3
In the two
months that he had been in Moab, Dave Robinson had pretty much had the
opportunity to do just about everything that he wanted to do as a newly “single”
guy. He was taking in slot canyons and archaeology and petroglyph sites
regularly, both during and after his work hours for the Bureau of Land
Management out of Moab. However, by the time that he drove off from his former
home in Salunga, Pennsylvania, in order to see if the dream job really was the
stuff that the fantasies about it had made him think it would be, he realized
that he was a lonely and still very much married man living several time zones
away from his wife, Charlotte. Sure, he had access to many of the canyons that
the desert travel writers guided tourists to with their colorful earth porn
books, but it wasn’t the same to go to them alone or as an unknown part of a
group hike that he had joined or arranged on some Internet site.
When they parted
ways in early May, Dave had driven west in his tiny Yaris, carrying only the
essentials that he would need for the first few months. He had his clothes, his
computer, and his hiking stuff. Charlotte did make him take some pots and pans
and utensils and plates, but that was the most civilized thing that he had
other than a promise to buy an iron and ironing board when he arrived in town.
Pretty much
everything else he needed other than clothes and hiking equipment was
digitalized except for a few DVDs and some guidebooks that filled a single box.
The rest of the stuff would be waiting for him to call in early August if the
job was everything he thought it would be. If it was, he could fill the rental
truck. If not, he still had his jobs as an adjunct professor teaching research
writing and an English tutor to go back to in Pennsylvania, so it would be easy
enough to throw his gear back into the Reliable Mobile, the name he
affectionately referred to his hatchback as, so that he could drive the two to
three days back east to the farm fields, forests, and smaller green mountains
of Pennsylvania knowing that he had a true desert experience before he got too
old to throw it all in the car and start off for something new.
At least he
would have tried.
It’s not like he
wanted to go back to Pennsylvania. He didn’t want to quit the job just yet
either, but he also didn’t want to get into something that wasn’t going to be
right for him or Charlotte either. It wasn’t like when he was in his late
twenties or early thirties. He had a family to think about now, even if he
didn’t have kids.
Fortunately for
him, the job sort of kind of fell into his lap. One day, it just stared out at
the computer screen, and he couldn’t not apply, so he submitted. A month and a
half later, he got the call for the first interview. That was an interview on Skype, while the second interview was
going to come with the knowledge that it would have to be in person. With that,
he knew that it was going to be more than a formality if they expected him to
fly into town to meet them, and it was. After an hour and a half of being
grilled, they saw his talents and his seriousness as well as his willingness to
professionally commit to them and their mission. They even saw his shoes were
shined and his car was clean, so he was definitely a man that had all of his
bases covered.
From the way
that they talked, it was clear that they were people who could love him and
that he would enjoy working for. He responded in kind with the hook getting set
as soon as Gary
Stanford, his future boss, went into the mode of a formal offer as applied to
government pay matrixes. It was all Dave could do to ask Charlotte what she
thought before he formally accepted the offer.
“If you know
this is what you want, then let’s give it a go. If it doesn’t work out, it’s
still full-time pay for three months. That definitely beats half-time summer
pay.”
For as much as
he was anxious to leave for the Utah desert, it wasn’t like Dave didn’t like
his job back in Pennsylvania. There were some really great students he taught,
but he was tired of the same old day in / day outs and rehashing the same
e-mail communications to a different e-mail address all of the time. He lived
for the great students, and he had seen a fair bit of them, but now it was time
to do something for himself, especially since the in-class experience was now
largely converted to going online, for better and worse. The same things could
be done with no cost in gas money, but the personal connection largely vanished
from the equation with people able to take classes in a home office while only
wearing boxers or pajamas.
Hell, he had no
idea what his students looked like unless he searched Facebook for them, and the only times he did that was when he just
needed a face to apply to the life.
As his friend
Terry once said, the adjuncting thing meant just teaching – and no meetings was
a good thing. He had bosses who supported him, but as Terry also would state
and Dave would agree, the only time he ever went to his bosses was when he
needed them or to answer for something a student said, which were two
situations that weren’t all that common if he knew how to keep things purring
like a cat on a throw pillow on the couch. However, there were always the personal,
mandatory responses to the semi-annual evaluations. That said, this, too, was
mostly done in its final stages through e-mail. In the 21st century
learning and business environment, anything that could be done digitally was.
What was left of the work day, the time not connected to the computer screen,
was his time.
That was the
good thing about not having an eight to five day job. The bad thing was just
about everything else. There was nothing steady or guaranteed, even benefits.
Dave and Charlotte made ends meet, and the money was nice except in the summers
when class loads diminished. Now, the things that this BLM job represented were things that
he had put years into getting volunteer outdoor club experience so that he
could go out to the desert wonderland in southeastern Utah. Nevertheless,
like many older people, and it’s not like Dave was as old as the Crypt Keeper
since he was only turning forty-five this summer, he wasn’t a spring chicken
anymore.
He was just
someone who needed to get something going soon or it was never going to happen,
so that, too, was why he felt he had to make the jump – a part of him knew that
he had to do it now or it would never come… ever.
“People just
don’t rush to hire geriatrics with walkers and canes, Dave,” his mother would
always say, and Dave knew it was true since he saw all too many “old” people
unable to find employment after being laid off.
While he and
Charlotte didn’t have kids, they had each other and their respective families,
which were full of nieces and nephews. Sure, he didn’t see his family all the
time, and Charlotte’s family was a routine but infrequent visit since they
lived eight hours away in Ohio, but that’s a lot closer than twenty-nine hours
and 2,022 miles to some nowhere desert in the center of southeastern Utah.
However, this
opportunity was too good to pass up on, so he waved goodbye to family and
friends in order to set out on an adventure.
Dave and
Charlotte’s last night in Pennsylvania was a quiet night that they spent going
out to eat at an Italian restaurant down the road. When it was over, they
returned to quietly pass the night in each other’s company without saying or
doing much else. In the end, the nervousness and the time apart filled the air
more than the feeling of romance did. They ended up lying beside one another,
just one man cuddling his “Little Spoon,” thinking about the future and talking
about when they would see one another again before they fell into restless dreams
of uncertainty.
Neither of them
knew the answer to this question, but it was the question on both of their
minds regarding the time between togetherness. A lot of seeing one another
depended on whether or not she would be coming out to do any job interviews at
the end of July or not. Nevertheless, July felt so far away from the early
spring world of May. The peonies, lilies, and irises in the garden weren’t even
really blooming yet. Just like these flowers pushing through to bloom, so many
things would have to happen before they saw one another, and all of those good
things would come at the end of the inevitable stream of time and action.
Seeing Charlotte
felt even further away on July 17th when Dave sat in the small
corner hipster café, which was called the Wooly Beard, waiting for “Wolf”
Owens. For as annoying as many of the café’s customers and employees were, they
could whip up some amazing pancakes, and Dave would be lying if he said that he
didn’t like pumpkin pancakes smothered in maple syrup.
For tasty
pancakes, he could ignore the self-righteous Millennial Generation denizens of
the café in favor of his magazines and guidebooks.
On this Sunday, Abraham
“Wolf” Owens was supposed to meet him to talk about the proposed archaeology
dig that would soon be going on in Blackrock Canyon. Wolf was never one to hold
back his thoughts, and he knew that he could talk to Dave to at least get
surface level discussions of which way the wind was blowing regarding potential
finds. Apparently, this included musings on the state of Willard Greer’s lands.
Robinson knew
that he was liked, but he was also smart enough to know that Wolf had not
endeared himself to the archaeologists of the state, which was over something
that had happened way back when at a place called Mormon Creek. However, he was
respected and feared equally in all of the things that he had done and was
willing to do. In addition, Robinson knew from discussions that Wolf was a
friend of Willard Greer, so it made no sense for him to not know what was in
the canyon unless the truth of Willard’s secrecy really was the order of
business on the ranch.
Nevertheless,
for those in the know, Abraham and Willard were thought to be “thick as
thieves,” which is how things were explained to Dave by Gary. To this, there
could be a sense that perhaps, Abraham was just wondering if the police had
discovered something back there in the canyon that they didn’t need to find.
Whatever it was, he was definitely interested in meeting up with Dave on this
sunny summer morning, which was already turning into a scorcher.
In some ways,
Dave didn’t mind being the errand boy since he idolized the sixty-seven-year
old man right from the first time he heard him discussing the comings and
goings of the Fremont people. This was one of Dave’s first true introductions
to the larger Utah area, and it was a breezy mid-May evening up in Moab with
many of the locals. He didn’t know how many people total were there, but the
room was beyond full. When the applause died down and people began to talk, he
felt he fit in a little better. Some of the anxiety of missing Charlotte and
being out in public by himself, as well as the thoughts of what would become of
this job, drifted away as he hung out with a couple of hikers named Billy
Padres, Kevin McGinn, and Suzie Heilman.
