IN DEFENSE OF GETTING LOST
The state of "being lost" does not have a positive connotation in the minds of most of us nowadays and it’s true, it can be a terrifying and even deadly experience. I recall the first time I got lost—I was just three and on a shopping trip to a local department store with my mother. She was trying on a dress and I grew bored after a while, sitting on a bench with my legs dangling while other mothers came by and pinched me on the cheek. I could smell the aroma of fresh roasted nuts somewhere and I followed my nose as children often do. Suddenly I realized, from my perspective, just two and a half feet above the carpet, that I could no longer see my mother. I can still remember the moment of absolute terror that gripped me as I spun frantically in all directions, searching for the sight of that familiar face. Before I could even begin to get too hysterical though, I heard mom’s voice and followed it back home to the comfort and security of her arms.
I suppose all children experience something similar and perhaps that’s why we spend the rest of our lives trying to avoid getting lost again. But is it as bad as we have convinced ourselves? Is getting lost always something we should fear and dread?
And do we truly understand what "getting lost" means?
Once, on a Stiles Family Vacation, we were on our way to Clearwater Beach , Florida, in the pre-interstate highway days, and my dad had to negotiate the streets of Atlanta. We made a few wrong turns and I could hear him losing patience as we began to travel in circles.
"Are we lost?" I asked my dad anxiously.
"NO!" he said. "I am NOT lost...I just don’t know where we are."
Very often that’s the case. He knew he’d find his way out of Atlanta eventually, even if it took the rest of the afternoon and only after he’d relinquished a bit of his manhood by asking a local for directions. Still he wasn’t lost. And there was an upside to our misadventure. We saw parts of Atlanta that we would have otherwise missed and the gentleman who found us on the map and pointed us straight was an interesting character that we would have otherwise never met. Being "lost" was at least more interesting than if we’d sailed smoothly through town without a hitch.
Now, not only is it difficult to get lost or misplaced on a road trip, it’s damn near impossible. Interstate freeways bypass cities and small towns alike, though I suppose there are still a few inept souls who could get lost in the endless loop of a cloverleaf interchange. If we need directions, there’s little hope of finding an interesting character to quiz; the best we can dream of, since they’re located at nearly every freeway exit from New York to L.A., is the blank and disinterested stare of a McDonalds trainee. In 2006, more than 10 million Americans have installed GPS units in their vehicles, so they don’t even need to consult the road atlas. Instead a metallic dispassionate "voice" tells us where to go. I’d like to turn the tables someday and tell a GPS unit "where to go," but I suspect the conversation would go nowhere.
The brutal predictability of daily life is, in fact, the reason more of us seek something different in the rural backways of America, but here again, our fear of getting lost has taken the fun and adventure out of the very experience we seek. Aldo Leopold once said, "To what avail are 40 freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" But guidebook writers, whose literary endeavors stand toe-to-toe with the lofty rhetoric of used car salesmen, are determined to make short change of those blank spots in short order. One writer, so prolific at his craft that’s he’s almost made himself extinct, asked a friend of mine, "Can you think of other places that need guidebooks? You know...where people would pay money?" There was a hint of desperation in his voice.
Portable GPS units and cell phones have made backcountry hiking and four-wheeling about as revelatory as a trip to the mall. Lost? Check your GPS unit. Lost with a broken ankle or the Jeep’s stuck in mud up to its axles? Call a tow truck or the ambulance on your cell phone after you figure your location on your GPS.
Some adventure. Search & Rescue teams don’t even get to hone their tracking skills anymore. At this rate, they’ll start getting lost as well.
And if all that life-saving technology is too intimidating, the catered backcountry tour offers the safest option of all. Nobody’s going to get lost on a four hour tour when they’re paying $150 for the experience. Getting your customers lost is...well, it’s just bad business. And be sure of this, the commercial exploitation of wilderness in the American West will someday send cold shivers down the spines of earnest environmentalists, who failed to see the threat in the early years of the 21st Century.
Ultimately, the fear of getting lost has more to do with our rapidly diminished self-reliance than anything else. Our inability to take care of ourselves, to be responsible for our own safety and well-being, has left many of us fearful of and intimidated by the Great Unknown. We long for a Mystery, are inspired by Adventure, but we don’t even know what they are anymore.
Packaged and marketed beyond recognition.
For myself, I don’t particularly long to be lost in the irreversible sense, but I love it when I don’t know where I am. Try it sometime—it may be a transcendental experience.
DID MELVIN DUMMAR FIND
THE "LOST" HOWARD HUGHES?
A few months ago, I was listening to KUER’s excellent "Radio West" with Doug Fabrizio. He and his producer Elaine Clark manage to offer one of the most consistently informative and entertaining programs on public radio. I’m grateful that they haven’t moved on to bigger markets. We need "Radio West."
