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Show 2 - MERRY TIMES - DECEMBER 1992 Headin' for the Future— lnterview with Bill Hedden The Heddens have been a presence in this Valley for many years. At the northwestern end of the valley, their lovely home and its verdant surround- ings are a welcome and breathtaking sight to those seeking respite from tumbleweed and desert. Exquisite furniture, designed and made by Bill, adorns their house. Originally created for the family’s use, the fumiture’s elegant yet simple lines have become treasured pieces of museum quality, and their sale provides the Heddens’ living. Theirs is a well established, smooth running life built out of mutually shared dreams. But it was not always so smooth. Let us start at the beginning. “Eleanor and I met at Harvard where I was doing my graduate work in biology. She was just about to leave, but, was nice enough to hang around with me until I got my doctorate. Within a week after I had my degree we left, because I’d decided before I finished that I didn’t want to continue killing animals to do research. She had a strong fantasy of having land somewhere, and she said, ‘Come on. I want The year the Heddens came saw an influx of other families. They mention the Ehlers, the Stuckeys, and the Taylors, as well as Denise d’Agnise who had come the previous winter. “No one had a house,” Bill recalls, “so everyone related constantly and intimately with everyone else. The valley was a close knit group of people.” They were there to help each other through innumerable crises, and to share warmth and laughter. The overt animosity of Moab residents toward the settlers in Castle Valley, punctuated by weekly raids looking for “pot,” also served to bind the community together. But after two years, the strain of being involved in the intimate details of one another’s lives had taken its toll and people drew back from one another. Like all the others, the Heddens painstakingly built their house themselves. They lived in the back of their open pickup truck after their tent had “blown to shreds” in their first week. They cooked over a camp stove and carried water up from the springs. Eleanor recalls Denise’s sheepherder’s tent, complete with wood stove. “It looked like the Taj Mahal to me,” she Bill soon became the information source. He was put on Governor Matheson's nuclear waste task force, the State’s official liaison with the Department of Energy. After many hours of negotiations, the Department decided against putting such a plant at the opening to a National Park and building a supply railroad costing a billion dollars. It took years of dedication and hard work to see this issue through to completion. Bill went on to work with Buttes Resource as their environmental manager, doing their environmental studies for their Ten Mile potash project. In this capacity he was introduced to Robert Redford’s Institute for Resource Management. He ran programs for them on national forest planning and nuclear waste issues. A step up came when he switched to working for the Keystone Center. They were involved in mediation and resolution of complicated environmen- tal issues. Bill’s job, when presented with an issue such as an unaccepted proposal by the Forest Service, was to identify important players all over the country and get them intrigued with sitting down together and hammering to show you some country I really like says. Bill remembers Deglas’s Aframe, dragged down from Castleton a lot,’ and so we came to Southern and set up on his property, again at that out a better Forest Service proposal which would meet their divergent needs. Bill would then facilitate a Utah.” They looked at land in the Capital Reef area but found the parcels either too big and expensive or too time an “incredible shelter.” “The idea mediation process which included of actually living up to the covenants dealing with contending needs and angry people. Bill commuted all over the west, including Oregon, where he worked on a bill designating 42 wild and scenic rivers. “I worked with the irrigators and the farmers, the timber small. Feeling discouraged, they came with friends to Arches for a vacation. In the Poplar Place, then owner Joe May told them of CastleValley. When they arrived there were few people living here: Earl Holtz, Annie McLanahan, Bob Deglas and Melody Taylor, Bill Durant, and Olie Hogan among others. Bill and Eleanor laugh, remembering how Deglas, Taylor, Durant, and Hogan had wanted to “have nothing to do with anyone.” So they all bought land on the furthest road in the Ranchos, and lived in the most crowded area. There were others on Shafer Lane, where lots—made green by an open irrigation well and five acres of tomato plants—sold more quickly. This big well also watered clear down to the Church lot, feeding alfalfa fields and a huge cottonwood When the well was shut off, the tomatoes, cottonwood, and alfalfa died. The Heddens also recall an orchard of pear and apple trees in the field across from the Ranch house. that all of us had signed was totally laughable,” says Bill. There were other joys in this time of simple living. “People would go out and spend the whole winter camping in Arches,” Bill recalls. “They had the time. Money didn’t matter very much. Most people didn’t have much to do with the cash economy.” Enjoying this beautiful country was more important and was not taken for granted. Bill’s love for both Castle Valley and Moab led him into politics back in 1978. A nuclear waste disposal plant was being proposed for development at the entrance to Canyonlands. High level nuclear waste would be shipped into Grand County for disposal. The town would triple in size, with a daily rush hour to and from Canyonlands. County commissioners, who were desperate for a way to bolster the econony, favored the plant. Bill reports the public feeling misled and “hungry for information” as to what high level nuclear waste was. Because of his knowledge and willingness to share, companies and the environmentalists, the boaters and the fishermen’s organizations,” Bill recalls. Bill next became a board member for High Country News, invited to join because the board felt he “knew more about western issues than anybody else.” Bill cites HCN as the most comprehensive news source for natural resource issues in the west. His concern about the impact of tourism in Grand County led Bill to join the board of Canyonlands Field Institute, “figuring that we had better start teaching the tourists about things that are and aren’t possible here.” Bill has been an active member of both boards until very recently, though he doesn’t compare serving on these boards to the intense energy demand of the “nuclear waste” years. More HEDDEN, Page 4 |
