The Monkey Wrench Gang (11 page)

One fine day in early June, bearing west from Blanding, Utah, on their way to cache more goods, the gang paused at the summit of Comb Ridge for a look at the world below. They were riding four abreast in the wide cab of Seldom’s 4×4 pickup truck. It was lunch-time. He pulled off the dusty road—Utah State Road 95—and turned south on a jeep track that followed close to the rim. Comb Ridge is a great monocline, rising gradually on the east side, dropping off at an angle close to 90 degrees on the west side. The drop-off from the rim is about five hundred feet straight down, with another three hundred feet or more of steeply sloping talus below the cliff. Like many other canyons, mesas and monoclines in southeast Utah, Comb Ridge forms a serious barrier to east-west land travel. Or it used to. God meant it to.

Smith pulled the truck up onto a shelf of slickrock within twenty feet of the rim and stopped. Everybody got out, gratefully, and walked close to the edge. The sun stood high in the clouds; the air was still and warm. Flowers grew from cracks in the rock—globe mallow, crownbeard, gilia, rock cress—and flowering shrubs—cliff-rose, Apache plume, chamisa, others. Doc was delighted.

“Look,” he said, “
Arabis pulchra. Fallugia paradoxa. Cowania mexicana
, by God.”

“What’s this?” Bonnie said, pointing to little purplish things in the shade of a pinyon pine.

“
Pedicularis centranthera.”

“Yeah, okay, but what is it?”

“What is it?” Doc paused. “What it is, no man knows, but men call it … wood betony.”

“Don’t be a wise-ass.”

“Also known as lousewort. A child came to me saying, ‘What is the lousewort?’ And I said, ‘Perhaps it is the handkerchief of the Lord.’ ”

“Nobody loves a wise-ass.”

“I know,” he admitted.

Smith and Hayduke stood on the brink of five hundred feet of naked gravity. That yawning abyss which calls men to sleep. But they were looking not down at death but southward at life, or at least at a turmoil of dust and activity. Whine of motors, snort and growl of distant diesels.

“The new road,” Smith explained.

“Uh huh.” Hayduke raised his field glasses and studied the scene, some three miles off. “Big operation,” he mumbled. “Euclids, D-Nines, haulers, scrapers, loaders, backhoes, drills, tankers. What a beautiful fucking layout.”

Doc and Bonnie came up, flowers in their hair. Far off south in the dust, sunlight flashed on glass, on bright steel.

“What’s going on down there?” Doc said.

“That’s the new road they’re working on,” Smith said.

“What’s wrong with the old road?”

“The old road is too old,” Smith explained. “It crawls up and down hills and goes in and out of draws and works around the head of canyons and it ain’t paved and it generally takes too long to get anywhere. This new road will save folks ten minutes from Blanding to Natural Bridges.”

“It’s a county road?” Doc asked.

“It’s built for the benefit of certain companies that operate in this county, but it’s not a county road, it’s a state road. It’s to help out the poor fellas that own the uranium mines and the truck fleets
and the marinas on Lake Powell, that’s what it’s for. They gotta eat too.”

“I see,” said Doc. “Let me have a look, George.”

Hayduke passed the field glasses to the doctor, who took a long look, puffing on his Marsh-Wheeling.

“Busy busy busy,” he said. He returned the glasses to Hayduke. “Men, we have work to do tonight.”

“Me too,” Bonnie said.

“You too.”

One thin scream came floating down, like a feather, from the silver-clouded sky. Hawk. Redtail, solitaire, one hawk passing far above the red reef, above the waves of Triassic sandstone, with a live snake clutched in its talons. The snake wriggled, casually, as it was borne away to a different world. Lunchtime.

After a little something themselves the gang got back in Smith’s truck and drove two miles closer, over the rock and through the brush, in low range and four-wheel drive, to a high point overlooking the project more directly. Smith parked the truck in the shade of the largest pinyon pine available, which was not big enough to effectively conceal it.

Netting, Hayduke thought; we need camouflage netting. He made a note in his notebook.

Now the three men and the girl worked their way to the rim again, to the edge of the big drop-off. Out of habit Hayduke led the way, crawling forward on hands and knees, then on his belly the last few yards to their observation point. Were such precautions necessary? Probably not, so early in their game; the Enemy, after all, was not aware yet that Hayduke & Co. existed. The Enemy, in fact, still fondly imagined that he enjoyed the favor of the American public, with no exceptions.

