Poems by Walker Thomas

The Road Less Traveled

by Walker Thomas

From Canary Spring 2021

Walker lives in a small suburban cave near the Rillito River on its, usually dry, course to the Santa Cruz.

In 1979, few beside Al Gore, his old Harvard professor and those in their academic circle knew about global warming. To the rest of us, pollution meant smelly ponds and big-city smog, watery eyes and burning airways, the browning of buildings and of trees at higher elevations. Those seemed problems enough.

On a balmy, late-fall Friday night, I took a break from the books to drive under a gentle rain and across the Tucson Mountains to Avra Valley. Traffic was scarce when I’d last drove that stretch fourteen years before. Outdoor enthusiasts perched atop oversized wheels roared by me one after another on the unpaved mountain pass. They left a tiger rattlesnake in their wake.

Its head listed at an angle.

I maneuvered the thick-bodied, small-headed, dusty gray rattler with faded cross-bands of tiger-orange into a pillowcase and returned home.

In a terrarium, the little rattler yawned to reposition bone and cartilage in its flexible skull. Jaws agape, it erected its fangs. One was broken, but a series of new ones stood in a graduated row behind, the next largest ready to take the missing one’s place. It looked full-bellied enough to survive a rapidly approaching time of winter hibernation while it healed.

I released it in the rocks above the road the next morning and drove down into Avra Valley.

The packed-sand was still wet under an overcast sky. A dead roadrunner, long, dark-green feathers rustling on a breeze, was an exotic-looking heap. A battered, beadwork purse in pink and black had been a Gila monster. Broken under a resilient cover of fur, a dead coyote lay like any dog asleep beside the road.

I found a still-living sidewinder, also called horned rattlesnake for its hornlike awning over each eye. Windblown sands in Avra Valley mark the easternmost extent of its range. Its unique method of advance over loose sand like a rolling corkscrew confines the small, salmon-pink and paint-spatter-white rattler to areas of shifting, fine-grained sand west of Tucson. This one was tire-pressed into the somewhat forgiving surface, stunned and sluggish.

I carried it to the shade of a distant ironwood tree, where it might heal if undisturbed, and then drove home by the paved southern route through Gate’s Pass.

An uncommon brown shroud covered the desert ahead as I descended from the pass. A ghostly Tucson peeked from under the smudge of smoke from far-off smelters and an increasing haze risen from the cars of the many who, like me, took to the roads to enjoy the day.

I’d answered an ambulance call to an attempted suicide three years earlier. Passersby called 9-1-1 about a man down before an idling car parked half-in, half-out of a garage. Instead of closing himself in with the fumes, he backed the car up just enough so its tailpipes emptied outside. Then he sprawled in front to await an unlikely death.

In his madness was a metaphor for the slow suicide of us all. The fumes he avoided in staging his personal drama emptied into what we once considered an infinite atmosphere. But we altered its color and clarity, tinted the firmament with our waste until it proved as finite as the space within a garage.

An alien visitor to our planet’s larger cities might think our skies were formed of a dingy, pungent medium that obscured distant objects and burned the throat. That we could visibly alter the chemistry of a planet’s atmosphere in a few generations showed the scope of our industry, but little of our humanity.

Our visible effects —the brown haze and acid rain, the irritation to throats and lungs by inhaled particulates, the strength-sapping burn of ground-level ozone— proved the smaller problem. We learned that more critical is how the imbalance of the less-visible carbon dioxide in atmosphere traps and intensifies surface heat. The effects compound the way the chemical changes in an injured person’s body snowball into a life-or-death crisis. Our weather, our fresh water reserves, the planet and all its life are at risk. Predictions fall short when that snowballing of cause-and-effect kicks in. We did this in an innocent desire for an easier life. Innocent or not, we’re small fish to so foul our pond.

We dickered over the magnitude of the problem, saw our individual contributions as negligible while we continued the assault, each doing his or her small part. I demanded that government put a stop to planetary abuse while I continued to contribute to the problem.

