"When I am forced to make the choice between truth and beauty, I always choose beauty." -- Herman Weyl

The light in this canyon shifts slowly but perceptibly. The glow on the valencia walls flattens as the sun moves closer to its zenith. Chill night air disperses in the morning’s first warm breeze swirl. My pores go to pepper before the sweat start. The velvet tapestries high on the caprock loose their dimension and fade back into the stone. A single raven circles silently upcanyon. I move down.

There is truth here. The cool beneath a cottonwood. The following of one day by another without fail. The weathering of stone to sand. There is truth in words, in promises, and in the dying which follows living. Truth is the slow cultivation in the canyon bottom of an ancient maize, weeded and tended through maturity. The structuring of a granary from molded earth reinforced with desert willow. The gathering and storing of grain upon grain, each insignificant but in total, vital. The seal of a flatstone and the remembrance of place and abundance. Truth is the returning for nourishment to a cache we know to be good and true and free from corruption.

Aye, beauty too lies hereabout. The twisting trunk shape and pale-green leaf glow of a cottonwood rooted in the sand. The layer of stone upon a multitude of others all similar, all different, all rusted and faded and shaped as the wind and water has seen fit. The glow of one wall upon the opposite, as if light were a gift between those separated. The movement, and pausing, and movement of water upon the rock. If truth is a word, then beauty is a note sung, and then sung again lower, and stepped down like this canyon in a trill of rock and water until the final stone of a grace note is placed just where the wren knows it should end. And then begins again.

Truth and beauty connect in a line, but their duality is insufficient here. The dawn and dusk cannot be made of truth and beauty alone. What of the balance of the canyon’s twisting meanders, one upon the other, in a serpentine grace? The stars burning through the firmament on a moon void night? The raven with one missing wing feather who’s gurgling caw changes to a clucking hoot upon my sight? The age of a twisted juniper growing from a high crag, apparently living only off of rain and wind and a view of all below. This is mystery.

Truth, beauty and mystery find balance here. Rock, water and sky. Granary, dwelling and kiva. Oak, cottonwood and juniper. Solidity, aesthetics and the unknown. Winter, summer, and the turning season (spring and fall one, and incomplete without the other like one canyon wall without its pair). Their central balance is a pivot about which all revolves. The pull bends the water about its meanders, gives the course its shape and grace. Rotates the sky about the polestar. Guides the drifting raven upon the updrafts. Turns the dancers in rattled and drummed rhythm upon the earth. Moves a circled caress in ways that bring comfort and pleasure and remembrance.

With the day’s heat swelling, and in the silence before the afternoon winds, I seem at the center of it all. Down in the humid puddles, the mourning dove coos the truth of water and life. Across the way a canyon wren reminds that there is a song in all things. And high on the canyon wall an alcove hangs inaccessible to mortals. It contains secrets unknown and unknowable. Relicts or twisted branches of a forgotten cedar or riches beyond my soul or maybe just dust which rises and moves in a curve and settles again when the stars move just so in the night. Or when a raven circles by.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cow Rant

Back on the mesa top there is no beauty, no mystery, only truth. Cows. Too godamn many cows. Cows run by welfare ranchers. On our land, at our expense. Piss and shit strewn through the junipers. A stock pond pea green and barnyard smelling. The air full of swarms of no-see-um’s and flies. The fragile desert soil everywhere pulverized by hooves. Foreign invasive weeds the only non-tree plant to survive. This is the true American Desert, man-made and cow grazed. What a tragedy, and we let it happen. We subsidize the ranchers, subsidize the "range improvements", and then pay the salaries and expenses of federal agents to help make it happen. What we get is a wasteland

Only 2% - 3% of cows are grazed on the open range in the US. The rest are corn fed in feed lots in states like Iowa. We let grazing leaseholders graze cows and calves on our public land for a fraction of what is charged by private landowners on the open market. Then we let the ranchers put too many cows on the land and don’t make them protect sensitive areas. When the range is degraded, we let them continue to abuse it. This has happened for over a hundred years. Many of the ranching operations are owned by large corporations and used as tax shelters. Places like this mesa top continue to be abused at our expense and on our land. Why? The cowboy myth and politics.

Now don’t get me wrong. There are responsible leaseholders out there. They are the minority, given my experience. There are places where the land management agencies are starting to protect sensitive areas. But this is a small fraction of our public lands. There are small, independent ranching operations out there who are responsible and hard working and are stewards of the public lands. I haven’t found many in my travels.

Let’s look at it from the Old Cowboy Myth and the New Economy. First, the Cowboy Myth. The image of the rugged self-sufficient sun-leathered cowboy out ridin’ the range is gone. Sure, some cows are still herded on horseback by career cowboys, but it’s more likely to be teenager on a Honda ATV hoping to be done in time for the Three’s Company reruns on at 8. The folksy Baxter Black stories on NPR of cowhands around a juniper fire out on the range tellin’ tall tales just doesn’t happen anymore, if it ever did. In fact, Baxter Black’s operation in California’s Mojave desert is one of the worst overgrazing offenders around. His operation is huge and his overgrazing of our land is aggregious and documented. The Marlboro Man is a corporate advertising image, not reality. Indeed, corporations, or corporate executives, or foundations own many public lands ranching operations. Hewlett and Packard have one in Idaho, for example (now probably the Packard Foundation). Why do high-tech executives own big ranching operations? None of our business you say? It is when it involves abuse of our land.

Now the New Economy. Ranching jobs are, for the most part, low wage no benefits jobs without many advancement opportunities. Beef prices are subject to the whims of global economics. Prices are still deeply depressed in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The only way that many or most operations break even is through our subsidies. The corporate tax shelter operations don’t really care if they run in the red continuously; they are not there to make money. So why not just write the checks to the people and save the land? Cut out the middleman (middlecow). Let’s call welfare welfare. Subsidies are for industries that are judged to be important to the nation or economy as a whole. We are not dependent on the beef that they produce, and if we want to continue our collective John Wayne movie daydream, let’s let the land have a break in the process. When other industries go out of business without taxpayer support, we call that good capitalism. When it is public lands ranching, we are somehow collectively convinced that we are laying off the Marlboro Man. If rural communities are dependent on the money from welfare ranching, let’s keep the money flowing, but stop the abuse of the land and find a way to create sustainable industries, not environmental disasters.

Actually, the fact that we still have subsidized overgrazing is a testement to our legislative system, and the equal representation in the Senate or the states. The power of the entrenched Western senators has torpedoed any attempt to change federal grazing policies. The system works the way it was designed, I suppose, but the land is being beaten to a pissy shit-pulp in the process. Year after year. Decade after decade.

And on this mesa top it continues. They block the road with their bloated bodies, the dim bulb in their skull only slowly brightening at the loud blare of my car horn. Huh, he must be trying to tell me something. Get the heck off my land and out of my wilderness! That’s what I’m trying to say.