The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  Regardless, the dream of an uncomplicated time persists. The Robinsons, Quinn tells me, prefer to manage their home landscape for “productivity,” without government agencies butting in and “locking things up.” They favored the monument’s reduction, hoping it would put more acres in play. “But it didn’t help us anyway,” Quinn says, “because the cuts weren’t around here.”

  That’s it for politics. The sun is now sinking behind a scrim of clouds, patches of ground—fifty feet away, twenty miles away—pulsing with a blush light. For a while, nothing moves but that light, including our conversation. We’re mesmerized, entranced.

  “Love’s kind of corny, but I do love it.” Quinn gives the cooler a friendly pat. “And it’s not only the land. You get on a horse and ride the same places your dad rode when he was your age, and his dad rode, and his dad rode. You call them by names passed down the generations, names that aren’t on any map. You do the same chores, maybe think the same thoughts. Shoot, it goes back and back.”

  Gatorades finished, he tips his ballcap’s brim, straps the cooler tight, hops in the truck, and suggests a campsite, a snug cove edging Thompson Creek. Black exhaust uncoils from the tailpipe. I’m alone. Sort of.

  Thompson Creek? I’d forgotten about Prof. Sure enough, there’s his name on my map, labeling a blue thread that enters the monument just beyond the Robinsons’ ranch house. And there, too, is the day’s third voice, speaking up to me from one of the diary pages I photocopied at the Kanab library: “Friday, May 31. Broke camp at 8:00. Traveled 16 miles by 3:00, when we came to a beautiful valley with a fine cool spring in it, and we camped…. Country over which we have passed rather rough.”

  According to a friend of mine from Boulder, a speck-like village in the heart of the heart of stone, the roads in southern Utah follow pioneer trails, the pioneer trails follow Native American footpaths, the Native American footpaths follow bighorn sheep tracks, and the bighorn sheep tracks follow faults, breaks, creases—any available weakness. It’s an elegant schema, an image of travelers stacking through time. Whether you’re Prof in 1872 or Wannabe Prof in 2018, stubborn bedrock is in charge, pushing this way and prodding that way, providing scant options for forward progress.

  I leave Thompson Creek at eight a.m. on April 12, eager to knock off a significant portion of Skutumpah Road. A mere seventeen seconds into the march, though, an employee of WinGate Wilderness Therapy, an outdoor treatment facility for troubled teens, offers me a ride, and despite the pep in my step, I accept. Jouncing along, my chauffeur, Teague Perkins, mentions that “there are sixty kids in the monument as we speak, sitting with their thoughts, some of them detoxing.” She also mentions a “magical” denizen of the canyons, a luminescent deer-man hybrid named the Guardian who monitors the backcountry.

  Fifteen minutes later Teague drops me at a trailhead so that I can make a detour into the narrows of Lick Wash, a gorgeously cross-bedded feeder of the Paria River. By the time I return to Skutumpah, the morning’s warmth has been replaced by a chill. During the next seven hours of walking, it gets colder. And colder.

  That night—whoa! No, I don’t mean an encounter with the Guardian. I mean forty-mile-an-hour gusts and a snow squall: hunkering, shivering, cursing myself for under-packing. Tossing and turning beneath a spastic tarp, I wait for the darkness to give so that I can yank my sneakers on and go.

  The upside to creeping hypothermia is that it cracks the whip. I make fifteen miles by noon of day three, descending into the Paria amphitheater, a shattered, rainbowed, kaleidoscopic basin, at the bottom of which sits the hamlet of Cannonville. Christa Sadler, whom I’ve arranged to meet at the town’s BLM visitor center, is ahead of schedule, and she passes me in her pickup. Window rolling down: “It—is—blowing!” Blond hair tangling with dangly turquoise earrings: “Get—in—here!”

  A science teacher and environmentalist based out of Flagstaff, Arizona, fifty-six-year-old Christa swung a paleontologist’s rock hammer in the monument before it was designated as such. Specifically, she swung that hammer in the Blues, a two-thousand-foot-high barricade of fractal badlands adjacent to Scenic Byway 12, east of Cannonville. We camp there, sharing the misery of another bitter night, and rise early on April 14 for an excursion into the unknown country of prehistory.

