Notes from Yellowstone and Wyoming -- Part 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2. This part focuses on the wildlife I saw during the trip. In Part 1, I’ve already mentioned prolific herds of bison, which are easily spotted in Yellowstone and take center stage. Here I list other, more subtle experiences:

1) Grasshoppers were our constant companions throughout the trip. Perhaps August – mid to late summer – is when they are most active. When flying, they made constantly spaced sounds -- one every half second -- loud enough to be clearly audible more than a hundred feet away, each note like a small, flat-sounding firework. On the ground, these drab brown grasshoppers were quiet and hardly noticeable. But when in flight, I noticed that their bodies had a touch of bright yellow. 

2) While driving from Cody to Riverton, we passed by the Wind River Canyon. On the slope of a high mountain adjacent to the road, we saw three male bighorn sheep, grazing along with deer, looking cautiously at us, although both distance and a steep slope separated us. We had seen female bighorn sheep before, in Zion National Park, Utah, and some in Yellowstone, but never any males with their signature curved horns. 


The writer and naturalist, Joe Hutto, who raised wild turkey chicks to adulthood in a forest in Florida – his experience has been reenacted in the PBS Nature documentary My Life as a Turkey – now lives in this area. He disappears for months at a time in the Wind River mountain wilderness, following populations of bighorn sheep as part of a research study. His new book, The Light in High Places, is as much about mystical and solitary engagement with high and wild places, as it is about the causes of decline in bighorn sheep numbers. 
4) Approaching Jackson from the south, you come to the National Elk Refuge. Elk are active here only in the winter. But right before the road enters town is a marsh, where we saw a pair of trumpeter swans (see center of picture below), whose numbers have declined in the last century.
5) Other significant sights: (a) a pair of resting ravens, probably a couple, completely still as if frozen, on a fallen log by the side of a lonely road in Yellowstone, the head and beak of one tilted upward; their jet black color – something I've always admired – contrasting sharply with the bright hue of the grass around them; (b) a red fox, caught in the headlights late in the evening, moving discreetly along the side of the main road in Yellowstone; (c) an osprey (a brown bird of prey, with a white head; see picture below) perched on a branch of a tree; and (d) pelicans soaring in the sky above Hayden Valley.  

3) At the edge of the Grand Teton National Park, not far from the Jackson airport (which, strangely, is also within the park), a mother black bear and two cubs crossed a major road and made their way to the wooded hills on the other side. They moved at a deceptively steady pace, but in the end covered ground very quickly. But for a pair of binoculars – amazing how an intelligent arrangement of lenses/glasses can bring the distant so vividly and breathtakingly close – we would have missed them. They would have been two black specks on the horizon not worth commenting about. Instead, it was an absolute delight to see their languid, unstructured and carefree walk towards the hills, now disappearing behind a thicket or tree, now reemerging again, before finally fading away on the forested slopes.

Notes from Yellowstone and Wyoming -- Part 2

Second part of my trip to Yellowstone National Park and Wyoming in August 2012 (read Part 1). The focus here is on the drive through some lesser known towns and parts of Wyoming, in particular the Wind River Indian Reservation, home of the Northern Arapahoe and Shoshone. I’ve reproduced the Greater Yellowstone map again below.

1.

Beyond Lamar Valley is the northeastern exit to Yellowstone. Here, the route south eventually becomes the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway. It runs through the pristine wilderness of Shoshone National Forest. Unlike Yellowstone, there were no cars and people around; it felt like we’d left the world behind. It was late in the afternoon; the desolate vistas that opened up along high mountain passes – over 8000 feet – were beautiful and striking in the fading light. It was a remarkably intimate experience of wilderness, exactly what I had been yearning for, but paradoxically I had found it outside national park borders. 

The presence of a few cattle grazing on steep slopes suggested that people did live around here. But the ranches that they presumably owned were nowhere to be seen.

The highway is named after Chief Joseph, the leader of a group of 800 Nez Perce Indians who were escaping from the US army in 1877. By this time, America's westward expansion and its capture of land that belonged to Indians had reached its peak. The Nez Perce band had refused to live in lands that US government had designated for them. Their defiance made them outlaws in their own land. Around 2000 American troops followed the escaping Nez Perce to arrest them and forcibly bring them back within the confines of a reservation -- the term refers to a territory designated by the US government for Indian tribes. It’s a strange term, but now accepted and commonplace; I’d encountered it first in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I’d read as a college student. The Phoenix metropolitan area, where I spent six years, and the state of Arizona more generally, has a number of reservations, including the largest, the Navajo Nation. In all, there are 550 recognized tribes and around 300 reservations.

Beginning in Oregon and passing through Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, the chase of the Nez Perce lasted for an astonishing 1,170 miles. This included a section through Yellowstone, and the Wyoming wilderness we were now driving through. The Nez Perce deftly avoided the US army at many points in the chase. But just 40 miles south of the Canadian Border and their destination painfully close, Chief Joseph and his group, exhausted and having suffered many casualties, surrendered.

Everywhere I’ve traveled to the US, there is such a story of forced dispossession and ethnic cleansing. In Massachusetts, where I now live, I learned about the Wampanoag, who helped the Pilgrims (this alliance may have resulted in the very first Thanksgiving), but eventually lost their own lands and people to wars and diseases. During a trip to Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, I learned of the infamous Wounded Knee Massacre. For the Cherokees, there is the Trail of Tears; for the Navajos in the Southwest, there is the forced Long Walk to eastern New Mexico. For the Arapahoes  who now have a home in the Wyoming – the Wind River Indian Reservation, which I’ll come to in a bit – there is the Sand Creek Massacre. If you collect these individual tragedies together – there is such a Wikipedia page that does exactly this – you realize the scale of the tragedy, the silent evidence that lies beneath the much touted notion of American greatness.

2.

After the beautiful mountain scenery, the landscape turned flatter and more arid, as we approached the western edge of the Great Plains in Wyoming. The Great Plains were the stage of the many of the Indian Wars of the 19^th century, and refer to the vast swathe of land east of the Rocky Mountains: the United States' sparsely populated middle. We stayed in the town of Cody for a night. There were irrigated farms at the outskirts of Cody, and among the long shoots of corn, gazing at us as we drove past, were small groups of deer.

Cody fit the template I had in mind of remote and small Western town: a single row of shops and hotels, a few side streets, and not much else; a rodeo every evening of the summer; the historic, Wild West themed Irma Hotel; no fancy organic stores as in Bozeman, Montana (see Part 1); and unlike Bozeman, no major university to influence the demographics and outlook; mostly steak restaurants, which, given the free ranging cattle, are likely to be good (though preferring vegetarian food, I wouldn’t know anything about quality); and the occasional Mexican or Chinese restaurant providing the only variety.

3.

The Wind River Indian Reservation is about three hours southeast of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. It is jointly shared by the Northern Arapahoe and Eastern Shoshone. Before European arrival, the Arapahoe had lived on the eastern plains of Colorado and Wyoming; American expansion drove them west. The Shoshones, in contrast, had lived in this region probably well before American settlement. Sacajawea, the famous Indian woman had helped Lewis and Clarke on their expedition to the Pacific, was Shoshone.  

A few weeks before the trip, I had read a New York Times article titled “Brutal Crimes Grip Wind River Indian Reservation”. It talked about arbitrary homicide, drugs, health problems and depression that plagued the Arapahoe and Shoshone. While all this may be true, the article itself was not convincing; it lacked depth and proper engagement, and was more intent on painting a certain surface portrait. But the disheartening facts in the article, which probably did have some basis in reality, made me think twice about whether I should visit.  

We stayed in Riverton, which I initially thought was in the reservation. At least that is what the map suggested. But land ownership in and around a reservation is often a complicated matter. Riverton turned out to be a majority white town. It sits on the outside edge of the reservation but is not in it. The town has benefited a recent oil boom; executives from big firms frequented the two or three high end hotel chains in town. I wondered if the oil boom also included the natural gas extracted by the controversial “fracking” technique, whose potential impacts on neighboring rivers, streams and house water supply are highlighted dramatically in the documentary Gasland. Indeed, recent sampling of wells in Pavillion, a small town in the reservation northeast or Riverton, seem to support these claims. Not surprisingly Encana, the Canadian corporation that is responsible for the drilling in the region has questioned these results. 

4.

The reservation starts one mile south of Riverton, with the newly opened and Arapaho owned Wind River Casino. The casino building had minimal but attractive Arapaho motifs. In the open space of the casino parking lot, a roping championship was going on. Roping refers to the cowboy sport where a pair of riders on horses ensures that an escaping calf is lassoed around the neck in just the right way and at just the right time. It was less violent sport than I’d imagined, although it was clear – and painful to contemplate – that a slight mistake could easily break the calf’s neck. The parking lot had large trailers to accommodate horses. The participants had red, sunburned faces and wore cowboy hats; they all seemed solemn, keen to perform well in the event, but in good spirits.

The interior of the casino was like any in Las Vegas: dark as a cave, with the strong odor of smoke and alcohol; scores of pair of eyes patiently – or perhaps obsessively – glued to the screens of slot machines; and the cacophony of rings and bells that accompany a successful or failed slot trial.

The local Indians were among the staff, but the gamblers were mostly white. The casino was not full, but I nevertheless wondered where the gamblers had traveled from. This part of the country is sparsely populated: Jackson, Casper, Cheyenne and Fort Laramie, the moderate sized towns in the state, were more than 2 hours away; and Denver more than five hours away. But I guess distance is no match for addictions. Perhaps gambling would also attract those passing through Riverton, on their way to Yellowstone or Grand Teton.

In modern day America, Indian reservations are closely associated with casinos: the National Indian Gaming Commission states that there are 460 gambling operations run by 240 tribes. Because reservations have some degree of sovereignty, states have limited tax and regulation control over what happens in reservations. So in a strange, roundabout way, reservation land, which is where the US government wanted Indian tribes to be confined to, would attain a degree of independence, and pave the way of lucrative gaming operations in the late 20^th century -- although it remains puzzling why it is only the casino business, and not others, that have boomed as a result of state tax exemptions. 

Casino revenues are sometimes used by tribes to open new healthcare facilities, elder care centers, and retention of indigenous languages. They have enabled a kind of cultural renaissance for American Indians. But Indian casinos are successful only when they are close to large metropolitan areas: 12% of the casinos make 65% of the total revenue. The small minority of reservations and Indians that have benefited have become tremendously rich; it does not seem that Wind River is among them. The Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut -- not far from where I now live – is one of the most successful reservation casinos in the country. Owned by Pequot Tribe, it is successful primarily because of population and travel density in the Boston-New York corridor. 

5.

We had dinner that evening at a restaurant owned by a Mexican family, back in Riverton, about two miles north of the Wind River Casino. A stocky, young man, about eighteen years old, the son of the immigrant couple who had started the restaurant, came to talk with us. He was cheerful and curious. Noticing that I did not want meat, he asked – with a sincerity that I found endearing – how it was possible to have such meals. His sister, he said, had recently turned vegetarian, but he could not understand it; he laughed heartily about it. He’d grown up in the US, but his parents were from the city of Guadalajara  Their family also owned a restaurant in Jackson, the affluent town near Grand Teton National Park.

The presence of this Mexican family, so far from home, and in such a remote part of Wyoming, is not surprising. There is a lot of that sort of immigration everywhere in the world. But then I remembered the Arapahoe and Shoshone Indians who had lived in this region well before American settlement. It struck me that Mexicans might not be that far apart from them genetically, despite the significant cultural differences. Here in Riverton, more than a thousand miles north of the US-Mexico border, the young Mexican-origin teenager at the restaurant could easily walk through the reservation and be considered native. 

6.

The next day, we drove through the Wind River Reservation. The place was quiet, as most reservations are; you wouldn't even know you were driving through one but for the signs. We passed by single story homes with old, disassembled cars rusting in the backyards; the odd high school, church or tribal administrative unit. But, strikingly, no businesses, no sellers of arts of crafts in old pick-up trucks or stalls (common in the Southwest), no small stores or restaurants let alone malls. Even gas stations were few and far between. Except for the newly opened casino, which may or may not do well, there was nothing that could contribute to the economy. This was made more puzzling by the fact that in Riverton, which is also geographically remote, there are plenty of businesses. What are the dynamics between reservations and states that keeps reservations so poor when the majority white communities in surrounding cities are able to do so much better?

