Dear HCN,
An absolutely brilliant
essay by George Sibley (HCN, 3/18/02: How I lost my town).
Memorable lines, sweeping flourishes, paragraphs that could stand
alone as poetry. But when you take it all in, Sibley never “had” a
town or “had” any place else.
Missing was some
call to action. It was kind of nihilistic. We should try to save
things * but then again, why? It was a meditation without a
message.
Sibley admits to being a hippie, like so
many of the brewski and pot-happy HCN crew, and
his penchant for relativistic ethics of the ’60s comes through loud
and clear as does the idea of hedonistic recreationism (the earth
as playpen for commercialized fun). There is to be no sacrifice for
some long-term common good. Instead it’s just the same old
do-my-own-thing ethic of the kids of the
’60s.
Sibley may be more skillful with a pen than
was Ed Abbey, but Abbey had black-and-white convictions that I
liked. Abbey did more, and will do more dead than Sibley will do
alive, to save not just Mendicant Mountain but the whole Mendicant
Range itself. Playing word games over “quaint” and “what really is
‘The West,’ ” and “is it development or growth” would drive Abbey
nuts.
I hunger and look for True Believers on the
pages of HCN. The equivocators (like Sibley),
who are proud to admit they joined up with the Realtor/developer
because they were clever enough to string together the PR words to
make sprawl seem right, are like Neville Chamberlin after a visit
with Herr Hitler; “everything is going to be all
right.”
“But it’s still a mountain.” That doesn’t
do it for me. No way. Not after the Realtor, road builders, ski run
incrementalist, economic determinists, hedonistic multiple-use
recreationists have torn so many good things out of it – like
authenticity, for openers.
Aldo Leopold in
Sand County Almanac wrote of a basaltic hulk of
a mountain called Escudilla. Once its grizzly had been shot, the
mountain had lost part of something that “had been a-building since
the morning stars sang together.”
We abuse the
West, split it into 20 million ranchettes, carve it up like a
pickled lab frog, and then wonder why the distant music is hard to
hear.
Dave
Tillotson
Lake Mills,
Wisconsin
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Sibley a brilliant equivocator.
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