Erica Soon Olsen

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Utah WildMall Rangers

 

When the help desk call comes in—it’s rockfall this time, on the Rim Trail—I head out in my Jeep. Another day at Utah Canyons.

***

Spacious skies and purple mountains, majesty and grace and an award-winning Image Management Plan. Our scenic values are off the charts. From daybreak through sunset and on into the night with our dark sky program, it’s all in the IMP.

***

Sometimes on my rounds I used to drive down one of the Seldom Seen roads that wanders off across the flats to the northwest, old mining or cattle-driving roads with a feeling of the Old West, desolate and parched and hopeless. All of these roads dead-end in the same area, a box canyon whose entrance is concealed behind a cottonwood that’s half fallen over. There’s nothing scenic about it. It’s basically Not Seen. On the other side of the park boundary, I’d sit on a flat rock and look at nothing in particular. Scuff my boots in some dust, throw a pebble over the edge.

***

Utah Canyons is America’s first wildmall. Tourists come by the busload. Our motto is NATURE. OWN IT. It’s an interagency partnership between Utah Parks and the BLM. We’ve got advantages over traditional parks. You can’t take a bad picture here. It’s a question of angles and sight lines, temperature and relative humidity. The weather is predictable. Rainbows appear at 4 and 6 on summer afternoons. The scenic dustings of snow run November through March. Our park manager has an MBA and an undergrad degree in Desert Adventure.

***

I take my time. I park at the rim lot, kill a few minutes watching two girls striking sassy poses with nature’s splendor arrayed behind them. Sunset shadows are creeping along the east face, lengthening with perceptible jolts. It’s a little alarming—the speed of it like time-lapse footage, plus it’s only two in the afternoon—but the girls don’t seem to notice.

Things have been off lately. The discomfort index has been way up, and some visitors have asked for their money back. IT’s out here on a regular basis.

Not my problem, not since the day my supervisor called me into his office. My supervisor looked like Humphrey Bogart, right down to the khaki uniform trousers that he wore belted high, and he sounded like him, too. It’s high tech out here, but lonesome. We watch a lot of Netflix. Walk past the housing units at night and you see the flicker of screens in the windows, the blue campfires that keep us warm.

He cued up the security footage, fast-forwarding through segments until he got to a sequence: some old roads, a nondescript little canyon, a blurry figure exiting a blurry state vehicle.

“Let’s talk about this footage and let’s talk about it straight.” He jabbed a finger at the paused screen. “That looks like you, kid.”

As a viewshed analyst, this surprised me. Line of sight, corridor management—how could I have screwed this up? He ran it by me again, frame by frame. I squinted at the monitor.

“It might be me,” I admitted, “but I can’t be sure.”

“As a supervisor, when you see something like this, you’re supposed to do something about it.”

In this way I was demoted from image management specialist to seasonal ranger. Right back where I started from.

The job’s not bad, though. In some ways I’ve got it better than before. I work eight tens, then I’m off six—which beats five days a week of nine-to-five. I patrol the frontcountry, the souvenir trails. When you register at the trailhead, you’re authorizing credit card charges for the pictures that you take and any rocks and fossils that end up in your pocket. As a way of life, it’s as good as any. I make a living in a place where, most of the time, I want to be. I remind myself that the simulated protects the real.

Down in the canyon, about a hundred feet below the rim, I run into Landry, from the entrance station. It must be his day off; he’s out of uniform, in shorts and a ratty T-shirt from Ray’s Tavern in Green River. He seems to be pushing a real boulder up the trail. He looks at my boots, then up at me, then back at the rock under his hands.

“Ah, crap,” he says.

My work’s routine. When I started here ten years ago I used to do trail maintenance, but now that all the trails have been upgraded to self-maintaining it’s really pretty boring. So whatever Landry’s up to off-duty, I’m probably going to be OK with it. Of course, he doesn’t know that.

“Is there a problem here?” I ask, one Utah WildMall Ranger to another. I don’t know him that well. Landry’s just a few years out of school, still gung-ho and baby-faced, though his pack is enormous and ratty. We’ve had a few beers in Moab. We’ve bullshitted a little.

“I got a call about some rockfall. Know anything about it?” I’m channeling Bogey. To my surprise, interrogation works. Landry says he thinks he may have tripped a sensor somewhere.

“Goddammit,” I say.

Pretty soon he’s singing like a canary. He says he’s had it with touchable pixels. He confesses that he’s been packing in unauthorized material. He smuggles in gnats, in vials. He sifts red dust into vehicles as they pass through the entrance station. When it comes to tripping hazards the man is a genius.

“Godfuckingdammit,” I say. This explains the recent surge in visitor complaints.

“They’re going to fire my ass,” Landry says.

Just then the light changes. The sky darkens, then turns a weird, luminous green. There’s a rumble of thunder, followed by a moaning sound which at first I think is my phone on vibrate. It’s not my phone.

“Did you hear that?” I say.

This time we both hear it. It’s definitely moaning—human moaning. We follow the sounds to a hiker. He’s sitting on a promontory with his legs outstretched in a patch of shade that’s rotating in an unusual way. Judging by the earbuds in his ears, he’s still transfixed by the audio tour, a narrative evocation of natural wonders and the labyrinths of time. It’s keyed to the overlook, not the trail. No wonder he’s in distress.

At least it’s not another rainbow incident. The week before last, we afflicted a whole troop of Boy Scouts with petit mal seizures, their eager eyes staring fixedly at our vista.

When we get up close to the hiker, I realize it’s worse than I thought. It’s not just an audio tour malfunction, it’s a viewshed disruption. He’s dazed and pointing.

Out on this ledge you can see the real. It’s not just Moderately Seen. It’s Visible.

I remember a backpacking trip out there with one girlfriend. She gashes her leg on some limestone, she’s on the ground all quiet and I’m next to her with first aid, both of us shocked by the white inside of her. This is what we are, this flesh.

It’s ugly and sullied and beautiful, the real. There’s conservation, there’s preservation. Does any of it matter? We don’t want much, just paradise. The yearning I feel is a stab in the gut so sharp I clutch my side, and for a moment I don’t breathe. It’s not about wanting the perfect place. It’s about wanting someone to be there with.

The hiker whimpers softly, and our training kicks in. We carry him off the ledge, remove his earbuds, get him stabilized. I’ve still got the passcode—they never changed it—and with a couple of keystrokes on my phone the viewshed is restored.

Landry reaches into his pack and pulls out a can of Rainier, which we share. It’s only semi-cold in its neoprene sleeve, but still.

“Let’s move some rocks,” I say.

“What about the IMP?” Landry asks.

“Screw the IMP. We’re de-maintaining this trail.”

The hiker struggles to his feet. He still looks dazed but he’s taking sips from his hydration pack. Over the sound of sliding rock—a beautiful sound—he asks, “Who are you guys, anyway?”

Landry and I answer together. “We’re Utah WildMall Rangers.”