Den of the Gray Wolves

	Never thought I’d have to defend my home like that. Never had my picture in the paper before either, and it’s definitely not in the way I would’ve chosen.
	My soon-to-be-nemesis had already checked into Pagosa Hot Springs, a treasured space for me that lets my brain drift off with the rising steam. After parking my beater in the lot, I didn’t notice anything weird until I saw five guys in suits in the scorching July sunlight standing over the hot tubs. Huh?
	One of them shook his head when I took off my shirt and started towards my favorite tub up top, 104 degrees every time. I love gazing down over its rocky rim at the clear blue-greens of the San Juan River racing below. Natural and alive, our turquoise life-stream glides into white rapids, flowing untamed, a bit wild.
	Like a bull preparing to charge, the suit grunted. I kept going even when I heard the clack of his dress shoes on the rock path behind me. He yelled as I descended into my blissful oasis.
	“You gotta get out!”
	“Why? This is my spot.”
	“Security. You can use the one down there” He directed me with one finger.
	“That one's only 99, total waste of time.”
	“Could I see your ID please?” the security guy asked, so I grudgingly stretched to my short’s pocket on the stepping stone behind me and pulled out my driver’s license. “Our apologies, Mr. Blair, but we’ve paid the owner to secure these top six pools.”
	“Secure for whom?” I replied, congratulating myself for top-notch grammar under pressure.
	He pointed at a large man with a black cowboy hat with red horns on the front, in the only other occupied top pool. The guy tipped his hat to me and smugly smiled, a billionaire’s FU. Must be rollin’ in it.
	I crossed my arms, sank deeper until only my chin was above water line, prompting two more security guys to pick me up, legs still crossed, sunglasses falling across my face and water pouring off my butt. And that’s when someone from who the hell knows where took the picture.
	“What, what’re you doing here, anyway?” I yelled at the cowpoke billionaire.
	“You’ll see.” It winked.
	I soon found myself in the lot, outside looking in, refund in hand. Dude!
	“Who is that?” I sputtered as the security guards turned on their heels.
	“Sorry,” one said. “We’re gonna … augment … some things. See you soon.”
	Great. Diplomacy by well-paid security guard, the best avenue for social cooperation in an open and free democracy, right? And what the hell was he hinting about?
	Then I saw my only clue - a red baseball cap sitting on a Cadillac dash. McVale Extensions, LLC. Got on my computer the second I got home.
	William Joseph McVale III, MBA. Former CEO at Exxon. Board Member of NewsCore Media. Cato. Heritage. Part-owner of Dallas Cowboys.
	Impressive life/ human business card trail, which, once lying back on my shitty couch in my shittier apartment, I interpreted as: he first makes millions in the oil game, joins the insider propaganda controlling The Narrative, consolidates by buying off lobbyists and politicians in DC, then goes full private equity and starts looking for playthings and vanity projects to glom onto for him and his buddies. Got it.
	I moved on to his Facebook Page next. On page fourteen a title of investment opportunities caught my eye. After scrolling through an endless list of private equity-funded housing projects, nursing homes, bars, hotels, skilled nursing facilities, I got to the newest one at the bottom: Coming Soon: Colorado Ski Area Development! Seven hundred residential units within four complexes and one-hundred-eighty exclusive single family homes with shared pool area and spa. That was it, he’s making our ski hill into a freakin’ Louis XVI playground in the Rockies. Another day, another pillage.
	I’d been dehumanized, again, by a blowhard in The Club, the ever-flowing wellspring of misbegotten self-importance. Another one had laughed five decades previous when the sixteen-year-old version of me tripped while serving Modelo Especials around the golf course pool, and needed stitches from the broken glass and concrete my palms landed on.
	Time for the Gray Wolves.
	In the pack we’re all in our sixties, hence the gray, but with fight still in us. Though we landed here from elsewhere, drawn by this transcendent outdoor existence to roam in, we bonded.
