{"id":767,"date":"2009-12-04T13:12:36","date_gmt":"2009-12-04T20:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffwallach.com\/?p=767"},"modified":"2011-06-22T17:26:24","modified_gmt":"2011-06-23T00:26:24","slug":"darkness-in-a-sun-bleached-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/adventure-travel\/767\/darkness-in-a-sun-bleached-land","title":{"rendered":"Darkness in a Sun-Bleached Land"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"D200804230201\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Photo by Leon Werdinger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Introduction to “In a Dark Land: Murder, Mysticism, and the Militia in the Remote Desert Southwest”<\/p>\n

In May and June of 1998, three men who had trained themselves in wilderness survival and military tactics gathered an arsenal of semi-automatic and automatic rifles, handguns, and pipe bombs and enough supplies to hold out through a prolonged siege, and then went on a tear through the heart of canyon country in the desert southwest.\u00a0 What they had in mind when they stole a water truck, murdered a police officer, and disappeared into the labyrinthine wilderness has generated a variety of theories.\u00a0 Some of these theories hint at the kinds of actions associated with militia movements and the homegrown terrorism of people like Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh.\u00a0 Others suggest that the trio were generally disgruntled with their station in life and just plain not very bright.\u00a0 Either way, their actions are alarming and dark-hued.<\/p>\n

But part of what makes their story irresistible is the outlaw landscape that the three men disappeared into and the desert wilderness where two of them were found dead.\u00a0 If these events had occurred in Chicago or Los Angeles they would have generated a passing interest.\u00a0 But bad men committing acts of violence and disappearing into western wilderness puts a full-Nelson on the American imagination and doesn\u2019t let go.\u00a0 This is the stuff of a John Ford or Sergio Leone movie.\u00a0 This is the Saturday western, fugitives in black shooting at the good guys while behind them the landscape\u2014the real protagonist\u2014 recedes in orange hills and high buttes where the outlaws will lead the posse into danger.\u00a0 It is John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and other dusty, unshaven men on horses pursuing justice on the wild frontier.\u00a0 Exuding the toughness and independence that we all believe made this country great.<\/p>\n

Even if you\u2019ve never visited the Four Corners region where the state lines of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado intersect, you have seen this land recently: a dark sedan corners hard on a serpentine blacktop road or a gleaming SUV kicks up red dirt as it skitters through a sharp curve.\u00a0 Impossibly beautiful humps and domes, hoodoos and escarpments, gleaming pinnacles and petrified hills and cliffs of polished red sandstone crowd the view.\u00a0 Sagebrush and prickly pear cactus yawn toward the blue horizon.<\/p>\n

Somehow a car careening through the redrock desert of the southwest has come to define the American ideals of freedom, frontier, and limitless wilderness the way Shane or The Gunslinger once did.\u00a0 Car commercials have become 30-second mini-westerns that stand for the very things that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner once claimed helped to create the unique American character.\u00a0 Of course Turner also said\u2014 in 1890\u2014 that the frontier which formed us had already closed.<\/p>\n

But more than a century later we still cling to these ideals: we like to believe that rugged country still defines our spirit, that wide-open possibilities can still be discovered in the wild places on the map.\u00a0 That the landscape is still untamed enough to harbor outlaws who can\u2019t be found.\u00a0 The notion that we can own a vehicle of such power and comfort and drive it through such a startling topography makes us feel larger than life\u2014 though how motorized vehicles and wilderness can exist simultaneously in the same place is beyond the heart-pumping half-minute of a t.v. commercial to explain.\u00a0 Nonetheless, we want the car.\u00a0 And the cartography.<\/p>\n

