He whipped around the next bend in the canyon. A bridge popped into view directly before him, an arch of steel spanning the canyon from rim to rim. He flew under it, aware of clusters of tourists on the roadway staring down at him, boatloads of tourists staring up.
Airspeed: 110. He struggled for altitude, eager to get above the narrow winding confinement of the canyon walls. The plane climbed a couple of hundred feet, the walls dropped away, the boat ramp at Lee’s Ferry swept past beneath his wings, the deep dark narrow gorge of Glen Canyon — like a hairless vagina, solid Navajo sandstone — beckoned from ahead.
He plunged into it. Not that he really wanted to. But he’d gone too far to attempt to circle and climb. He flew onward, banking right, left, left again, then right, with the snakey meanders of the canyon, wingtips almost grazing the stone ramparts. Gradually the plane climbed. He had nearly reached rimrock again, four thousand feet above sea level, when suddenly, dramatically, completely, unavoidably, the dam appeared.
The dam. That dam. Glen Canyon Dam. That goddamned unforgivable dam.
The Baron’s lips twisted in a grin of fiendish glee. At full speed he shot beneath another highway bridge and flew straight toward the vast blank concave cement face of the world’s most despised and hated dam. He aimed himself to the right and a little above the powerhouse at the dam’s base, took his foot off the brakes and jammed it against his cargo of black milkjugs, pulled back on the wheel and soared steeply upward to the left.
He pushed. The milkjugs tumbled out, set after set, sailing in graceful arcs toward the dam’s facade. The Cessna climbed, slowing quickly; stall warning lights glared red, a buzzer snarled, the plane oozed over the rim of the dam like a sick butterfly and on to safety while in its rear the black jugs exploded one by one, a staccato, against pale gray concrete.
The Baron was not finished. Half his jugs remained. He banked above the bilge-green waters of stagnant Lake Powell, circled west and approached the dam’s face for a second bomb run, this time coming in from the left and climbing out to the right.
He shoved and kicked them out, the last five sets, fifty gallons of black latex, cleared the rim of the dam by a few feet, leveled and gained speed, banked and climbed and circled high for a good look at his work. On the way he noticed clots and clutches of sightseers, bouquets of pink dim faces staring up, and even detected a few men in uniform scribbling notes, jabbering into radios. They’d have the Cessna’s I.D. number now. So what? The craft was the property of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — a taxpayer-financed article.
The Baron circled again for one more viewing, pleased with what he saw, what all the tourists on the highway and in the visitor center saw: a huge black spattered “X” upon the dam’s massive face, the “X” of condemnation, of doom implacable, inescapable, complete and certain. The Baron’s sign, his mark, his signature.
Grim grin on his thin lips, stern satisfaction in his goggled eyes, the Baron waggled wings in farewell to the onlookers below and set his course south-southwest, bearing for the dirt strip where this flight began, for his waiting motor vehicle which would bear him away in quick escape to the high cool forests of the Kaibab, cocktails and dinner at Jacob Lake, a restful evening in a reserved motel room, an hour of meditation with the Book of Mormon. Then beddy-bye and a well-earned sleep.
First, of course, he had to find that little airfield beyond Badger Creek and set the airplane down in one piece and comfort at the proper attitude. The task would require thought and some concentration but he felt confident; he had seen it done before. Many times.
24
Earth First! Rendezvous
They straggled in from everywhere that’s dim, obscure, unsavory, crawling from the woodwork and creeping out from beneath stones, coming by jeep and bus and horse and bicycle and pickup truck and railroad boxcar and Cadillac convertible from Barton, Vermont to San Diego, California, from Key Largo, Florida to Homer, Alaska, a motley crude Coxey’s army of the malcontent, the discontent, the madly visionary, the vengeful revolutionist, the pipe-smoking field-trained deep ecologist, the misty-eyed tree-hugging Nature Lover, the sober conservationist, the native American 1/16th Chippewa Mother Earth Goddess, the mountain man in buckskin with fringes, the mountain girl in doeskin gown and flowered headband, the beer-drinking fun-loving gun-happy trailbusters in sweat-rich camouflage T-shirts and worn-out steel-sole jungle boots, the zealot-eyed unisexual fun-hating sectarian Marxists in corduroy and workman shirts, the pot-smoking flower kids sagging into middle age, Vietnam vets hiding in the woods, desert rats baked on the rocks, swamp hogs soaked in muck, misanthropic redneck pseudo-intellectuals steeped in Thoreau and Garrett Hardin, a few wolf-howling goose-honking owl-hooting elk-bugling Neanderthalian macho mystics, three socio-feminist Furies in baggy dungarees and steel-toed ball-crushers, straw-haired Ned Luddites in bare feet and faded Osh-Kosh B’Gosh bib overalls, Pleistocene naturists with firedrills and panpipes and no clothes at all, a shifting number of uniformed observers from the Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management and shifty numbers of spies and informers garishly disguised as 1960s hippies representing the same (and other) Federal, state and county law-enforcement agencies.