Near the town of Fort Washakie, at the eastern end of the reservation – this was the Shoshone side – we found a small market. We went in to ask about lunch. They did have a kitchen of sorts, but only pizza and deep fried food. I asked a man in charge of the kitchen if he knew of any nearby restaurants in Fort Washakie.

Without a hint of irony, he said: “This is the best restaurant in town.”

He and the other staff who worked in the kitchen were genuinely friendly and wanted to help as much as they could. Their skin shone with sweat from the heat of the all oven cooking and deep frying. Their features and complexion reminded me of the Mexican immigrants I’d met in kitchens of restaurants in southwestern towns. When I asked for vegetarian options, they all looked sincerely around to see if they could get me a cheese pizza, which they’d run out of. In the end, I found some jalapeno poppers and some meat lasagna without pieces of meat. It was good comfort food, something I’d not had in a while.   

Three hours northeast of Fort Washakie, at the base of the dramatic Teton Range of the Rocky Mountains – jagged peaks that rise suddenly for thousands of feet from the valley, creating a view that is scarcely believable and extensively photographed – is one of the more affluent towns in the country: Jackson. The contrast from Wind River could not have been sharper. In Jackson, I would get the fancy vegetarian food I was looking for. At the restaurant, the waiters and waitresses were all well dressed formally; there was emphasis on etiquette that had no intrinsic meaning or essence except to signal social status and refinement; there was a separate and extensive menu for all kinds of drinks; the diners held wine glasses the right way; the smart phones were out for pictures and the instant Facebook uploads; the expensive bills were conveniently paid by gleaming credit cards. The main plaza of Jackson is full of boutique shops and store of brands such as Eddy Bauer and Gap. One bookshop I went into prominently featured a biography of former vice president Dick Cheney, who is from Wyoming. 

Such different socioeconomic realities, in the space of a few hours! 

Notes from Yellowstone and Wyoming -- Part 1

1.

The iconic Yellowstone National Park, the oldest in the US, established in 1872, is not easy to get to. If you don’t live in or close to the northeastern corner of Wyoming, you need either to drive from major cities like Denver, Salt-Lake City or Seattle – by no means a trivial drive -- or fly to two small airports, Bozeman (Montana) or Jackson (Wyoming). Despite its remote location, Yellowstone National Park gets 3.6 million visitors each year. Each day in the summer, as many as 10,000 tourists may visit the Old Faithful Visitor Center, named after the natural geyser -- one of dozens in the park -- which spews thousands of gallons of hot water every 90 minutes or so. Yellowstone is so crowded in the summer months that it can feel like a catered amusement park, rather than the genuine natural wonder it is.

For eight days in August 2012, we visited parts of the Greater Yellowstone region, shown below [map credit: yellowstonewiki.com]. Our flight departed from Hartford (Connecticut) at 7 pm; we reached Bozeman, Montana, with a stopover in Minneapolis, at 11 pm. From Bozeman, we drove to Yellowstone, where we spent two days, before leaving the national park and exploring some of the lesser known towns and regions in Wyoming.  Cody was the first stop on this route, reached through the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway that runs through the desolate Shoshone National Forest. Next, the town of Riverton and the Wind River Indian Reservation. In the last leg, we turned north to Grand Tetons, the other major national park in the area. Yellowstone is only 40 miles north of the Grand Tetons. From Yellowstone, it was a short ride back to Bozeman, Montana, through the town of West Yellowstone and Gallatin National Forest, for the return flight.

The descriptions below mostly follow the chronology of the trip.

2.

The Bozeman airport was just outside town, in Belgrade. We stayed at a Quality Inn nearby, managed by local employees. There was a Bible in the room: a reliable presence in most American hotels. But there was also, uniquely, a long note encased in a glass frame, placed on a desk. I will paraphrase the gist here: “We sincerely wish you a wonderful journey wherever you are headed in this beautiful region. We wish your presence is profitable for us; we also hope that if you are conducting business, like we are, that you have a most profitable time.” The message, brimming with cheer and goodwill, seemed a most natural merger of American evangelism and entrepreneurial zeal. It felt like a condensed version of the hyper-positive sermons the Houston evangelical preacher Joel Osteen delivers every Sunday on television.

In the morning, I had my first glimpse of the landscape around Bozeman. I’d imagined a very lush green setting, perhaps Alpine forests in close proximity. Instead, what I saw was not very different from the small towns in northern Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico that I had traveled to as a graduate student: a mostly flat, dry and indistinct plain that stretched in all directions, allowing a very large sky, and ringed by bare brown mountains in the distance. 

Bozeman was a ten minute drive from the hotel. Naively, I had expected it to be a remote town with little to offer. Instead, Bozeman sprawled over an area that seemed large for its population of 37,000. The downtown had trendy restaurants, well-stocked bookshops, and a cooperative grocery selling local and organic food. The idea of a rugged, inhospitable West is only a decorative exterior in Bozeman. The coffee shops had plush seating and colorful interiors; and the well dressed young clientele, absorbed in their laptops, were probably students from the nearby Montana State University or urban backpackers on a break. Thinking back, I feel amused I did not spot a meditation or yoga center. But an easy google search reveals that there are in fact many in town.

There are two routes from Bozeman to Yellowstone National Park. One leads to the western entrance and the other through the northern – through Gardiner city. We took the latter. After downtown Bozeman, one could be forgiven for momentarily forgetting about the social conservatism of the region. Very soon, however, there were prominent signs on the freeway: “Life is a Beautiful Choice”. The radio shows were sympathetic to the Republican worldview. The grass had a beautiful tinge of yellow; the wildflowers by the roadside, also mostly yellow, were in full bloom. Otherwise the scenery was primary agricultural: grazing cattle and farms with mechanized equipment for irrigation, suggesting some sort of large scale ownership.

