“You guys are climbers, huh?” Sunny asks.
When I nod she says, “I’m learning how to climb. A guy I met here in the valley’s teaching me, but he’s kind of a beginner, too. Am I going to get muscles like yours?” she asks with a laugh.
“You might,” I tell her. “And scabs and scars and all that.”
“God, I hope not!”
“It depends on how hard you want to climb.”
Kim breaks in, “I was hoping for the chance to talk to you gentlemen about what’s going to happen to this place. Have you been here before?”
I wait for my father to answer but he doesn’t. So I glance at him and say, “Dad put up a bunch of the routes in the canyon, like a hundred years ago. Before anyone even knew about this place.”
Kim looks past me at my father for a long time while neither speaks. Measuring him. Sunny seems on the verge of saying something to break the silence, when Kim says softly, “Then you must really love this place.”
Again Dad doesn’t answer. I’m used to it but still annoyed at how he can be so closed-mouthed with strangers, bordering on the impolite. I know it’s probably a habit he’d picked up from years of semisecret missions and training exercises as the leader of Pararescue teams, but it doesn’t seem like an effective technique to me—it just makes the strangers all the more curious. It’s my father’s commanding presence and impassive features alone that usually keep people from asking more.
Kim doesn’t push, but doesn’t look particularly intimidated either. From the steady way she watches us with her one good eye, I’m willing to bet she’s as tough as he is. Speaking to us both, her voice now hard, she says, “It’s about to be made private land in a crooked swap with the government. A group of us are trying to do something about it.”
I nod. That was what I’d read about in a newsletter from the Access Fund, a climbing-oriented environmental protection organization. It was the reason I’d wanted to bring my father here before it was forever closed to the public. I tell her that.
“I’ve seen the plans,” she goes on, her coffee-colored eye blazing with a zealot’s gleam. “You men are climbers, right? Well, a developer named David Fast”—she spits out his name with such venom that I guess she must be taking his assault on the valley personally—“is going to make that canyon down there into a bunch of high-priced homes on the river. This meadow”—she turns and sweeps her brown arm past the Hacky Sackers and other campers—“it’s going to be a goddamned golf course. And the hot spring up-creek is going to be some sort of massive concrete bathing facility.” She points at Wild Fire Peak looming to the east and tells us that it will be the ski area proper once they’ve stripped it of its forests and built lodges all over it. “In about two weeks Fast will start the serious construction, when the Forest Service makes its approval official. He’ll begin with a guarded gatehouse down the road to keep us out.” She pauses to look at each of us in turn. “We need help fighting him.”
I ask, “What are you going to do? From what I read, the Forest Service has already announced they’re going to approve the swap. It’s kind of a done deal, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not,” she says fiercely, her hair slinging back to fully expose the eye patch. “Not when there’s fraud involved. Fast bribed some scientists and then lied to get a positive environmental assessment. We’re still trying to keep the local Forest Service manager from approving the exchange. If that fails, we’ll try to get an injunction in federal court. Tomorrow we’ve got a local TV station and one from Denver coming up here for a rally. What we need is more bodies, to show the Forest Service and the media we’re serious about this.”
Sunny chimes in, “And it could get nasty, with the townies—”
Kim cuts her off with a glance and then explains, “Fast has managed to convince some locals that his ski resort will be good for the town. A lot of them are investors, too. There’s a rumor going around that they plan to disrupt us tomorrow.”
My brother’s impending arrival momentarily forgotten, I look to my father. He’s methodically chewing on his sandwich, leaning against the Land Cruiser, his face as expressionless as ever. Almost imperceptibly he shakes his head at me. Turning back to Kim, I say, “I’m interested, but I don’t know yet how available I’m going to be. My dad and I are waiting here for my brother, who could arrive at any time over the next couple of days.”
Clearly that doesn’t seem like a very good excuse to her. She gives us both a one-eyed scowl and says, “We’re having a campfire meeting tonight, over there near our sites on the other side of the meadow. At least come by and listen.”
Hearing nothing from my father behind me, I tell her I’ll try to stop by. Kim’s turning to leave when Sunny speaks up again. She’s kneeling in the grass, a few feet from Oso, with one hand tentatively extended toward him. “Is it all right to pet him? God, he looks like he’s thinking about taking my arm off,” she says, laughing nervously. My eyes are drawn straight down her loose shirt where two perfect breasts, as pale and smooth as the rest of her, float above the purple fabric. It takes a conscious act of will to lift my gaze.
