Leave It As It Is by David Gessner

Leave It As It Is by David Gessner

Author:David Gessner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00


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After my rest in Colorado, I drove west through the state into Utah and then south to the town of Bluff, the small, southeastern Utah town that was the jumping off point for Bears Ears. If you want to see antiquities of the sort the Antiquities Act was created to protect, you could do worse than traveling to Bluff. Entering town, you will be greeted by this sign:

Est. 650 A.D. Bluff.

Some of the residents of Bluff, a sleepy town for most of the year, with a population of 258, are ambivalent about their new designation as the “gateway to Bears Ears,” but there are few indications that the town is going the over-commercialized way of its northern neighbor, the adventure mecca Moab. Bluff looked pretty much like the place I had gotten to know back during my earlier visits: dry, dusty, quiet. The rise and fall and potential rise again of Bears Ears did not seem to have affected it much, though there was a new hotel being built as you were entering town that would have to be watched like a precancerous mole.

When I visited back in January, I had slept in a trailer behind the house of Amanda and Zak Podmore, the two young environmentalists I had befriended. This time my lodgings were more luxurious: while in Bluff I would be living at a friend of a friend’s house that sat below two towering rocks and stared straight into Calf Canyon. The first night I slept out on a lawn chair on the deck as the moon and clouds played a shadow game off the canyon walls.

The next day was, like every day here during the half year that in most places we would call summer, very, very hot. Climate, more than anything or anyone else, more than Teddy Roosevelt or even progressivism, is what allowed for the creation of the thing we call the Antiquities Act. Because without this climate there would be no antiquities. My wife liked to say of our adopted home in southeastern North Carolina that it was “like living inside someone’s mouth.” The Southwest, in contrast, was like living in a kiln. The kiln bakes this land. And it is the kiln that preserves the pottery and artifacts and ruins of an ancient civilization.

To beat the heat I got up before dawn. It was still dark when I began my hike just outside of town, through a small forest of juniper and sage. I was ushered in by a half-dozen ravens, and dipped down and then up on the sand trail, crunching over a river of last year’s cottonwood leaves. I followed a red sand path that led deep into the canyon, until I found myself standing below a spectacular sandstone village backed into the canyon and tucked under a great stone ledge. I looked up at long-abandoned rooms and granaries of the Ancestral Puebloans.

Tall cottonwoods from the valley below had grown up almost to the level of the ledge that held the dwellings.



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