Читать книгу Sagebrush Sedition - Warren J. Stucki - Страница 11

Well over fifty-five hundred feet in total elevation, the cliffs of Utah’s plateau land are towering, rangy and distinctively colored. It is, in fact, the various rock hues that have inspired each tier’s popular name.

Commencing with the rim of the Grand Canyon and rising ever higher and higher in a northward progression is a great system of cliffs sometimes christened in western geology, the Great Staircase. In geological time, the oldest cliffs form the basal strata and the youngest, the crest or the crown. At the lowest echelon, sits the desert-edged Chocolate Cliffs; the second terrace, the brilliant Vermillion Cliffs; third, coursing ever upward in a step-like manner, are the chalky White Cliffs; the next landing, the steely Gray Cliffs; and the pinnacle, the lofty Pink Cliffs, alpine cap of the Aquarius Plateau.

Certainly, such a regal staircase, so massive, so majestic may be tramped, traversed, or otherwise trekked across by mere mortals—but surely only Gods may glibly stride up and down its colossal steps.

“What a great speech!” Sean Dunn O’Grady jumped to his feet, enthusiastically joining the erupting applause. With tears brimming and overflowing, he turned to the short, balding man on his right and shouted above the din, “Isn’t he great? Best damn president since JFK!”

The thunderous applause continued and so did Sean. His hands ached, his palms turned a meaty red and his fingers felt like stiff wooden appendages, numbed from the paralytic pounding. But who cared? What a victory! What a day!

Just imagine, Sean Dunn O’Grady rubbing shoulders with congressmen, senators, cabinet secretaries, governors, top-level bureaucrats and a virtual who’s who of the Intermountain business community. Everyone who was anyone was here, that is everyone except the conspicuously absent Utah political delegation. They considered it grandstanding, but to Sean it looked more like a grand display of sour grapes. The governor, both senators and both representatives, all republicans, as a show of solidarity in their displeasure, had snubbed the proceedings. What sore losers. Who needs them? Who cares?

But what an honor for the likes of Sean Dunn O’Grady. Never in his wildest dreams did he think he would be hobnobbing with these people, literally the de facto royalty of America. Nor did it matter that they mostly ignored him. What counted, he was here!

Looking around he grinned, his abundant freckles bunching at the corners of his mouth and surfing over the bridge of his nose. Without a doubt, from the looks of the attendees, he must have the smallest bank account of anyone. Being president of the Southern Utah Chapter of the Western Wilderness Alliance wasn’t exactly a yellow brick road paved with blocks of gold bullion or landscaped with dollar trees. But he hadn’t done it for the money. He would gladly trade trivial paper money for a righteous cause any day. Environmental crusades were his staff of life, his soul food, and that’s what he did it for. Today was his payday, not some computer printed check. And this was one hell-uv-a-day.

When he’d first received the invitation, he had been ecstatic. It was so unexpected, not that he hadn’t dreamed about it. The summons had to be the administration’s way of thanking him for his part, however small, in bringing this mammoth project to fruition. And he had played a modest part. Perhaps, a bigger part than anyone had realized, but some things are better left unsaid, some stories simply cannot be told. By their very nature, some things are not to be openly applauded and are meant only for self-congratulations. His role was like that.

From his church days of another life and time, he knew pride was a sin, but even in those days it was always considered a minor sin. Now as a devout atheist, he really did not believe in retribution for transgressions, thank God for that, nor rewards for good works. He realized, of course, a certain code of ethics was necessary for society to survive and keep anarchy at bay, but he really didn’t believe in sin, only crime, and of course crime was legislated by society as a firewall to deter chaos. But if a crime was committed and not witnessed, was it still a crime, philosophically speaking of course? Certainly that would be true of sins, if you believed in an omnipotent all-seeing God, but probably not of crime. Sin implied someone was watching and intimated future retribution. Crime on the other hand, suggested punishment by mortals. So, if someone committed murder and it was not witnessed and there was no evidence, it cannot be punished by mortals. Therefore, is it a crime? Or a sin? In essence, Sean rationalized, this was nearly the same question of a tree falling in the forest and no one hearing it.

Anyway, no one would be hurt by his momentary plunge into the narcissistic world of self-congratulations and self-backslapping. So for now, he would bask in the warm glow of the victory, gorge at the table of triumph, sleep in the bed of the conqueror. To the victor go all of the spoils, thank God, if not all of the adulation.

“So what do you think, Sean?”

