Sagebrush Sedition. Warren J. Stucki
Mr. Rehnquist is a local rancher with two permits in the monument both in the Fifty Mile Mountain area. He has consented to represent the ranchers and their interests. Would you like to say a few words, Doug?”
Roper stood up and eyed the group. Most of them looked back at him with varying degrees of suspicion or indifference. He cleared his throat.
“My name is Douglas Rehnquist, but my friends call me Roper. I am a permitee on the Grand Staircase. Specifically I have two allotments, Lake Allotment on Fifty Mile Mountain and the Soda Springs Allotment, just to the east of Fifty Mile Mountain down on the desert and bordering the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. I, for one, am happy about this new monument and see no reason we can’t all make use of this tremendous resource together. All it takes is patience, a little give and take, and a little bit of mutual respect for each other’s goals and dreams.” Roper again looked around the table then sat down.
Abruptly Monty stood, a fierce scowl painted on his face, his thin lips stretched and blanched.
“Yes, Monty,” Brisco acknowledged.
“Why him?” Monty asked. “That’s like inviting the enemy to your flight briefing the night before the mission.”
“I agree,” Sean blurted out, suddenly wide awake and bristling, “it— it’s like inviting a bear into your camp to help you fix dinner.”
The smile disappeared from deputy manager Ron Sparks’ face and the rest of the group looked stunned by the outbursts.
“Monty,” Brisco chided, “you’re not with the marines anymore and Sean you have a lot to learn about the fine art of diplomacy, though I must say it is nice to finally see you awake.”
“Might just as well be up front with it,” Monty snarled.
“And I don’t like it neither, not one damn bit. I, for one, know what these ranchers have done to the land,” Sean growled. “They’ve literally raped it.”
“Let’s remember,” Ron Sparks grinned nervously. “The monument is designated as a multi-use park. If we manage it well, there should be enough room for everyone.”
“Sean,” Brisco interrupted, taking charge. “This is a new era. You and Monty and the ranchers are going to have to learn to get along. I know it’s hard. Coming from the National Park Service, it’s been an adjustment for me as well, but we’ll learn together.”
“But they—they’ve been damn poor stewards.” Sean persisted. “And you know what Christ said about poor stewards.”
“The range is in better shape now than it has been in the last fifty years,” Roper said, “and I have old photographs to prove it.”
“Enough!” Brisco said. “What we don’t need is in-fighting. If we can’t get along, how can we expect everyone else to. In this committee we will work out our differences like professionals and we will follow the guidelines as set forth by the administration—to a T.”
Though he didn’t show it, Sean was embarrassed by his biblical outburst. Goddamn it! What was wrong with him? Quoting the Bible. After all, he was an atheist now.
For a tense moment, the three combatants eyed each other suspiciously, then Brisco once again took charge. Using her most officious voice, she continued, “now let me take a moment to outline our strategy, how I envision the new committee will function.”
Sean settled back in his chair and began to drift as Brisco droned on. Politics—yeah, he knew about politics. His whole life had been involved with politics, or at least political agendas. Over the years he’d learned one could only accomplish so much with politics then when things started to bog down, one had to resort to other less refined techniques. Covert methods. As he had become more involved with the environmental movement, it was in the other methods Sean had realized that he had a natural talent. Not that he didn’t agree that politics were always the first step, but for sure it wasn’t the only step. In his experience, political solutions were tedious, evasive and hard to come by. When the political effort was exhausted, that’s when they always came looking for him.
However, thank God, he’d hiked practically every gorge in the red rock maze, ascended almost every juniper-peppered plateau, hiked all the colorful cliffs of the Grand Staircase and explored virtually every dusty valley where only rabbit brush, blue sage and black brush grew. Indeed, it was an enchanted land dotted with the occasional red sandstone arch, random shoulder-width slot canyons, sporadic phallic monoliths and the rare bizarre rock garden, uncanny in their resemblance to a moonscape. And as the piéce de résistance, the monument was a virtual treasure of Jurassic and Cretaceous fossils, anything and everything from massive dinosaurs to tiny trilobites.
But the Staircase could also be treacherous. With very little standing water on the entire park, just a random spring and an occasional seasonal creek, people could, and sometimes did die in this harsh land. Dehydration, starvation and snake bite in the summer—cold, snow and exposure in the winter, not to mention the rare gunshot wound, occasional skull or bone fractures from a fall, or the infrequent assault by a renegade cougar. However, perhaps, the biggest risk was becoming disoriented and lost. With few roads and even fewer marked trails, even with a map one could wander for days and never see a sign of civilization and never see another soul.
But what really irritated Sean were the ranchers. Rough and uneducated, they didn’t act like they loved this land. Actually, at times, they behaved as if they hated it. To them, it was something to conquer or subdue, not to appreciate and preserve. And those cows! Those foul stinky, dirty beasts. They destroyed, trampled or gnawed everything from the fragile native grasses to the delicate desert rose. And then, they shit everywhere, including the hiking trails, pristine pure springs and the fragile riparian banks of the delicate Paria River.
Stubborn and possessive, deep down these ranchers actually believed this land belonged to them and not the American people. While vigorously trying to keep hikers and campers off the land, they would, at the same time, not move their cows from an allotment until it had been totally stripped of anything vital or green. Not even a prickly pear cactus or a quaking aspen sapling would be left unscathed. The situation was intolerable. Personally, and with God’s help, he would drive them from all public lands.
That would not be easy, Sean knew. Even though this was government land, the BLM allotment leases were extremely hard to revoke. They were open-ended leases that could be inherited, passed from father to son, or sold to another rancher like any other commodity. That was why the Grand Canyon Trust was so effective. Rather than trying to force the ranchers off the land, they simply bought up their allotments at a fair price then put them in cold storage. Obviously, that was the preferable way to purge these leases, but unfortunately there was not an endless supply of money and some ranchers were more stubborn than greedy. They simply refused to sell.
The only thing worse than the cowboys were the miners. It seems they all had subscribed to General Sherman’s scorched earth technique of mining, strip and burn. What this amounted to in Sean’s estimation, was a legal destruction of the land. As with the ranchers, only one thing flourished after the miners were done, the ugly scars of erosion. That excavating arm of nature that systematically destroyed dismembered and disemboweled the land.
Over the years, even while still in college studying paleontology, Sean had visited Wilderness Alliance clubs across the west, constantly talking up the area. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, they had started to come, this time, his kind of people. People who appreciated the play of shadow and light across the sheer canyon walls, intricate but ephemeral patterns constantly changing with the arching sun. People who loved to just sit quietly and watch the amazing kaleidoscope of deepening colors of clouds as the sun slowly sank behind a square purple butte. People who relished crisp clean air, wild flowers, blue skies and the red silica sands. People who enjoyed photographing or painting wildlife, not shooting them, eating them, or skinning them for pelts. People who appreciated solitude and valued a chance for of introspection.
In the past, there were daunting times when Sean was convinced this day would never come. In