| June 30, 2006 Red Alert by Soren Wuerth Learning
To Minus
Ahead of me on the trail, my wife stopped and quickly turned around. “You go first, there’s a man down there with a gun,” she said. I looked down the trail. The path descended to a wooden bridge where I saw a man leaning against a railing and gazing across a lake that fed the stream below him. The silver barrel of a shotgun protruded above his shoulder. A puppy on loan for the hike scurried ahead and wriggled at the man’s feet. “Look out,” I called as we approached, “he’s a tough customer.” The man grinned and now I could see he wore the tan-green uniform of a Forest Service employee. “Excuse me,” he said with a look of sudden importance. I feared he would warn us about a leash law. “My name is Patrick. I’m wondering if I could ask you a few questions for a survey we’re taking on trail use.” He asked us to rate the impact of meeting other hikers on the trail on a 1-5 scale, with one being the most disturbing impact. My wife offered a four. “Oh, I don’t mind much.” We knew where this was going: open more trails for commercially guided hiking. The trail we hiked that day is a backcountry loop around the perimeter of Beaver Lake south of Sitka. It meanders through gigantic columns of old-growth cedar, hemlock and Sitka Spruce. My wife, who considered working for Sitka Bike and Hike a few years earlier as a trail guide, said she really didn’t mind bumping into folks on the trail. But while she talked with Patrick, I thought about the numbers. Numbers are used by policymakers to limit complex variables; a way to quantify, rather than qualify, a means of science, not philosophy; of math teachers, not language arts teachers; and numbers are used to arrive at conclusions expeditiously, a convenience that skips the laborious process of deeper thought. I thought about the number Frank Murkowski and his oil company sponsors spit out to leverage negotiations in their favor ... start with a ridiculously low figure, like 20 percent, to set a shallow benchmark. The first number proffered, psychologists know, is the number that sticks. “Set the bar low,” my friend, Bob, advised me to do when negotiating household chores with one’s spouse. “I tell my wife I can’t hammer a nail straight, so, when I do the most minimal carpentry project, she cheers.” The Forest Service man tucked his elbow in to wedge the shotgun closer to his shoulder. “What about you?” he said after my wife jogged away with the puppy. I remembered our old saying, “don’t gossip on the Beaver Lake trail,” that expresses the way sound is amplified in the church-like hall of tall trees, and the time a woman and her children skirted passed us, embarrassed, when Bob and I skinny-dipped off the big log. I reflected on the misty remoteness of the lake, fishing its still, black waters with my brother and his daughters years ago, how gawking tourists would have diminished our experience. “There need to be few places left that are free of money-making enterprise,” I said, speaking into Patrick’s eyes. “If you want a number, I’ll give you a minus one.” He smiled and I drifted down the trail, subtracting, with each step, the distance back. Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist, and is the winner of the Alaska Press Club's 2006 'Best Columnist' award. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com. |
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