Plus Erika, Girl-Viking, Nordic goddess of beauty, last name unknown, representing the song of Norway, the mind of Arne Naess, the spirit of Grieg, Nielsen, Sibelius, the beauty of Greta Garbo.
And somewhere in the mob young J. Oral Hatch, R.M., masquerading as a flower child from Dipstick, Utah.
Totally absent from this convention were any bureaucrats above the rank of patrol ranger, any elected official other than county sheriff, any officers of national conservation or environmental organizations, or any correspondents from the national press. Many such had been invited; none appeared.
Maybe they’d tried to come but got lost. The Rendezvous convened this year deep in a national forest, high on the Kaibab Plateau, far out on the north rim (the clean and decent rim) of the The Awful Grand Canyon of the Colorado. State of Arizona. Land of the horned toad, the Gila monster, the cone-nosed kissing bug, the sidewinder rattlesnake, the lung fungus, Barry Goldwater, congressmen Eldon Rudd and Bob Stump, jumping cactus, whiptail scorpion, the Udall brothers, hairy tarantula, brown recluse, black widow, Arizona Highways magazine, American West magazine, slime mold, eight-inch centipede, No-See-Um, fire ant, killer bee, a newspaper known as the Arizona Daily Estrellita (“La Voz de Lata Mejico en Baja Arizona”), cowshit, cowfly, barfly, buttonfly, cowperson (“Yoohoo buckaroo!”), cattleperson (“Who ya runnin’ for State Senate this year?”; “Huh? I’m spozed to remember the dingbat’s name?”), solpugid, Jerusalem cricket, giant cockroach, coral snake, diamondback buzzworm, Dennis DeConcini, bubonic plague, Peter McDonald, fetal alcoholism, liver fluke, bark scorpion, vinegaroon, Phoenix-Tucson, giardia, Syn-Fuels, Phelps-Dodge, Del Webb, IBM, Hughes Aircraft, commercial astronomy, kidney stones, Roy Drachman, U.S. Air Force, the Bonano brothers, old drug money, old real estate money, old multiple-organ inverted-sphincter transplant money, and — growth. Growth. GROWTH. GROWTH. …
True sagebrush patriots, the Earth First! Sixth National Round River (from a phrase by Aldo Leopold) Rendezvous began, as always, on the Fourth of July. Independence Day. War & Revolution Day. Death Before Dishonor Live Wild or Die Don’t Tread On Me Give Me Liberty or Give Me Damnitall Coors? or Budweiser? Day. Seven days of fun, frolic and anarchy.
The welcoming address to some five or six hundred assorted riffraff was delivered by Dave Foreman, unacknowledged non-leader (“We’re all leaders”), founding father (one of several), editor of the Earth First! Journal, and principal Earth First! Spoke:
Big and burly, bearded and bellicose, native-born son-of-the-pioneers Southwesterner, one-time shoer of horses, packer of mules, Marine Corps Officer School dropout, bow hunter and fly fisherman, lover and husband, he opened his wide smiling loud mouth and bellowed to the multitudes, to the listening pine trees, to the hovering clouds in the sky, to the rosy walls and purple dep
ths of the Grand Canyon —
“Welcome, you posy sniffers, tree-huggers and toadstool worshippers. Glad you made it.”
“Fascist!” screamed a shrill voice from the far fringes of the assembled mob. Alecto the Red-eyed —
“Eco-fascist!” screamed another. Tisiphone the Red-beaked —
“Creeping eco-fascist hyena!” screamed a third. Megaera the Red —
“Terrorist, sexist, racist, rightwing libertarian eco-brutalist!” screamed all three in chorus, snakes writhing in their hair.
“ — Welcome also to the social ecology delegation from Berkeley,” Foreman continued, barely missing a beat.
