Picnic in the Ruins

by Todd Robert Petersen

  “I told you we’d be issuing a statement,” Dalton said.

  “I’m sure you will, but in the vacuum caused by your bureaucratic punctiliousness, a whole town is wondering why a pillar of their community took his own life on a morning he might normally have been found in church.” Stan gestured to the diner. Dalton looked around to see everyone frozen, watching him. Stan lifted a half-empty glass of orange juice and toasted Dalton.

  “Don’t you have some oath to do no harm?”

  “I’m a newspaperman, not a Greek physician. I ran a story with the best information available at the time. And if you had read past the lede, you might have noticed that the article doesn’t point a finger at anyone, it merely recalls comparable events from a few years ago in an attempt to make certain the citizens of our community don’t jump to any rash or uninformed conclusions. I mean, really, Sheriff. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

  Someone in the diner shouted, “Yes!”

  Dalton looked around and lowered his voice, “There’s all kinds of reasons for a person to take his life that have nothing to do with federal government. You planted that idea in people’s heads, and now you’re responsible for it. Couple of months ago I went to the doctor for a pain in my eye. Thought I was going blind. Doctor said when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

  Forsythe made a show of thinking about what Dalton said. “What was wrong with your eye?” he eventually asked.

  “That ain’t the point.”

  “You brought it up.”

  “Plugged tear duct.”

  “That’s awful. I had that happen to a salivary gland once. Fixed it with some of those sour candies.”

  Dalton scowled. “This is an ongoing investigation.”

  “I never said Bruce killed himself because of the Feds. That story was just a little history to provide context. When you’ve got something for me to print, I’ll print it. Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter,” Forsythe said.

  Dalton threw up his hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know who said that?”

  Dalton shrugged.

  “Thomas Jefferson. The primary author of the Declaration of Independence. Governor of Virginia. Secretary of state. Third president of—”

  “I know who Thomas Jefferson was,” Dalton shouted, then he composed himself. “I’m just saying you made my job about a thousand times more difficult. You get this town tied up in knots, and we’ll have more grief on our hands than what we’ve got right now.” Dalton didn’t wait for a response. He walked to the register. Before he could ask for it, Jenny had a Diet Coke ready in a to-go cup with a straw. He took a twenty out of his wallet and said, “Thank you. This is for that muckraker’s breakfast. Please keep the change.”

  On the counter by the register was a line of business cards in little plastic holders. He noticed that three of them were for real estate agents. He took one of each and stuffed them into his shirt pocket. “I’m sorry for turning your place into a dinner theater,” he said.

  “It’s okay. We’re still doing breakfast,” Jenny said with a wink.

  ___

  Sophia turned off the highway and followed the long line of taillights that led through the crowded cluster of hotels, gas stations, and fake frontier buildings outside of Bryce Canyon. She was listening to the audiobook of Far from the Madding Crowd, and she thought to herself how ironic it was that the only traffic she dealt with anymore was in national parks.

  She had been listening to a section of the book where Bathsheba and Troy encountered a pregnant woman on the road who was destitute and making her way painfully toward the Casterbridge workhouse. She was Fanny, Troy’s old love. Troy sent Bathsheba ahead in the carriage before she could recognize the woman, then he gave Fanny all the money in his pocket. She spent the last of her strength reaching her destination, and a few hours later, she died in childbirth, along with the baby. Their coffin was later brought to Troy and Bathsheba, who discovered the two bodies inside.

  As Sophia sat in the backed-up traffic, waiting to get through the entry station, she thought about the bodies she’d seen in museums, mummies desiccated and sometimes entwined. She thought about the ones she’d seen in photographs curled together in stone burial cists. One pairing from Mexico was layered in yellow and blue feathers, the bodies decorated with turquoise. Sophia realized that behind all the data, context, and information, there was a great sadness to the ruins she studied, a sorrow the artifacts would only sometimes reveal. The rest of the stories came from what Dr. Songetay called a historical imagination. He caught hell for that term from his colleagues but never walked it back.

  The swirl of thoughts triggered by her book, and the idea of mummies trapped forever in museums, made her eyes misty. The whole purpose of Thomas Hardy was to give her something to think about that wasn’t archeological, but at this point in her life, her work was a black hole that pulled everything into it. At the entry station to Bryce Canyon, she could have used her government plate to skirt the line, but she wanted to talk to her friend Lucy, who was working the gate today. She even moved over, so she’d be in her lane, then she rolled down her window and waited. The two of them met during the seasonal employee orientation. Lucy smiled when she saw her.

  While Lucy helped visitors on the other side, Sophia checked her phone for messages.

  “Oh crap, are you crying?” Lucy asked, pointing to Sophia’s face.

  “Me?” Sophia said, dabbing her eye with the pad of her finger. “No. Well, yes. It’s this stupid audiobook I’m listening to. I should stick with the Shins, right?”

  “How’s the research?”

  “It’s good. I need to crunch some numbers, though.”

  “I’d love to get out in the field,” Lucy said, gesturing to her sandstone enclosure and the lines of cars. “What book is it?”

  “Far from the Madding Crowd,” Sophia said.

  “I love that book. Well, I saw the movie,” Lucy said.

  Sophia sat straight. “Both are good. I better get moving before they honk. It’s been a crazy couple of days. I’ll take you out sometime and we can catch up. Text me.”

  “Yes. You’re doing a talk at the lodge today, right?”

  “Yep. I’m supposed to share my research project with the taxpayers. Here’s to transparency.”

  “Right? I will be stuck out here. So, break a leg.” Lucy gave her a double thumbs-up.

  Sophia passed through the entry gate, crossing the threshold from the regular world to the front country of the park, the most artificial of transitions. She pulled ahead, plodding along with the rest of the traffic past the visitor’s center with its stone, timber, and glass architecture—half college campus, half shopping mall—designed for the visitor who can’t be without amenities for even an afternoon.

  Sophia meandered through the parking lot and turned down the incline to the drab backside of the building where the staff parked. It reminded her of the false front sets on a movie backlot; with two and a half million pairs of eyes on the front, there’s no sense wasting money where it won’t be seen. In 1916, when they set up the National Park Service, they couldn’t have imagined all this.

  As she was parking, she ran the legislative language through her head: parks were meant to preserve the scenery and nature and historical objects, and somehow also leave them unimpaired. All these buildings and roads and buses seemed like the opposite of preservation. Not all the parks were circuses like this one, though. Where she was doing her fieldwork, there was only backcountry, no offices or kiosks, no pavement or parking lots. The contrast was extreme. Everyone working for the Park Service or the BLM seemed to understand these contradictions, but all of it was complicated. Learning the ins and outs clarified very little.

  She took her backpack to the door, where she punched in a key code.
The air was filled with a deep pine scent and the hush of the ponderosas. It seemed like a shame to come up here just to go inside, but she had paperwork to complete before her presentation, or she wouldn’t get paid. She was also hoping to grab a few minutes of the park archeologist’s time.

  She headed upstairs and checked her small mail cubby. Inside was a newsletter, an invitation to a potluck for seasonal employees, and a schedule of her interpretive presentations for the rest of the summer. There were three more to do after this one. She stuffed everything into her backpack and went down the hall to the archeologist’s office, whose door was open.

  “Hi, Dalinda,” Sophia said. “You got a minute?”

  Dalinda looked up and cracked a smile, followed by an eye roll that Sophia wasn’t sure how to interpret. She was wearing the gray-and-green uniform, her hair in a bun. Sophia’s eyes lingered on Dalinda’s silver, turquoise, and coral earrings. When Dalinda relaxed her smile, her crow’s feet disappeared. Sophia then noticed her desk, which was strewn with three-ring binders. “Come in and sit,” Dalinda said. “I’m just finishing an email.”

