JUST

Saturday morning, snow falling soft and white and everywhere. I should be out skiing, building a snowman, relishing this dynamic spring weather, this fleeting absurd life, this body, this earth, while it lasts. 

Nope. I’m YouTubing on the couch, watching C-SPAN, a testimony before the US House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Federal Lands. Watching the video for the umpteenth time. Watching it and grinding my molars.

The man testifying is mustached, in a dark cowboy hat and dark blazer. He sits at a glossy wooden table, thick hands folded together, voice booming with confidence. A piece of me appreciates that his speech is firm and that he is devoted to a place; I suspect we would manage fine if somehow—over breakfast at a cafe in rural Utah, sunnyside eggs and toast, chitchat about Grandad’s cattle operation and the local school, pass the salt—we could avoid discussing politics. Big somehow. This rancher, this county commissioner, has flown to D.C. for a specific reason: to oppose the GSENM, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. 

“Probably twenty percent of that monument is visited . . .”

“But eighty percent of a landmass like that . . .” 

“If you don’t believe me, come on out, we’ll go out and . . .”

I’m refilling my coffee, refreshing the video, banging the spacebar to halt the man mid-sentence, banging it to start him pontificating again. My girlfriend, Sophia, pokes her head into the room and rolls her eyes at this caffeinated Saturday madness. With the dullest of pencils, I’m gouging a notepad. Banging the spacebar, banging the spacebar. Double-checking to ensure a verbatim transcription.

“And I’m sorry, people are not going to travel from all over the world to look at sagebrush and regular BLM rangeland . . .” 

“There’s no tourism value . . .”

“It is just BLM rangeland like you’ll find anywhere in the western United States . . .”

Since the presidential proclamation was signed in December of 2017, I’ve been monitoring the dismemberment of GSENM—the “American outback,” to borrow a longtime wilderness activist’s apt nickname. Under the pretense of reining in government overreach, and with dubious legal authority, the monument’s borders were redrawn: corners lopped off, corridors severed, protected zones reduced by almost fifty percent. Stroke-of-the-ceremonial-pen style, nearly one million acres were opened to potential abuse from drills, dozers, pavement, noise, industry, extraction, dollars, the gamut. 

That’s bad. But this video, this man, this word echoing after I shut the laptop and drain the coffee and step into the yard to dazedly gaze, to drift with drifting flakes—this is worse. “It is just BLM rangeland” sets off in me a deeper indignation, a more philosophical and fundamental disgust.

Argh, the worldview of just. 

Argh, the self-serving unreflective anthropocentrism of just.

Argh, the crime just commits against scarps and rincons, warblers and eagles, coyotes and mice, ferns and cactuses, stillness and silence, thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands (upon thousands!) of pebbles in any given gulch, each pebble a planet, a sphere, rounded and smooth and beyond perfection, beyond any idea in any human mind, any song in any human heart.

Snow dampening my hair, I return to the couch, and though it’s tempting to continue prowling C-SPAN, I opt instead for Shakespeare, asking Sophia if she’d like to join me in a rousing recitation. 

Act 3. Scene 1. 

Alarum. Enter KING HENRY, EXETER, BEDFORD, GLOUCESTER, and Soldiers, with scaling-ladders.

—

Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart

“Old cowboys love telling stories about their family on the land.” 

“It’s a beautiful thing to be white and come to the West.”

“There was so much open land, so much land that was unclaimed.” 

“What’s not beautiful is what happened to the people who already lived here.” 

“Just to have a conversation with you my ancestors had to survive.” 

“They had to hide and survive.” 

—

TO-DO LIST

Pull my trusty GSENM maps from storage—gnat guts on Wolverine Bench, sunscreen stain on Egypt—and with a juicy neon highlighter mark the altered boundaries in yellow, thereby focusing my distractable brain on the amputated acres.

Read a shelf of books, everything from cartographer Almon Thompson’s 1872 diary to a biography of pioneering river guide Dave Rust to an anthology of Southern Paiute lore to Ellen Meloy to the Italian eremite Carlo Carretto’s Letters from the Desert (about praying in the Sahara), and make a note to email Paul Nelson congrats on one of the greatest titles ever to grace a cover, Wrecks of Human Ambition: A History of Utah’s Canyon Country to 1936.

Study the Draft Environmental Impact Statement prepared for the new monument by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management to some, Bureau of Logging and Mining to snarky others) and, well, basically vomit.

