A good healthy sagebrush is a beautiful thing to me. Its color is blue against spring grass, silver against fall aspen, soft green after summer rain. I love its textures: the rough unbraided bark, the leaves that look like so many Van Gogh brush-strokes. I love the smell, and I love the sagebrush-covered hill on the other side of the highway more than I would if it were forested, especially now that the pine beetles have gotten into the valley’s lodgepole pines and turned most of them into firewood.

Yet as much as I love sagebrush, it doesn’t bother me when my neighbor clears her field of it. I take satisfaction from watching her high-headed grass wave in the wind, especially now that there are acres of it. There’s genetic joy in gazing at cereal monoculture, I suspect, if you’re the end product of a couple of hundred generations of peasants.

Besides, I have my own cherished hatred. Willows. The noise of my neighbor’s sagebrush shredder has been echoed this year by my chainsaw, as I’ve sawn and piled willow bushes in heaps for burning.

Willows burn well. In April they’re full of the previous season’s oil but have yet to start running sap, so if you cut one bush and pile it on another and set fire to them both all you will have a half-hour later is cooling ashes in a small heap on the gravel. The ash acts as a fertilizer in these acidic soils, and a couple of years later you will have grass and sagebrush where once there was impenetrable willow thicket, and small ground-nesting songbirds where you once had magpies and robins and huge ant-piles.

Such an activity is rightly regarded as messing with the ecosystem and it’s an ethically suspect business. You have to do it the right way, and there may be no right way. Every time I set fire to a willow bush sheltering an ant pile, I worry that I’m destroying some vast collective intelligence with an IQ of 400 and a genetic archive with all the history of the planet in its files.

And sometimes I’ve burnt willows late enough in the year to have destroyed nests under construction, although I try not to burn willows containing nests of baby birds or even eggs.

Our place is not made up of decomposed granite like my neighbor’s. She’s at the sandy mouth of Gold Creek, which drains hills made up of Idaho Batholith Granite, geology’s equivalent of rotten cheese. Where we are is all glacial gravel chewed out of ancient compressed rock that resists being broken into pieces smaller than softballs. If you pick rock in our fields, you find that there are other and bigger rocks under the rock you just picked. Topsoil reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be fine quartz sand and bits of punky willow wood. Willows can grow in it. Lodgepole can grow in it. Timothy can grow in it. Cheat grass has a hard time growing in it, which should tell you something.

The river braids back and forth across the floodplain. Willows are the only plant with roots deep and extensive enough to keep the river from chewing the whole valley into heaps of bare gravel.

So I don’t burn the willows on the river banks, and they hold the banks in the same place from big-water year to big-water year. When the really high water hits, the river jumps its banks and forms new channels, willows or not. Seventy years ago, when bulldozers first came to Sawtooth Valley, the long-dead people who then owned the Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch channeled the river so they’d have more grass for their cattle. The channeling sped up the river and started a huge mass of gravel moving downstream. Those old owners have bequeathed me a landscape of dream—because of all that gravel moving through, the place I call home is slightly surreal after a big water year. New fishing holes are in the river. Overflow channels have dried up. New beaches of fine quartz sand have been deposited. Above where I’ve picked rock and stacked it in low dams in old channels, large deposits of silt are in place, ready to grow new grass.