A Story in Two Parts: Two. Glacier National Park
““One of the best proofs that one had entered a sublime landscape was the emotion it evoked.””
Late September, sixty degrees, exquisite blue sky, vibrant yellow larch, golden aspen, empty roads, and carrying the invisible wounds of a broken heart, my visits to McGee Meadow Fen and Huckleberry Lookout in Glacier National Park (GNP) were quite different than that of the Arboretum. There is something about GNP and the surrounding area that is sublime for me. Just passing underneath the picturesque stone railway bridge to enter West Glacier lifts a heaviness in me that I hadn’t known was there. I am relieved of a burden. I am escaping from the mundane and entering what I have thought of for over 20 years as sacred space. But, this place, too, is created space. It is stolen space. It is occupied space.
Life. Death. Life.
I grew up wandering this landscape with its invisible boundaries, bathing in its waters, sleeping on its floors, and it has always been this place that I have called home. This is a conflict that I allow to live inside of me in a way that I do not recognize with such immediacy in the Valley, which is also an occupied and stolen space.Glacier National Park was named in 1910 by Taft after some in the Blackfeet nation sold the land for 1.5 million dollars in 1895 due to mass starvation of the Blackfeet people caused by the eradication of their primary food source. I contemplate the ways in which I sometimes, conveniently, forget these details. I knew them but did not know them. In the creation of this paper, I have read and listened to the Blackfeet people in a way I had not truly done before, I will no longer be able to relegate the details of the acquisition of this space in which I find peace and home, to the background. To the Blackfeet, the Kootenai, the Ktunaxa, and the Salis, GNP was, and is, sacred space. There is a series of videos on the GNP history page with interviews of tribal elders, leaders, and members. In the videos, some feel that, in the end, it was a good thing to have sold the land in that the land is still protected. Others speak with anger and feel that they have been excluded and cheated.
““The removal of Indians to create an uninhabited wilderness””
When I stand on this land, I feel a presence. The sublime, yes, but I think it is more than that. In my younger years, I attributed that presence to the genius loci in a way that I did not have the language to define then. This place has always felt different, felt alive somehow. I have visited national parks and wild spaces across this continent, and yet it is this landscape that has fulfilled a need for connection, belonging, and transcendence and has always been perceived by me as sentient, long before my awareness and knowledge of the indigenous experience of this place. What is interesting to me is that the indigenous people who inhabited and danced upon, gathered, hunted in, and prayed on this land, according to their descendants, felt the same way
I question, then, if landscapes might hold imprints of memory, like repositories of the encounters that have occurred within them, and while we can dance around this understanding academically, we may not be able to address it with the rigor demanded of Western science. Could what I feel be a bit of the cultural biography of this place in a stretched definition of commodity, pieces of the history, story, and emotion of those who have interacted with and lived on this land, with these plants, with these trees, long before me? Perhaps it is both a mingling of the genius loci that was itself “special” to begin with, which may have been one of the reasons the indigenous tribes chose to hold their ceremonies here.
““To this day, for instance, the Blackfeet continue to be accused of “poaching” on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with the proviso that they be permitted to hunt there””
The flora and fauna here are abundant. Interwoven. They live amongst each other, with each other, despite each other, over, under, together, and apart in a thick and complicated fabric of the seen and unseen. While the space is created in that it has borders and is slotted into the National Park system, and while it has paved and unpaved roads to accommodate car, horse, bike, and foot travel by visitors, and while it has designated camping areas and pullouts and turnarounds, and while it is maintained and preserved, it is otherwise left to itself. Only it isn’t, because here I am, and here also were 3 million people (about the population of Arkansas) last year, driving in, wandering, photographing, talking, drawing firearms at each other over limited parking spaces, coughing, riding on wheelchairs and bicycles, hiking, packing, playing, renting kayaks and horses and bear spray and eating ice cream and pitching tents, silent in awe, crying and laughing, grieving and celebrating, and sleeping in small houses with generators and flushing toilets that they drive in as if it were the right thing to do.