“Huh—huh?” Sean mumbled, forcing his mind back to the present. “S—orry. Guess I was daydreaming.”

“Do you want to be a part of it?” Monument manager Judith Brisco asked, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice, “or not?”

“I apologize,” Sean said sheepishly. “Be part of what?”

“A part of this,” Brisco trumpeted, arching her petite arm through the air with a grand flourish, “a part of the team.”

“I was never very good at teams,” Sean acknowledged, rubbing his eyes, then running forked fingers through coarse, shoulder-length, red hair. “What exactly would we be doing?”

“You really didn’t hear a word I said,” Brisco sighed, placing her hand on her slender hips. “I’m about to appoint an advisory team to take stock of what we’ve got, gather preliminary information before we formulate a comprehensive management plan. When a corporation buys a company, the first thing they do is take inventory—see what they’ve got, what needs to be fixed, what needs to be purchased, what needs to be sold and what needs to be changed.

“The first thing I need to know is what we’ve got. How many springs and rivers have dried up with the drought? What kind of shape the rangeland is in? How many cows are presently grazing on the allotments compared to what those same permits allow? And does the foliage justify such numbers? Are we overgrazing? Is natural grass being replaced by opportunistic weeds, like thistles, tumbleweeds, snake broom and rabbit brush? Is erosion a problem? How many deer do we have? How many elk? Is poaching a problem? How much private property is in the monument and who owns it? Are they being good stewards? How many mines are here and are they just paper mines, leases, or has some digging actually commenced? How many minor roads? Which ones can be closed? How bad a problem are the ATVs? It’s a huge area, one million seven hundred thousand acres, and in short, I need to know what’s going on in every last single acre.

“My management style is definitely hands on. I like to make informed, educated decisions and I like to be involved in every one of those decisions. In my jurisdiction, I definitely will not tolerate loose cannons,” Brisco declared, her dark brown eyes glancing around for scowls of dissent. Fortunately, there were none.

Seated at a square oak conference room table were about a dozen men and women stuffed at various angles and inclines in their uncomfortable chairs, some slouching, some stiff with rapt attention, some resting their chins on their elbows and occasionally some dozing.

“My crack team, and it will be a crack team, will be a composite of BLM specialists, environmentalists, ranchers and recreational consumers,” she continued. “So how about it, Sean, do you want to represent the environmentalists?”

Sean’s mind had already started drifting.

It had been more than a year since that great speech and that equally great day, but none of the luster had faded. He could remember when he had started working on this project, more than ten years ago. At first, just trying to convince anyone outside of Utah that these canyons and plateaus had any real value had been a monumental task. In those early years, there were virtually no recreational backpackers, campers or sightseers in the Grand Staircase area. Other than Sean, the only other human creatures were cattlemen, Indians, hunters, miners, prospectors and the occasional fugitive from the law. Trying to convince people of the beauty of this land was like trying to convince the Cattleman’s Association of the elegance of a Jackson Pollard painting.

Back then, alpine terrain seemed to be all the rage—camping, hiking or photographing lush green foliage with musical bubbling brooks and relaxing in cool mountain air. Very few people appreciated the beauty and solitude of the dry desolate deserts of the American West. To most, they were forbidden wastelands, God’s forsaken earth, badlands, Satan’s Strand, Hell’s Kitchen and on and on. Why preserve them? Nobody wanted to go there anyway. Nobody wanted these lands. Certainly, not the state of Utah.

He was like a lone voice crying in the wilderness. No one listened, no one cared. As it says in the Gospel of Matthew, a prophet is never appreciated in his own land and certainly, Sean was not appreciated in his. Involuntarily, he grimaced. It was irritating, even downright embarrassing, that even after all these years he still unconsciously looked to the Bible for justification. It seemed one was never completely free of childhood indoctrination. Some atheist he’d turned out to be.

“Sean!” Brisco bellowed.

“Huh?” Sean stammered as he again jerked his mind back to the present. “I’m sorry, I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

“Obviously. In the short time I’ve known you,” Brisco chastised, “it seems you do a lot of that. I can’t imagine how you get anything done.”

“I manage, but I admit, I’ve always been a dreamer—an idealist,” Sean confessed. “But when needs be, I can roll up my sleeves and do the dirty work.”

“I’ll take your word for that,” Brisco said. “Well then, while I’ve got your undivided attention, let me make this short and to the point. Do you want to be a member of my inventory team?”

“I’m really sorry,” Sean said, trying to focus. “I was thinking about this last year. It has been truly amazing.”

