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