At the northern entrance to Yellowstone – commemorated by a historic old arch – a black SUV from Colorado proudly declared: “God bless our troops and especially our snipers.” How this message, aggressive in tone and spirit, could be reconciled the large cross of Christ that hung from the rearview mirror of the same car, remained a mystery.

3.

Most natural parks revolve around some startling visual feature or theme. The Grand Canyon National Park, for example, is about the wondrous shapes, depths, colors and textures that water and other natural forces have created in the brittle, dry and high Colorado Plateau. The same theme echoes, on a smaller but no less dramatic scale, through the national parks of southern and south-central Utah: Zion, Bryce, Arches, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands.

Yellowstone, however, is not just about one thing, though its active volcanic status – expressed through geysers, strange-colored (prismatic) springs, mud volcanoes, steaming vents – would be grand enough to draw crowds. There is a lot more. The Yellowstone River carves its own canyon (picture below), and provides startling and intimate views of waterfalls, sheer cliffs and rapids. And then there is the easily observed wildlife: bison, elk, bears, bighorn sheep, red foxes, pronghorn antelope, bald eagles, pelicans, ospreys, otters, trumpeter swans.  

This diverse visual bounty means that the five visitor’s centers, where the expensive lodging, dining and shopping options are, can feel like miniature cities in the summer. The large parking lots are constantly abuzz with people and cars, the constant opening and slamming of doors.

The suburban mall analogy isn’t far off the mark: for us humans, it is about shopping and consuming experiences that Nature has to offer. Whatever the cost, we are intent of capturing a slice for our own memories: by driving the 142 miles of paved roads in the park; getting too close to herds of bison or mother bears and cubs (as happened during my visit) for the petty reason that the posing tourists can be in the foreground of a photograph that can be proudly paraded on Facebook; using the expensive lodging and dining facilities, creating enormous quantities of trash in the process, a fact quickly forgotten as we bask in the glow of the odd environmentally sustainable practice that the parks and hotels promote.   

4.

During the summer, the National Park Service (NPS) hires 800 employees, who live within the boundaries of Yellowstone. The private firm, Xanterra Parks and Resorts, runs the lodging, fine dining and cafeterias for NPS, while the general stores are owned by Delaware North Companies Parks and Resort. These corporations have 3500 employees who live in inside the park, in shared dormitory-like settings. The employees, young and old, are hired from far flung states like Texas, but also abroad (Taiwan has a formal exchange program).

Xanterra claims to be an environmentally responsible corporation. It also has a presence in Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and Zion. Their 2011 sustainability report, accessible online, provides details about how they reduced absolute as well as adjusted greenhouse gas emissions over the last 10 years.

In true corporate style, the report is glossy and promotional, with scenic pictures distractingly placed next to the graphs and tables. The report essentially admits that the very idea of high end resort in a fragile natural places runs contrary to any notion of environmental protection. In this sense, it is honest. Corporations, the report says, make huge claims about sustainability to promote their public image; this façade is aptly called “greenwash”.

To its credit, the report does list some specifics: waste vegetable oil to partly power Xanterra activities; building a solar power generation facility in Death Valley National Park in California; soaps that are made of organic materials; and creating a store (the first of its kind, they claim) with a sustainability scorecard, to promote awareness. The vending machines smartly adjust themselves to peak and low usage periods, switching refrigeration on and off, thus minimizing unnecessary energy use. At Zion National Park, Xanterra has stopped the use of bottled water.  

In 2008, Xanterra was bought by Philip Anschutz, a Colorado-based billionaire whose empire includes businesses ranging from petroleum to entertainment. Anschutz is a cultural and social conservative, and, according to Wikipedia, was a major supporter of the George W Bush administration and his policies. When he bought Xanterra in 2008, however, he was, as this website claims, fully in favor of its sustainability initiatives. The question however remains: Can a billionaire involved with the petroleum industry and interested in furthering economic development, really be supportive of sustainability, or is he concerned more with the impression of sustainability, so that customers who use Xanterra feel less guilty about their travels – proud, even? The impression of sustainability is good for business, but sustainability itself is a more complex matter, and raises questions that we are afraid to face. 

One of Xanterra’s high end attractions within the park is the pricey Lake Yellowstone Hotel. The building is large and multistoried. Its yellow paint makes it look bland although the blandness could also be interpreted as a kind of minimalistic elegance. The lobby and lounge are spacious, have clean wood floors, small lamps attached to pillars, cushioned seating, a large piano, and a glass doors which provide a view of the Yellowstone Lake. When we got there in the afternoon, families and older couples, with drinks in their hands, were enjoying the view, as they waited for dinner.

An LCD television on a wall near the lobby provided a map and details of the local farms the food was sourced from. It was good to see this, but I wondered whether the benefits of local were incomparably overwhelmed by visitors like me, who had flown or driven from far flung places in the world.

5.

Driving north from Lake Yellowstone, you pass through Hayden Valley. The wide meadows and rolling hills here looked grand, and I felt it was principally because of the striking green and yellow hue of the grass, this last phase of the summer. Bison grazed in the valley along the winding path of the Yellowstone River. Occasionally there were clouds of dust as they indulged in mud baths, vigorously twisting their upside-down bodies, their legs flailing. Roads were routinely blocked by herds leisurely making their way across the road, from one meadow to another (these traffic halts have a name: bisonjams). Unlike elk, deer, bears, foxes, coyotes, and pronghorn antelopes, which are alert to the slightest movement, sensitive to the presence of people around them and therefore harder to see up close, bison seem to display a Zen-like dispassion to the flow of people or cars. This dispassion is an illusion of course: a roused bison can move fast and finish off a pesky, intrusive tourist with little fuss.

Indeed, bison are so easy to spot within the confines of Yellowstone that weary tourists, who have been in the park for a few days, declare with a touch of annoyance: “Oh, it’s only a bison.” 