When I look up, I see that Kim is watching my face. I wonder if this is why she’s brought Sunny along with her—to try to recruit us. She’s the honey to attract some worker bees. If my father and I had been women, Kim probably would have brought some shirtless stud from the Hacky Sack circle. It shows she’s pretty cunning for an environmental activist. I kind of admire that.
Grasping Oso’s collar, I hold his head close to my hip. “Go ahead,” I tell Sunny, “just be careful. He was abused.” It seems like a good time to start socializing the beast.
“You poor thing!” Sunny says, touching his chest with her hand uncomfortably close to my thighs. Oso starts to lift his lips but then rolls his eyes up to meet mine with a sort of annoyed resignation. His lips droop back down as Sunny continues murmuring and stroking him. “Who would do such a thing to you, you big, beautiful creature. You’re really sweet, down deep inside, aren’t you?” Behind us my father makes another noise that might be a chuckle.
They walk away a few minutes later. Watching them, I focus on Kim’s slender back instead of Sunny’s, and I feel that strange, inevitable attraction.
“What do you think?” I ask my father.
“Not bad, but I’m still married to your mom.”
“I mean about the meeting tonight. The rally tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a lost cause to me.” After a minute he adds, “There are two things worth fighting for, son. The things you can win and the things worth dying for.” He looks around the valley for a long time before meeting my eyes. “This isn’t either one.”
THREE
R
OBERTO DOESN
’
T SHOW
up in the afternoon. I’m not too surprised that he’s late—promptness has never been among his few virtues. And he’d been reluctant to agree to meet us in the first place.
“
Che
, what the hell do I want to see that asshole for?” he’d said to me a few weeks ago when I finally reached him through his parole officer in Durango. “Haven’t seen the dude in years and I like it that way.”
I did my best to explain that Dad was different now, that he’d mellowed a little since accepting the fact that a ceiling had been imposed on his career and that his days in the Air Force were numbered. The time was right for reconciliation. My words on that count weren’t too persuasive—Roberto wasn’t interested in apologizing for ruining Dad’s career or not living the kind of straight life our father wanted him to. Finally, I got him to agree to meet us by simply begging. “C’mon, bro, do it for me. Do it for Mom. Do it for the family. What have you got to lose by climbing with us? Besides, I hear you’re getting weak, that you can’t climb for shit anymore.”
The last part made him laugh. A few months before, I’d received a postcard from him that was forwarded from the AG’s Office in Cheyenne to my current assignment in Lander. The scrawled message told me to watch a certain cable channel at a certain time. Not owning a TV, I’d tuned in to the program at a local bar and found it to be some sort of special called “Generation Why?” on a sports channel. It featured extreme athletes doing all sorts of high-risk things and discussed the psychology that made them do it. A primary segment showed my brother free-soloing the Painted Wall in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
I’d watched the segment with a combination of horror, envy, and awe. A camera team filmed Roberto moving easily, ropeless, up over two thousand feet of vertical rock on Colorado’s biggest wall. At one point, when he was climbing inverted beneath a granite roof that jutted from the massive cliff’s face with his hands and his feet stuffed deep in a crack, Roberto turned to the camera with his movie star’s grin and streaming black hair, then hung from just his feet and one jammed hand to shake his other out over the void. His eyes were lit up with either rapture or methamphetamine. In another scene he was resting on a tiny ledge, slumped against the wall with his feet dangling in space much the way I’d sat the day before with my father. Only I’d been wearing an anchored rope. Realizing the camera was on him, he quickly popped up into a handstand with his fingers curled over the edge. The inside of his left arm was exposed just beyond his tangled hair, and there were tiny red scabs tracked down it. Over the pumping music I could hear the cameraman’s panicked shouts for him to
cut it out.
I realized I was quietly saying under my breath exactly the same thing as the cameraman, watching my brother on late-night TV, as the rest of the bar hollered and whooped.
After Dad and I soaked in a hot spring that was crowded with naked and frolicking environmental activists (sadly, neither Kim nor Sunny was among them), we cook dinner over my blowtorch of a camp stove. The noise it makes is loud enough to preclude much conversation. And that’s fine with me, as the tension between us, a tension born of Roberto’s impending arrival, has been steadily increasing. Oso drools on my thigh when I crouch by the stove to fry turkey sausage and boil pasta. My father slumps nearby in a low sling-back chair, watching the night descend on the meadow. As a sort of peace offering I take a bottle of wine from one of the plastic gear crates in the back of my truck and toss it to him. He nods his thanks, then pops the cork from the bottle with his pocketknife.
