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The Machine in the Desert
How many years since I became acquainted with Moab,
Utah? More than I'd realized, apparently. When I first saw the place,
a room at the Canyonlands Motel cost $19.95 per night, I recall, and
you could get breakfast at the motel's cafeteria, pleasantly located
in the shade of a hoary cottonwood tree, for $2.25. Now the motel has
long since been knocked down, the tree uprooted, and you can wait as
long as forty minutes for a breakfast seating at any restaurant in
town. Who's surprised? Though it seems like the day before yesterday,
June, 1980 has fallen into the past by nearly a quarter-century.
Even in the 80s, I used to avoid Easter week in
Moab for the jeep safari and, later, the mountain bikers down from
Salt Lake City. In those days, the jeepers were countable in dozens
rather than by the hundreds, while the bikers, though annoying, were
half female; eye-catching in their tight, bright Lycra pants, and
wonderfully silent on their motorless machines. The mountain
bikers have been largely displaced over the past ten years by the dirt
bikers--not just a different breed, but almost a different
species-whose delight is not in physical exertion and peace (of a
sort), but bodily inertia and ear-splitting noise. As the
pre-Christian Easter was a ritual celebration of the forces of natural
rebirth and renewal, post-Christian Easter in the American Southwest
recognizes and aggressively affirms the triumph of the machine over
nature, and even man. And then, it has to rub it in.
Overnight, the tethered horses had spread a mess of
hay and manure in the midst of so much custom-painted and
hand-polished steel parked around the Virginian Motel at the end of a
side-street a block away from the main drag. My wife and I ate a bad
breakfast costing fifteen dollars at a restaurant whose sole virtue
was a deservedly short waiting line, went for groceries and two cases
of three-two beer at the supermarket, and stopped at a farm and ranch
supply store for a new halter and lead to replace the ones the mare
had spoiled in her escape from elk camp the year before. Secure within
cast-iron tubs warmed by heat lamps, a couple of dozen spring chicks
played and peeped contentedly. The red slickrock wall was misting
again as we left Moab on Highway 191, and a soft rain fell. "I'll take
a beer now," I suggested to Maureen. Playing by Mormon rules means
never having to feel guilty about anything, including taking a "drink"
before twelve.
Alpine storms tented the peaks of the La Sal
Mountains in snow clouds, while the desert below, despite the several
years' drought, looked green and refreshed; thin sheets of water
glistened in the arroyos. Around Wilson Arch the sky cleared above the
plateau, revealing the Abajo Mountains twenty-five miles away to the
southwest across the sagebrush plain, a tall blue island bisected
laterally by a storm of its own making. At Church Rock we turned west
and began the long descent to Indian Creek, on its way around the
mountains to the Colorado River beneath Island in the Sky. They had
done some work to the Dugout Ranch in the past year; this afternoon
the hands were burning piled brush between the irrigated fields. After
Charley Redd (an old friend of Ed Abbey's) signed over the ranch to
his wife as part of their divorce settlement, the former Mrs. Redd ran
the place by herself for some years, before selling off most of the
land to the Nature Conservancy under an arrangement that permits her
to continue to operate the place as a working ranch. We crossed the
mouth of Lavender Canyon, with its view south to Cathedral Butte
standing majestically above the distant head wall, and passed beneath
the crimson Six Shooter Peaks ensconced on their triangular bases of
red talus. At the Lockhart Trail turnoff, a retired couple stood
beside their camper to read the government sign posted there.
"There may be a problem getting off by ourselves,"
I warned Maureen. "We're in a narrow corridor between the park and
private lands, managed by the BLM which doesn't impose a lot of rules
and regulations regarding use. That means everyone and his three
wives, plus their extended families, want to camp here, along with all
their gear. The way the place fills up in Easter week, you'd think the
Mormons celebrated the Resurrection. Of course, they have the Easter
Bunny. You couldn't ask for a better fertility symbol than that, could
you?"
