Hayduke Lives!

by Edward Abbey

  Cheers! The joy of unanimity!

  The R.N. was called, one Mrs. Kathy Smith. A stout redfaced woman, mother of two, wearing shiny maroon Dacron pants too tight for her large butt, hair done up in a bleach-blond apiary, she clutched the microphone and glared at the crowd, silent, too angry for words.

  “Sit down,” a man shouted from the back rows.

  “Sit down and shut up,” suggested another.

  Cheers! Applause!

  The woman eyed her hecklers. “Shame on you, Duane Bundy. Shame on you too, Eldon Stump. Where’s your manners? You had your say, now it’s my turn. And I say — “

  “We heard it before.”

  “I say uranium is poison. Deadly poison. It gets in the air, it gets in the water, it gets in the ground — “

  “Gets in your hair!” (Laughter.)

  “ — gets in your hair, gets in our children’s bones. Strontium causes acute leukemia, ruins the bone marrow, makes people die. Especially children and young people, they almost always — “

  “If God didn’t want us to mine that uranium why’d He put it in the ground?”

  “ — almost always fatal for young people. What? God? If God wanted us to mine uranium, why’d He hide it four hundred feet under the ground? Like it was something He was ashamed of? [Boos. Jeers.] That stripmine will be half a mile wide. The tailings dump will be five hundred feet high. Nothing will ever be able to grow there, this Belgian corporation will dig out the uranium, process it here in our backyard, haul away a few thousand pounds of concentrate and leave us with a million tons of radioactive waste and a slime pit big as ten football fields full of radon gas. Radon gas — “

  The hearings officer interrupted. “The right name for stripmine, Mrs. Smith, is surface mine. Not stripmine. This is open cast mining we’re talking about, not strip mining. Strip mining is something they do to get coal back in Ohio. Watch your language, please. Stick to the facts and try not to get emotional. Also, your two minutes is up. Now let’s see, who’s next …”

  “Wait a minute, I’m only started. About radon —”

  “Your time is up, Mrs. Smith.” Consulting his list of names. “Next: Joseph F. Smith.” Looking out at the crowd. “Smith — you here?”

  “I’ll finish my say, J. Marvin, whether you like it or not.” The nurse hung on to the mike. “And what I want to say is this: you can’t cook with radon gas. Radon gas cooks you. You just think about my words, folks, and when this last uranium boom is over we can all talk about it in the nursing home. [Coarse laughter.] Inside our oxygen tents. Sure do thank you nice people for all the polite attention.”

  Engulfed in a storm of boos, jeers, catcalls and laughter, Kathy Smith searched for her open-back chair in the third row, found the chairseat taken by the big booted feet of a grinning rancher seated behind it. He did not remove his feet. The sharp pointed toes of the boots were thrust directly upward, like a pair of spearheads. Mrs. Smith pushed them apart and down, sideways, and planted her broad heavy bottom on the man’s feet. He was caught like a skunk in a Number Two varmint trap.

  “Smith!” yelled the hearing officer. “Last chance.” A gangling middleaged awkward fellow in rumpled jacket, oversize shirt collar with necktie askew, approached the microphone. His mop of sandy hair, plastered down with water and carefully combed only hours before, had fallen into disorder again: the forelock dangled over his eyebrow, a tuft of hair stood straight up on the back of his head like a sprig of snakeweed.

  He adjusted the microphone, raising it about a foot, and introduced himself. “My name is Smith,” he said. (Vigorous boos.) He grinned. “I guess you already know me. For any as don’t, out there in TV land, my name is Seldom Seen Smith. I am a native Utahn and a good jack Mormon and I make my living in the tourist business. I’m a dude wrangler.”

  “You’re an anti-nuke puke,” said a voice from the crowd.

  “Bet your life. This uranium industry has damn near ruined southern Utah. Now they want to tear up the Arizona strip. I’m agin it. I’m — “

  “You’re an aginner, Seldom. You’re agin everything.”

  “Damn near.” Grinning, bobbing his head, brushing the forelock out of his eye, Smith continued. “This goldang nucular industry moves into our country, tears up the land with open pit mines, blasts roads everywhere, fouls up the trout streams, poisons the ground water supply, dries up the springs, drives out the wildlife, leaves garbage, junk, mineshafts, tailings dumps and radioactive mills all over the place, takes their profits back to New York and London and Tokyo and Gay Paree and leaves us nothing but miners with lung cancer and a ten-billion-dollar cleanup job which our kids are gonna have to pay for. We’re stealing a decent life from our children to buy Lake Foul cabin cruisers and California mobile homes for ourselves.”

