Seventy years ago my grandfather built a road into the Sespe
wilderness of Ventura County.
He was working then as a construction supervisor for the
Civilian Conservation Corps. The road was so important, and money
so tight, that the people of nearby Fillmore raised $2,000
– a large sum for a small town struggling in depression-era
America – to buy materials.
My grandfather donated three months of leave time to make sure
the road was finished as far as Tar Creek, a burgeoning oil
exploration area.
Seventy years ago my grandfather built a road into the Sespe wilderness of Ventura County.
He was working then as a construction supervisor for the Civilian Conservation Corps. The road was so important, and money so tight, that the people of nearby Fillmore raised $2,000 – a large sum for a small town struggling in depression-era America – to buy materials.
My grandfather donated three months of leave time to make sure the road was finished as far as Tar Creek, a burgeoning oil exploration area.
In the end, the road brought jobs and a small measure of prosperity.
Eventually that road was extended through what later became the Condor Sanctuary all the way to Lockwood Valley. As a boy I was thankful for my grandfather’s road. It opened up a backcountry playground to which I would have had difficult access otherwise. It is a daunting landscape riven with steep cliffs ideally suited to the condors who soar from their nesting places looking for food.
One of the logging industry’s arguments for such roads has been that roadless, remote forests are vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires.
My grandfather envisioned his road partly as a fire-fighting road, but that argument carried little weight last week as the Day fire marched relentlessly through the Sespe.
It is a challenging fire-fighting and road-building environment, where wildfires burn hot and fast, and change direction with their mood. Roads can bring crews, but have limited capacity to convey fire retardant to where it’s needed. They cannot compete with a fire’s hunger for fuel.
And you probably couldn’t build it today.
On Wednesday U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte reinstituted President Clinton’s ban on road construction on 50 million acres of federal land, which the Bush administration has been trying for years to reopen to mining, logging and other development.
The conflagration that has charred the magnificent Sespe wilderness to a crisp in the last three weeks has become a reminder not of why we need roads into such places, useful though they may sometimes be, but rather why we must be extra judicious in our choices of where to build them.
When one road leads to another, and then another, the wilderness we claim to be husbanding and even protecting ceases to be wilderness at all. It is the wilderness, not the resources, that give roads value. And fires have a habit of ignoring logging roads.
Our great western writer Wallace Stegner tried in 1960 to impress on us the value of wilderness. In what became known as his “Wilderness Letter,” Stegner spoke of the West as a “geography of hope,” describing the magnificence of the terrain, the very idea of wilderness, as “a resource in itself,” beyond the measure of the normal yardsticks of minerals or recreation. The grandeur of it, he wrote, subdued the men who thought they had conquered it.
Stegner’s letter, and the hard work of committed conservationists led to the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. In an introduction to a republication of the letter in 1980, Stegner, wrote there were reasons beside “as a scientific reserve, or a land-bank, or a playground,” to preserve wilderness. It was also needed “as a spiritual reserve,” because “we all need something to take the shrillness out of us.”
If anything, that shrillness has only gotten worse since 1980, and Judge Laporte’s decision, with the Day fire as its backdrop, will surely rekindle our heated national dispute over roads and wilderness.
At a time when conservation has taken a seat far behind war and terrorism in the public mind, it is worth listening to Stegner again. He understood that, when it comes to wilderness, if you use it you lose it.
My grandfather built his road during a simpler time, when wilderness, like minerals, seemed to be in inexhaustible supply.
That is no longer the case. If we have any hope of preserving it, wilderness must be given the same consideration as other resources. The only way to value wilderness is to leave it alone, so that future generations can share our experience and that of our forebears. Wilderness puts life in perspective, humbles us, and is “a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures.”
“We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.” That, Stegner wrote, “is precisely its value.”
John Yewell is a columnist and night city editor of the Monterey County Herald.
