I. Patriotism Written in Stone

It used to be called Sam’s Rocks—named for its nineteenth-century owner, Samuel Morrison—until the Forest Service decided to call it a “scenic overlook” and change its name to Rimrock after the Allegheny River was dammed. Rimrock was once owned and specially loved by Chief Cornplanter who, when he realized Seneca possession of their Allegheny land was doomed, sold it to the white man he trusted above all others, James Morrison, Samuel’s father.

But I’ve only known it as Rimrock. I first heard about Rimrock as a teenager when the Kinzua Dam was being finished. Tales about immense numbers of rattlesnakes being removed from dens there were commonplace. While it’s likely there was an element of truth in those tales, it’s equally likely they had a direct relationship to an interaction between alcohol and testosterone. Seething masses of venomous vipers were one of those special horrors holding lurid fascination and an opportunity for verbal displays of abstract, courageous woodsmanship for manly men. I never went to Rimrock in those first days of its new identity. My hunting, fishing, and forest wandering mostly centered twenty miles south of Rimrock, in ancestral territory on both sides of the border between Warren and Forest counties.

I left Warren, the place of my birth and childhood, the morning after high school graduation, in 1967. During college years I often sought respite from the various tensions of the times in brief, impulsive forays into the woods accessible from Aunt Gert’s camp in Mayburg and with Hartie, my cousin-in-law and brother-in-spirit, from his forest-edge home in Tiona, halfway between Mayburg and Rimrock. The myriad ways my consciousness was rooted in the forests of the Alleghenies were mostly unconscious. I attributed the ease, wholeness, and healing I found there to a generic sense of the contrast between wild, forested land and the baffling lunacies of a society mired in absurd war and stifling inhibitions supported by hollow simulations of spirituality.

When I returned to Warren I did so with little sense of returning home; I was merely following the happenstance of a job offer. A few months later, a civil service test led to a much “better job” (the good job turned progressively weirder, but that’s another story). My sense of home had gone into a healthy hibernation while the exuberant liberations of my adolescent soul reveled in sex, drugs, rock and roll, political outrage, and art. As that flush of multifaceted liberations settled into balance with the grim realities and simple sanities of trying to live well in the world, I began to find in the elegant horizons, fertile forests, and ancient rocks of my native territory a new sense of what it means to be native to a place. Though the groundwork for such a realization had been laid in earlier, more youthful wanderings, its new blossoming began at Rimrock.

Rimrock was a place of new beginning for the very simple reason that it was known and accessible. I didn’t need a topographical map, pack frame, or time off work to breathe in its wonders, and I could easily tell out-of-town friends how to find it and meet me there. I was part of a close-knit circle of early-twenties hippies who either graduated or dropped (sometimes with a little push) out of academia as the great countercultural wave of the sixties lost its momentum and receded. We were all struggling in various ways to reconcile the wildness of heart we cherished in ourselves and each other with the often heartless demands of making a living. I was the one who, after our brief run of liberation, excess, joyous confusion, and college, returned to the boondocks to serve as a weekend host and guide, offering a floor to crash on, the ability to build a campfire, and a lonely, constant willingness to hike and wander in the company of kindred spirits.

Rimrock became our gathering place. At times we were crazily reckless—we free-climbed the cliffs tripping so heavily the rocks respirated like breathless animals and the trees writhed like the legendary masses of rattlesnakes from barroom tales. It was in social situations outside the tribal camaraderie of our freakdom that we felt endangered. We mostly had Rimrock to ourselves, especially in winter when the access road was closed. We felt safer there than most other places. Falling seemed among the smaller risks we courted, even when disaster was avoided by a frantic, bloody-handed scramble. We believed the confluent wildness of the land and our hearts somehow protected us, which was hugely naïve, but not entirely untrue. The constraints of reverence often parallel those of caution.

The intimacy of our relationship with the place synchronized our awareness of our physical abilities with the risks and demands of the rocks. Though we were functionally more cautious than any factual description of our behavior can sound, I can’t deny that we were also just plain, dumb-ass lucky. I can’t responsibly recommend our attitudes or actions to anyone, but I do believe that everyone must, and probably does, engage in some equivalent dance of risk and joy as they find their way to feeling at home in their own heart, body, and place.

We frolicked, climbed and laughed. We cooked brown rice on small fires of gathered twigs. We made love, and had great gasping floods of insight. We were transformed by processes we barely understood into the new people we had to become as the great wave of exuberant dissidence we had ridden with youthful abandon dissipated and left us aground in a strange America knee-deep in simulacra and greed.

