Start at the beginning of these notes if you haven't read part I.
I drove north from Hanksville, past the entrance to the remote Mars Desert Research Station, to the Goblin Valley, a little known public landscape in Southern Utah. Goblin Valley is three miles of sandstone hoodoos, oddly shaped, like ten foot mushrooms, or an army of smurfs. I walk out into the hoodoos, looking for life.
Life here, approaching night, is a plethora of bats and a scattering of lizards. When I walk in the woods back home and I find the summer trails dotted with the little dead bodies of shrews – dead and defenseless - I can see and understand the bat. I can understand the unimaginably slight shrew of the sky.
The white-furred western pipistrelle bat fluttering above me weighs less than a nickel. Its shape resembles the tiny animals from which it evolved, but, it found a way.
Bats remind me of why mammals are the Earth’s canvas of biological creativity. In places where no other mammals survive, the bat flourishes. In the long mammalian history of Utah, so many different mammal forms have dominated one time or another – go back in time, and Utah’s mammals are mammoth sloths, aquatic wolves, horned beasts, tusked invaders.
When the last bit of light fades from Goblin Valley, I find my way back to the Jeep with a headlamp; the enchanting structures now cold and unpresentable-looking. Tomorrow, I start heading south.
Some people think the bicentennial highway is America’s perfect road. Two lanes, twisting and winding through a uniquely American landscape. In the autumn, the trees that line each canyon are bright yellow. The reeds and grasses match in shades of gold and orange.
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 A tiger beetle rests on the sandy bank of a stream in the Kolob Canyon unit of Zion National Park, Utah. |
I stop to take a walk in a canyon. Near its entrance, I meet a man in a cap, who looks to be about sixty years old.
He had travelled this road thirty years before, by bike, “before people did that sort of thing.” I told him he was welcome to join me up the trail. No, he said, he was in a hurry. Odd place to be in a hurry, I thought. Odd way to memorialize a trip of your youth.
Despite his hurry, he chooses to stay and talk a while as I show him everything creeping and crawling at the edge of the canyon. More bats. A golden eagle above. A desert cottontail. A hopi chipmunk. I genuinely sense he wants to join me up the canyon. But I can relate to his hurry. That is the way of our world these days. We are spending less time outdoors. The industries for outdoor sports are worried. We are spending less time hiking, less time walking, less time traveling. We don’t play ball as much as the old days.
There is something changing in our modern culture. Americans are not the same people we used to be. Those fundamentalists in Colorado City, you can’t altogether blame them. The roots of fundamentalism, in Utah, in America’s south, or in Saudi Arabia, they are all born from the same thing: a reaction to our modern world, a strong desire to hold onto the fundamentals of our culture and civilization in a brave new world of disconnection.
I think about this when I shake hands with the man, leaving him to look at his watch. The canyon I am entering is somewhat preserved as the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. For the past week, I have been moving through a series of interconnected protected patches of public land. Almost all of them fit together to make this unimaginable brilliant land a single whole.
When President Clinton signed the controversial Grand-Staircase Escalante region into a national monument, he completed a giant puzzle piece, a plot larger than Delaware which nearly connects Zion, Bryce, Glen Canyon NRA, Capitol Reef National Park, and the arch parks nearer Moab into a much more cohesive unit.
He did so for general reasons, to satisfy the interests of a variety of western conservation movements, to win votes, to save a rich piece of America. But some of the people behind such a land protection, the people who lobbied its creation, had a much grander outcome in mind. They were imagining the prospect of returning big sections of land back to their original state. Not all of them are thinking just southern Utah. The Escalante monument was created partially because of efforts to connect public land in Chihuahua, in Sonora, in Arizona, in Utah, in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Alberta – by people who imagine a long continental green corridor, a sort of environmental fundamentalism.