“Eat shit, Nazi Foreman!” screamed a slightly deeper, somewhat normal maler voice.
“Tofu to you, Doctor Mushkin,” Foreman replied, and waited for the screaming, howling, grumbling and laughter to die away. “I’d also like to welcome our friends the Freddies, both those in uniform and those in the tie-dyed shirts and love beads. Please feel free to penetrate, infiltrate, conjugate or copulate whatever and whoever you can. We appreciate your interest. No secrets here. Like you heard, we’re just a bunch of fascists, racists, terrorists, sexists, anarchists, communists, Young Americans for Freedom, Democrats and just plain folksy eco-freaks. If you find anybody acting respectable report them to Igor and the goon squad. If you see any illicit sexual activity report them to Bruce and the vice squad. If —”
“Homophobe!”
“If you see anybody having fun report them to the Rednecks for Social Responsibility Committee.”
Foreman raised his big right fist, squeezing a beercan and spraying the front row audience with a fine mist of sweet green watery Coors. “Earth First!” he bellowed.
“No, Earth second!” the crowd responded, eager to follow wherever not led, raising a forest of fists, a thicket of flags, an effervescence of beercans.
“No, grizzly bears second!” the leader corrected.
“Naw, women!” came the response. “Men!” cried others. “Red squirrels! Dolphins! Desert turtles! Old-growth forest! Rainforest! Central Park! Bats! AIDS! Band-aids! International Monetary Fund! Androgynes! …”
“Down with Empire, up with Spring!” Foreman went on.
“Up yours!”
“We stand for what we stand on!”
“Shoes! Feet! Linoleum!”
“Earth First! Terra primum!”
“Sieg heil! Beer! Sex! Condors! Park rangers! Cowboys! Erika! George Hayduke! The Common Man! The Unknown Soldier! Jesus H. Christ! John Muir! Aldo Leopold! Henry Thoreau! Walt Whitman! Emily Dickinson! Doctor Norbert Wiener! …”
“Who?” said Foreman. He chugalugged his beer and shouted, “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth!”
“Yeah! No! Maybe!”
“And I thank you all for your unanimous support!” Grinning, waving tossing his empty beercan to the platform floor, Foreman started to descend, then remembered his emcee duties: “Now if you’ll …” He waved both hands above his head, begging for some attention in the midst of the uproar of laughter, screaming, yelling. “… If only you’ll … please … please … we’ll now have … the invocation by … by the Reverend Mike Roselle and the Virgin Grove … the Virgin Grove. …”
The bedlam grew in all dimensions, a swelling sea of laughter capped with shouts of mock derision, rolling cheers of approval, polite hand-clapping, and a little constellation of silent “sparkling” (burning matches) by envoys from the Rainbow Gathering, a group that regarded any form of audible demonstration as disruptive to the true higher communal spiritual experience. The Rainbows were set upon at once, however, and rudely, by a pair of uniformed USFS rangers concerned about human-caused forest fires. Sheepishly, the Sparklers blew out their matches, held them till cold and broke them as instructed by the outraged Smokey Bears. “Only you can prevent forest fires,” sez Smokey — a lie, of course, since 95 percent of the nation’s forest fires are caused by God and lightning, but the kind of lie that easily becomes religious dogma in the bureaucratic mentality.
Still trying to get the crowd’s attention and complete his introduction of the next act, Foreman threw back his head, raised both hairy paws to his muzzle and began to howl like a wolf. He started low and deep in the chest, rising in slow crescendo toward an apogee of animal liberation, the blood-cry of the eternal untamed, the true and original call of the wild.
That did it. That caught their interest. The mob echoed his howl in antiphonic recapitulation, male and female, adult and child, human and canine, six hundred voices soaring through the cathedral of the trees, into the listening sky, over the yawning abyss of the world’s one and one only Grand Canyon, where a waxing young moon, at this very moment, was shining like a platinum shield above the Powell Plateau, the Great Thumb Mesa, the towers and temples of gods far older than any ever imagined by man. (Or by wo-man.)
Even the cops and rangers were impressed by this mass outburst of angelic demonology. Not frightened, not disturbed — hard for them to imagine so anarchic and jolly a multitude becoming dangerous — but impressed. They listened, they stared, their hearts beat faster with the power of the primitive — be primordial or die! — and they remembered, under the thin imposed film of cultural consciousness, something older, deeper, richer, warmer, lovelier and finer than anything they’d ever been taught in school, heard from Church and State, or osmotically absorbed from TV, radio, newspapers, billboards, politicians, evangelists, priests, experts, M.D.s or Ph.D.s.
What? What was it? It was that sense of life that cannot be expressed — or depressed — through mere words. It was the message of the wolf’s cry, the lion’s roar, the whispering of the forest, the thunder of a storm, the silence of the canyon, the wail of wind, the meaning of the moon. The fire of the blood. The drumming of the heart. The beating of the drums.
Drums, drums, drums and tambourines and flutes, all present heard the coming music, the procession of the dancers.
“Mike Roselle,” announced Foreman, “and the Virgin Grove Spikettes!” He leaped from the stage, snatched a beer from a careless hand, and melted into the mass.
“Nazi!” squealed a heckler, recovering his hatred. “Animals!”
Useless protest: the crowd ignored him, shoving him aside as they cleared a path for another hulking brute of a man in antlers, whiskers, T-shirt, bluejeans, boots, tools, who sprang onto the stage followed by six girls in gowns of white and green and gold, impersonating an aspen grove. Chanting, they danced in a circle around the horny satyr with his grin, his can of Michelob, his singlejack sledgehammer, the canvas bag of spikes slung from his shoulder.
The meaning of the pantomime seemed obscure, at first, until Freddie climbed on stage, a man dressed in the brown-shirted uniform of a U.S. forest ranger and lugging a gigantic cardboard make-believe chainsaw. At sight of him the six aspen girls stopped their dance, quaking with fear. Freddie yanked the starter cord on his chainsaw; snarling like a two-cycle engine he approached the trembling trees, menacing them with his implement of massacre. They skipped in a circle, round and round, chased by the ranger until — Oh terra primum! — the bold satyr interposed himself with uplifted hammer. A brief clash of weapons and the forest ranger fled, yelping with terror, pursued by Roselle deep into the shadows of the evening woods.
Cheers, whistles, applause.
“Sexist!” screeched the Furies from Berkeley, “male chauvinist piggery!”
Vain outcry: the drumming resumed, the piping of the flutes, the dancing. The Virgin Grove, hand in hand, jumped from the stage and led the crowd in a whirling spiraling joyous dance that wound about the stage and across the meadow and through the forest and every which way but loose. …
Sundown. Moonshine. Smoke of burning oak in campfires, juniper incense, guitars and banjos, drums and flutes and panpipes. Smell of barbecued spareribs, corn on the cob, refried beans, Mex-Tex chili, avocado dip. Burning hemp. Sweat. Seminal ideas. Porta-johns. Baby diapers. Gasoline. Dust and pine duff. Tennis shoes and foot po
wder. Silverleaf lupine in midsummer bloom. Cliffrose. Sacred datura.
“Oral,” she gasped, stroking his cheeks. “At last I find you my crazy handsome Mormon-Moroni man!”
“Oh no,” he said, backing off, glancing furtively about, “not me, you got me mixed up with somebody else, my name, my name … ah … is J. Bracken Benson, that’s right, I come from, from Moab, Utah. You know, Moab? Land of Moab?”
Oh Moab, thou art my washpot. — Psalm 108
Moab, alas! thou art undone. — Numbers 29
“Oral …!” Reaching out, she flung her arms around his neck and clung, clung (clang?) like a twining woodbine, like a kudzu vine, like the running blackberry of clearcut and/or fire-scorched woodland. “Oral, my little Oral Hatch I miss you so much so long your Erika she comes all zee way to America to find you and now at last — “
Whimpering with fear, he managed to break free from her strong sweet arms. “No, no, sorry, miss, you got the wrong, I’m not … you better look again, us … we … we Mormons do kind of look alike but really, honest, I’m not … see? look, mustache, brown hair, no glasses, Oral wore glasses, right?, didn’t he? … did he? …”
Young Hatch ran, ran like a man in fear, into the fringes of the swirling crowd, into the darkness of the wood, and vanished. For the time being. Erika stared after him, astonished, eyes wide in wonder and shock. Could she be wrong? True, true, most young male Mormoni tended to resemble one another like pease in a pot, like ants on a hill, like sheep in a flock, but she knew her Oral, how could she ever be mistaken in those adolescent lineaments, those perfect fluoridated teeth, that small peenhead without neck set like a soccer ball midway between the shoulders? The first great love of her life. And he denies her.