Utah Desert Quotes

As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.

I had a dream about you. We were fishing in the Utah desert. You caught a dinosaur, but due to Federal regulations, we had to release the bones so Ted Kennedy could drive back to the cemetery, drunk.


I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.

This was the desert, everything all at once, whether it was needed or not. What survived had learned to save, live carefully, and keep a low profile, even appear to be dead for long periods. Perseverance and patience.

Is it possible to make a living by simply watching light? Monet did. Vermeer did. I believe Vincent did too. They painted light in order to witness the dance between revelation and concealment, exposure and darkness. Perhaps this is what I desire most, to sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone or simply to walk parallel with a path of liquid light called the Colorado River. In the canyon country of southern Utah, these acts of attention are not merely the pastimes of artists, but daily work, work that matters to the whole community. This living would include becoming a caretaker of silence, a connoisseur of stillness, a listener of wind where each dialect is not only heard but understood.

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the spirit of the Mountain was thinking; and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great western slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the eastern Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. And beyond, beyond, over the Sierras the other side if Carson sink was bejeweled bay-encircled nightlike old Frisco of my dreams. We were situated on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night, eastward over the plains where somewhere a man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word and would arrive any minute and make us silent.

God, how I long to go out west again someday—to drive some blue highway in Nevada or Utah until there’s absolutely nothing around me, then stop the car, in the middle of the road, maybe, and get out and just stand there, where I can see from one horizon to the other, and smell the air and feel the sun and listen to the silence of the desert. I have this idea that if I could do this, time might hold still for a second, and I would know, for just a moment, what it feels like to be here.

In April of 2006, the Church-owned Desert Morning News, in a remarkable week-long series on suicide in Utah, reported: "A former surgeon general who recently spoke in Utah about suicide prevention said he was impressed with the state's warm and friendly people...But, he added, 'In New York, we kill each other. In Utah, you kill yourselves.'" The newspaper gave the shocking statistic that Utah leads the entire nation in suicides among men aged 15 to 24. Utah also has the 11th highest suicide rate over all age groups. (36)

The ancient canyon art of Utah belongs in that same international museum without walls which makes African sculpture, Melanesian masks, and the junkyards of New Jersey equally interesting—those voices of silence which speak to us in the first world language. As for the technical competence of the artists, its measure is apparent in the fact that these pictographs and petroglyphs though exposed to the attack of wind, sand, rain, heat, cold and sunlight for centuries still survive vivid and clear. How much of the painting and sculpture being done in America today will last—in the merely physical sense—for even a half-century?

Picking oranges in Florida. Pushing a broom in New Orleans. Mucking out horse-stalls in Lufkin, Texas. Handing out real estate brochures on street corners in Phoenix, Arizona. Working jobs that pay cash. ... The faces on the currency don't matter. What matters is the sight of a weathervane against a violent pink sunset, the sound of his heels on an empty road in Utah, the sound of the wind in the New Mexico desert, the sight of a child skipping rope beside a junked-out Chevrolet Caprice in Fossil, Oregon. What matters is the whine of the powerlines beside Highway 50 west of Elko, Nevada, and a dead crow in a ditch outside Rainbarrel Springs. Sometimes he's sober and sometimes he gets drunk. Once he lays up in an abandoned shed-this is just over the California state line from Nevada-and drinks for four days straight. It ends with seven hours of off-and-on vomiting. For the first hour or so, the puking is so constant and so violent he is convinced it will kill him. Later on, he can only wish it would. And when it's over, he swears to himself that he's done, no more booze for him, he’s finally learned his lesson, and a week later lies drunk again and staring up at the strange stars behind the restaurant where he has hired on as a dishwasher. He is an animal in a trap and he doesn't care. ... Sometimes he asks himself what he thinks he's doing, where the hell he's going, and such questions are apt to send him in search of the next bottle in a hurry. Because he's really not going anywhere. He's just following the highways in hiding and dragging his trap along behind him, he's just listening to the call of those roads and going from one to the next. Trapped or not, sometimes he is happy; sometimes he sings in his chains like the sea. He wants to see the next weathervane standing against the next pink sunset. He wants to see the next silo crumbling at the end of some disappeared farmer's long-abandoned north field and see the next droning truck with TONOPAH GRAVEL or ASPLUNDH HEAVY CONSTRUCTION written on the side. He's in hobo heaven, lost in the split personalities of America. He wants to hear the wind in canyons and know that he's the only one who hears it. He wants to scream and hear the echoes run away.

