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from: Alexandra Fuller

Brave Towns and Tranquil Hide-Outs

Posted Monday, Oct. 21, 2002, at 6:42 PM ET

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Today's audio update: Christian Kallen describes a Twilight Zone-like vision in the middle of the Utah desert.

The day is a woman who loves you. Open.
Deer drink close to the road and magpies
Spray from your car. Miles from any town
Your radio comes in strong, unlikely
Mozart from Belgrade.
—from Driving Montana, by Richard Hugo

I've grown to admire and respect the men and women who people the unlikely all-you-can-eat, big-hair towns that mushroom from under their own smog of despondency above the sagebrush flats out west. The residents of these small towns (populations range from under 200 to 5,000) stare down the prospect of a long, blowing-sideways winter and the knowledge of their own isolation with a kind of stubborn, determined good cheer. They support each other and their communities because if they don't no one else will, and they don't live here because they have to, they live here to get as far away as they can from people like the rest of us.

Crossing over the Green River into Brown's Park

The highways that connect these scattershot settlements are relentless swaths of black Tarmac slicing through pale green-yellow desert ("What fresh desert is this?" I ask Christian, as miles swallow themselves meaninglessly under our tires), and the only things preventing us from driving maniacally off onto the landscape and into the seemingly endless horizon are rumble strips and what is left (and it's only Day 5) of our ever-diminishing sense of who we used to be before we were followers of the "Outlaw Trail." Or, as Christian (in what he claims to be a Freudian slip) has started to call it, the "Outlaw Trial."

We leave Rawlins, Wyo., and head for Vernal, Utah (via Tipton—an easily missed coaling station, famous as the site of a train robbery committed by Cassidy's Wild Bunch on Aug. 29, 1900). Vernal, sunk down into a valley at the end of the aptly named Flaming Gorge, seems, like many of the other towns we have driven through, to be an accident of civilization rather than a deliberate act of residence. And to a certain extent, this is true: Towns in the West sprang up along the Union Pacific Railway line as convenient coaling stations or they formed (in this high desert) near rivers and springs and in the middle of cattle country or they were built on the dreams of prospecting potential.

Christian Kallen takes aim in Flaming Gorge

Fifty miles northeast of Vernal by road (or horse trail) is another of the hide-outs used by the Wild Bunch. Brown's Park can be accessed by the little-used Crouse Canyon Road. For a moment, the sagebrush-dusted slopes give way to a canyon of such beauty that I regret having used up all my superlatives for earlier parts of the trip. A creek nestles itself into autumn-burnt foliage, steep mountain-lion country rears above us. Christian takes advantage of my momentarily stunned wonder to scamper up high for photographs while I treat myself to a lunch of scrapings (Heineken and pistachios—needs must) from the back of the SUV, to which I have attached an unprintable epitaph on account of its gas consumption. I perch on a rock near the creek to attempt to write into poetry the landscape around us.

Brown's Park is the kindest terrain we've covered yet. Tucked up on the Green River, it is the sort of place that, had it not been protected by its isolation, would now be dotted with multimillion-dollar homes (eight bathrooms and all-you-can-watch big-screen TV). Instead it is, much as it was a hundred years ago, an out-of-the-way spread covering the three meeting corners of Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado.

Sundance is rumored to have come out here to recover from heartbreak after his lover, Etta Place, decided to stay in town and teach or whatever it was that she did. Butch said about Etta, "She was a decent housekeeper, but at heart she was a whore." Christian and I stop at the old Jarvie Ranch, a station that served as ferry, post office, and general store for the haphazard residents of Brown's Park until John Jarvie's murder by vagrants in 1910. The Green River rolls lazy and fat here, a relief of green spreads from the old cabin down to the river's banks. Ducks startle up and swing in an arc above the water before resettling in the reeds.

It is an effort to get back into the car and start the five-hour journey to Green River and Moab, where we will try and find the third and final hide-out on our journey, the enticingly named Robber's Roost.

Check back tomorrow for the next Outlaw Trail dispatch from the water-forsaken Moab and Robber's Roost.

well-traveled
entries
123456789
from: Alexandra Fuller

Brave Towns and Tranquil Hide-Outs

Posted Monday, Oct. 21, 2002, at 6:42 PM ET
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Alexandra Fuller is the author of the best-selling memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood.
Music heard in the map feature: "The Last Steam Engine Train," by John Fahey, The Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites (Takoma TAKCD-8909-2) (p) 1999 Fantasy Inc. © 1967 Tortoise Music (ASCAP). All rights reserved.
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Notes From the Fray Editor (Notes From the Bog):

Many residents of the Southwest spoke up for various parts of the contemporary scene there. The usual move was to call Fuller a second-tier cultural prostitute herself (selling her experience to Slate). The two posts below also attack Fuller, but from opposite sides. Gloria Tagai says that Fuller has been misled and is misleading others. The information in the article is wrong. Ernest, who grew up on the Navajo reservation, thinks Fuller has mischaracterized her exchange with Rose Yazzi as "prostitution."

Remarks From The Fray:

I am a Navajo woman. I am wondering where the writer received her information. What is "Teehindeeh" (she says it means "bog hole")? I tried to decipher this word and then asked an elder who had no idea what I was referring to. Who is Chief Hoskinini? Again, I tried to decipher the name and again referred to an elder. We were both puzzled.

This white African of British descent, who attempts to portray herself as worldly sophisticated traveler, has instead been sadly misled by her "guide". She states, "To pay for glimpses into something I can never hope to understand or assimilate in an afternoon can only be degrading and demoralizing to both parties." If she felt as such, why write such a horrific piece of trash?

It has been she who has been degraded and she should feel demoralized for offering such an article without validating the facts. I shudder to think of how many Americans are reading this article and take it for truth. As a closing remark, dream catchers are not native to Navajos, so the belief that it "prevents evil spirits from entering from Mother Earth" is not a Navajo belief. And what was that about the poles and the umbilical cord in a hogan?

-- Gloria Tagai

(To reply, click here.)


So why is being (even briefly) introduced to a new culture a negative? Why is it "cultural prostitution" for age old customs to be shown as they have always been practiced? Travel to Shiprock New Mexico during the festivals and see the Navajo Dancers perform. These people have to fight every day to keep at least the essence of their old cultures and traditions alive...and it is a worthwhile fight. I do not see these attempts as "prostitution". I think the author should stop looking at the world through the myopia of cynicism and instead try looking at it from the perspective of a child...untainted by past experience.

-- Ernest

(To reply, click here.)

(10/25)

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