  Christa requires no caffeine to jump-start the day, her manic energy firing nonstop. “Fucker,” she shouts, right hand forming a fist around a rolled map that highlights Trump’s cuts. We’re sorting supplies on the truck’s tailgate, loading snacks and sunscreen into her daypack. “Where is the monument? Are we even in the monument anymore? Honest, I’ve never cursed so much as in the last eighteen months.” She musters a fresh batch of curses for emphasis.

  Our plan is to reconnoiter the Blues, the core of which remains protected, the northwestern corner of which has been excised. The Kaiparowits Formation represents, arguably, the planet’s best record of terrestrial late-Cretaceous ecosystems, while the Straight Cliffs Formation below it represents, to some, a profit in the offing. Christa has published a book about the monument’s superlative paleontological resources (more than a dozen dinosaur species identified over the past couple decades), and she knows plenty about the coastal swamps that deposited copious organic matter (i.e., future coal) in the Straight Cliffs. Hence her breathless venting as we strike off for six hours of scraping in the Kaiparowits dirt.

  Inhale. “I’ve rafted the Grand Canyon about ninety times, educating other rivergoers and whatnot, but this place is extra special to me because there’s still so much to discover.”

  Exhale. “I don’t have kids. This place is where my love goes. This place.”

  Inhale. “What’s happening to the monument has been worse than any of my breakups, ever. Problem is, instead of wanting to kill myself, with this I want to kill someone else.”

  Exhale. “Okay, let’s set the crap aside for a bit and prospect. I could use some prospecting.”

  Prospecting is the search for fossils, plain and simple. Our outing, which yields hundreds of petrified-wood shards, a bunch of clamshells, and three bits of dimpled brown turtle carapace, demonstrates to me that it’s a distinct mode of ambulation as well, a quirky style of being. To prospect, abandon the trail. Blur your eyes. Meditate on the delicately patterned, crumble-at-the-slightest-touch ground. Meander and scan. Scan and meander. Stay loose, open to whatever emerges.

  “It’s called float,” Christa says. “That’s our name for the stuff eroding out of these slopes and floating to the surface, indicating there might be something worth digging for nearby.”

  “The float zone,” I say.

  “The float zone,” she echoes. “You’ve got to get in that headspace.”

  This coinage inspires her to share an anecdote about prospecting the Blues in the 1980s, era of Walkman and cassette tape. Alone, classical music crescendoing in the headphones, she wandered away from the so-called real world and temporarily lost herself in the realer world of textured earth and potential. That the anecdote doesn’t mention a jaw-dropping find—say, a new-to-science dino skull—strikes me as significant. The point is just being in and with the land.

  Memory transports Christa, and when she returns, the morning’s cursing, the outrage and sorrow, are absent. “I can never come out here too often,” she says. “Never.”

  But where, I’m soon wondering, is out here? Consulting the map, I can’t tell if we’ve veered from the protected section of the Blues into the BLM’s open-for-business district. It all appears of a piece. For now.

  Christa invites me to join her and some fellow paleontologists for dinner that evening in Escalante, nineteen miles east of the Blues. I hem and haw—I’d not expected so many rides—but the offer is interesting, hard to pass up. Notwithstanding Prof’s disciplined leadership, my trip takes a turn toward the random, and I spend two days in town. On Sunday, exiting Escalante, I chat with an octogenarian historian who suffered a stroke and struggles with the Prof anecdotes he recounted confidently in his pri
me. He and his wife, the gentlest of couples, longtime critics of the monument, insist that I spend the night in their guest bedroom.

  Finally, on Monday, I again roam the backcountry alone—Antone Flats, Death Hollow, nameless slickrock alcoves. After seventeen miles I’m back on Scenic Byway 12, pounding pavement. An ache develops in my hip, disappears, reappears. The ache doubles down. The ache swaps hips. I dawdle—feast on the remaining salami, sleep eleven hours, spend the bulk of an afternoon journaling—before limping onward.

  Day ten, lips chapped to splitting, nostrils scoured bloody by relentless blowing grit, I crash at my friend’s home in Boulder, the speck-like village surrounded by incised tributary canyons of the Escalante River that, according to Prof, “no animal without wings could cross.” Wait a second. Do I have wings? How did I get here? And is this whiskey in my mug? I’ve slipped into a state of dopey detachment. Increasingly, I’m losing the sequence, the order: Tropic Shale, woman who feared I was lost, scampering lizard, Canaan Peak, potsherd.

