Download Document - The Wilderness Society

© Jeff L. Fox
camp, miles hiked per day, number of pancakes
consumed by visiting Forest Service bigwigs,
on and on. His was the kind of inspired quirkiness
dear to a writer’s heart, so perhaps it was a
natural evolution for this curious historic figure
who died the year I was born, 1939, to become
something of an off-stage fellow compulsive in
my own environmentally tilted journalistic life.
...his irrefutable answer whenever
asked how many wilderness areas
this nation really needs: “How many
Brahms symphonies do we need?”
Then came the summer of 1977, when I returned
to Montana with a book in mind. I had
long stayed away, daunted by the loss of loved
ones to that hard life under the shadow of the
Rockies, but determined now to tell our family
story. First, though, by whatever impulse that
had been waiting 20 years, I pointed myself and
my unflinching wife Carol into the Bob, the waiting
wilderness area.
Those memorable days on the trail, we knew
even then, were unrepeatable; we were graced
to have one such experience in a lifetime. Knifeedge
ridge hiking took our breath in more ways
than one, with views of the snowy ranks of the
interior Rockies while a gorge with Yosemite-like
domes waited below. The Montana sky as big as
advertised. Fishing —and better yet, catching!—
at a creek-side campsite. For 40 miles, about a
www.wilderness.org
day’s walk for Bob Marshall, we cloud-walked
back and forth across the Continental Divide. In
five days we encountered not another living soul,
except nature’s own.
Out of this and much else that adventurous
summer came This House of Sky: Landscapes of
a Western Mind, a finalist for the National Book
Award and still high among the most popular of
my books. But as it turned out, I was not through
with Bob Marshall and his namesake country, nor
he and it with me. Subsequently my fictional Two
Medicine trilogy focused on a Forest Service family
in that inspirational neck of the woods, and
perhaps inevitably, in a later novel, Mountain
Time, as my modern characters hike into the Bob,
who do you think shows up in the pages as a lasting
presence, tireless as a shadow, on the trail?
I shall always believe that not the least of
Bob Marshall’s legacy was his irrefutable answer
whenever asked how many wilderness areas this
nation really needs: “How many Brahms symphonies
do we need?” And now, in a climatestressed
world, how many Bob Marshalls, in
imagination and actuality,
do we need? As
many as fate and luck
can ever give us.
Ivan Doig is the author
of 13 books, including
his Two Medicine trilogy
of English Creek, Dancing
at the Rascal Fair, and
Ride With Me, Mariah
Montana.
The Bob
Marshall
Wilderness
runs along 60
miles of the
Continental
Divide with
elevations
ranging from
4,000 to 9,000
feet. There are
more than 1,000
miles of trails.
© Carol M. Doig
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