The washboard road ran a couple of miles across the
gently rolling plateau, and began the descent to Indian Creek. Trails
diverged among the juniper trees and eroded sandstone cliffs toward
improvised campsites half buried by the deep red sands only slightly
less fine than talcum powder. Here and there a camper trailer showed,
tucked against a cliff wall or within a grove of trees: not much
population--yet--to speak of.
"Today's only Tuesday," I said. "Or else-who knows?
It could be the herd's moved down to Grand Gulch, or somewhere, these
last few years. In there among those rocks looks like a good place for
someone to put a Winnebago. Vivo jo! as they say in South
America. First come, first settled-it's the law of the Old West.
Anyone wants to dispute it with us, we have the firepower to take him
on."
I drew the horses from the trailer by their tails,
snubbed them to the tie rings beside the rear doors, and dragged over
a bail of hay from the truck box. Together Maureen and I raised camp,
dug a pit, and gathered wood for a fire. The canyon was scavanged as
thoroughly as India or the Sudan, and we spent nearly an hour
accumulating enough fuel for the evening meal. Fortunately, I had the
white-gas Firefly stove along for a backup. When everything was fixed,
I saddled the mare and rode out from camp, leaving Maureen seated with
her book in a canvas chair and leading the gelding on a ten-foot rope
I held coiled in my gloved hand.
The weather had passed away to the east, along with
the afternoon, and the sky showed a soft spring blue above the
slickrock cliffs, glowing in hues of rose and yellow in the horizontal
light of the low-down sun. The sun burned on my cheek below the brim
of my straw hat and on the backs of my hands holding the reins, but
the downhill twilight breeze was pleasantly cool. The gelding,
remembering, and scenting water now, pushed ahead on his lead, nearly
uncontrollable without the bit in his mouth. I wrangled him back and
kicked the mare into a trot as Indian Creek swung into view below us
around a bend in the road, running slow but sure within green margins
of aspen and tamarisk. Years ago, I used to strip to my shorts and
gallop bareback for a half-mile in the sandy riverbed, through silver
sprays of water. Tomorrow, perhaps--assuming a warm April sun overhead
and not a lot company arrived down here by then.
The horses stood with their noses together in the
stream, sucking up water with a deep interior rumbling sound. Back at
camp I gave them a measure of grain and went to pour drinks for the
human members of the expedition. Seated together in comfortable chairs
beside the pale flames of a climbing fire, my wife and I drank wine
while the opposing cliffs flamed with color, the shadow in our private
canyon deepened, and a pair of ravens performed an aerial show in the
purpling sky overhead.
"Are you feeling all right?" I asked Maureen.
"I'm fine! I feel much more relaxed here than I did
last year. It's easier for me when we aren't camped in the middle of
nowhere, away from civilization, the way we were the other time."
"It's the middle of nowhere that's civilization,
actually."
"Anyhow--I don't think I'm going to take a sleeping
pill tonight."
"That's good. By the end of the camping season, the
only pill you'll need will be the stars overhead, the good earth
beneath your sleeping bag, and the joyous squeak of bats in the
darkness."
"You mean, there are bats here--in this
place, too?"
In the morning I watered the horses at the creek
and rode out from camp again on the mare, leaving the gelding pawing
the sand behind the trailer and neighing shrilly, at intervals. From
the top of the bluff we paused for a look down into camp, where
Maureen sat peacefully reading while the horse ran back and forth at
the end of his lead. Then I turned the protesting mare's nose away
from the canyon, toward the high desert stretching west to a horizon
formed by some of the most fantastically beautiful country on earth.
