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Show THE ZEPHYR/JUNE-JULY 2003 POINTBLANK OLD WEST/NEW WEST CONVERGENCE _ By Greg Gordon Last springI was leading a group of college student on a backpacking trip through a remote section of southern Utah when we encountered a man on horseback. “What are you all doin’?" he asked, bewildered to see us. "You all are walkin’? Man, I don’t walk unless I have to," he said when we told him. Brian said he had worked as a cowboy in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, as well as Utah. Today he was coming through to mop up the few remaining that they missed last week when they had to pull the cows off this range and them up to the mountains for calving and branding. The land we had just hiked through was the most devastatingly overgrazed I'd ever seen. Not a single stalk of grass or forb remained. The cows had been marginally palatable rabbitbrush, tamarisk, greasewood and even prickly pear. strays bring places eating Brain tenuous future, we stared back with romantic longing at the solid and defined past that never was. Self-proclaimed social philosophers would call this a meeting between the Old West and the New West. However, the history of the West is far too complex to be divided into such simplistic temporal designations. On the surface, Brian would surely serve as much as a symbol of the Old West as I would the New, an environmentalist backpacker dressed in purple Patagonia shorts and Teva sandals. Yet when you start looking, you find the differences dissolve, and the divide between the Old West and New crumbles. When does one start and the other begin? says three permitees jointly hold this 190,000 acre allotment (roughly 30 square miles). This may explain why it is so hammered. The tragedy of the commons. Is it the fault of the ranchers for putting too many cows here or the fault of the BLM for allowing too many cows, or the fault of Congress for refusing to reform an unviable system? As ranchers seek to cut costs, employees are the first to go. Corporate ranches now hire managers, not cowboys. Brian is one of the last. He wore Wranglers, of course, and a very worn and shapeless black hat, with a cord that descended into a long horsetail braid. No sunglasses. He wore a plain blue button-down cowboy shirt with a pen and can of chew in the breast pocket. Silver designs were embedded into his worn boots. A lariat dangled from the saddle horn and a six shooter from his hip. He was dressed for work. His weatherbeaten face sported a moustache that drooped down to his chin. He pulled a silver pocket watch from his vest, looked at it and put it back. I expected him to say he should be going but he didn’t and answered thoughtfully and slowly as we pelted him with questions. Brian said he’s been doing this all his life. "It sure ain’t for the money. Maybe I’m just too stupid to do anything else.” "So why do you do it?” asked one of the students. “Peace,” he replied without hesitation. "Never seen anyone down here before,” he said in a quiet tone that suggested he viewed us as harbingers of a future fraught with uncertainty and as inevitable as a new Walmart on the edge of town. Just as he gazed across the cultural divide at the ‘(NEW WEST or MOO,WEST "So why do you do it?" asked one of my students. "Peace," he replied, without hesitation. My family has inhabited the Colorado Plateau for more than 70 years and maintains a deep connection that spans generations, from crossing the desert for the California gold fields in 1850 to mountain biking in Moab. Yet for the 150 years spent in the West, we never farmed, mined, nor ranched. My mother came from a family of western doctors. My father’s people were Jewish merchants, who since 1900, supplied Western clothing to those coveting the Western mystique. Even in the 1880's people longed for the good old days and by 1910, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show mythologized an Old West that lay in the nostalgic past. The stated purpose of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to expand possibilities of commerce. The fur trapping that followed was not a romantic activity but a form of economic extraction. Yellowstone became BLUES? a tourist destination twenty years after BY JIM STILES AGLUAL CARTOON’ (left) drawn in 1977 "ACTUAL CARTOON" (below) drawn in 2002 y ,,24 HOURS of MOAB ig, BIKE RACE! ¥. ABUSING THE PUBLIC LANDS-25 Years Have Complicated the Issue |