  “Our kids need jobs,” shouted the heckler.

  “Stop having so many kids,” replied Smith.

  A moment of shocked silence. Then a chorus of protest: “What? What’s that? Genocide? You’re agin children too? You want us to shoot ‘em? How many kids you got, Smith?”

  “Seven,” he admitted. “Seven of the little devils. But I got three wives. That comes to two point two kids per wife.”

  Laughter. Jeers. Impatient applause.

  The chairman banged his gavel. “Quiet. Let’s have some order here. Not so much emotionalism. Smith, you try stickin’ to the issue. The issue here today is a mine-mill permit for Syn-Fuels Limited and jobs for working people. Try not to get emotional, Smith. Stick to the facts and don’t interrupt your neighbors when they ask you a question, please. All right. Your two minutes is up and it’s time for the final testimony of the day.” J. Marvin Pratt raised his head, looking about for his old buddy Bishop J. Dudley Love.

  “Okay, but I’m gonna say one thing more,” Smith concluded. “And that is I agree one hundred and fifty percent with my wife Kathy.” He pointed to the large proud stubborn woman sitting on the sulky cowman’s pigeon-toed and pinioned feet. “When she says uranium is dangerous for children and all other kinds of life she knows what she’s talking about. Why, if I was one half as smart as that woman of mine I’d be twice as smart as —” Grinning. “— yonder Bishop Love.”

  Cheers. Jeers. Restrained, sitting ovation. Pointed remarks: “That ol’ Smith he hain’t as dumb as he looks.” “Nobody could be that dumb.” “Two point two kids per wife?” “That makes six regular and one six-tenths of a kid.” “That must be the one that looks like Daddy. …”

  Still grinning, grimly, Seldom fumbled his way toward his wife through a shouting crowd now risen to its feet, hands clapping like a panic of penguins, as the impressive figure of Bishop Love marched toward the podium.

  The two men passed each other en route. “Smith,” muttered the Bishop, smiling his crocodile smile, “I’m gonna core you like an apple.”

  “What?” said Smith, confused by the hubbub.

  The Bishop reached the microphone. He gripped it like the neck of a chicken, yanked it another foot higher. A strangled squawk burst from the speakers. Love surveyed the hearing room, the cheering applauding crowd still on its feet, the attentive video cameras, the alert reporters, the complacent and satisfied faces of the Suits ranged behind the long table at his side. At last, one of their own had regained the floor.

  The Bishop’s suit, naturally, was a little different from the others. They wore business suits, some with vests; he wore a Western stockman’s suit of silvergray gabardine, with leather buttons and a yoke back, the lapels high and sharp, the pockets outlined in red piping. Instead of a standard necktie he sported what was called a “bolo” tie: a string of braided leather passing around the shirt collar and through a clasp on the underside of a brooch. The brooch — or bolo — consisted, in this instance, of a wedge of clear plastic containing a dead scorpion, mounted to an arrow-shaped base of polished black pitchblende (U-235). The free ends of the tie, dangling, were each encased in sterling silver. His shirt and cuffs were fastened with pearl snap butto
ns. His Tony Lama high-heeled boots, hand-tooled, were made from the skin of a Komodo lizard. (Rare and endangered.) On his large silver-haired pot-shaped head he wore (disdaining to remove it) a silvergray XXX Stetson with three-inch brim, shaped — like his suit, like his paunch, like his gait — in the stockgrower’s roll.

  Love:

  Love, Love, Love, thought Smith, observing this absurd manifestation of reticulated vanity, how come you’re everywhere? Bishop Love, J. Dudley Love, you make the grass turn gray, Bishop Love.