  “You’ll flip for Grant,” my friend says, pouring another dram.

  I drain it. The hip tingles.

  “Really, Grant has the Escalante’s nooks and crannies in him like nobody. Wait until you see his house.”

  Grant Johnson has been exploring the Escalante canyons since 1975, and for twenty-two of those years, while running a horsepacking guide service, he spent five months annually in “the wild spaces.” Working sporadically during his winters off, the chip-toothed, barrel-chested sixty-two-year-old dynamited an orange bulb of Navajo sandstone to create a network: den with bookshelf of obscure geology tomes, jam room with PA system and harmonicas, larder brimming with foods harvested from his Deer Creek homestead. Totaling 5,700 square feet, the dwelling is nothing like a dwarf’s dank hovel and everything like Architectural Digest melded with The Flintstones.

  It’s April 21, day eleven. I snagged a ride here from Boulder with my friend, the two of us peering into a frenzy of snowflakes. Prof didn’t swing this far south—he kept to the Aquarius Plateau, a forested behemoth hidden by the morning’s swirling gray weather—but given the conditions, ascending said behemoth is less than appealing. No part of me regrets deviating from the historic route, perhaps because I’m a wimp, perhaps because I bedded down on the deck last night and woke soggy. To understate the case, I’m psyched to be a guest of Grant’s sheltering caves.

  “There’s only one suspect crack in the whole structure,” he says, craning his neck, inspecting the nearly invisible fracture with a squinting focus. We’re perched on stools at the kitchen counter, a bazillion pounds of sand swirling in ancient compressed stillness above our heads. “But heck, my life will be over before the thing collapses.”

  That life is eclectic, an obsessive passion for the unknown country’s hideaways (obscure pictograph panels, secret springs) lending coherence to what might otherwise appear a random mishmash. Grant landed in the region as a teenager, taking quarters off from college in Washington State to apprentice with itinerant uranium miners. He co-founded the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in 1983; for his activism he was hung in effigy by the antienviro faction in Escalante. He stabilized Ancestral Puebloan ruins alongside professional archeologists and hauled supplies for AmeriCorps crews eradicating the invasive Russian olive. He built roads and fought the building of roads.

  “Everywhere that I hadn’t been was my goal,” Grant says, passing a bowl of steaming black beans enriched with salsa from the previous summer’s garden and bacon from the former pet pig. “But there’s too much for anyone to know it all.” He passes a spoon. “More you know, bigger it gets.”

  I’m enjoying the restful lunch, but my host is antsy, the sunshine burning off this morning’s overcast reminding him of neglected chores. “I better get my ass busy and milk the cow,” he says, not getting his ass busy. Unfolding my map prompts him to unfold a map. Shortly, the counter is papered with hogbacks and rincons, features labeled Lamp Stand and Wolverine Bench, and we’re nerding out on the minutiae of Prof’s journey.

  “I haven’t used a topo in ages,” Grant says, explaining that, fundamentally, it’s the mystery of the wilderness he’s after—the beauty of the mystery. I ask how he squared his role as a guide with the task of introducing clients to the Escalante’s unguidable essence, and he says that sometimes, though he had the group’s whereabouts dialed, he’d linger atop a gargantuan prow, stone-faced, incommunicado. “My clients would freak. ‘What’s going on? Are we in trouble? Do we know how to find camp?’ I’d let that moment hang. Even if it lasted, like, thirty seconds, they had to deal.”

  He slides his index finger across the overlapping maps: east from Deer Creek on the Burr Trail Road, out of the monument, through the warp of the Waterpocket Fold (centerpiece of Capitol Reef National Park), up to the crest of the Henry Mountains. The finger pauses there, as if catching its breath.

  “Dude, I seriously do need to get my ass busy and milk,” he says. “Aw, but can you imagine? Can you imagine this in 1872?”

  “I’ve been trying,” I reply.

  “Me too. Since I was a teenager.” He lifts the finger. “It’s pretty much all I’ve done.”

