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Show THE ZEPHYRDECEMBER 89 Old turtle looks PAGE 9 back again as he trots forward on his little clawed feet, sees the unknown unknowable thing closing upon him yard by yard, hears the grunt and moan then scream of triumph as It uproots a tree, pushing the tree aside to die from its wounds, scraping the ground bare of every living thing, piling a great furrow of ruin into the flowing stream. Ten feet behind the turtle, the monster roars In fury, jetting oily smoke Into the air, and clatters forward. Too late the turtle turns aside from the ancient path. Too late he searches for sanctuary of overhanging ledge. Glancing back over his shell one last time, the old turtle sees the billow of advancing earth, the flat blunt snout of the yellow steel blotting half the sky. Too late Turtle drops flat to the sand. Quickly he pulls in head, tail and all four legs as the wave of matter towers above then thunders down upon his brittle shell. His world goes black, all light extinguished. Buried, he feels like Atlas the weight of earth upon his back. It is a terrible weight, an overwhelming weight, followed at once by a vibrating mass of advancing pressure one thousand times greater ....... Above, In the light and the dust, the tractor clatters on, unaware of and Indifferent to any living creatures beneath its tread. The shining bulldozer blade pushes another mount of dirt to this side, to that side, over the grass, into the streambed and the clear water. The blade rises, the tractor backs and turns a few degrees, rumbles forward again. A dim anthropomorph, helmeted, masked and goggled, fixed in place under a canopy of steel, attached by gloved forelimbs to a pair of levers, moves jerkily half blindly inside the fog of dust, one small component of a great machine. The tractor moves on, down the canyon, guided by a line of pink ribbons twitching on stakes of pale thin lathing. Trailed by its dust and Its ten-fo- ot wide track of barren ground, the yellow machine dwindles with distance, its howl of engine fading off, the tin-c- an clacking of its becoming faint, fainter, dying away to a plates and sprocket-whee- ls petty irritation on the air. Old man turtle Is gone. Burled alive. Packed beneath compacted soil, his monument the broad straight Imprinted treadmarks of the forty-t- on machine, the old desert tortoise dwells now in darkness, silence, a firm and perfect stasis. Not a drop of blood nor a splinter of bone, not even the shadow of footprints, remains to trace his ephemeral passage upon and through the littler world of sunlight and sand, gopher hole and gopher snake, ant lion, sidewinder, solpugid and vinegaroon, green ephedra and Indian paintbrush and prickly pear and Gambel oak and dagger-blad- ed flowering yucca. They too are gone, down under, over turned and smothered under dirt. The silence might seem complete, the destruction sufficient. Not so. Miles behind the bulldozer, as yet inaudible, visible from the turtles structure with upthrust arms, comes grave merely as a pallid box-li- ke ne true real the monster, the advancing down machine, the shroud of smog. the canyon through its own permanent tall. The top of its Its engine housing is 120 feet wide, seven stories stories high, overreaching the canyon walls, main boom is twenty-tw- o longer than a football field. The excavating bucket that hangs from the big enough to point of the boom has a capacity of 220 cubic yards hold two railroad cars, eight bulldozers, twelve automobiles, or a battalion of soldiers stacked three men deep in firm military formation. The complete machine (with empty bucket) weighs 27 million pounds, ALL-AMERIC- AN AGENCY 505 No. Main 259-649- 3 Meet Our Real Estate Team Doug McElhaney owner 259-687- 8 Delbert & Glenna Oliver Norma Nunn 259-737- 0 259-727- 5 Rail Tibbetts 259-636- 1 Julie Bierschied Randy Day & V?vv. Vi. 259-567- 0 259-628- 3 . mega-machi- self-genera- ted or 13,500 tons. What is this thing? What shall we call this creature, dimly seen within its veil of dust and smoke? It is the Giant Earth Mover, GOLIATH a Bucyrus-Er- ie the G.E.M. of Arizona, the Super-GEwalking dragline, worlds largest mobile land machine. Mobile? Yes, it moves. It does not roll on wheels or track on endless treads but it moves, it walks on a pair of steel shoes mounted above the circular tub that forms the base, or one on each side of GOLIATH. The shoes, each 130 feet long, bottom, or mono-buttoare hoisted in unison, cambered forward, downward and back, raising the base 80 Inches off the ground and moving it ahead by fourteen feet at each rotation. Maximum walking speed Is 90 feet per hour. A slow or until the power fails. Very but steady pace, sustainable forever slow Indeed; but GOLIATH Is a patient monster. of any land Only a turtle, not the largest but the longest-livi- ng animal, could be more patient As it waits, six feet under, for the coming of the beast. M, ck, first appeared in Mother Earth News. Havduke Lives! will be & published in the Spring of 1990, by Little, Brown Co. "Burial ... , ' Box 1806 Castle Valley Star Route Moab, Utah 84532 6 (801) 259-729- .I- rlf Ik-- |