How quickly one gets used to extraordinary sights! It’s easy to forget that this magnificient animal almost went extinct. In fact, it is not to be found in other wilderness areas in the country. Bison are raised in farms for their meat, but such herds cannot be considered wild. In all, there are about 4000 bison in Yellowstone. Once millions of them roamed the Great Plains. As America expanded westward, Plains tribes lost their lands; and new settlers hunted bison with rapacity and abandon. Their numbers at Yellowstone came down to an astonishing 23 – yes 23! -- at the end of the 19^th century. By pure chance, the thermally active region around Yellowstone did not lend itself easily to agriculture, and so was spared direct colonization by settlers. That did not stop poachers, however. The decline in numbers would have continued had it not been for a concerted, government backed effort at protecting bison and its habitat.   

6.

The somewhat less crowded Lamar Valley is in the northeast of Yellowstone. The landscape, dominated by scrub vegetation, is more rugged, and the silences mysterious. Bison herds are even more extensive, and are spread for miles and miles along the banks of Lamar River. Now and then, I spotted elusive pronghorn antelope grazing with bison. At trailheads, park rangers warned of recent bear activity.

Lamar is also where one is likely to see wolves. If the Bison’s near-extinction story is tragic, the Wolf’s is even more so: wolves were completely eliminated in Yellowstone, primarily due to their adversarial relationship with farmers. Efficient, large-scale agriculture is opposed to species diversity: anything that kills, directly or indirectly, what we eat (cattle or crops) must be eliminated to improve yields. Wolves kill cattle and therefore are on the wrong side of human interests. So, even as bison were protected in Yellowstone, wolves continued to be hunted. Unlike bison, wolves were not threatened on a global scale: there were other habitats where they still thrived. But in Greater Yellowstone, by the mid nineteenth century, they had disappeared.

In 1995, wolf packs were controversially reintroduced to Lamar Valley and Greater Yellowstone. They have a healthy presence in the region now. Their reinstatement provides a fascinating opportunity to quantify the impact a major predator’s absence or presence creates in the food chain.

This is what has been hypothesized: With wolves missing, elk numbers rose through the last century. Coyotes, rivals of wolves, also prospered. But streamside vegetation – willows, aspen – that elk consumed declined. Beavers, which depended on these plants, also declined. When the wolves returned, elk numbers reduced by half, coyote numbers are down as well. But beaver populations are back to healthy levels. Bears, meanwhile, have benefitted, since they can scavenge wolf kills easily. Scavenging birds – ravens, eagles, and magpies – have also more wolf-kill carcasses to feed on.

Whether observed increases and decreases in numbers of other species are chance correlations or whether the reintroduction of the wolf was indeed the principal cause is difficult to say with certainty. Nature is far too complex:  there exist plenty of other changes that happened in the same timeframe for the reintroduction experiment to have neat conclusions. Yet it is fascinating preliminary evidence on the interconnectedness of everything.     

Reviving this blog...

Time flies quickly! The last time I posted was well over a year ago, in March 2012. I won’t give the tired old excuses of how busy I've been: who isn't these days. Instead, I’d like to present some disconnected thoughts on what I've been up to recently, and gently ease into the task of blogging again.

 ***

On May 1st, I finished five years (10 semesters) of teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. That day, after the last class session of the semester, some students came by to say they’d enjoyed the course (you generally don’t hear from those who did not like the class; perhaps it’s best that way). I left the class in a joyous mood to have lunch at the student union building, and the beautiful spring scene outside – warm and gentle sunshine; messy, overgrown and dark green grass; the leaves just beginning to make an appearance on bare trees – matched what I was feeling. Adding to the excitement was the realization six year long process of securing tenure was slowly but surely drawing to a close: I now again nurture the hope of reading, writing and traveling – the three things that energize me more than anything else.

***

Since reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, about a year and a half ago, I am now halfway into War and Peace (the new Pevear-Volokhonsky translation). If anything, the latter book is even more complex, wide ranging and longer. I often look forward to the end of a day or week, just so I can immerse myself in the book. Like many others, I was intimidated by the book’s size before I started it, but I am now thankful that it is long – it seems that I could go on reading it forever, delighting in the drama of the story, the astute psychological details and the philosophical and religious speculations that Tolstoy embeds so well into what is essentially a soapy, high society narrative.

When a book resonates powerfully within, I feel as if I have access to a special secret that no one else in the world is aware of -- this despite the fact that countless others may have read the same book. In the last ten years or so, I felt this way while reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (2001-2002; though its effect has faded considerably); Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (2003-2004); Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (2004-2006; the book that set the tone for a lot of my travels in the Americas); Charles Mann’s 1491 (2006-2008); V.S Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now and his other travel writing (2005-2008); Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov (2006-2008); and now Tolstoy’s long works (2011-present). 

While still on Tolstoy, here is a quote from his work, What is Art?, which defines art in as open-ended a manner as possible:

as that human activity which consists in one person's consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he or she has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.

Interpreted this way, art would cover -- as it should -- everyday activities such as talking, playing, and conveying by the way one lives certain feelings and emotions that others can connect with.

***

Since March 2012, I did not manage to travel abroad but I did visit many national parks in the US: Everglades in Florida; Bryce and Zion in Utah; and Yellowstone in Wyoming. This year, I traveled New Mexico and Colorado to experience cities and landscapes of the American southwest (Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Denver, Boulder, Rocky Mountain National Park) that I’d somehow missed as a graduate student in Arizona. All of these deserve their own posts, but the one that I have managed to write and that will be up soon, is my 8-day trip in Yellowstone and neighboring towns in Wyoming. I wrote this slowly over the last few months, whenever I had a little bit of time, and it now stands at 5000 words. I’ll post it in 3-4 parts.

A Fictional Conversation

For about a year, I've wanted to share and write about my newfound interest in religion, nature, animals, science, and all sorts of things that never interested me before. I tried the essay format, but so far I haven't quite succeeded in writing anything interesting. It takes time, I guess, to find the appropriate language, words and tone. It's always a work in progress. But here is an initial attempt to discuss religion and science, using two individuals. The two individuals are merely puppets to get some points across; it's very artificial for sure, but still felt better than an essay. Not sure how this is going to read -- but how does one know unless one tries?
 -----

“… but you still believe there is no conflict between religion and science?”