He wasn’t sure
how he ended up sitting with them. It just seemed like there was something in
Suzie’s eyes that said things to him without speaking until she spoke it all
out loud in so many words.
“Sit down, Dave.
You’re one with us. We like you. Relax. Just be yourself.”
Listening to
these words, he felt compelled to take it all in like the obedient man he was.
The trio seemed
to be a lot of fun, and they were in the process of trying to do as many hikes
as they could to the kind of places he went to and wanted to go to. Billy and
Kevin were really well-built and wiry, perfect for crazy ascents with and
without rappelling gear. The muscles they had honed in their Army days still
pushed out through their t-shirts. If their torsos were any indication of the
work they were capable of doing in the canyons, then they had serious
experience with descending and climbing rocks in the slots.
As for Suzie,
she wasn’t that hardcore of a climber. In fact, she seemed to be more the kind
of person who only went on some of the less extreme hikes for the petroglyphs,
pictures, and meditation opportunities. She talked a lot about wanting to learn
more about this canyoneering life, but at the same time, like Dave, she didn’t
seem to have a lot of upper body strength for getting up some of the steeper
ascents. However, unlike Dave, she didn’t have near the same amount of weight
to haul up the rock faces. A simple comparison showed that her stomach was flat
from ab exercises, and she didn’t need to be exercising to sweat it off in the
same way that he did. Nevertheless, Dave knew that the stories of zero calorie
chocolate iced and brownie batter-filled donuts that he told himself were all
lies. However, so far this summer, it seemed like the trail was helping him to
get back into those size thirty-four pants he hadn’t worn in a few decades. He
was a ways away, but that number was a goal in sight, at least he told himself.
The key was staying away from the mega calorie donuts, especially the ones with
filling, long enough to get slim and trim enough to think about maybe next year
getting into some rappelling or this summer looking good for when he saw
Charlotte again.
If today was a
sign of future things, all things out here were possible. In fact, after this
first meeting, the four of them connected occasionally through Facebook to get out and try to figure
out some of the places that were out there to see. It was nice to have regular
associations again, and it made Dave feel like something had brought him here.
It was almost like fate had intervened and dropped him off at this place.
This was also when
he first spoke to Abraham Owens, who personally came over to talk to the group
after his presentation was over. He had originally become acquainted with Suzie
from their shared interest in the Native American and metaphysical worlds about
a year earlier. A part of him seemed to hang on her words a little long
considering how long a normal person listens to discussions about feathers, portals,
crystals, and pyramid powers of the world.
Maybe it was because he thought that she was a rather attractive gal for
being in her early thirties at the oldest. Then again, maybe Wolf really did
have an interest in some Sedona concept of spirituality.
And yes, Suzie really
was a beautiful woman of Japanese descent. Her long dark hair complemented her
short, thin body, which definitely looked good to any man who was being honest
with the question. However, she wasn’t an exotic beauty like some bimbo with
implants, a fake tan, and a ton of makeup, let alone the stereotypical and
mysterious Asian bombshell. She just smiled in such a simple way that with what
she brought to the table, all of the guys in the room noticed her at least twice.
The first glance was for her beauty, but the second stare was the hope that she
would make eye contact with them. However, for most of the macho hikers, she
never seemed to do this. Here, it wasn’t like anyone could get upset since she
didn’t to it as a stuck up thing, but rather, it was something that didn’t
recognize her own appeal to the opposite sex in any way that said, “Take me;
I’m yours.”
After meeting
her, Dave would have agreed with all of this, at least as long as he wasn’t
pressed into a statement in the presence of his wife. Talking to wives about
female attraction was like talking about weight. No smart man did it.
For all of her
slender and exotic Japanese traits, Suzie had no Asian accent all. This was, as
he would later find out, because she was adopted by a family that relished in
their American-ness enough to demand it of their daughter. These adoptive
parents were Mormons, but she quickly realized that this religion wasn’t for
her as soon as she had a chance to experience the world and get introduced into
the various concepts of new age religion.
Unfortunately,
it took her six
more years to
abandon the chains of Mormonism for good.
For her
difficulties with her conservative upbringing, she would tell everyone who
asked that she did her best to try to spend time with the “inherited parents.”
This would either abruptly end the discussion, or she would have to tell her
inquisitors how her adoptive parents dismissed her “interests,” which led to
them disowning her and ignoring the calls that she made to them for the first
few years of their estrangement before they finally told her in that many words
to just not even try to call until she forgot about “the Devil’s trickery,”
which was their pet name for her metaphysical interests.
This had truly
hurt her at first, but over time, she tended to think about it less and less.
Now, it was clear that she was wrapped up in being a part of a larger circle of
Moabites. Billy and Kevin were cool with her because as Kevin put it, “she was
a groovy chick.” Billy would just echo the words and speak about how she was
“down” for the canyons, and they were equally down with her being their
companion on adventures.
Dave took this
to mean that they wanted to get down to business with her. Had he been a single
young man with four less inches around his midsection, he might have a shot,
but as a middle-aged, pot-bellied Eastern transplant, he figured he wouldn’t
have been as high on this hypothetical list as these young stud suitors at the
table, even with the excess amount of times that they said “dude.”
As for Wolf, he
would ask her things directly and seem to stare at her to see how she replied.
This wasn’t a stretch since she seemed to have that ballroom dancer’s gaze that
caught her partner’s attention and didn’t let go. Nevertheless, considering he
was almost twice her age, this familiarity presented itself to some people in
the room as awkward, but it was clear that Wolf wasn’t looking for “young meat,”
even if the hiker guys would have probably high-fived him for scoring such an
“impressive young chick.”
At first, Dave
thought that this could have been Wolf’s endgame; however, the longer Dave
talked to her, the more he found that she gave her undivided attention and
respect to everyone there, and it was clear that this was the standard
operating plan for most of her friendships, be they casual or deeper relationships.
Put simply, this was a woman who radiated true love to the world. It worked
well with anyone who was willing to respect her a lot, and it was clear that
Wolf felt more in regard to this than her younger suitors, so if he ended up
with the prize, so be it, Dave felt.
Nevertheless, as
time went on, it was clear Wolf wasn’t looking for this. He just really wanted
to know what she thought about things and how they “jived” with the Native
American sensibilities that he felt. Besides, he was married, even if his wife
Clara had died four years ago. Through time and distance, the ring on his
finger never left his hand.
His own personal
statement about true love and commitment, when asked about where his wife was,
impressed everyone there, even the two athletic desert rats.
“Time and
distance do nothing to erase love if it’s real, so why should life and death
offer anything other than a time between when two souls meet again in another
world?”
However, for all
the love that Owens was getting from the lecture crowd, not everyone felt that
Owens was totally without an agenda when it came to his interactions with the
younger crowd. For this, Dave knew from his boss, Gary Stanford, that it was
important to have boundaries when dealing with him because Owens, as he had
repeatedly said in many different ways, had a lawyer’s knack of getting
privileged and secret information out of people, whether they were in
government jobs or just local hikers. At the end of the day, he was a “Native
American with an Indian’s politics of doing what was best for the tribe and
himself. Damn, Whitey, if that’s what it took.”
Dave nodded
appropriately, but at the end of the day, he was his own man when it came to
making up his mind about who to trust and who not to, and like many people who
weren’t raised in such racial divisions as he was finding here, he had no
interest in judging this book by its cover. Besides, there were plenty of books
to dislike when people started opening up their pages. Here, the more he knew
Gary, the more it seemed he wasn’t very likable.
As time went by
since their meeting seven weeks ago, Dave felt that Wolf would act like a
second father to him, and it felt nice to have someone he could relate to out
here, even if he would be silent all too much for Dave to really get a read on
him. However, for the few hikes that the two men had gone on, he knew their
friendship wasn’t endearing him to Stanford.
“Boundaries. We
need to have a firm distance between our position as land managers and
protectors and people who we might have to keep at a distance from some of our
dealings.”
Dave knew that
Gary was, at least for the most part, right in this, and it was always easy to
go back to that teacher mode of being us and them, but at the same point, he
knew that most of Wolf’s interests were in the remnants of history that his
ancestors, a term that could seem broad and general to many people, left behind
in the deep recesses of the canyons out behind the desert highways of this
forbidding desert land.
Dave also knew
that Wolf upset a lot of professional men and women off because he carried the
business cards of Juan Cortez, a lawyer that had plenty of interest in
discussing the finer parts of NAGPRA and the history of discrimination and
violence against Native American people and interests. Much of Cortez’s
discussions were designed to either quickly stop things or impede government
interests in getting things done. However, he wasn’t doing it to be a jerk
since he did have interests in letting the right people into the right places,
but there was a side of him that didn’t mind being the heavy when it came to
getting “gringos” and “honkies” away from burial grounds.
