Pawnee Buttes: Synecdoche and Microcosm

Author’s note

I was inspired to write this essay when I took an unplanned detour through northeastern Colorado in the course of a business trip to Boulder and Denver. The contrasts between the part of Colorado of which I write (which I had not seen in many years) and the urbanized Colorado Piedmont remain striking. I was surprised, nevertheless, to see a great increase in the human impact on the Pawnee Buttes area. The overwhelming global connections that those developments represent, even in the middle of nowhere (by the geographical estimations of most Americans), are striking and continue to stimulate contemplation.

May 31, 2013, a day that is the thinnest sliver of a nanosecond in geologic time. My memory replays clips of mental footage of the miles since I left the interstate. Nothing but broad skies and sweeping Colorado High Plains landscape: an amnesia of vastness and a severe challenge to wakefulness. Then a wheel veers off the road, and I’m jarred by the precipitous lurch from pavement onto crushed rock. Mild fear abruptly displaces idle contemplation, reminding me that I should pay more attention to driving. While an infusion of adrenaline kicks in, making my heart turn over and my pulse pound in my ears, I scan ahead nervously. On the far horizon I finally see what I have plied such a long stretch of narrow asphalt toward, and the scene that awaits me is much more than I had expected.

The Pawnee Buttes are suntanned lumps above the late- spring green of the grasslands: unassuming remnants of sandstone and siltstone unhurriedly dissolving over millennia of sporadic rains, blizzards, and incessant winds. Unacclaimed monuments to the inevitable processes of natural change, they consist of volcanic dust and other silty leavings of Oligocene winds and waters, capped by the deposits of Miocene rivers that flowed through scenes reminiscent of an African veldt. They provide snapshots of the slow unfurling of the continent- wide grasslands from which they now protrude, and their strata are scraps from a few folios torn at random out of the colossal ledgers of geologic time. The frumpy clerks chiefly responsible for cataloging these scraps have been a succession of intrepid vertebrate paleontologists (a sometimes maligned and often-forgotten subspecies of scientist), stretching back to the walrus- whiskered Othniel Marsh in 1870. Among all possible visitors from the outside, only a paleontologist would be truly enamored of this erstwhile lonely spot.

Fig. 1.

Pawnee Buttes are eroded from strata that record the physical and biological development of the Great Plains. For millennia they have also been a landmark for humans. Today, the machinery of the global energy economy dots the landscape around them. Photo by R. M. Joeckel.

Confident that I’m now unlikely to fishtail again, I gently apply the accelerator. Soon the buttes occupy a good one- quarter of the vista. For all their geologic modesty, they are beautiful and compelling, now seeming to be very much worth the inconvenient journey. But there is more to the scene than buttes and grass and storm- graying sky. The newly widened, freshly graveled roads I’m driving on disgorge a steady stream of service pickups and occasionally even heavier equipment. It’s a very good thing indeed that I have begun paying attention to the road. Pump jacks, pipelines, wellheads, separators, compressors, and other bright and well- maintained paraphernalia of the petroleum industry have sprouted across the landscape, along with dozens of buildings and a lot of unexpected traffic. In the far distance, an advance guard of two maniples of white wind turbines spin stiffly atop the buff shoulder of the High Plains escarpment. Additional ranks stand behind them over the rolling horizon. It dawns on me that my immediate field of view contains a perfect microcosm of humankind’s checkered relationship with the natural world.

For a long time, few people gave much thought to this place. Pawnee Buttes have always stood on the southern slope of the wide divide between the two Plattes, drainage lines that are traceable back in time to a world...