Organizing Chaos and Pushing on a Rope

Tonight I was trying to explain to my foster son the notion that there is value in leaving the wild
places left on this earth wild.

I grew on a ranch in the Black Hills. The ranch was to small to make money and never grew
anything well except rocks, but it was the best place on earth to grow up. It was there I learned to
read the land, the weather, feel the rhythms of of the seasons. I learned what would sustain you
and what would kill you. I learned to re spirit the best place is to sit on the mountaintop at sunrise
thriugh the night and then sunrise. The land was wild! I've seen rain so thick you
couldn't see throught it on one side of the valley and sunshine on the other, clear and calm one
minute and blizzard blow in in under two minutes with the temperature falling from +50 to -10 in 20
minutes. I've seen the evening sun explode in dazzling white on the limestone cliffs at the top of the
mountain. I learned the ebb and flow life itself in the wild. The value of the wild place is that it strips
all pretense away and allows you to see and feel the totality of life along with your place in the
great scheme.

Forty years ago the country around the ranch and the ranch were wild, it was nothing to see elk,
deer, cougar, bobcats, coyotes, turkey and other wildlife. Now the ranch has been broken up into
"ranchettes' and sold to people with five more horses than they have land for, whose dogs run off
the wildlife, who demand the "sanitization" of the surrounding land and then have the gall to tell me
I can't go to the top of the mountain that they don't own.

As the wild spaces shrink they become ever more exclusive, untill they become like little snow globes
insulated from the rest of the universe and then they are gone. My children will never
feel the wild as I have and I know it will be their children that will know that all the bling, gadgets,
and fancy buildings will not replace it.