“It’s all about how you interpret it. It just depends on what you call ‘religion’.”

“To me, religion is belief in God, and that’s pretty clear cut.”

“Well, alright, let that be our definition of religion then: belief in God. It’s a problematic definition, but we can work with it.”

“Good. Now tell me how you can reconcile science with religion. To me science is about evidence and cultivating doubt, whereas belief in God is not.”

“Yes, that’s true. Science certainly provides more evidence than religion and also – if the scientists are honest – allows doubts and failures. You turn on the switch on and there is light – that’s proof that science works. The evidence is there in virtually all aspects of life, which we now take for granted…” 

“Whereas religion gets away with unverifiable claims: the presence of a soul, someone was enlightened thousands of years ago, or someone walked on water, or someone lifted a mountain…”

“But you cannot disprove these claims; these things could have happened. It would be unscientific to negate these possibilities outright, even if our current laws of physics suggest otherwise. A more apt way to phrase it would be to say that religious miracles, unlike everyday scientific miracles, cannot be demonstrated on a regular basis. You just take them on faith, which is really a blind faith, rather than saying: It could have happened but I cannot say anything for sure; there is no evidence.”

“Exactly! In science you have the burden of proof, whereas the burden of proof is not there in religion. One promotes skepticism, the other asks for blind belief no matter what. And then exploits that belief to create wars, divisions, ideologies. To me that’s an irreconcilable difference.”

“Well, science, if not practiced well, can also divide, create wars, ideologies and destruction. We humans are the problem, though we like to play the secular/scientific versus religious game. I have a more moderate view on the debate between science and religion. I think of it in terms of degrees of objectivity. In a relative sense, yes, science is more objective than religion, and there is no disputing that. But it would be incorrect to call science the ultimate truth or theory. We can instead call it the most objective truth we have, or what humans have collectively and gradually come up with, using the tools of logic and mathematics.”

“So there is something over and above?”

“I don’t know. Good science represents the limit – and it’s an ever expanding limit – of what humans can think of and explain. Beyond it, who knows what’s there. I simply don’t know. And that’s important: I don’t know – that space of not knowing is very important. Socrates said something about not knowing....” 

“I think he said: I know only that I know nothing…”

“Right. In my view, not knowing is where religion begins. Knowledge often leads to arrogance, but not knowing and being sincere and honest in accepting that you do not know is humility. This is the same humility that most of the world’s religions ask us to cultivate. But in general – and almost no one is immune from this – the more you know the more you think you can control, and you become egocentric and protective of your knowledge. In this aspect, science has a serious downside: the ability to know the laws of nature and exploit the natural world to suit human needs makes us feel supremely confident; we feel can achieve anything. We look only at what we have achieved, and feel tremendously proud as a species, but we ignore what we do not know at all.”

“But our lives are better…”

 “Materially better, yes, for now, but sooner or later, you run into a wall. Reality doesn’t quite function the way humans want. No amount of knowledge can capture the ever changing nature of reality. What the future has in store we have absolutely no idea. The universe and even events in our solar system may have some unpleasant surprises in store for us. Science is the effort to find answers, but no matter how deep you go, quantum mechanics, evolutionary theory and what not, you always reach a point where you do not know anymore. So you stop for a moment there and acknowledge, ‘Wow, this is too vast, too big and too complex, for my puny mind to understand.’ It’s the Great Unknown.”

“I understand that. But that’s still very different from belief in God…”

“Is it really? That’s why I said it is all in the interpretation. For me, the Great Unknown is what you can label, for the purposes of convenience, as God. I believe in this Great Unknown; I don’t know what it is, but it is there…”

“Well you know, you are sounding very mystical now!”

 “Why not! A scientific pursuit is really a mystical pursuit. I start with the feeling, ‘I want to know’ and you do get to know more, and you are able to explain more. It is a great feeling – you can compare it to the religious joy that a pilgrim or a monk or a yogi might feel. Einstein’s theories of relativity are aesthetically beautiful theories – they say it is the most elegant use of mathematics to show the intertwined nature of space and time. Darwin’s ideas make you feel connected to every living creature in earth – by his thesis, the animals and birds you see around you are your cousins! That promotes a wonderful feeling of unity! At the same time, there still are unanswered questions and new questions, and you realize you can’t know everything. That does not mean you stop – you can be thankful for the knowledge you have and you can keep the search going – but the illusion that you will know all begins to go away.”

 “Alright. Your ‘religion’ -- if you can call it that -- is quite different. Something like a poetic impulse with scientific bits thrown in. I don't have an issue with it. My main issue is with the monotheistic faiths that claim that there is a Creator, or that the world has been intelligently designed. I feel these faiths are quite arrogant – they prescribe that there is only one way and no other way, and in doing so cause all sorts of problems.”

 “Saying that there is only one way and no other way implies that the person who is making that very strong claim has complete knowledge – wouldn’t that be the opposite of humility? Is it possible for someone to claim, with tremendous sincerity and honesty and without a trace of doubt, that there is only one way to God and that all other ways lead to hell? And as for the existence of a Creator, one cannot reject the possibility: no one can disprove something that so far not been seen. But it does not matter anyway. Whether a Creator exists or not is irrelevant; the Creation exists – by that I mean this universe, this earth we live in, the sun, the moon, our senses and our thoughts which allow us to experience the world, they all exist, or at least seem to be vivid and real to us. That’s all that matters, and that itself is a miracle of sorts. This is actually an amazing fact: the Creation is everywhere and all around us, this table here that my eyes allow me to see, this chair whose solidity I can feel, this fruit that I can smell and taste! It makes you ask the question: What is all this? That itself can impart a sense of wonder.”

Christmas at Machu Picchu

Reflections on a day trip

1.

On December 25th, 2009, I took the early morning train to Machu Picchu, from Cuzco, the Andean city that had once been the capital of the Incas. I had flown in to Cuzco from Lima two days ago. I had only two more days to see the area before I left for La Paz, Bolivia. The bleak, cloudy morning only enhanced the surreal, high-elevation setting of Cuzco. Victor, the taxi driver who took me to the station, had a difficult time negotiating curved roads that disappeared into cloaks of white mist.