“Well, yes,” Brisco said curtly, “but that’s all past history now. We need to organize. There’s work to be done. Do you, or do you not, want to be a part of this project?”

“Anything,” Sean said softly, with a hint of reverence in his voice, “anything to do with the Grand Staircase/ Escalante National Monument, I want to be a part of.”

“Good,” Brisco said, reaching up to smooth her already immaculate auburn hair, “then it’s settled. Ron, will you stand?”

Wearing the brown BLM field uniform, Ron Sparks stood up and grinned. He appeared to be in his fifties, robust with pent up energy, balding with gray hair swept back at the sides, accommodating blue eyes and wide grin.

“This is Ron Sparks,” Brisco said. “He is the deputy monument manager and will handle a lot of the day-to-day operations of the park. His experience has all been BLM and he comes to us from the Idaho state office. Among other things, Ron will be in charge of the Citizen Advisory Committee and that group will report to him. Now Monty, will you stand?

A middle-aged, slightly stooped, thin man also wearing the standard two-tone chocolate and beige uniform of the BLM with logo patches on both shoulders rose from the far end of the table and scowled silently at the group. He looked slightly emaciated and tired, and his skin had a fallow amber tinge, as often seen with cancer patients or people with cirrhosis of the liver. His eyes, however, were anything but cadaverous. A mahogany brown, they were alert, hard and mean.

“Monty Coleman,” Brisco continued, “for now, will double as a law enforcement specialist and as range conservation officer. Hopefully soon, we’ll be able to hire another range conservation specialist, so poor Monty won’t have to do both. However, he does have vast experience in both areas. Also at our disposal from time-to-time, we will have a government hydrologist, a botanist, an archeologist, a paleontologist, a geologist, a zoologist, forest and range management specialists and a historian.

“Finally, Mr. Douglas Rehnquist, would you stand? Mr. Rehnquist is a local rancher with two permits in the monument both in the Fifty Mile Mountain area. He has consented to represent the ranchers and their interests. Would you like to say a few words, Doug?”

Roper stood up and eyed the group. Most of them looked back at him with varying degrees of suspicion or indifference. He cleared his throat.

“My name is Douglas Rehnquist, but my friends call me Roper. I am a permitee on the Grand Staircase. Specifically I have two allotments, Lake Allotment on Fifty Mile Mountain and the Soda Springs Allotment, just to the east of Fifty Mile Mountain down on the desert and bordering the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. I, for one, am happy about this new monument and see no reason we can’t all make use of this tremendous resource together. All it takes is patience, a little give and take, and a little bit of mutual respect for each other’s goals and dreams.” Roper again looked around the table then sat down.

Abruptly Monty stood, a fierce scowl painted on his face, his thin lips stretched and blanched.

“Yes, Monty,” Brisco acknowledged.

“Why him?” Monty asked. “That’s like inviting the enemy to your flight briefing the night before the mission.”

“I agree,” Sean blurted out, suddenly wide awake and bristling, “it— it’s like inviting a bear into your camp to help you fix dinner.”

The smile disappeared from deputy manager Ron Sparks’ face and the rest of the group looked stunned by the outbursts.

“Monty,” Brisco chided, “you’re not with the marines anymore and Sean you have a lot to learn about the fine art of diplomacy, though I must say it is nice to finally see you awake.”

“Might just as well be up front with it,” Monty snarled.

“And I don’t like it neither, not one damn bit. I, for one, know what these ranchers have done to the land,” Sean growled. “They’ve literally raped it.”

“Let’s remember,” Ron Sparks grinned nervously. “The monument is designated as a multi-use park. If we manage it well, there should be enough room for everyone.”

“Sean,” Brisco interrupted, taking charge. “This is a new era. You and Monty and the ranchers are going to have to learn to get along. I know it’s hard. Coming from the National Park Service, it’s been an adjustment for me as well, but we’ll learn together.”

“But they—they’ve been damn poor stewards.” Sean persisted. “And you know what Christ said about poor stewards.”

“The range is in better shape now than it has been in the last fifty years,” Roper said, “and I have old photographs to prove it.”

“Enough!” Brisco said. “What we don’t need is in-fighting. If we can’t get along, how can we expect everyone else to. In this committee we will work out our differences like professionals and we will follow the guidelines as set forth by the administration—to a T.”

Though he didn’t show it, Sean was embarrassed by his biblical outburst. Goddamn it! What was wrong with him? Quoting the Bible. After all, he was an atheist now.

