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C H A P T E R T E N Hiking In, and Hiking Out One of the assumptions the teachers talked about the most and examined the least held that nature was good for troubled kids, and that’s why we’d brought this assortment of high school students to spend spring break in the canyons of the Escalante wilderness, the drainage just north of the Kaiparowits Plateau I’d contemplated the summer before from my overlook on Navajo Mountain. I had finally gotten serious about teaching. My graduation with a degree in English was looming ominously on the horizon, and that fall I had visited the school of education offices to complete the necessary application paperwork and found myself part-time employment the following spring in an alternative school-withina -school for at-risk high school kids. The program was housed in a wonderfully high-ceilinged and well-lit room, but we didn’t spend a lot of time there, preferring hikes in the foothills and field trips to museums and parks, and each spring we’d scrounge backpacks and sleeping bags, pack ourselves and our gear into an assortment of student and teacher cars, and drive into the southern Utah desert for reasons we believed were more profound than merely recreational. Our hope for these students was that contact with what in the mid-seventies we naively called “pure nature,” in combination with distance from the traumas and temptations of home and neighborhood, would prompt them to reconsider some of the bad decisions they were 201 202 Shooting Polaris making. Even though my own approach was complicated by the very different kinds of experiences I’d been racking up during each summer, I basically agreed with the other teachers in the program that nature—especially wild nature, untainted by the appropriation and waste that define human use (which is another way, I suppose, of saying “unsurveyed”)—had that kind of power to heal and transform. Even I operated on the assumption, if only provisionally , that when it came to transforming these kids, it was all in the approach: take nature on its own terms, open yourself up to what wilderness could teach you, and something good would probably happen. I remember that it rained during most of the drive south, making us worry about the thirty miles of dirt road we’d have to cover to reach the Coyote Wash trailhead. We stopped for lunch at a cafe in Escalante, the small town that marked the end of the paved road, ran splashing from our cars through the rain, and rushed through the door into what was clearly a cafe for the locals, not the tourists. My two summers’ experience as a surveyor, living in small southern Utah towns like this one, had taught me the difference. Most of the customers who looked us over were men. Some of them were regulars, the usual gathering of farmers and ranchers who met over coffee to talk feed prices, rainfall, and politics. The rest had been driven by the rain from their work in the mountains and canyons to a place dry and warm and not so lonely: contract loggers, cowboys, post cutters, men who entertained even fewer illusions about the beneficence of nature than surveyors did. Because Escalante was located at the base of the Straight Cliffs that marked the north boundary of the Kaiparowits Plateau, the locals sustained many of the same hopes for development and prosperity I’d seen in Warren Knowles, and I understood pretty well that many of the cafe’s regulars who checked us out that day would eagerly leave their work under the sublime wide-open skies of southern Utah to become miners and welders and pipe fitters the moment work commenced on the power plant proposed for construction not so far away on Nipple Bench. During the years since it had been announced, the project had become a lightning rod for every possible land-use faction—environmentalists objected to the inevitable degradation of air and water, tourists such as ourselves wanted the scenery to remain pristine, and the locals Hiking In, and Hiking Out 203 needed the work—and the arguments had only gotten uglier during the months since I’d surveyed Nipple Bench. Its fate, and the fate of Escalante, and a number of other small southern Utah towns, was being decided in courtrooms and legislative chambers even as we walked through that cafe door. Less than a year earlier...

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