Redrock, White, and Blue

An elegy for dying deserts and a lament of patriotism that excludes the land.

The desert heat makes sleep hard but dreams easy. You need to live half in a dream for this landscape to make sense, to explain expanses of sage that are both bushes and a wash of green on a sea of red. The redrock dreamscape is a hypnotic suite of pastels – lavender, mauve, rose, slate, indigo – always changing against the shifting sun, always impossibly in the distance until you’re suddenly amongst them.

Nestled into folds of sandstone, you feel that this red rock on blue sky is all you’ve ever known. With red dust embedded into the fibers of your clothes and the pores of your skin, the desert seems a natural place to erode yourself into. Until a sip of water falls from your chin and sizzes on impact with the hot ground, disappearing like a memory. That vanishment of water shatters the illusion of ease. This is hard country, and its lizards and people are built for sun that scorches, wind that weathers, and water that never quite saturates.

Here you can inhabit geological time. There are eons on the wall. You can read this story vertically as you trace back in time, where ancient seas left their treasures and rivers flooded and dried up and flooded again. When the earth shook, the layers tilted and collided till you’re left with rock so fluid you can almost see it moving.

If the rock holds what was, the dirt tenuously binds what is. That bumpy carpet of dirt is alive. Would it help to know its name? Cryptobiotic Soil Crust is what the scientists call it but let me translate. This is good dirt.

Living and breathing just below our level of awareness, a fragile community of cyanobacteria, lichens, and mosses are eking out an existence on grains of sand, turning the red dust into a microtopography of black hills. Fixing nitrogen and absorbing water, they do the quiet work of holding on in a desert that whispers “wash down” “blow away” with each drop and breeze. A moment’s decision immortalized as a footprint crushes hundreds of years of habitat, taking decades to recover. If a footfall could clearcut a forest, if the cells screamed from their earthen pinnacles below, what path would you walk?

The patience of the desert is powerful, sculpting spires and arches from slabs of stone. But patience feels fragile when pitted against our hurrying. Maybe if the soil was made of glass we’d listen to it shattering under our soles. But we have no time to mourn the hundreds of lives we step upon.

It’s not only wayward steps that mark the earth; we carve deep gashes into the landscape. We rushed to mine Utah’s uranium to fuel our weapons of mass destruction during WWII and the Cold War. 30 million tons of ore were taken from the Navajo Nation alone. And where the land hurts, so do the people, with poison dust coating the lungs of miners and toxic tailings leeching into the water. The only remaining conventional uranium mine in the country radiates out from Utah’s mesas and buttes. We continue to extract uranium without questioning the ground we pull it from, to build weapons without asking if we should, to track eerily straight roads without noticing the canyon’s meander.

And if ripping the very rock from the body of the earth was not violation enough, now even entrance fees are being mined from our national parks and carted back to DC to fuel the machine of ego. More than $90 million of park funds are being used to fund a fireworks show that will never be big enough and marble that will never be white enough. Can $14 million make the reflecting pool clear enough to reveal that these indulgences are monuments to our own vanity? How arrogant to think that this country just began 250 years ago.

Look to the canyon walls. There is no delineation at 250 years. The unrelenting dust continued to blow over rock and scrub when those quills swept across a declaration to steward the idea of a country.

These rocks stood watch before we labelled them and ourselves as a nation. These arches and mesas and spires will loom over the plastics we leave when we’re gone. The question is, what will happen to our neighbors? The spotted frog whose wetland is draining like a bathtub to water impossibly green golf courses in Las Vegas. The kangaroo rat who can’t cover its sensitive ears when hulking mining machinery rumbles over its burrow. The California Condor who soars alone because his mate was slowly poisoned by lead from bullets fragments scattered in her prey.

Our collective inheritance is the access to these wild desert spaces and our collective responsibility is to honor and protect land which we may not yet understand. We as a species are too young to fathom the wisdom of the rocks, the fragility of the soil, and the vim of the water. In place of understanding we can offer our uniquely human capacity for awe.

331 million people offered up their awe and admissions fees to our national parks last year. Without that funding, desert parks are desiccating like a prickly pear thirsts for rain. Are we so greedy for spectacle that we can ignore amphitheaters of sandstone teeming with nonhuman players? If we can’t dream up a future that includes living deserts, future Americans and the nonhuman citizens of this country will never be able to regain what we are losing.

All photos by Ava Kocher.

Ava Kocher

Ava Kocher is a student at Duke University studying the natural world through biology and science communication. She is a Rachel Carson Council Presidential National Environmental Leadership Fellow. She grew up amongst the woods of New England but delights in exploring new ecosystems, learning how they function, and where they need protection. This piece was inspired by a pilgrimage to the Utah National Parks: Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce, and Zion.