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. IN the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess.

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in the darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess—across the night, eastward over the Plains...

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess—across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent.

Perhaps I am here because of last night’s dream, when I stood on the frozen lake before a kayak made of sealskin. I walked on the ice toward the boat and picked up a handful of shredded hide and guts. An old Eskimo man said, “You have much to work with.” Suddenly, the kayak was stripped of its skin. It was a rib cage of willow. It was the skeleton of a fish. I want to see it for myself, wild exposure, in January, when this desert is most severe. The lake is like steel. I wrap my alpaca shawl tight around my face until only my eyes are exposed. I must keep walking to stay warm. Even the land is frozen. There is no give beneath my feet. I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined. Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.” We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.

What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not? Jesus Christ, lady, roll that window down! You can't see the desert if you can't smell it. Dusty? Of course it's dusty—this is Utah! But it's good dust, good red Utahn dust, rich in iron, rich in irony. Turn that motor off. Get out of that peice of iron and stretch your varicose veins, take off your brassiere and get some hot sun on your old wrinkled dugs! You sir, squinting at the map with your radiator boiling over and your fuel pump vapor-locked, crawl out of that shiny hunk of GM junk and take a walk—yes, leave the old lady and those squawling brats behind for a while, turn your back on them and take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it, it'll do you and her and them a world of good. Give the kids a break too, let them out of the car, let them go scrambling over rocks hunting for rattlesnakes and scorpions and anthills—yes sir, let them out, turn them loose; how dare you imprison little children in your goddamned upholstered horseless hearse? Yes sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! like women! like human beings! and walk—walk—WALK upon your sweet and blessed land!

The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop. The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi. The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.) Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush. Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo spectacular bursts of change. In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent. But the story doesn’t end there, because these savage transitions are exacerbated by yet another unusual phenomenon, one that is a direct outgrowth of the region’s unusual climate and terrain. On

Few regions of the present United States were more inhospitable to human habitation than the lands of the Great Basin, the high desert country of southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, Nevada, and Utah. Indians of the Great Basin spent much of the year foraging for food in small and dispersed groups, although several families might come together for a communal rabbit drive or to dig for camas bulbs. It was common for Shoshonis to name their subgroups after the food most abundant in their customary dwelling grounds: thus among the Shoshonis were groups whose names translated as “seed eaters,” or “fish eaters,” or “mountain-sheep eaters.

The Skull Valley reservation is ringed by toxic and hazardous waste facilities (Figure 1). To the south lies the Dugway Proving Grounds, where the US Army tests chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and other weapons and trains elite members of the US armed forces in their use. To the west is the Utah Test and Training Range, a vast swath of desert the US Air Force uses for target practice by bombers, the testing of cruise missiles, and air-to-air combat training for fighter jets. North and west of the reservation a private company, Enviro Care, landfills 93 percent of the nation's Class A, low-level nuclear waste. East of the reservation sit the Tooele Army Depot, one of the largest weapons depots in the world, and the Deseret Chemical Depot, which until recently was home to nearly 50 percent of the nation's aging stockpile of chemical weapons. From 1996 to 2012 the US Army worked around the clock to incinerate over a million rockets, missiles, and mortars packed with sarin, mustard gas, and other deadly agents.