Machu Picchu is a major destination on the global tourist circuit. It competes with the pyramids of Giza and Angkor Watt in popularity. For the upwardly mobile in the major metropolises of the world, it is a trophy to be paraded on social occasions and through pictures on Facebook. So I wasn’t surprised, when, at the Poroy train station – where the early morning PeruRail train left for Machu Picchu – I saw faces that I might have seen at a university or a major airport in the United States. The travelers were Europeans, Americans, Australians, Chinese, Indians and Latin Americans (Latin Americans from countries other than Peru). They had come in large groups or with their families, and with hiking gear.

This, I realized, was to going to be a trip very much within the tourist bubble: the people traveling with me, even though they were from different countries, aspired to and engaged with exactly the same things: a secure professional life and career, wealth, fashionable clothes, cars, the latest cellphones and Facebook.

Outside the station – in what seemed like a different world -- local vendors advertised, with rhythmic high pitched songs, ponchos and umbrellas that the tourists would need for the rainy day.

2.

Two women from Bogota sat across from me in the train. They were in their twenties. From their carefully polished red nails, fair complexions, stylish dresses, shawls and sunglasses, I could tell that they were from wealthy Columbian families. Culturally, they were closer to Peru than I was, yet they seemed – except for their familiarity with Spanish – just as new to the place as me. I sensed that their excitement and disorientation had something to do with the strong indigenous presence in Peru. Though Columbia has many ethnic groups and Mestizos form the majority, the original indigenous peoples, in contrast to countries like Peru and Bolivia, are a small percent of the population.

Maria, the more talkative of the two, explained how safe Bogota was these days, a real improvement from the 1990s when kidnappings and murders were rife. “Uribe” – the President of Columbia then – “has to be credited for it,” she said. “He’s ultra-right in his policies but when it comes to making Bogota safe his accomplishments are indisputable. He has used something called the security tax to fund this effort.” She then talked of the corruption that was inevitable when you are power for long (in 2010, Uribe was at the end of his second term, and was eventually replaced by Santos).



She asked whether I had been to Plaza de Armas (the central square) of Cuzco on Christmas eve. A large informal market had been set up in the square. I had walked to the square from my hostel at about 5 in the afternoon. Most of the makeshift stalls had been covered by white tarp since rain was expected. Hundreds of Quechua-speaking locals were selling their wares– food, coca leaves, slippers, clothes. The women were in bowler hats and in multicolored, multilayered skirts. There had been long lines at soup kitchens where children waited with bowls.

Maria and her friend had been surprised most by the fact that the people had slept in the square at night. They found that unusual.

Marcos, the Peruvian tour guide seated next to me, explained that the Christmas market always attracted people from the little towns in the Andes surrounding Cuzco. To the question about children being fed at soup kitchens, he said: “There are still huge pockets of poverty in Peru.”

Marcos was from Cuzco. He was in a uniform that marked him out as a guide. He had a faint moustache and a friendly smile that revealed decaying teeth. On this trip, he was guiding two German women. Now and then, he would speak to them in German. He was one of many multilingual Peruvian and Bolivian guides I met during my travels who had degrees in tourism management from local universities.

I asked what Marcos thought of Evo Morales, the popular, left-leaning Bolivian president. A startling fact about Bolivia is that, like South Africa for the most of the 20th century, it had been never had a leader from the majority community (in Bolivia’s case the indigenous Aymara) – until Evo Morales in 2005. Morales had recently been re-elected in December 2009 with a comfortable majority. This was one reason I was drawn to La Paz. Here was something rare in the Americas: a entire country that had an indigenous majority and was ruled, after centuries of subjugation, by a person who did not have a privileged upbringing but had come up from the working class.

But Marcos wasn’t too enthusiastic about the socialist movements of Latin America. “I don’t know where they are heading. They seem to be all going the Chavez way. That route has no future.”

3.

The glass windows of the train were only slightly tinted and I liked it that way. Never had I traveled through such a green and intensely mountainous landscape. We passed by hamlets, terraced farms; the Urubamba River was almost always in sight. The slopes were steepest I had ever seen and it brought to mind the descriptions I had read of Inca routes that went vertically up rather than the gradual switchback style of ascent I was familiar with in the US.

The train reached Aguas Calientes at 11 am. This was the little town at the base of the saddle mountain atop which the ruins of Machu Picchu are located. The rain was more persistent now. I bought an umbrella after some tame bargaining with a woman who seemed to know that I would cave in easily to the inflated price. The buses to Machu Picchu left every twenty minutes. By the time the bus reached the entrance of Machu Picchu – after a memorable short ascent – it was already noon.

I wasn’t as eager to see the ruins. My drive to visit famous archaeological sites was already on the wane. The previous year, with great excitement, I had visited the pyramids in Teotihuacan, near Mexico City and Mayan ruins in Palenque and the Lacandon rainforest, near the border between Mexico and Guatemala. Those visits had satisfied the curiosity I’d had about the grandeur of Mesoamerican empires. What interested me more was how that past influenced – if at all – modern realities.


I was nevertheless blown away by the view that surrounded Machu Picchu. A number of very steep – almost tower-like -- mountains surrounded the ruins. At the base of the tallest of these mountains, I could see the thin winding strip that was the turbulent Urubamba River, and the insignificant cluster of buildings that was Aguas Calientes, where I had been less than an hour ago. Machu Picchu is at an elevation lower than Cuzco. It is on the eastern side of the Andes, where the high mountains gradually give way to the tropical jungle of the Amazonian basin. There was something grand in that: that Machu Picchu lay in the middle zone between a famous mountain range and a famous river basin.

The trails through the ruins were dotted with clusters of tourists in colorful ponchos. I met an Indian couple from London. Peru was the first stop in a long journey through South America (they planned to visit Chile and Argentina later on). Most tourists had their own local Quechua guide who interpreted the ceremonial utility of the Inca structures and how resistant they were to earthquakes. The guides were understandably sentimental about what was their cultural heritage. One of them, a man in his thirties, attributed mystical qualities to the Incas. Some Western tourists, tired from the long 4-day hike that had finally brought them to Machu Picchu, groaned as their guides waxed eloquent. “What is he talking about?” one of them said, shaking his head. I remember feeling offended at these reactions.

