SEARCHING FOR COMMON GROUND

Dear Jim Stiles,

Here I was, wondering if people could ever really come together to find agreeable solutions to the issues facing canyon country, when your last "Feedback" issue came out. It was encouraging to see so many people interested in the idea of getting together to talk about it.

My husband and I would love to be more involved with people in this community who are exploring how to keep both the wild and human parts of this PLACE vital. We've been a little bit perplexed about how to do that (having 2 small children is a BIT of a distraction, I admit.)

Having spent most of the past 15 years as biologists in small Western towns, we've seen how destructive the polarization of environmentalists vs ranchers, miners, developers, loggers can be. It creates a bad feeling--instant mistrustfulness. It makes you want to go away. It doesn't make you want to stay and be a part of the solution. It's easy to fall into one camp or the "other;" in fact it seems almost primal, but it means that we close our eyes and ears and hearts and minds to each other.

That means no more learning from each other, and a lot less creativity. It means believing that our individual characters--our basic honesty and concern for others--are less important than our religious or political affiliations. I don't believe that.

My husband and I have been touched by the kindness of people in Moab who did not share our religious or political views. Like the time my Mormon neighbor took my oldest child in the middle of the night while the younger was being born. We were new in town and she had only known me a few months. Or the time our basement flooded from the big rainstorm in 1997 and 15 strangers showed up to help bail us out. We are not interested in joining one camp or another, if it means stereotyping people. We are interested in learning what the various people in Moab think makes this community vital, what degrades it, and what common ground we can find in terms of solutions.

To that end, I'd like to propose one way to follow up on your idea (as stated in the Editorial) of getting together to "talk." How about beginning a weekly "study group" to focus on issues facing Moab? It would be a literature-based conversation, using books or magazines, that could give us ideas about how to think about, for example, tourist economies, or supporting local farmers/businesses, or open lands management. We could decide the issues and come up with relevant literature as we go along. I can think of 2 good sources right now:

Wendell Berry's writings about the value of locally based and small-scale economies, as well as the potential contribution of farms and ranches to the long-term viability of a community.

The magazine "ORION Afield" (see oriononline.org) highlights people and projects nationwide which have found real world solutions to problems facing Nature and Communities.

As you suggested, this group would not be a pro- or anti- environmental group, or any kind of group that makes people from the community feel unwelcome to participate. It would be a way to:

a) listen to and get to know each other better

b) expose ourselves to innovative ideas from thinkers around the world

c) be better prepared to participate in maintaining a vital Moab (and maybe even the Colorado Plateau in general).

I don't think Moab is unique in terms of it being a small Western town faced with issues of growth and a changing economic base. Maybe what we learn in this group could eventually be useful to other places. More importantly, my hope would be that this group could be a place where people could find a meaningful way to be a part of, and contribute to this community.

If you are interested in forming a group like this, please contact me by e-mail: dawschelz@moci.net

Sincerely,

Sonya Daw

Moab, Utah

A DIFFERENT VIEW FROM ESCALANTE...

Dear Jim,

Our basic response to your articles ("It's Time to Look in the Mirror") was: "Bravo!!! It is about time!" If any of us are going to survive out here in the desert, it will have to be a joint effort that is balanced and realistic.

If the desert does anything at all it teaches you reality! You get your life simplified and purified and if you are listening you also learn that others have similar experiences that may be on different levels, but all are being transformed. Is that perhaps then the draw to the desert experience that seems almost sacred? Did not men of the Bible go out for 40 days into the desert to be cleansed and not always by choice.

I believe respect for those who have lived here longer is primary. They have learned lessons and balance and that wisdom is available only if you do not come at then with antagonism and ego! We all need humbling in the eyes of our Creator and then we will go humbly before our fellow man.

Sincerely,

Harriet and Philip Priska

Serenidad Gallery and Serenidad Retreat Escalante, Utah

(10 year residents formerly of Menlo Park, CA)

MORE 'GOOD CHEER' FROM ESCALANTE'S PATRICK DIEHL...

Dear Jim:

In the June/July issue of the Zephyr, you speak of the "voracious monster" of development. Now that people have decided that Moab is a desirable place to live, how can the development monster be stopped from eating the place alive?

We can take our cue from Tom Disch's '60s science fiction novel, White Fang Goes Dingo. In it, a hyperesthetic alien race rules the solar system. They think human beings make great pets--they're SOOO cute! (No accounting for tastes.) One of the pets, a human male fondly known as White Fang, has the idea of the human race driving away the aliens by being as ugly as possible. It works. Their exquisite sensibilities outraged, the aliens pack up and leave.