From Alan Thein Duening: Picture North America from space. Look at the upper left and start an imaginary line on the rugged coast of southern Alaska. Climb the ridges that encircle Prince William Sound. Cross the snowy teeth of the Chugach Mountains and descend through kettle-pond country to the feet of the towering Alaska Range. Rise again to the bitter heights and turning southeast along the crest, clip the corner of the Yukon Territory. Enter British Columbia and veer east through its folding north. Turn your line south when you reach the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains. Follow the divide down the thousand-mile spine of British Columbia, across Montana, along the buttressed ridges of the Idaho border and into Wyoming as far as Jackson Hole. There, leave the divide and turn westward toward the coast. Following the swells and benches that limit the Columbia Basin, dip southward into Utah and Nevada, then northward again around the high desert of central Oregon. When you approach the Cascade Mountains, veer southwest through the tangled topography of northern California to the crest of the Coast Range. Just north of San Francisco Bay, descend to the shores of the Pacific. The line you have drawn is an unfamiliar one. You won’t find it on maps. But it shows a geographical unit more real, in ecological sense, than any of the lines governments draw. You have drawn a biological region, a bioregion. Specifically, you have outlines the watersheds of rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean through North America’s temperate rain forest zone with a fifteen-hundred-mile belt of rain forests along the coast. The unity of this diverse bioregion is the movement of its water; every ounce of moisture that the ocean throws into the sky and the sky hurls down on the land inside this region’s borders tumbles toward the rain forest coast. If it does not evaporate or get trapped in underground aquifers along the way, water will reach that dripping shoreline through one of several hundred swift, cold rivers. Most likely, it will travel through the Columbia or the Fraser rivers, home to the Earth’s greatest population of migrating salmon. This place, defined by water running to woodlands, has no perfect name. You can call it Rain Forest Province, the North Pacific Slope, or Cascadia… Natural units of place such as this have always mattered more to people than has humanity in general or the planet in its entirety. Indeed, history is unequivocal; people will sacrifice for villages, homelands, or nations, even giving their lives. But humans seem unwilling to sacrifice for their planet, despite the fact that it is now suffering proportionately greater losses from social decay and environmental destruction than most countries at war.

After dinner one night, me and the boys are on the edge of camp, tossing rocks over the barbed wire. There’s plenty to throw. Rocks are maybe the only thing that’s plentiful here besides dust and anger. For maybe the hundredth time, I think about leaping that fence. It’s only about three feet high, and kids like Yum-yum’s brother, Fred, sneak through all the time to catch scorpions in the desert. I could go running out there, out with the wild horses they say roam this part of Utah, free as the goddamn wind. But I’d never abandon Mas and the boys, or my uncle Yas, who took me in when my parents shipped me out to California. The whole camp’s buzzing with the news today. Everyone seventeen and up has gotta do this questionnaire to see who’s loyal and who’s not. If you’re loyal, you can volunteer for Roosevelt’s combat unit. It’s Nisei-only, which is a shit idea, if you ask me. If Uncle Sam sends ’em to the Pacific, the other battalions are gonna mistake them for the enemy. “They won’t get sent to the Pacific,” Mas says, pitching a stone so far into the desert, it disappears from sight.

THE FIRST MORNING This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome—there’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space. For myself I’ll take Moab, Utah. I don’t mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it—the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky—all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.

The elder wife said that the stranger was welcome to the children, but she insisted that they hear nothing of the outside world, and that they be kept to the teachings of the Mormon geography—which made all the world outside Utah an untrodden wilderness. August Naab did not hold to the letter of the Mormon law; he argued that if the children could not be raised as Mormons with a full knowledge of the world, they would only be lost in the end to the Church.

August Naab’S oasis was an oval valley, level as a floor, green with leaf and white with blossom, enclosed by a circle of colossal cliffs of vivid vermilion hue. At its western curve the Colorado River split the red walls from north to south. When the wind was west a sullen roar, remote as of some far-off driving mill, filled the valley; when it was east a dreamy hollow hum, a somnolent song, murmured through the cottonwoods; when no wind stirred, silence reigned, a silence not of serene plain or mountain fastness, but shut in, compressed, strange, and breathless. Safe from the storms of the elements as well as of the world was this Garden of Eschtah.