Before we had traveled a quarter-mile we had
passed, the mare and I, from the Mormon playground on Indian Creek
into another dimension--completely removed from the human world by the
pressing wind, the circling space, the howling silence of the
slickrock desert. Underfoot the sand, the blackbrush, the prickly pear
in flower; around, the circle of red plateau cut by arroyos and dotted
with the dark juniper trees; beyond, in a sweep of three-hundred-sixty
degrees, an arrangment of mountains, cliffs, buttes, and gnomons, like
compass points in bar relief on an ornate circular map beneath a shiny
tumultous sky. A mile and a half out, at the eleven o'clock position,
an outcrop of rock and trees broke through the desert floor. I heeled
the mare in both flanks and we were off across the sands like
Bedouins, the horse as responsive to the reins as a sports car as we
dodged among rocks and cacti, and seeming nearly as well-suspended
over the resilient ground. We arrived at the outcrop at a gallop,
veered hard right, and galloped on toward purple distant cliffs carved
in the plateau by a tributary of Indian Creek. The fresh wind,
compounded by our own velocity, chilled the sunshine, leaving the mare unsweated and still frisky after a run of several miles as we
approached camp at a trot. I slowed her as the unshod hooves struck
rimrock and drew rein at the cliff's edge to wave my hat to Maureen
below. The gelding, spying us in silhouette against the sky, shrieked
once-his eager cry insufficiently strong to cover a sound of greater
intensity still, as alien and distressing as the neigh of a horse is
natural and consoling. bbrrUMM-puhpuhpuhpuhpuhpuhpuh-bRUM-RUM-RUM-puhpuhpuhpuhpuh..
The Easter Riders were arriving at last, and almost up to full
throttle already.
We eyed each other resentfully, the Mormon party
and we, as Maureen and I gave the sun a helping boost over the yardarm
by uncorking a magnum bottle of red wine. They wanted our space; we
wanted our solitude. It was a family reunion, apparently: the
obligatory Winnebago with dirtbike trailer attached, surrounded by
three or four pickup trucks, also towing trailers, and several sedans.
Each of the adults had his own bike; so did the six or seven
pre-adolescent kids, each dressed in complete outfits that included
striped pants and crash helmets. For the next two days, the human
ability to walk seemed to have been suspended. Everybody rode-and
rode noplace: up, down, and around, wherever virgin sand stretched, in
however small a spot, like alpine skiers seeking fresh powder. bbrrRUM-puhpuhpuhpuhpuh-bRUM-RUM-RUM-RUUUM!!!!.
But skiers are not entirely mindless. Almost the whole aim of modern globalpolitik is to maintain and protect an idiotic way of life. For
bbRUM-bRUM!, hundreds of thousands have already perished, and
thousands are dying now. And just wait until the credit empire that is
its other support crashes. I hope to be off in the wilderness
somewhere with a horse, a rifle, a frying pan, my wife, and a case of
whiskey when that happens.
We stood it for forty-eight hours, then struck
camp, packed it into the truck, and pulled out, leaving piles of horse
manure and trampled hay where the Winnebago was going to go.
Emboldened by our imminent departure, the bikes swarmed closer and
closer like angry asteroids, looking for something to impact and
destroy. It was Easter Saturday anyhow, and we had to be at Mass in
Cortez, Colorado, by nine-thirty the next morning.
Whoever knows the Rocky Mountains knows also that,
out here, snow is certain as death and taxes on Easter Sunday. Maureen
and I awoke next morning in a Cortez motel room, surrounded by the
camp gear and horse tack we'd dragged inside to protect them overnight
from prowling Utes from the nearby reservation, to discover several
inches of wet snow on the ground and the cliffs behind Mesa Verde
shrouded in cloud. Mass at St. Mary and Margaret Church, where a
pianist played what sounded like cocktail bar music throughout the
Consecration (and elsewhere), failed to elevate our spirits. We got on
the road, finally, after eating a surprisingly satisfactory Easter
dinner at a chain restaurant (all the local places were closed) across
the street from the motel, and caught up with the snowstorm on the
mountain pass between Cortez and Durango. It was snowing hard again at
Pagosa Springs, where I made a decision against pulling horses over
Wolf Creek Pass (elevation 10850 feet) and in favor of detouring south
to the Spanish village of Chama, New Mexico, where we spent Easter
night trapped between two snowed-up passes, in bed together in a
primitive motel room at the edge of town, surfing across the four or
five accessible channels on an ancient television set.
There are times when belief in the possibility even
for natural rebirth and renewal seems as much an act of faith as the
glorious fact of the Resurrection Itself. |