Many folks have been drawn powerfully enough by images of the redrock desert to explore their own southwestern version of an American dream.\u00a0 Possibly they\u2019ve sat in an idling rig (nobody in the rugged west calls it a \u201ccar\u201d) waiting to pay the entrance fee to Arches or Bryce or Zion National Park, munching power bars and sipping sports drinks before walking the 1.5-mile paved loop trail.\u00a0 Mornings, they might pass through a motel lobby full of Kachina dolls and Kokopellis on their way to the free breakfast of sugared doughnuts and Tang and weak coffee.\u00a0 After their five-day adventure they may return home with stories about how the brutal noon time temperature grilled their cheese sandwiches in the trunk of the car.\u00a0 If they\u2019re really lucky, they\u2019ll have seen a rattlesnake.\u00a0 They will feel wide and free ranging, having gotten in touch with the land.\u00a0 Western land.\u00a0 Desert land.\u00a0 Ahhh.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of books available at gift shops and park visitors\u2019 centers natter on about the sacred this and the spiritual that in the desert southwest.\u00a0 They describe modern white people performing Native American rituals to cleanse themselves because the Indians were so at one with the land.\u00a0 So pure and good, living off the meager bounty of a hard but beautiful place.\u00a0 Every pot shard and corncob and scribble of rock art the Indians left behind, these books pontificate, is the basis for a religious epiphany or worthy of ecstatic contemplation.\u00a0 What are the dead Indians saying to us, such volumes ponder.\u00a0 As if any of this could even possibly have anything to do with us.\u00a0 They further romanticize the idea of the southwest and its former inhabitants up the frigging wazoo until there is nothing real or genuine left.\u00a0 Except the land itself, which has endured eons of erosion, of battering winds and raging waters.\u00a0 So surely it can endure an age or two of human yammering.<\/p>\n

In fact, the Four Corners Region is as stunning and inaccessible as a supermodel.\u00a0 Also known as the Colorado Plateau because its topography is influenced by the action of this once-mighty river and its tributaries carving through a vertical mile of stacked sandstone spreading like a huge pallet of soft red cake, the terrain has an ability to deliver a refreshing slap.\u00a0\u00a0 Like a cold plunge on a blistering day.\u00a0 It brings on shudders the way a shot of mescal does.\u00a0 It moves us, whether we\u2019re prone to emotion, or over-dramatize our experience, or prefer not to be so moved.<\/p>\n

But car ad landscapes and books and visitors\u2019 center dioramas describe mere ghosts of the real southwest.\u00a0 These images have no soul despite the fact that we have spiritualized the canyons and mesa tops beyond all reckoning, imbued them with fluffy power sanitized for our protection.\u00a0 Sure, this still-wild west is beautiful and moving.\u00a0 But it is also a humongous Indian graveyard encompassing enough bad juju for centuries of whoop-ass haunting.\u00a0 It is a killing maze where modern men, women, and livestock, and a whole race of ancient Native Americans, among other things, have simply disappeared.\u00a0 In a word, this land is dark\u2014 darkness being something that the most powerful forces always encompass as part of their alluring complexities.<\/p>\n

Wilderness is more than an improved campsite with running water and an outhouse; if you wander off the blacktop path, if you touch the wildness in this wilderness, real dangers of every sort may take the opportunity to present themselves.<\/p>\n

The car commercials and visitors\u2019 centers and the happy-faced mystics never talk about the desert southwest as a land of death and hardship.\u00a0 They never mention that humans have a history of vanishing here the way that water holes that appear after a rainstorm are shortly sucked dry by the relentless sun.\u00a0 Unsolved mysteries rise from this sandy soil as prolifically as sage and yucca\u2014 beginning with the Anasazi, a race of ancient Native Americans who spent a millennium and ultimately built fantastical cliff dwellings in the canyons here and then evaporated into history before the European Dark Ages were even revving up.<\/p>\n

The stories of this region are as twisted as the trunk of a hundred-year-old juniper tree.\u00a0 Still, I must confess to having fallen under the spell of this land many years ago and being drawn back countless times to wander in canyons, to stumble dry-throated across mesas, to climb rock faces I had no business climbing just to reach some archaeological site abandoned by people who surely didn\u2019t have me in mind when they left their mark here.\u00a0 When they pressed handprints of wet red paint above their doorways 700 years ago.\u00a0 And although I don\u2019t claim to comprehend what three violent men were up to when they went postal here in 1998, I can<\/span> relate to the way this place urges you to test your limits.\u00a0 How it provokes you to discover what you can get away with and just how alive you can feel\u2014whether that means climbing a dangerously exposed route across crumbling sandstone or something else entirely.<\/p>\n

