Note: MARTIN MURIE died on January 28, 2012 but his words will always live on, here in The Zephyr.
An excerpt:
A couple of miles outside Blanding, Utah I followed directions, found a clearing at the edge of a narrow canyon. Pop bottles and other signs marked it as a school teen hangout. I stepped out of the pickup and worked my way to the floor of the canyon where a small, slow-moving stream wound its way. I looked up, noticed a regularity at the base of tall cliffs. I climbed, came to broken down adobe walls rooted at the rim of the steep slope, enclosing a deep cliff overhang. There, again, the charge in the air, the wonder. People had lived here, in a shelter not much more spacious than the shelter “Injun Jack” had built out of landfill stuff, at the edge of Jackson’s “dump.” That’s what we called it. “Landfill,” the euphemism, came later when our civilization began to smother under gigantic heaps of garbage and throw-aways. Kids burned down the house that the man we called “Injun Jack” built. Homeless, he built again. The town did nothing. No inquiries, his word against nameless kids. He disappeared. What was his real name? How did he lose out in the competition for place? Where did he go? What kind of man was he?
To read more of Martin’s article, click the image below:
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.