Visionary Mammals

Editor’s note: Ellen Meloy was a writer, artist and naturalist. Her books include Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River, The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest, and Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild. She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for The Anthropology of Turquoise Meditations on Landscape, Art & Spirit (2003).

Ellen gave us permission to reprint this essay in The Road-RIPorter before her unfortunate and sudden death in November 2004, at the age of 57. She lived in Bluff, Utah.

Utah’s unique redrock country remains, in Meloy’s words “highly vulnerable.”

In 1995 Utah’s congressional delegation placed before Congress a bill that would have designated only 1.8 million acres of 22 million acres of roadless Utah administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The delegation’s concept of wild land was baffling at the least, if not outright defiant of the Wilderness Act. Their bill allowed roads and vehicles in much of the proposed “wilderness.” It created boundaries that made no sense to watershed, wildlife, or environmental assets and all the sense in the world to politics. Organized by writers Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams, twenty-one writers sent Testimony, a multi-essay letter to Congress, urging its members to protect Utah’s extraordinary wildlands. The bill was defeated.

Five years later, similar efforts, through legislation and vandalism by illegal vehicle entry, leave Utah’s redrock country highly vulnerable. There is still room for testimony on its behalf. The following essay was included in Testimony, which Milkweed Editions published s a book in 1996. — Ellen Meloy

One morning at my camp beside the Green River in Utah’s Desolation Canyon I awoke to a glorious surprise. From river’s edge to my open-air bed ran a swath of tracks and drip marks. The tracks curved around my sleeping bag in an easy lope then disappeared into the cottonwood trees. The pale sand was pebbled with the drips of an unshaken pelt. The deepest paw prints were still dark brown and wet. Near my bed the creature grazed my toes. Mere inches closer it would have leapt over my head, and I would have stared up at the belly of a cougar.

The cougar brushed by me on one of hundreds of nights in Desolation Canyon, where I lived and worked with my river-ranger husband for eight years. Desolation is one of many wilderness study areas in Utah that could join a legacy of wild country like no other on the planet.

The Utah delegation’s wilderness bill falls miserably short of this opportunity. It fails to include millions of acres of extraordinary land, and in an unprecedented biological sterilization of public policy, it prohibits agencies from protecting their natural values. The remnants of proposed wilderness are worm-holed with exemptions to roads, dams, and utility lines. Contrary to myth, the current law “locks out” machines, not people. This bill, in places, would lift the ban on the infernal combustion engines, as if the amputation of our vehicles from our persons on a mere fraction of public lands would cause undue suffering, not welcome relief from the techno-shriek of daily life. There is little “wild” in this wildlands bill; it erodes the idea of wilderness upon which we agreed as a country in 1964.

In this redrock desert, change is measured by sand drawn down the face and veins of the continent, grain by grain, a pace that defies America’s compulsion o reduce the particularity of a place. In Utah we still have islands of visible, palpable uniqueness. Here you can taste and feel color; the sheer immensity f distance becomes intimate. This land is remote, prickly, painfully beautiful. Its innate scarcities have preserved it despite a culture that mines, dams, and grids the rest of creation. Do we so lack in material well-being that we cannot leave the last 10 percent of Utah in its wild state? A hundred years ago desert lover John C. Van Dyke lamented the dismissal of aesthetics as a highest good, lifeblood as vital as food and love. He said of the prevailing ethos, “The main affair of life is to get the dollar, and if there is money in cutting the throat of Beauty, why, by all means, cut her throat.” Can we afford to live without beauty?

We need wild country. We are mammals, not gods. We ask you to be visionary mammals. Others want political expedience. The latter would have you toss Utah’s finest asset to the profit geeks and still end up in debt. We’ve already done this in the West for over a century. You can listen to those with a frontier hangover so great, they still reject any notion of limits, or you can heed the enlightened consensus of ecological sanity and a hunger for wild places. The visionary says—awkwardly because it thwarts western history: We cannot measure this land with numbers or dollars. It looks so very peculiar, like red bones. But we need this strangely wild country, for here we can explore and rest and listen in an agreed peace.

When I tell the story of the cougar, friends ask, Were you terrified? No, I was half asleep, sensing a liquid ghost at the edge of my slumber. Had I been fully awake I would have been filled not with fear but with ecstasy. In its graceful arc over me the cougar did not need my notice, only my care.

— © 1996 Ellen Meloy. Reprinted with the author’s permission.