The Monkey Wrench Gang (16 page)

Captain Smith & Crew, rolling merrily down the road, left the Monument turnoff at the junction with Utah 95. Here they saw a string of four-wheel-drive vehicles—CJ-5s, Scouts, Blazers, Broncos, elaborately equipped with spotlights, hard tops, gun racks (loaded), winches, wide-rim wheels, shortwave radios, chrome-plated hubcaps, the works—parked in a file at the side of the road. Each vehicle bore on its door panel identical decalcomania, a bold insigne complete with eagle, shield and scroll:

A group of Search and Rescuers squatted in the shade with Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up clutched in hairy hands. (These men are regular churchgoers.) A few were scuffling about in the brush, along the now un-flagged and unstaked survey route of the projected right-of-way. One of them hailed Smith. He was obliged to stop.

The hailer came toward them. “Hey there,” he bellows cheerily,
“if it ain’t old Cohab Smith. Ol’ Seldom Seen hisself. How you doin’, Smith?”

Smith, letting the motor idle, answered, “Just fine, Bishop Love. Fine as a frog’s hair. What’re you doin’ out this neck of the woods?”

The man, huge as Dr. Sarvis, lumbered up to the door of the truck, laid his big red hands on the frame of the open window and smiled in. He looked like a rancher: a mouthful of powerful, horselike yellow teeth, a leather-skinned face half shaded by a big hat, the regulation snap-button shirt. He squinted beyond Smith at the three passengers in the gloom of the cab. (The light outside was dazzling.) “How you folks today?”

The doctor nodded; Bonnie gave her receptionist’s frigid smile; Hayduke dozed. Smith offered no introductions. Bishop Love turned his attention back to Smith.

“Seldom,” he says, “haven’t seen you around these parts for some time. How’s everything?”

“Can’t holler.” Smith nods toward his passengers. “Making a living and paying my tithe.”

“Payin’ your tithe, are you? That ain’t what I hear.” The bishop laughed to show he was only kidding.

“I pay mine to IRS, which is more’n I hear you do, Bishop.”

The bishop glanced around; the smile grew broader. “Now don’t you start no rumors. Besides”—he winked—“that income tax is socialistic and against the Constitution and a sin against man and God, you know that.” Pause. Smith raced the engine for a moment. Love’s wandering eyes came back. “Listen, we’re lookin’ for somebody. There’s a man afoot out here somewhere makin’ a public nuisance of hisself. We think he might be lost.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Wears about size ten or eleven boots. Vibram lug soles.”

“That ain’t much of a description, Bishop.”

“I know it. It’s all we got. You seen him?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. Well, we’ll find him pretty quick.” Pause. Again Smith raced the engine. “Now you take care yerself, Seldom,
and listen, next time you come through Blanding you stop and see me, understand? We got some things to talk about.”

“I’ll see you, Bishop.”

“Good boy.” The bishop grabbed Smith’s shoulder, gave it a vigorous shake, then withdrew from the truck window. Smith drove away.

“Old friend of yours?” Bonnie said.

“Nope.”

“Old enemy?”

“Yep. Old Love he ain’t got much use for me.”

“Why’d you call him Bishop?”

“He’s a bishop in the church.”

“That man is a
bishop?
In the
church?”

“L.D.S. The Mormon church. We got more bishops than we got saints.” Smith grinned. “Why hell, honey, I’d be a bishop myself by now if I’d kept my nose clean and stayed out of Short Crick and Cohabitation Canyon.”

“All right, come on,” Bonnie said, “talk American.”

Hayduke, who’d only been feigning sleep, put in his two cents. “He means if he hadn’t been following his cock all over Utah and Arizona he’d have a bishop-prick of his own.”

“Nobody was talking to you, garbage mouth.”

“I know it.”

“Then shut up.”

“Sure.”

“That’s about it,” Smith said. “What George said.”

“So what’s a search and rescue team doing on that road project?”

“They work pretty close with the county sheriff’s department. What you might call a posse. They’re mostly a bunch of businessmen who like to play vigilante in their spare time. They don’t mean no harm. Every fall they bring a few California deer hunters in outa the blizzard. Every summer they bring a few dehydrated Boy Scouts up out of Grand Gulch. They try to do good. It’s their hobby.”

“When I see somebody coming to do
me
good,” Hayduke said, “I reach for my revolver.”

