“But we really wanted to see this,” one said.

“This sign?” I said, puzzled.

“Yes.  A picture of it appeared in the AARP Magazine.  They did an article on it.”  She said “AARP” as if it were a word.  I had difficulty understanding.

“Art Magazine?” I asked, thinking some artist or group interested in Ancestral Puebloan art had called attention to this canyon for some reason.  “No, AARP,” they said.  One spelled it.  “A-A-R-P.”

 “Ah, okay.  A-A-R-P.”

 “I just admire the group that did this,” Talkative Woman said.

Doubting she meant the Bureau of Land Management, the “group” that erected the sign, I said, “You mean, the group that got the canyon closed?”

“Yes!”

 “The …” I tried to remember. “The Grand … uh, Great … Old … Broads for Wilderness?”

“They’re the ones!” Talkative Woman squeaked.  “I really admire them.”

So these two were Great Old Broads for Wilderness groupies—maybe even members.  The organization is based in Durango, Colorado but has thousands of members in numerous “Broadbands.”  While the group has done admirable work and is to be commended for caring so deeply about wilderness, the GOBFW’s purely objective-driven actions in this area—sweeping in from out of town, working legal mechanisms, and catalyzing Crossfire’s closure to OHVs without (to my knowledge) a word of dialogue with invested locals—touched off turmoil about which these two hadn’t  a clue. 

“Preserving cultural resources” is the reason often given for such acts, and indeed, the cultural resources do need protecting.  But sometimes these efforts—especially when initiated by “outsiders”—have opposite results as defiance mounts against them.  Certainly, at times it is not only necessary to regulate or stop exploitative or destructive behavior but it’s also measurably effective.  However, having lived in this area for almost five years, I’ve become aware of the more painstaking, deeper work that some in these isolated communities have been doing for decades, the actual turning-of-hearts teaching that lays the foundation for peaceful and lasting change.  The kind of lesson the GOBFWs taught the locals effects change in the way that pulling a rug out from under somebody teaches that person a lesson.  Compared to the more involved efforts others have made locally, what the GOBFWs accomplished with their “evidence gathering” activities in Crossfire comes off as the cheaper trick, an assertive rather than persuasive act.

Indeed, what my two new acquaintances appeared to adore here was the “silver power” aspect of the project, the sword-wielding gleam the act had to it.  They seemed unaware of the depths to which these matters run or of the effects they produce, especially in confluence with other acts.  Nor did they seem aware of the tragic circumstances that had unfolded in the community over the past few days, the highly-publicized, federally executed artifact raids, code-named “Cerberus,” after the three-headed dog Greek myth assigns guardianship of the underworld. 

I thought I might try showing these ladies something of the depth of feeling along whose trail they were so casually hiking.

I turned to the sign.  “As you can see, the sign has suffered some abuse.  Shot four times in the back and four times in the front.”

The more talkative of the two groaned. “Why would they do that?” she asked.

“It’s language in response to the sign.”

“Do you really think that’s what it is?”

 “I’m sure of it,” I said.

 “Oh, that’s just hateful,” Talkative Woman said.

 “Well … I guess it depends on how you look at it.  Come over here, I’ll show you something else.”

Down the trail a little ways I showed them a pile of juniper logs pushed off to the side.  These logs had once barricaded the trail—rather ineffectively—against OHV travel.   Two months ago someone broke up the barricade and pushed the logs aside.  Beneath the largest log now lies the brown plastic BLM sign prohibiting OHV travel, bent to the ground, its top anchored with stones, its prohibitive language silenced.

“Those butt-wipes!” Talkative Woman said.

I sighed.  “Like I said, it depends on how you look at it. Do you know what’s happened in this community over the last week?”

 “No,” the women replied.  “What?”

I told them the short version, how just two days earlier, a small army of armed and flak-jacketed FBI agents had ended a two-and-a-half year undercover investigation of illegal trafficking in antiquities, raiding the homes of and arresting twenty-four individuals in the Four Corners area, many of whom were from my community.  One of them, Dr. James Redd, was in my LDS ward. Federal agents dug into Dr. Redd with language threatening the loss of life as he knew it—the suspension of his medical license, years of imprisonment that could carry the sixty-year-old doctor well into his senior years, financial ruin, and so forth.  The next morning, Dr. Redd arose, left a note telling his family they could find him at the pond on his property, drove his Jeep there and took his own life*, apparently via asphyxiation.

“Oh, that’s awful.  How old was the doctor?” Talkative Woman asked.

“Sixty,” I said.

“Oh, that’s going too far,” she said.  Whether she meant the federal agents had gone too far in intimidating Dr. Redd to the point of despair, that the doctor had gone too far in taking his own life, or something else entirely, I couldn’t say.

 “Whatever the condition of this community has been, these events have thrown it into crisis,” I told the ladies.

This gave them pause.  The more quiet of the two said, “Some of these people had their collections before the Antiquities Act and other laws came into existence.”

“That’s true,” I said, opting again for the short answer.

 “Is there even anything out here anymore?” she asked.

 “You mean artifacts?” I asked.  She nodded.

How to answer posed some problem because it’s a more complicated question than the simple “yes or no” form supposes.  The answer is: Yes, there are lots of “things” still out here.  As far as the Ancestral Puebloan culture is concerned, and in spite of decades of pot-hunting and other acts of digging and collecting, a tremendous amount remains, buried in the middens of uncounted undisturbed sites and even in many of the disturbed ones.  