His concept of rights vs. shares was something like the difference between democracy and old European feudalism. Liberty wouldn’t be bought or dictated—it was an unalienable right, as Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams might say. When protected, this right unleashed the energy of cooperation and competition—a diverse and evolving ecosystem like Hock had observed in the Utah desert.

Above all, he loved the desert rivers. Brower’s favorite place in the Colorado Basin was Echo Park. Near the confluence of the Green and the Yampa rivers, Echo Park was a pure indulgence in the most austere of deserts. In autumn, its groves of cottonwood and yellowing willow gave it a New England air. In the spring, the swollen Green would flood the canyon bottom and leave lush meadows as it went. Echo Park was probably the most beautiful canyon flat in all of Utah, part of Dinosaur National Monument. It was also an ideal site for a dam.

But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years—that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be catastrophic. But climate scientists believe it will keep getting hotter. If so even drought-resistant plants will die, reservoir levels will continue to fall, crop production will drop. Worse, as vegetation withers, it will no longer be able to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change. And now to this precarious and combustible mix we have decided to add fracking. We have chosen to do this not with caution but on a massive scale, and to do it right next to our precious rivers, right smack in the middle of aquifers. We go into these places and use, mixed with the millions of gallons of water, a secret recipe of chemicals, many of them poisonous to humans, which we then force into fissures of rock with high-powered blasts to flush out the fuel we are seeking. The man in the bar had warned about earthquakes, but fracking is, in essence, a small seismic event, designed to blast out minerals. We have decided to inject poisons into the ground, then shake that ground, in a region where potable water is more precious than gold. But not, we have decided, more precious than oil. One thing is crystal clear. Though fracking is unproven technology, we are not treating it that way. Instead we are conducting a vast experiment all over the country, from the hills of Pennsylvania to the deserts of Utah. Since we are moving into unfamiliar territory you would think, if we were wise, that we would carefully monitor any and all results. We are not. When people in the fracked area complain that their water is fizzling out of their taps in a foamy mix, smelling of petroleum, the companies are quick to offer other water sources, like cisterns, but not quick, of course, to question the enterprise itself. In fact, the corporate response to the contaminated water supplies and groundwater has been consistent. They tell the landowners and anyone else who complains that they are concerned but that they will not slow down until there is conclusive proof that what they are doing is dangerous and poses a health risk. This is standard operating procedure in today’s world, but it is also, to anyone with a dollop of common sense, an ass-backwards way of doing things. “Despite the troubles people are having, we’ll keep going full-speed ahead until someone proves to us the trouble is real,” they tell us. Never, “Maybe we should slow down until we learn the facts.

There is an unmarked line in Utah, somewhere among the flatworm lengths of invisible county borders, past the point when you can say you’re headed South and are now already in it and just going further down, where the plain opens forward and the plateaus are too high on either side for you to see the sun and so the sun seems to come from the ground itself. He watched the earth shed its green skin and dry into tan bruises of acacia bramble and sand–the top fingers of the desert, spread upon the map from below like a callus on the earth.

These good white liberals want monuments and wilderness to protect the places they recreate, to keep out companies that want to suck the fossil fuels out from under the sandstone. But the oil and gas will be burned by and large by them, to travel to Utah’s public lands. And it’s used by us - you in your big red Cadillac and me in my Toyota truck - although I’ve recently downgraded to a more fuel-efficient Subaru, the preferred method of transport that’s most often frosted with bike, ski, and boat racks for outdoor enthusiasts across the nation. The land and those who live off it know this arrangement breeds no symbiosis. We all want to get to, and get off on, a body corralled and commodified. Our orgasmic need for release and relief eclipses the fact this is the living, breathing body of the Beloved - the naked desert that has demarcated and delineated - ribbed, we believe, for our pleasure.