	Mariah showed up first at Gino’s, still dusty around the edges of her Forest Service uniform, but as usual her smile lit up the bar. Mariah’s from Albuquerque, first one from her family to move out since, like, the 17th Century. She’s the real deal, a Fire Management Officer, I’d met her when I went bat-shit crazy and signed up to be a volunteer firefighter with her group two years back. We’ve had a couple of crazy adventures together, up in some smokin’ hot ponderosa groves.
	“Hey Eric, how’s life in the slacker rat race?” She always started with the same question.
	“Can’t complain, but I manage to do so anyhow.”
	“Workin’ the big floor buffer at the middle school?”
	“All summer.”
	I ordered her usual pint of Smithwick’s and we went to the back of the wood-paneled room, an ode to 1973.
	“What’s up?”
	“I just met this fancy guy who I think wants to develop our ski area.”
	“Shit. Figured it was just a matter of time.”
	Booker and Betty show up together. They’re a never-married sort of couple who commute from the forested outskirts, inseparable.
	Betty’s a linguistics PhD and currently opinion editor for the local rag Pagosa Rising. She came out from Boston to be a reporter but everyone at the paper quickly realized she was over-qualified and they’d just won the American journalist lottery. Made her the boss in two months.
	Booker’s mostly a debonair history professor from the west side of Chicago, but also a philosopher-par-excellence, at least in our minds.
	“We heard,” muttered Booker, pointing at his favorite beer lever behind the bar. News gets breezy fast in a small town, like the scent of Colorado cannabis on a Friday night.
	I regaled them with the history of Monsieur McVale, ending with the real estate plans for our sacred mountain. No one exploded … yet. Then I mentioned, that in addition to running the ski area, I’d just discovered that there’d be an exclusive 20% of the hill reserved for Platinum Pass holders only, in the coming “Lift Ticket Plus” category.
	Booker: “What’re they gonna call that? Crybully Run?” 
	“Wanker Way.”
	“Pissant Pass.”
	“Bootlicker Boogie.”
	“El Diablo.”
	“Shithead Chute.”
	“Alley of the Arse.”
	We spent the next two hours devising a workable strategy. Each of us would stage a separate approach, according to what we’re most comfortable asserting, then we’d invite the McVale team to a “Welcoming Discussion Tea Party” when we were all ready.
	Time for another beer.
	“It’s like we’re stuck in a dystopia here,” I said. “Dickensian even, what with some rich guy taking over a place he knows nothing about and treating us like we’re street urchins in his shoe polish factory.” I remembered our mantra. “This is our home. We meet friends here, speak our minds here, take risks here. This is where we live.”
	The others smiled, raised their faces, and glasses, to the sky. “Roo, roo!” America at its unconventional best.
	“Orwellian, too,” said Betty. “He’s in media — he’s gonna swamp us with podcast and streaming propaganda —  conveniently ignoring that we’ll lose the natural feel around here, and a lot of visitors won’t ever come back. The principle of Free Speech is missing just one adjective, Free and Accurate Speech.”
	“The libertarian rich guy, the effin’ Fountainhead, can do whatever he wants to do? I’m sorry, but did we forget that great individuals spring from competent and supportive groups, not the other way around? E Pluribus Unum and all that?” Mariah asked. “All encompassing individual rights, what Ayn Rand wanted back in the 60s. So, yeah, Randian dystopia as well. Triple freakin’ dystopia.”
	“Don’t forget the willful ignorance,” I added. “They’ll think: ‘I’m the smartest one here and I believe that wrecking the place so a bunch of my rich buddies can have a charming view is okay without any long-term consequences. Wildlife, climate, habitat —all lost and, for us humans, once again, an idiotic short-term win-win. There a term for that one?”
	“Nelsonian Knowledge,” announced Booker.
	“Huh?” replied everyone else.
	“The Brits’ term for willful ignorance. Admiral Nelson, the Battle of Copenhagen, 1801 I believe,” began Booker, stroking his furry chin. “He got a signal to retreat from any approaching Danish boats, so he put his telescope up to his blind eye and said, ‘I don’t see no boats’, and won the battle. His had a more positive spin to it, I think.”
