsiders his long-ago travels in Afghanistan, and a new world of human tragedy

By Jack Turner



	"The Tetons and the Snake River" (1942) by Ansel Adams

Since the bathhouse near the cabin where I live in Wyoming is closed for the winter, I haul cold water every day from the creek. The water must be heated for bathing and washing dishes, the stove requires wood, the rounds must be split, and the splitting makes you intimate with an eight-pound maul. Few things calm the mind like an hour with an eight-pound maul.

Around me is the ever-changing sky and the Teton Range, the mountains I love most. The rut is in full force. The bulls bugle, the cows answer with their little barks. The pronghorn are gathering for their journey back to the Green River. Geese and eagles are heading south. Three black bears have pestered me for a week; one of them was enthusiastic about pepper spray and kept coming back for more—two canisters' worth. The trout refuse every fly I've ever heard of. A friend got his elk on the first day of the season. It snowed for the first time since June, a storm I call the Winnebago because it sends all the RV folks south for the winter.

If there is fear around me in the wake of the terrorist attacks, it is not so much the fear of bombs or germs as the fear of a collapse of civil order. As a person primed by a diet of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event, and Stephen King's apocalyptic The Stand, I bought extra ammo for my sweet-shooting .270 rifle and my grandfather's 12-gauge. Batteries. Extra fuel for the chainsaw. A spare chain.

People have started doing strange things. A friend who traps deer mice with a Havahart trap talked to me about purchasing a 9-millimeter Glock pistol. There were reports of telephone calls from people in cities wanting to know if Jackson Hole was safe. At the stores in Jackson, part of the standard chitchat has become how safe Wyoming seems, especially if you come from a place where the population density is 24,000 people per square mile.

Despite setbacks in Somalia and Vietnam, we have endured and celebrated many victories—World War I, World War II, the Berlin Wall, the demise of the evil empire—but our historical trajectory now seems headed into a worrisome labyrinth. So some people smoke more, some drink more, some decide not to get divorced after all, some start going to church again, some just watch it all happening on television. And some, like me, go into the wilderness.

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