Stock the Subaru with tortillas, peanut butter, instant Folgers, tent, sleeping bags, binoculars, macaroni, sardines, cheddar, extra macaroni, extra Folgers, mustard packets, and remember to leave a space for Sophia, a woman skilled at jettisoning agendas and itineraries, goals and objectives, i.e., skilled at lounging like a lizard, meandering like a creek, dancing like a box elder in the breeze.

Kick the tires because that’s what you do prior to hitting the road.

Hit the road, radio blasting, sunrise in the rearview mirror.

Forget what I presume to know, my own personal justs, and go out there, out into the American outback: to see, to hear, to touch and be touched, to meet the ground on its terms, to let its moods and moments call the shots. 

Stay out there the full month of October—green leaves goldening, golden leaves scattering, scattered leaves accumulating at the base of a skeletal cottonwood’s gray corrugated trunk—and realize that forgetting isn’t the kind of thing a person does on command, as an active agent, but rather is the kind of thing that happens to a person, a scouring that a person undergoes, the land a stiff-bristled scrubber brush.

—

Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart

“Dreams out there can mean something.”

“They can be something to pay attention to.”

“People go out there to have dreams.”

“People go out there to find new beginnings.” 

“And find old beginnings.”

—

PRICKERY AND STICKERY

Here are three details I enjoy about Ace, my buddy who resides in Boulder, Utah, a speck of a town (population two hundred thirtyish) that floats atop the creamy cross-bedded Navajo Sandstone, the gargantuan petrified dunes of an Early Jurassic erg: he’s devoted the bulk of two decades to trekking the GSENM hinterlands—heating water with a twiggy fire, sipping tea, casting consciousness to the stars, reeling consciousness back in, striking camp, pushing forward; he’s eager to direct attention to the Latin phrase Solvitur ambulando (“It is solved by walking”) engraved on his pocketknife and, furthermore, assumes the phrase’s “it” requires no explanation; he’s got dogs on the rug farting and a pot of tomato sauce on the stove bubbling when—excited, hungry, fatigued from the drive (Boulder was the last municipality in the lower forty-eight to receive mail by mule and remains a long haul from anywhere)—Sophia and I arrive.

Eight PM, a Tuesday. The windows of Ace’s home, which tomorrow will frame the monument’s glowing slickrock domes and reefs, presently frame darkness—darkness and the reflection of us three talking, clearing plates and glasses, spreading US Geological Survey quadrangle maps, hunching over their intricacies, bumping elbows. Ace keeps a stack of these quads on a hutch within easy reach of the kitchen table. “You’ve got to have the maps handy,” he says, as if, like Solvitur ambulando, it’s utterly obvious.

I brought a bottle of whiskey in from the car, figuring we’d raise a toast, celebrate aimless exploring, but the maps prove plenty intoxicating. They’re a journal, a palimpsest, topo lines faded and fading, overwritten with chicken scratch: reliable pothole, this ramp, awesome, upstream route? Ace once went out there for sixty consecutive days. He’s out there even as we speak, it seems. And so the bottle squats nearby, meditating on us as we meditate on the paper terrain.

An hour passes—we’re all yawning, dogs included—and yet another map unfolds. “I’ve been into this a bunch,” Ace says, palming the Circle Cliffs, smearing his palm south: Lampstand, Burr Trail, Colt Mesa. “But I can’t claim to have been in there.” He fingernails a knot of topo lines, a dense jam of ink. “Nobody goes in there. That’s some dry, bland country. Prickery and stickery, though I’m sure it’s interesting.”

“It’s been cut?” Sophia says.

“It’s been cut,” I say, wondering how rutted the two-track will be, how far we’ll need to hike.

—

Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart

“People ask me all the time if they should bike or hike somewhere.” 

“I always say that I can’t tell you where to go on public land, it’s a free country.” 

“But if you spend the night, then you might want to talk to the landscape, let the landscape know why you’re here, what you’re doing, and that you don’t intend to cause any harm.”

“Talk in your language.”

“You don’t have to talk in any other language.” 

“Explain the reason you’re there.”

—

A BRANCHING WASH

Eating wind. I thank the novelist Ivan Doig for that poetic locution. However, in this instance—Subaru parked crooked, two tires in the road and two in the ditch, doors open, trunk open, gusts wickedly gusting—it’s a tad misleading. Making our familiar trailhead preparations at this unfamiliar spot (miles from any trailhead), we are eating wind, certainly, but also airborne grit, ancient speeding particles of this ancient, eroded place. Trying not to swallow. 

