You'll be reading ahead about the loneliest road in America. I was on that trip. I was there. I support Dave Robertson's account of it, but there's one thing he left out. The survivalist encampment. On the road into the Moriah trailhead, just ten miles from Nowhere, Nevada, by the Utah line. That's right; they were out in the desert. Atop an empty hill, just off the road, nothing but sagebrush and leaping pronghorns for miles. A mortar on a tripod, 'Nam vintage. Old rusting trailers, smaller, quicker weapons. A shiny American flag, hanging from a makeshift pole. Frayed, though, on the edges.
What were these people thinking, miles from Nowhere? I suspect we were afraid to talk to them; I certainly was, or else they weren't home. This could be the final outpost. When the government brings on the apocalypse, we'll know where to hide. Or maybe you can run if you can't hide.
What is this connection with retreat to the wild lands and Big Guns? Every man for himself? Everyone with enough machines to defend themselves against the invisible enemy. The people ask the government to cut back, then flee from authority. They hide in the wasteland and wait for the final days.
There must be something comforting in preparing to outlast the end of the world. Imagining you will survive. Imagining that a simpler, comprehensible world will remain where the individual will really matter and be able to take charge of one's destiny.
But things change. The fabled pony express only lasted three years before the railroad caught up with the horse runners across parched plains. The end of the world might pass by without us noticing that it happened at all.
I don't want to face any impending doom alone. The myth that is Chief Seattle has already warned us of "the end of living and the beginning of survival." Survival's no fun. Survival is the worst part of Darwin's bleak picture of life. Living is something people do together, in response to and because of the world that surrounds. I see a place that is nature where people come and go. They trust each other and work together. They do not hide on the hilltop with weapons ready for action.
Maybe nobody does. Survivalism may be more image than actuality. It seems to converge the Right and the Left. (Some say that green politics does the same.) The unplugging hippie meets the mountain militiaman on line at the hospital for emergency care.
But survival appeals, beckons, at the edge of the desert, deep in the forest, on the lam from the long arm of the law. The media make us want it--this simplicity, the hunt and the gather, the defiance of twentieth-century factionalized rule. It's easy enough to get away from it all in America, so why prepare for the fight?
The mood behind change in this country has become violent and hysterical in contrast to earlier dreams of hope and of love. The most famous Luddite in the land blows up his targets as they open their mail--what courage or defiance lies in that? Sensationalism takes the cake, making it hard for reasonable persons to find an audience. You may fight computers, expose the travesty that is the law, but to no avail. Relax, the system likes those that attack it. The World Bank has an entire floor full of people criticizing its mission. The downsizing of attention spans leads to whole new departments of popular culture studies.
How naive are those who want the world to change and believe they can will it so? How indeed. There are signs that something is wrong from the wilderness. Smog over distant hills in the cleanest of places. Clearcuts as wide as the eye can see. Is unused land severed from humanity? Need we isolate nature beyond our prowess if we are to care about and love her?
The easiest answer is to run, and you can hide. This is America! You can just disappear into the woods, and hardly anyone will bother you. You can say whatever you want, not because speech is free, but because no one will listen. Perhaps the frogs will listen. Or the mourning doves and harrier hawks in the trees.
There's a drought on. The squirrels are coming down from the boughs and being smushed on the highways in record numbers. Even black bears are hurtling into suburbia, being waylaid by the cops on the way to the George Washington Bridge. Something's going on. Creatures are coming out of the woods. More than water is in short supply. Those animals are hungering for something else: conversation, transformation, not just animosity.
I live somewhere where there actually are black helicopters in the sky. Really--they lift into the air right from West Point. And behind, in the hills, the cannons are sounding; flashes shoot through the trees. Someone's practicing for war. I close my eyes, listen to the out-of-place sounds that signal where we are. This might be it. This could be the last battle. No balance is secure, but I doubt we'll go this way. Destruction in the name of peace is far more dangerous than the game of defiance.
I'm already making travel plans. I'm ready to trek the loneliest road once more, find those jokers hiding out on that Nevada hilltop. Talk to them, tell them it's time to come home. Time for the end of survival, and the beginning of life.
David Rothenberg, editor
Cold Spring
10/20/95