The program that struck a personal chord with me was Fabrizio’s interview with Gary Magneson, a former FBI agent who recently wrote a book called "The Investigation." The book is about Utahn Melvin Dummar and an incredible story that few believe. But I do (I think).
Dummar claimed that in 1967, while driving a lonely dirt road in the Nevada desert, he came across an old man lying semi-conscious and incoherent in the middle of the gravel. Dummar helped the man into his truck and drove him to Las Vegas. The old man identified himself as Howard Hughes. Hughes asked for money, Melvin gave him all the change in his pocket and left him behind the Sands Hotel. He never gave the encounter another thought.
Years later, after Hughes’ death, a will was discovered on a receptionist’s desk at Mormon Church headquarters in Salt lake City. In it, Hughes left $156 million to his desert savior, Melvin Dummar. Later, Dummar’s story was ridiculed and dismissed by the courts and the public. Hollywood made a movie called "Howard and Melvin" but Dummar faded into obscurity.
Now, Magneson has found evidence that supports Dummar’s claim. He says that old Desert Inn records, the hotel where Hughes stayed, prove Hughes was away on precisely the day Dummar claims to have encountered Hughes. And he has the testimony of Robert Deiro, a Las Vegas businessman and pilot who says that on four occasions in the late 60s, he flew Hughes to a brothel north of Vegas called the Cottontail Ranch. Hughes apparently had an ongoing interest in a prostitute named Sunny. On one of those visits, Deiro fell asleep waiting for Hughes to return from a Sunny visit, but when he awoke, Hughes was gone. It was the same night Dummar found Hughes. Deiro flew back alone, but never made the connection to the Dummar story until just a couple years ago.
Recently the media asked Dummar if he felt vindicated after all these years. He said, "I’ve got a lot of hope but not much faith."
The reason this story interests me is a tiny anecdote I can add to the discussion. In 1982, when I was still a seasonal ranger at Arches National Park, my buddy Mike Salamacha and I were at a place called Plateau Supply, near a vacant lot next to the old Miller Shopping Center. We were loading cedar posts into the bed of a Park Service pickup truck to do some fence repairs in Salt Valley.
On that vacant lot, someone had pitched a small version of a circus tent and one man stood there with what appeared to be an inventory of used or blemished furniture. I gave the man a glance and went back to the cedar posts.
But a moment later, I heard a friendly voice over my shoulder.
"What are you fellers doing?"
The face looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. Then I recalled a photo I’d seen in Newsweek a year or so earlier. Why it registered with me, I’ll never know.
I stood up in the truck and said, "Say...aren’t you Melvin Dummar?"
He grinned a bit sheepishly and nodded, "Yes I am. How did you know that?"
"For some reason I remembered your face from a magazine," I replied. He nodded again and smiled. I could tell he enjoyed being recognized but also seemed to be bracing himself for more doubt and derision. Still I couldn’t help but ask.
"So Melvin," I asked as I sat down on the tailgate. "Is the story really true?"
He sighed and sat next to me.
"It’s all true," he said wearily. "Just like I said. All I was trying to do was help an old man. I never believed he was Howard Hughes at all until years later when the will showed up." He shook his head. "Now I’m selling used furniture and everybody thinks I’m crazy. But I’m not."
We talked a bit about the movie and he confided to me that the actress Mary Steenburgin, who won an Oscar for her role in the film was "sort of snooty."
"I had a bit part in the film," he told us, " but didn’t get paid much."
Melvin helped us load the cedar posts and when we were done, Mike and I shook hands with Dummar and drove back to the park. "I don’t know," said Mike. "It’s a wild story but I almost believe the guy."
"Yeah, me too," I said. "He really wanted us to believe him. I got the feeling that was more important than the money." The next day I heard the city had denied Melvin’s application for a temporary vendor’s license to sell his furniture. Dummar’s luck continued to hold—all bad. He had to move on. But I never forgot the conversation. When I read that vindication at this late date might still be a possibility, I can only hope that it’s true. Melvin Dummar deserves some good news.
REMEMBERING THE OLD ROAD
TO DELICATE ARCH...
I took a short sentimental trip to Arches a few weeks ago. I haven’t worked at Arches for 20 years now, but I still remember it fondly and sometimes visit my favorite places. This was a "frontcountry road patrol" on this particular day and I was grateful that it hasn’t changed all that much. The parking lot has been expanded at Balanced Rock and the parking area extended at the Devils Garden. I don’t know why they built an airport terminal at the park entrance. The campground looks about the same, though I can’t figure out what all those cut-stone walls are. More year-end money guys?
