Past and present in a Western town

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

By Brooke Williams

I spent this past weekend in Bluff, the tiny hamlet at the edge of the Navajo Reservation in southeastern Utah. It’s a great community, with a population as divided as anywhere else. The town is discussing whether or not to allow cell phone towers in town and debating the merits of a proposed sewer system.

What kind of growth is acceptable, and how can it be controlled? This is the central issue in Bluff and in every small town in the West. Bluff has a grocery store and gas station, four motels, a few restaurants and three trading posts, one of which serves espresso.
Friday night saw a literary reading at Nadabar, which was once a bar but is now a home. The living room is the best place in town for people to gather. More than a hundred people were there - nearly half the town.

Pro-development factions sat next to environmentalists. People were getting along, which, we heard, is not always case. Everyone brought food ranging from gas station pizza to “pigs in a blanket” to a nice selection of cheese, including Gruyere (Austrian Alps) and the wine-soaked Brillode Treviso. One of the many beer selections was Moosehead. I know only one person who drinks Moosehead - Vaughan Hadenfeldt, a local guide who with his wife, Marcia, runs Far Out Expeditions. I spotted the green Moosehead can across the room and, sure enough, the hand holding it belonged to Vaughan. We ‘howdied’ and hugged and made plans for the morning.
“I’ve got something special to show you,” Vaughan said, “one of the oldest sites around…down by the river.”

 Saturday morning, we explored Bluff. We drove a mile on an unmarked dirt road until the truck started to sink into the mud from the wettest winter in a decade. Then we started walking. The smells wafting up from each step suggested life might still be possible beneath all that snow. At the edge of a small sandstone canyon, we saw two rocks stacked, one on the other, marking the route. Cairn and the six moki steps carved into the cliff beneath us were proof that we were not the first to come this way. We made our way down to the soft mud in the canyon bottom.

In front of us, the San Juan River flowed with more muscle than I could ever remember. A path through willows and oak led us to the base of a cliff covered with petroglyphs of big horn sheep, insects, well-endowed flute players and mysterious geometric creatures from somewhere deep in the dream of the artist. High on the wall was the head of an animal - a bison, I realized, once I found the familiar shoulder hump. As my eyes adjusted to the faint lines time had almost obliterated, I saw something I couldn’t believe - the trunk of a mastodon. “Paleo-archaic,” Vaugan said. “Imagine…the artist either had seen a mastodon, or had heard very accurate stories about one.”

We talked about how time had changed the river and lowered the banks but it had not altered the story told on that rock face. Then we were silent for a while before Vaughan spoke.

“I love Bluff,” he said. “I love how we’re connected to a different dimension of time.”
PERMALINK:
Past and present in a Western town | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

Leave a Comment