Crossfire is full of such sites.  I knew of several within the mile-long stretch I usually travel.  They include rubble mounds, rock shelters, and other features often littered on their surfaces with telltale sherds and lithic scatters, bits that provide records of trade and movement  to those able to read them.  Also, many of these sites hold tight in their middens and unexcavated spaces other meaningful artifacts. Many “things” have been left elsewhere, such as in rock chambers and cracks in canyon walls. But what did these ladies really need to know?  They had come here with ideas, their own and other people’s, ideas that they liked.

“Things are tucked away here and there,” I said.

 Quiet Lady said, “They say it’s a squeezed orange.”

 “That the artifact content of the area is a squeezed orange?”

 They nodded.  “That’s what some archaeologist said.”

The image flashed across my mind: half a ripe orange, a mere husk of a fraction of a whole, collapsed, drained.  More heightened rhetoric, a sound bite, a mind’s-eye-catching artifact of somebody’s more deeply buried intentions. It’s true that much has been lost, but it’s also true that much remains. I made no reply.

By now the no-see-ums had gathered and the two ladies were swatting the air and spritzing themselves and each other with insect repellant. I leaned against a rock, arms crossed at the wrists.  The insects swarmed me too, but from experience I knew that it takes a while for the nasty mites to work into position and bite down, and I guessed that our conversation was winding down.

 “Well, we’re going to move on on account of the bugs,” Talkative Woman said.  “Thank you, Dearie!”

“You’re welcome,” I said, turning in the opposite direction, heading home.  Out of curiosity, I found their car and checked their plates: Colorado.

I’ve seen pot hunting damage firsthand, sites hit very badly.  I’m haunted by images of skulls and other human remains churned up and tossed aside—men, women, children—remains meaningful to diggers only as signs that grave goods like pots, jewelry, or other unique or marketable artifacts might lie nearby.  The exposed human remains don’t trouble me so much for their grim “to this we must all come” reminder—though there’s always something show-stopping about coming upon human bones. Nor do they impress me for the unsettling evidence they offer of the pot hunters’ disregard for law.  To me, what’s telling is the pot hunters’ complete objectification of a culture, the shrinking of life down to “things.”  In reducing the ruins of this prehistoric civilization to mere exploitable resource, pot hunters and other kinds of dedicated collectors reduce themselves to the role of predator in a predator-prey relationship. Such a mind sees the other culture, animal, mineral, stretch of land—whatever the object of their interest might be—as existing mainly to service his/her hunger for whatever gain or obsession they seek to gratify.  In the case of pot hunters, their connections with the culture thus damaged, they further fail to imagine the importance of these “things” not only to sciences constructing the human narrative in general and the Anasazi story in particular but also to descendent cultures not so far south of here, the Puebloan peoples of New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico to whom the Anasazi gave rise and who consider their roots—what we call ”cultural resources”—in this area as sacred.  Thus pot hunters fail to see the life that the “things” signify.

Beyond this, collectors and traffickers in illegally obtained artifacts can’t feel the havoc they wreak upon their own psyches and, by extention, to their cultural surrounds, because really, when it comes down to it, in our communities we act in concert with or in reaction to one another.  What we do will affects others, sometimes others so far down the road they are out of view.  Many of the acts an individual engages in on self-seeking “It’s my life, I can do with it what I please” premise misdirects the language of freedom.  The entelechy of freedom—the vital force of true liberation—arises not in being able to do whatever one wants but in being able to do better than one does, alone or in company with like-minded people. 

In being so quick to call the locals “hateful” and “butt wipes,” Talkative Woman similarly reduced a culture to an exploitable resource, in this case getting her dig in to bolster tightly held beliefs.   Just as the area’s  isolated Anasazi ruins make easy targets for pot hunters, the people of Southeastern Utah are an easy target for rhetorical exploitation and ideological  artifact collecting.  The towns here—originally Mormon settlement communities—are small, separated from each other by wilderness.  Their populations are not especially vocal.  Furthermore, as targets go, they’re politically uncomplicated. Amy Irvine’s Trespass, the bulk of which takes place in southeastern Utah, is nearly cover-to-cover cultural artifact collecting and glassed-in display, as was the GOBFW’s newsletter when they touted their good work in the world, reserving the Crossfire for what they called quiet users.  The BLM, too—I’ve heard, here and there, the set of their language as they’ve come down the trail discussing enforcement matters.  Crossfire’s acoustics are excellent. 

Human language is both a cultural and a natural resource.  If exploitation of a culture for personal gain is wrong, whether it be for monetary gain, to enhance one’s sense of righteousness, or to advance oneself socially or professionally, then given the amount of digging language focused on this region there’s been enough tossing of skeletons and upending of lives, present and past, in and around Blanding and Monticello to go around, including from out-of-area crusaders who visit higher truth upon the heathens. 

If you upend a culture to teach it not to upend another culture, then the act becomes more about the upending and much less about the teaching.  To find the better way, find the better language.  Creative, proactive, reaching language opens the frontiers, does the necessary work to build bridges, and produces an array of possibilities from which others might choose.  It maps the unexplored terrain of actual relation, it gets across.

As for the FBI codenaming their investigation and subsequent raid “Cerberus”: Ovid tells us that the triple-headed hound of hell’s saliva was poisonous.  When Hercules dragged him up from the underworld in the process of completing one of his labors, Cerberus in a foaming fury drizzled the area with spittle.  Foaming around the mouth suggests not only that Cerberus was in a rage but also that he was rabid.  According to the story, this poisonous spittle engendered the growth of aconite, a plant of deadly toxicity.  The witch Medea used this plant’s poison to try to kill Theseus, her husband Aegeus’ son.

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*A second person Cerberus bit has taken his own life, Stephen Schrader of New Mexico.