In the new year before our inauguration of a new president I computed a route home from Alberta to southern Colorado that would skirt the cities and track the Rockies. I dragged the blue Googley lines along old roads to old places, cross-cutting the Can-Am grain. When it was done and printed out I had 2491 miles to go in 12 days, with stops to ski and see friends.

The global political economy was going to hell, so I resolved to keep the radio off and drive in silence, transcending conceptual thinking about collateralized debt obligations or morally bankrupt bankers. Within minutes of kissing my sweetheart Pat goodbye, however, I was thinking about real estate. It was everywhere along the new west Edmonton freeway. Tall new houses standing eve to eve in blocked-out farm fields practically eclipsed the sun (It’s low in the winter there). I recalled a granite craftsman telling me at a party, “These houses will be falling apart in ten years. We’ll be going back in to do things right.”

On the sterile freeway I cleared my mind of thoughts about unsettled foundations, fuming particle board, green studs, nail guns and spray guns, or tried to. I was setting out on something higher: a pilgrimage down along the Rocky Mountains, the wild continental crest. It was sacred. I would think about hope and whether it meant anything – not so much Barack Obama’s generality but the more concrete meaning of Wallace Stegner’s epithet for the West: “the native home of hope.”

Stegner, born 100 years ago, was a novelist and essayist with a deep interest in history. He was one of the few native Western writers who could communicate with the East without having to play cowboy or Indian. His “Wilderness Letter” written a half century ago to a federal panel called the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission was being quoted by environmentalists and academics on the occasion of his centennial. It’s a tight little essay with useful quotes like: “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.” It became the passionate heart of the argument for the Wilderness Act of 1964 shepherded into law by then-Interior Secretary Stewart Udall (whom Stegner was visiting in Santa Fe when a car crash took the writer’s life 1993).

I met him once at Stanford, an old bull with a drift of white hair. I asked him how he would define American history, expecting a discourse in the spirit of the Frontier Thesis. He leaned forward, and said, surprisingly, simply: “One big real estate deal.” That was the practical side of the writer who could find the poetic in an engineering term like “angle of repose,” which became the title of his most acclaimed (Pulitzer Prize) novel . . . But the tall new fast houses intruded, flickering by.

What is the worth of a house? I lived 35 years in Santa Fe, where building and selling houses was probably the most lucrative industry. I knew that fake adobes (flat-roofed stuccoed frame houses) brought more than historic adobe houses. I knew (and many buyers didn’t) that outlying subdivisions with romantic $600,000 homes had no sewer systems. A retired real estate agent once suggested to me that an enterprising journalist would find a lot to write about by investigating why Santa Fe real estate appraisals for mortgages never came in under the contract prices. The implication was that agents and drive-by appraisers conspired to inflate prices to whatever the dreamy buyers would pay.

A hot market generated more, and larger, commissions and fees, but the stronger implicit motive was profit because agents and appraisers were buying and selling houses on the side. What’s wrong with that? When supposedly objective evaluators are corrupt or incompetent – think, bond-rating agencies willfully blind to the risk of CDO’s – the market can, and probably will, crash.

As a newspaper columnist I did not have the resources to investigate, but I did report the case of an Arizona woman who as executor of her father’s estate was thoroughly pissed at the Santa Fe system. Her father’s small house in a trendy Santa Fe neighborhood had been on the market nearly three years (versus an average then of just a few months). It had been listed by a series of agents who discouraged her from lowering the price. After commissioning an independent appraisal, which came in 12.5 per cent below the listing, she fired the agent and advertised she would sell the house to the best bidder at the end of the next weekend. About 100 prospective bidders, including low-balling agents, swarmed the little house. She sold it to a young couple who offered cash, closing in a week without any of the usual fees. She went home happy with about 75 per cent of the final listing price, able at last to close her father’s estate.