There is no one here now, one other empty car in the parking area. This is the gift of summer’s end, and I feel alone in the universe. But if the memory of the land carries the lives of the Blackfeet Nation, it must then carry the lives and interactions of the millions upon millions of visitors. And while this particular location isn’t often visited the way that Going to the Sun is, there is still an increased influx of human activity. As I interact with the pine, the multiple varieties of fungi, moss, lichen, and grasses, and navigate around the bear, moose, deer, bobcat, and lion scat, I wonder at Camas Road that separates the fen from the lodge pole pine forest, and in particular, I’m curious about the man-made scar between what was once a contiguous landscape, a scar made from the echoes of prehistoric plants and animals that scurries humans back and forth in metal machines powered by the same echoes, and I am curious at how this scar changes what I see, and what the beings that live alongside, inhabit and pass-through this space see and experience. How and in what way is the scar interpreted?
The Forest Floor, Huckleberry Lookout Trail
Paying attention to the forest floor opens new worlds. Everything here is interconnected—the reality is that everything everywhere is interconnected—but it is visible and alive when you kneel down and observe the undergrowth. What can we learn from this interconnection, these “more-than-human” dramas that take place out of our awareness and out of our notice? Life. Moving, shifting, becoming, breathing, living, and dying together for millennia. Most of the stories are untold.
I pay particular attention to the disrupted space at the edges and the ways in which the landscape pauses, collects itself against the difference, and then moves away on each side to be what it is: flora, fauna, earth, and water shifting and adapting itself to its new reality. Is it wrong to call it a scar? I have no way of knowing what this place was like before the road, but I can imagine. Huckleberry Lookout and the peak of the Apgar Range tops at 6593 ft and slopes downward over 3 miles to the fen at 3868 ft, according to my AllTrails app. There is lodge pole pine at the far Eastern edge of the fen and a 60-foot band of the same at the Western edge near the road. This band of pines gives way to edge grasses and fungi for the last twenty feet before meeting Camas Road proper. Once across and then down and up a steep ditch, lodge pole pine stretches again for a mile or so before giving way to huckleberry and other low brush at higher elevations. Without the road, the fen would have been nestled between uninterrupted pines, its water table still feeding the tuft grasses, inviting birds, and the relationship with the peat and minerals dictating what grows in its midst. And what else?
I lay on my back in the middle of the forest. Silence. And yet, I know I am not alone. This trail is rated one of the most dangerous in the United States for the sheer number of grizzlies that visit, especially at its higher elevations, to partake of the huckleberries in the frenzied hyperphagia of autumn. It is the site of the Night of the Grizzlies, when, for reasons still mostly unknown but likely human interference, grizzlies mauled sleeping humans in a horror that still permeates the place. The wind moves the pine tops against the fading light of the sky, clouds move swiftly far above me, and I watch a small woodland spider wrapping its dinner as the last rays of the sun highlight the intricacy of the web. A large branch cracks somewhere to the North, then more stillness. The sublime moves through me once again, even here at my desk writing this. The way that it is the intermingling of the present and past, history and future, with my material, transient, changing body, a multispecied ecosystem of its own. This is Anna Tsing’s “assemblage” ripe with “indeterminacy” in action. Outcome unknown, still transforming, still taking shape. I have escaped grizzly attack or mushroom poisoning and avoided twisting my ankle on a fallen log (as if indeterminacy can only be realized in harm), but what academic alleyway will this encounter pull me toward? I think about those who do not get to, or who do not want to, experience this. The phrase from Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness, “contested moral terrain” comes to my mind; As Haraway said, everything is only a partial perspective, a situated understanding.
“The environment is a social construction: a product of cultural responses to specific historical circumstances which give rise to shared sets of imagined landscapes”
A raven calls far above me. What do I imagine of this landscape? What does it imagine of me? I think about the two experiences of the ravens, one calling me toward the wild that existed at the edges of the tame, the other reminding me that as much as I do not belong here, I do belong; that most of the wild is some sort of tame in disguise. In this stillness, where history whispers to me through the tops of the pines and where at dusk the land seems to hold its breath, I find that I am straddling worlds, the world I have known and the world that has always been beyond my knowing. The imagined and the real. I am holding many things at once.