“When I hear the word culture,” Dr. Sarvis said, “I reach for my checkbook.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” Bonnie said. “Let’s try to keep our thoughts in clear logical order.” She and her mates stared ahead through the windshield at the red panorama beyond, the blue cliffs, the pale canyons, the angular silhouette of Woodenshoe Butte against the northwest horizon. “What I want to know now,” she continued, “is who is this Bishop Love and why does he hate your guts, Captain Smith, and should I or should I not put a hex on him?”

“The name is Seldom,” he said, “and old Love hates me because last time we locked horns he’s the one got throwed. You don’t wanna hear about it.”

“Probably not,” Bonnie said. “So what happened?”

The truck rambled down the red-dust Utah country road, wandering a bit on the ruts and rocks. “Think maybe the front end’s a little outa line,” Smith says.

“So what happened?” Bonnie says.

“Just a little difference of opinion which cost old Love about a million dollars. He wanted a forty-nine-year lease on a section of state land overlooking Lake Powell. Had in mind some kind of tourist development: summer homes, shopping center, airfield and so on. There was a hearing in Salt Lake, and me and some friends talked the Land Commission into blocking the deal. Took a lot of talking but we convinced ’em Love’s project was a fraud, which it was, and he ain’t forgiven me yet. We’ve had differences like that before, him and me, several times.”

“I thought he was a bishop.”

“Well that’s on Sundays and Wednesday church-study nights only. Rest of the time he’s neck deep in real estate, uranium, cattle, oil, gas, tourism, most anything that smells like money. That man can hear a dollar bill drop on a shag rug. Now he’s running for the state legislature. We got plenty like him in Utah. They run things. They run things as best they can for God and Jesus, and what them two don’t want why fellas like Bishop Love pick up. They say it’s a mighty convenient arrangement all around. Jesus Saves at eight and a half
percent compounded daily, and when they make that last deposit they go straight to heaven. Them and all the ancestors they can dig out of the genealogical libraries. It’s enough to make a man want to live forever.”

“Tell them Hayduke’s back,” Hayduke said. “That’ll calm them down.” He tossed his beer can out the window. And opened another. Bonnie studied him.

“I thought we were only going to litter paved roads,” she said. “This is not a paved road, in case your eyes are too bloodshot to notice.”

“Fuck off.” He tossed the little metal tab out the window.

“That’s a brilliant retort you’ve worked out, Hayduke,” she said. “Really brilliant. A real flash of wit for all occasions.”

“Fuck off.”

“Touché. Doc, are you going to sit there like a lump of lard and let that hairy swine insult me?”

“Well … yes,” Doc said, after due consideration.

“You better. I’m a full-grown woman, and I can take care of myself.”

Hayduke, by the window, gazed out at the scenery, that routine canyon country landscape—grandiose, desolate, shamelessly spectacular. Among those faraway buttes and pinnacles, rosy red against the sky, lay the promise of something intimate—the intimate in the remote. A secret and a revelation. Later, he thought, we’ll get into all that.

They came to Fry Canyon, which consists of a slot in the bedrock ten feet wide and fifty feet deep, crossed by an old wooden bridge; a cinder-block warehouse, which functions as Fry Canyon’s store, gas station, post office and 3.2 social center; and a bulldozed airstrip, cobbled with rocks, stippled with cow dung, on which waited one Cessna four-seater—Fry Canyon Airport.

Smith drove past the limp wind sock dangling from a pole straight to the wing of the aircraft and stopped. As he unloaded passengers and baggage, the pilot came out of the store drinking Coke from a can. Within five minutes all kisses (Smith and Bonnie), handshakes,
embraces and farewells were completed and Dr. Sarvis and Ms. Abbzug, airborne once again, were winging their course southeast toward New Mexico and home.

Hayduke and Smith restocked the beer chest and drove on, sunward, downward, riverward, upwind, into the red-rock rimrock country of the Colorado River, heart of the heart of the American West. Where the wind always blows and nothing grows but stunted juniper on the edge of a canyon, scattered blackbrush, scrubby cactus. After the winter rains, if any, and again after the summer rains, if any, there will be a brief flourish of flowers, ephemeral things. The average annual rainfall comes to five inches. It is the kind of land to cause horror and repugnance in the heart of the dirt farmer, stock raiser, land developer. There is no water; there is no soil; there is no grass; there are no trees except a few brave cottonwoods deep in the canyons. Nothing but skeleton rock, the skin of sand and dust, the silence, the space, the mountains beyond.