Sophia measures out walnuts and raisins for four breakfasts. I transfer fourteen liters from a plastic jug to a row of Nalgenes. Sophia crams thermal underwear into her bulging backpack. I apply SPF 50 to my precious pale neck. Sophia swaps the stale batteries in her headlamp with freshies. I annoy her with aeolian mania: “C’mon, c’mon, hurry or I’ll lose the enamel off my teeth!”

Then it’s finished, meaning it’s begun. Thirty steps and we’ve abandoned the road. Sixty steps and we’ve descended—awkwardly, due to the heavy loads—a crumbly bank. Two hundred steps along the scalloped silt of the wash’s floor and we’ve had our pause button punched by a darting cottontail rabbit. 

We follow. The wide wash narrows, the narrow wash branches, the narrow branch branches, the banks become ledges, the ledges become stubby cliffs. Decisions ramify. Red sun sinks, brown stone pulses. The thermometers in our earlobes, in the tips of our noses, record the plunging temperature. By moonrise I’ve dropped my pack three times, climbed out of the wash three times, looked for a nice, sheltered site three times. The wind relents, revives, and a fourth reconnaissance delivers: “Scramble that slab, then traverse over. I’ll get right to pitching the tent.”

Nice, sheltered site? Fumbling aluminum poles, nylon rainfly sucking and slapping around my face, I imagine the dawn, when we’ll wake from half-sleep to laughing pinyon jays, a gregarious alarm clock, and imbibe enough Folgers to launch ourselves—skipping and whistling and eager—further into searching. 

Not searching for. Searching merely for searching’s sake. 

—

Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart

“And you might want to give an offering.”

“It could be tobacco.”

“It could be food.” 

“Give a little piece of what you’re eating, even just a little piece of bread.”

“Spread it to the four directions, either before you sit down to cook or after.”

“Or when you’re making camp.” 

“You’re telling the spirits that you’re not there to cause harm or create a ruckus.”

—

NOTEBOOK SNIPPETS

Sharp-shinned hawk, fast.

Scarlet gilia, a couple raggedy petals.

Delicate veils of rock, lace doilies of rock, spiderwebs taut across hollows, banjo strings, desire to “twang.”

Wash tightens, eleven feet, seven feet, five feet, very exciting, but why does tightening excite? Secrets, secrecy, hiding, hiddenness.

To Soph, when she catches up: “That was cool, that left-right-left squiggle.” And as I speak my arm is a slithering snake, the snake of the canyon, mimicking its form. Landscape puppeteers, determines behavior, subtle.

Kaibab Limestone, pocked, razoring my pants.

First sign of humans is a rusty beer can, vintage church key, 1950s maybe.

To Soph, resting in a shady patch: “Typical tourism is going on some outing to some arch or waterfall and receiving that destination from that outing. But what if there isn’t a sought-after and anticipated X? The destination can be anything. You’re invited to discover.”

Constellations of mule deer turds. 

Hornet, chipmunk.

“Let’s walk less tomorrow and spend more time plunking our asses down and inspecting pebbles.” Soph!

—

Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart

“Owls?”

“For Southern Paiute, owls are messengers.”

“Could be messenger of death, could be messenger of life’s future, a prediction.” 

“When you see one you have to pray.” 

“It’s something important, even if it’s death.” 

“Something important is coming.”  

“You have to accept.” 

—

IN

We keep at it, steps flowing into steps, washes into canyons, canyons into nights, nights into days, days into steps, the land flowing and flowing and flowing, always into itself, never ceasing to flow. Can you separate ground from ground, earth from earth? Can you slash the eternal desert to shreds with a reckless ceremonial pen or a juicy neon highlighter? Strata can be peeled, watersheds soured. Health can be degraded, integrity and vigor damaged. But does that stop the American outback from achieving, from enacting, a sort of absolute wholeness? 

Our excursions repeat, same style, again and again: choose a giant chunk of the monument that’s a goner; rattle over twenty or forty miles of washboard road; scan for a parched streambed, a dusty crease, a gateway, a portal; load the packs and go.

