You most likely have never heard of Paul Rokich, but today you will get to know him. Once you do, I believe you will think of him as a one of the most fantastic examples of how an ordinary person can accomplish extraordinary feats armed simply with the power of persistance.
Rokich was born in the late 1920’s and grew up in Smelter Camp, Utah, a mining community located in the Oquirrh Mountains. It was once a fertile and beautiful area, but years of overgrazing, clear-cut logging and pollution from copper mining operations had turned it into what resembled a desolate moonscape.
Even decades later, Rokich clearly recalled the crisp fall night when he made the commitment that would direct his life path forward. He was six years old and was standing outside of his shanty home. As he glanced up at the surrounding mountains, he noted their scarred faces and spied the lifeless trunks of two Russian olive trees silhouetted atop a lonely ridge. “At that moment I knew without a doubt what my future was,” Rokich recalls. “I promised myself that one day I would climb that mountain and replant those two dead trees.”
Life wasn’t easy growing up in a mining camp, and Paul encountered all of the common difficulties and then some. From the age of six he worked, scrubbing onions in the local grocery store. His father, who worked as a smelter, died of pneumonia when he was thirteen. After that Paul worked at night after school setting out markers so the mining trucks could see where to go in the dark. The $47 per week he was paid went to his mother to help provide for him and his siblings. “there was no time for much fun,” Paul recalled.
Four years later, while he was still in his teens, Paul’s mother died of complications from diabetes. Shortly after his mother passed, Paul was reminded of his vow to replant the two dead olive trees when a visitor to the town commented how awful the place was. This angered Paul and that anger jogged not only his memory but revived his commitment to do something about it. He approached the management of the American Smelting and Refining Co. asking for permission to plant trees on the surrounding mountain property which they owned. They refused. He was told that he didn’t have the expertise to successfully complete such an endeavor.
Instead of giving up, Paul decided that he needed more knowledge. A college degree in botany seemed to be the pathway to achieving his dream. However, one major obstacle stood in the way—Paul Rokich didn’t have the money for tuition so, after finishing high school, he enlisted in the army.
After finishing his tour of service, using his G.I. Bill benefits, Rokich enrolled at the University of Utah, where he did major in botany. He also met and fell in love with a girl, Ann, who would become his lifelong partner. While attending college, he shared his dream of replanting the area in the Oquirrh Mountains with one of his professors who promptly opined that Paul’s dream was impossible. Replanting trees on barren soil where there were no animals to help spread the seeds just wouldn’t work. Sighing, Paul decided to try and get on with his life.
Paul and Ann married in 1957 and soon had a burgeoning family of three boys. The couple’s finances became so stretched that both Paul and Ann were forced to drop out of college, he to work in road construction, while she became a secretary at the university. But, try as he might, Paul’s promised dream never left him.
In 1959, when he was 25, Rokich began to keep his promise, even though that meant trespassing on private land owned by the American Smelting and Refining Co. On a moonlit night, not unlike the one 19 years before, Paul quietly hiked up Black Rock Canyon, an olive tree seedling in his backpack and a shovel in hand. Now that he had started living his dream, Paul knew there would be no retreating; if he planted one tree, he’d have to plant another. He described his obsession as follows: “More than anything I wanted those hills to come alive again. No matter what it took, I was going to do it.”
And so he did, secretly, alone, and entirely at his own expense. From the family’s modest earnings, Paul budgeted carefully to buy a pine or poplar seedling or two whenever he could scrape up the extra funds. “Times were tough,” he recalled years later. “I had a wife and three little sons to take care of, but I had to keep planting. When one of my boys was sick, and I was down to $10 in my pocket, I’d spend $5 on medicine and $5 on trees.”
Most of his seedlings died, but year-after-year he continued his planting. Fires burned down his plants, construction workers dug them up, floods killed them, the sun burned them, and many just wouldn’t grow at all in the poor soil. But then, slowly, things began to change. Some of the seedlings lived, and animals began to return to the area.
For fourteen years he confided his obsession to only a trusted few. Then in 1973 Rokich finally “confessed,” taking mining officials on a field trip to show them what he had done. Instead of sending for the sheriff, the company was so delighted with his efforts that they hired Paul on the spot to work full-time to rehabilitate 70,000 acres of the company’s barren, long-abused lands.
Today the evidence of Paul Rokich’s determination to renew a once forlorn landscape is visible everywhere in the Oquirrhs. He built irrigation systems and planted shrubs, rye grass, wildflowers and, by his own estimate, more than 65,000 trees—Aspens, poplars, oaks, willows, and, yes, two Russian olive trees. All have now grown tall. And with the greening of the Oquirrhs, the fauna has returned in abundance. Rabbits, foxes and deer bound across the hills; golden eagles soar lazily in the sky above their nests. On a ridge surrounding a 5,000 acre copper-tailing pond, patches of soft alfalfa and bright daffodils greet visitors who pass through the mining company’s entrance gate—virtually on the spot where a young six year old Rokich stood nine decades before gazing forlornly at those two blackened olive tree trunks.
The moral of this story is as simple as it is profound. Even when things seem impossible, even when your efforts are destroyed time and time again, just keep on planting. That’s what Paul Rokich did, and look how his persistence paid off! – People Magazine, Nov. 26, 1990
“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results… but it is the effort that’s heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.” ? George R.R. Martin
Have an AWE-full weekend!
William J. “Bill” Bacqué