	“Holy shit,” said Mariah. “Quadruple dystopia, the old-timey Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse —  famine, war, conquest and death. Only this time it ain’t physical warfare, it’s all mental.”
	Booker needed nothing further.
	“… and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. Revelation 6:1-8.” He looked up and glared at each of us as he finished.
	Mariah slammed down her pint glass.  “Buckle up, my friends, you Silent Spring desperados … ’cause we’re doin’ this.”
	A day later, we had the town council — all of whom owed us a favor or two, except for Gary — send a flowery invitation. They accepted.
	And then there he was again, black cowboy hat, matching boots and now matching goatee, three security detail dudes in tow, and this time also an Armani-suited gal with super-trimmed blonde hair, emanating a scent rarely detected outside of Milan or Lake Como — must be the lawyer.
	“I want to thank you for joining our community today,” I began, “and we welcome you to see the qualities of what we have to offer you. Mariah’s with the Forest Service, she’ll be showing us around first.”
	Pleasantries accepted with nods. “First, we take you to the top, the pinnacle of the San Juan Mountains!”
	We’d arranged to ride the chair up that day, a special occasion. Brian was the on-site manager in the off season, he had his own special ideas about wealthy folks on the ski hill, so he was chomping at the lift.
	Chatter turned ebullient on the ride up, arms pointing, gasping as we climbed above the 10,000 foot elevation sign, more exclamations as an elk herd could be seen lying in the tall green summer grass on a blue run.
	The chairlift slowed and we hopped off, and at 10,500 feet, Mariah took over. “Here’s my favorite trail, you should see the views up a bit this way.”
	We climbed through glaring high-altitude UV radiation, and with no wind that day, it was hotter than usual. Mariah kept going and going. One suit jacket came off, then another and another, then the cowboy hat. Billy Joe’s face turned a light pink, like a lava lamp. Me and Mariah knew about the UV radiation at altitude, we had on our usual wide-brim hats, shades and light shirts.
	“How much further?” McVale asked.
	“Not too far, I know you guys can handle it.” Mariah winked.
	Then we got to the steep parts. Slipping on loose gravel and dirt that’d been dried to the point of becoming inches of dust, I had to smile to myself. Mariah knew how to scale this mountain like she knew the back of her shot glass with Georgia O’Keeffe’s jimson weed flower etched into it, eventually churning into her patented on-all-fours climbing style when we went near-vertical.
	At the top, McVale stretched out both arms against a Douglas fir, head down. “I don’t have your conditioning, gimme a break.”
	“Oh, around here, we’re the mediocre hikers,” I couldn’t resist mentioning. “It does great things for your humility, though, when an eighty-year-old goes chugging past you.”
	“I don’t feel so good,” announced Elaine. “Can’t … breathe … really.”
	Mariah reached into her front pocket, her smile wide as the vista around us. “I have just the thing.” She pulled out her finger oxygen meter and placed it on Elaine’s index finger, bobbing in sync with her heavy breathing.
	“Seventy-nine percent oxygen saturation. Ever smoke?”
	“Yeah … in college … then about … twenty more years.”
	“Let me try,” McVale announced. Also breathing both rapidly and deeply, I was not surprised. His age and girth usually did not bode well under current circumstances.
	“Eighty-four percent.”
	“Is that normal?”
	“Oh, no. Ninety-eight is normal at sea level, but up here with the birds, low nineties is about as good as it gets.” Mariah looked around joyfully, inhaling deeply, with satisfaction. A crow cawed excitedly above us.
	“Am I gonna die?” asked McVale in a serious tone.
	Mariah and I laughed. We never really answered.
	“What’s that over there?” McVale pointed to a nearby mountain side of charred tree trunks with no leaves and no limbs left, with a bunch already lying on the ground.
	“Fire back in ’02. Pretty dry around here, but I’m sure you know how to handle building insurances.”
	“Shit.”
	We didn’t hike down. We rode the chairlift again, like foreigners.
	The EV was waiting at the base for the trip back into town.