In Coal Canyon, a freestanding tower—not exactly a corkscrew hoodoo, not exactly a blocky skyscraper—appears with the head’s slightest tilt. In Pasture Valley, a squad of six ravens and six shadows (twelve black bodies and twenty-four black wings) slices a peach-colored butte. In Upper Buckskin Gulch, a lizard scampers the ridge of my knuckles. In Bull Creek, a spring fills a bedrock bathtub, one drip per five seconds. In a claustrophobic slot feeding Dry Fork, in the purplish dimness of a mucky crawlspace, in a shock of bright electrifying fear, a tarantula says hello.

Increasingly, Sophia and I are overwhelmed with this sense of being in the land, as one is in water and in love (knee-deep, soul-deep). It’s got to do with the incised nature of GSENM topography, definitely, but there’s something else, something about faith in the immediate, the elemental, about acting on the belief that every acre, every inch, deserves observation, curiosity, regard. Without the faith we are on, which is to say we are off, whereas with the faith we are in-timate, we are in-trigued, we are in.

Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century German theologian, offers his two cents: “There is no way of making a person true unless he gives up his own will. In fact, apart from complete surrender of the will, there is no traffic with God.”

Zero trails, zero plan. Solvitur ambulando. 

—

Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart

“I’m not sure what to tell you.” 

“Don’t cause a ruckus, don’t make a big mess.”

“Don’t mess with the rocks.”

“It’s not worth altering the land.”

“Be respectful.”

“Pay attention to the land.” 

“Maybe just don’t overthink it.”

—

BLIND WASHING

Between the third and fourth trip, or perhaps it’s the fourth and fifth, we swing by Tropic, a tidy village on the monument’s western edge, to resupply our larder. And because we’re in Tropic, I root through the Subaru’s chaos of semi-rotten wool socks and feral Goldfish crackers, locate the stashed cell, dial a number, and ask if a visit in fifteen minutes would be agreeable.

“No problem. I’m the house with a red roof and solar panels.”

A shaggy-bearded, shaggy-headed paleontologist—nominally retired but actively publishing—Professor Eaton is busy in the garage with a carboy of apricot wine when I knock. By way of introduction (we’re strangers, connecting via a mutual acquaintance), he provides a disquisition on how Prohibition ruined the art of DIY vinification, segues into a riff on the “aridity” of sober Mormon Utah, then jumps to his history with GSENM. I dig the prof straightaway. 

Eaton first toured the region in 1982, scouting around for an area to conduct research on Mesozoic small mammals. By the end of the decade, he felt compelled—such was his infatuation with the backcountry’s limitless quiet and the quiet’s limitless backcountry—to write Bruce Babbitt (future Secretary of the Interior) and urge federal protection. To his surprise, Clinton’s official declaration of GSENM in 1996 incorporated material from that letter.

The prof pursued music in Manhattan before switching to science, so we survey his guitars. He is incapable of neglecting a stray critter on the road, so we check out the kittens in a box. He scoffs at dinosaur paleontology, disparaging it only partially in jest as “too flashy,” so we discuss his preference for the obscure, rodent-like multituberculates. Conversation roams—jokes, curses, toponyms, biostratigraphy, seasons atop the rugged Kaiparowits Plateau—and eventually settles on modes of engagement, specifically prospecting and blind washing.

Prospecting is the traditional paleontological fieldwork of questing after fossil fragments that have drifted to the surface, indicating treasures buried below. “It’s enormous fun because you see all the places you wouldn’t see if you were chasing scenic overlooks,” Eaton says. “These wonderful little gulches. Marveling at animals and plants, shapes and textures—I’ll often forget that I’m prospecting, and that’s the best, that immersion.”

Alternatively, blind washing is an idiosyncratic technique developed by Eaton that involves collecting bags of sediment from outcrops that should bear miniscule fossils but that he can’t be positive about until returning home, sifting with fine screens, and scrutinizing under a microscope. “I’ll go almost anywhere with blind washing, the craziest places,” he says. “Tiny rock exposures are fair game now, nooks and crannies other paleontologists wouldn’t dream of working.”

Listening to our host, to his delight and his passion, I’m simultaneously watching a movie of the past weeks; a movie of twisting, swerving, curving, wriggling washes that constantly blind the walker to what’s next; a movie of Sophia and me tracing these washes, trusting them totally, relying on them—leaning on them—as though they were a cane.

Eaton grins, affects a stage whisper. “Honestly, everything is an excuse to wander in places I haven’t yet wandered.”

—

Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart

“The first thing we’re taught as Southern Paiutes is you’ve got to respect that everything has a spirit.”

“Everything.”

“Even down to the little insects that come out and annoy you at night.”

“Those little guys.”

“Them too.”

—

JUST REVISITED

Just dirt, the mysteries of dirt. 

Just a graveyard, the Late Cretaceous on display, ornithomimid bones and turtle scutes literally spilling from disintegrating badlands. 

Just an Ancestral Puebloan granary snugged into an alcove three hundred feet above the valley floor, mud mortar holding the structure intact, registering prehistoric fingerprints, a thumb’s quick swipe. 

Just the wren, eyeball eyeing me, toes gripping that granary perch, and then emptiness, blue sky perching, the wren vanished.

Just strolling sandstone halls, staring at sandstone walls, sliding from penny to tawny, carob to umber, taupe to mauve to beige to tan, unnamed hues that fuse the named, an unspeakable palette. 

Just your dumb tongue, your mute astonishment.

Just relationships, moths, blossoms, evolution, eons, seeds, flooding.

Just the American outback, the sprawling horizon-to-horizon immensity of thirst. 

And, of course, “It is just BLM rangeland like you’ll find anywhere in the western United States . . .” 

Just “regular.” 

Just “sagebrush.” 

Ah, sagebrush. Genus Artemisia. Olympian goddess of chastity, wild beasts, the wilderness, the moon, the thrilling hunt.

—

Charley Bulletts, Cultural Resources Director, Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Shares a Few Thoughts in a Phone Interview Two Weeks Before I Depart

“People say it’s such a hostile landscape, but they don’t understand that my ancestors had songs.” 

“Music helps soothe the savage beast, that’s the expression.”

“And music helps soothe the savage landscape as well.” 

“Picture your aunt or grandma singing in the kitchen as she cooks.”

“But if you’re going to do that, you might want to make another offering when you get back to your car, say thanks for letting us walk through the land.” 

“Thanks but we don’t want to take you home with us.” 

“Because when you sing, things can end up following you.” 

—

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

The memory of C-SPAN trudges with me up a final wash. Goodbye, October; greetings, November. Sophia forges ahead, setting a brisk pace despite the backpack crushing her shoulders, and soon I’m alone, left behind with cantilevered cliffs and faint dusk light and a poorwill and a beetle and a dark cowboy hat and Shakespeare’s Henry V.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” That’s the famously emboldening order that begins the English king’s speech to the soldiers at the siege of Harfleur during the Hundred Years’ War. The invasion of France is cranking, the blood gushing, the bodies heaped. A battle rages—flames, agonized cries—and there’s nothing for it but rushing the ruptured fortification, plugging the gap with bravery. 

“Dishonour not your mothers.”

“Let us swear that you are worth your breeding.”

“The game’s afoot.”

Indeed, the game’s afoot, I think to myself, trudging onward. (If you don’t believe me, come on out, we’ll go out and . . .) Our current war is waged not by county commissioners in dark cowboy hats with folded hands and booming voices, not even by corporate executives and lobbyists and politicians wielding ceremonial pens, but by a utilitarian mentality, a reductionist vision, a dismal worldview. (There’s no tourism value . . .) This foe is ubiquitous, an enemy of perspective and possibility, of what the land is and what the land can be. (It is just BLM rangeland like you’ll find anywhere in the western United States . . .)

Okay. But here’s the lesson a person learns from a month rambling the labyrinthine desert, the interstices of just: we can fight the necessary fight, the urgent fight, with peaceful tactics. It’s quite simple. The scaling-ladder is fourteen liters and sardine mac ‘n’ cheese and instant Folgers. The sword is a pair of shabby, bald, sand-filled sneakers and a spool of thread for sewing torn pants. The winning strategy is this wash, this branching wash, this ramifying wash, this flowing wash that we can follow—that I will follow—to who knows where.

And when I arrive there, wherever I arrive—some tributary of a tributary, some thin shallow anonymous gulch—Sophia will be waiting, chilling, butt to the earth. I’ll plunk down beside her and together, like children, like adults, we’ll count the pebbles, each pebble a planet, a sphere, rounded and smooth and beyond perfection, beyond any idea in any human mind, beyond any song in any human heart.

Bellows the king: “Follow your spirit, and upon this charge . . .”

One, two, three . . . ■

Note: On October 8, 2021, after the trip described in this essay was completed, President Biden signed an executive order to restore protections to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. On August 24, 2022, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, backed by the state’s GOP leaders, filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse that executive order. The Interior Department is currently developing a new management plan for GSENM. And the pebbles? They’re still out there. 

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