From One Life at a Time, Please (1988)

We launched ourselves, my little boat and I, onto the flowing river. Here is what happened:

Saturday

We float beneath the bridge. From the shade I gain a splendid view of the Moab valley, a vale of greenery walled in by red sandstone cliffs. Beyond the cliffs rise the snow-crowned La Sal Mountains, only fifteen miles away by line of sight. Valley, cliffs, mountains—one of the world’s most magnificent settings for a human community. Unfortunately the town of Moab (about five thousand people) was overrun by the uranium industry back in the 1950s and remains an eyesore, a commercial-industrial slum. But that junk will rot and fade from the scene, given time, as a thousand other ephemerid boomtowns have vanished from the landscape of the American West, leaving what belongs here: some farms, a few little ranches, the original Moab, the national parks and perhaps, someday, a small college and arts center.

I row past the uranium mill, which is at present shut down, silent, empty except for a cadre of supervisors, watchmen, maintenance men. Like most people in the Moab area, I hope it stays this way—silent. But the enormous twenty-acre slime pit of uranium wastes remains in place beside the mill, on the shore of the river, a constant threat to the health and well-being of every living thing downwind and downstream.

The river flows around a swampy bottomland and enters the Portal—a fifteen-hundred-foot-deep notch in the red-rock wall, the gateway to what, only three decades ago, was still terra incognita: the canyonlands, the Needles, the Maze, the Confluence, Monument Basin, the grabens, the Fins, the Henry Mountains, the deep, intricate, uninhabited marvels of the Glen and Escalante Canyons. Half of this grandeur now lies submerged (for the time being) under the stagnant waters of artificial Lake Powell. But much remains. More than enough to make a journey into this region, whether by foot or horse or boat, still a delight for anyone who loves the primitive, the deep time of ancient stone, the bedrock foundation of soil, grass, flesh, spirit, life.

A few great blue herons stalk the sandbars, and many ducks—pintail, mallard, cinnamon teal—drift on the water. The mudslides of beaver indent the banks. A few hawks soar overhead. In the jungles of tamarisk and willow on the riverbank I can hear the quiet chirping—not often—of little birds. Black-throated sparrows? Towhees? Verdins? Not many around, this time of year, and the few that stay through autumn and winter are quiet birds.

I pass a trailerhouse and mine workings on the left bank; then a potash mill on the right bank, an enormous silent exotic structure of grotesque design, poisonous green in color, where a dozen men are employed in the monitoring of machines that pump liquefied potash from three thousand feet below. A few cars stand parked inside the high-security fence; a wisp of steam rises from a pipe; the hum of electrical motors seeps through the metal walls; but human beings themselves are nowhere in sight. The plant is like an installation from Mars or Saturn—vast, complicated, sinister, an alien presence. I row vigorously for a few minutes until the bend of the river takes me beyond sight and sound of the mill. Again I am surrounded by desert, by red-rock walls and towering cliffs, and feel as if I have escaped the surveillance of hostile and otherworldly eyes.