Hayduke and Smith, jouncing down into the red desert, passed without stopping (for Smith could not bear the memories) the turnoff to the old road which formerly had led to the hamlet of Hite (not to be confused with Hite Marina). Hite, once home for Seldom Seen and still official headquarters of his business, now lies underwater.

They drove on, coming presently to the new bridge that spanned the gorge of White Canyon, the first of the three new bridges in the area. Three bridges to cross one river?

Consult the map. When Glen Canyon Dam plugged the Colorado, the waters backed up over Hite, over the ferry and into thirty miles of canyon upstream from the ferry. The best place to bridge the river (now Lake Powell) was upstream at Narrow Canyon. In order to reach the Narrow Canyon bridge site it was necessary to bridge White Canyon on the east and Dirty Devil Canyon on the west. Thus, three bridges.

Hayduke and Smith stopped to inspect the White Canyon bridge. This, like the other two, was of arch construction and massive proportion, meant to last. The very bolt heads in the cross members were the size of a man’s fist.

George Hayduke crawled about for a few minutes underneath the abutments, where nomads already, despite the newness of the bridge, had left their signatures with spray paint on the pale concrete and their dung, dried and shriveled, in the dust. He came up shaking his head.

“Don’t know,” he says, “don’t know. It’s one big motherfucker.”

“The middle one’s bigger,” says Smith.

They stared down over the railing at the meandering trickle, two hundred feet below, of White Canyon’s intermittent, strictly seasonal stream. Their beer cans sailed light as Dixie cups into the gloom of the gorge. The first flood of the summer would flush them, along with all other such detritus, down to the storage reservoir, Lake Powell, where all upstream garbage found a fitting resting-place.

On to the middle bridge.

They were descending, going down, yet so vast is the scale of things here, so complex the terrain, that neither river nor central canyon become visible until the traveler is almost on the rim of the canyon.

They saw the bridge first, a high lovely twin arch rising in silvery steel well above the level of its roadway. Then they could see the stratified walls of Narrow Canyon. Smith parked his truck; they got out and walked onto the bridge.

The first thing they noticed was that the river was no longer there. Somebody had removed the Colorado River. This was old news to Smith, but to Hayduke, who knew of it only by hearsay, the discovery that the river was indeed gone came as a jolt. Instead of a river he looked down on a motionless body of murky green effluent, dead, stagnant, dull, a scum of oil floating on the surface. On the canyon walls a coating of dried silt and mineral salts, like a bathtub ring, recorded high-water mark. Lake Powell: storage pond, silt trap, evaporation tank and garbage dispose-all, a 180-mile-long incipient sewage lagoon.

They stared down. A few dead fish floated belly up on the oily surface among the orange peels and picnic plates. One waterlogged
tree, a hazard to navigation, hung suspended in the static medium. The smell of decay, faint but unmistakable, rose four hundred and fifty feet to their nostrils. Somewhere below that still surface, down where the cloudy silt was settling out, the drowned cottonwoods must yet be standing, their dead branches thick with algae, their ancient knees laden with mud. Somewhere under the heavy burden of water going nowhere, under the silence, the old rocks of the river channel waited for the promised resurrection. Promised by whom? Promised by Capt. Joseph “Seldom Seen” Smith; by Sgt. George Washington Hayduke; by Dr. Sarvis and Ms. Bonnie Abbzug, that’s whom.

But how?

Hayduke climbed down the rocks and inspected the foundations of the bridge: very concrete. Abutments sunk deep into the sandstone wall of the canyon, huge I beams bolted together with bolts the size of a man’s arm, nuts big as dinner plates. If a man had a wrench with a 14-inch head, thinks Hayduke, and a handle like a 20-foot crowbar, he might get some leverage on those nuts.

They drove on to the third bridge, over the now-submerged mouth of the Dirty Devil River. On the way they passed an unmarked dirt road, the jeep trail leading north toward the Maze, Land of Standing Rocks, the Fins, Lizard Rock and Land’s End. No-man’s land. Smith knew it well.

The third bridge, like the others, was of arch construction, all steel and concrete, built to bear the weight of forty-ton haulers loaded with carnotite, pitchblende, bentonite, bituminous coal, diatomaceous earth, sulfuric acid, Schlumberger’s drill mud, copper ore, oil shale, sand tar, whatever might yet be extracted from the wilderness.