The Lowbagger Vision By Mike Roselle

Pico De Guano Wilderness

As the sun rises high here in the desolate southern Chimichunga Mountains, west of the stale, dry plains known as the great Tostito Desert, I am watching a rare and endangered triple-snooted cootamundi mate, and I am eating and eating a Pop Tart.

Across the deep narrow Muscatel hued canyons of the Rio Riviera River, two tawny mountain lions fight over what’s left of a rapidly decomposing beaked-whale carcass wedged in the mighty limbs of a giant Saguaro, silhouetted by the full Eostar moon,  and disturbing the sleep of two Osprey who where out late.

A bear shits in the nearby woods. The smell alone is enough to make me loose my lunch. But that’s nature for you. It’s a lot like country music. It’s all about fucking, fighting, eating, shitting and not getting to sleep in. It’s also about trucks, of course, since you really can’t get into the middle of nowhere without a truck.

Since I lost my El Camino in the Divorce, and I am still in Missoula, what I am really doing is sitting in the Break Espresso Coffee Shop pretending to work on a computer. The reason I am in the Break instead of the Raven, where I’d rather be posing as a Montana Writer, can be summed up in one phrase; Closed on Mondays.

Therefore, what I am actually seeing I will not describe for you in great detail, but I will give you a clue. It has twenty legs and is dressed in navy blue pile sweaters and Carharts. It stands impatiently by the cash register holding unwashed large containers, and demanding a triple decaf latte supremo with organic soymilk. It hasn’t mated for some time, but it is still multiplying and growing by the hour. If this beast doesn’t get served any faster than I did, this place could erupt into chaos any minute, and I will go next door to Charlie’s. 

The other reason I am not in a way cool wilderness type place writing turgid prose on my laptop is because it’s been a while since I was actually in one. People I know say this is a bad thing. I believe my not going into the wild is actually a good thing. Good for the wilderness. You can ask Howie. Over the last few decades, I usually go up to the edge of the wilderness and chain myself to something big and yellow. Or occasionally someone like George Sexton of the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Alliance in Ashland Oregon will take me out to some rocky outcrop in the Siskiyou or somewhere during sunset and say “Behold this wonderful unique unspoiled ecosystem! If you cannot help me raise money, these forests will be gone tomorrow, and it will all be your fault”. Then we would bushwhack ten miles in the dark to find his truck. This is the real reason that I try and stay in town as much as possible. People sometimes ask me for money in Charlie’s, but they never say that the bar will be gone by tomorrow. But the forests will be gone by closing time, and we both know it. 

We here at Lowbagger have a vision to reunite all of the world’s wild, untamed roadless areas and get rid of all the people. Well, let’s just say certain people. Where they go and what they do is not a problem for us, since we spend most of our time fighting to save the last remaining roadless areas, and fighting each other. So, if you are worried that the Lowbagger Vision will put you out of work and lock you out of public lands, don’t worry. You still have some time to prepare. We are not that far along. We are still working on the maps and fundraising. We will let you know as soon as we figure out how to accomplish this important mission.

It is far more likely that we will lose our jobs before you lose yours anyway. The difference is that you will probably also lose a paycheck. In a perfect world, Lowbaggers will get paid to work, while loggers will be writing proposals for foundation grants that will never come, instead of the other way around. When this shift happens, the loggers will probably not be able to support their families. But this will be good for the earth and the movement overall, because instead of us not getting the money, the loggers won’t be getting the money. And, it’s far more likely that all of these things will happen, than it is that Lowbagger will ever get a foundation grant to fund our vision thing. 

Speaking of vision, one of the reasons you have not read about a lot of the important stuff going on in the world, and our reasonable, economically viable solutions to the major problems facing the environment, and what people are actually doing about it, is because nobody wrote about it and sent it to us. Again, it’s the same reason you haven’t seen quite as many photos of Alpenglow on the Tetons at sunset, as you might want. This problem can only be solved by Josh and I working harder, or using Google more.

So if you are one of those worthless Lowbaggers, too busy saving the Planet to write stuff for us, we are talking to you. If I can do e-mail and take photos and send them to Josh, so can you. OK, I can’t really operate a camera very well, (again, ask Howie about that) but as we have mentioned in this space many times, I can do e-mail. Otherwise we will have to make stuff up, as usual.

Mike Roselle was last spotted heading up Jackrabbit Gulch on Arid Hallows Mesa, with a pack of American Spirits, his laptop and some binoculars.