  “If you’re busy, I can—”

  “It’ll be worse later,” Dalinda said, beckoning.

  Sophia set her backpack on the floor and sat down while Dalinda returned to her typing.

  The office walls were covered in maps. A few were framed watercolors capturing the exquisite misapprehensions nineteenth-century cartographers had about the American West. The rest were working maps thumbtacked to the wall and flagged with notes on colored squares. They were plain but beautiful in their own way, like mathematical formulas, exact where the others were imagined. One displayed the distribution of debitage in lithic scatters. Another revealed stratigraphic layers of Indigenous habitations. Each map told a different story of the people who once lived here. Sophia thought about how maps charted space but also invoked time. Every map described a place but also told a story about the thoughts and attitudes of the age that produced it.

  Sophia unzipped her backpack, took out a notebook, and wrote that idea down.

  Another of Dalinda’s maps showed an array of sacred sites in the park. This one had been marked and amended by hand many times. It was part of an ethnographic project Dalinda was working on with tribal liaisons. Native people had been bitten by the government so many times, the project was constantly at risk. So much of the information here was protected. Somebody couldn’t just walk in and get access to it, even with a Freedom of Information Act request.

  A confidentiality clause had been built into Sophia’s grant project. She would have to redact sensitive information about cultural sites when she wrote her dissertation. The complexity of the laws and regulations pertaining to federal land made her head spin. It was a whirlwind of acronyms. It was all meant to protect park resources from looters and vandals and the negligence of tourists, but these directives often looked backward, overlooking contemporary Native peoples, the way their lives and concerns were unfolding. An exhibit in a visitor’s center might present traditional agriculture methods, but it won’t say a thing about a tribe’s struggle with diabetes.

  Her mind jumped to a lecture where she remembered the professor saying that our laws were simply a catalog of our injustices to one another. Legislation is always written in hindsight, by the victors, who revere the vanquished but turn a blind eye to the survivors.

  She nodded to herself and wrote that down, too.

  “Okay,” Dalinda said. “Sophia Shepard, it is good to see you. What’s up?”

  “I’m freaking out a little about this presentation,” Sophia said, a little nervous about skipping the small talk. She tucked her notebook back in the bag and zipped it up. “I mean, I teach undergrad classes at Princeton, but doing this is just—I don’t know—it feels like some armchair archeologist is going to pounce on me and wreck everything.”

  “That is one-hundred-percent guaranteed to happen. An hour on the internet beats an advanced degree.” Dalinda stretched in her chair. “I took a look at the slides you sent. You’re going to do fine.”

  “I’m not just worried about the visitors. It’s having you and the superintendent there.”

  Dalinda’s face dropped. “About that. The superintendent can’t come. He has a funeral down in Kanab today. It’s a sad story.”

  “Is it for the guy who—”

  “Bruce Cluff,” Dalinda said. “He was an amateur collector who knew everybody. Apparently, he took his own life Sunday.”

  “I heard. That’s terrible,” Sophia said.

  Dalinda motioned for Sophia to close her door. When it was shut, Dalinda leaned forward and said, “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but Cluff has been a problem for us for a very long time.”

  “Oh,” Sophia said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Cluff was tight with his senators, so he got special consideration he didn’t deserve. He did whatever he wanted and never checked with us. And he never got busted for it. If the Paiutes had Cluff’s access and influence, we’d be doing very different jobs right now.”

  “That drives me out of my mind,” Sophia said.

  “It is what it is,” Dalinda said, leaning back in her chair. “You’ve seen what it’s like around here, white guys calling the shots, sweeping Native people under the rug. When the tribes push back, they’re told to sit down, shut up, and mind their own business. Status quo is as status quo does.”

  Sophia froze, her jaw set and her mouth a straight line.

  “You know the Native population of the county you’re working in is less than two percent,” Dalinda continued.

