One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine December 2001

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One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)


	Home again on the range: a portion of the Flying D's 5,000-head bison herd

RATTLING AROUND AVALON in his old Toyota truck, Beau’s intimacy with the landscape shows. At one dried-up peat bog, he talks at length about what will replace it: a 360-acre lake he’s restoring. At another lake he hops out into a biblical gathering of insects.

“Oh, hell, don’t worry about those,” he laughs as the swarms blacken us. “They’re just hatchlings. They won’t do anything.” Unperturbed, he pulls out a fly rod. “How about a sportsman’s shot?” he informs the photographer with me. “Let me catch a bass. Right here.” He walks to the water’s edge and starts examining the surface and the shadows. He casts, and two minutes later a fish is dangling on the line. Then he does it again, like a Saturday morning Bassmaster. The day wears on like this, Beau driving around the lumpy roads of his 25,000 acres, yakking endlessly. “Black bears like to cross through here,” he says at one point, and sure enough, one appears, sees us, and rambles off.

We pull up to some thick woods. The stretch is dense with oak and magnolia; the underbrush is as tall as a basketball player—impenetrable without a machete.

“You’ll never get a better view of past, present, and future than right here,” he says. He asks me to look at this forest, and it just looks like “forest” to me, but then it becomes clear that these woods are supposed to be repellent. If I leave this land knowing anything, he wants me to know that this is wrong.

“Pre-Anglo, this land burned every year,” he says. “Those hardwoods would never make it to this height. This should be longleaf pine.” We continue on, bouncing up and down past different styles of forest, and then come to a clearing where bulldozers are shoveling ripped-up trees into piles to be burned.

“This is tung-nut tree,” Beau says. “It’s not a native species. It was planted in the forties to produce tung-nut oil. But it chokes out the longleaf pine.” So, on about 3,000 acres, he’s tearing out the tung trees and reseeding pine. We drive to a patch of newly reclaimed longleaf forest, where the tung trees have been removed, the hardwoods logged, and the floor cover burned to make it easier for the longleaf to come back.

“Look at that,” Beau says. “It’s amazing. What you’re seeing is a work of art.”

The man who taught Beau to see the land this way is just up the road at Beau’s latest acquisition, an old 8,500-acre pine plantation. We hook up with Leon Neel, Beau’s mentor, an originator of the Turner ethic, and a driving force in its implementation. Neel is an old-timer in this area, a 74-year-old environmentalist who’s worked with loggers all his life. More important, he is a practitioner of fire ecology, the growing school of thought that fire was not just a part of the land “pre-Anglo,” but—whether set by migrating American Indians, by lightning, or by Beau’s employees today—a necessary part of wildlife management.

“You’ve got to understand how this works,” Neel says in his smooth inland drawl. He grabs a small clump of longleaf in the grass stage. He explains how it closes up during a fire, protecting the tree’s heart, and then shoots straight up above the usual fire line, beginning its ascent to the top of the forest canopy.

Longleaf pine produces beautiful, languid, 12-inch needles precisely to create the kind of fuel that will combust into fire every fall, destroying its competitors. The “hand of man,” as Beau and Neel like to say, stopped the fires and deprived the longleaf of its main Darwinian advantage. It started to disappear as the unburned forests easily pushed it aside, and as mill companies clear-cut these woods to make room for fast-growing pulp trees like slash and loblolly pine.

On some level, there’s a tree-hugging sensibility at work here: Neel and Beau look at these woods and can see the difference between overgrown hardwood and the cathedral spaces of a climax pine forest. But this is where Beau also earns the Turner in his name. “Longleaf is a really nice timbering wood for furniture,” he says. “Slash and loblolly aren’t.” Beau believes he can profitably log these woods while maintaining the parklike cathedral conducive to quail and, at the tip of the pyramid, the red-cockaded woodpecker.

“Clear-cutting wrecks your soil, and that’s just going to hurt you in the long run,” says Beau, shouting now. “Economics and environmental sustainability go hand in hand, that’s what we’ve learned.” His mind now fixed on wrongheaded ideas, he recalls the story of a huge $50 million grant proposal that came to him. Some guy had created a hybridized Sahara-type grass that, in an arid environment, produces a wheat grain, a corn grain, and then another grain so that livestock could forage all year long. The perfect plant. He was surprised when Beau asked where the nutrients for this miracle specimen would come from.

“He wasn’t thinking it through,” Beau says, actually pissed off. Then he lets loose with an almost comical “and um” that only Tom Wolfe could spell—“aaaaannnd aaaahhhhhhmmmmm”—before adding, “We can’t go on like this. It’s crazy.” The accent, the tone, along with the disgust, frustration, and impatience, come together into quintessential Turneritude—and there’s no mistaking who this boy’s father is. error waiting for process to exit: child process lost (is SIGCHLD ignored or trapped?)

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