Incorrect. They lay on their stomachs on the warm sandstone, under the soft and pearly sky, and peered down seven hundred vertical feet and half a mile by line of sight to where the iron dinosaurs romped and roared in their pit of sand. There was love in neither head nor heart of Abbzug, Hayduke, Smith and Sarvis. No sympathy. But considerable
involuntary admiration for all that power, all that controlled and directed superhuman force.

Their vantage point gave them a view of the heart, not the whole, of the project. The surveying crews, far ahead of the big machines, had finished weeks earlier, but evidence of their work remained: the Day-Glo ribbon, shocking pink, that waved from the boughs of juniper trees, the beribboned stakes planted in the earth marking center line and shoulder of the coming road, the steel pins hammered into the ground as reference points.

What Hayduke and friends could and did see were several of the many phases of a road-building project that follow the survey. To the far west, on the rise beyond Comb Wash, they saw bulldozers clearing the right-of-way. In forested areas the clearing job would require a crew of loggers with chain saws, but here in southeast Utah, on the plateau, the little pinyon pines and junipers offered no resistance to the bulldozers. The crawler-tractors pushed them all over with nonchalant ease and shoved them aside, smashed and bleeding, into heaps of brush, where they would be left to die and decompose. No one knows precisely how sentient is a pinyon pine, for example, or to what degree such woody organisms can feel pain or fear, and in any case the road builders had more important things to worry about, but this much is clearly established as scientific fact: a living tree, once uprooted, takes many days to wholly die.

Behind the first wave of bulldozers came a second, blading off the soil and ripping up loose stone down to the bedrock. Since this was a cut-and-fill operation it was necessary to blast away the bedrock down to the grade level specified by the highway engineers. Watching from their comfortable grandstand bleachers, the four onlookers saw drill rigs crawl on self-propelled tracks to the blasting site, followed by tractors towing air compressors. Locked in position and linked to the compressors, the drill steel bit into the rock with screaming teconite bits, star-shaped and carbide-tipped. Powdered stone floated on the air as the engines roared. Resonant vibrations shuddered through the bone structure of the earth. More mute suffering. The drill rigs moved on over the hill to the next site.

The demolition team arrived. Charges were lowered into the bore holes, gently tamped and stemmed, and wired to an electrical circuit. The watchers on the rim heard the chief blaster’s warning whistle, saw the crew move off to a safe distance, saw the spout of smoke and heard the thunder as the blaster fired his shot. More bulldozers, loaders and giant trucks moved in to shovel up and haul away the debris.

Down in the center of the wash below the ridge the scrapers, the earthmovers and the dump trucks with eighty-ton beds unloaded their loads, building up the fill as the machines beyond were deepening the cut. Cut and fill, cut and fill, all afternoon the work went on. The object in mind was a modern high-speed highway for the convenience of the trucking industry, with grades no greater than 8 percent. That was the immediate object. The ideal lay still farther on. The engineer’s dream is a model of perfect sphericity, the planet Earth with all irregularities removed, highways merely painted on a surface smooth as glass. Of course the engineers still have a long way to go but they are patient tireless little fellows; they keep hustling on, like termites in a termitorium. It’s steady work, and their only natural enemies, they believe, are mechanical breakdown or “down time” for the equipment, and labor troubles, and bad weather, and sometimes faulty preparation by the geologists and surveyors.

The one enemy the contractor would not and did not think of was the band of four idealists stretched out on their stomachs on a rock under the desert sky.

Down below the metal monsters roared, bouncing on rubber through the cut in the ridge, dumping their loads and thundering up the hill for more. The green beasts of Bucyrus, the yellow brutes of Caterpillar, snorting like dragons, puffing black smoke into the yellow dust.

The sun slipped three degrees westward, beyond the clouds, beyond the silver sky. The watchers on the ridge munched on jerky, sipped from their canteens. The heat began to slacken off. There was talk of supper, but no one had much appetite. There was talk of getting
ready for the evening program. The iron machines still rolled in the wash below, but it seemed to be getting close to quitting time.

“The main thing we have to watch for,” Hayduke said, “is a night watchman. They just might keep some fucker out here at night. Maybe with a dog. Then we’ll have problems.”

