The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  Turns out the mystery-thing was all of the above. Crazy yellow eyes. Curved beak pasted with dried blood and torn bits of feather. A long-eared owl, caught by a barb, dangling from the thin flesh of its back. Wings spread. Alive. Assuming the collision occurred at dawn, the owl had been exposed to the baking sun for ten straight hours. Not good, I thought, coming in close, retreating, coming in close again. Clock is ticking. How to help?

  With pliers I cut free a section of the fence, the depleted, desperate bird struggling to fly from this nightmare of daylight and pain and humankind, struggling to turn and bite the metal on her spine. With my shirt I wrapped the depleted, desperate bird and set her gently in the plastic crate strapped to the wheeler’s hood, set her there along with the five feet of fence that wouldn’t release. With softness in my voice I entreated the depleted, desperate bird—hold on, little buddy, hold on, little pal, hold on.

  But she couldn’t. That evening, at a raptor rehab center, she was euthanized. Just as the season had to roll forward and the nights had to lengthen and eventually the grass had to stop growing—which meant the work was through—the owl had to let go. Come September, I took off my beat jeans, abandoned my leaky waders, started my car, waved goodbye to my friend. Drove away from Wyoming and that dirty, boring, thankless job, that beautiful, powerful, opposite-of-pretend job—away from those fields, those yellow eyes.

  Drove away thinking about the real, the elemental.

  Drove away thinking yeah, an irrigator, welcome to the club.

  Pooh Bear in Yellowstone

  Once, walking a beach in San Francisco, I found myself surrounded by old men wearing only T-shirts. By accident—shouldn’t they have signs or something, yellow caution tape?—I’d entered the nudist zone. In every direction, disconcertingly tan nether regions freely absorbed the golden warmth.

  “Poohbearing,” my girlfriend said when I described the scene to her that evening. “That’s what it’s called.”

  Poohbearing? As in sweet innocent honey-loving Winnie?

  “He had just that red top, no pants. You never noticed?”

  Entirely unbidden, this memory flashed fleshily in my mind a few years later, on a February morning in the Yellowstone backcountry. The sky a perfection of blue, the temperature 10 degrees at best, I was standing barefoot in sparkling powder, making final adjustments to a fat backpack prior to committing its awkward weight to my shoulders.

  Skis cinched tight—check.

  Boots secured—check.

  To my right, a close buddy, Turner, dealt with his own gear. To my left, a cow moose, her gaze steady, seemed to ask with big quiet eyes: Are you idiots for real? The Snake River flowed smooth and strong before us, a hundred feet wide, no telling how deep. We were, of course, outfitted from the waist up with layers of Capilene and Gore-Tex—and buck-ass naked from the waist down, Poohbearing hardcore.

  Why would two young fellows drop trou, drop thermal undies, drop skivvies, and subject their manhood to the frigid rush of winter water? Why would they torture themselves so? Simple answer: no bridge, yearnings for the other side, bravery in the face of imminent shrinkage, fun.

  Our plan was to relax, to spend four or five days touring forested valleys, letting secret hot springs determine the route. Each night we would camp beside a pool, soak for hours, sway to the soundscape of bugling swans and howling wolves, catch glimpses of starlight through rents in rising steam. It would be surreal, a mix of the harshest season and the cushiest luxury. To reach that luxury, though …

  Maybe the moose had a point.

  I hoisted my pack, gripped my poles, and stepped into the current, Turner following hot on my heels, or cold on my cheeks, as it were. Ankle-deep became knee-deep, knee-deep became thigh-deep, thigh-deep became you-know-what-deep. Toes went numb, went beyond numb, went beyond beyond. Bones splintered, shattered, exploded in the imagination.

  And then, arriving at the far bank, a tall drift of white that given the circumstances suggested a snuggly terrycloth towel, it was over, whew. The silly bear (me) and the drawerless ursine adventurer (Turner) had done it, had managed to keep clothing dry and pass through the liquid gate that bars entry to the kingdom of inhuman wilds. Calves and thighs a horrifying shade of violet, we clambered out, The End.

  Uh, yeah, not exactly.

  The thing about fording a river at the start of a trip is that, in most scenarios, you’ve got to ford it again on the return. We did. After blue moonglow and elk hooves sloshing in eddies and magnitudinous solitude and hot cocoa—after breakfasts of Fig Newtons and many untracked miles and faint rosy alpenglow and the complete mesmerization that is a trillion flakes dancing into boiling tubs—we found ourselves back at the Snake. Inside a sideways blizzard. Shivering. Dreading the inevitable.

  No time to waste, Turner bared himself to the whirling weather and I did the same, thinking that certain orifices aren’t meant to be involved in skiing. Ready? Ready. We plunged into focus.

  What focus! I swear on the cuteness of Piglet and Roo, on the sorrow of Eeyore, that the purity of our attention bore a distinct resemblance to spiritual awakening, to enlightenment. The universe contracted to the now-now-now of inching progress. The do-or-die intensity led consciousness toward a rare and marvelous clarity.

  Water, snow.

  White chaos, burning pain.

  Though the entire Yellowstone outing was fantastic, a waking dream of elemental reality, this crossing is what I recall most vividly, what I cherish above all else. This Poohbearing. This Poohbearing in winter. This crazy agonizing gleeful Poohbearing in winter. This getting from here to there.

  UTAH

  The Unknown Country

  Deanna Glover’s voice hits a high note along with her eyebrows, tone and expression conveying the same grandmotherly concern. She’s not my grandmother—we met for the first time an hour ago—but that hardly seems to matter to the sweet, white-haired eighty-year-old. “Tell me you’ll have a friend hiking with you, because it’s a lot of country,” she says, gripping her walker. “And, you know, I start to worry.”

  The Kanab Heritage Museum, in Kane County, Utah, is cluttered with arrowheads, wedding gowns, antique farm implements, and sepia photographs of the families that founded the town in 1870. I phoned Deanna, a descendant of these Mormon pioneers, earlier this April morning, and though the museum, her baby and brainchild, was closed, she insisted on opening it so that the displays could inform my upcoming two-hundred-mile, two-week trek through Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument.

  Hiking with a friend? I shake my head, and a latent anxiety rears up, the prickly fear-thrill of engaging a desert that demands resourcefulness (drinking water found in sculpted potholes), extreme caution (camouflaged rattlesnakes in the middle of the trail), and a tolerance for solitude (my girlfriend, as I hugged her goodbye before leaving for Utah, told me to enjoy peeking into the recesses of my own skull).

  Recounting this quip about the intracranial vista to Deanna, I notice her grip on the walker tighten. “Oh, I’ll be praying for you, then,” she says. “I’m not kidding—it’s a whole lot of country.”

  Ocher buttes, umber scarps, maroon hoodoos: whole lot of country indeed. Extending north and east from Kanab, Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument encompasses one of the gnarliest stretches of the lower forty-eight. Geology, that’s the word. Borrowing author Charles Bowden’s apt phrase, “the heart of stone.”

  Ever since President Clinton established the monument in 1996, it’s been contentious: old-timers versus newcomers, Republicans versus Democrats, advocates of using the land versus advocates of conserving the land (as if these were mutually exclusive agendas). Conservative politicians in pressed blue jeans and blazers tend to see the monument as an assault on economic growth. Dirtbag adventurers in Chaco sandals deem it the epicenter of North American slot canyoneering. In Kanab, mention Edward Abbey, the Southwest’s iconic nature writer, and you’ll receive a high five or a tirade, depending on your interlocutor.


  The latest dispute began on December 4, 2017, when President Trump cut the 1.9-million-acre monument into three units, reducing the overall area by almost 50 percent. As outlined in the official proclamation, the White House’s stance was that the Clinton administration had designated more terrain than the law allowed. Deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas obviously played no part whatsoever in the decision—obviously. Environmental organizations immediately filed lawsuits, arguing that Trump lacked the authority to shrink an existing monument. Nevertheless, the Bureau of Land Management went ahead and drafted plans that, if implemented, would open approximately seven hundred thousand acres to mining and drilling. With the final decision tied up in court, nobody can predict whether the original boundaries will or will not be reinstated.

  My interest in the place is personal. Working for the Forest Service in my twenties, I resided in a cabin an hour south of the monument: bought my groceries in Kanab, thrashed myself silly every weekend (for fun) in the intricate back-country of arroyos and yuccas and coyotes. It was upsetting to picture the wilderness ransacked for profit, to sense my cherished memories of the region disappearing into the abstraction we call “news.”

  Thankfully, I didn’t forget Almon Harris Thompson.

  Nicknamed Prof, Thompson was a school superintendent–cum-cartographer from New England who wore a bushy mustache, abstained from smoking tobacco, and, according to a colleague, was “always ‘level headed’ and never went off on a tangent doing wild and unwarranted things.” John Wesley Powell, the Civil War veteran famed for boating the Grand Canyon’s whitewater in 1869, was Prof’s brother-in-law and boss. Together they were employed by the federal government, a congressional appropriation funding their brave, meticulous research into the geography of the Colorado Plateau’s remote canyonlands.

  “Remote” is an understatement: An 1868 military map of Utah delineated a Connecticut-sized blank space. In 1872, at the age of thirty-two, Prof led a small party into this “unknown country.” The last river to be discovered in the continental United States (the Escalante) wet his dry throat that spring, and the last range to be named (the Henry Mountains) registered his horse’s hoofprint.

  Emotions rarely inflect the spare prose in Prof’s diary, a document devoted to mileages, elevations, the shapes of watersheds, the dips of strata, cold rain, and “a sort of dysentery attack.” What does come through, however, is a seriously badass route that, by chance, flirts with our modern monument’s boundaries, weaving in and out of both the Clinton and Trump versions.

  For the next two weeks, I’ll attempt to retrace Prof’s route (he took twenty-five days), mostly by walking, occasionally by hitching. The itinerary that earns Deanna’s worry and prayer has me heading northeast from Kanab: up Johnson Canyon, past the Paria amphitheater to the Blues badlands, along the headwaters of the Escalante River, through the Waterpocket Fold, and over the eleven-thousand-plus-foot Henry Mountains. In my pack I’ll carry a sleeping bag and headlamp, two single-liter water bottles and a four-liter reserve dromedary, and not much food other than instant coffee, pita bread, and salami. Hopefully, beer and potato chips will greet me at the few-and-far-between gas stations—in Cannonville (pop. 175), Escalante (pop. 802), and Boulder (pop. 240). I’ll lug no tent, no toilet paper, no GPS, no smartphone.

  The goal is to drop below politics—to find, and to hear, the lovers who love this unique landscape. Even better, the goal is to drop below conversation, below language, and viscerally, with my own ache and my own thirst, contact the ground itself.

  April 10 is my departure date, until it’s not.

  The visit with Deanna runs long, so I decide to spend the afternoon riding shotgun beside forty-three-year-old Charley Bulletts, the soft-spoken, quick-to-laugh cultural-resource director of the Kaibab Band of Paiutes.

  A local boy, Charley left for a spell—tried his luck in Cedar City, Utah, and Mesquite, Nevada—but now he’s home, raising his kids in this desert that raised him. His grandfather, one of the last medicine men of the tribe, was born nearby. If the Kanab Heritage Museum situates the monument within a frontier context, Charley’s perspective, which he shares as we drive the outskirts of town, links it to an even deeper oral history.

  “This is so bad it’s comical,” he says early in our tour, parking with the windshield framing a cartoony mural on a supermarket’s cinder-block wall. The painting depicts a procession: covered wagons, livestock, dogs, young men carrying rifles. “I get a kick out of it, I really do—the happy Mormons entering an ‘unpopulated territory,’ following their destiny.”

  Southern Paiutes have inhabited this region since “time immemorial,” and their songs make reference to woolly mammoths and flowing lava, among other bygone creatures and forces. For generations the rhythm of human life was, by necessity, synchronized with the rhythm of seasons: When the rabbitbrush turns yellow, the pinyon pine’s nuts are ready for harvesting. The modern concept of private property, unsurprisingly, didn’t exist. “Fences did it,” Charley says. “After they sprang up, and we crossed them, and we got shot at numerous times, then we understood that land could be owned.”

