Bill Benge grew up in the Bay Area and as a young man, embraced and absorbed the many cultural opportunities that an international city like San Francisco offered. His taste in music was eclectic and extensive. He read more books in a week than most of us might hope to skim in a year. And he traveled the world. Bill was my walking, talking encyclopedia. He was often better, faster and more accurate than a Google search. I liked to call him Renaissance Man—Ren Man for short, and he appreciated the title.

And yet, despite his knowledge and educational background and his erudite ways, he preferred the quieter and more honest life that he found in Moab. He never wore his sophistication on his sleeve, though he never tried to hide it either. It was simply who Bill was and in that spirit, his friends were as broad and diverse as his vocabulary. He counted among those closest to him, teachers and artists and writers—he was Ed Abbey's attorney while Ed lived in Moab—but also ranchers and miners and carpenters and short-order cooks and even some of the men and women he'd prosecuted over the years.

More than anything, he never wanted to change Moab. His talents and his personality enriched the community but Bill never wanted his town to be a reflection of himself. He loved and reveled in the differences. He preferred the honest and the genuine to the contrived and pre-constructed. And more than anything, he loathed the bland homogeneity that has infected so much of the rural West in recent years.

Today's latest New West immigrants could learn something from Bill. They might try embracing a small town on its terms, not theirs. They might consider that different values can often complement each other, instead of conflict. And that in the end, the New West should strive to be the sum of its many different parts, and not an exclusive and regimented and inflexible culture determined to rid itself of the very qualities in a small town that brought them there in the first place.

..Jim Stiles November 2006

October 2006