Flora de la Luna

18 October, 2012

Bliss, Idaho

Editor’s Note:   This one is dedicated to Amy Goodman, who not only works the night shift, but the day shift, all points in between, and apparently, a few dimensions beyond that.

“To live outside the law you must be honest.”   Bob Dylan

We roared back into Moab from the South, at 90 MPH, with an angry tractor-trailer on our heels.  I had decided to abort my delusions of hitting Needles, The Maze, and Mesa Verde, in lieu of talking a grieving relative back down.  Our conversation had been truncated by my rise onto the Spanish Trail plateau, wherein all cellular communications fade instantly.

I had also realized that I was heading South and East, the latter a taboo, while the Big Picture called for West and North.

Kaya was bent, I was bent, and the ipad was quite bent, and slightly broken after a dozen days on the road and reluctantly giving up our magnificent campsite in the Colorado Riverway, where we had seen the elusive Bighorn Sheep just that morning.  I had a serious hankering to see some Anasazi cliff-dwelling ruins, as these are the final remains of the last Real American Architects.  Kaya really didn’t want to leave, and it portended storms in the sky of our mutual acquiescence.

South of Moab, one encounters industry.  Drilling rigs, earth-movers, platforms and heavy equipment rental agencies abound, interspersed with oases of potential, like the Lazy Lizard Hostel, where I purchased my first shower in days.  It generally appears there is no water in the desert. 

Kaya is also generally right.

But we had spent the previous two days in Negro Bill Canyon, where the flowers continue to bloom in mid-October, and the river cuts through the mountain with the alacrity of polygamous Mormons to St. George.  The bounty of our travels through the pristine Canyonlands and Arches National parks was affronted by the sacrifice of a rise graffitoed with the massive painted words, “Hole in the Wall,” and its requisite arrow pointing at the souvenir shop located in a shallow cave.  The letters must be a hundred feet tall.

Coming back into Moab, the topography again took center stage, with the river gorges and buttes close to the road, receding only as we entered the valley where the town first located.  Moab is actually a fault, geologically, and at its widest point is maybe one-half of a mile between the canyon rims far above.

Unfortunately the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency charged with protecting and maintaining public lands, has put nearly 52,000 acres of land into a lease/sale arrangement for mineral exploration.  This will include hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a violent process that shatters its way to new deposits along with the aquifers that protect the water supplies beneath the ground.  It speaks to a brobdingnagian process of destruction, the diminutive outposts of Lilliputians spiking their chemical hypodermics into our sacred land.  It would only become a darker shadow on the plain of mankind’s achievements if the actions were synchronized, to jar loose tectonic plates in places like the Moab Fault.

I’m reminded by the quote from an unnamed Vietnam-era general, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”