Sagebrush Sedition. Warren J. Stucki

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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!

      3

       THE CHOCOLATE CLIFFS

      With its genesis roughly 240 million years ago in the early Triassic geological period, the Chocolate Cliffs are the granddaddy of the Staircase’s terraces and form the first and lowest rung. Created from brown mud deposited on the fluvial plain of an immense pre-historic lake, the rocks produced are mudstone and siltstone and these stones, along with a thin layer of beige sandstone, make up the Moenkopi formation. As a signature feature of this layer, erosion occasionally exposes large sheets of fossilized ripple marks.

      Capped by a mosaic of Shinarump Conglomerate, the Chocolate Cliffs are the oldest, least visible and most deeply buried of all the Staircase cliffs. Only on the very southern border of the Monument, east of Kanab, is a comparably short shelf of Chocolate Cliffs that erosion has unearthed for inspection.

      Judith Brisco fought the unfamiliar knobs and ridges of the lumpy mattress, then rolled over and once again tried to go to sleep. God, how she hated these motel beds. In the lodging business, there seemed to an unwritten but almost universally adhered to code, furnish your rooms exclusively with stone-hard mattresses. Try as she might, Judith could think of only two possible explanations: one, long ago, someone must have decided that hard mattresses were good for the back and that theory was still popular today. If true, whoever that person was, had obviously never studied the normal spine curvature. No way was the spine straight as a board, so why should beds be? Two, hard mattresses were more cost effective. They were cheaper to manufacture or less likely to sag under body weight and hence would not need replacing as often. Regardless of the reason, Judith sighed, now one could hardly stay in any motel without sleeping, or at least trying to sleep, on a concrete slab.

      At least her own bed was on the way, arriving today she hoped. She had rented a small one-story bungalow in the Ranchos section of Kanab. It was a wonderful house in a picturesque location just across the Kanab Creek and right smack up against the looming Vermillion Cliffs. This setting, up against the cliffs, was a constant reminder of why she was here. Here in this God forsaken little Mormon town without so much as a Wal-Mart, a Macy’s, an opera house or even a movie theater. She was here to forge a national monument out of a mishmash of raw materials, whereas a little over a year ago there was none.

      Ever since her arrival, she had been treated with courtesy and civility, but with a definite coolness. Not being Mormon, she had expected some minor cultural problems, but the one thing she had not foreseen, though in retrospect she should have, was the overwhelming public sentiment against the new monument. Naively, she would have suspected the citizens of southern Utah would have been happy. A new monument would instantly put them on every travel agency or tourist industry trade map and it goes without saying, the increased auto and bus traffic would be good for business. My God, it was not like they were throwing up six-story tenement housing or constructing a heavily-polluting manufacturing plant in the center of downtown Kanab.

      If she lived to be a hundred, Judith would never understand westerners. It was almost as if they were a genetically similar but nonetheless a totally separate species, like the land mammals and porpoise, or the fish and shark. Somewhere along the evolutionary road, they had made a left turn from mainstream Homo sapiens. In general westerners were definitely independent, irascible,

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