Though I doubt that my neighbors in Escalante have read Disch, they have been proceeding along similar lines. By hanging in effigy, slashing tires, breaking house and car windows, cutting phone lines, running people off the road, uttering death threats, on occasion brandishing the odd knife or revolver, and regularly snarling to the media, they make Escalante, despite its visual attractions, an unattractive place to live. The result? Lots of empty houses, a flat real estate market, virtually no new businesses. The "voracious monster" has taken a good look at Escalante, and the sight has killed its appetite.

With a little effort, Moab could achieve the same condition of blissful undesirability. I will offer a few ideas, while refraining from suggesting that local restaurants raise their prices just a little bit more and make their food just a little bit worse--they are already a pretty good deterrent, after all. No, let's get serious about this!

1) Eliminate all but one checkstand at the City Market, and close the checkstand from 5-8 PM every day. 2) Send two-person teams with lengths of rope up onto the slickrock to lie in wait for mountain bikers and clothesline them as they pass. 3) Have local ranchers drive their herds back and forth along Main Street, blocking traffic and fertilizing the blacktop. 4) Disguise all residences as trailers and have a civic uglification day where people come to the dump and haul old stoves, washing machines, etc. away to their front yards. 5) Decorate the valley walls with huge, multi-colored, badly copied Robert Crumb drawings, featuring Zippy the Pinhead.

The possibilities are endless! Get ugly, Moab! Cloudrock will vanish like virga, and the developers will be seen hightailing it south for Big Water, which already has a leg up on ugliness. One by one, SITLA's teeth will fall out, and it will end its days whimpering in a back office in Salt Lake.

Sincerely,

Patrick Diehl

Escalante, Utah

P.S.: For readers who would rather capitalize on the tourist trade than drive it away, but who would like to see some concrete results from the last couple of Zephyr issues, I propose the following: each Eastertide, let's have a procession of environmentalist penitentes stagger through town, flagellating themselves and chanting "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" in unison. Prizes could be awarded to the best whip-wielders, and tickets could be sold to the tourists, with the proceeds going to the Big Piggy Bank for Stopping the SITLA Monster (BPBSSM, for short). If you get me a comp, Jim, I promise to watch.

It's always an...experience...to read Mr. Diehl's sincere, compassionate and heartfelt analyses of the problems we face in southern Utah. Diehl and his wife Tori Woodard are two of southern Utah's most vocal environmentalists and Patrick is a member of the Executive Committee of the Glen Canyon Group of the Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club...JS

TOO LATE FOR HAND-WRINGING...

Dear Jim

I remember watching the evening news with my father on the day Ansel Adams died. The anchor man spent the obligatory 30 seconds talking about how Mr. Adams was a renowned photographer and a strident environmentalist. Being an inquisitive boy, I asked my father what an "environmentalist" was. "Son, an environmentalist is someone who owns a cabin in the woods and doesn't want anyone else to."

I have puzzled over that definition for many years, sometimes I agree and other times I don't. After reading your article I find myself agreeing with my father. While I do not doubt your sincerity and devotion to your image of what the desert southwest should look like, I find it necessary to tell you that you don't get to choose. The people who lived in Moab before you got there probably didn't want you to come and stay, and now you don't want others to come and stay. Or maybe you would allow some to come and stay if they elected a lifestyle, means of income, residential density and type of dwelling that fits with your world view. I am not sure if you are being hypocritical, arrogant or selfish.

I read Desert Solitaire back in college and I didn't understand what Ed Abbey was saying when he told us that the place he was talking about in his book (Arches and Canyonlands) was gone. Then, one day about thirteen years ago I drove to Moab and I understood immediately what he was trying to say. The Moab you love is already gone. It was gone at least thirteen years ago. I suggest you move on down the road to some other small town that hasn't been overcome yet (maybe Mexican Hat?). The folks there won't like you, but you will be a small group that doesn't like each other rather than a large rapidly growing group.

Frank Metzler

Tallahassee, Florida

(but my heart is floating somewhere down on the San Juan River)

PS I love your paper. Keep up the good work.

NO MORE SLEEPY SMALL TOWN MOMS-AND-POPS...

Editor,

Thanks for the great article ("It's Time to Look in the Mirror") in the April-May 2001 edition.

These two sentences said it all: "We are now contributing our own kind of destruction to the last remnants of the Wild West. Our recreation, our money, and our sheer numbers are poised to do the kind of long-term damage that should be setting alarms off in our heads. The changes we're making may be harder to detect and more insidious. But in the next 50 years, we are poised to recreate the Westen landscape in ways our cowboy cousins could never imagine."

I liked Moab when it was a sleeply little town, with mom-and-pop motels if I decided not to sleep out under the stars and mom-and-pop restaurants where I could get real food.

I gotta confess that if I had the money, I'd buy the property cheap and sell it expensive. I'd love to time the market right--if the tailings are moved--and laugh all the way to the bank, because I could retire and spend more time in southeast Utah.