  “What?”

  “Yes, one point five five percent, actually. It’s not a mistake that you don’t see them. It’s a hundred and fifty years of concerted effort. For a while in the eighties, tribes had a seat at the table, but they’ve been shut out again.”

  “But it’s their table,” Sophia said.

  Dalinda nodded. “You are correct. Congress is ready to sell off the parks to energy companies for pennies on the dollar, but if anyone starts talking about giving it back . . .”

  “How do you keep going?” Sophia asked.

  “I’m an optimist. That’s why I sit all day, sending emails into the void,” Dalinda said, gesturing around her. She made an exasperated face that softened into a crooked kind of half smile. “We’re doing good work, Sophia. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. We make progress despite everything. It’s not a straight line, but it’s something.”

  Sophia sat up and thought about the coils of bureaucracy that were looping silently around her. It was a strange world, equal parts hope and cynicism. How could you ever survive it? Sophia realized time was getting away from her, and she had much to do, so she queued up her other question. “Dalinda, have you ever been threatened when you’re working? Sorry to just change direction on you.” Sophia was nervous about putting the question out there. She didn’t want to seem naïve, but she also realized maybe this wasn’t something to fool around with.

  “That’s okay. You mean, like, out in the field?”

  “Yeah. Yesterday a couple of guys near Antelope Flats made some threats.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s pretty common, I’m afraid. What did they look like?”

  “One was tall. The other short. They were weird, like cartoons. Drove a turquoise pickup. I forgot to get the plate.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It sounds like you came across the Ashdowns. They’re poachers and pot hunters—goons. A month ago, somebody reported them trying to yank a petroglyph panel off a cliff wall with that truck and a tow chain.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. How come they’re not in jail?”

  “We’ve got bigger fish to fry and not enough evidence to build a case. All it takes is money, which is in short supply these days. Did those knuckle draggers shoot at you?”

  “No. Just verbal threats. Intimidation. They suggested that I could get hurt out there. It was so stupid. I filed a report
at the BLM offices in Kanab.”

  “Okay, that’s good, but they are so shorthanded down there, who knows if anything will come out of it. If you see those two again, call dispatch, okay?”

  “I don’t have a radio.”

  “What? They didn’t . . .” Dalinda was beside herself. She pulled a notepad close and wrote something down.

  “They had this hand-drawn map, which they were obviously using to dig stuff up.”

  “The thing is, everybody’s got a map,” Dalinda sighed. “And they all think they’re going to strike it rich. I’ve only seen a couple maps that are even in the ballpark. Leave those guys to law enforcement.”

  “All right,” Sophia said.

  “But I am going to get you a radio. We’ve got policies about that. And I’m pissed that they sent you off without one.”

  “I am, too, now that I know they were supposed to give me one but didn’t. Thank you.”

  There was a ping from Dalinda’s computer, and she cursed under her breath. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to respond to this. Another fire. Some ranger broke into a meeting in Denver—never mind. Good luck, Sophia. You’ll do us proud. I’ll try to make it over, but if this Denver thing comes off the rails, it’ll wreck my whole afternoon.”

  “It sounds awful,” Sophia said, gathering her stuff. She took another look around Dalinda’s office and tried to imagine herself in the archeologist’s place, juggling fieldwork and bureaucracy. It didn’t feel like a good fit for her.

  “And really,” Dalinda said, “I’m going to get you a radio. I’m the worst mentor.”

  “No, you’re amazing,” Sophia said. On the way out, she asked if Dalinda wanted the door open or closed.

  “Closed,” she said. “All the way, please.”

  ___

  The Ashdown brothers barreled down the winding double lanes of the Virgin River Highway. The steep gray stone walls of the gorge shot skyward as they descended. Lonnie watched for the open spaces that would momentarily reveal terraces of Joshua trees receding into the sunlit alcoves. The view would open for a second, then disappear.