For a tense moment, the three combatants eyed each other suspiciously, then Brisco once again took charge. Using her most officious voice, she continued, “now let me take a moment to outline our strategy, how I envision the new committee will function.”

Sean settled back in his chair and began to drift as Brisco droned on. Politics—yeah, he knew about politics. His whole life had been involved with politics, or at least political agendas. Over the years he’d learned one could only accomplish so much with politics then when things started to bog down, one had to resort to other less refined techniques. Covert methods. As he had become more involved with the environmental movement, it was in the other methods Sean had realized that he had a natural talent. Not that he didn’t agree that politics were always the first step, but for sure it wasn’t the only step. In his experience, political solutions were tedious, evasive and hard to come by. When the political effort was exhausted, that’s when they always came looking for him.

However, thank God, he’d hiked practically every gorge in the red rock maze, ascended almost every juniper-peppered plateau, hiked all the colorful cliffs of the Grand Staircase and explored virtually every dusty valley where only rabbit brush, blue sage and black brush grew. Indeed, it was an enchanted land dotted with the occasional red sandstone arch, random shoulder-width slot canyons, sporadic phallic monoliths and the rare bizarre rock garden, uncanny in their resemblance to a moonscape. And as the piéce de résistance, the monument was a virtual treasure of Jurassic and Cretaceous fossils, anything and everything from massive dinosaurs to tiny trilobites.

But the Staircase could also be treacherous. With very little standing water on the entire park, just a random spring and an occasional seasonal creek, people could, and sometimes did die in this harsh land. Dehydration, starvation and snake bite in the summer—cold, snow and exposure in the winter, not to mention the rare gunshot wound, occasional skull or bone fractures from a fall, or the infrequent assault by a renegade cougar. However, perhaps, the biggest risk was becoming disoriented and lost. With few roads and even fewer marked trails, even with a map one could wander for days and never see a sign of civilization and never see another soul.

But what really irritated Sean were the ranchers. Rough and uneducated, they didn’t act like they loved this land. Actually, at times, they behaved as if they hated it. To them, it was something to conquer or subdue, not to appreciate and preserve. And those cows! Those foul stinky, dirty beasts. They destroyed, trampled or gnawed everything from the fragile native grasses to the delicate desert rose. And then, they shit everywhere, including the hiking trails, pristine pure springs and the fragile riparian banks of the delicate Paria River.

Stubborn and possessive, deep down these ranchers actually believed this land belonged to them and not the American people. While vigorously trying to keep hikers and campers off the land, they would, at the same time, not move their cows from an allotment until it had been totally stripped of anything vital or green. Not even a prickly pear cactus or a quaking aspen sapling would be left unscathed. The situation was intolerable. Personally, and with God’s help, he would drive them from all public lands.

That would not be easy, Sean knew. Even though this was government land, the BLM allotment leases were extremely hard to revoke. They were open-ended leases that could be inherited, passed from father to son, or sold to another rancher like any other commodity. That was why the Grand Canyon Trust was so effective. Rather than trying to force the ranchers off the land, they simply bought up their allotments at a fair price then put them in cold storage. Obviously, that was the preferable way to purge these leases, but unfortunately there was not an endless supply of money and some ranchers were more stubborn than greedy. They simply refused to sell.

The only thing worse than the cowboys were the miners. It seems they all had subscribed to General Sherman’s scorched earth technique of mining, strip and burn. What this amounted to in Sean’s estimation, was a legal destruction of the land. As with the ranchers, only one thing flourished after the miners were done, the ugly scars of erosion. That excavating arm of nature that systematically destroyed dismembered and disemboweled the land.

Over the years, even while still in college studying paleontology, Sean had visited Wilderness Alliance clubs across the west, constantly talking up the area. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, they had started to come, this time, his kind of people. People who appreciated the play of shadow and light across the sheer canyon walls, intricate but ephemeral patterns constantly changing with the arching sun. People who loved to just sit quietly and watch the amazing kaleidoscope of deepening colors of clouds as the sun slowly sank behind a square purple butte. People who relished crisp clean air, wild flowers, blue skies and the red silica sands. People who enjoyed photographing or painting wildlife, not shooting them, eating them, or skinning them for pelts. People who appreciated solitude and valued a chance for of introspection.

In the past, there were daunting times when Sean was convinced this day would never come. In those early days, no doubt about it, he had pushed the envelope, both morally and legally. But in some cases the ends did indeed justify the means. This monument, to Sean’s way of thinking, was one of those cases.

