16 Land and Love in the Rockies

The poems in Headwaters often spoke of land ethics—defined by ecologist Aldo Leopold as caring and right relations between the land and people—as Marty exposed the ideals and struggles that wardens faced in parks.⁷ Confronting contradictions in Canada’s mountain parks also defined land use and management as problematic and political. At a time when the sixties’ generation often proposed back-to-the-land alternatives, his poems asserted different ways to know the environment and ethics from a working warden’s perspective.

At a time before myriad titles were published on mountain parks and by local people, Marty’s work was unusual in being written by a park resident rather than a tourist. And not just an ordinary park resident but one who held the reins of a western bridle and wore a park warden’s uniform. The national parks—areas of federal jurisdiction in the Rockies—became his arena in which to challenge abuses, affronts, and what he saw as a skewed political approach toward the land and to reassert land ethics.

In the land poems, Marty explores his philosophy of being and his place on the land. “Departure” focuses on the question of “What is true?” Like Wordsworth and Sartre, Marty seeks the meaning of life and existence. Looking for it in nature, he finds his answer in mountains:

I tell you

I have climbed mountains

But what are they

What are they

but blue skies driven crazy cornered

sharpened

by the weight of heavy resolutions

in which we played no part

But they

are the headlong ships of my blood

sailing through a land

of animals and flowers

sailing through me

A man⁸

The mountains are as a bloodstream running through a man and a living land. Mountains rise above humans, but still the writer is part of the land. This is his place, his truth, and what he believes—a sense of being and a fundamental land ethic.

Even with the mountains in his blood, the power of the land looms large and cannot be underestimated. For example, in “Cairn Pass,” a warden on horseback descends an alpine pass and races against winter on the southern boundary of Jasper Park. Chasing his stray pack pony, he nearly falls off his horse as “Earth claws for me/ come down young lover.” Lightning sends rocks falling. Drizzle sets a dark mood; yesterday’s “wild flowers are deserts of winter.” To ward off the harsh elements, his mind finds comfort in the warmth of human love:

This the first storm of that season

broods on, freezes my intrusions

Its searching icy fingers nip my groin

wet and icy where the old chaps end

Wish I felt some warm hands now

woman bringing me coffee in

lazing in bed, and home with love⁹

The forces of nature animate the Earth and lovers alike. Even as he daydreams, the cowboy cannot escape being a mortal part of nature.

“Pushing the Boundary” reveals a land ethic and meanings behind the title of the collection. It positions the national park ideal and reality in tension:

In here we declare

only the animals

may kill each other

sometimes

may even kill us.

But it’s hard to draw

the boundary

imaginary line

that cuts the watersheds

You got to know the ground

climb the crumbling mountain walls

to know which way the rivers run

headwaters, where the world begins¹⁰

Principles and boundaries prove difficult to map and enforce on the land. Headwaters are a source of life to protect, and only animals are supposed to kill, yet the warden must terminate injured animals like bighorn rams, whom he observes “dragging their broken / hindquarters / over the finish line.”¹¹ Even the warden is at risk inside the park. He rides the boundary with a thousand square miles to protect, keeping out hunters who riddle his markers with bullets fired from outside the park:

And dressed all in green

I float among the trees

Staring out on the plains

in September

to hear the distant roll of guns

draw near¹²

A competition plays out—hunters seeking game and a warden seeking hunters—that is reiterated in the poem “On the Boundary.” The dangerous rivalry also makes clear the high stakes: “Last year a guide and his yankee hunters/threatened a warden with loaded rifles.” The warden on boundary patrol feels he grows horns and is a target for poachers from beyond the mountains, as if “I was a green pin” on their maps.¹³

In these poems, it is the warden who knows and makes the national park by riding the uneven land to enforce the rules on the ground. He becomes the boundary, predator, and prey in a place of shifting and dangerous contradictions. In this way, Marty places himself into the larger picture of the warden as a hunter of men who prey on territory designated as a public commons, where avaricious self-interest cannot be allowed to prevail, and he upholds land ethics and the law in precarious situations.

