Whatever We Want

One reason I am a sworn enemy to Jesse Helms (and now his ghost) was due to his repeated blockage of the Smokies Wilderness Bill back in the 1980s. I couldn’t believe anyone could be against wilderness designation for a national park – still can’t. Driving into the Smokies definitely doesn’t feel like a visit to the wilderness anymore. Only the entrances at Big Creek, Cataloochee and Happy Valley are still relatively undeveloped, and I’d say their days are numbered as well. In the Smokies you have to squint to feel wild, for real wild you gotta go west.

I just returned from a visit to the Frank Church/River of No Return wilderness - one of the largest and wildest wilderness areas in the Lower 48. The place Idahoans simply refer to as “The Frank” you can find on even the simplest of maps. It covers the rippling belly of Idaho where rivers are still the primary thoroughfares, and bush planes are the preferred taxis. If your map only shows roads, it is the Empty Quarter.

Unlike most backcountry excursions, which are ultimate statements of self-interest, I visited Senator Church’s namesake wilderness on a quest of High Purpose. I was there at the request of my recently widowed friend Sandy. I was there to usher her deceased husband, Frank (no relation) to his Eternal Home...in The Frank. Frank (my friend) was a statesman in his own right. Like the late Senator Church, Frank was a firebrand and risk taker. He was a barrel-chested, red-bearded, coal-fired locomotive. He knew life was for the living, and only in the wilds can you find True Freedom. “Buddy,” Frank once said as we pondered the itinerary of one of our excursions, “We can do whatever we want!” True Freedom. So it was clear that Frank should spend eternity in one of our last great vestiges of free. My partner on this mission was appropriately Buddy Koonce – a half-century old (Happy Birthday!) Nashville engineer - who had introduced me to Frank when I was sowing a field of oats on Colorado’s rocks back in 1980. We played round ball and drank highballs in the thin air of our youth.

So we took a single engine taxi deep into the gorge of the Middle Fork – the vena cava of the Frank. There we packed more beer, wine, and such than necessaries and found an appropriately impassable path up some godforsaken canyon on which we could hear Frank’s reprimands to get more civilized on our next trip and take a friggin’ raft and forgo this young man’s passion for flagellation-by-undergrowth which we always seemed destined for. So exhausted and bleeding, we limped to the hot springs at Loon Creek - site of the finest backwoods Love Shack in America, where we soaked, toasted, and left Frank to continue his never-ending passion for the woodsy bacchanal now and forevermore. We then found a cliffside view of the river of absolute perfection to finally take leave of our friend. Damn Frank. You were right.