Being around
skeletons was Cortez’s big fear. On the obvious hand, it was a desecration of
the dead, but on the other hand it represented how, to him, a person had two
spirits. One stayed around and walked the earth after the other vanished. Even
though it was the culture of many Native Americans and accepted as a truth
because of its place in religion, it didn’t mean that it didn’t scare Wolf to
the core, too. He knew that these ideas scared many tribes as well. Some Native
Americans just understood how much jealousy that the dead had for the living.
As a result, tribes like the Apache incinerated the houses and property of the
dead after burying the bodies quickly. Other historical examples saw tribes
barricade skeletons in their homes so that they would be stuck in these places
instead of getting out in the open.
Some situations
called for the extreme.
Wolf was torn
between ancient customs and modern traditions. He knew that the Native
Americans as a whole had no agreement on the right way to do things, but he
wished that more tribes would have either buried the bodies further away or cremated
them. He also loved the images of the ancestral cliff dwellings, but he wished
that they, too, had disintegrated into the dust of time.
“The Ghost World
Kingdom is just too powerful to still exist in modern times. Besides, there are
many kingdoms built on top of one another. It’s like a high-rise building with
many basements below what you can see. That’s the really scary stuff.”
Because they
were still there, he knew that it didn’t matter what he thought should have
happened throughout the eons of history. Owens would always state how these
historical places were not an amusement park for tourists from the cities to
come and play in. They weren’t open season for academics looking to gaze deeply
into the eye sockets of these former tribesmen and women’s skulls either. They
were graves, pure and simple. Travelers need not enter into them.
And somehow,
these intruders always found the ghostly remains of those haunted, mesmerizing
eyes, which seemed to lure them in until they were gone and never able to come
back. It was like they had stared into the fire and were now consumed in the
sins of the past. The darkest souls always were.
To Owens,
skeletons also weren’t meant to be stored in boxes in a basement of the local
museum, with or without their heads, and their homes definitely weren’t meant
to be vandalized, covered in graffiti, turned into party central, or emptied of
all significant remnants so that they could be a site for local school kids to
be mandated to see. He always talked about packs of kids yanked out of their
brick and mortar learning centers to travel on buses to go on a
field trip to learn about some token example of “cultural” history. To him,
there was nothing that could be gained in the hopes that they could learn
something Americanized about an ancient people from long, long ago before they
were actually trained and ready to be there, learning about it from someone who
believed in it and knew the appropriate cultural understandings.
“And willing!”
Wolf would always say at the end of these discussions, which he would be
dragged into over and over.
With this,
Cortez would always laugh, and they would clank glasses in agreement to all
things.
These places
were graveyards with more sense of all things mysterious and nightmarish than
he could begin to explain, so instead, he said nothing to potential visitors
who didn’t seem to get it except to “stay the hell out!” or “go wrap yourself
in turquoise until you’re down with your 1/64th Native American
side, you asshole liberal.”
“The white
liberal is the V.D. of the revolution,” Cortez would snicker, and then he and
Wolf would
laugh and carry on
when the offended party would run for his or her Prius.
Just like Wolf,
Cortez had as little use for most gringos as Bill Smith had for hippies. While
neither Cortez nor Wolf liked Smith or many of the other ranchers of the mesas,
all of them did have a lot of the same stubborn, pig-headedness about people
who had no business in the desert. Anyone could travel through and do the
National Park circuit, but not everyone could or should stay here – even if
they contacted a realtor to buy a home complete with air conditioning and every
other modern amenity, cash up front.
“Rest in peace,
Glen Canyon,” Cortez would add to every discussion they ever had about the
sprawling cities of the Colorado Plateau, and it was said that he would always
cry a little bit for all of the things lost in that great submerging of
civilizations. As he did this, he would align himself with the true desert
rats; white, black or brown, and the Native Americans, since only they knew
what it was like to lose such important places to jet skiing tourists and
bureaucratic officials sent to “do good for the Injuns.”
Through it all, Cortez’s
gringo insults would slip out often, but it wasn’t a universal term for all
white men in the region. In fact, it was known that he got along well with
Willard Greer and a few of the other ranchers who understood what it meant to
be a man living in this particular desert, even if they didn’t play poker or
watch football together. On the two occasions that Dave met with
Cortez, they got along well enough because Dave showed respect to Cortez’s
outlooks, mostly by shutting up about his opinion on them. In addition, Cortez
respected Dave since he helped gather evidence against local college kids who
were using some of the cliff dwellings as places to hold beer and dope parties.
Neither Wolf nor
Cortez had any use for this modern peace pipe to be passed around, especially
when some of the ancient fireplaces were getting used for modern bonfires for
teenagers to hang out and get stoned at.
“When you get
stoned, you give a part of yourself away to the thieves and creatures who want
to exploit you,” Cortez would say, and then he would laugh as he was caught
drinking his beer. Wolf would laugh back at him, drinking his own beer until
the men were singing merrily about better days, whether they happened last week
or 800 years ago. Nevertheless, for all of their drinking and carousing, they
never touched any drugs, even marijuana.
Partying in the
ancient sites, with or without substances, was something that was completely
anathema for all three of these men. They clearly knew that people just
shouldn’t start making themselves at home at cliff dwellings that had been
covered in the dusty sleep of ages. Just because All-American Joe felt it would
be some cool, transcendental experience, which he felt was well within his
personal liberty to enjoy, Cortez was more than happy to tell this person or
any other people, and he did tell other people often, to go and “get stuffed”
over their “feelings” and asinine interpretations of libertarian desert
politics. If that didn’t work, he too was willing to point and aim his .357
revolver at them.
This always
worked, and rumor around Moab was that he had even fired, albeit intentionally
wild, at some “disrespectful asshole,” one time. Whether that was true, it
didn’t matter. The story did its job to chill people out around him.
When it came to his
name-making actions, Dave had spied this aforementioned activity on one of his
overnight hikes into Wild Horse Pass, a recently popularized canyon to the west
of Moab. A national magazine had printed a story about how “cool” it was since it
offered pictures of the constricting canyon and some of the ancient Native American
remains. Of course, the magazine did this with the small print disclaimer that
people needed to leave these things as they found them, but even if they were
in blazing, huge neon letters, the ethics of Leave No Trace don’t apply to
people who serve only their own interests, especially when the warning is
buried at the bottom of the page and the readers’ minds are raging full on with
“neat-o, man!” thoughts of getting in there as some “rite of passage”
experience.
Unfortunately,
unlike the Stampede Trail in Alaska, there was less opportunity to end up as
dead as Chris McCandless was at the end of his journey. This was something Dave
had read about since the site of McCandless’ pilgrimage was now a deathtrap for
hikers with more money than commonsense.
On that fateful
day, when Dave and his hiking buddy Harry Fultz came upon the men, the partiers
seemed to be non-confrontational enough and deeply spaced from the substances they were
imbibing. Thus, it seemed
easy to pass by, while just sort of kind of taking some pictures of the area
and getting just enough frontal images of the men and their actions in the
photos. When he returned home, Dave got the pictures to authorities who
utilized facial recognition software to find out who the vandals were. With
this, the police arrested the offenders and brought big fines and big news to
the plateau as well as a nationwide name and shame campaign to scare off any
more offenders before they dared to think about doing anything so stupid and
disrespectful. It’s amazing how quickly things like this can happen when the
right people know the right people and social media catches hold of that.
Such is the
nature of not conforming to the gospel of Leave No Trace or just heeding
President Obama’s message to not do stupid stuff.
For his actions
in Wild Horse Pass and in spite of his friendship with Owens, Dave was a rising
star at the office and a hero / narc within the community. If this were
baseball, he would have been the agency’s Rookie of the Month for his first
month in office. Like his favorite baseball player, Bryce Harper, he was
equally loved and hated while being scorned for playing the game of veterans by
his own rules. Despite this, it seemed that the right people liked him, but
there were other community members, people who didn’t understand the need for
tough laws on drugs, let alone oversight by a liberal leaning nanny state for
the Native American sites. This was especially true when there were so many
around that to some, “it seemed like if you went out in the canyons, you
couldn’t help tripping over ancient pottery and arrowheads in some worn out
dwelling or other.” Many of these mega-landowners also took a disliking to the
many Eastern transplants like Dave telling them what to do on their own land,
and there was even a fear that Dave could end up shot, though that mostly
seemed to pass, despite receiving hate mail on a continuous basis.
And what’s
worse, while it was their right to have whatever stupid opinion they wanted,
they always had their shotguns and itchy trigger fingers with them, too. What’s
more, many of them knew the best places to hide bodies when they skipped threat
and went straight to execution. Dave realized that at some point in time, he
might open his front door and stare down the barrel of a 9mm pistol and get
filled full of lead without so much as a hello.
It didn’t take
long living in Utah to know that making people vanish was an easy task, and it
didn’t take long being in the crosshairs of wacko s to think about
maybe moving to Idaho and not dealing with people anymore.