Our often foolish, risky, and/or naïve behavior had been an essential component of our generation’s point of departure, the vessel on which we sailed forth in search of a new world as well as the essence of whatever new and unique we could give to humanity. For a small circle of us, Rimrock was our Ellis Island, our point of re-entry into the “real” world beyond the wildness of tripping through a sea of wonder and risk. Outside the ceaseless, virtually tribal social life of hippie college years we began to see ourselves from a broader perspective—much like emerging from the detailed multi-sensory opulence of Allegheny forest onto the sandstone cliffs of Rimrock and seeing the overall shapes of the land spread out before you. What I saw in the confluence of those two broad perspectives, the shapes of life and land, was home.

In the years that followed, Rimrock became more known and popular, while I grew more adept and comfortable in wandering to other less easily accessible forest places. My growing sense of nativeness to the land of my birth and youth drew me toward more private territories I could discover or rediscover on my own. I came to disdain places of easy access, but the wonders I sought, found, and loved in my miles of off-trail wandering all bore the indelible imprint of Rimrock’s powerful contrasts: hard sandstone weathered into soft organic forms, a simultaneously harsh and gentle blend of intimacy and grandeur, the sunny openness of valley spaces and the cool darkness of caves, shelter and danger, rattlesnakes and song birds.

A decade and a half after those early years of homecoming, I returned to Rimrock with my young son to show him wonders otherwise inaccessible to his short legs or unacceptable to my fatherly overprotectiveness. Though I was dismayed to see it looking worn and threadbare around its trails and edges, we picnicked there several times each summer for a few years. I believe Rimrock gave to Oren something parallel to what it had given to me long before—something made possible by the very accessibility that had widened its paths and deposited beer cans in its caves.

A hopeless forest romantic, I fall in love with wild places; I fall deep and hard. For a while that was safe and hence joyous. In the late sixties and early seventies, other aspects of our personal wildness were safe too; the largest dangers in our sometimes exuberant, sometimes desperate promiscuity were the emotional hazards of falling too quickly into loves whose intensity exceeded their depth. Those of us who kept our alterations of brain/blood chemistry in the realm of perceptual enhancement mostly emerged unscathed, if also unmatured, when the revelations eventually grew repetitious and simplistic. But when the places I dearly loved began to fall one after another to the chainsaw, bulldozer, and drilling rig, my heart took a more savage beating than any it had received from the capricious young women of my overlong adolescence. To love a particular territory came to seem at least as risky as the drugs and free climbing of younger days. When my favorite hunting territory of twenty years was chewed so ragged I could no longer bear to witness its wounds, I embraced the nomadic urges already rising in my heart as an opportunity to share with my, by then, adolescent son the joys and skills of wandering, and the newfound love of discovered places.

One of the several wondrous places we discovered was Fool’s Creek, a little valley with rock formations that mirrored Rimrock in similarity and uniqueness. Our shared explorations of Fool’s Creek’s wonders became one of the threads that stitched our father-son friendship together through the hormonal and emotional tumult of Oren’s teenage years. He fell in love with Fool’s Creek; he fell deep and hard. It became a refuge and a friend. He frequently escaped to the wildness of Fool’s Creek, and its wildness is part of what kept despair at bay while he struggled through the lost loves and disillusionment that are twenty-first century America’s sad version of a vision quest for our young. It remains a place he shares with friends who cross a threshold of intimacy only he can define. I have thought of Fool’s Creek as perhaps the truest gift I have given my son—not a parental duty, but truly a gift.

In the spring of 2008 it was announced that Rimrock was to become an oil field. As with most of the Allegheny National Forest, the subsurface mineral rights are privately (i.e. corporately) owned. The public consensus reflected by local politicians and the local newspaper seems to be one of helpless surrender to some combination of the sanctity of ownership and the unquestioned imperative of petroleum. There’s a lot to be said about those two topics, but frankly I have neither the aptitude nor education for the intricacies of legality interwoven with political history—I’m neither a scholar nor a journalist. I’ll try to keep my focus on my forte, which is my own life, here in the northern Alleghenies.

