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Show CONNECTING with the PAST Does the Future Have any Room to Remember the Past? Two Short Essays... but it’s the same belly. And they do sometimes put on a good show of standing at the wheels of decision, or at least somewhere in the pilot house. Periodically one of them gets to live in the Big House. We go along with the pretense, the show. Some laughs | along the way, there’s that. Don’t fret, get on with your life. In Defense of Nostalgia Yes, but I’m not that generous. What about that zillionaire crook who hid out in By Martin Murie Switzerland and then bought a pardon from the outgoing president? And not one word about Leonard Peltier who deserves a pardon, who deserves at the very, very Approaching my old home grounds, Jackson’s Hole, I start gearing down. Deep breathing, concentrating on traffic, letting all else blur by. But a parking place has to be found and by then I’ve remembered the sagebrush flats where Albertson’s grocery monopoly now squats, and the springtime shows of Johny Jump-ups and wild onion and windflower, and the paved-over willow patches along Cache Creek. I begin to lose it. I start making judgements. _ Yes, nostalgia is a dangerous ailment, but it has a saving side, the use of remembrance to make sense of shreds of history, and the places where history has ~ landed us. Where would we be without those selected memories colored by emotion? True, they're often, maybe usually, overly simple, sentimental in a bad way, ‘misanthropic and racist, et cetera. Old timers in Jackson’s Hole complained that the valley wasn’t like it used to be, too damn many people; they swore they'd light out for the territory: Alaska. Some did go north; most stayed; some made good money catering to the summertime hordes. least, a parole hearing. Outrages like that, the list is long. We can make jokes about these things, we ought to make the jokes, but it’s black humor, and we all know it and it has a certain flavor that hangs on. Accountability, part of our history, demanded of each of us, rich or poor, no exceptions. That’s an idea that’s become fact. We've hammered it into shape for a long time now. "We hold these truths to be ... and pledge our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor." Do you know a single mega corporation head who talks like that? I can’t take the High Road of forgetting what's past and “getting on with it." Why do the power people go on and on about "getting on"? Because they want us to forget, that’s why. I think the High Road is a sort of fraud, anyway: serenity that graces us when we put ourselves above it all. I’m hoping we varmentalists can find another kind of serenity. It could come from a lot of listening before we jump, listening before spouting off insulting inanities like "Cow Free by 93." Or from looking backward into where we've been. Or a sudden light in the sky. I don’t know. Something’s got to give. Martin Murie can be reached at: sagehen@westelcom.com _ Perfecto Martinez Revisited By Evan Cantor Everyone has a favorite campsite. Whether it dates from a happy childhood, undergraduate hi-jinks or racial memory from prehistoric humanity makes no difference. If you're lucky, you have a favorite secret campsite, one that will hopefully remain unknown forever. in a strangely Native American sense, we sign no deeds of mortgage to possess such secret places, yet we call them our own. And we are outraged when they are discovered. | am no exception. Mine once belonged to Perfecto Martinez. Once upon a time, near the tiny Mormon hamlet of Moab, there were no National Parks, no river-runners, no hordes of RVs, no masses of hikers, bikers, jeepers, and z Jackson, Wyoming in 1966, from the top of Snow King Mountain. Without nostalgia, how would we know that it’s things tourists. The vast canyonlands were mhabited by a few Mormon settlers, a handful of like zillionaire trophy homes and Cloudrocks and maquiladoras on the border that disgrace the American landscape? Our touchstones for comparing good, bad and indifferent don’t spring up from Zero, they are ragged survivors from the past, once part of a living present, one of the few things we own, and they offer a stance, a pause, before we follow blindly into the future without a clue. Hemingway, in "The Sun Also Rises,” wrote, "And then came the Rich." Who are these Rich, who take over and build over and fence in paradises where ordinary folks have been enjoying nature's glory and each other's company, maybe feeling a little smug and a lot lucky? Hemingway didn’t say, probably reluctant to bog down the flow of the prose. We could be generous: The rich are ordinary folks doing what they more or less have to do, given their situation, just like the rest of us here in the belly of the Beast. Theyre human, after all. Sure, their accomodations are much, much better than ours, outlaws, Native Americans, and the occasional hardy soul I's enough to make me buy some Lycra. WHAT DO WE DO? We write custom software for the big people and the little...OK...We take that real big file cabinet full of paper and put it all into your computer. 121 E. 100 S. #108 Moab, UT 84532 435.259.4384 800.635.5280 providing a basis for modern cowboy mythology. Perfecto was one of those hardy souls. In 1921, he staked his claim to my favorite secret campsite by carving name-anddate on a huge boulder. The valley, bounded by soaring red cliffs, was probably overgrazed then as now. Perfecto ran sheep or cattle out of a settlement called "Valley View,” now an empty sagebrush flat, working for some honcho who sent him out to do the round-up. In those days, there was a reservoir at the mouth of the valley. I can barely imagine where the water originated because this place is dry as a bone and the nearby La Sal mountains contribute nothing more than a nice view. But those were rainy years on the Plateau. By the time Perfecto signed his name on the rock, the wettest twenty had just ended and the Colorado River would soon be apportioned accordingly. Although the valley floor is bare from overgrazing, there are no cow-pies up in the rocks. A huge white slickrock mass rises just south of camp, the view from which is, as you might imagine, expansive. Around a corner, tucked in a bend of the ridge, is a series of slots and cracks, generally untouched by people and Foofprints celebrates | Summer... It looks good on HER, pal... |