We eat in silence. When the food is gone and the bottle’s drained, I scrub the pans with sand in the stream where it cuts close to the meadow. Coming back into our camp, I see that Dad has built a small campfire. He’s also taken out a bottle of Yukon Jack from his own gear. Across the meadow, near where the activists have parked their cars and erected their tents, is a much larger fire. In its orange glow I can see ten or fifteen people already gathered around it.
My father holds out the bottle to me, making a peace offering of his own. My nose automatically wrinkles at the cheap whiskey smell.
“No thanks,” I tell him, my stomach twisting with memories of when Roberto and I used to steal the stuff from his liquor cabinet. I’d gagged it down and thrown it back up more than a dozen times in my high school years.
“I’ll be back in a little bit,” I say as I tie Oso to the truck’s bumper with a chopped-off piece of an old climbing rope. Dad responds with a disapproving grunt.
Everyone eyes me with suspicion when I stroll into the group. I know that my damaged, scratchily bearded face makes me appear dangerous, so I try to compensate by smiling. Judging from the way people move away from me, the result is an appearance of being both dangerous and demented. I end up standing alone, buzzing from the wine and uncomfortably scanning the dark faces, until Sunny comes out of the night and takes my hand.
“Hey, Antonio. Glad you could make it, man. Where’s that sweet dog of yours?”
“Back at camp. With my dad.”
Her bright teeth flash. “Leonard, your old man, he didn’t seem too into things. Guy seemed a little hostile, you know?”
“He’s got a lot on his mind right now.”
“But I fucking love your dog. You should have brought him.”
Sunny’s looking up at me, staring openly. I should be flirting back. She’s wearing the same high-cut khaki shorts she’d had on earlier, now with a flannel shirt that’s unbuttoned halfway down her chest instead of the loose purple tank top. Cannabis Sativa is her perfume of choice. Even though she’s a few years younger than me, her sexuality is so obvious and so powerful that I toy with the image of a sleeping-bag fling. But I’m still feeling the lingering effect her friend Kim had on me in the afternoon. And I’m a little wary of Sunny, because of what I suspect is her job as a recruiting tool. I don’t want to be manipulated. At least not so obviously.
“C’mon,” she says, tugging my hand, “there’s people you should meet.”
She introduces me to a few of the younger activists. Their faces are bright in the firelight. The flames glint off the studs and hoops that adorn many of their eyebrows, lips, and noses. Studded tongues click against teeth when they speak. They seem so alike, all working so hard at distinguishing themselves and yet so disappointingly similar. Because I know it will be hard to differentiate them in the daylight, I don’t worry too much about trying to remember names. But one stands out—a skinny young man named Cal, who puts his arms around Sunny protectively from behind. He wears a Gore-Tex jacket that’s caked with dried mud.
“Antonio Burns, huh?” he says after being introduced. “Sunny told me about meeting you this afternoon. I’ve heard your name, dude. Used to read about you in those climbing magazines. Your brother, too.”
I smile at him to convey that I’m not a threat, that I’m not hitting on Sunny. I’m probably not convincing, though, as Sunny still has a warm grip on my hand.
“Are you the one who’s teaching Sunny to climb?”
“Trying to. But I’m just a recreational climber, you know? I don’t do anything serious. I’m more of a cave rat.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask. “Is there a lot of that around here?” My dad had never mentioned finding any caves.
Cal shrugs, meets my eyes for a second, and then looks at the ground before meeting my eyes again. “Sure. There’s caves everywhere. If you know where to look.”
“Was it you guys I saw this morning, rappelling down that red cliff?”
Cal looks away quickly now—it looks almost like he’s blushing but it’s hard to tell in the dark. “Could have been us. I was just teaching Sunny to rappel.”
I assume he’s embarrassed to have been caught rappelling instead of climbing, and even more embarrassed that it was on such an ignoble bit of rock compared to the higher, more vertical, and more solid stone down-canyon. Even Sunny looks away and drops my hand as if she knows enough about climbing to be embarrassed. Cal seems eager to change the subject.
“Haven’t heard much about you lately, although your brother’s still pictured in the mags all the time. You get a job or something?”
“Yeah, something like that” is all I will admit. It’s my turn to be evasive.
The night is loud with voices, low laughter, the crackle of the giant campfire, and beyond, the rhythmic chirping of crickets. I can’t help but keep glancing around for Kim in the reflection of the flames.