I live in Warren, on the edge of town. Like the deer whose flesh has fueled my life, I’m fond of edges. I have neighbors. I own my little piece of creekside land (subsurface mineral rights and all) free and clear—no debt, no mortgage. If I decided to raise hogs in my yard, I would not be allowed to do so. Although I have more than twenty-five years of my life invested in my unencumbered ownership of this piece of land, I agree that I should not be allowed to raise hogs there for the very simple reason that my ownership does not confer upon me the right to degrade the day-to-day quality of life for my neighbors. Such restraint and consideration are a fundamental aspect of civilized behavior, not merely here in the United States, but around the globe. It’s not just a matter of money, of the decreased property values that might result from a small, in-town hog farm; it’s a quality of life issue—a matter of the smell of pig shit, the appearance of a churned mix of mud and manure versus the present mix of trees, flowers, and grasses. It’s a matter of ambience that takes precedence over economics, even if I gave a small boost to local economy by hiring local people to shovel shit and slop hogs.

Weakened by a mixture of paranoia and carelessness, my generation’s gift dissipated in the apathy, voyeurism, and money that defined post-Vietnam American culture. In dark moments I still feel the palpable absence of our lost promise. But revisiting Rimrock to refresh my memories for this writing, I still felt its electric buzz in the subtext of nostalgia. Surprisingly, the threadbare quality that had dismayed me nearly two decades before had gotten no worse. Rimrock seems to have achieved some sort of ecological balance with its human traffic. I could still walk through the cool, green, fertile lushness of forest and feel my sudden emergence into the vast space of the shape of the land that shaped me as a wonderfully repeatable epiphany. That experience is not some rare or rarified act of connoisseurship or a labor of pilgrimage—it’s there for all of us. Our culture is dying and our young becoming lost for lack of such epiphany. When its possibility is taken from us the loss will be as democratic as its current accessibility: our lives will be equally diminished.

Sitting on a clifftop rock to write the scribbled notes that became this essay and waiting for friends to arrive, my pondering was interrupted by the arrival of several young men on a nearby rock. I overheard them talking about camping at Fool’s Creek. I asked if they knew Oren Darling. Yes, they’d just come from camping there with him. Back home that evening I received an e-mail from Oren telling me that the trees in his favorite area of Fool’s Creek had been marked for cutting.

When they log Fool’s Creek, they will surely wound my son. They will use chainsaws to amputate part of the meaning of home in his world. He is a grown man now and probably more resilient than I am, but I still bleed when he is wounded.

A gridwork of oil well sites and access roads has been marked in orange tape and paint along the road to Rimrock and all over the surrounding forest.

Nowadays, we hear a lot of talk about patriotism. It’s a notion with a long history, but we seem to have lost touch with the core of its meaning. Patriotism is more than an irrational loyalty to a flag. It is more than a fanatically held opinion that some particular form of government is superior to all others. Patriotism mutually defines, and is defined by, the confluence of the shapes of life and land that is the foundation of what it means to call a place home. Patriotism is a faith that can only live in the context of being native to a particular place; it cannot exist without a deeply felt loyalty to, and reverence for, the land itself.

If true patriotism existed in northwestern Pennsylvania, the survey markers at Rimrock would be widely regarded as an act of war. I don’t know what “war” would mean. I’m not a wise man. I don’t believe in armies and I don’t want to encourage anyone to risk their freedom with vengeful felonies, but my forest, my great-grandfather’s forest, my son’s forest is bleeding deep and hard.

What is the half-life of passive acquiescence—how long does it take for apathy and defeatism to decay into active complicity? The very soul of our land, the wildness of our forests, and of our spirits, is being plundered and pissed on for the short-term profits of petroleum greedheads. We must not go quietly into that dark night.

II. Greed Written in Oil

Though the land of the Allegheny National Forest is owned by the Federal Government, which, in theory, means “we the people,” more than ninety percent of the subsurface mineral rights are privately owned, which, in fact, means corporately owned. The very idea of having separate ownership for the land’s surface and subsurface seems like such a self-evidently dysfunctional notion that it’s difficult not to rage against a perversion so vastly more twisted than anything practiced by gay folks, whose imagined bedroom behavior keeps the shorts of conservative politicians in a perpetual twist. But that irrational separation is neither luridly imagined nor theoretical; it’s done a deal and not likely to be undone anytime soon. We have to accept the now well-established legal right of our lusty corporations to sodomize the land the ancestors of those same conservative politicians allowed them to marry.

Regardless of whether subsurface rights should have been separately sold, they were, in fact, purchased and it behooves us to respect those purchases as we would respect other forms of ownership, lest we step onto a slippery slope, at the bottom of which everything and everybody is fair game. That if you own subsurface mineral rights and the use of the surface owner effectively destroys that resource by rendering it inaccessible, you should be fairly compensated for your loss is rooted in an age-old principle so ingrained in our culture as to be essentially beyond dispute. Though there are issues that could complicate or even attenuate that principle, for purposes of this discussion let’s accept it as fundamental and avoid the tempting distractions of philosophy.

