Forrest Gump and the Cities of Gold -- An Essay

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very nicely written, nice flow to it. I think the link between Gump, you and the Spanish was a bit of a stretch for me. I really enjoyed the Spanish narrative.

nice essay tho.

 

LOL ... yeah, I suppose it is a stretch. I just thought it was interesting that the Gump marker is out there alongside the highway in the middle of nowhere.

The idea that those buttes in Monument Valley, when viewed from a distance, look man-made and could be mistaken for "cities of gold" occurred to me the first time I ever saw that landscape. Then when I saw them in the movie, it seemed like there was a connection to be made there.

 

I'm thinking it should have been simple enough for Coronado's men to figure out that the natives were lying in order to get rid of them. Maybe they were worried about losing face (or worse) if they returned empty handed. They were looking for gold.

To my way of thinking, they would have done better to look for good cattle country and farmland in the fertile valleys of central California. Gold is a means of exchange. If you have cattle and harvested crops for export, someone is bound to trade with you, whether they trade in gold, paper money, barter goods or whatever.

The badlands of the Southwest have their own unique beauty. They never did have much water for cattle or farming.

 

You'd think so, huh? But it went on for decades. Never underestimate the power of mindset.

Which of course they eventually did. There might be .. umm .. one or two Spanish place names in California today, including the little village of "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles sobre El Rio Porciuncula".

You are correct. Grazing is a huge issue in the desert Southwest, and it's marginal at best. Overall, the land here isn't really good for much, economically speaking. And yet to some of us, it's the center of the universe.

 

I think maybe L.A. was better off as a sleepy Mexican village. I grew up there. None of its 13 million people are my offspring, to the best of my knowledge. As for Coronado, why didn't he just invest in mutual funds?

 

Maybe so. Los Angeles and Southern California is more than a metro area though ... it's a sociological phenomenon. Movie stars ... pretty girls ... surfer dudes ... the little old lady from Pasadena.

I think he would have been more inclined toward real estate in Phoenix or Albuquerque or Denver. That's some high-priced dirt there.

 

It may be off topic, but what would Edward Abbey have invested in? (Author: Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Fool's Progress. Noted environmental conservative.)

 

Oh, I know who Ed Abbey is. I quote him all the time. In fact, I even met him once at a talk he was giving. This was not long before he died, round about '92 or '93. It was in a high school auditorium in Utah. I got there early and found a seat in the second row, not noticing at first the unkempt-looking old coot sitting in the seat in front of me, in the first row.

Well, you guessed it ... the old coot was Abbey himself. When I realized it, I struck up a conversation with him. I don't remember what we talked about, but I do remember that he kept staring at my chest. Why, I don't know ... there's not much to stare at.

Anyway, he gave a terrific talk, showing slides of his trips through Glen Canyon and all around southern Utah. It was a fascinating evening.

Ok, back to the original question ... what would he have invested in? Well, he believed in the National Park Service, even though he heavily criticized some of their policies. I don't think you can "invest" in that, though.

So I'll come back to real estate. Not in his beloved Moab, unfortunately. He'd positively roll over in his grave at what Moab has become.

More likely the Arizona Strip ... that remote part of Arizona between the Grand Canyon and the Utah line. It's a huge area, and other than the little town of Jacob Lake, up in the mountains near the North Rim, almost totally uninhabited. The map shows a couple of "towns" west of there in the Strip, but that's a laugh ... they're just wide spots in the road. There's not even a bar out there, and I think the nearest post office is on the South Rim of the Canyon.

And not to change the subject, but I know where he's buried, too ...

 

Abbey died in 1989. I don't need to tell you what he thought of Glen Canyon Dam. As to your interaction, well, boys will be boys. When they stop noticing you as a woman, that will be something for you to deal with.
All I need to know about his burial may be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey#Biography. That link also contains a couple of potent quotes on off road vehicles and sport hunting. He was my age when he died.

 

Wow ... was it 1989? Ah, I was off by a couple of years. Yes, I know his feelings about the Dam and about Lake Powell. He'll eventually be vindicated, too. They estimate that the lake will silt up behind the dam enough to make it basically useless within a century or less.

Yep, the Cabeza Prieta is where he is. Or was. I've been out there a couple of times. Trust me, that's one extreme piece of dirt, even by Arizona standards. The old 4WD track that runs through it is called El Camino Diablo ... the Devil's Highway.

It's also very sad ... because of its remoteness it's a perfect corridor for the illegals and drug runners to come through on their way to Phoenix and Vegas and Los Angeles, and the place looks like a trash dump. Those drug runners are horrible, violent, murdering scumbuckets, which is something that kids don't think about when they rattle on about their little giggles with pot.

The last time I went hiking there, a BLM ranger scolded me quite severely for being out there by myself. "It's dangerous out here, ma'am". I got his point ... I stay away from there now. Well, I stay away from the border in general now ...

I never met Doug Peacock, but I have friends here in Tucson who worked with him in Earth First, years ago. I read his book on grizzlies before I knew of his association with Abbey. Nobody knows griz like Doug Peacock.

Speaking of Abbey again, the old coot could definitely turn a phrase. Some good Abbey quotes:

"Governments are like stew. Unless they're stirred up from time to time, scum forms at the top."

"Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and aesthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one."

"The fat pink slobs who go roaring over the landscape in these over-sized over-priced over-advertised mechanical mastodons are people too lazy to walk, too ignorant to saddle a horse, too cheap and clumsy to paddle a canoe. Like cattle or sheep, they travel in herds, scared to death of going anywhere alone, and they leave their sign and spoor all over the back country: Coors beer cans, Styrofoam cups, plastic spoons, balls of Kleenex, wads of toilet paper, spent cartridge shells, crushed gopher snakes, smashed sagebrush, broken trees, dead chipmunks, wounded deer, eroded trails, bullet-riddled petroglyphs, spray-painted signatures, vandalized Indian ruins, fouled-up waterholes, polluted springs and smoldering campfires piled with incombustible tinfoil, filter tips, broken bottles. Etc."