We move on roads carved into mountains, on swaths cut through forests, gravel beds dumped on marshes. What seemed immeasurable land is measured by roads and cut into parcels on a grid of crossroads. The grid isolates and compromises interdependent ecosystems. Pedestrian wildlife dashes through traffic from one checkerboard square to another. As we gain in mobility, we lose more of the planet to ourselves.

On ninety percent of my ambulance calls I raced traffic to get to traffic’s victims. Drunk drivers whined that the fault rested on the sober bodies in the cars they struck. Driving seemed an absurd occupation. Costs exceeded benefits.

The dirt road through Avra Valley offered a microcosm of highway slaughter in a naïve environment. We see nature as a powerful mother whose scorn we fear, but before our technology she’s as vulnerable, as easily compromised as a child entrusted to our care.

I had no wallet when I stopped for gas in Tucson. I must have dropped it when I moved the sidewinder. I returned on foot to search the next day. I left at dawn and returned home emptyhanded late that night.

I replaced my bankcard and University I.D. I wrote to get my Social Security card replaced. But I put off the trip to the DMV for a new driver’s license. When I did, I stood in line a while and left. The line was too long I told myself. Truth was, I couldn’t bring myself to request another license. Deforestation, smoke-belching factories and power plants, sewage and chemicals dumped into streams, rivers, lakes and seas were bigger offences, but my overuse of fossil fuels was the one I could address directly, if only in a quixotic way.

I sold the car and bought a bicycle. To continue to drive was out of sync with my concept of human responsibility. Embarrassed that I took so long to see the light, I wondered that I was among so few who had. Like a newly-saved Christian I grew impatient with those who still sinned in the ways I once did. I became a bore on the subject.

Seven years later, Ed Abbey invited me to an EarthFirst! meeting where he and Doug Peacock —template for Ed’s Hayduke character in The Monkey Wrench Gang, his novel that inspired the Earthfirst! movement— were featured speakers.

“What do you think?” Ed asked on the church parking lot afterward.

After I sold the car, I wandered off into wilderness. That day, I’d walked down off a mountain from the cave where I lived, to the ranch where I parked my bicycle and then biked to town. I was especially full of myself.

“Look at all these cars. Why pollute the planet on the way to rail against pollution?”

“You need to shake that ‘holier than thou’ attitude,” Ed said as he turned to autograph a book. He didn’t bother to add, and I didn’t stop to think, that before I left my wallet beside an injured sidewinder, I’d have been proud to drive to an EarthFirst! meeting to rail against pollution.

He caught me on the University of Arizona campus some weeks later.

“I’ve got something to show you. You’re going to love this.”

He led a quick pace over to Euclid Ave, where he’d parked the vintage, red Cadillac he just bought.

“Nice, huh?”

In his final years, Ed seemed to bury his concern for technology’s pace against nature’s delicate balance, as well as his embrace of the underdog. The New York Times refused to print the last editorial he sent them, for its red-hat jingoism thirty years before Trump.

To put his sentiments in the proper perspective I reread his first book, The Brave Cowboy, published in the mid-fifties. In its quiet opening pages, I was reminded of how he’d shared my skeptical view of, and distress at technology’s pace. And how, in the same book, he championed the downtrodden he disparaged in the letter. A reflexive desire to close borders, though, may reflect the solitary man of Desert Solitaire. Better minds than mine may someday find a way to correlate his support of individuals who strive and his rejection of the striving masses, his distrust of misused technology and his embrace of it. One thing I know: Ed always sought ways to express his skepticism to a Pollyanna world, and he was happy to set himself up as a bad example to stir the pot. I hope the vulture soaring overhead —his self-described alter ego— agrees.

The basis of this article first appeared in a longer piece, “The Commute” in Outside. A version titled “The Road Not Taken” then appeared in the Gateway Community College anthology, Stories from the Other Side: Thematic Memoirs.