The Way We Remember

The American mountain men were notable – and at the same time, unexceptional – in their approach to natural resources.  These men, the United States’ vanguard in the North American west, enjoyed a few rich years of beaver trapping in the Rocky Mountains before harvest numbers started to fall.  The beaver, as numerous mountain men acknowledged, were being trapped out.  There simply weren’t enough of them.  The mountain men responded to the declining beaver population just as Garret Hardin would have predicted: they trapped further, and harder, and longer.  By the time demand for fur hats dropped off and killed the beaver trade, the trappers had nearly extirpated beaver from the Rockies.

So with an eye to investigating modern parallels of resource overexploitation, I spent today touring Mono Lake and the Owens Valley – two areas famously dewatered by the city of Los Angeles, which began diverting water from the Owens Valley in 1913 and from the streams feeding Mono Lake in 1941.  Diverting massive quantities.  In the Owens Valley, farmer’s wells went dry, farms went belly-up, and Owens Lake became a dust bowl.  At Mono Lake, the water level dropped precipitously, migrating birds that had traditionally found refuge on islands were devoured by predators as land bridges emerged, and strange rocky formations called “tufa” that had formed on the bottom of the lake poked above the waterline.  But these, fortunately, are stories that may happy environmental endings: in response to litigation, Los Angeles began allowing enough water to reach Mono Lake that its level has been slowly rising since 1994, and in 2007, the Owens River once again flowed, albeit at diminished levels, into the dusty bed of Owens Lake.  Mono Lake is still very low, and the lakebed of Owens Lake is still substantially dry, but things are headed in an encouraging direction.

A sign by the mostly-dry lakebed of Owens Lake.  If you can't get what you want, at least enjoy being bitter about it.

So it was with some satisfaction that, after dark had fallen, I drove north on US 395 from Owens Lake toward Bishop, California, with a mug of hot chocolate in my hand thoughts of supper on my mind.  Because I admire his writing and hope to learn from it, I was listening to Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Sunburned Country in audiobook form, wondering idly whether I should stop at the next roadside pullout to pee, or wait awhile longer.  On the one hand, I had to go.  On the other, I was having a very nice drive and it was cold outside, and what if a cop drove by . . .

Engaged in such important musings, I wasn’t paying my fullest attention when I heard Bryson say, “I spent a good hour reading through the book at random, spellbound by the simplicity of the age she described.”  The simplicity of what age? I wondered.  I couldn’t imagine an age in which people considered their problems simple, so I put off my bodily needs for a moment rewound the audiobook.

Bryson was talking about a book, published in 1959, that described the economic prosperity of Australia in the 1950s.  Bryson wrote that “with admiration bordering on amazement, Ms. McKenzie [the author] notes that by the end of the 1950s, three-fourths of city dwellers in Australia had a refrigerator, and nearly half had a washing machine.”  He then quoted McKenzie: “‘most homes have other electric appliances, such as vacuum cleaners, irons, and electric jugs.”

“Oh, to live in a world in which the ownership of an electric jug was a source of pride,” Bryson pined.  “I spent a good hour reading through the book at random, spellbound by the simplicity of the age she described.”

Now this, I think, is a common fallacy.  There is nothing inherently simple about an electric jug.  It is more complicated than a clay pot, but less complicated than a Cray Supercomputer.  That does not mean that an age in which ownership of an electric jug was coveted was a “simple” age – just as the age in which a CrayPlus SuperDuperComputer exists will not render “simple” the age in which we considered its predecessor advanced.  An electric jug only sounds simple to us because we are familiar with it.  In 1959, presumably, Australians were unfamiliar with the device, and there was nothing inherently simple about wanting one.  Coveting an electric jug only seems simple if we superimpose our notions of the device’s commonality onto the people of the 1950s.

But I think the root of the fallacy of yesteryear’s simplicity runs deeper than our failure to appreciate technological advances.  We tend to think of times gone by as “simple” because the problems of those days have, for the most part, become irrelevant or have been resolved.  Because we know how the story of yesteryear’s problems ended, we don’t view those problems as particularly threatening, and our ancestors’ preoccupation with those problems seems to have been needless.  Since our ancestors were preoccupied with problems that were not so grave as to end the world as we now know it, their age seems simple, as though there wasn’t much to worry about.  Today’s problems, by contrast – whose resolutions are still in doubt – seem more threatening, more severe, more complex.  But our ancestors’ problems likely appeared equally threatening before history wrote the chapters that resolved their problems and connected their time with ours.

There was, for instance, nothing simple about the California Water Wars of the twentieth century: whether farmers and ecosystems of the Owens Valley would ever reemerge, and whether Mono Lake would continue to hold water, were very much in doubt.  In the nineteenth century, the question of whether beaver and buffalo would go extinct in the United States – as had the passenger pigeon – was an open question.  That we now believe we have the answers to these questions does not mean that the problems were simple when they first burst on the American west.

I stopped the truck at a turnout and got out to answer nature’s call.  The other analytic question raised by dismissing past ages as simple is that it implies that the present age is more complex, and its problems graver, than others.  As I listened to the splatter I looked up at the stars, bright, cold, and eternal.  Maybe this is the age to end all others, but you’ve got to be suspicious of someone who tells you that – exaggerating the difficulties of the present is a common bias.  Dickens said it best, in the lesser-remembered half of his introduction to A Tale of Two Cities.  In a salute to another excellent writer, I’ll end this entry with his quotation:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.