FERNIE, BRITISH COLUMBIA

Where was I? Oh, approaching British Columbia via Crowsnest Pass with its defunct coal mining towns only partly revived by hundreds of quixotic power windmills on the hills. I was going to Fernie, an hour from the Montana border. The redeveloped Fernie Alpine resort is sometimes compared with Taos Ski Valley in terms of chutes and powder, and with its sharp-peaked crest above a long valley it looks like Jackson Hole for ski bums (The New York Times travel section once promoted Jackson Hole as a place where you are spared the sight of skiers with duct tape on their parkas.) From the lift in the highest Fernie basin you can see the grid of the old mining town and clusters of new condo developments up the valley where a golf course is promised.

The internet real estate listings showed condos from US $140,000 for a one-bedroom at the ski area to $2 million for a penthouse atop the remodeled brick shell of the 100-year-old Fernie school downtown. In the classic old railroad resorts further north in the Canadian Rockies – the mountainous UN world heritage site that includes Jasper, Lake Louise, and Banff – real estate speculation has long been prevented by law (absentee ownership, among other things, is prohibited), as is exploitation of natural resources. Fernie, however, is newer and more Americalike. It reminded me of Telluride in the early seventies when miners still went to work at the Idarado and their sons and daughters dreamed of becoming ski instructors.

As I approached Sparwood, just before Fernie, my thoughts turned to a deeper reality underlying the romance of ski-in residences or a condominium project where half the population went to school. The Christmas decorations were still up in Sparwood, but they were unlighted and dark. The town was mourning the deaths of eight men, most in their 20’s or 30’s. Family men, best friends, co-workers at the coal mine. Mining towns are inured to such tragedies, but this was not a mine accident. It was a recreation accident. The Sunday after Christmas 11 buddies, experienced “sled heads,” as they called themselves, drove up a backcountry valley on snowmobiles to a favorite high basin.

The first one in got stuck and the next two drove into the basin to help. The three were caught in an avalanche. The eight others drove in to dig them out. A second avalanche buried the entire group and their machines. Two dug themselves out and rescued a third. When another avalanche came down, they realized further rescue was hopeless (all their equipment was buried) and they went for help. The bodies of the eight young men were subsequently recovered.

On that fatal Sunday morning the avalanche danger was so high the management closed Fernie. These are steep mountains that receive huge dumps of snow. I slept fitfully after a fast Thai special and awoke in the morning and rode up to Currie Bowl where I found skiers and boarders standing by a barrier and listening to sharp explosions. The patrol was bombing. A sign warned that what might look like tufts of soft snow often could be pieces of solid ice blown down in the avalanche control. Later I examined one of these clunkers in the middle of a catwalk. Skiing into it would be like a head-on crash with a boulder.

I was distracted by the name of a new log lodge at the top of a quad lift: “Lost Boys Café.” I wondered if the boys were lost like the eight lost lives at Sparwood. No, the lost boys must have been found, or a café would never have been named for them. You don’t want a sad café. “I once was lost and now I’m found,” goes one of the most sung of Christian hymns. It’s a Western thing to be lost, a wilderness experience. . .

There, I was doing it again: skiing lost in thought. See, I have a problem. I talk to myself, and this can be dangerous unless you are one of those young automatics with head phones who operate on pure reflex. I resolved to still my mind, which meant trying to crank down the internal chatterbox. I needed to pay attention to the snow, the bumps, the shadows, the tree wells, the avalanche-control clunkers, the lions in the trees. Call it yoga skiing or maybe Zen. Call it mindfulness.

The next lift, the highest, unloaded at 6,316 feet elevation, the trail map said. That’s only about a thousand feet higher than a fourth-floor office in downtown Denver, yet the lift is above timberline. I was seeing an example of a geological anomaly that is so familiar it has no name. As latitude increases, the average height of the Rockies decreases, compensating for the harsher climate. The highest lift at Jackson Hole, Wyo., unloads at 10,450 feet, at Telluride, Colo., at 12,570 feet. The Rockies are an autonomous north-south life zone – same geography, same culture, same economy, same environmental threats – bisecting the parallels that were an obsession of those who laid out the two countries, east to west.