The most basic, primal core of human morality is rooted in reciprocity. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you—the old, almost trite “Golden Rule.” That’s why we should all agree that a subsurface rights owner should be compensated if they’re denied access to their property. Now, consider that in the Allegheny National Forest such access to their rightful ownership will deny and/or destroy the clearly entitled use of the surface rights, which we the people own. Should we not also be fairly compensated for our loss? If not, why not? Someone needs to explain without diversion or obfuscation why this one human relationship among all others is not bound to the principle of reciprocity.

What is the moral/ethical difference between “You can’t drill here” and “You can’t hike, hunt, fish, camp, or experience the epiphany of creation here”? The only difference is dollars and when it comes to the love of the land you own (and we all own the Allegheny National Forest) and live within, dollars are not necessarily the bottom line. Still, I realize that dollars often represent the only common ground we have in achieving equity between conflicting values. So the real problem is a matter of establishing the appropriate compensation for the short-term gains of the subsurface rights owner versus the long-term losses of the surface rights owner (i.e. we the people). Regardless of the subtlety and complexity of that issue, compensation must be made for the very simple reason that a one-sided relationship is an oxymoron. Reciprocity lies at the core of all human morality.

I can’t begin to say how one can put a dollar value on the loss of Rimrock or the Arnot or Kinzua Heights, or Salmon Creek. But I’m keenly aware of the desperate, greedhead sound of a con man’s bullshit and right now, it’s spewing like a gusher.

We live here. Our grandparents lived here. Our great-grandparents lived here. Our children live here. Our grandchildren live here. Why? What is so special about this place that we have become native to it? Whatever that is, we must take it into our hearts with all the righteous ferocity of mated goshawks defending their nest. Those who would take our land from us must be made to pay for our loss.

A precise one-to-one match of monetary value for losses that are only partially monetary and whose monetary aspect is far less easily quantifiable than units of oil or natural gas is not a simple matter. But the subtleties and complexities of defining just compensation are certainly no more daunting than other such issues routinely addressed by our court system in damage claims for the loss of a spouse or child, for pain and suffering, for emotional distress, etcetera.

The trade-off could be something as simple as acre for acre, with some small adjustments for special place-specific values on both sides of the equation. The net result of such an approach would be the protection of fifty percent of our remaining forest. Could the oil and gas industry be content with the reduction of a mere fifty percent of the surface owned by we the people to a ravaged, grid work, industrial site? I’m tempted to say it’s absurd to think they’d be willing to settle for only half of our land. Maybe that’s unfair of me—it is, after all, only a gut feeling based on an accumulation of impressions with little that’s analytical or objective to support it. But if it’s true, what does it say about the level of sheer, ravenous, amoral greed we’re dealing with? Why are we not furiously outraged? If a foreign enemy attempted to do this to us and refused to settle for even half of our land, would we consider any other reaction than to lock and load? Are we so demoralized, so desperate and defeated that we’re ready to surrender the beautiful, living heart of our land in exchange for a few hard-labor jobs? If so, how have we become so gutless and pathetic? Why are we not shamed by our cowardice?

I’ve never been inclined to be swept up in the testosterone-addled patriotism so dear to the hearts of rednecks and the mouths of politicians, but I have always believed that Americans in general, and rural Americans in particular, were especially blessed with resourcefulness, fierce independence, and love of their land. But let speculators drive the price of gasoline up by a buck and we’re ready to surrender. What happened to us? How did we get so weak?

At what magnitude does the single-mindedness of greed accumulate into criminality deeper than what can be defined by law? That’s a large and ancient philosophical question requiring wisdom beyond both my eloquence and the scope of this essay. But I believe that we can all access such wisdom in our hearts even when we can’t cultivate it into eloquence with our intellects, if only we can step outside the shrill cacophony of politics and gossip. That belief remains one of the cornerstones of my battered, but still living, capacity for hope.

III. Grief Written in Mud

While a loosely formed group  (which included me) calling themselves Friends of Rimrock labored in uncertainty to summon public attention and political support in hope of sparing Rimrock from brutal transformation into an industrial site, another weird, ugly drama unfolded a few ridges up the Kinzua valley.

