Utah Meditation

We’re somewhere out in the Arizona Strip – in a desert patch between I-15 and Hwy 91. The Virgin River cuts the landscape of limestone bluffs and desert sage a few miles away. I can see its contours in the fading evening sun. There is another glow in the sky to the south of us. It’s the lights of Las Vegas – plastered against the night sky like an advertisement telling all within a 100 mile radius of it’s grandeur; competing for brightness with the stars. The town of Mesquite, NV is less than 15 miles away and St.George, UT is about 30. Old, discarded, ply-wood and and cinder block houses rest against the horizon. Although there are all these signs of human habitation and alteration it feels like a no-mans land.

Our van glows in the dark out here. We are passing through this land, looking for our people, trying to find our place.If this were still the wild west we would be in danger of being spotted- for fear of being robbed and raped by others who are equally out of place in this landscape. Sometime in the 19^th century Mormon settlers started to arrive, pushing the original people further out into the fringe of the strip. Those families who were lucky enough to survive the battles with the whites now inhabit the reservations which disappear into the expanse of the desert. With the native people out of the way the land could then be used for personal gains. The land has been heavily impacted by it’s human use. In the early 20th century ranchers ran estimates of 100,000 cattle through the area to forage on the once large stretches of grassy meadows in the valleys and on the high Kaibab Plateau. In the present day an industry of intense and sporadic mining efforts of minerals, coal, natural gas, gold and who knows what else have left areas ravaged and desecrated.

Tapped into the Welcome Springs – one of many constructed watering holes for livestock purposes.

Disrupted dust of the altered landscape from the Grefco mine on Hwy 6 blows through the Nevada desert.

It’s beautiful here and I turn my back to I-15, trying to picture the place before the roads, buildings, and people. I try and imagine it under the sea,as it once was. But it seems so far fetched, because after all this interstate is one of the busiest, most traveled in the country. It’s sole purpose to feed commerce as is a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement. One of the end results of this road with it’s eighteen wheelers, 5^th wheel trailers, and air conditioned SUV’s has been the fast growing populations of California, Nevada and Utah. The impact is vast.

I-15 and the Virgin River

Nicky Dyal basking in the Virgin waters

The Virgin River, once a wild and free water flow is now covered by this freeway and fed by the run-off from cookie cutter homes, casinos, Mormon Temples and white bread factories. The desert tortoise is now fenced into areas of the range – for it’s own protection from vehicles speeding by. I keep my eyes peeled for them but, in all the weeks out here I’ve not seen a single one. Horses, which used to run free have been rounded up by the BLM and either killed or sold. Deer still roam the country in small herds and it’s been said that Big Horn sheep and Mountain Goats roam the high plateaus and rocky outcroppings, navigating the roads and fences. Only the birds seem to have the freedom their ancestors once knew of.

a Joshua tree forest in it’s interpretation of time

We fit well into this no-man’s land though. For we’ve come here to be removed from the hustle and the freeway and the overpopulation and all the packaged compartments of modern day living. We’ve come here to climb rocks and be with the landscape and live as harmoniously as we can with the nature that surrounds the cities and roads. There are five of us here in three vans. We’ve established a van camp – our home base where we cook, eat, play scrabble and stretch in the morning sun together. Our lives are simple – we rise with the sun and go to sleep with the moon. We watch in amazement as the Arizona Toad (a friendly group of neighbors in the nearby spring) perform their sacred dance of centuries old. It is their mating season and each night they chirp their song and get it on. It is beauty in it’s most basic form. We feel about as close as we’re gonna get to a tribe, to a traditional way of living – to being primal and in tune with our surroundings.

Important social gatherings, like mate at the crag, keep us connected

The night Ben Ditto won at Scrabble

Let the mate lead the way

Our time in this swath of land is a glimpse of how simple it once was and perhaps how simple it one day could be again. Before the freeways and stores and perhaps again after. In the meantime, however, we still rely quite heavily on these facets of society. We need the commodities the towns have to offer but when we venture into them to gain our sustenance we feel out of place and far removed. It is our retreat back into the Joshua Tree forests, clear running springs, Limestone cliffs and nights filled with the croaking frogs that hold us in comfort and ease.

Katie Lambert on an evening Resurrection