Underlying land ethics are further examined as a theme in poems that question the precarious existence of life and death on the land. Caring about death in the mountains figures prominently in these poems, but it is never simply death. Sometimes it is death caused by foreigners with the wealth to buy a trophy that claims to affirm the conquest of wilderness, a concern that comes up in “The Death of Mustahyh.” Elegiac and political in tone, the poem recounts the killing of a silvertip grizzly and his future offspring:

His terrible hide is a rag

in a rich man’s fist

his lard sticks in the raven’s craw

He was shot out of season

By a poaching guide

for Yankee dollars

He was sold to the highest bidder

as a fixture in this sold out land

His skeleton stinks

an extant document of corruption¹⁴

Pointing to an absence of land ethics, the wrongful death of Mustahyh (the grizzly) poignantly illustrates another way that Canada sells itself out to the United States and how supine Canada is toward rapacious “Yankee dollars” in a capitalist culture that proclaims everything is for sale—even magnificent wild creatures in national parks—much as raw resources like oil and gas are.

Similarly “On Highway 16, Jasper” explores the pointless death of a moose struck on the Yellowhead Highway. Empathetic to the animal’s three days of slow suffering, the point of view shifts to that of the moose and imagines its delirious pain—“for I had no voice”—evoking dignity and compassion.¹⁵ Another fatal road accident surfaces in “Meat in Snow,” this time involving a trucker run off the road and killed. Faced by futility, a first responder struggles to give meaning to a senseless scene and turns to making poetry “to ease a racing heart.”¹⁶ Accidental deaths, both non-human and human, are a painful loss in Marty’s work that challenges indiscriminate violence on highways as another shortcoming of national parks in reality.

Pathos hangs in the air as a futile death once again confronts the warden in “Mercy.” Chased by dogs, a doe has lost her fawn over the falls and is trapped. “Dogs and men have the world/ and they worry it to death,” says the warden as he confronts “the masters of war.” “I thought that life in this park/ should be holy/ and no killing/ would be at random,” he reflects. Looking into the doe’s eyes, he shoots.¹⁷ Like the world beyond the park, nothing in it is safe from depredations; the war machine is endless. This poem also provoked contemporary reviewers to relate such pathos to the Vietnam War and anti-war protest.¹⁸

Another reminder of the volatile nature of life and death he witnesses is seen in “For Young Men.” A climber has plummeted onto the glacier. The search and rescue team—a job for “young men and fools”—is “risking their necks/ to witness his adventure.” The victim’s brain was eaten by ravens. Someone jokes that the victim is “open minded,” as a “way to numb the pain.”¹⁹ Pain, however, is a sign of humanity facing yet another trauma, and numbing it is a coping mechanism for some. Wardens experience situations beyond superficial assumptions of epic mountain adventure and masculine heroism. Duty calls, yet climbers put not only other men at risk but also their families. The warden is not a dauntless mountaineering machine or a solitary hero of westerns but a working man and mortal both in his apprehensions on the land and in caring for others.

An underlying gravity also arises in “Bright Morning.” A speaker, presumably a warden and father, reaches for the baby’s blue brush on top of “a box of bullets” on the windowsill. As he looks out the window to the mountaintops, he compares his brushing the baby’s hair with the wind combing snow on the peaks.²⁰ Even as the man loves the mountains and nurtures a baby, he is armed with .308 calibre cartridges that can kill an elk or bear. Nuanced juxtaposition points to tensions in warden backcountry life for the caring cowboy and land steward. Duty is a two-sided coin with family on one face and wage labour on the other, even as the Rockies appear to be a beloved refuge for anti-modernists, they also exist in an undeniably bright and real modern world.