  Focusing on the mural, almost like he’s addressing it rather than me, Charley elaborates on this difference in worldview. “With European culture, it’s pieces of paper that tell who you are and where you come from—your birth certificate, your deed. But for my people, tradition instructs us that once your baby’s umbilical cord comes off, you have to put it under either a young tree or an ant pile. That way your kid can be connected to a place.”

  He shifts the truck into gear, and momentarily we’re part of the wall’s cartoony procession. Then we’re cruising, our talk gaining momentum: tortoises, earthquakes, prejudice, fisheries, alcohol, dams.

  I ask about the monument, figuring the subject can’t be avoided, and Charley answers with grim humor. “If we let this man, this businessman, run the country, the end of the world might come earlier than we want.” The joke isn’t funny—isn’t supposed to be funny—and neither of us smiles. On the whole, we spend far less time talking current events than talking “old ones.”

  After discussing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and pausing at a site where a reburial ceremony was held, we pull into a gravel lot overlooking a reservoir. Charley’s grandfather used to tell of certain spots along the road where he’d seen spirits, where you wouldn’t want to change a flat tire alone in the dark. This is one such spot: The remains of fifty-three bodies were unearthed here during construction.

  It doesn’t look like much, metaphysically speaking. Swallows fly with their reflections. Pebbles line the shore. Kanab’s buildings stand toylike in the distance, backdropped by angular red ledges. But this nondescript quality, I suspect, is the very point: Everything isn’t visible to everybody. I try to envision the scene in spring of 1872—a timber stockade and a scattering of adobe houses, Prof sorting supplies, tinkering with his theodolite, glancing up, seeing a problem to solve, a mapmaker’s challenge.

  Charley nods at the horizon. “People always say, ‘Oh, it’s desolate!’ But no, that’s not desolation. Spirits live out there. Beings live out there.”

  Out there. It’s where I’m aimed. Tomorrow.

  Strolling the paved road in Johnson Canyon the next morning—the road wending through the Vermillion Cliffs and White Cliffs, low steps in the gigantic topographical staircase for which the monument is partially named—I catch a glimpse of Trump’s scissor work. Like most of the snipped parcels, this zone east of the road appears unaffected: no drill rigs, no ATVs tearing cryptobiotic soil crust to hell, no indication that the tilted slabs and twisty junipers have undergone a transformation. Says a sudden voice in my already-getting-dehydrated brain, A cut on paper draws no immediate blood from the earth.

  Thirteen withering, solitary miles later, I top the Whites, turn onto Skutumpah Road, and slump down in a heap, the 85-degree heat having extracted its toll. Pure serendipity: A dented pickup with a cooler strapped
to the flatbed eases to a stop alongside me. Forgoing the usual “hello,” the driver mentions that people like him might not get a lot of ranching done, but they sure are good at leaning against the truck with a cold beverage at sunset. It’s the long day’s second voice—Quinn Robinson’s voice. I hobble over on blistered feet for a Gatorade dripping with ice slush.

  “Suppose I’ve been anywhere you can see,” Quinn says, gazing across a rolling sagebrush bench bordered to the north by the Paunsaugunt Plateau’s limestone ramparts (the rim of Bryce Canyon National Park) and to the south by endless violet sky. “With our few hundred acres private and the permits, well, I couldn’t say how much land it adds up to.” He rubs his brow, as if to massage loose an exact number. “Put it this way: five hours on a horse east from the ranch house, two hours south—we summer our 250 head on all that.”

  The ranch house—renovated by his dad atop the foundation initially laid by his great-granddad—is about two miles off, in a hollow, spitting distance from the monument’s western margin. Quinn was homeschooled there, but he skipped grades seven and eight because “you learn more working.” Cactus Ropes ballcap, oversized belt buckle: He’s twenty-three years old and has twenty-two years of cow-boying to his name, give or take twelve months.

  Between tilts of Gatorade, Quinn calmly articulates the frustrations of keeping the family ranch going: ramping prices, scarcity of available grazing allotments in the monument, the need for a couple sidelines (he’s got a degree in welding). Great-granddad Malcolm ran a herd of a thousand cattle on the Skutumpah Terrace in the early 1900s, but that type of open-range operation is out of reach in the twenty-first century.