All in all, what
this came down to was that for the good that this did for Dave, this series of
arrests came across as really bad when what he was essentially saying was that the
government is allowed to take land away from good old American conservative and
home grown people who just wanted to make a living here in the desert where
they had lived their entire lives.
“Why shouldn’t I
be allowed to do that when these Injun painters and builders is long since
dust? Is it cuz I’m not some Eastern transplant with a Brooks Brothers shirt
and tie and a lot of money? Fuck you, ya bastard! Make me leave!”
On top of that,
there were other locals who didn’t give a hoot about Leave No Trace, and they
would leave their garbage behind or flip off, tell off, or square off (or all three
at once) with anyone who dared to say anything about their desire to “urinate”
all over these places like they were some sick dog looking to mark its
territory. It didn’t seem logical to Dave, but to some degree, it also felt
like another opportunity for the white man to suppress or destroy Native
American culture, the wilderness, or anyone else’s property, which they didn’t
respect.
There was still
enough selfishness and racism in this desert area to be palpable.
In addition to
the drunken trailer trash / redneck vandals of the region, there were a lot of hippie
/ artsy / strange people interested in the metaphysical parts of the region.
Some of them were sincere and good natured people like Suzie, who approached it
as a spiritual religion, and others were misguided with conspiracies or based
somewhere out of their minds on acid, psychedelics, and other drugs. Others
were complete hucksters. As for Suzie, her new age interests seemed harmless to
many people since they mirrored many of the ideas on shows such as American Paranormal and Historical Unearthings, the two biggest
purveyors of “alternative” history beyond what the “mainstream scholars” were
willing to accept. Whether Dave believed them or not, they at least were
interesting television.
A part of him
subscribed to the world of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan’s skepticism, and
he really wanted to be smart enough about science to see the extreme joys in
how much neater science was than science fiction, but a part of him just
couldn’t grasp the mechanics of science well enough to move beyond the black
and white space ship movies and monster flicks that he would watch at his
grandmother’s house when he was a kid. Those and ghost shows like The Demon Hunters of Dodge County were
exciting programming, even if they did appear to be 100% bullshit.
Nevertheless, he
just loved the irrational world, so he spent more time with that than with PBS.
This wasn’t to
say Dave didn’t spend time with science in passing. He did, and he accepted it for
the truth of the scholars, but his mindset just never moved well enough with studying
for physics, chemistry, and biology to process the knowledge. Instead, he loved
history and the aesthetic qualities of the world, so he appreciated these
scientific marvels for making that possible. Despite his academic deficiencies in
science, he was definitely more than capable of calling bullshit on people who
tried to speak science without understanding it. This aided him greatly in
reading and grading student research papers in his now suspended life as a
professor.
It would be fair
to say, as well, that when Suzie spoke about this other scientific reality, he
was captivated by her commitment and understanding of the paranormal and
metaphysical realms. Sure, other guys would listen because they appreciated her
feminine form to the point that they wanted to see it naked, but Dave really
was enraptured by the way that the everyday and spiritual worlds could be
navigated in these other ways, even though he never thought of them as “real.”
Granted, he couldn’t understand it any more than he understood the chemical
reaction that made photosynthesis possible, but just like with that process
summarized, he got the quick overview of what this was all about and nodded in
agreement.
Even if it
wasn’t his spirituality, and there was nothing he could do to make it so, he
appreciated that it was her philosophical / religious understanding of the
universe, and listening and learning about it was pretty “right on” to him.
While he could
appreciate some of the new age stuff, at least the stuff that wasn’t hippie
dippy or con artist in nature, what he deliberately steered away from was all
the satanic cults that frequented the area. Sure, many of them were just messed
up kids looking to rebel against the rules of their parents, but some of them
reeked of pure evil. This was true whether they were red-blooded Americans or
Native Americans, since they were more than just teenagers and twenty-something
Millennials getting stoned, vandalizing things, or committing acts of petty
thievery. These groups represented a seedy underbelly that was out here in the
recesses of the desert. Like some of the geysers at Yellowstone, they spent
years bubbling, and eventually they came to the surface before they just blew
over once and for all with every bit of their destructive forces going at once.
The biggest of
these was a story about what began as a mid-concert animal sacrifice at a club
called the Cauldron. Located smack dab in conservative Salt Lake City, this incident
occurred in December 2014, and because of the intensity of it, it had been
national news. Dave wondered how it had occurred, and then he wondered how the
slender man on the stage managed to kill two people and injure four more with
just a single knife before the people in the nightclub tackled him and beat him
into the stage. Most people who looked at the man, Lester Grimsley, wouldn’t
have taken him for much of anything, but something inside of him took on a
characteristic of animal rage, and it left shock and awe and dead bodies in its
wake.
In the
conservative / religious communities of eastern Pennsylvania with their large
populations of traditional Americans and their Amish and Mennonite neighbors,
it served as a cautionary tale for the evils of death metal, which was
something that hadn’t been seen since Bob Dole’s outrage at Cannibal Corpse and
the PMRC’s rage against many other bands like Twisted Sister and Frank Zappa,
as well as other lesser bands who were too numerous to list. Sure, Lester Grimsley
might have been some dude whacked out on bath salts, but there was something
else at play there, too. When Dave saw the articles and the TV blips, it was
like they were placed there in the MSN headlines for him to see. Even from as
far as he was from it, it scared him into some sense of what good and evil
really were. While he didn’t always go to church, he was there when the homily
discussed that incident.
From something
that seemed to begin as just a quick little glance in between signing into Facebook and getting to his wall, this
story stood out for the better part of a slow news week in between discussions
of who was primed to still be there in the summer of 2016 when the two parties
nominated the next great President of the United States. With seeing the
choices of Trump and Hillary for the country’s leader, life was scary enough,
but seeing the image of Lester Grimsley scared the bejesus out of him.
He couldn’t see
any of those people who were already in office, let alone The Donald or Clinton,
understanding how to deal with someone like Grimsley other than to sweep him
under the rug for the peons to deal with. At best, the angrier reactionary ones
would execute him quickly while the pro-lifers would reflect on how all life
was sacred or it was a worse punishment if we let Lester rot in jail forever.
In the end, despite being hidden away, Grimsley’s memory would still linger as
people just found more ways to deify or vilify a serial killer.
Dave wasn’t so
sure what the answer was, so he left it to the higher pay grade to decide. All
the same, he correctly figured that most of America wouldn’t give a hoot
tomorrow if someone electrocuted Grimsley today. Oh, people would get
self-righteous and full of themselves over ethics, but Dave knew that most
guilt-based ethics were the privilege of the rich or the young and emotional,
and as far as Dave was concerned, he would be happy to see them shove their
politically correct gibberish up their holier than thou asses.
As of the summer
of 2016, Lester was currently sitting in Uinta 1, a maximum security prison in
Utah, for these actions and many other incidents that had mysteriously come to
light after his capture / hospitalization. His behavior on trial, a series of
guttural screams and threats to everyone there and anyone who had any degree of
power, from his nursery school teachers to the current President of the United
States, revealed that he had more problems than inhaling bath salts like they
were a handful of Halloween candy. By the time it was over, everyone in Salt
Lake City and the trial’s lawyers, both those who were charging him and
representing him, seemed more than happy to abandon him to his fate of being
the subject of endless late night television jokes and life in solitary
confinement while in prison.
Dave remembered
a conversation that he had with his teacher friend Terry about this. It seemed
odd that even Grimsley’s own lawyers appeared to not to be trying as hard as
people would normally expect in a trial with death penalty ramifications.
Nevertheless, the conversation, which evolved out of a news flash on the TV
while they were out at a local restaurant discussing their semester, quickly
went back to the coming baseball season.
Better to
discuss Mike Trout, Jose Altuve, Clayton Kershaw, and the Cubs’ World Series
chances with Jake Arrieta on the mound than to spend too much time with
politics or current events.
In the end, for
as sick and twisted as Lester was, he wasn’t a part of Dave’s life. Reacting to
his comings and goings was about as interesting for most people as discussing
the life and times of the various groups of ultra-rich reality TV subjects or
the myriads of flash in the pan actors and actresses that made the daily burst
of paparazzi news. Dave would often kid Charlotte about her interest in their
divorces, childbirths, fashion attire, or stance on public issues in 140
characters of slacktivistic actions via the social media world. That said, it
should also be mentioned that when it came to Dave’s interest in random baseball
players, musicians, historic figures, and the murder / politics world that he
would read about on the news, it was obvious when Charlotte tuned out.