Perhaps the most dramatic change is the Delicate Arch road. It was always something of a small miracle to me that the three mile road was allowed to remain primitive for as long as it did. While the NPS looked high and low for new construction projects, until the mid-90s, the gateway to the most photographed natural arch in the world could only be accessed by a dusty washboard road that had to be closed every time it rained. I thought it was great. (For a then and now image of the old road, see "Transformations," on page 29.)
What price was a visitor willing to pay to see Delicate Arch? Was he willing to subject himself and his car to a grueling one and a half mile drive on a corrugated road? The answer was, not really, once they thought about it. The Park Service loves to accumulate data, and at several locations in the park, they placed traffic counters to study use patterns and flows. Not only did they know how many visitors enter the park at its entrance, they knew how many took the time to visit the Windows section of the park, how many ventured to Salt Valley, even how many intrepid tourists journeyed over the ledges on the 4WD trail to Tower Arch.
At the turnoff to Delicate Arch, the park had for years maintained a counter near the intersection with the main road, right at the point where it turns to gravel. But Jerry Epperson, the chief ranger at the time, suspected the numbers being reported were much too high. So we moved the counter a mile down the road to a point near Salt Valley Wash. Suddenly, "visitation" to Delicate Arch dropped by half. What we discovered was that many cars were taking one look at all that treacherous washboard and were turning around, in search of a more comfortable ride.
And yet, it was my observation that some of the park visitors’ most memorable experiences were found on that old road. At three locations, the Delicate Arch road crosses over dry washes...Salt Valley Wash, Salt Wash, and Winter Camp Wash. When it rains, of course, the washes cross over the road. Salt Valley Wash lies between the Delicate Arch trailhead and the main road. If the wash floods, hikers on the other side (as well as their cars) can get stranded.
It was my job to warn visitors of the possibility of flash floods when the threat was there, and to assist them when the warning came too late. Salt Valley Wash originates to the west and north of Delicate Arch and drains a large portion of the Devils Garden and the Fiery Furnace. In the desert, isolated thunder storms really live up to their name. While it’s sunny and calm at Wolfe Ranch, it can be raining torrents upstream.
As I’d race down from the campground, I’d sometimes be able to see the flood building in every rivulet and side drainage, but I would be hard-pressed to convince anyone at the trailhead that a wall of water was on the way. After doing my best to spread the word, I’d drive back across the wash to the safe side and wait.
I could usually hear the oncoming flood before I saw it. The head of a flash flood doesn’t roar, it hisses. Before the water, comes the foam, a thick brown smoothie that inches down the waterway at a pace that always seems so much slower than the wall of water that’s directly behind it. I’ve walked out into the middle of a dry wash and waited for the foam. And when it arrived, managed to stay just inches ahead of it while walking at a leisurely pace. It always felt like I was being followed by the Blob.
When the non-believers finally decided to make their departure, and drove 200 yards to the Salt Valley Wash crossing, I always liked to be there waiting for them. I may have had an all-knowing smirk on my face.
But while the flood sometimes meant they missed their dinner reservations, or threw them off their itinerary, I never saw anything but smiles and sheer wonder on the faces of the stranded tourists. How many people can say they were stranded on a dirt road in the desert by a flash flood that arrived while the sun was shining? Some of the best "campfire talks" ever given at Arches were shouted across Salt Valley Wash to an amazed, albeit captive audience.
It usually took a couple of hours for the water to subside and another hour for the wash bottom to become firm enough to support the weight of a vehicle. Then, in 1983, the NPS road crew spent a day doing bulldozer practice in the wash and actually altered its gradient. When they were done, water had to flow uphill at the wash crossing. When the next flash flood came along, the water pooled, instead of flowing downstream, and the crossing became a frequent quagmire after that.. A few years later, they got the funding to build bridges and pave the road. By 1995, the project was complete.
While I guess the improvements were inevitable, visitors will never know what they missed. Ordinary, uneventful vacations became extraordinary, memorable adventures for people whose lives were already often confined to dreadful routines. And it was nice to know that Nature could still have her way once in a while, and force us to live by her schedule.
With a paved Delicate Arch road, you can be guaranteed a safe, smooth, on-schedule visit. But the unexpected?
Perish the thought.
(At press time, I am pleased to report, a recent stunning flash flood took out the paved road at Delicate Arch...
NATURE RULES!)
AN EARLIER THAN USUAL
ANNUAL DISCLAIMER
For reasons that are totally personal, I have printed both winter issues early this year. Ridiculously early, in fact. Don’t look for stories that are as topical as today’s headlines because you won’t find them here. Not this year.
So...if the world ends and there’s no mention of it, it’s not because we don’t care. And if some event occurs that renders part or all of this and the next issue tasteless or inappropriate, it wasn’t intentional.
And I promise this will never happen again. But for this year, thanks for bearing with me...JS