	“Whose pedal pusher is this?” Billy Joe did not want to get in.
	“The alternative’s a walk, a long one.”
	“You know, gasoline engines transformed our economy, accelerated the Industrial Revolution,” said the oil man.
	“Yep, and every adaptation has an expiration date.”
	“Christ.”
	Mariah saluted good-bye, winked, and went back to work while we left for town.
	Booker was waiting inside the library, overgrown gray eyebrows matching an impressive gray faux-fur scarf and fedora. Nice.
	“I’d like to introduce our local scholar and historian,” I said. “Doctor Johnson.”
	Booker shook each pair of hands, including mine for some reason, adding “a real pleasure” every time.
	“I’d like to acquaint you with our culture here, since you will undoubtedly have an enormous impact, and we want you feel as at home as possible.”
	“Make it brief,” said Elaine, her hair looking a bit frazzled. The silent security guards had sweated through their shirts, coats still slung over their shoulders.
	“Seventy million years ago, mammals became social creatures and learned that mutual cooperation added exponentially to the group member’s survival prospects, which gradually progressed to an understanding of others’ minds and multi-specialized teamwork, resulting in our very own personal planetary domination, but also requiring giving those within our perceived groups a generous benefit of the doubt, the beginnings of in-group morality, the beginnings of democracy.”
	“You’ve got to be kidding me!” McVale said with exasperation. “How is this relevant to why we’re here?”
	“Many of us believe that one goal of society is to expand that in-group morality as much as possible, understanding and then integrating other cultures, and even other living beings in the natural world we currently preside over, like the endangered Canada lynx in our mountains. Do you know about the Canada lynx?”
	McVale’s face had evolved from pink to fiery red. “No, I do not.”
	“Thanks for the biology lesson, professor. I think we’re good. Eric, what next?” Elaine pushed the fuming McVale away from us toward the door.
	“We’ll talk to our newspaper editor. She’s right around the corner.”
	“Let’s go,” said McVale, then audibly whispered to Elaine, “get this over with.”
	Betty was in her office. “Hello! I’m so happy to be a part of your tour today. What can I tell you about our paper?”
	“I heard that NewsCore has a station around here somewhere,” said McVale. “Are you part of our system?”
	Betty stared at Billy Joe through her brown, close-set eyes and then laughed, a high-pitched squealing, inhuman laugh, exposing her impressive canines.
	“Oh my goodness, no!” She shook her head back and forth. “We’re supported by public funding only. That way we remain independent, informing people what they need to know, not what they want to hear. Evolution left a lot of stuff in our minds, and the journalism part of our culture can either help bring out our best decisions, or our worst. But, you’re kidding, right?”
	“No. I’m not.”
	“I think it’s time we move on,” grumbled Elaine. “We have a busy schedule.”
	“Oh wait, just one more thing.” Betty held up one finger. “We have a small locals group who have a couple of questions about the project.”
	Betty led us down the hallway, festooned with posters of every tree-hugging crusader of the last century, and opened the door to the conference room overflowing with about a hundred locals. They cheered and pumped signs like “Solar is a Higher Power”, “Wage(s) to Live”, “Factual Free Speech = Actual Free Speech” and “Save the Fuzzy Lynx!!!”
	Billy Joe and his entourage froze in the hallway. He looked down at his boots, then at my face.
	“I hate this place.” He looked like he meant it. He turned and they all left.
	Mariah and Booker came in through the back hallway and met us.
	“They might be back,” I said, as we made our way to Gino’s.
	“Maybe, maybe not,” Mariah added, grabbing a chair with her brew. “Don’t forget to return Kathy’s EV today, Eric. She’s working with me tomorrow.”
	“Good call. Raise a glass.”
	Booker: “This is where we meet our friends.”
	Mariah: “This is where we speak our minds and take risks.”
	Betty: “This is where we live.”
	Me: “This is our home.”


Gustav Hallin is a retired physician, lives in Durango, Colorado, and dedicates this story to the 50th anniversary of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.