As I considered this unity and the impossibility of telling American boarders from Canadian boarders (same smartass kids), I was reminded that Canada at large has one crucial difference from the U.S. The couple next to me on a chairlift seemed to be staring at me. I smiled.
The woman said, “Pardon. Are you an Anglophone?”
“What?”
“Do you speak English?”
“Oh, yes. And you would be Francophones? From Quebec?”
They smiled.
“May we ask about the use of whom?” she said.
“It’s a grammatical. . .” — I did not wish to say pretension — “perfection. You use it after prepositions.”
“With whom shall I ski,” the man rehearsed.
“Yes,” I said. “But most people just say, Who am I gonna ski with.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding to his wife.
The unloading ramp ended our conversation.

In a restaurant that night I read an interview with a local teacher in a monthly paper. He recently returned to Chile, where he lived as a kid until his family immigrated to Canada to escape Pinochet. In the months after the general bombed the presidential palace and assassinated Allende, the boy would see bodies floating down the river near his house. One day at school the teachers were gone, replaced by soldiers. They inspected the children for “cleanliness,” they said, ordering the boys to drop their pants and the girls to lift their skirts to show their underwear. Intimidation was the essence of the junta.

The thin newspaper was written by members of the community and supported by local ads. These small papers seem to be the only ones that are surviving, probably because they never had high expectations of profit to begin with, but I wondered what will happen when the real estate ads dry up. The monthly had no news of the snowmobile tragedy. I asked a waitress what she knew. She said talking about it was hard because everybody in the valley knew someone involved and nobody wanted to fix blame.

WESTERN MONTANA

I checked out of the Super 8 next morning and headed for the border. Stegner wrote about its invisibility in “Wolf Willow,” how as a ranch kid in Saskatchewan and Montana he crossed and recrossed it almost daily. Driving across now is a little harder. I was detained for a while in the Border Patrol office, waiting for a searcher to look at my stuff. It occurred to me as I waited that although Stegner is often characterized as America’s foremost Western writer, Canada can claim some patrimony.
His letter to the American recreation panel said:

“What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical minded – but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them. I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. It has no more to do with recreation than churches have to do with recreation, or than the strenuousness and optimism and expansiveness of what the historians call the ‘American Dream’ have to do with recreation.”

The letter is dated Dec. 3, 1960, a month after the election of John F. Kennedy. It is instructive that in the subsequent era of anti-liberalism, practical-minded politicians would reinterpret the American dream. Under George W. Bush the dream became a dream house (affordable for all in a dream economy). The dream merchants in 2003 even enacted a low-income home buyer assistance bill with the slick title: “The American Dream Downpayment Initiative.” It was part of the campaign for what Bush called “the ownership society,” which also was the Big House society, which became the Big House payment default society.

My friends Sara and Rob, next on my schedule, moved to Montana in the Sixties, declaring independence from their upper middle class families, and bought a homestead in a remote mountain valley near the Idaho border. One essential amenity was the creek that runs through their 40 acres on its way to the Clark Fork River. Rob was a total fisherman then. He had a degree in fishery management. He tied his own flies, creating them if necessary on the spot to match the hatch. In those days there were natives, big fresh water salmon and more. Now they are gone, having gradually died out because of the unnatural effects of the hydro-electric dam on the Clark Fork. So Rob doesn’t fish much anymore, but their son became a fisherman. He fishes for salmon in Alaska, the wild sockeyes that bring top dollar. Rob and Sara had several hundred pounds of these fine fish, headed, gutted and frozen solid, that might have come from their son’s boat. A few days before I arrived, the torrents from an unseasonal rain on the two-foot snowpack flooded a storage shed where freezers keep the fish and garden vegetables. They had to move the fish quickly to a vacant hunting lodge that had lots of freezers. The rural neighbor code at work. When the owners come back in spring, I suppose, they’ll receive a gift of salmon.

For fish and friendship, Rob last winter parked his 1973 Volkswagen bus (on its third engine) in a friend’s auto-body shop. He stripped the bus to the sheet metal body – removing bumpers, lights, chrome trim, everything – and then patiently sanded and repainted the body (beige, as I recall) and baked the enamel and put everything back together. It looks like new. It will make his heirs rich, I suggested. “It’s my coffin,” he said with a hearty laugh.