“There won’t be any watchman,” Smith said. “Not all night, anyhow.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“It’s the way they do things around here; we’re out in the country. Nobody lives out here. It’s fifteen miles from Blanding. This here project is three miles off the old road, which hardly nobody drives at night anyhow. They don’t expect any trouble.”

“Maybe some of them are camping out here,” Hayduke said.

“Naw,” Smith said. “They don’t do that kind of thing either. These boys work like dogs all day long; they wanta get back to town in the evening. They like their civilized comforts. They ain’t campers. These here construction workers don’t think nothing of driving fifty miles to work every morning. They’re all crazy as bedbugs. I worked in these outfits myself.”

Doc and Hayduke, armed with the field glasses, kept watch. Smith and Bonnie crawled down from the ridge, keeping out of sight, until they were below the skyline. Then they walked to the truck, set up the campstove and began preparing a meal for the crew. The doctor and Hayduke, poor cooks, made good dishwashers. All four were qualified eaters, but only Bonnie and Smith cared enough about food to cook it with decency.

Smith was right; the construction workers departed all together long before sundown. Leaving their equipment lined up along the right-of-way, nose to tail, like a herd of iron elephants, or simply
in situ
, where quitting time found them, the operators straggled back in small groups to their transport vehicles. Far above, Doc and Hayduke could hear their voices, the laughter, the rattle of lunch buckets. The carryalls and pickups driven by men at the eastern end of the job came down through the big notch to meet the equipment operators. The men climbed in; the trucks turned and ground uphill through the
dust, into the notch again and out of sight. For some time there was the fading sound of motors, a cloud of dust rising above the pinyon and juniper; then that too was gone. A tanker truck appeared, full of diesel fuel, groaning down the grade toward the machines, and proceeded from one to the next, the driver and his helper filling the fuel tanks of each, topping them off. Finished, the tanker turned and followed the others back through the evening toward the distant glow of town, somewhere beyond the eastward bulge of the plateau.

Now the stillness was complete. The watchers on the rim, eating their suppers from tin plates, heard the croon of a mourning dove far down the wash. They heard the hoot of an owl, the cries of little birds retiring to sleep in the dusty cottonwoods. The great golden light of the setting sun streamed across the sky, glowing upon the clouds and the mountains. Almost all the country within their view was roadless, uninhabited, a wilderness. They meant to keep it that way. They sure meant to try.
Keep it like it was
.

The sun went down.

Tactics, materials, tools, gear.

Hayduke was reading off his checklist. “Gloves! Everybody got his gloves? Put ’em on now. Anybody goes fucking around down there without gloves I’ll chop his hand off.”

“You haven’t washed the dishes yet,” Bonnie said.

“Hard hat! Everybody got his hard hat?” He looked around at the crew. “You—put that thing on your head.”

“It doesn’t fit,” she said.

“Make it fit. Somebody show her how to adjust the headband. Jesus Christ.” Looking back at his list. “Bolt cutters!” Hayduke brandished his own, a 24-inch pair of cross-levered steel jaws for cutting bolts, rods, wire, most anything up to half an inch in diameter. The rest of the party were equipped with fencing pliers, good enough for most purposes.

“Now, you lookouts,” he went on, addressing Bonnie and Doc. “Do you know your signals?”

“One short and a long for warning, take cover,” Doc said, holding up his metal whistle. “One short and two longs for all clear,
resume operations. Three longs for distress, come help. Four longs for … what are four longs for?”

“Four longs mean work completed, am returning to camp,” Bonnie said. “And one long means acknowledgment, message received.”

“Don’t much like them tin whistles,” Smith said. “We need something more natural. More ecological. Owl hoots, maybe. Anybody hears them tin whistles will know there’s two-legged animals slinkin’ around. Lemme show you how to hoot like a owl.”

Training time. Hands cupped and close, one little opening between thumbs, shape the lips, blow. Blow from the belly, down deep; the call will float through canyons, across mountainsides, all the way down in the valley. Hayduke showed Dr. Sarvis; Smith showed Abbzug, personally, holding her hands in the necessary way, blowing into them, letting her blow into his. She picked it up quickly, the doctor not so fast. They rehearsed the signals. For a while the twilight seemed full of great horned owls, talking. Finally they were ready. Hayduke returned to his checklist.