Jack Hunter abandons his Sierra Club
lobbying job in D.C. and a marriage gone sour, eager to settle on
life’s placid surface near the Diablo National Forest of
southwestern New Mexico. He takes up horseshoeing and jumps into a
meaningless affair, enjoying the respite from strenuous work for
hopeless causes. But then he meets a beautiful conservation
biologist and learns about the endangered Mexican wolves in the
forest’s imperiled roadless area.
Such is the
outline of The Lobo Outback Funeral Home, Dave
Foreman’s first venture into fiction. Foreman, a founder of both
Earth First! and the Wildlands Project, has written books before,
including the provocative essay collection Confessions of
an Eco-Warrior and a national inventory of roadless areas
called The Big Outside. Lobo
Outback goes beyond these, delving into a particular
place that Foreman knows as few others
do.
Foreman’s fictional Diablo National Forest
stands in for the Gila National Forest, but his descriptions ring
true: “Blooming lupine washed a blue tide” through a ponderosa
forest of “plate-barked yellow pines,” while along a creek,
“violet-green swallows scooped up aerial plankton … like tiny,
feathered baleen whales.”
Lobo
Outback is more than Foreman’s chance to wax poetic over
one of America’s wildest landscapes. The novel is a chilling
reminder that much of the West’s old power structure remains
intact, and that some of its beneficiaries are disposed to thuggery
when their good-old-boy politics fail.
Catron
County, a locus of militia organizing and anti-endangered species
activism, appears in Lobo Outback as Fall
County. Fall County’s most powerful rancher, Buck Clayton, who
lives in a “ducal manor” complete with private airstrip, lobbies
for more taxpayer-built roads in the forest and hires a local yahoo
to hunt down endangered lobos – Mexican wolves. When
conservationists stand in his way, he excoriates them as
“modern-day witches and druids” and “dangerous terrorists” – and
follows his rhetoric with violence.
The
Lobo Outback Funeral Home is a literate and highly
readable story of a region where the soil itself seems seeded with
conflict. This is a book about the present, about the persistence
of wildness and about the intransigence of those opposed to Nature
itself.
The Lobo Outback Funeral
Home, by Dave Foreman, 2000, fiction, University Press of
Colorado, 226 pages, $24.95.
Copyright
© 2001 HCN and Michael J.
Robinson
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The wild West lives.
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