This magnificent land deserved to be protected. Sometimes, he would sit quietly high on a plateau and look across at the grand vista with awe and reverence. At those times, he could almost understand why people assigned such beauty to God, though there wasn’t any reason one could not have beauty without God. Beauty was a learned response, it was in the eye of the beholder, Sean reasoned, and not in the eye of some imagined God.

Sometimes he wished he still believed, even though he knew the idea of God was silly, invented by man’s own insecurities. Other times, he wondered if the president was really a believer, or if he was just being politically expedient. Caving in and going to church because that’s what the majority of Americans expected from their president. You didn’t need much political savvy to know that translated into millions of votes. But after all, the president was a Rhode’s Scholar and arguably, the most intelligent president we’d had since Jefferson. No way, Sean thought, that a man like him really believed in the naive concept of God.

As clearly as if it were happening today, Sean saw himself standing in the human line that snaked for at least a hundred yards, inching slowly forward to shake the president’s hand. What an honor, it would be—to shake this great man’s hand. Whenever he heard the back stabbing of the republican conservatives attacking this man, Sean turned livid. To his way of thinking, if Mount Rushmore was being sculpted today, William Jefferson Clinton’s handsome profile would surely grace the mountain’s face—though he really did not believe in defacing mountains in that way.

The only slightly disconcerting thing was, well—to be honest—was all the credit he had heaped on vice president Al Gore in the speech. Not that the vice president didn’t deserve some of it, he had written a book and had always been a good friend of the environmentalists, but he had a knack for usurping credit, stealing the limelight, so to speak. Remember that internet fiasco? And certainly, Gore hadn’t done all the leg work, the grunt work that Sean had. It had been Sean who had slugged it out in the trenches and fought the dirty little secret war. The war politicians, by inference gave their blessing, but didn’t want to know the gory details so they could distance themselves. They had to keep their hands clean and reputations spotless so they could continue to captain us toward more lofty goals.

Not that Sean had expected the president to actually mention his name in the dedicatory speech, but it would have been—

“—So, will Monday be all right with you, Sean?”

“Huh? I’m sorry.”

“For God’s sake!” Brisco exploded, her small frame shaking. “Could you pay attention?”

“I said I was sorry,” Sean snarled, his normally docile ruddy countenance now blazing bright crimson with anger.

“Can you start to work on my inventory project this Monday?”

“Yeah, I guess that will work for me. Monday’ll do fine.”

“Where do you want to meet, Ron?” Brisco asked the deputy manager.

“You can call me Sparky,” Ron said as he faced the group with a smile. “How about the Escalante office?”

“Okay, then we’ll meet on Monday,” Brisco confirmed, “at the BLM office in Escalante, just on the east end of town. Any other questions?”

Slowly, Brisco surveyed the room. “I want you to know I take my mission as steward of this land very seriously. President Clinton put me—uh— us in charge of this fine monument and in twenty years, I want Americans, when planning their summer vacations, to mention the Grand Staircase in the same breath as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone or Yosemite,” she paused and looked them each in the eye.

“It’s a big task and we will have our share of problems and maybe even a couple of setbacks, but let me assure you, I know we are up to the task. Someday this will be one fine national monument.” She paused again for effect, gathering her papers. “Well then, I have one last question. Does anyone here play chess?”

“I beg your pardon?” Ron Sparks asked, not sure he’d heard her correctly.

Puzzled, the rest of the group stared blankly back at her.

“Does anyone here play chess?” Brisco repeated, glancing over the room. “When I’m not working, I like to play a little chess—for recreation. How about it, Sean?”

“Nah, I’m not much into games,” Sean replied, “never held much fascination for me.”

“Monty?”

“Never had the time.”

Brisco looked over the room again. “Well then, let’s adjour—.”

“—I used to play a little,” Roper said hesitantly.

“Excellent,” Brisco said, pleased. “We’ll have to arrange a game sometime. Well then, if there’s nothing else, let’s adjourn.”

“Could I have you all stay for a couple minutes,” Sparks grinned as Brisco got up and left, “and we’ll go over specific assignments.”

As he watched the manager leave, Sean couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong with the monument the way it was. Briefly, Sean saw in his mind her vision, another Yellowstone or Yosemite with throngs of people, inundated lodges, congested hiking trails, trash littered roads, thick foul air and noisy traffic jams. It made him shutter.

Brisco had her agenda, he had his. For now, he would help, as long as their agendas ran parallel courses. But another Yosemite—no way!