However, there
was the time around the trial’s verdict when the national news did a special on
the burgeoning death metal scene in Salt Lake City. Here, they juxtaposed the
conservative Mormon community with teenagers / twenty-something teens with long
hair, tattoos, and face paint. The video was heavy on the doom metal / funeral
dirge and extreme thrash metal sung with demon voice. The producers worked hard
to dig up about 10% real information, at best, to go with the subjective images
of screwed up kids / sensationalism that went with the story. This was an
accomplishment for each and every one of them. To this, Dave remarked how news
pundits like Kerry Morgan only ran with 5% facts. He didn’t say this to
belittle her as he knew she was smart enough to know her audience, and besides,
5% facts for them was a good thing. These were people who wanted to be sensationalized
to when it came to news. Facts are optional in a world of confirmation bias, so
let’s just run with good and evil in terms as simple to define as kids with
white painted faces, jet black hair, tattoos, and leather still exhibiting
pentagrams and upside down crosses like it was the mid-1980s and Slayer really
wanted people to still “believe” that they were Satanic. This was an audience
that wanted to hate this man Grimsley and his murderous actions for the fact
they were the work of Lucifer. And when it was over, they would clutch their
Bibles in church, tighter than they did before, and they would continue to know
that because they were able to hate this stuff from the safety of hundreds to
thousands of miles away, they would be assured a place in Heaven for it.
There are just
some places where the words of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God” are still interpreted as gospel and not a cautionary tale.
TV specials like
this were common in the months leading up to the April 2016 trial. Lester’s
trial really came quickly by all standards, even though a year and a half is a
long time for something so open and shut, especially when the defendant isn’t
declaring him or herself insane. However, as the law mandated it, he was given
his fair day in court. When it came, the biggest hitch was that the defense
lawyers made sure that trial took place in Denver since the whole state of Utah
was way too charged over the incidents that happened inside of the state.
Charlotte’s reaction to most of these types of discussions about the news was
to nod appropriately, but here, she reacted differently when it seemed that
Moab and some of the areas around Arches, Canyonlands, and Mesa Verde were now starting to notice a presence of more
people that fit the Grimsley demographic being seen in the park. At first, it
seemed like it could be based on someone who created a script that was based on
the popularity of the ghost and alien shows on the higher numbered cable
channels, but the reality soon seemed to be looking like the details of this
case were something else.
One park ranger
referred to the new concerns as “assholes on drugs who were on reconnaissance
missions” to find odd petroglyphs that looked like cryptids, aliens, or people
with six-toed feet, even though he “most definitely didn’t buy their off the wall trip justifications” since the amount of drug,
littering, and vandalism arrests increased in the same way that backcountry
rescues did.
“The science
fiction world has placed a shadow on what our researchers and employees view as
the sensible and logical understanding of the pre-Columbian world of the Four
Corners Region. This new trend of entering into sacred and historical lands to
deliberately misinterpret and destroy ancient art for the purpose of
sensationalizing a violent criminal is completely at odds with what we in the
National Park Service hold dear.”
These images of
the extra toes were common enough, and Charlotte remembered how she and Dave
saw them at Newspaper Rock, which was a small highly-concentrated petroglyph
area located by Canyonlands. However, she didn’t understand the coyotes that
were mentioned specifically as being things that many of these “other” new
groups of people were said to be looking for. With this, the conversation went
from an inquiry into what Dave knew about these images (little more than
nothing) to whether it unnerved him that he would have to deal with these “wackadoos,”
which was the term his aunt used to refer to the
motley collection of people she was forced to deal with at her job working in a
local clothing outlet.
Dave just made a
face to the effect of “don’t know / never thought about it / cross that bridge when I
get to it[,” and with that, they went back to the discussion
of their respective work days and the early spring flowers that were pushing
through in the garden.
By the beginning
of May, when both the end of the trial and Dave’s wait time to leave for Utah
ended, the world tuned in again. Whether it was over drugs or being considered
schizophrenic, Lester was quickly sentenced for being involved in the multiple
murders, attempted murders, and butchering the animal on the concert stage.
Some of these other magically-solved cases were robbery-related and others were
assault-related. In addition, two women mysteriously appeared from the shadows
to come forward to say that they had been raped and cut or carved by him.
“So you were
stabbed?”
“No, he drew
pentagrams on us with a knife. See?” the woman said, pulling up her top to expose
a huge pentagram with a monstrous looking goat in the middle of it.
A huge gasp came
from the courtroom, and the judge called the court to order again.
It was like
Lester’s luck just fell through the floor and hit rock bottom in one quick
swoop. When all of the charges were brought together, he had well over a decade
to sit on death row during his appeals process for being a “rotten to the core animal with
no respect for human beings, much less animals.” The judge who gave the
sentence and the lawyers looked on at him the way that the Los Angeles County
Hall of Justice’s inhabitants must have viewed Charles Manson, Susan Atkins,
Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten. In fact, the judge personally noted
how he hoped that the powers that be would speed things up to do away with his
ilk much faster and save this great country some money.
At the time
though, nobody seemed to be willing to appeal the case as anything more than a
formality, as if there were any grounds for it, and there were no complications
since there was an excessive amount of video shot from multiple angles. In a
world with tons of cell phones, it seems like this was a time that all of the
evidence led to an open and closed case that even the staunchest of right to life supporters was willing to step
aside.
In addition to
these things, what the story of Lester Grimsley really did other than take one
seriously disturbed college-aged kid off the streets was to resurface the
stories of southeastern Utah’s “lost” past. This past all seemed to come from
the myths and legends of what made people abandon their cliff dwellings and get
out of Dodge on a moment’s notice. The easy, convenient truth was long-term
droughts, but there were other clever and extreme conspiratorial solutions to
go with those that were based in politically-incorrect facts. Even the
historians who took their research seriously were coming back with strange
tales of Aztlan and cannibalism and holocausts, which clearly had more
historical accuracy than many of the TV tales, but which were still far removed
from what most educated people were willing to accept as gospel truth.
All the same, rumors
had persisted in the area for years that bad things had gone down many moons
ago. Nobody really knew what they were, but Dave and Charlotte would reflect on
how novel and fun some of these ideas were. Some TV shows would have people
talk about an alien evil. Other people talked about demonic possession. Still
others talked about this being inter-tribal hatred that flowed like some cases
of modern day racism. Whatever it was, drought, the paranormal, tribal warfare,
or just a need to move to a climate where there were more seasons than “hot and
exceptionally hot and dry as hell,” there were serious yarns to spin and books
to write about it. Granted, the paranormal ideas would sell more than the idea
of a drought would, but for whatever the reasons, there was a book that was
waiting to be written by whoever felt like he or she had the credentials on
this given day.
A perfect
example was the one less than politically correct author who stated, “The
ancient Aztecs were up here long before their blood-thirsty ways descended on
Mexico in those bloodlust scenes that pulled the hearts out of many a
sacrificial victim. We can only imagine the reality of the centuries old crime
scenes that Christy Turner investigated. Places like Awat’ovi now stand as a
reminder to just how necessary it was to deal with these Indians the way we
did, politically correct or not. Granted, Wounded Knee was a terrible memory,
but so too were places like Cowboy Wash. Better to save civilized American
lives than to let these naked heathens eat the flesh of those that their warlike ways killed.”
The arguments attempting
to define these historical artifacts tended to believe so many extreme things about
this paranormal desert world. In the end, it always went back to having three reasons to explain the odd petroglyphs
that provided much of the modern evidence. The first was a need to be creative.
This is understandable, but where did the scary images that these men and women
created come from? Certainly there was a reality that they were based on, but
what was it? Thus, the second reason was that these drawings were actually
people in costumes. This seemed logical as well, but why would they dress up
this way if they weren’t trying to emulate something?
The failure of
emulation to clearly identify the reason led to the last reason, which was a person having shamanic visions that originated from
the artist being on hallucinogenic drugs. There was plenty of evidence for
this, so it seemed to be a great way to make sense of the situation and
multiply it with sensationalism for the entertainment outlets with their modern
need to be scary and science fiction at the same time.
However, as to
whether it was real, nobody had a clue. There was no way-back machine to go
there and figure it out, so it just seemed neat for a lot of historical, anthropological, and creative types to try to
contemplate.
And Dave did contemplate
it since he saw himself writing the book on Grimsley and this
phenomenon in time. He joked with Charlotte about how if the stories held true
and it really was something evil and horrible, then he would get rich and
famous writing about it. Seeing as she wasn’t willing to give in to his desire
to become a demonologist, a la the Warrens, he was looking to do something to
expand his dreams of an interesting life that people could and would talk about
while getting rich and famous.
And it was
dreams of things like this that led him to wanting to be friends with guys like
Wolf and gals like Suzie Heilman. He could learn about the hiking, the history,
and the occult deal mixed with the Native American take and the New Age
understanding all at once. Two people didn’t make every single one of a book’s credentialed
sources, but this could be something that would help him get more information
and ideas, and then he and Charlotte could find themselves on a Polynesian
beach in Bora Bora, sipping cocktails and doing nothing much else. It could
also see him not having to teach and to just write full time. This might also
allow him to replace the Reliable Mobile out with a new four-door Jeep Wrangler
with a canvas top in lime green color.
