Gene Smith and Family - Webber Lake Falls, August 2009
The harvest fall festival we call Thanksgiving has always seemed to me to be a celebration of home and family. As such, it is a fine holiday for conservationists. All of the work that we do together is about protecting homes of one sort or another–our own, or those of other people or wild creatures.
The work feels most important when we are striving to protect our own home ground (or places we have adopted as home)–which is why local partners are the most important ones to have in any conservation project. Professional conservationists often bring energy, skill, and passion to their work. But it is the people who love a landscape who will give up the most and work the hardest to protect it. When the bulldozer is posed at the edge of the field where you played as a kid . . . or when it is the last farm in town that is on the auction block . . . or when No Trespassing signs may go up along the stream where you and your kids have always camped? Well, that’s when a conservationist’s juices really start to flow.
In August, I had the opportunity to attend a special family reunion along the Little Truckee River in the Sierra Nevada. This was not my family, but the family of a lovely man named Gene Smith. Ten of them showed up: 88-year-old Gene with his kids and grandkids gathered where the river, flowing out Webber Lake, makes a series of 50-foot leaps to the meadows below. Surrounded by Tahoe National Forest, this idyllic spot has long been a popular place to soak in an icy pool after a long, hot hike. But like many such places across the Northern Sierra, it has been both publicly used and privately owned — in this instance by a timber company that eventually would need to sell it, perhaps for development.
Webber Lake Falls - Photos: William Poole
Gene Smith, who had owned a home in the area for years, and whose family had vacationed there, and who recalled happy days cycling nearby roads with his wife, decided that the land should be conserved and added to the national forest. And he thought he might donate some money — quite a lot, actually — to help make this happen. That kind of made it his family’s business, so he called them up to see what they thought. Yes, they said, yes — let’s do it. Which is why they were all gathered on an August day to celebrate the addition of Webber Lake Falls and the surrounding 480 acres to Tahoe National Forest.
“When I saw these falls this morning, I was convinced again that we made the right decision to help protect this land,” Gene said.
Stories like this are repeated every day across the country–people giving of their wealth and time and energy to save the places they care about. So I will be giving thanks for people like the Smiths on Thursday — and I will be thinking, gratefully, about all the folks who no longer have to worry about losing a place that feels like home to them as they sit down to the family feast.
Have a joyous Thanksgiving, wherever your home may be.
Katherine Gregor writes in the Austin Chronicle:
