THE BACKBONE OF THE WORLD

A balanced report brought back by Los Angeles Times science and environmental editor Clifford after extensive rambles through the raw country of the US Continental Divide.

Along the divide, as it snakes its way from New Mexico to Montana, live people who still make a living off horseback. Veteran journalist Clifford’s intent is to gain a sense of this “world of remote ranches, one-room schoolhouses, volunteer fire departments, gyppos, trappers, prospectors, and range riders,” to find out just why they are there, typically staring economic failure in the face every day. He isn’t here to judge—though it’s obvious that his sympathies lie with an undamaged landscape—but to witness both what appears to be a doomed way of life and some of the last great wilderness in the Lower Forty-eights. His tactic is to make contact with an individual and in that person’s company spend some time, be it with a shepherd on the ragged financial edge above the tony resorts of Vail and Copper Mountain, or with a rancher on a cattle drive, a mule packer, or a group of loggers. These are small-scale operators, and their environmental impact is minor, but what is in jeopardy, and gets Clifford’s attention, is the extinction of a way of life outside the thrum, one he can identify as a fancier of the wild, of chaos and old night, places “hostile to life but full of life, elemental and mysterious.” And he does an excellent job of summoning these lives. What sticks in his craw are the instances of rural decay, though he admits it is “expatriate’s syndrome,” when “poor, indigenous people don’t behave the way you want them to,” people who are more difficult to get into focus than the guy who chirps “You need to be able to go out a kill something” as he gears up for a coyote hunt.

A well-told tale of a place that breaches the centuries—a place to measure what has been lost.