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from: Alexandra Fuller

Recipe for a Desert

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2002, at 6:10 PM ET

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Today's audio update: Desert guide Dave Lyle calls in from Robber's Roost.

But dimly I do see
Against that darkness, lifting in blunt agony,
The single great cactus. Once more I hear the coyote
Wail. I strain to make out the cactus. It has
Its own necessary beauty.
—from "Arizona Midnight," by Robert Penn Warren

Photo ops are everywhere in scenic Arches National Park

If everything we've seen until now has been high desert, dry and scrubby and dotted with fragments of vegetation, the land around Green River and Moab is desert proper. It has been a place of limited rainfall since before the white man settled here over 110 years ago—somewhere around 7 or 8 inches fall a year. The land around us glitters with its own reflected idea of the sun.

"The biblical Moab," says our Moon handbook of Utah, "was a kingdom at the edge of Zion, and early settlers must have felt themselves at the edge of their world, too, being so isolated from Salt Lake City—the Mormon city of Zion."

What those forsaken Mormons must have made of the hellish temperatures can only be imagined. This summer, for instance, temperatures climbed to 115 degrees and stayed there for 30 days. And this is how Edward Abbey describes summer in his Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness: "Even the tourists that creep in and creep out in their lumbering, dust-covered automobiles reveal a certain weariness with desert travel. … And they should. Why anyone with any sense would volunteer to spend August in the furnace of the desert is a mystery to me; they must be mad, these brave tourists."

Headed out in the morning toward Robber’s Roost

Driving out to Robber's Roost, the third and final outlaw hide-out, I cannot help wondering what might have possessed anyone to imagine that this sun-scoured, dust-blown roll of land might make decent cattle country. More remote than anything we've seen yet, Robber's Roost is tucked into a canyon a four-hour drive from Moab down a gravel road (a few sheltering caves and a limited seep of water were an added attraction for the fugitives already attracted by the formidable isolation).

The ranch surrounding Robber's Roost is so large and so stubbornly inaccessible that the owner used to round up his cattle by airplane. Last year, he crashed his plane during the year's round up and killed himself. Since then, the cattle on this beyond-nowhere ranch have been left to take care of themselves—the rancher's widow runs the operation from Salt Lake City. It's enough. The odds of anyone having the inclination or energy to rustle these bone-strung desert cows are slim. The cows exist here, feral and subsidized by tax dollars like some kind of requiem for the West and for the century-old myth of the cowboy.

This wasn't always cattle-torn country. A little more than a hundred years ago, the desert was belly-deep to a horse in grass. While bison traditionally migrated through the range and left it churned up and fertilized ("left it" being the operative phrase here), cattle came and stayed, and stayed, and grazed down to the dry bone every last blade of grass until they starved themselves off the range, only to be replaced by sheep. Ground cover is all but gone and the ground's limited potential to hold what little moisture there is has been grazed into stubble and dust. "This nation and civilization is founded upon nine inches of topsoil and when that is gone, there will no longer be any nation or any civilization," said Dr. Hugh Bennett of the Soil and Conservation Service back in the 1920s.

And that is how this feels—like a land that has been used up without any thought to a future civilization. Its beauty is surprising (a 400-foot canyon sinks out of an unimpressive wash, a haven of trees and geology) and secret, but this feels like an unloved place, wasted by misuse.

A desert sniper victim is buried where he died

It's an effort to get here, which is why a sudden headstone by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere stuns us to a halt. The headstone is a rusted metal structure decorated with a metal flower—a tribute to the county road worker who was killed while grading the road four years ago by a sniper who did not know the man he pointlessly murdered. Man is cruel to his land and to the people of his land—is this a self-evident truth?

The sun feels ruthless. The landscape is a bitter-tasting film of dust in my mouth. I am homesick for water and mountains and snow and innocence. I am suddenly struck hollow with a need to be with my children.

Check back tomorrow for a dispatch from Navajo country.

well-traveled
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from: Alexandra Fuller

Recipe for a Desert

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2002, at 6:10 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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