  Days. They pass. And I pass through them, trading the monument for Dixie National Forest, the forest for Capitol Reef National Park, and the park for Notom-Bullfrog Road, which parallels the eastern flank of the Waterpocket Fold. On the fourteenth day out from Kanab, instant coffee flooding my bloodstream and the Henry Mountains looming, I’m hit with a dual realization. One, the trip is concluding, Prof soon to spin a 360, absorb the panoramic view, ink his understanding onto the American atlas’s remaining white space. Two, this conclusion must for me be mute, inarticulate, the time arrived to shun characters, perspectives, varieties of dedication and fascination and love.

  Grant was the last local whose story I heard, more than forty-eight hours ago. My hip is throbbing again and the temperature is climbing into the eighties again, but none of this really matters because I’ve got twenty-seven nonnegotiable miles to make, uphill. I’ve been planning this grueling ending since the beginning: trudge a knobby BLM road, bushwhack the scraggly forested slopes above Pennellen Pass, gain the alpine ridge of Mount Ellen’s south summit (named for Prof’s wife).

  Sneakers laced tight, I hike the complex mess spilling from the Henry foothills for five, six, seven hours—squiggly passages with vertical walls, scorched mesa tops, mauve and dun and apricot soils. Prof’s diary consistently downplays challenge and travail (“Could not find trail so went up canon exploring side canon. Find trail out. Have not found one yet”), but an assistant’s report mentions that at this point on the route, the party pickaxed notches into the rimrocks and wedged their shoulders against the equines’ rumps to heft them over these impediments. Referring to southern Utah’s contorted topography as a maze is lazy and clichéd. That doesn’t alter that fact that it is a maze.

  Painfully, by inches, the dark mass of Mount Ellen nears, resolving into detail: conifers, talus chutes, wizened snowbanks. I apply myself to the task of making those details more detailed and, simultaneously, the task of quieting my brain with exhaustion. For some reason though, in spite of the heaving effort, my brain won’t quit. At treeline, the range’s crest an hour distant, the symbolic finish approaching, I’m still occupied by words.

  The words, it turns out, are my own.

  People think they have the monument pegged, what it’s made of and, accordingly, what it should be made into: a coal mine, a cow’s supper, a preserve for scientific investigations, a stirring wilderness experience, an anchor for family history, a political token, a sacred grave to receive our prayers. But if enough people know something, and if they know that something differently, is that something actually known? What I’ve learned from two weeks of walking and hitching—two weeks of listening, both to people with my ears and to the ground itself with my ache and my thirst—is that there are layers upon layers to this famously stratified land. Always more layers. Untold
layers. And that to interpret the place via a single layer is to miss the place, to know nothing whatsoever of its truth.

  So goes my little monologue, a distraction from ragged lungs and cramping quadriceps. At dusk I achieve the desired spot—the mental spot (blank mind) and the physical spot (pad of crunchy grass straddling the mountain’s narrow spine). I’m dazed, depleted, barely able to spread my sleeping bag, entirely unable to wrap my belief around the scale and power of the scene. The new monument sprawls within the sprawling old monument. Both monuments sprawl to the horizon and beyond. Limitless naked desert, as I remember it from my twenties, as I hope to always remember it, is here beneath me and before me: strange, spooky, utterly unknowable, utterly unknown.

  I can feel Prof close, scribbling in his diary, disagreeing: “Sunday, June 23rd. Fred sketched our trail since leaving Kanab. Got it done at 5:00 P.M., when we started on our way back.” Not wanting to interrupt yet unable to withhold comment, I speak to him, whether aloud or just internally it’s difficult to say. You tried your best, buddy, but you failed. You had to fail. Look at this. Look at this. Mapmaker, there was no possibility of succeeding.

  And then, at last, the words really are gone, swallowed by silence. The view is saturated with black, the black sparking with stars.

  ARIZONA

  The Drop

  Mike and I are sitting at the edge of an anonymous prow that juts from the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, seventy miles past the nearest town. It’s not a large campsite, maybe ten feet square, but it’s flat enough to lay pads and sleeping bags across, with a dizzying plunge on three sides.

  We’ve come here to do nothing, at least nothing that resembles anything. The plan is to nurse a bottle of beer until the sun goes down, then nurse a second until the moon rises—to enjoy the evening’s swells and lulls and silky transitions. You don’t do the Grand Canyon at sunset: It does you. You stare. You blink. You breathe. You grow energized and inspired, then small and humble, then empty as the river of space flowing beneath your dangling feet, against the sheer clean cliffs. So much for any plan that claims otherwise.