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Looking up through narrowing canyon walls the blue of the sky calls about thoughts of treasure lost deep at sea. As my sandaled feet tread thin water in the bottoms I move through time and find my way through the desert. My footprints cross under the shadows of cottonwoods and looming, desert varnished cliffs. And just as they should be they are lost to the moving spring water. 
The desert has long been home to my deepest thoughts and refuge for my aching heart. As I wake in by bed at home I see sun scorched rocks and distant plateaus. In my minds eye I look to the passing clouds over the red stone of canyon country to start my day. These wild places are where I enjoy the peace of my own life. It takes away the pressing social interference of a civilized life.
Imagine the voice of the most beautiful woman you’ve ever known and you’ll hear the voice that comes to me on the wind. Everything is bright and laid out before me and I am left with my thoughts, the ones that matter. I don’t have to be anywhere else. I’m in no hurry. While the juxtapose of a traffic light frustrates me, being stranded at a spring in a desert under the Escalante sun is a welcome adventure.
Imagine a place that brings you comfort in the most terrible of circumstances or even escape from the mundane social existence that we all live and you will have this place. These wild places where the only access is on foot. There are places like this that are protected from industrial development. Places like this are subject to become endangered, or even decimated. It seems that an area can qualify for wilderness protection or “other multiple public uses.” Please take a look at this article published in the High Country News.
I’ve taken time to join the efforts of SUWA and the Sierra Club because I don’t want to lose the places that are real and also part of my dreams. Wild places cannot be wild if they are sectioned off to the neighboring coal mine or power plant. Please help protect the wilderness.
While many think that organizations like this are for the granola’s and hipsters of society, take a look at what the Sierra Club is doing. You’ll find that they’re moving people to take action against air pollution in densely populated areas. If you live in Salt Lake City, or even along the Wasatch Front please take a moment to consider the level of toxins you take in with each breath simply due to the proximity of oil refineries and the Kennecot super-smoke stack.
Down at the end of Dead End Road stands a solitary snowman complete with coal eyes, carrot nose and a sandy smile. Whoever travels there might be bewildered to find such a statue out in the middle of the desert.
Due south of Robbers Roost Canyon above the canyon rim there is knoll on which stands our snowman. He is there at the end of the road, the end of the line, contemplating the silliness od his existence. He doesn’t know better and neither did the two people that built him. He is facing northeasterly into the wilderness that Butch Cassidy and his band of robbers only knew, only a few years ago. Now it is known by outdoor enthusiasts.
Arriving at the end of Dead End Road is like arriving at one of the most ethereal places I’ve found in the desert. It was a combination of little side roads that took us there and by no guessing and no direction at all we came up and found ourselves starring down into the beautiful rocky canyons of Robbers Roost. In all my desert travels I have never ended up where I wanted to be by accident. But there’s a snowman there now. Just a snowman.
Our snowman represents the simpler things in life. In total we drove 500 miles to build a snowman on the edge of nowhere. There wasn’t anything else we could do there but build a snowman. We couldn’t even stay very long because of the continual snow. There are these moments in life: all tied up in the world of technology and progress and the peaceful moments when nothing really matters, only living.
Down at the end of Dead End Road, we lived like people and not gears in the machine. Is there anything more important than living as a person whose thoughts are his own, or her own, and not purchased by the hour by some “entrepreneur” as it were?
I’ve had a continual argument festering in my mind that has something to do with what Karl Marx talked about: Men become part of the machine of society, partly to survive, and then, slowly, the man is stripped from him. By the time this happens he is only concerned with surviving with what can be purchased with payment received from his labor. He survives to work among the cogs and gearing. He is a slave to the machine.
And Thoreau, what about that man is important? I mean, living on the edge of a pond wasting away in a the pages of his own work? Well, have you ever enjoyed a cup of tea on the crisp morning air at the edge of a pond knowing that you fully own your life and that you report to no one for livelihood? Think about that. Think about building a snowman in the middle of the desert and all the while you have no one to report to. Just think about climbing a mountain and knowing that once the summit is reached you don’t have to hurry down to join the rest of the world.
Traveling down the trail without a name is part of that ideal. Find yourself and break loose from the perpetual habit of submission. Be full of life and live something better. You don’t have to quit your job but save the most important part of yourself for you and those moments.