Finally, the poem “Invitation and Covenant” also explores right relations on the land as a possibility of living together. Nature is personified as a haunting and sensuous power that beckons the warden to come outdoors into the wild: “Yet you are alone with me/ even in the arms of my daughters,” says the voice of Nature. “Come out/ from all that ordering geometry/ Unlatch the cabin door,” the voice utters. “With the feel of my breath/ upon your loins/ like a glacier/ birthing in your blood” it persuades him to come outside as the snow begins.²¹ The month of October gives way in Jasper’s secluded Moosehorn Valley as to the approaching winter. As the final poem in the volume Headwaters, “Invitation and Covenant” offers an invitation to open doors and take hands with the wild on its own terms.

An invitation to such a covenant offers poetic potential for a radical politics that spurns human-built order and embraces loving the wild, implicitly destabilizing the culture/nature dichotomy in a move to integrate the two. To see humans wedded as one with the land emerges as an intrinsic land ethic and relationship. Embracing the wild, not taming or exploiting it, is a land ethic and radical politics. Taking hands with the wild circles back to being more human as part of the land in ecophilosophical terms, much as in the poem “Departure.”

Ultimately, these poems call readers to know the land, respect life, and conserve the wild. They also assert the importance of law and governance in achieving such ends. The warden figure is symbolic of the rule of law in the Alberta Rockies and embodies the boundary lines of a national park, within which certain ethics prevail, even if ambiguous and flawed. In riding the Rockies, the warden draws a boundary on the land. The thin green line was paramount, and Marty understands the potential dire consequences of a land made vulnerable by a lack of protectors. His voice as a warden is a clarion call to action and a defence of boundaries, yet he is aware (painfully at times) of how illusory the dividing lines are for environmental protection in national parks and also for sovereignty in Canada. Ultimately, the boundary is a thin green line that fails to push back multifarious capitalist encroachments of poachers, tourists, and developers, not to mention government bureaucracy.

The warden thought that life would be holy within national parks and is appalled to find that it is not. The hard reality of life and death prevails in the mountains, with risks of many kinds. Life on the land touches him and makes him more aware and compassionate but also watchful. Contradictions abound as the poet finds the land a force of its own, but he also finds that the land can be defiled by those with sufficient means or inadequate understanding. He makes it clear that mortals are all predators or prey in one way or another, thereby seeing a world as ecological, but he also aspires to an ethical love of the land in a political world of ambiguities.

In Headwaters, a cowboy’s longing for a woman translates into a warm and tender language of love. And love is a way to know a man’s true heart. Marty, the new and sensitive cowboy, understands that wild land alone will not sustain him. His poems often dwell on romantic thoughts of a lover far away or soon to be seen, much as a warden’s life was a shift cycle of miles away. Many hours of intense physical work allow time for contemplation, memory, and imagination. Time does not stand still but works its way backward and forward in thoughts about love. The love poems navigate how a cowboy’s heart that dares to reveal inner emotions can be strong and true—and where he finds himself in love.

First, “my love” is a figure present in many ways in these poems. Making coffee, splitting wood, and shoeing a gelding barely dull “the ache of love” and separation in the poem “The Work of Hands.” The hands move in sundry cowboy tasks as the mind revisits “transitory flutterings of violet butterflies in green grass” and showers of flower petals in the sun. Distance is made worse by re-reading his lover’s words while alone at Miette Cabin in Jasper.²² The hands splicing rope falter as he struggles distractedly to bring mind and hands together. The distance between lovers is clear in the poem, but flashes of memory and fantasy pull him back to her. Meanwhile, memory and mood bring the lovers together across distance with fluttering impressions of light and landscape. The cowboy’s hands are full, but the heart, too, is full of longing.

Making love is explored in the poem “Finding a Woman.” It describes lovers “rocking in the night” as a man anchors sensations to finding a vessel, harbour, and home that is not his, but tenderly touched inside a woman.²³ Finding a woman means finding his element and boundary with her. Without her, he is but a sailor adrift. Risks of opening his heart and feelings emerge as a young man finds his place in intimacy. Above all, a sensuous sexual encounter is expressed metaphorically in aesthetics of beauty and intimacy.