  He and his wife edged toward the door. They knew what Love would say. They’d heard it many times before, from Love, from a thousand men like Love, from the papers, from the radio and TV, from the weekly magazines, from the Halls of Congress and the Commerce Chambers, from the lips of little children bearing home from school the teacher’s lesson for the day:

  Growth. We got to grow. We got to go and grow, forever grow, onward upward forward for-everward, growing with GOLIATH, for God for Country and for Love. …

  “Folks,” bellowed the Bishop, raising both hands for order and quiet, “good folks of southern Utah and the Arizona Strip, listen to me, I’ll only take a minute, just like everybody else I’ll speak my little piece and let you go. [Crowd resumes seats.] Thank you. Now we heard a lot today, especially in the last ten minutes, from those good neighbors of ourn, Mr. and Mrs. Kathy Smith [laughter] about how dangerous this nucular industry is. Uranium is poison, they say. Well I want to tell you folks something different: that uranium smells like money to me. [Cheers!] It smells like jobs to me. [More cheers!] Hundreds of jobs right here in Hardrock and Landfill County and just across the line in northern Arizona. Hundreds? I mean thousands of jobs. [Thunderous applause!] Now ol’ Smith he says he got seven kids. Seven kids by three wives. [Laughter.] Well folks, you know and I know that ain’t nothing. I know half you good men got a dozen kids. [Shouts of A-men!] Why I got eleven myself and me and the missus —” He winks. “— we’re workin’ on number twelve. [Laughter. Cheers.] Right. And that’s why this Syn-Fuels mine smells good to me. Smells like jobs to me. Smells like money to me. I don’t mind telling you, folks, I like that smell. [Cheers!] Yessir, I like the smell of money. We don’t need more so-called wilderness; only attracts more environmentalists. Like a dead horse draws blowflies. Round here we eat them environmentalists, ain’t that right, boys? [Shouts of agreement.] Cause there ain’t much else to eat, right? [Right!] Poison, they say? Cancer? Leukemia? Listen, folks, I’m here to tell you there’s one man don’t fear the smell of uranium, don’t fear the smell of radon. Because I lived here all my life and I worked in the first uranium mines and I’m still here and I don’t glow in the dark — [Laughter] — and by all heck and tarnation I’m happy as a hog in hog heaven. [He pats the vial of digitalis in his inside jacket pocket, near his heart.] Some of us just don’t buy this scare talk about cancer and radiation. In fact I’m here to tell you folks, what most of you already know: radiation is good for you. [Murmur of happy voices.] That’s right, and I’ll say it again, radiation is really good for you. What’d you think the sunshine is? Radiation. What’s that old sun hisself. One big old nucular power plant boiling away, shooting out all those rays of golden radiation that makes the grass grow, the flowers bloom, the pigs happy and the clouds fill up with rain. Yessiree bob, radiation is good for everything. What does that Seldom Seen Smith know? Nothing, that’s what. He’s the kind of guy can fall in a barrel of tits and come out suckin’ his thumb. An ignorant man! [Applause.] And his wife, well that Kathy, she’s a good woman, she’s a good nurse, but I’m sorry to say she has been sadly misinformed about radiation. Because she’s got it all backwards. And I aim to prove it to you. Right here and now. Let me show you something. …”

  Bishop Love reached inside his suitcoat and pulled a small chunk of carnotite — a friable, yellowish, highly radioactive uranium ore — from an inside pocket. He held it up where all could see it.

  “That’s carnotite, folks. That’s what we got south of here in those big canyons off the Grand Canyon. Now you know and I know the uranium industry is in a slump these days, the American nucular business is shot to hell, the doggone environmentalists are shutting down the nuke plants, but this ore is so rich, my friends, such highgrade ore, that even with yellowcake down to seventeen dollars a pound this stuff is worth mining. Let the price go down to ten a pound this carnotite will still pay. Europe wants it if we don’t. And Japan, Brazil, them places. This is pay dirt, men. Radioactive gold.”

  Murmurs of approval. Love pointed to one of his crew in the front row. The fellow handed him a portable Geiger counter, battery-powered, with probe and cord. Love set the black box-like device on the table, in full view of the audience, switched it on, held up the attached chrome-plated probe in one hand and the lump of sulfur-colored rock in the other. A loud clicking noise began immediately.

  “All right, folks, now listen to that music. This high grade or ain’t it?” He touched the probe to the ore. At once all present heard the radiation count rise in crescendo to the frantic buzzing of an infuriated rattlesnake. “Hear that? You people out there in TV land hear that? That’s high-intensity radiation. That’s one mad buzzworm in there. Pure U-238. Yessiree bob, this little yeller rock is hot as a pistol, folks, hot as my Aunt Minnie’s old-timey radium wristwatch. …”

  Murmurs of admiring approval from the audience.

  “Yessir,” Love went on, “this here is one hot little piece of power. And am I afraid of it? Am I one little teeny-weeny itsy-bitsy scared of it? Watch this.”