There were so
many options, but first he had to have the chance to become a great writer who
published a book worth reading.
That was the
life, but that was also a future life in 2018 or somewhere down the line. He
could wait for that since he knew he could dream about it until then, but he
also had to find a way to pay the bills in the meantime.
That was the job
in public relations with the Bureau of Land Management. It wasn’t perfect, but
it definitely worked.
And so it was
that on that first night he met Wolf, he asked about these “lost tribes of the
Southwest,” phrasing it like they were the equivalent of some Biblical group
thrust out of Israel way back when, and both Owens and Suzie quietly focused on
him. Billy and Kevin had heard the stories, too, and they were inquisitive, but
they never really needed to hear the answers, just a goal of making some
semblance of conversation about some “bitchin’ ass gnarly canyon that needed
conquered.”
As for the
reaction to what was just said when Dave’s words came out, they were all
sternly rebuked with a cool as cucumbers quote from Wolf about how not to
“believe everything you hear. We Native Americans are known to lie to you
honkies left and right to send you down the wrong path… because we can, you
know? Besides, if there’s really evil back in any of the canyons, and if it’s
real evil, not just made up evil, you’d do best not to go out there and mess
with it on your own or at all for that matter.”
With that, the
group laughed nervously.
Suzie spoke next
stating, “When you speak to evil as if it were on your level, it gets to come
whenever it wants. There’s an element of control that evil gets when you name
it.”
“Dude!” Billy
said, looking at Kevin. “Watch out for vampires!”
Kevin looked at
her, and quickly told everyone that, “Vampires now, they’re not the cool image
played by Bela Lugosi. No way are those anemic, pasty, metrosexual vampires
getting in my house, even if someone else pays for the DVD and brings the beer
and her hot rockin’ bod for some sweaty summer lovin’!”
“I remember some
great movies from when I was a kid that warned not to let them in the door,
Dude.”
“Unless your
childhood was in the early 1970s or before, it’s the same difference, man. Same
difference. Cool vampires end with Christopher Lee.”
Owens cut off
their pop culture discussion with the last word.
“It applies
equally to all of the evils of the Colorado Plateau as well as the evils of
suburban society way back there in Dave’s Pennsylvania world of houses that all
look the same as one another. Evil doesn’t need to be a monster to permeate its
diabolical schemes on the world. If you don’t think you can trust something or
someone, don’t.”
“How did you
know I was from Pennsylvania, Wolf? I never told you this. Are you psychic or
something?”
“No, but you did
use the phrase ‘Nice to meet yous guys.’ What sensible person says that? Only a
person who comes from a place where they have a war over whether it’s ‘pop’ or
‘soda,’ that’s who!”
They all laughed
and went back to their conversations about Native American culture and hiking
expeditions into the late hours of the evening.
For the rest of
the evening, nobody ever mentioned the term “metrosexual” or any other love
stories involving vampires again, let alone asked whether it was pop or soda.
Obviously, Wolf knew the answer to the question was that it didn’t matter.
People should just drink beer instead.
NNNN
After that first
night in Moab and the success of his actions against the vandals, Dave got
invited to spend time with leaders on the reservation where the incident
occurred and to shake hands and talk with other men from the universities and
the various government organizations. This cut into some of his time in trying
to see the local canyons, but it was OK, at least at first. It made him feel
less lonely, and it took his mind off of some of his anxiety and depression.
This condition had been there with him for all of his days. For the last few
years, he had been taking meds for this, and they worked to a degree, but the
only thing that really worked to get his mind off of his existential troubles
was having fun things to do where he didn’t think about things like how much he
missed Charlotte or if the job would work out or if he left the stove on or if
Satanists and rednecks who would love to get a chance to kill him or someone
like him finally had the opportunity to do so. It sounded weird to wonder if
people were really hiding back in the corners of the canyons with his name on
their hit list, but it had happened when he was out and about before, so he was
advised to tread softly and carry a big stick, though he chose chemicals over a
pistol because he didn’t want to be “that guy” packing like it was the Wild
West, when it was really only a drunken asshole.
He thought of
that moment and the power of a can of Mace, and he contemplated what it was
like to have to defend himself when the moment came. To put it simply, this
scared the shit out of him.
Since that time,
driving the endless nothing between places in the desert multiplied these
feelings into some pretty bad obsessions, but at least he had the bear mace.
Now, when that
wasn’t going on, if he wanted, he could be connecting with all the right people
in such a way that would allow him to find future promotions and to be able to
write this grand historical novel that was his self-proclaimed destiny. It all
sounded so good, but he still missed sitting close to Charlotte, holding her
tightly, and he wasn’t sure the Colorado Plateau was the right place for them
to be snuggling on the couch contemplating life when there were other great places
out there, too.
To the contrary,
Dave knew she liked the lands of the Colorado Plateau because they had been
there several times including the year before. That was when they took their
trip to Horseshoe Canyon to see the Holy Ghost Panel. This seemed to seal the
deal on coming to this part of the world, but the complete absence of anything
substantial for miles and miles from Moab to the canyon led Dave to obsess how
she was only going to be down for a short stay here with him before she called
for another move back to the flat lands of Pennsylvania. Then again, if he was
really wanting to move, and she would convince him that he was, they would go back
to her home lands of Ohio.
In short, this
job was only something that he felt he could do until the opportunity for a
great job back East fell into his lap, and when it did, he would take it so
that she could have her golden years, too.
To the average
person, there’s only so long someone can live without the shady leaves of a
forest of maples and oaks playing host to the deer and bears and other forest
critters of a world where seasons exist. Even Dave knew that was true.
In the meantime,
in his empty time without Charlotte, he often thought of the feelings that
flowed on that amazing day at Horseshoe Canyon. It had been his dream to be
there, and then he was finally there. It had been his dream to find a beautiful
and intelligent woman who would love him for who he was, and then he got to be
with that woman, feeling and expressing love, through good times and bad. This
was especially true on those vacation days in the desert.
Vacation time
was always a seemingly perfect time since essays that needed grading, all the
other have-to things, and what money that they did or didn’t have didn’t really
matter. Neither did outstanding family concerns or television gossip. It was
all just them, and they felt young and in love, contemplating their past and
their future together, even though half of their lives had already taken place
in their middle-aged existence.
It was always a
known fact that the trip was going to be magical, but the dirt road into Horseshoe
Canyon took forever to get back to where the good stuff was located. Simply
put, there was a lot of waiting around to find out how awesome it really was
going to be. The road itself was thirty miles of very slow driving, which drove
Charlotte bonkers. That was hardly a time that they wanted to remember, but then,
when their rental car thankfully came to a stop, still in one piece, they were
there. Even after getting to the trailhead, they still had to hike down 780
steep feet to the canyon floor. Yeah, that was long, too, but the three and a
half mile hike that happened after it really was beautiful.
As they walked
and looked at the walls of the canyon and the vegetation in there, they
reflected how out in the middle of nowhere this place was. As they walked to
the petroglyphs, they thought about how all of the obstacles that went with getting
into the canyon kept a lot of people out of there. These were people who might want to damage the priceless
artifacts. If truth be told, they were really priceless artifacts that should
have been protected by armed guard.
The art in this
canyon were 2,500 to 4,000 years old, dating from the Late Archaic Period. The
guide who was with them also told them that, “They are referred to as Barrier
Style, which is the former name of this canyon. This canyon was used for mining
purposes before Canyonlands made this a part of their National Park to specifically
take in the ancient petroglyphs and pictographs. That act of protection was the
best thing they could do because it made sure that the images were protected
before they were damaged by some uncouth vandal. The Four Corners has already
lost enough of them to paint brushes and gun shots and chisels.”
In the minds of
most hikers, Dave included, “uncouth” was a nice, professional word for
“bitch-ass mother fuckin’ piece of shit.” He thought of some additional strung
together profanity that would rival that of Ice-T or any other first rate
“player-hater,” but he chose not to say any of them in the presence of the
guide. Instead, he reflected on the thoughts of what the canyon meant to
history, Utah, and the Native Americans.
Those were
happier thoughts.
And when he did,
he realized that history has seen many places damaged, and it’s horrible and
rotten to think of people who would spend days kicking over the stones that
made up the old Celtic cross, which was the shape of the stone monuments at
Avebury in southern England. Dave had admired the stones that were left there
when he went to England in his younger days on a family vacation. He loved
these stones for the architecture, and he loved them for the culture they
represented. When he went to these places, he was excited to learn and be a
part of it, and it was an education that he took back home to learn even more
about. This was his best souvenir of his family’s trips.
Through all of
his journeys, places like this helped him to commit to his goals of protecting
the world’s historic resources by learning about them and sharing their wonder
with like-minded souls.
Other people,
however, didn’t feel the same, and for this, it broke his heart every time that
he heard about incidents like religious and historic sites and museums in the
Middle East being ransacked by terrorist scum like ISIS and the Taliban.