Mature love and expressive manliness are combined in “She Asks for a History.” “It began as a stallion with a mare,” the poet writes of the couple’s early summer days and cold mountain nights together. The woman grew into a lover and summer blueberry-picking companion, with her “mouth my only berry.” But she later departs for “the wild borealis,” and the man recognizes he does not circumscribe her life. He is troubled by separation and agonizes in pain at the thought of being apart:

I hold you too tightly now

gaze too earnestly into your eyes

in my selfishness, my unmanly fear

We are so naked

when the covers

slip to the floor²⁴

Shedding all, a feeling man is vulnerable and deeply in love. He reveals his fear and innermost sense that she is the centre of his life. In effect, the typical gender order is reversed, and he must await her return, knowing he is sensitive and fully exposed. He is not unafraid; he loves her and reveals an open heart that can be hurt or even rejected. The cowboy takes a new shape that challenges a conservative gender order by showing an emotional and caring man full of feelings for his woman.

Taking another lyrical direction toward love and sensuality as a way to a man’s true heart, the abstract poem “Purple” leans to a figurative language of sensuous landscape. Its landscapes are abstracted to traverse boundaries and encode sexuality as a metaphorical way of seeing the land as “a shaft of snow/ married to rock/ where deep purple/ crowns the pole star.”²⁵ Forms and colours are abstracted as a mood with a daydream feeling. The poem creates an impassioned circle of land and love enjoined as landscape imagery, calling out for an awakening—for “Love’s giant life” to “shake me.” Sensuous love is abstracted and understated lyrically as erotic landscape.

Marty’s poems present alternatives for thinking about love and manhood. They also challenge the conservative gender order that expected men to be stoic and unemotional. The men in these poems are feeling and sensuous lovers, revealing emotion, vulnerability, and their innermost thoughts. Intimacy and sensuality fuses contact with the inner self. A man in love ultimately becomes more human. His lover is present in high country life. The land is also a figurative symbol of sensuality and life force, of moods and emotions. The poet shows sensitivity toward his lover and his own feelings, a sense of manliness and conventions different than a more typical taciturn and tough cowboy masculinity.

Marty translated the wild mountain backcountry into lyrical poetry—an expressive poetry of beauty and imagination—to rewrite the land and masculinity. Landscape lyricism and anti-modernism were joined as his poetry conveyed both the warden’s way of life in the Rockies and a lost time in the West.²⁶ But his lyrical storytelling also expressed land ethics and love in poems with an irrefutable credence and appeal coming from a cowboy.²⁷

Traditionally, Alberta writing rarely saw mountain prose and cowboy stories that were so revealing of open emotion and sensuousness. Marty challenged conservatism in a dissident voice that, although undeniably of the West, also ran counter to narratives of rugged cowboys and taming the land. Discovering himself in the land and in love, the poet portrays an unconventional cowboy and becomes the voice of a new kind of landman and lover.

In Headwaters, the cowboy warden is a man informed by reflexive ethics and practice in relations with the land and his mate. Exposed to the power of the land, man is touched by nature and a woman; he learns to listen. This creates a point of contact between the outer and inner world of man in Marty’s poetry that alters boundaries and opens doors to be wild and to love. Man becomes aware and sensitized with compassion and strength. To be gentle with a grizzly and feel the pain of a dying moose beside the highway. To see a wild landscape as a lover and a lover’s mouth as a blueberry. To love a woman tenderly and give away his whole heart. The warden is more fully a man because he feels and expresses emotions in lyrical complexity. Being wed to the land and to a strong woman is powerfully conveyed as love in poems that also rethink ecophilosophy and manhood. In this way, Marty’s cowboy poetry conveys a radical potential for a new politics even as it revives elements of the Romantic and anti-modern imagery in conservative ideas of the West—cowboys on horseback and the Rockies as a colonial western frontier—in modern free form like the Beat poets.²⁸ Further, the work describes a sensuous landscape and intimate love that was unusual in Canada’s mountain prose at the time but was made explicit in his poetry.

