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Show cesT eB eE EES alien MNO When I read Wallace Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, I realized that Powell and his protégés Clarence Dutton and Grove Karl In my childhood, I chose my father’s lineage for my connections. Geology was the bed- Gilbert were icons for my father and his friends. And that, in turn, my father’s cohort of government scientists were my models, the men I would choose to emulate. rock underlying patriarchy. Science was our religion, western history and natural history our tribal lore, the public domain of the West our Holy Land. Like my father, I took as my prophets the pioneers and mountain men, the explorer-scientists and writers journeying and journaling across the continent, and paid due respect to Lewis and Clark and to my The landscape where Powell and Dutton and Gilbert made their mark was the Colorado Plateau, that great maze of canyons carved by the Colorado River. My father introduced me to these places on family trips. Later I worked in the canyon country as a park grandfather's pioneer energy. Asubliminal message ran through this history: that government was good. From Lewis ranger. Today my retreat—my Eden—rises on a sandstone mesa with views across public land to a national park in the heart of the plateau. My imagination travels far but always and Clark themselves to Powell and the nineteenth-century surveys, Aldo Leopold, and comes home to these canyons. Bob Marshall's invention of the modern concept of wilderness while working for the Forest Service—the stories that nourished me featured federal bureaucrats as heroes. I grew up with the assumption that civil servants did visionary work. The visionaries’ disciples were the men of my father’s generation, not long back from the war, returned alive to family, to good work, and to the canyons and deserts and rivers and mountains of the West. These were the places that gave them their stories. These were the places that make us who we are. A cement-lined fishpond. A dusty alley with hollyhocks and bumblebees. These are my elemental, fundamental memories, from a time almost beyond memory. BARGAINING for EDEN is available at your local independent bookstore... or visit the University of California Press webpage: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/ pages/10734.html Bargaining for Eden is also available at Stephen Trimble’s website: http://www.stephentrimble.net/Books/ this book.asp?book=54 The anti-intellectual stereotype of masculinity in the West veers in another direction entirely —that of the cowboy who turned up in western movies and television series of the ’50s, a man of the land but one who is driven to possess, own, and dominate — quick to take up arms to defend his property. Americans fancy this stereotype. We imagine these mythic heroes as our leaders—and we keep electing to the presidency men who play to that myth. And listen to Steve's interview with Doug Fabrizio at KUER on “Radio West:” http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kuer/news/news.newsmain?action=artic leS6 ARTICLE ID=13288376sectionID=184 My father and his friends, by contrast, were men who drank and swore but treasured clear thinking and well-spoken ideas. They socialized as couples, women and men together. With plenty of World War II footage on the black-and-white television screen of our living room, I knew what they had done in the war a few short years before. Now “going out with the boys,” for them, meant getting together with their sack lunches at the : office to talk politics, argue theories, and banter. They saved their extra energy for climb- ing mountains and anonymous ridges, intent on deciphering the story of the landscape. Mostly irreligious, geologic time was their scripture. Their fieldwork mixed the physical and the cerebral. They drove Jeeps and forded rivers and sweat-stained their hatbands. They mused in grand scale, comfortable with the millions and billions of geologic time, but they spent their days in physical contact with the earth, picking up rocks warmed by the sun, collecting rough horn coral fossils and PLEASE HELP US KEEP THE ZEPHYR ALIVE... You can now join THE BACKBONE online with your CREDIT CARD. We need all the help we can get right now. We’re not looking for big donations or full page ads... PLEASE HELP. knife-sharp chunks of obsidian, kneeling to measure grain size and the angles of rocks www.canyoncountryzephyr.com jutting from the surface of the planet. Mapping and photographing and drawing in their journals, these men made art while doing science. community radio...90.1 & 106.7 fm And listen to us worldwide NO MORE POLITICS!!!!!.......for a while on the internet Free at last! Bite me. Chill out Dick... Have a drink. REQUESTS 435-259-5968 OFFICE 435-259-8824 100% wind-powered Zt |
