A Deeper Intimacy with the Earth

"Social capital" is a term that you learn in a college Intro to Sociology or Poli Sci course. It refers to the benefits that we all take from being part of the groups that we belong to, groups of all sorts: economic, fraternal, religious, etc. As the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard explains it, "the term social capital emphasizes not just warm and cuddly feelings, but a wide variety of quite specific benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks." Discussions of social capital tend to always focus on economics or politics in the abstract, and so put this English major to sleep, but the thing itself is central to anyone's life: "When a group of neighbors informally keep an eye on one another's homes, that's social capital in action. When a tightly knit community of Hassidic Jews trade diamonds without having to test each gem for purity, that's social capital in action. Barn-raising on the frontier was social capital in action, and so too are e-mail exchanges among members of a cancer support group. Social capital can be found in friendship networks, neighborhoods, churches, schools, bridge clubs, civic associations, and even bars."

Social capital is, one often hears, on the decline in this country, and where I live, that's easy to believe. Things are not as bad as in the famous incident in Queens, New York, when a woman named Kitty Genovese was murdered; all of thirty-eight people witnessed some part of the attack, but none called the police. This response--exemplified by the now-famous comment of one witness that "I didn't want to get involved"--is the opposite of social capital. But cities are like this, and I think they always have been (the Genovese case, we should note, happened all the way back in 1964). I am myself no angel in this matter; here in urban California, I communicate with strangers and even some acquaintances in grunts and glares. But in Yellowstone, things are different.

Every time I go back, I remember just how different. In the communities that surround the park, strangers talk to one another on the street. On our most recent trip, I even had a near-stranger invite me into his home. I have been writing for much of this year about the positives and some negatives of the Yellowstone life--in this post, for instance. And here is another example of a positive, one that does not get as much publicity as the geysers and the bears: the stock of social capital in Greater Yellowstone is ridiculously high.

Let me give a small example--small for me, at least, but a great adventure for the central figure in this story. During a trip to Yellowstone, I found myself one morning in sole charge of our toddler Lewis, who was then about two and a half. We wandered around for a while and had a look at the visitor center, but a national park visitor center is a tedious place for him (he didn't want to learn from the exhibits; he wanted to destroy them). However, there was a construction site nearby, where a crew was building a new sewage treatment plant. Lewis likes nature; he likes bison and elk, for instance, although when he sees elk, he tends to yell "Neigh, horsie!" But he really loves construction equipment.

We found a tree that threw some shade next to the temporary fence around the construction site, in a spot where we could see inside. We watched a dump truck make a run; a pair of big dump trucks were being loaded in turn by an excavator that, we now saw, was digging a hole about the size of a baseball infield, and maybe twenty feet deep. We watched the dump trucks make multiple runs, building a mound of volcanic rock to one side. A driver waved, then later honked, and the horn did not go "beep." The dump truck had an airhorn, which varoomed like a locomotive. Lewis was entirely absorbed by the spectacle: "That's a big truck!" was all he could say. "It's got big tires!" We moved closer to the excavator, the center of the action.

Which was a monstrous piece of machinery, a Cat 320CL, I can see now on the photographs I took. The operator sat in a cab and dug with a bucket at the end of an articulated arm. The arm and cab sat on a turret that spun atop the main chassis, and could in fact spin 360 degrees; the whole machine could move around on tracks, like the tracks on a bulldozer, or a battle tank. I later found Caterpillar's brochure for this model on the internet. It weighs over twenty tons. Measuring from the bottom of the tracks to the teeth of the bucket at maximum extension, the arm can reach thirty-five feet high and dig twenty-five feet deep. If I am reading it right, as long as it does not have to lift it far, the arm can pick up 20,000 pounds, about nine tons. Our excavator had to lift the load high enough to drop it in the dump trucks, so the bites its bucket took were not so hoggish. As we watched, though, it filled a truck about every five minutes.

Inside his glass cab, the operator of the excavator pointed toward us. I assumed he was pointing at something else. We moved in to get a closer look, and he pointed again, this time very definitely at us. I assumed we were in violation of some safety rule--but no, that was not it, not at all. Finally, he talked to one of the dump truck drivers, who jogged over to us, pointed at Lewis, and asked, "Does he want a ride on the excavator?"

You've got to be kidding. But no--of course, they're not kidding. This is Montana, almost (the contractor was from Butte). I carried Lewis to the excavator. The seat in the cab was six or seven feet off the ground, so I had to kind of hand him up. The operator, a rough and ready Montanan, arranged things so that Lewis was up close to the front window, but strapped in. The excavator, I saw, was controlled by two joysticks, one on each side of the seat. The operator closed the cab door and got ready to operate. Lewis never, through this whole experience, had any look but one of deep fascination. He kept his pacifier in his mouth and said nothing.

I had to get out of the construction zone now; I turned around and looked at the bucket, which seemed really big up close, then walked back out the gate in the temporary fence. I now noticed the "Hard Hat Area" sign on the fence (elsewhere, the signs were more emphatic: "Construction Area. Danger. Keep Out."). But even as a perpetually anxious father, seeing menace for the kids under every leaf, I could tell that this was not really dangerous. The operator fired up his machine and started working, with Lewis sitting in the window like a pilot, spinning back and forth, and focused intensely on the action of the bucket as it bit off rock, hoisted it into the sky, and dumped it with an explosive clatter into the dump truck.

They filled two dump trucks while I stood there watching. The operator paused in between the two, and asked--yelling so that I could hear him over all the idling diesel engines--if he could fill another. Hell, we can do this all day, I thought, nodding emphatically. I felt like the greatest dad in the park.

I doubt the construction guys ever worried about whatever rules they were breaking, but they did decide that two dump trucks was enough. When the second was full and clear, the operator threw the joystick that controlled the "turret" motion all the way over. The turret started spinning on its chassis, and of course that whole elaborate arm-and-bucket spun with it. He spun the machine around and around like a top, then finally dropped the bucket into its rest position on the ground like Ripley dropping a crate with her cargo loader (Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, that is, the one who kills the aliens). "He was a good little helper," the operator said when he handed Lewis down, his pacifier still in his mouth and a look of intense concentration still on his face.

As I said, theorists of social capital talk mostly in terms of its large-scale political and economic effects, but this event was an example of social capital in action, too. People in that part of the world simply trust more easily, and worry less (and since social capital involves debt, too, I have obscured one crucial detail about this incident, to guard against the possibility, probably remote, that the construction guys might get in trouble). Lewis immediately added the word "excavator" to his vocabulary, the only four-syllable word he knew, and he talks about the experience to this day.

Still, it seemed odd to me that I thought, as we walked away, That was the perfect Yellowstone experience. Why? We were not exactly communing with the Earth Mother, and would not be unless the excavator bucket opened up Her subterranean lair and killed Her. But it was obvious why: for Lewis, it was the highest of high adventure. And of course, something like this could only happen here. It would be impossible to imagine, in California.