Absurd Harvest

America’s power to wage war hangs more on the sex life of the greater sage-grouse than you might guess. You wouldn’t want to overstate the case. If you were to rank determinants of wartime readiness, the greater sage-grouse’s amorous entanglements would probably place behind things like defense outlays and the upkeep of stealth bombers. But those entanglements do play a small role, and that’s still more than most imagine. It is certainly more than I did until only a few years ago. Then I took command of a cavalry troop in the U.S. Army and lost my innocence forever.

The greater sage-grouse are picky eaters. Nature did not bless them with the strong gizzard a bird needs to eat seeds and so they have few options. They prefer sagebrush, black when possible. They nest below sagebrush, too, and among it they establish their leks, here a noun and elsewhere a verb, derived from the Swedish word for play, that refers both to the greater sage-grouse’s mating rituals and the sagebrushed sites where they occur. It is on the strength of these facts that English-speaking man gave the greater sage-grouse its name.

The trouble is that the land in America where the sagebrush grows also often lends itself to cattle grazing and natural gas drilling. Less valued than beef and power, the greater sage-grouse has retreated to certain swaths of federal land where legal protections mean cattle cannot graze and energy goes unexploited. One such swath lies in the rain shadow cast by the Cascade Mountains over Central Washington. It is a wind-swept steppe, about as big as Nashville, belonging to the U.S. Army. It is called Yakima Training Center.

To Yakima Training Center I would trundle as a cavalry commander with my trucks and troops to train. The trip to Yakima was already a nuisance. My unit was garrisoned at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, some 165 miles away from Yakima, on the far side of the mountains. Though it was peacetime, we were under standing orders to train hard and so serve as a “credible deterrent” to unrest in the Indo-Pacific. But owing to the density of human settlement on the Puget Sound, and to the sensitivities of another of God’s creations called the Mazama pocket gopher, we could not blow up the large munitions in Tacoma needed to stay sharp