first draft

the answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind
– Robert Zimmerman (Bob Dylan)

Time has passed, right? Rob’s sad refrain comes vibrating through the speakers as i sip my free diner coffee. A week prior i was first wading through Edward Abbey’s polemic proposition to this soundtrack. Now i pour over newspapers from bygone days, when Moab was quaint and only dreaming of tourism to come, fully unaware of the uranium treasures hidden below.

Earlier in the witching hours, under the waning but nearly full moon, i had danced down Park Avenue in Arches National Park presenting my full moon to Queen Victoria Rock and the Courthouse Towers. During the hours of the sun this canyon is populated by the automobile tourist. This night i walked solitaire to an audience of insects and stars. A gentle breeze whispered by the rocky parapets. My current year tutelage made it easy for my ears to mistake its hums as passing vehicles.

Signs at the trailhead cry out – Warning: drink lots of water! Take care to not lose this primitive trail – pay attention to the rock cairns marking your way!
I bring with me only my camera, descending down a beautifully crafted stone staircase, scoffing as i repeat ‘primitive’ to myself, rarely noticing any rock cairns for the well trodden path before me is difficult to lose.

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First draft, as in a working copy of a thing in progress.

I feel blessed in a way by the nature of the medium for my words. A typewriter leaves a volatile minefield of xxxx across errors. A novel so permanent, a monument so easily lost among the cries of endless tomes all eating physical space, so many overlooked. My digital text is malleable, edits pass through like ghosts. My website ephemeral, similarly easily eagerly forgotten but adrift in a sea of unknowable depth, surrounded by the many also shouting their truth into the void. A reflection of myself? Quiet, comfortable, simple, with minimal impact?

In today’s chorus i am one of many. There are so many grand figures of days yore, who stamped their identities into the fabric of civilization. People of immortal deeds, with stonewrought names from when our edifices were carved, our paths blazed. What of us who live in their shadows? Who paw at their heels, daring to dream?

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A first draft upon a table. In the words of a confidant, Ed could be sensitive to criticisms of his work, could be truly hurt by them. Once more does the soul resonate. A handful of my first drafts live in the annals of this website machine. Thoughts and phrases that i have plundered, mixed, and remixed into proper things. I loathe to think of any of these embryos being read casually by others, of being delved through for undercooked morsels.

Yet here i am, wielding a facsimile of a facsimile of an opus, pages 27 – 53. Ed you scamp, i’ve read more than once that you were prone to self contradiction. It would not surprise me if that were the case, my historical kin, as i dive into the batter finding treasures abound.

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His acidity on display in this draft, “Are tourists people? The answer, clearly is no.” A sensible prune, along with a number of raw verbal interactions he presents. They come off bitter, too bitter; i much rather prefer the final copy where he holds more pity for the industrial tourist, a victim to greater systems of growth and wealth.

Still, through the sediment i find flecks of discarded gold. I appreciate his description of tourists as “half-human, half-crustacean,” as they mass migrate through national parks, “fleshy animals in their shells of steel and glass.” I’m also fond of his friend’s biting words, calling them “masses of asses in sunglasses,” but again the words presented are of a rather low pH for the regular to swallow. He goes on to proclaim that tourists are not travellers – for they strongly intend to return home, are not wanderers – for they are scheduled and rooted, and are not lovers of the out-of-doors – for their true love affair is with the automobile. I am sad to see all these thoughts removed; they speak heaps of truth to me, just like

Of course they don’t see anything because they haven’t the time to look; instead of looking they take photographs so that, presumably, when they get home they can look at their pictures and find out where they were and what they missed.

the more things change…

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He mentions that the unpaved entrance to Arches only permits an average of ten automobile visitors (the term “tourist” was frowned upon in the Park Service with the euphemism “visitor” being preferred) per day during peak season, for only the hardy stock who were willing to pierce the sieve of cruel dirt road could approach. He theorizes that with a paved road the traffic would grow to one hundred automobile tourists per day, perhaps far more.

The Integrated Resource Management Applications Portal presents usage numbers for National Parks. For the two years that Ed was working at Arches, 1956 and 1957, the visitor counts were 28,500 and 25,400 respectively. The vehicle count numbers don’t go back beyond 1992, but over the years since then the average visitor per vehicle dwindled from around 3 to around 2. Using an uneducated estimate of 4 average visitors per vehicle in the 50s gets 7,125 and 6,350 vehicles in his years.

In 2022, Arches started to do a limited entry reservation program which requires a two dollar tithe (by credit card, of course) from every visitor from 7am to 4pm to help stem the vehicular tide. The year just before it was instated saw 685,011 vehicles on its asphalt carrying 1,806,865 visitors. Since then the numbers have hovered at around 560,000 vehicles with 1,450,000 visitors per year. Perhaps a few more than one hundred per day, indeed.