However, these historic worlds, former places like the Arch of Triumph at
Palmyra and the Bamiyan Valley Buddahs, were a million miles away from the
history of his own country, so he did what he could to experience his own
heritage before erosion and the elements got to it. Fortunately, here, there
weren’t any “religious” groups that were hell bent on destroying the past, at
least yet, or maybe it was the fact that he wanted to believe there weren’t any
people like this here yet. To Dave, the real enemies were forces of nature,
which did a number on places like the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire.
The bigger concern was problems with things like the piles of trash that
adorned the parking lots of many great trails of the east, such as many of the
Pennsylvania entrances to the Appalachian Trail.
Nevertheless, it
wasn’t those thoughts of what shouldn’t be that filled his mind when he thought
back to the trip that Charlotte and he took to Horseshoe Canyon. This was a
magic time when Dave’s obsessions and worries and anxieties didn’t plague him.
Instead, the day was all about holding hands and marveling at real art, not the
cruddy modern variety, while wandering through the mega canyons and looking up
at the images of the “Holy Ghost” and all of his other assorted ancient friends
and thinking about how he, Dave, had been directed to it by a book that he once
read. This book, Desert Solitaire,
had talked about these horrifying, yet beautiful images of American prehistory.
Looking at these art works like they were the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,
Dave and Charlotte both agreed that they seemed to be more alien than demonic,
as some people would claim that they were. However, Dave wasn’t putting that
truth past the artists who left the images of faceless visitors on the walls of
their canyon. Through this
transcendence, he thought as well how the author, another former Pennsylvanian
named Edward Abbey, must have been right about this art panel telling
trespassers to not come here for their own good. These images of phantoms were
creatures that were there a long time ago, but these monsters might come again,
so watch out and beware! Take your pictures, and take this knowledge back to
your everyday world, and while you’re at it, don’t come back because I don’t
want you screwing up my private sanctuary or worse, getting yourself killed by
these evil creatures.
I’ve got better
things to do than go on corpse retrieval missions.
In thinking back
to the canyon’s art, Dave wondered if there was something else in the artist’s
intent of these works, a warning perhaps: Prepare for their visit better than
we did by seeing what you will be up against and learning how to fight it.
Yeah, other than
those weird feelings he took in while looking at those petroglyphs, that day
was a beautiful moment in his own personal history. It was a night when Dave
and Charlotte camped out under a billion stars. Eventually they fell asleep
beneath the fluffy clouds of the Milky Way, thinking about all of the good
things that transpired in the seven years of their marriage. The future didn’t
matter because they were together, and with that, they fell asleep, two sweaty,
sunburnt bodies intertwined in the desert heat with the sounds of life all
around them to let them know they were just two small parts in a larger world
where even though supposed life was so far away, it really wasn’t.
And here they
were, and everything was good with one kiss for every star in the sky, which
still didn’t even begin to equal just how much he loved this amazing woman.
NNNN
But that trip
was over a year ago. The time that represented now was a different reality that
he looked at as a reason to have never left Pennsylvania without his wife in
the first place. Back home, there were suitable stars in destinations like Elk
County, a place where they could also go and share kisses for all of the
celestial objects from a myriad of galaxies. Swirling in a haze of his own
confused thoughts, this was his final thought as he sat waiting for Wolf to
come and ask him whatever he was here to talk about.
As he drifted
into that, he reckoned to himself that this time in the desert would be a few
years at a minimum, if it all worked out, that is. Then he thought about how he
hadn’t given up either of his jobs back in Pennsylvania, so if he wanted, it
could just be a month and a half. At this point, both schools assumed he would
be coming back to work at the end of August. That first day of school, the 22nd
of August, was getting closer and closer, however. He knew it as he sat at the
table waiting for Wolf while eating his eggs and pancakes and thinking about
how he was literally able to have his pancake and eat it, too, since he wasn’t
mandated to work in the summer if he had something else to do in the meantime.
Thus, he hadn’t
given up his livelihood to try this daydream out.
As he gobbled
down breakfast, he thought of something else. Dave knew that the conversation
he was about to have wasn’t about him, but he also wished that Wolf would at
least stop whatever line of questioning he came for in order to provide the
answer to the question of whether or not Dave should be here or not. Wolf
seemed wise enough to let Dave know if this was a good choice to base his
family’s future on the BLM in Moab.
As Dave moved
from the eggs to the pancakes and over to the bacon and on to the toast, the
door opened, and Wolf came in with the chiming bells on the door singing out to
the staff that a customer had arrived. Owens wasn’t smiling, but it was still
earlier than most people tend to wake up. However, when he walked over to the
table, he sat silently and stared across the room. Dave looked at him and saw
how serious and alert he was. Before he could wonder what was going on, Wolf
spoke calmly, with a matter of fact tone.
“Something bad
happened in Blackrock Canyon late on Friday night.”
Just like that,
it was at the heart of the matter. Wolf was a man on a mission with no time for
small talk.
“What was it?”
Dave asked, stunned because he hadn’t heard anything in the papers or in the
e-mails that he would get on the weekends from his supervisors and the upper
parts of the food chain. In addition, he had spent a significant amount of time
working with Gary at a local Moab arts festival the previous day, and he knew
that anything that happened in the Greer ranch area would be something that
would have called out a major response of sorts.
“I can’t say for
sure, but there is a feeling of things being out of balance in that area. I was
summoned north to Fort Duchesne yesterday and told that I needed to meet with a
shaman named Ouray. To put it simply, he is very in tune with the intersection
of the everyday world and the spiritual realms, especially in our little corner
of the world. You might refer to him as a medicine man or a healer, but I’ve
encountered several medicine men and many healers in my time, and trust me,
I’ve read about a lot of acknowledged bull shitters in this field, too. To put
it nicely, they’re not always on the level, unless the level is parting a fool
from his money. However, if you meet Ouray, then you’ll see that there’s
something different with his take on what I’m discussing with you. Perhaps,
that’s why when he was born that his parents named him after our great
historical leader. And just like Chief Ouray, the modern Ouray was born under a
sign. The same meteor shower that brought our past leader signaled the modern
Ouray’s arrival. However, as he grew older, it was clear that his place was
more spiritual than political, although it was also said that his future
existed in a clouded realm. Anyway, I listened to his assistant tell me why I
needed to come up there. As I listened, and I listened very intently, I was
told in the simplest and vaguest of words that bad things were happening in
Willard Greer’s former lands. Since I was Willard’s closest Native American
friend, and I was a trusted member of the Ute tribe, I needed to travel up
there to find out the greater details of what I needed to do in directions that
would come straight from Ouray.”
“He couldn’t
tell you on the phone?”
Wolf looked at
the young man like he had two heads.
“I was told to
get up there so I could return down here and start getting people together to
get onto the land to help close it off again. He knew that since I was friendly
with Willard, I would be able to meet with his family, especially his son
Harvey. He figured that Harvey might be willing to let someone from the tribe
back into the land to investigate, and it was best that it was a trusted
friend.”
There was a
pause.
“Investigate
what?”
“He didn’t say.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“My place isn’t
to ask when I’m brought forward to listen. Besides, I’m sure I’ll hear later
today when I go there to speak to Ouray personally.”
There was
another pause for Dave to process it.
“Dave, I don’t
have a lot of people that I trust, but I trust you. Can you come with me to
help out with this?
“I don’t know,
Wolf. What good can I be? Besides, you’ve got this Ouray and hopefully Harvey
and Juan and the other people from the Ute tribe who really know about this
stuff.
Wolf stared off
and nodded appropriately. Then he began speaking again.
“With any luck,
Ouray will come down here to the site, and he will ascertain more of the facts
from their presence. All I need to know until I see him is that something
happened in there. Right now, I need to help smooth the way so that Ouray can
tell me how to enter into the canyon to find what has to be found so that
someone can perform the old rituals to cleanse whatever it is that has
happened. He’s the only person I know of who can do this. However, there’s
something in me telling me that you need to join me on this, Dave.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re really
going to make me say this?”
“Say what.”
“I specifically
need you involved.”
“Why is that?”
“Call it a gut
feeling.”
“But you don’t
even know what you’re looking for, and that land that Blackrock Canyon is on is
huge, so how do you know that I can offer you anything about a specific part of
it?”
“I know that I
will know it when I see it. Besides, just because I don’t always see it or say
it doesn’t mean that I don’t know what it is.”
“You’re not
messing with me trying to get your buddy to get you a free visit back to the
cliff dwellings that are back there, are you? If you are, I’m telling you that I
have no authority to get you back there. I tried to get Gary to green-light a fact finding
trip down there before the university went in, and he told me that he’s been
told that it’s not going to be possible until at least August when the
archaeologists and higher ups in Salt Lake City get in there to secure the things
that they want first.”
