Review by Ed Quillen
Mountain Life – January 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dragons in Paradise – On the edge between civilization and sanity
by George Sibley
Published in 2004 by Mountain Gazette
ISBN 0-9763111-0-0
IF YOU ARE a regular reader of this magazine, then you are familiar with George Sibley’s writing; he has been a frequent contributor since we started in 1994, and a regular columnist for the past four years. Currently he teaches at Western State College in Gunnison, where his duties also include organizing two annual gatherings: the Colorado Water Workshop every summer, and the Headwaters Conference in late fall.
But he wasn’t always in the classroom. Like many of us who migrated to the mountains, Sibley has been a jack of many trades – small-town newspaper editor in Crested Butte, winter caretaker in Gothic, wildfire fighter all over the West, ski patroller on Crested Butte, and sawyer on Black Mesa, to name a few of the odd jobs he took when free-lance writing wasn’t paying the bills.
His efforts and musings about these jobs form a large part of this collection of essays that range from relatively short pieces (several of them were initially published as columns here) and brief poems to long, rambling ventures that, at their best, make some new connections for the reader.
OF THOSE LONGER PIECES, my favorites were called “Sawmill I” and “Sawmill II.” Sibley calls his work running the four-foot circular saw at Luce Pipher’s small mill on the north side of the Black Canyon “the most intellectually demanding job I ever had.”
Granted, it takes some thought to keep one’s limbs out of the way, but otherwise, what demands does sawing make on the intellect?
“No tree, being a natural thing, growing out of naturally uneven and hilly terrain, grows perfectly straight; they all have a little ‘crown,’ or bow, that is going to translate into a little crown or bow in the boards that come through the gate between nature’s world and ours. . . .
“The trick was to try to peel the boards off the log in a way that would result in the board warping mostly along only one of its dimensions (preferably its thickness) rather than warping along both its thickness and width dimensions, which meant that the most important moment there at the gate between the natural and cultural worlds was when I levered the log with my cant hook off the deck and onto the saw carriage. . . . By learning how to read the log – and caring enough for the tree that had been, to want the boards to be worthy of its memory – I learned I could minimize the extent to which the tree’s problems in the natural world would become the carpenter’s problems in the cultural world.”
There’s a thought-provoking metaphor, the saw as a gateway that connects the gnarly natural world to the linear cultural world, and in the second sawmill essay, Sibley examines how the owner – a rancher who picked up some extra cash running a mill – managed to operate a reasonably sustainable “resilient system” with his expertise as a scrounge artist. As Sibley explains, a good junk pile, full of parts that will eventually find a use, is a benefit to the environment and the local economy. It’s recycling at its finest, and it keeps money from leaving town.
There’s plenty more about trees in this book, as well as the land they grow on, and how we humans relate to that landscape through both community and government.
Our communities are formed of old-timers and newcomers, and there will always be tensions between them. Newcomers often arrive with the idea that they’re gaining the “simple life,” and Sibley points out that there’s nothing simple about modern simplicity. And further, simplification is not necessarily a virtue:
Often we imagine “that complexity lies behind in the city and simpletopia lies here in these ‘quaint Victorian mining towns.’ But it’s just the opposite. You’ve come from a . . . machine that consumes the diversity of the earth and converts it to a monocultural appetancy – and you’ve come to a place where there’s little insulation, no cocoons, and the rich yuppie retiree with his 5,000-square-foot menopause manor ends up on the town council with the dreadlocked hippie Marxist freestore saint. And all of us who can afford it of course bring the baggage of the old urbanized simpletopia with his, and eventually recreate a lot of the old insulations and conveniences we thought we wanted to leave behind, because the real complexity of living together in small places, with large mountains watching, is – well, it’s complex.”
FEW PEOPLE WRITE so thoughtfully about life in our little mountain towns, or how that life connects with the rest of the world, often in surprising ways.
Sibley can get wordy and digressive, something that Mountain Gazette editor M. John Fayhee celebrates in his fulsome introduction. That doesn’t bother me a lot, since I’m a skim reader, but it perturbs editors who must adjust wordage to available space, as Ed Marston (former publisher of High Country News) notes in his preface.
But in general, even his longest essays eventually find their cohesion, and long or short, prose or poetry, Sibley’s work gives voice to those feelings we all have when we try to think about where we live, whom we live among, and how this all fits together on both the intimate local scale and the indefinite cosmic scale. This is a fine book for people who think about living in the mountains.