I also enjoyed your passage about the "justice and retribution" so similar to what was visited upon the native populations of North America. An Indian writer told it so much better in a recent column in a Montana newspaper. If I can find the column, I'll send you a copy.

Keep pumping out the Zephyr, and don't forget to dump your old appliances in the front yard.

Jack Savage

TIME FOR ARCHES IMPROVEMENTS?

Jim,

I know I have not written in a while, and after my most recent visit last week I see I need to reengage. By the way, I loved your Feedback edition and my subscription request will arrive shortly under separate cover.

A couple of disturbing things have happened in and around Moab that I felt I should call to your attention:

Where is Arches? I was very annoyed to find that the park is now very difficult to locate. The entrance sign is gone and it is not easy to spot the park from the road like it once was. It was only after I realized the visitor center was actually the visitor center, and not an RV repair facility, that I was able to get back on track.

I think we need to consider something like a big neon Delicate Arch or something up on the cliff above the visitor center. I know the concept is rough, but the people at Hole In The Rock can probably help with the specifics.

The Windows. I appreciate the spiral staircases leading up to the arches in the windows, but there are a few places where some banisters and perhaps even carpet would be nice. Also, there is a lot of sand in that area and it gets in peoples shoes. Any chance we can clean that up?

Devils Garden. What a disappointment. No new stairs or anything. I was thinking, with all the trams going in around Moab, has anyone thought about putting a tram system in that would carry you out to Double-O and back? If we did this we could stop improving the trail and pump the money into the cable cars instead. It solves the sand in shoes problem as well. You could have the cars go through some of the arches on the way for a neat effect. I can provide some sketches if you think there would be some interest.

Expanding the park. I understand the park may be expanded to take in, among other things, Dry Mesa. That's OK, but there isn't much out there and it certainly won't generate revenues. What about expanding along 191 to the South from the visitor center? I would come a good ways in and take in the water slide and maybe a motel or two. They can be run as concessions. Also, that unused tram lift could also be annexed and expanded to outfit the whole park (see #3 above).

Again, I apologize for not writing sooner. Thanks for the great work you do.

David Travers

San Antonio, Texas

LOOKING IN THE MIRROR FROM GRAND JCT...

Hey Jim,

I recently had a chance to read "The Zephyr"; it is the April/May 2001 edition. I read it cover to cover. I was interested in most of the articles and agree with several of your points about public land exploitation for profit. In some instances, such as Tex's Riverways, it is a necessary evil.

Others, such as leading bungy jumping day hikes to remote arches, are absurd.

I am a 39 year old Grand Junction, Colorado native and have witnessed the recent overcrowding of Western Colorado and Eastern Utah. I too had special places to escape to that now are visited daily by newcomers. I remember hiking in the Cedar Mesa area below Blanding and not seeing another hiker all day.

Times are definitely changing. I guess that I wasn't aware of your newspaper because we typically don't spend much time in Moab, rather we pass on through to wherever our destination lies. It is refreshing to see someone speaking up for the land. Keep up the good work.

Brian Sheley

Grand Jct, Colorado

TAKING ISSUE WITH MR. SLIFER'S 'ODE TO MOAB'

Dear Jim,

I suppose this letter might qualify for the Feedback column. I just feel the need to reflect some of my thoughts regarding a recent trip out that way, and I figured the Zephyr is the perfect place to voice those thoughts. Because I work in a tourist town and travel a lot, I get to taste both sides of the tourist trade. Both sides experience the same emotions. Tourists visit new places in order to see and experience things they don't normally see and experience at home. Unfortunately, frustration often accompanies a trip in the way of getting lost, getting bad service, or getting tired of trying to find amenities similar to those back home. As residents of tourist towns, we experience the same emotions by having to serve bad tippers, put up with strangers on our streets and listen to visitors whine about the lack of services ("You don't even have a Wendy's here!"). Dennis Slifer's recent letter to Feedback is just another case in point.

I feel more well rounded by being on both sides of the coin. But that doesn't mean I am not sympathetic to both sides. On my recent trip with my mom through Moab, I actually admired the way your funky little town seems to function on its own energy. It made me feel as though it didn't matter whether I, or any other tourist, came there or not. Moab will continue to grow, or not grow, oblivious to whether you should cater to out of town money or just circulate your own cash amongst each other. The fact that we happened through made absolutely no impact on the ambivalent yet friendly folk we encountered there, and I was glad.

Not so in the other stops on our itinerary, including Cortez and much of New Mexico. Sometimes they killed us with such kindness we wanted to run and hide. Other times they were so snotty I wanted to grab them by the shirt and throttle them until their heads rattled. A lot of the friendliness was supercharged by the prospect of making another buck. The rudeness bore signs of how tired some are of seeing another stupid tourist full of equally stupid questions. Fortunately, the kind people far outweighed the unkind, even if some of the kindness was thinly masked over greed for our money.

Things change. Our country has been raised to think that progress, in any form, is good. Which would explain why the wonderfully remote roads of New Mexico are being widened into four lane highways and why many of the beautiful old historic trading posts along Route 666 have transformed into nothing more than another convenience store. New Mexico is losing its enchanting flavor, bit by bit. I had not spent time there in twenty years or better. With that in mind, I realize that the change has been slow. Still, like the tourists that visit my hometown, I felt violated to discover differences that would make New Mexico ugly to some.

We were especially disappointed with the Four Corners Monument. For those who need an update, the Monument now charges $2.00 per person to see where the only four states in the U.S. meet in one spot. There is a tiny and fairly worthless visitor's center, flanked on all sides by flea market booths with Indians selling their wares. The monument itself is a large concrete platform, with a wooden deck from which to take photos of loved ones standing on the four corners. There are two lines: one to the deck for tourists to take pictures, and one to the concrete platform for tourists to stand on the monument.

We were disappointed for a number of reasons. 1) The Four Corners Monument is no longer a remote spot with a plaque and a little Navajo girl dressed in her beautiful native costume, like it was when I visited there some 25 years ago. 2) I don't understand why you have to pay admission to maintain a monument that is virtually unmoveable and nearly impossible to deface. 3) My mom and I have never stood in line at Four Corners, and we never intend to. When my mother stepped onto the New Mexico side of the platform so I could take her photo, several tourists were bent out of shape and said so. In turn, I was bent out of shape because they were all standing in line on the Arizona side, where I was born, and I couldn't even get to it. Even the Navajos should be ashamed at such blatant commercialism and obliterating views of the fantastic landscape with their shabby little booths.

These complaints aside, we really did enjoy our trip. We accepted the changes and progress better than some and less than others. Because we travel extensively, however, we are perhaps more understanding (though no less disappointed) to see some of the same things Mr. Slifer pointed out: trails, campgrounds, visitor centers and fees where there used to be none, invasion of tourons and their yippy dogs, nasty children and booming stereos, and a general disregard for the way things used to be. But these things did not prevent us from enjoying the vast open space along many highways, the desert scents after a good rain, or the many good people who continue to maintain their lifestyles, despite the changes around them. We went out of our way to take the less beaten path and avoid the stereotypical pessimism displayed by others, and I think we found what we were looking for.

Mr. Slifer, I encourage you to put yourself in the shoes of a tourist and take a real trip through Santa Fe. Leave your comfortable abode and pretend like you don't know where your favorite shops or the nearest grocery store is. Visit all the tourist spots dressed like you are from out of town, and check into a motel for the night. Ask the locals where the best places are to eat, drink and dance, and see what they tell you. Tell someone, preferably a museum employee, how they have ruined Santa Fe and watch their reaction. At the end of your in-town trip, look back at what you remember as the best and worst of your experience. Too often, it is easy to forget that the place you are disgruntled with is the same kind of place you come from. You can move on with the good memories, or you can lay down and die.

Also, Mr. Slifer, I am happy you have opted not to return to Moab. Those guys have it hard enough with small town politics, growth issues, and other problems that plague every small town across the nation. They certainly don't need you standing in the middle of them, bitching and griping about loss of your personal space. I'm sorry they won't dispense with desecration of the land in the way of mining, grazing, logging and poisoning of our precious water supply just so you can have some peace and quiet. I'd invite you to

camp right in the middle of Colorado's largest open pit mine near my home, but I don't think we need you here anymore than Moab needs you there. Your self-centered views are more shameful than you even admitted.

No, I think you are better off to disappear with your Dingo, if you can, to your so-called secret refuge. But I've got news for you: someone else will find it, sooner or later. Then the challenge is for you to open your mind and accept it, or move on to yet another treasured hiding place. Adventure is the spice of life, and if you can't relish the prospect of enjoying each and every new special place you find and appreciating what you have seen in the past, you have lost the game.

Jan MacKell

Cripple Creek, Colorado

Dennis Slifer's Feedback letter can be read on The Zephyr web site (Archives, June/July 2001)

PUT 'THE MIRROR ISSUE' ON THE WEB SITE

Jim,

Please put your April-May 2001 article on the web page for all to read ....."Its Time to Look in the Mirror".....so those folks now reading the Feedback Issue can see the origination of this incredible, unfolding forum. You are really creating possibilities for change........set up a feedback web page......let's see where this can lead.......thanks for your courage....it has been coming..... this necessary self examination, for quite some time......but you are the obvious person to get the stone rolling.....Thanks

Susan Smith

Kayenta Az

Many of the articles from the April/May 2001 issue are already on the web site. In the near future we hope to post all of them...JS