The most interesting visitors were a family of four from Quito, Ecuador: a middle aged couple and their two teenage children. They looked and were dressed very much like the Quechua-speaking locals. Here, among the foreign tourists they – paradoxically – looked out of place. I had a short conversation with them. The wife helped me take pictures. I never managed to ask what had drawn them to Machu Picchu. If I visited an ancient Hindu or Buddhist temple in north India for the first time, I'd perhaps feel the same way as them: despite visiting for the first time, I'd nonetheless have an intuitive familiarity with the place because of my cultural upbringing.

Quito had once been the northern capital of the Incas. In the decades before the arrival of the Spanish, the Incas had expanded their empire by force into new northern regions and made enemies along the way. The Spaniards would later exploit these rifts. Just before the Spanish arrived in Peru, Atahualpa, the son of the famous Inca emperor Huayna Capac, had battled his way southward from Quito, fighting with his brother for control of the empire after his father had succumbed to disease. It was during this southward march from Quito – circa 1533 – that he first encountered Francisco Pizarro, his nemesis, at Cajamarca, the site of the famous battle in which hopelessly outnumbered Spaniards overwhelmed the Inca army.

4.

By 3 pm, I was back in Aguas Calientes, enjoying a good vegetarian lunch in a narrow street that was full of restaurants and hotels. The train back to Cuzco started at 4:30 pm. The travelers were noticeably tired after the long day. I had chosen a pleasant day trip and was still fresh, but others around me in the train began to doze off.

This time, seated across from me was a couple from Bolivia. The woman, thin and tall, wore black glasses and was leaning against the shoulder of a somewhat stocky, well-built man with thinning hair. They might have slept peacefully had I not pulled them into a conversation. Only later would I realize that this couple that I ended up speaking to for nearly three hours – until the train reached Cuzco – had a perspective on Bolivia that was diametrically opposed to the more working-class perspective that I encountered in La Paz a few days later.

The woman, Ana, had worked as a television journalist in Florida. Her parents, Bolivian immigrants, still lived there. Her fiancé, Antonio, was a businessman who lived in La Paz. He owned a logistics company. His work took him to Europe and North America frequently. They had met a year ago and had fallen in love. Ana had taken a break from work, and for the last six months, she and Antonio had stayed together in La Paz, with the wedding soon to come. They were enjoying each others’ company. “I knew Ana would cook well, but I never expected that she would have such a strong appetite!” Antonio joked. But the evidence of all the eating was only in his own stockiness.

Eagerly, I turned the conversation to the recently concluded Bolivian national elections. I was instantly flooded by their criticism of Evo Morales and disaster that awaited Bolivia after his emphatic reelection. This wasn’t surprising: the rich of Bolivia feel threatened by Morales’ populist policies. But I realized their concern also came from feeling like a minority all of a sudden in Bolivia. They considered themselves not only economically but racially quite different from the majority Aymara-speaking people who now had one of their own, Evo Morales, at the helm.

It brought to fore a question I’d had for a long time. How in Latin America does one decide who is indigenous and who is not? And if one is mixed, where is one’s allegiance likely to be? What did nationalism mean in these countries? Ever since the Spanish had conquered the region in the 16th century, there had been considerable intermixing. So except for a few, no one could claim exclusive Spanish ancestry. Certainly some people with their darker American Indian features looked more indigenous than others. But even among the wealthy, more light-complexioned elite, there was a great deal of variation. Both Ana and Antonio were dark, and I could have easily mistaken Antonio for an Aymara man.

“When you travel go to La Paz,” Ana told me, “make sure, if you need help, you talk to people like us.” She did not explain further what “people like us” meant, but it was clear she meant those who were not Aymara – or at least working class Aymara. A few days later, in La Paz, I found that this advice was totally unnecessary; I found plenty of help from Aymara guides.

“There is a strong mob mentality these days in Bolivia,” Antonio said. “We might be walking down the street, and suddenly groups of people will start mocking and make comments about us, simply because of who we are. Now that the people have a person who is one of their own in power, they feel emboldened. This is not a good culture to be in. It is an aggressive culture.”

“Morales’ ideals are in the right place. In Bolivia, the indigenous people have suffered more than they have in other places, say Peru. The silver mined and stolen from Potosi -- a once prosperous city -- by the Spanish in the 16th and 17th centuries could have been used to build a bridge of silver from Bolivia to Spain! Working conditions were horrid for the indigenous people who mined the silver and many died or lost their health. Bolivia does have a terrible history of oppression. But Morales’ government is not a government that wants to reconcile. It may also be that his people are now more aggressive now that he is in power. A shift seems to have happened ever since his election.”

There were other complaints. The elections, in which Morales had won a comfortable majority, were not really free and fair. “They were clever in deciding what voters they allowed to register”. And the press was no longer free – there was intimidation from the government if a newspaper wrote something against it. An Aymara guide in La Paz, whom I became close to and who like many others, admired Morales and his policies, agreed that that the press was indeed not free anymore. For him, it was a small price for the considerable progress that had been made.

If there was one thing that Ana and Antonio admired about the Morales government, it was his commitment to work and his punctuality. “He doesn’t fool around; he and the vice-president come to work very early in the morning. No late arrivals are tolerated. Alvaro, the vice-president, is the real brain behind the administration.” Alvaro is white – and that made this compliment seem back handed, as if without somebody like Alvaro, an indigenous man couldn’t run a government.

Their political views aside, Ana and Antonio were a friendly couple. They gave me a number of places to visit in La Paz and restaurant recommendations. They said they would have invited me to their New Year celebration had they been in Bolivia; but they were going to be in Lima, still on vacation.

The train reached Poroy station at 7:30 pm. I looked for Victor, the taxi-driver who had promised to come to take me back to Cuzco in the evening. I couldn't find him in the waiting area but soon I heard his earnest and endearing voice calling me from the outside. He dropped off at the main square in Cuzco, and I began to look for a restaurant to have a hearty dinner.