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Show THE ZEPHYRJULY 1993 PAGE 8 New West Trading sofifade Q steers for bikers Q boutiques By Jim Stiles This ain't the same old range. Everything seems to change. Where are the pals I used to ride with? ...Cone to a land so strange. daily baas. The Sons of the Pioneers Oh no...you're Baying. Another story from the disgruntled and to editor of this little tabloid who exists whiny misanthropic only complain about the demise of and to his and near dear heart. jaded cynical everything g WelL.OK, that's true I can't help myself. In my quest to try to make some sense out of what is happening to us here in the rural West, I haven't "been to the mountain top," but I've been to the Sand Flat, and the view from there is discouraging. A few days ago, my attorney and I took a drive to survey the destruction. (I hadn't been back since the "Easter Weekend Riots") Besides being surprised at the number of campers still enduring the 100 degree heat, I was shocked at my reaction to another sight that should have only caused more aggravation. After wading through a hundred or more bikers, we came around a corner and saw local rancher Don Holyoak with a couple dozen cows. Smelly, stupid, cows..."stinking bovines," Abbey used to call them. biker-bashi- ng tourist-trampi- ng never-endin- fly-ridd- en V "4' a ' c ' .I, v ' national parks began to show There were, of course, blatant exceptions. Some of die West's from Aspen and Telluride, to small Several towns, the effect of abuse and overuse decades ago. little mining and ranching villages, Jackson and Taos, were transformed from sleepy, even dying to bustling communities full of trendy restaurants and boutiques. They became rustic playgrounds for the rich and famous. But they were the exception to the rule. The rest of the West changed very Me from a in die same small western demographic standpoint Generation after generation grew up communities. The towns looked the same, decade after decade. A person could go away for yean and come back to his hone town and find the same grocer behind die cash register, the same than just the way these Me towns postmaster behind the stamp window. But it was more communities It was the pace of life itself that set such apart. While some may call it turns itself inside out on a stagnation, it was comforting to find such continuity in a world that All that is changing at breakneck speed. We are watching in effect the last land rush, and when it's over, the West will bear little resemblance to what it still is today. The decay of America's cities and urban areas, the congestion, the pollution, the crime...the stress of urban life, is driving millions to the wide open spaces. And the explosive growth of tourism is creating for the first time, the climate necessary for that kind of exodus. For the first time. West Coast immigrants can dream of moving to a rural community and making more than a subsistence living No sacrifice is needed to sell a $500,000 home in California, buy a $100,000 home in a small Western town, invest $200,000 in a business, and put the rest in the bank. A few hope to schemes. But this time, fortunes won't be modern day Charlie Steens, dreaming of be made with a second hand drill rig and a thousand dollar grubstake. Speculators buy up land for IB's and McDonald's franchises the way miners staked uranium claims in the 50s. As long as people in the cities can sell their homes at a great profit (and so far, the prices continue to rise exorbitantly), and can take that money and reinvest here, where the prices are still substantially lower, we will continue to see this remarkable inflow of humanity. . f, .. The new herd and the old...Coming and Going. was glad to see them. Don't get me wrong I still believe that the mismanaged use of our public lands for cattle has done immeasurable damage to the land, has fouled countless streams and water sources, and been a burden on the U.S. taxpayer. In fact, efforts by the extractive industries to literally tear up the West for maximum profit continues at an alarming and devastating rate. But I have become painfully aware of a shift in my thinking that has left me confused and bewildered. There are more than a few of us longtime environmentalists who are suffering from some kind of an identity crisis. Edward Abbey once wrote, "The idea of wilderness needs no defense; it only needs more defenders. But to be a defender of the West has changed in 15 years. Just who poses the greatest threat to the West? Where does the real danger lie? I'm afraid it's become more complicated than I ever thought it could. This is not just another complaint about our changing tow- n- the New Moab. What's happening here is happening elsewhere. And what's coming may be bigger than even we doomsayers would dare predict. Barring a miracle, we are about to enter a new phase, the last phase, in the taming of the West When it's over it won't be "the West" anymore. We all know "how the West was won." What we are about to see is "how the West was done." To use a recently popular expression, pretty soon, you can stick a fork in it And all of us, no matter how much we love the country bear responsibility. I When I first