Happy Birthday America. 250 Years!!!

I’m in Pike National Forest, home to its namesake, Pikes Peak, the mountain (AKA, “America’s Mountain”). Pikes Peak is the inspiration for America the Beautiful, a song written by Katherine Lee Bates. The song describes a particular beauty in, “amber waves of grain” and “alabaster cities” and “fruited plain.” There are even a couple of nods to wild nature in, “sea to shining sea.” and “purple mountain majesty.”

Written in 1893, “America the Beautiful” describes a land already thoroughly colonized. Tamed. On July 1913, William Wayne Brown drove his car to the summit of Pikes Peak, the first time this had been done.

This is the same mountain in the historic territory of a band of Ute calling themselves the “Tabeguache”. Their name for themselves meaning, “People of Sun Mountain”. The name to me implies that these were people who considered themselves to be a part of the mountain, rather than owners of the mountain. However, we’ll never fully understand the historical relationship between the Tabeguache and the mountains, because that relationship has been irredeemably altered.

Today the summit of Pikes Peak can be reached by railroad and there is an annual car race to the summit. Donuts are cooked at a high elevation restaurant near the top. This mountain is completely accessible. It’s easy. You can even hike it if you choose.

I’m in Pikes Peak National Forest as a contractor, working for bird conservation. I’m staying in a historic cabin made of historic logs. There is electricity and running water. I’m staying with my supervisor at the cabin. There was a short time when a pump to the well was broken and we hauled water in ourselves.

One time we filled our jugs at a fire station along the Colorado Trail and talked to a teacher who was hiking the trail over the summer. He told us how he gains 50 pounds of stress weight from teaching every year and goes hiking and loses this weight in the summer, as we filled our jugs at a spigot.

We now have running water at the cabin but the water heater’s broken. So goes field work.

Across a paved road from the cabin, is a rougher road for ATVs, motorcycles and perhaps modified jeeps to drive. As I write this now, I can hear the idle and rev of an engine.

During work, we leave from this cabin at the crumbling edge of the woods, in a truck, in the evening. We drive along well-maintained roads, stopping to open gates with combinations or keys and drive some more. Then we walk. We follow trails sometimes, but almost always at a certain point, we set out into the trackless woods. We scramble eroding hillsides, climb over fallen logs and push through tangled groves of Gambel oak. We skirt cliffs and piles of boulders. Then, arriving at a point indicated on our GPS units, we stop, unpack our gear and sit to wait for sunset.

In the gloom of trees on the edge of night, we hang a battery powered speaker from a branch. At sunset, we turn on the speaker, and a recorded voice makes a lonely call, in the language of owls.

I am here, working as a surveyor for Mexican spotted owls. These owls haven’t been seen in the particular areas we’re surveying for years. We survey so that the US Forest Service doesn’t damage any habitat that might be newly inhabited by owls.

To prevent fires as well as to make a profit, forests are selectively logged or “thinned”. Spotted owls are supposed to be protected from this logging, under the law. This is because these owls, who prefer old growth forests, are endangered.

Often before we play the owl calls, the growling mutter of a motor is heard, floating through the trees. Many times, while cresting a trailless ridge in the dark, my eyes are met with the glowing patchwork of light that is Colorado Springs or Castle Rock. In this forest, boulders and cliffs have been defiled by the splash of painted vandalism and aspens are carved with initials. Anywhere you can find a deflated mylar balloon or sometimes an old tennis ball that rolled down a hill. The Forest Service land is cut by private roads and wedged in around spacious inholdings occupied by sprawling “cabins”.

Often we hear the wooo, wooo of a flammulated owl, once we caught a northern saw-whet owl in the beams of our light. We haven’t found the Mexican spotted owls we’re looking for.

A young, blonde, black bear ran across the road in front of us the other afternoon, but grizzlies were eradicated from Colorado since before I was born. The last grizz was killed in 1979 with an arrow by a hunter the bear mauled; this is the wildest thing to happen in my home state in 47 years. Mountain lions, moose, elk, hawks and owls, nuthatches and thrushes all live in this forest but it increasingly feels like a zoo.

This is America, land of private property and the freedom to tear down public trails, engine roaring, music blasting, confederate flags whipping from your vehicle.

Drive very far down these roads and you see America celebrated in flags with blue stripes, or rattlesnakes on yellow. You see it in signs reading “We Stand With Charlie”, a reference of course, to the bigoted, fascist piece-of-shit Charlie Kirk —may he rot in Hell. Look and you see private gun ranges and Christian summer camps carved out of the forest.

This is the true face of America. Trump, or someone like him was always inevitable, even normal. Mundane. Did we forget that Jefferson, as he wrote “All men are created equal” was profiting off the blood, sweat and lives of slaves working land, bereft of dignity? Have we convinced ourselves that Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears was an aberration? Does no one know that the FBI stalked American activists, writers and artists that weren’t aligned with the official government agenda? That they threatened Martin Luther King?

What about the government programs to shoot and poison wolves, bears, coyotes? Or the consumerist impulse that wiped passenger pigeons from the skies and turned bison into tourist attractions and ground patties? What about the bounties to kill bald eagles in Alaska? (Alaska’s still in the business of massacring brown bears by the hundreds). Or the money paid for rattlesnake lives that lasted in Minnesota until 1989? Today snakes are still murdered like gladiators in much of the south, there’s just no government bounty.

“Freedom” in America has come at last to its natural expression, the choice between brands and types of products. The choice between the pathetic, desperate flesh of an animal made into an assembly line product and a GMO, lab-designed, plant-based “meat” burger produced en masse. The flesh of America —the land, has been cut into bite sized pieces to feed an ongoing ‘pandemic’ of flaccid, resigned, obesity.

I’ve been to West Africa and uninhabited islands in Alaska; South America and Madagascar. I’ve collected data on alligators living on golf courses. Everywhere the disgusting tentacles of American capitalism twist, reaching, grasping, pulling the land and her inhabitants towards its all-consuming maw. In the far north, you can order a Papa Murphy’s Pizza to be delivered by bush plane. In Africa, I’ve walked the beach and found cartons of cellophane wrapped cigarettes washed up on shore tangled with fishing tackle and old bottles.

We’ve infected the minds of billions. Everyone wants to be Elon Musk; everyone wants to eat the world like a ripe peach, dripping with the blood of the innocent. This is our culture.

At home, National Park entrance fees are used to fund a $90 million party in D.C., replete with gilded statues. This is our nation.

Happy Birthday America. At 250 years old, you’ve finally made it. The world is your gilded toilet.