Rob is skilled and patient, a fisherman in life. With a lot of help from friends and Sara, he built their two-story solar-oriented house, too – on the foundation of the one that burned. The old farm house burned to the ground, destroying all their possessions, one mid-winter night a few months after they moved in. With two small children huddled in a shed, all their money spent buying the place, and no insurance (for what that’s worth these days) they were in despair. Immediately the far-flung community started coming down the road with tools and materials and skills. A kid with an engineering degree sketched the roof structure. There were carpenters and plumbers and electricians. After a summer of hard dawn to dusk work, they had a weatherproof shell. It was a homemade house, with windows from an abandoned saw mill and beams and siding from old barns.

They spent the next 35 years – as money for materials and fixtures became available from seasonal employment with the U.S. Forest Service and in later years from small inheritances – finishing their one-of-a-kind handmade house. It is a work of live-in art, an aged-wood living space with a central stairway guarded by rails from a corral rubbed smooth by livestock. They have protected the property against any future subdividing. From their antique oak dinner table by the south-facing windows they watch nature go by – birds, deer, raccoons, bear, and even big cats.

Out the big window is a 30-foot grand fir in the rising meadow they call their ski hill. It’s the “Christmas Tree,” or used to be. Thirty-five years ago while cutting saplings out of the meadow they decided to save just one. It was knee high and pretty. They hung Christmas lights on it year after year as their children grew, as did the tree. By 1995 they decided it had outgrown Christmas lighting.

“Oh look, it’s a siskin,” Sara said at breakfast (a casserole of eggs and veggies). It was a different bird, feeding on their home-grown sunflower seeds, among the chickadees. “It’s the first one this year.” She reached for a worn log book and made an entry. The pine siskins were several weeks early. Sara seems to know every species of animal and plant on their 40 acres. She identified the birds nesting under a bridge as barn swallows.

“They are becoming rare around here,” she said.
I asked why.

“No barns. They were an eastern bird. They followed the barns west. Now the barns are caving in. Nobody builds barns.”

Sara loves to read and write about these things. She published a guide to the Cabinet Mountains National Wilderness near their place. She edits a newsletter for opponents of the Revett Minerals Co. proposal to mine a silver and copper ore body underneath the Cabinets. Revett claims the subterranean activity and the tailings ponds would do no harm to nature, the grizzly bear habitat in particular. Her essays in a regional monthly called “The River Journal” have a strong following (obviously not including the jolly absentee executives of Revett Minerals).

We clamped on cross-country skis and went walking along the creek. We watched a dipper bird diving. It could stay under water for 20 feet in a fast current, then fly back and try again. Rob saw a bald eagle, very high, circling. Sara talked about the white tail deer, how they seem to have a memory of historical escape routes. The creek bends around the open meadow, the “ski hill,” that rises into timber. Winter after winter during their tenancy, the deer have broken trails in the same two places, along the same lines, from the stream bank to the trees. The trails in the deep snow are a matter of survival, she said, because the deer with their sharp hooves cannot run on top of the crusted snow to the protection of the trees, but their predators – coyotes, cougars – can. The lines don’t follow any feature of the meadow – seemingly arbitrary but always the same. The deer must, therefore, pass the knowledge of the trails from generation to generation. Or, it is genetic.

After I was home, Sara sent me an email. On the night before the full moon a yearling white-tail deer was walking with others up their mystical trail which passes within 30 feet of the Christmas tree. “On the uphill side of the fir, lower branches are caught in the snow. On the downhill, drooping branches conceal a deep tree well. Out of these inky depths – an ink well from hell – leapt a cougar and in two bounds, had the young whitetail down in the snow.”

She learned this as a crime scene investigator, so to speak, the next morning. Ravens already were on the scene, pecking the ripped carcass. During the second night the mountain lion returned and dragged the carcass closer to the trees. Sara pieced all this together from the blood streaks and the round cat tracks in the snow. Bald eagles arrived that morning, chasing away the ravens, and on the third day the local pack of coyotes arrived. Sara, who knows the species of every plant on which the whitetails feed, wrote, “I ponder how apples, roses, willow buds, and cedar tips are now becoming eagles, ravens, coyotes and cougars.”