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FOUNTAIN PEN                                                                     July 2008

There were three Gulfstream private jets lined up on the Jackson Hole, WY airport apron, next to the United Airlines plane that would take our daughter and son-in-law back to San Francisco after a week spent fishing in local streams. Maybe all three Gulfstream owners were visiting their mansions on what was once working ranchland a few miles out of town. We were told they fly in for two weeks a year, from their homes in Texas, Tennessee and Alabama. We saw one of their places on a morning horseback ride. Our trail emerged from a slope of wildflowers and fireravaged tree skeletons onto a carefully graded clay road. A culvert allowed a man-made stream to supply water to a pool between the chipping green and the putting green at the far edge of the front lawn. Three laborers were grooming the grass and tidying the aspen-lined driveway up to the main house, the guest house, the garages, and the stables. Purchase price for the land plus the monthly $5,000 assessment fee include private fishing rights to the stream below. The rivers and streams around Jackson are the richest remaining eco-habitats in the world for the spotted cutthroat trout, and only the richest people can fish in some of them. There are ski slopes carved onto the slopes of the foothills at the edge of Jackson and onto a mountain a few miles east of town, so there is a good reason to fly in to the area when the fishing season ends. All the laborers I talked to, with one exception, came from somewhere else…Honduras, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Boston… or made the morning commute over the Teton Pass from neighboring Idaho. Needless to say, Jackson is a thriving town and has come a long way from its pioneer start in the 1840’s, but almost everyone is there for the day, a couple of weeks, or a few years.

Tonopah, NV looks like a large-scale version of what several children can do to a beach with shovels and pails. Open shafts are merely fenced, mine tips are left as they were the day the companies shut down jobs that supported 8,000 people who left town. Machinery rusts where it was left, lifts and cages are silhouetted against the desert sky like so many gallows. Half the storefronts on the town’s main street are boarded up, though you can buy the vacant and historic Mizpah Hotel and Casino for $1.6 million. A lot of things happened in or near Tonopah: it was the world’s largest deposit of silver ore, it was a stopping place on the 1908 New York to Paris auto race, and the B2 Flying Wing Stealth bomber was built and tested at Nellis Air Force Base Testing Site to the southeast of town. There are 350 ghost towns in Nevada, abandoned when the ore veins were cleaned out, but Tonopah is more zombie than ghost. Today the town is a motel, restaurant and refueling station mid-way between Las Vegas and Reno. Tomorrow things could change for the better, when the Bureau of Land Management decides what the new rules are going to be for 125 solar array projects that have submitted their applications for pieces of the desert. If all 125 projects reach their potential the resulting energy can service 20 million homes, and Tonopah will come alive again.

Idaho Falls, ID once served Tonopah’s present function: mid-way between Salt Lake City and Montana the town provided food, water, lodging, and supplies to miners on their way to the gold fields. When the boom ended all but a few families left town. Those who refused to give up looked at the Snake River and then at their rich valley and set about building irrigation canals from one to the other. The result is Idaho potatoes on your dinner plate, grown on a million acres of moist Miracle Valley soil. Downstream at Twin Falls, ID, one man saw how that area could prosper as fully as Idaho Falls, and set about building a dam and 1100 miles of irrigation canals. The result is even more Idaho potatoes on your dinner plate and a city with tree-lined residential streets at the end of the usual shopping malls and service businesses. This thriving city is populated by people who came –and are still arriving, from somewhere else. And all, except for the migrant workers herded into their camps, are proud to be Americans living The American Dream.

All this prosperity, present or past, is due absolutely to natural resources and hard work: water, ore, timber, sport fish, sunshine, and breathtaking scenery were the underlying wealth. A dramatic illustration of our reliance upon natural wealth is the day the Twin Falls irrigation project opened its gates and sucked the Snake River dry. The falls emptied (picture Niagara Falls bone dry) until balance was eventually restored. Downstream from the falls, the Snake was …and still is… replenished by springs branching from an underground water reservoir the size of Lake Erie. We spent our last afternoon fishing Tuolumne Meadows at the northeastern end of Yosemite National Park, CA. During our late lunch break an SUV stopped beside our parked Toyota Prius and the driver asked about its gas mileage. We said we had averaged 48.7 mpg so far on the trip, and he said he was getting 8 mpg from the SUV. If there’s a lesson to be learned about stewardship of our natural resources –in this case petro-fuel, I think it should start with that brief conversation. Not only will the high price of gas cause us to think in terms of conserving our use of it, but it also may help us comprehend the fact that this natural resource has assumed a value of its own beyond its supply-demand, utilitarian value. The Jackson ranch land on which the Gulfstream owner’s mansion stands was bought out of a bankruptcy auction ten years ago and subdivided for sale to people who could and would pay any amount for private access to the world’s best trout fishing streams… way beyond the land’s supply-demand, utilitarian value. The land, stream, and trout package was commoditized. The commoditization of silver allowed Tonopah mining companies to take what they got for “their” ore and abandon the town. Land in Idaho’s Magical Valley is virtually worthless without irrigation, so Snake River water was commoditized and its distribution rights sold as shares right along with the sale of the land. In each case, those who own the commodity control its market price, while those who do not own the commodity commute to work.

It will be interesting to see just how desert sunshine will be commoditized. A start-up outfit in New Mexico uses desert sunshine to convert algae and water into gasoline; their engineers figure that by covering 1% of New Mexico with such generators they can produce enough fuel to supply all America’s commuters. Those who control our current energy commodities are talking about> our need to extend off-shore drilling for oil and about our need for “safe” nuclear power plants; in short, more of the same. We might be able to do better than that, but we commuters are not yet demanding available alternatives … like the Prius, or campaigning for innovative alternatives… like solar arrays and bio-fuel generators. Until that happens, Twin Falls, ID and our home towns will come to resemble either rich Jackson, WY or zombie Tonopah, NV, in direct proportion to their remaining natural resources. Drive a thousand miles in either a Prius or an SUV and you too> will comprehend commoditization of a natural resource….in this case, oil. And chances are good that you will find yourself wishing for something better to come along by the time your grandchildren make the trip.