Ed saw his monument as a place of quiet exploration and feared of a future which would see it transformed into a “museum-like diorama.” Such a thing has come to pass, for i see my developed lands as nature themed amusement parks, to be respected from behind the stanchioned velvet ropes. It bothers me deeply whenever i see an egotistical visitor stomping and stamping off trail where they please. Were all of the 1.45 million to treat the land so callously, what would remain? With free rein of my most exotic lands the callous visitor tide would surely have smothered out all of their glory. I find my joys of quiet exploration these days in my National Forests, away from National Park completionists.

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And the poor tourist, who doesn’t deserve this sympathy, who had left home seeking diversion and recreation, returns to his home…He has seen very little, done very little, enjoyed very little, felt very little; all that he has to show for his time, money and effort are rolls of undeveloped film, trinkets and souvenirs, and a great addition of mileage to the odometer of his car. Here at least he will feel that he has accomplished something definite. He is an eater of miles; and in eating those hundreds and thousands of miles he feels justified in removing from his check-list of places to go a further number of parks and monuments. They have been “seen.” They have been “done.”

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First draft, as in the initial call to action. Imposed upon, perhaps with passion, perhaps with resignation, but ultimately by the will of another.

In the fading of 2019 i watched the film Peanut Butter Falcon. (It was delightful, 4/4 stars, worth your time.) It rekindled within me a smoldering fire that had been present for years, that desire for a Huck Finn-esque river romp, a meander through some ancient waterway of my lands. So i started research on that classic American waterway, the Mississippi. Quickly i learned of grand paddling exploits to be had upon his rustic brother, the Missouri River, and my focus changed, set on a summer 2020 Montana start as opposed to a Minnesota one. (my oh my, so many M’s had my mind mixed and mouth muddled for many months)

Being a weathered long distance traveller my plans were slapdash and confident. I read some words on how there would be some lakes that i’d come across with the portages to follow, some vast distances without easy resupply options, and how it would turn into a shipping lane at some point. I spent way too much on a guidebook, (David Miller be praised…what was that about pawing at the heels of giants?) thumbed through it, and found it as full of anecdote as it was with guidance so ended up consulting it very little. I threw my backpacking gear into a new used kayak with a bunch of plastic hiker food, water fears, and ten gallons of water, setting off into that river a couple days after my 30th birthday.

Here in my corner i am the alpha and omega storyteller, yes please sit down criss cross applesauce (yes you can also sit on your feet as i often did) and turn your attention to these spells i cast, painting vision into your mind. I have and will continue to do my best to tell good stories, happy stories, for why share negativity and sorrows when oh so many others are doing a fine enough job at that?

It took me years to finally get pencil to paper to tell my tale of that summer because i struggled terribly with what i saw, with what had been done to that waterway. The Missouri isn’t much of a free flowing river in current year. Most of it is dominated either by great lakes kept alive by even greater dams or by full barge shipping lane chanellization. I settled upon framing my story from the perspective of my kayak to keep focus on the journey, cordoning my Missouri miseries off to a short two sentences with with as much precision as i could muster about the difficulties of an imprisoned river:

The Great Dragon of the West of the West lies low, crippled, and fettered. The induced lakes: the flooding marshlands all muddy and morose, the shorelines of fully subsumed mountainsides all silty and sad, the forgotten histories and legacies all sunken and lost, the sleek expanses weak to the common winds of the region, the no man’s land of engineering holding back an impossible force of water, the raging portholes on the far side with waters eager to be freed of this prison, all the way down to its channelized ditch: the mile markers and traffic signs delineating this jail for the mighty beast like a motorway, the cruel behemoth wardens endlessly patrolling and dredging the deeps to keep the shackles secure and the waters tame, the vacant gazes of the humans telling tales of the wrath of the flood of ’93 when the bonds broke wildly, the vindictive eyes of the humans telling tales of the flood of ’11 and the chaotic nature of its birth, the manmade placards of metal and stone with words memorializing the flooding depths from the times the Dragon lived free in its former stomping grounds and wreaked havoc as it saw fit, the rivermade placards doing the same in the form of homes and goods and lives strewn about the embankment, and that’s more than enough, thank you.

It should be of little surprise that i found a kindred spirit in Edward Abbey. He was there so many years ago when the strength of men failed. He looked upon the glory of Glen Canyon before it was consumed by stagnant dammed water that we both scowl at. He experienced the wonders of the west before homogenization came rolling in on asphalt interstate. He could stroll in the glory of Park Avenue, solitaire, under bright blue skies. In the twilight years of wild America as development truly accelerated he was a canary crying out for all the grandeur that was to be lost. And now, thanks to Zach Gottsage, Shia LaBeouf, and the kind woman who gave me a summertime job in Moab, i am tethered to a stranger whose shadow i live in.

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i had some words in here about how brevity can be accepted easier in digital form because i don’t have to claw at length to pass the hurdle from pamphlet to book. they were pruned because hooee i wouldn’t exactly call this brief

ms woody, a powerful figure in my formative years of composition never enforced a word limit on our assigned essays, saying instead “they should be like a good skirt: long enough to cover everything, but short enough to be interesting.”