Marty’s literary work in Headwaters documents a time and place at a major transition point. The district warden system in national parks ended with government changes in 1969, and wardens ceased to live year-round in the backcountry in 1972. In the Rockies, park wardens had once lived on the land, made backcountry cabins and warden stations their homes, married, raised families, and felt at home with pride of place and caring at the heart of a lived land ethic. Their presence on the land was part of tending parks and wildlife, knowing an ecosystem by dwelling within it.²⁹ Likewise, Marty and his wife, Myrna, were ultimately a warden family caring for the land and each other as they lived and worked together; the book’s dedication to Myrna is also revealing. In many ways, Marty’s poetry is a cultural landmark of flux and changing times between the backcountry traditions of a district warden system and emergent structures of government centralization. Positioned this way, it also becomes a form of lived resistance and poetic talking back to hegemonic state modernization trends in parks, much as it challenges conservative tropes of hypermasculine cowboys.

Just as he served as a public protector of Canada’s national parks, Marty also stood up for Alberta’s environment. National parks were a terrain spared from the hardest hits of resource extraction in Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s, because they were federal jurisdictions under law, but national parks still faced daily contradictions and incursions. Wildlife, highways, tourism, and escalating development were not an easy mix inside parks.³⁰ Moreover, oil and gas, recreation, and tourism were rapaciously eyeing the edges of the national parks with a view to open development. So Marty’s poetic call for the wild acted as a rallying cry against callous violations and bureaucracy, advancing a more radical environmental politics for stronger land ethics to meet the ideal of national parks as protected by law.

The Great Divide headwaters, remotely situated in the Rockies range, are distal to life’s modern intrusions, yet not so far away. Even as the warden rides away from modernity, it rides with him on patrols, enforcing wildlife regulations and searching for lost mountaineers as part of a modern administrative force and national park system. The long reach of the wardens is simultaneously a rationalist mechanism of the federal state. Here is the path typical of anti-modernists and Romantic poets: even in resisting modernity, all roads lead back to it. Yet even as Marty’s employer the National Parks Branch—renamed Parks Canada in 1973—worked toward making the “wilderness” a managed space of master plans and bureaucracy, Marty tossed truth back to power and resisted from his vantage point of a western saddle, counting on Albertans and others to listen to him as a cowboy instead of a mere poet.

Nonetheless, certain local and regional park managers did not appreciate his literary politics, and after the publication in 1978 of Men for the Mountains they consigned him to a desk job that clipped his wings. His prose offered overt criticism of problems in Banff National Park, whereas his poetry had slid subversively under the radar. Despite it all, Marty would not be silenced or confined; he opted to resign from the warden service and move to southern Alberta, near Pincher Creek.³¹ He turned his talents to freelance writing and to being a singer-songwriter, while raising a family and contributing to wilderness and conservation advocacy efforts in Alberta as a vocal advocate for the eastern slopes and the Old Man River. And he continued to ride and live in the foothills, close to his family roots, caring for the land.

The long-standing institution of Canada’s national park warden service, served by Marty and many others, was forced to restructure under Pierre Trudeau’s government and ultimately was broken up under Stephen Harper.³² Continuing to advocate for the land, Marty stated in 2015, “I learned that asking people to do the right thing isn’t good enough—you need to have people on the ground representing the government who are there to enforce the regulations for the benefit of the whole population.”³³

Like Thoreau, Marty writes of contact with nature and existence in pursuit of answers to the question of what is true.³⁴ His response is likewise an expression of politics and philosophy but from a working man: we are one with a living land. In Headwaters, the emphasis on a warden pushing physical boundaries of headwaters—“where the world begins”—is paralleled by the poet’s imaginings that call out for “Love’s giant life” to shake him but also to awaken readers. The sensuality of landscape also embodies sensuous love and passion. Existentialism and eroticism join forces, answering what it is to be alive. Imagination is a starting point for agency and change as poetry subtly offers readers the potential to see and feel the world anew—to “forget geometry”—and to step outside free and alive with a wilder nature.

The message of Headwaters—know the land and your own heart—is clear. Feeling can awaken insights and compassion. Marty’s poetic politics of the Rockies convey that a sense of where we belong relies on listening for an intimate knowledge of caring and love.