Vandals, allegedly a pair of disgruntled former employees, took a wild, vicious shot at haphazard revenge against the oil developer they had once worked for. Not content with merely smashing some equipment, they opened the valves on oil tanks—twenty of them. The Forest Service initially announced a spill of around 1,000 gallons of oil in the Chappel Fork (a branch of the now submerged portion of the Kinzua Creek) watershed, an ugly wound indeed on a small, woodland trout stream. But within a week the estimated spill had grown to 45,000 gallons—not merely a wound, a catastrophe. The alleged culprits were apprehended quickly. According to newspaper accounts, they claimed to have had no intention of harming the environment, but were merely lashing out at the former employer whom they felt had treated them unfairly. It’s easy to react to their claim of quasi-innocence with sarcasm and contempt: what did you think would happen when you dumped that oil? Duh! But hold on, these guys were oil field workers. Their foresight may have been crippled as much by culture as by ignorance, and perhaps alcohol.

I went out to Chappel Fork with a couple of fellow Friends of Rimrock to witness the damage first-hand and confirm the credibility of Forest Service and newspaper reports. We took a walk through some of the drilling-in-progress, not far from the sight of the spill. I didn’t see much that I hadn’t seen before. The oil spill itself was terrible. To witness hungry trout taking insects from the surface of an oil-slicked stream, thus poisoning themselves, is darker than poignancy. But the simple unspoken truth is that the watershed was already doomed before it was poisoned by angry fools. It is being reshaped and ravaged by bright yellow machines of destruction so fierce and powerful that their aftermath can only be described using the language of warfare. All discussions of the economics of oil, energy, and need aside, I don’t believe we can treat the land and its creatures with such heedless, callous brutality without paying a huge price in degraded humanity. The thinly veiled cost of all brutality is its damage to the soul of the perpetrator. Aboriginal people know this; any hunter, fisher, or farmer ought to.

There’s no pretty way to drill oil wells in a forest, but the visible brutality currently inflicted on the land goes pervasively beyond that self-evident limitation. When you walk in an area being drilled you observe an obvious thoughtlessness, a careless disregard we can only assume comes from a rote refusal to consider any value beyond the completion of the task at hand, a refusal which seems to be deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry.

A friend who does technical work on equipment for oil and gas developers tells me that the workers are extraordinarily rough on their tools and equipment, not out of necessity or even expediency, but with a twisted, collective, macho pride in the casual wielding of brute force and the dismissal of care, finesse and caution as effeminate and weak. They beat the crap out of their tools and equipment with little regard for the consequences in terms of wear or malfunction. There is a peculiar disconnect between their actions and consequences—beyond “git ’er done,” nothing else matters.

So it’s no surprise that, when a couple of their own got pissed, they dumped 45,000 gallons of oil without even considering damage that might be done beyond the cost and inconvenience to the object of their anger. Their actions were a classic example of oil industry culture. That’s exactly why such operations are desperately in need of both public and governmental scrutiny and oversight. The utter failure of their internal culture to foster an ethic that connects them to the larger world of watersheds, stewardship, and fundamental human values of compassion and beauty renders them incapable of recognizing their own brutality and hence, incredibly dangerous.

Chappel Fork is not is not a place where I’ve spent a lot of time, but in its unravaged state it was typical of my homeland creeks in both its commonality and its uniqueness. It was typical too in its demise, which largely took place before a couple of vicious thugs spilled their ignorant savagery from its already gaping wounds. I’ve seen it before; the long list of beloved places—small valleys, each as distinctive and alike as a human being—slaughtered for oil and veneer is heartbreaking.

This is not a call to end all harvest and extraction. I don’t deny the ways my life is deeply and often happily embedded in a society that pervasively fails to imagine sustenance without destruction. I’m aware that the damage that sustains my thoughtless habits and casual pleasures, as well as my survival, will sometimes alight on places tender to my heart. I once knew a whitetail buck who I intended to kill and eat, despite knowing him so well it was and remains impossible to speak or write of him using the grammatically correct “it”. I loosed a poorly aimed arrow and caused him to die in terrible suffering without gaining even the meager redemption of my sustenance. I am not innocent. This isn’t abstract theorizing or tree-hugging naiveté. I mourned that buck as I now also mourn Chappel Fork. I mourn its beavers and its trout. I mourn its beauty, which I cannot live to see return. Everyone I know who truly loves these gentle Alleghenies and their myriad beauties feels the same way.

What is the critical mass of grief? To what depth must it accumulate before its heat and pressure result in a chain reaction of outrage and resistance? To allow brutality to force a marriage of hope to anger is a hidden surrender that merely perpetuates the evil it seeks to resist. But how can we take our land back? I mourn the absence of an answer.