I must also admit to feeling some sort of bucking in my solar plexus in the canyons that I am not comfortable trying to explain lest I sound like one of the smiley spiritualists I\u2019ve grown so weary of.\u00a0 Like them, I also believe this land has a power\u2014 but not the benign hippie love-fest power that people speak of in hushed tones.\u00a0 Okay, yes, I\u2019ve even felt some of that.\u00a0 But I also know how this land\u2019s power has drawn and nurtured murderers, thieves, liars, and exploiters of every ilk and grand design.\u00a0 It has attracted rebels and outcasts, raging fundamentalists, and a varied portfolio of hard cases.\u00a0 Backpackers and river guides and other misanthropes flee here to escape the rampant commercialism and fast-food mentality of our nation.\u00a0 And all of us\u2014all the pilgrims who\u2019ve felt the pull of this territory\u2019s sun-drenched beauty\u2014will admit that the heart of this land lies in shadow.\u00a0 We carry a bone-deep understanding that canyon country may coax a person to do strange things.<\/p>\n

From the earliest human inhabitants here, whose culture peaked seven hundred years ago and then vanished entirely from the earth; to the wandering explorers\u2014Father Escalante, John Wesley Powell, the Weatherill family that was instrumental in discovering the Anasazi\u2019s legacy; from loners and artists such as Everett Reuss who disappeared in the 1930s without a trace after last being seen in Davis Gulch, a tributary of the Escalante River, itself the very last river to be discovered in the continental U.S; to a trio of modern-day malcontents who carved a glyph of murder and hatred across our pure image of this land, men have acted badly or dumbly or both in the rugged southwest.<\/p>\n

The story of these three recent fugitives, in particular, is a fine tale for exposing the underlying character of the canyon lands and the effect they can have.\u00a0 To truly love a place we must recognize and accept its undesirable qualities as well as its many alluring attributes.\u00a0 To love the desert we must acknowledge the terrible burden of its freedom.\u00a0 The anarchy of its open spaces. \u00a0The geographic madness it sometimes inspires.<\/p>\n

If there is a radical discontent fomenting in this nation, a movement that strikes against order and complacency and all the familiar comforts that most of us hold dear, it would likely find succor in the stingy, hardscrabble soil of the Colorado Plateau\u2014in the heat of the sun and the shade of the canyons.\u00a0 It would rise sharp and tough and unapproachable as a cholla cactus in a terrain so biblical it drew an entire religion\u2014the Mormons\u2014to call it their Promised Land.<\/p>\n

What was this triumvirate of violent renegades up to when they cut loose from the reins binding them to society?\u00a0 Were they would-be terrorists for whom things turned badly before they had a chance to act?\u00a0 What had the land inspired in three men who already lived on the periphery before disappearing into the backcountry for three days, for seventeen months, and possibly forever?\u00a0 How is their story relevant to our comfortable, well-watered lives?\u00a0 What is it about the desert, and this particular desert, that exerts a power to both draw us in and drive us away?<\/p>\n

Regardless of the fugitives\u2019 ultimate goal, their own canyon country adventure led to senseless killing, mayhem, a good old-fashioned posse care of 50 U.S. government agencies, and\u2014in the case of at least two out of three of the perpetrators\u2014their own rather mysterious deaths.\u00a0 The bleaching bones of the third fugitive, who has not been apprehended, may haunt the topography in some remote side canyon.\u00a0 Or perhaps he escaped detection here, as did the outlaw Butch Cassidy, who often hid in this same wilderness between robberies and somehow became a hero.<\/p>\n

The tale of the Four Corners Fugitives, as well as any story, communicates the dark history of this stunning, hexed land that wants neither to be discovered nor explored.\u00a0 Juxtaposed against other little-known stories from the territory and some new perspectives on familiar stories, the saga of these men\u2014their wrong turns and missed chances and deadly mistakes\u2014 fills out part of the incomplete map sketched by car commercials and coffee table books, by old westerns and the air-popped accounts of desert spiritualism and arid grace.\u00a0 If anything, this place is more beautiful, more enticing, more powerful for being dangerous and dark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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