“And that’s why
we’ve gotta go first.”
“Yeah. Even
then, I got a feeling like I was talking about something I shouldn’t be
saying.”
“You were.”
Dave looked at
him.
“Blackrock
Canyon is more problematic than you can begin to understand, but I’ll tell you
about it when we go up there to Fort Duchesne.”
“Wolf, I’d
really like to, but I need to unwind around here today. It’s been a long
stressful week. I’ve been going constantly with one thing or another, and it’s
not stopping since all those threats came after we locked up those vandals. I
just need to decompress before this next even crazier week. Thinking about
having to mace some desert rat piece of shit does that to a man.”
Wolf ignored his
excuses and said, “You really need to consider this. There are things here that
you can learn about your job’s future. Maybe I can even get you into Blackrock
Canyon. Maybe I can even do it before August. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?
This is what it’s all about, right? Career and life opportunities?”
Dave paused in
thought about what that would mean, and then he spoke again.
“What do you
mean that Blackrock is more than I can begin to understand?”
“Ancient Indian
secret. Maybe you should ask your boss. He probably knows.”
“There’s lots of
things he seems to have no time for.”
“That’s Gary.
Nothing is ever convenient for him except what keeps him at his job paying for
his house, his boat, and his alimony to his ex-wife while keeping his current
gal pal beautiful with implants and tattoos.”
Dave laughed a
little, which was nice to break the tension, but the tension was still there.
“Wouldn’t there
be someone else who could help you find out the essential facts if something
really bad did go down?”
“Not a single
person that I know of.”
“How about the
guy who heads up Jedidiah Smith University? What’s his name? They are going to
be heading up the archaeological investigation anyway, so couldn’t he be a good
reference point to find solid help? Besides, he’s in good with all of Utah’s
political powers. That’s what got him the big power gig in the first place. We
might be in a cool town up here in Moab, but we’re not sitting in the corridors
of power like those university and Congressional guys are. How about your buddy
Cortez? Would he have more pull at getting things to happen if you really
wanted to make them occur?”
Wolf cut him off
by stating, “Dave, those things with colleges and politics take time for an
old, weathered Native American with a lot of wear and tear on his tires to
break the ice and get his point across and acted upon. I’m not looking to build
a casino; I’m looking to stop an amusement park. Right now, we need to get
started on something as soon as possible because the storm that’s coming is
more powerful than what we have to hunker down against it.”
“But how do I
tell Gary to let me go out or call in the troops when I don’t even know what we
need to do something about? Besides, maybe Ouray is just hallucinating or
paranoid or senile in his old age, and if he isn’t, maybe he’ll have some sway
with Gary, or better yet, the university or the politicians, after you actually
talk to him up there in Fort Duchesne.”
“He’s not
hallucinating, and your buddy Gary is a piece of work, which you can take as me
saying that he’s the last person who needs to have his grubby fingers in this
Blackrock pie.”
Dave pretended
he didn’t hear that, but he knew it was true.
“There’s a whole
lot of somethings that are evil in this canyon. There always has been. For a
long time, they just built them on top of one another because they ran out of
room to find a safe new place. Hell, maybe they wanted that ambiance of old
evil permeating their dwellings. I’ve seen enough to know what I needed to see,
and I
know what I don’t want to see again or at all. If you want to know the secret, this is it; a long
time ago, something really evil went dormant. Some people thought it vanished,
but something brought this thing back, and when it and other evil forces came
back, they signaled to other things, which brought even more evil out into the
open. Right now, it’s coming in from everywhere.”
“You’re not just
messing around with Whitey on this, are you?”
“Dave, I have
better things to do with my life than to play games with you. If you can’t help
me, I guess I’ll have to understand even though I wish you’d step up as a man
and do the right thing.”
There was
something in the comment about his manhood, which really stung, and that was
why Wolf said it. If Wolf couldn’t convince him to come, maybe he could force
him to go with so that Dave would be there and find out how necessary he was.
“I know that you
have a wife and your career to think about… mortgage payments and the hope that
someday you have a son, even if you say you don’t need to have one to be
content. But…” and he paused there, “I have my people to think about, too, and
right now they trump the BLM’s concerns and your neuroses, so unlike you, I
have a responsibility to go, and I will do so whether you want to help me out
or not.”
Responsibility
was another word that hit Dave. He always wanted to think he was filling his
responsibilities, but he never could be quite sure. With that, he knew once
again that Wolf was saying all the tough talk things to get to his right
ending. Dave was hurt by it, but he ignored it all the same and went back to
meeting Wolf’s eyes.
“Show no
weakness. Don’t give in when you know that giving in isn’t right.” Dave thought
to himself before listening to Wolf speak again.
“Nevertheless, if Ouray is right, it seems I
have your people to think about, too, which is something you will soon need to
think about – whether you like that idea or not. In the meantime, I need to get
down to Harvey Greer and get him to let me in there. But yeah, I understand if
you don’t want to be a part of it.”
There was
something in the conversation, something that said Wolf was his spiritual
mentor, and Dave was the stock character youthful learner, but what mission was
the aging teacher taking him on? What world must he abandon to go on this trek? Somewhere between fate and Joseph Campbell’s
Monomyth, something he had taught many times as an English teacher, there was a
serious, rational, and by the books world for him. It was time, for once in his
life, that he followed that path instead of the ideology of the daydream
fantasy adventures in his head, which got him into so much hardship so often.
But Dave
couldn’t face that on this quiet Sunday morning. Instead, he simply felt that
he needed to stand tough for just a few minutes more because he really didn’t
believe that this new world was the right world to be entering into.
“I would if I
could, but it would compromise my place with the agency. Besides, it’s not like
I’m a ranger. I’m just a public affairs specialist. I have no real
understanding of law enforcement other than having watched 24, and I doubt that those policing methods qualify as proper
procedure in dealing with these political situations. Why don’t you contact the
police chief down there?”
“I know Tony
Lucas. The guy is a good cop, but he has no understanding of what is going on
back in Blackrock Canyon, and when he does, it’s going to be a whole other can
of worms that will be opened. He’ll be up to his eyeballs in shit really soon.
When this instance comes to light, he and his men will be overextended beyond
their capabilities and resources. When that happens, he isn’t going to have the
time to spend playing in the canyon with me, which is what I think I’m going to
need.”
“Well, I don’t
have an understanding about that situation or any other situations that involve
making sense of unknown tragedies in the recessed canyon world behind the Greer
Ranch.”
With that, he
needed to add his own response to the word “responsibility” and the concept of
“manhood.” He needed to cut back with what was and wasn’t truth and logic.
“Besides, you
don’t know what’s going on in there either.”
Wolf saw the
game, but he didn’t take the bait. He would forgive the young man his failed
response at retribution in his calm and wise way by nodding appropriately.
“I know the old
stories enough to know that there’s a reason that they’re not spoken of to just
anyone, especially the people in Blanding and Moab and all of these other dirt
stains on the brow of southeastern Utah. I know that some ninety-four-year old
shaman doesn’t just get a wild hair one day to call on some weathered old
Indian down the way because he wants to have lunch or something.”
The two men
looked at one another.
“I need to go,
Dave. It’s a long drive to get to Fort Duchesne, and it’s a longer trip from
there back down to the Greer ranch. I’ll be in touch with you when I find
something out. You may not think you’re needed, but I think you’ll find out
that you really are going to have to be involved with this situation when I
come back from the reservation.”
Dave looked at
him.
“And one more
thing. Quit your job back in Pennsylvania and commit to staying here permanently.
You’re more needed here in Utah than you can begin to imagine. Maybe when you
finally shit or get off the pot, you’ll think straight again.”
Like that, Wolf
walked out of the café, his boot steps reverberating as he vanished into the
mystery that he had just opened up. No handshake. No goodbye. No go screw
yourself.
All that was
left was a certain truth that Dave would be needed, and if he were needed
sooner than he was ready, he would eventually be recruited, with or without his
consent. The realization that he was being driven into this great big mystery
that the desert was in no hurry to reveal scared him to the core.
With that, Dave
leaned back, more consumed in anxiety and desire to have stayed in
Pennsylvania’s Amish country than he ever had felt at any point since he came
here. These feelings of screwing up cut deep, and this one cut harder than
anything he felt in a while.
“None of these
things happened when I was back in Salunga,” he thought to himself.
Nevertheless, he
just sat there pushing eggs around a plate as the café started to fill up with
people. He couldn’t escape them or his destiny as it was clear that he was
chained to the chair while he listened to the real, responsible man, who was
named Wolf, drive off and vanish into the unknown destiny of his own predetermined
life. As he thought about the man who could be his other dad,
the sounds of the stereo started to drift into the room, and he heard the voice
and guitar of some Sun Kil Moon CD play through the café’s Sunday morning air to
the realization that he received his answer loud and clear, but he was still as
unsure as ever what to do with it.
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