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Show PAGE 16 THE ZEPHYRJANUARY-FEBRUAR- Y 1993 the year in review by Ken Davey There are good years and there are great years and, once in a while, a year that should never have been. After awhile they all swirl together in the back of your brain, more flavors of a time than actual memories. But it's the holidays, a time to look back at the past 12 months, when the individual carbohydrate-base- d globs that scientists believe hold the thoughts and mind pictures we call memories are still sharply outlined and bouncing off synapses in the cortex like metal balls in a ringing and clanging pinball machine. Now's the time to decide: was 1992 a good one, a bad one, or a do-ove- r? Whatever else, 1992, the year of the tragedy, will not be soon forgotten here in Grand County. It will not be forgotten, ever, by the family and friends of Mark Yates and Maribel Loveridge and Jeremy Hopkins and Bill Turk, the four victims of last winter's avalanche. Charley and his strikingly beautiful and classy wife M.L, we came away with the distinct impression that if they thought they had a shot at another big strike, they7 d mortgage their annuities in a flash and climb bade into the old jeep without a moment's hesitation. was the year of the motels in Moab. All winter long construction crews poured concrete and put up frames and applied stucco, so that guests in the spring could plunk down cash for the privilege spending the night in our town. Visitation at Arches and Canyonlands broke all records, and new restaurants and souvenir shops drove downtown rents skyward. And residents stopped talking about Moab becoming a tourist town, we were one. And not a single visitor was bludgeoned by an enraged drugstore or shop clerk when asked, for the 400th time that day, why toothpaste costs more here than in LASalt LakeBoulderHeidelberg. And many 1992 T-sh-irt Bill Turk to Yitei 'Wnyizi9B They were skiers, expert and young and confident, and they went for an afternoon cross country run near Gold Basin. And a wall of snow killed them. For days we waited for the recovery of the bodies, but we already knew they were dead, as two survivors of the snowslide worked feverishly for hours and dug them out, though unable to bring them back. But still we waited as rescue professionals and volunteers went up against storms and wind and continued dangerous conditions to retrieve the victims. Days later hundreds gathered on a fittingly rainy and cold afternoon at City Park for a memorial service, to celebrate their lives instead of mourning their deaths. But for many, the snowcapped peaks of the La Sals will never be the clean and beautiful and inviting wild places that captured our imagination and won our admiration, but rather dark reminders of painful and horrifying mortality. the return of Charley Steen. central the Steen was figure in the biggest boom this region has ever seen, when in the 1950s he found vast deposits of uranium just miles from Moab, setting off a rush that transformed a tiny town into a center of western states commerce. Steen was crazy. At least, that's what everyone from wizened old prospectors to the federal government thought. Everybody KNEW that uranium was on top of the ground, or just under it. To find it, you walked around with a geiger counter, picking up readings of radioactivity. When the needle jumped, you did too, and scoured the desert landscape. But Steen had other ideas, based on a solid, though insubordinate, history as a geologist and oil wildcatter. The uranium, he said, was in the rock, and like all rock, it was layered, and if you figured out where those layers were and drilled DOWN... Steen made and lost fortunes the way the rest of us find and leave "lifetime" mates, and has 1992 was also the year of settled into comfortable if not ostentatious middle class retirement in Colorado. But for those of us who came out to the picnic in his honor or attended the host of banquets and luncheons for 74 of us began realizing that the visitors from those distant and highly unpleasant areas are worth talking to. was the year of political change, brought to full flower by die voters' decision to replace the county commission with a more representative 7 member council. Residents of all types, from those born and raised in Spanish Valley to those moving in from the Frontrange, decided enough was enough, that political life should reflect where Moab is and is going as much if not more than a surly and pathetic bitterness that everyone doesn't think, act, and worship die way we do. It took a highly ineffective and selfish county, commission to bring a majority of residents together, but it happened, and die slate has been wiped clean, forgiving all of us for our petty and ridiculous posturing in the past. Have die problems and disputes gone away? Of course 1992 not. But we have a chance to work on them, never reaching consensus, never SOLVING them, but learning to grapple with them and reaching at least some sort of community vision of where we need to go. The road to Vernal, the Keystone pits, the idea that county government is a way to provide jobs for your relatives who can't make it in the real world, they were all sparks to a profound of how local politics should be carried out. WORST DECISION BY POLITICIAN- S- The Grand County Travel Council discovered that Judith Morris, Travel Council director, was moving to Crater Lake, Oregon. So they laundied a search for a replacement. But the county commissioners, well versed in the needs of the tourist industry because, hey, they've taken vacations, decided to override the unanimous choice of the travel council and pick someone more attuned to their political, social, and moral point of view. For some in town, that was the last straw. Here was a volunteer board that put in hundreds of hours of work being told, "we don't care what you think." South Main o Moab, Utah 259-SUB- S HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM JOHN HARTLEY AND THE SUBWAY GANG. |