moved here in the late 70s, the threats to fee canyon country were obvious and easy to define. The extractive industries...oil and gas, uranium, timber and cattle...those operations that actually reduced the quality of the resource, were the natural target of environmentalists. In those years, the desert was turned upside down by seismic crews and oil g series of harebrained ideas to exploit the fragile rigs, chaining operations, and a Western landscape. For almost a year, we could see the big mercury vapor lights on an Exxon oil rig in Gold Basin, a place too beautiful for such a monstrous intrusion. Seismic crews worked right to the edge of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, collecting geologic information that they could sell to other energy companies. In their wake, they left hundreds of miles of ugly scars nuclear that would take centuries to heal. The Department of Energy wanted to build a high-levBLM to The in to San thousands Needles chain the continued Juan County. repository adjacent forest as part of its "range improvement" policy (and one of my favorite of acres of pinion-junipeuphemisms, I might add, next to "nuclear exchange. In short, there was plenty to complain about And we complained loudly, well, and often. We, who actually lived here in the heart of the country we were trying to defend, felt honored and proud to be a part of the battle on the front lines. It was, after all, not easy to live in the rural west; it truly required a sacrifice. Just trying to find a way to eke out a living was a challenge, for most jobs were low paying and many were seasonal. In addition, a poor infrastructure, a lack of cultural opportunities, under funded schools, and an extremely closed conservative population made it difficult for an "outsider" to survive. That is why, despite warnings by some about the threat of "industrial tourism" for more than 25 years, the effect on the West by all those millions of gawkers seemed trivial when compared to the damage a bulldozer could da never-endin- el er Is it all that bad? In some ways, it's not Critics of tourism as an economic base claim that such an industry is too unstable, that a town that builds its economy around tourism is asking for trouble, that sooner or later, the bubble will burst and all the tourists will go somewhere else. But I just don't see that happening While energy towns have gone boom and bust for decades, I cannot think of a single tourist town that ever went belly up.. Maybe business in these communities has ebbed and flowed with the national or regional economy, but dry up and blow away? Never. So.. .with an established tourist base, changing community profile that demands better educational and cultural opportunities, and a larger tax base, positive changes to the community are inevitable. And yet, in a perverse way, those same improvements represent the final nails in the West's coffin, changes that guarantee the demise of the West as we know it. me, "the West" is a lot more than the sum of its parts. The West is, first of all, the resource itself. The West is the desert, the canyons, the mountains and the wildlife that roams among them. It's the wildflowers that bloom in the most unexpected places and the gnarled spruce that clings to life at 12,000 feet It's the polished skies and the exploding cotton clouds that loom over the high peaks each afternoon. It's the kangaroo rats and fence lizards that we see all the time and the cougar that we wait a lifetime to see just once for a fleeting moment. But file West is more than that The intangible aspect of the West is as vital to its survival as the resource itself. It's the solitude, file silence, an almost pleasant loneliness that this country evokes in the souls of those that love it. These are an integral part of the West as a state of mind. Abbey could not describe this land without references to the "strange and mysterious" country that he loved so much... "the voodoo rocks." Even the inhospitable aspect of the West itself became a quality to be admired and respected. You loved file West on its terms and made the sacrifices that were required to be a part of it. Solitude was not something to avoid, it was something to love and respect, and even to depend on. So today, as I what the West is, I find a strange contradiction in the experiences I seek out. For instance, I can hike into the badlands country north of Arches, into country that was tom apart 40 years ago by the uranium industry and which still bears the scars, and there amidst the rubble can feel like I'm in the West. I poke my head in a deserted miner's cabin and find a Great Homed Owl in the rafters waiting for nightfall. I sit down on the rocks above the Big Ape mine and watch the sun set behind the Devils Garden. Magnificent silence, brilliant light only the wind and the hooting of that owl to disturb the silence of the evening...the West. But I can hike to Delicate Arch, where the resource has been preserved for sure, but also promoted to the far comers of the planet, and I feel like I'm in Disneyland. Surrounded by dozens of camera snapping, video taping tourists, screaming ldds, and rangers, I think to myself...this is not the West. well-arm- ed |