I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted.
I’m tired of living in a world where every week — or every day — I’m asked to defend one more thing I thought we’d already agreed was worth protecting.
Where do you turn when something makes no sense at all? I’m talking about when the headlines leave you feeling monumentally hopeless. Like, literally.
I turned to poetry and read Wendell Berry’s “Questionnaire.” It asks in part: What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization? Please list the monuments, shrines and works of art you would most willingly destroy.
I turned to nature. On an early morning walk, I pondered a smoky sky rimmed in pink clouds so beautiful they stopped me in my tracks. Later, I pedaled my mountain bike high into the Wasatch, my heart exploding in my chest as I climbed through a cathedral of trees. Places know nothing of headlines.
But the simple awareness of the world’s beauty isn’t enough, is it?
I made some phone calls to Utah’s U.S. senators, Mike Lee and John Curtis. To my surprise, someone answered.
“Hi, I’m a constituent from Park City,” I began, reading from the script provided by 5calls.org. “I’m calling to urge the senator to push back against Trump’s order to shrink Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. He doesn’t have the legal authority to modify these monuments—”
I stopped. I wanted to make sure she was still there.
“Did you get all that?” I asked.
“You’re urging the senator to push back,” she replied as if she were reciting a grocery list.
I decided to take another tack.
“This is not what people want,” I continued off-script. “Are you aware that 70% of Utahns support protecting these monuments?”
There was a pause.
“I have heard that,” she said quietly.
This is not the first time we’ve had to step up to protect our national monuments, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. In 1997, photographer Clyde Butcher’s stunning Ansel Adams-like pictures of Grand Staircase-Escalante helped convince politicians that it was worth preserving. Advocates made their case. Laws followed. Boundaries were drawn. Presidents came and went.
But none of our actions could reconcile us with the land itself. Long before it was an American monument, it was home to the Hopi, Paiute, Zuni, Ute and Navajo peoples. And long before that, it was, well, it just was.
I’ve spent enough time outdoors to know that standing in a place like Escalante isn’t about possession. It’s about belonging. The gratitude you feel looking out over a landscape so ancient and mysterious, you can’t help but wonder how it got here in the first place.
Those cliffs have seen Puebloan people, Navajo shepherds, Mormon settlers, uranium prospectors, tourists, presidents, lawsuits, floods, droughts. It makes me wonder: What’s the highest use of such a landscape? It could be minerals, adventure, memory. It could be home. I suppose every generation arrives convinced they know the answer.
But the canyon knows better.
It has outlasted the certainty of every era that believed it would have the final word.
Most of us tend to ask what the land can do for us — can it give us oil, copper, tax revenue? Even those of us who love the outdoors talk about what it gives: peace, beauty, recreation.
But one thing the land cannot give you is permanence. How can you own something that never really belonged to you in the first place?
I was once the owner of an 1876 Victorian home. Sometimes, walking through it, I’d think about all of the other families who’d occupied that space. Someone planted the maple in the yard. Someone celebrated birthdays in the dining room. Someone grieved a lost love in the front room. Then I came along. I didn’t really own it. For a little while, I just inherited responsibility for it. And now, it’s someone else’s responsibility.
Maybe that’s how it is with land.
You can think my home, my country, my monument. But every deed is really just a receipt for temporary custody.
We fight over ownership on a timeline the landscape barely notices. What would happen if we knew we were only borrowing this place from the past and from the future. Would we treat it differently?
Not that long ago, I stood alone on the Wedge Overlook of the San Rafael Swell. I looked out over a canyon so vast, so improbable. Over the sandstone goblins and gnomes and ridges and buttes that looked like they’d been sent from the moon or Mars. The canyon wasn’t waiting for me or anyone else to finish it. It was becoming all by itself. At the whim of weather and time. Just as it always had. To own it would be like trying to own a cloud.
The wind came back to me like a laugh.