She finally shows up when just about everyone else from the environmentalists’ camp has already appeared. The fire is well fueled from the enormous pile of dead wood that I’d seen the activists gathering in the forest all afternoon. Kim steps close to the fire, wearing the same jeans and shoes she’d had on in the day but with a sleek-looking black fleece coat to protect her slim frame from the night’s chill. She begins to speak while the rest of the activists squat on large branches they’ve dragged off the woodpile.
I don’t think she’s noticed me until she starts off by saying, “There’s a new person with us tonight—his name’s Antonio Burns—so I’m going to review the situation here in the valley for his benefit and for those of you that haven’t been around lately.”
The shifting orange light from the campfire dances over her as she explains how Wild Fire Valley is a part of the San Juan National Forest, created in 1937, and supposedly placed forever in the public’s trust for the use and enjoyment of the nation’s citizens. Several times over the last twenty years various developers have attempted to lease the land from the federal government in order to build a ski resort that would rival nearby mountains like Aspen, Telluride, and Purgatory. Wild Fire Peak, the broad mountain that stands above us blocking out the moon and the stars to the east, is considered to be the perfect ski mountain due to its abundant winter snowfall, moderately steep glades, and quick access to the nearby town of Tomichi. For years the Forest Service, with the strident support of environment groups, rebuffed the developers’ proposals. The prospective developers grew more and more excited as profits in Telluride and Aspen skyrocketed with the influx of stockbrokers and movie stars in the 1980s.
Finally a local timber baron and developer named David Fast got the attention of the Forest Service by proposing a land swap. He had recently mortgaged himself to the hilt in order to purchase a huge private inholding to the north in the White River National Forest. That piece of land was at the top of the Forest Service’s “must have” list, as it was in the very center of a proposed habitat for the reintroduction of the Canadian lynx. But there was no way a Republican Congress, which was vociferously opposed to the reintroduction plan, would ever approve the millions of dollars it would take to buy the land for inclusion in the National Forest. Fast bought the inholding, placing his bet in a great gamble, and then offered to trade it for the entire Wild Fire Valley. The Forest Service was definitely interested, as the trade would cost them nothing and give them something they very much wanted.
Federal law requires that an environmental assessment be performed on any proposed land swap. Unfortunately, the Forest Service did not even have the available funding to undertake it. So David Fast volunteered to cover the expense himself and hire the necessary scientists and environmental engineers. According to their assessment, the Forest Service would benefit tremendously by allowing the exchange—the value of the White River land was appraised at twice that of Wild Fire Valley due to the discovery of a vast amount of coal buried beneath its rolling forests.
Public hearings were held. Various environmental organizations, including Kim’s small group of locals who called themselves “the Wild Fire Tribe,” decried the proposed swap. When it appeared that the Forest Service would deny the developer’s plan, David Fast announced his “reluctant” intention to develop his White River land if the swap wasn’t approved. He was going to strip-mine it for coal, he told a reporter, as that was the only way to recover something from his gamble and keep himself from bankruptcy. The resulting excavations would render his land and the entire White River National Forest around it forever uninhabitable for the tuft-eared cats.
“Fucking blackmail,” one of the young activists next to me mutters.
The national environmental organizations were horrified—they desperately wanted to reintroduce the lynx. They had worked for years toward that goal. Their position switched overnight from condemnation to eager enthusiasm for the swap. The small and powerless Wild Fire Tribe found themselves alone in opposing the trade. With the support of the larger environmental groups, the regional manager of the Forest Service announced his intention to formally approve the exchange. This valley would then belong to David Fast.
A few weeks ago Kim’s group learned from one of the engineers who performed the assessment that the whole thing was a “bunch of crap.” There was no economically extractable coal to be found on Fast’s White River land. The land had no significant economic value at all. It was too remote for tourist cabins. It was too wooded for ranching. Its trees were too gnarled and diseased for logging. Yet the Forest Service and the environmental groups who’d fallen for Fast’s blackmail remained adamant that the swap must go forward. For the sake of the lynx.
The Tribe’s allegations of fraud on the part of Fast and his hired engineers have once again put the developer’s plans in jeopardy. Fearing for his project, Fast has hired a “consultant,” a man named Alf Burgermeister, a.k.a. Rent-a-Riot, who is considered an expert in combating environmental groups. It’s rumored that Fast may have even made him a partner. In any event, the resulting harassment has been petty for the most part. Like the Tribe’s members receiving fake flyers that changed the time and place of where the Forest Service was to hold community meetings to get public feedback on the swap. Some of it had been irritating—members of the Tribe had had expired license plate permits stuck over their current ones so that the local police would frequently stop them. And some of it had been mildly frightening.