 

Good thread, you two. I knew Ed fairly well, first met him in the summer of 1967. This was a year or two before Desert Solitaire, and he was working as a river guide out of Moab. I ran into him one night popping the top on a Pabst Blue Ribbon in the only tavern Moab had at the time. Back then, Arches wasn't yet a National Parking Lot and Moab was still decades away from turning into another one of those quaint playgrounds for yuppies and their $4000 mountain bikes.

Hell, Moab was a long way from being anything in those days. It wasn't nothing but a sleepy, dusty, played-out uranium boom town in the middle of nowhere, with more boarded-up windows on Main Street than not, and you couldn't even get a hamburger most of the time. They called it the summer of love, 1967, but we didn't know anything about that. It was a good time anyway. Canyonlands National Park had just opened and all the good roads were still dirt.

But then the book came out and Ed somehow found himself famous, and he never turned an honest day's work again till the day he died. "Abbey, are you ever gonna amount to a hill of beans?" I would ask him. "Goddamn, I hope not," he'd reply.

I never knew Peacock either, but he was a real wild man, I heard. And I mean that in the good sense, although how in the hell he avoided becoming grizzly food I never knew.

Caliente, the particulars of Ed's interest in you sounds about right. Can't say I blame him, neither. But he won't ever be remembered for his social graces. Not to make excuses for him, but Ed Abbey was important for other reasons, and I think from the sound of it, you understand what I mean.

And darlin', that ranger was right as rain about staying the hell away from the Cabeza Prieta. It sounds like you took him at his word and in that you're smarter than I am. It took me two or three times of being shot at before it finally sunk in that those hombres ain't fooling around out there.

 

The best roads still are the dirt ones.

You got that right! We realize that around here more and more all the time.

 

Not wanting to get sidetracked into a discussion of Caliente's physical attributes, I have to mention a good article I found on my shelf at home:
Edward Abbey: "The Southwest -- A Thirst For the Desert", in Wilderness USA, Seymour Fishbein, editor, 1974, National Geographic Society, pp. 89 - 118.
Synopsis: A richly illustrated discussion of Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, Cabeza Prieta Game Range in Arizona, and Death Valley, California. This is written in Abbey's very personal style, but with only a minimum of environmental sermons:

I didn't much like the looks of that crazy landscape north of Hickman Bridge or south of Capitol Gorge. Today things have changed; wilderness is vanishing at a rate which accelerates from year to year. Nothing to do, then, but plunge at once into the heart of what is left, embrace it if you can, try to save it -- if only for the record.
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Written in 1974!
(But someone help me here - what does 'caliente' mean in English?)

 

It means "hot", primarily in the sense of "spicy" as it refers to food. But also in the sense of temperature, although that's somewhat of a secondary meaning. There's a town called "Caliente" in California (or maybe it's Nevada).

Not many things break my heart as much as the disappearance of wilderness. In retrospect, the Wilderness Act of 1964 was one of the best things Lyndon Johnson, or any president, ever did.

And I admire Bill Clinton if for no other reason than his creation of the Escalante National Monument and other wilderness parcels throughout the Southwest. For instance, Phoenix has more designated wilderness areas within 100 miles of the city than any other metro area in the lower 48.

Ah, Capitol Reef ... one of the most under-appreciated National Parks in the entire system, I think. And the Cabeza Prieta ... it's too bad that it's so unsafe, but in a sense I guess it's never been safe there.

If you haven't seen these places, DirtyDog, come on down sometime. I'll give you a tour. I promise to slow down for you ...

 

Hot and spicy, nothing wrong with that.
I can give you a tour of some small part of the Canadian Rockies if you find yourself in the neighborhood...

Lake Minnewanka, Banff Park, Alberta

Yes, you may have to slow down, although I climbed some big mountains not too long ago. (See "Rolling the Dice on Assiniboine' in Writers Forum, including the 'Blizzard on the Headwall' and 'Summiting' entries. Also see 'Castleguard'.)

If I had a choice between a week in the Cabeza badlands and a week in Vegas, I'm sure I'd choose Cabeza, assuming no banditos and not in summer.

It would be interesting to write a story about Coronado getting into a time warp looking for the golden city of Cibola and stumbling onto the main street of Vegas. Rod Serling came up with something similar, but that's another story.
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Summer is the best time, DirtyDog. When the yuppies and yippies and yappies are all back safe in their air conditioning and big screen TV sets and you can breathe again, that's when the desert is the most pure and the most real. It ain't wilderness if you don't have to worry about the heat and the rattlesnakes and god knows what else. It ain't wilderness if it don't make you think today could be your last one on earth.

That was a great Twilight Zone episode, wasn't it?

 

Well, you know for almost 20 years I lived in the Idaho panhandle, about 75 miles from the border. I once hiked in Kootenai Nat'l Park in Alberta. Damn, that's wild country. It was in the autumn of the year, when the grizzly are fattening up for winter and the serviceberries are ripe. I found a big patch of the berries one afternoon ... they're so sweet and juicy, and I was chowing down on them bigtime when it dawned on me that the griz love them too, and they get real cranky if they happen to catch someone in "their" berry patch.

So I got the hell out of there.

LOL ... yeah, they only have one-armed banditos in Vegas.

 

Crotchety old Ed Abbey couldn't have said it better

(Actually, maybe he did say that ... are you quoting him?)

 

Not intentionally, but subconsciously could have been.

Damn, Caliente ... slipping something by you is like trying to slip a pork chop past a wolf :Angel_anim: