Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

Tire Puncture Road (not its real name) is one of those impressively harsh mountainside climbs where fatality can occur while fiddling with the iPOD dial and only karma decrees how often you must back up along the edge of certain-death cliff plunges upon meeting the very occasional oncoming hunter in nearly-identical Ridiculously Oversized American Truck (R.O.A.T.).

Of course, the hunter, always in camo and as shocked to see me as I him, nods at first as though to another McCain supporter until he catches a whiff of my suspiciously liberal vegetable oil exhaust and bumper sticker reading: “Earth to Think Tank Pundits: Please Shut Up.”

There is a sort of backwoods protocol for who will be the one to back up the terrifying half mile until something resembling a “pull-out” appears, usually surrounding which vehicle obviously has more weaponry on board. One envisions all early primate encounters in the Rift Valley going something like this.

I’ll say one thing about non-liberal hunters (and progressive putative hunters like myself): at least they’re out here. The birthplace of my valley’s watershed is no cakewalk to access, thank God (and thank God the idiotic congressional plan to ram a road through here is being re-thought). Too many land management decisions are cooked up by people whose idea of environmentalism is to visit the gift shop in the Yosemite Valley.

Which is why I have a fair amount of faith in the Complete Recovery Architecture Proposal for Economy and Earth (C.R.A.P.E.E.) I came up with while accessing the heart of my ecosystem on a recent four-day backpacking trip. Here’s its genesis:

About a third of the way up Tire Puncture Road, “road” becomes too strong a word for what is essentially just slightly-less-than-vertical mountainside shale. So I had to pull over (really, just brake where I was) to shift into an even more advanced form of four-wheel-drive (Ford only gives you this chapter in the Owner’s Manual if you promise you’ll be heading into the hills to kill animals -– I thought bacteria and inadvertent ants counted). And when I did, after peeing off a 1,300-foot drop that Mack, my dog, wanted no part of (his hackles were raised and he was growling at what must’ve just been some nearby bear or mountain lion), I saw astonishing vistas in two directions: across a ridge to the northeast lay the literal heart of the heart of everything that lives and breathes in my world. Right at the source of the river system that feeds everything from the centuries-old local acequia water sharing system to the Funky Butte Ranch’s creek, a patch of re-growth from what must’ve been a teen-aged lightning fire was formed perfectly in the shape of a heart. A golden heart, no less — the aspens therein were turning. That was one direction. Zipping up, whistling for Mack and praying for no more traffic on this, the world’s third crappiest thoroughfare, I caught the view to the southwest, where perhaps twenty miles away, glared the scar of the world’s largest open pit copper mine.

Needless to say, I preferred the view to the northeast. The sun was setting on this Heart in the Heart as I bumped along like a cork to the abrupt end of the road and my first night’s campsite, clutching at essential and potentially injurious articles like notebooks, drums and dogs that were floating around the truck cab as though I were in a space capsule in zero gravity (at 8,000 feet elevation, the air felt about as oxygen-rich). Perhaps jostled into enlightenment by the cranial-sacral massage provided by Tire Puncture Road as factored over a Ford F-250 transmission, this was the moment I came up a fully formed plan for C.R.A.P.E.E.: I thought, “When in charge, I’ll put everyone back to work restoring the mines from decades of water table poisoning, defoliation and overall Mordor-ization. There’ll be soil building, native plant- and tree-planting, water maximization through permaculture zoning, and most of all, jobs, jobs and jobs.”

At the moment, something like 80% of my county’s copper miners are laid off due to drops in copper prices. To be fair, the mine owner’s CEO, Freeport-McMoRan’s Richard Adkerson, brought home only $33.4 million in total compensation in 2008, down from $74.1 in 2007, so everyone’s hurting.

Now, C.R.A.P.E.E. might seem naïve at first. After all, if not for copper, everything from my R.O.A.T. to my laptop would have trouble operating. If I’m serious in my mantra that that the Digital Good Life needn’t go away for the world to be saved, surely I’ll have to keep some copper mines open. By here’s what I think is the most innovative part of C.R.A.P.E.E., what you might call C.R.A.P.E.E. #2: after the Earth is in as good a shape as it was at the dawn of the Industrial Age, presumably copper prices will have recovered, and copper stockpiles, presently at their highest levels in history, will have diminished somewhat. If Mr. Adkerson can avoid bankruptcy for a few years, we’ll let him re-hire all our Earth-restorers as miners again, provided his company for the first time follows a few, obvious, long-avoided rules for what is in the industry currently and laughingly called “reclamation” following mining operations. Einstein said that all useful ideas can be grasped by an eight-year-old. My sixteen-month-old grasps this one.

Three hours and fourteen miles later, I shut off the R.O.A.T. for a few days and re-entered the world as a member of the animal kingdom. When I returned, I could hardly remember how to start the thing. And that’s after I found the key –- no easy task in a world where keys are as foreign as mining executives.

A day and four hiking miles after parking, I reached the spot I had seen from the opposite ridge coming in: I, wrapped around (and I like to think as often as I can manage it in touch with) my own heart, stood in the heart clearing, in the heart of my watershed. I was rooted in the heart of the heart of the heart –- where my world is born. Indeed, This Dispatch begins with a shot from the womb of my watershed –- from the place, a mile and a half above the sea, where everything in my valley begins.

Now normally you don’t want to take a photo when the late morning sun is right on your subject. But I did. Because even though the spot receives hours and hours direct desert-ecosystem sunlight at 35 degrees north latitude nearly year ‘round and there hadn’t been rain for more than a week, the ground was not just damp but dank. Mushrooms sprang up almost before my eyes. You think this spongy organ isn’t crucial for the survival of everyone and everything below? It is literally my ecosystem’s emergency water tank. Water retention for all of us. It is not just sacrilege but murder to mess with this land, particularly without a comprehensive plan for reclamation. Or, stating things more brightly, even maintaining that most crucial element for all life –- hydration –- is a question of mind over matter. A decision we can make, on the species level.

I snapped a few more photos, then did some sun salutations, then dawdled considerably, making notes and examining aspen bark at length, before moving on. While I fiddled around, not so eager to leave the heart in the heart in the heart, the literal birthplace of everything in my life, Mack found some mud and panted contentedly in what you might call the autumnal glow of the left ventricle. He didn’t seem to be in such a hurry to cruise either. So I sat back down and took the self-portrait below, in case posterity wants to see the face of the man just as he hatched the C.R.A.P.E.E. idea. It makes me wonder if all babies come up with promising ideas in the womb -– maybe that‘s what all the kicking is. By way of my kicking, I’ll try to let the Obama Interior Department know about this employment spurring idea.

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