  Love lowered the probe. Holding the rock high in one hand, he turned to face the TV cameras and the glaring lights, the important men behind the table, the crowd in the folding chairs. “Watch me now.” Head up, in profile to the cameras, he opened his mouth and placed the carnotite in his teeth, bit off a piece. Chewing vigorously, grinning at everybody and everything, he masticated his tidbit thoroughly, then — swallowed it. Mrs. Smith covered her eyes.

  Laughter. Cheers. The assembly began to stand again.

  “Yes!” Love bellowed, “radiation is good for you! [Growing applause.] Uranium is good for you! Uranium is good for Utah and Arizona! The nucular industry is good for America!”

  The audience rose to its feet, clapping like geese, bawling like sheep, roaring with love for Love and heartful joy in its own brave common sense. Holding both hands aloft like a triumphant fighter, Bishop Love shouted his benediction. “And now, folks, now everybody, I want to invite you all to come across the street with me to Mom’s Café. I’m gonna buy a Pepsi for every man in the house!”

  Seldom Seen Smith — face flushed with anger — struggled toward the microphone, going the wrong way against the current of the surging, laughing, cheering, merry throng. The cameras watched. J. Marvin Pratt, chairman and hearings officer, reached behind his chair and unplugged the microphone, then departed with the other Suits, all smiling, through a rear exit.

  4

  G O L I A T H the

  Super-G.E.M.

  The lonesome juniper, nine-tenths dead, thrust its bare burnished gray claw toward the blue. A brown towhee crept beneath the juniper’s one live branch, picking at the turquoise berries and the bugs that crawled within the clutch of surviving green. High on the rosy canyon wall a wren sang out, flute notes falling in a bright cascade of quicksilver semiquavers. A pair of ravens watched and listened. On the rimrock, in dark silhouette against the sky, a horse and rider waited, watching, listening. Above them all, high in the vault of heaven, one black buzzard sailed in lazy circles, waiting for something, somebody, anybody, anything incarnate and animal, to die. Where there’s life there’s hope.

  The flat treadmarks of the tractor lay stamped upon the desert turtle’s grave, implacable and mute, final, permanent, perfect. Nearby, in the half-dammed streambed, a funnel of muddy water poured around the encroachment of the spoilbanks of overturned earth, broken and jumbled sandstone slabs, torn sagebrush, mutilated and slowly dying trees — Gambel�
��s oak, stripling cottonwoods, sapling willow, box elder, singleleaf ash, pinyon pine, juniper.

  On the far side of the stream appeared a similar, almost identical broad highway of progress, improvement and development: the earth scraped bare of vegetation, the rocks and trees and brush bulldozed aside and piled in ragged heaps beyond the lifeless track. The treadmarks of the iron tractor led both ways — down canyon toward whatever lay concealed around the next bend, up the canyon toward the natural springs that formed the source of the stream. Beyond were high rolling tablelands of red cliffs, sandstone domes, grassy swales, forests of sage and juniper and pinyon pine.

  In that direction, beyond and within its self-generated pall of smog and dust, laboring forward but with many miles to go, came the machine. The mega-machine. The red and yellow G.E.M. of Arizona, the Super-G.E.M., high as a hotel and taller than a grain elevator, heavier than 150 Boeing 727 jet-liners, wide as a railroad barn or wider than six Caterpillar D-9 tractors lined end-to-end, with enough power to supply electricity for a city of 100,000 —!

  “From Bucyrus-Erie. An international business. Flood control. Canals. Underground utilities. Pipeline construction. Dam construction. Road construction. Mining metals. Mining non-metallics. Mining phosphate — soil food. Mining energy. The multibillion-dollar U.S. coal and uranium industry and a larger electric power industry continue to grow each year, here and abroad. B-? machines lead in surface mining — worldwide. Energy needs and energy mining. On the increase. Everywhere. With new regard for mining’s legacy. Reclamation. Improved, more useful land — the legacy of open cast mining. The ultimate step. In the cities. In the country. In the remotest regions. Bucyrus-Erie is there. Here. Everywhere. Essential ingredient … people. Skilled. Well-equipped. Conscientious. Trained. Motivated. Dedicated to precision and accuracy. Experienced management. Worldwide manufacturing. Tradition of excellence. Commitment to quality. Leadership. Advanced designs. On Nature. On Life. On YOU! … Bucyrus-Erie.”