Two weeks ago, Grand Junction went into shock. Over protests from Sen. Ken Salazar, Rep. John Salazar, and more local officials than you can count, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management hurriedly auctioned off oil and gas leases on 24,000 acres of the Grand Mesa, including Grand Junction and Palisade watersheds.
Petitions, e-mails and arguments are flying thick. My own thoughts, however, keep returning to my first night on the 11,000-foot Grand Mesa.
It was 1998. My son, Julian, and I had flown in from Oregon, then driven up the mesa to camp under a tiny tarp in a friend’s backyard, on a mission to see if our family could move to Colorado from Portland and make the break from urban life.
Dizzying stars were followed by a drenching thunderstorm. Near dawn, horses whinnied, and something heavy climbed on top of my wet sleeping bag.
I muttered, “Go on, Mo!” and nudged it away, sure it was the family dog come to play. It rolled off easily.
My eyes were glued shut, aching with weariness, but my mind couldn’t stop thinking about the graceful street we’d lived on for 10 years. Yet my husband and I dreamed of returning to the interior West, living again in a small town, under buttes, mountains and the endless sky over the canyons.
I was almost asleep when something crawled back up on me, sniffing. This time I shoved the weight away. It lifted off all at once.
A tiny, strained voice said, “Mom! That’s not a dog.”
“Honey, go to sleep. I am so … ”
“Mom. Mom!”
We sat up. At our feet, a full-grown black bear rose up, pawing the air, his snout pointed up.
I was frozen for a long moment. I didn’t think I was even still breathing, except the blood kept thumping painfully in my ears. In the back of my mind was the knowledge that black bears don’t make a diet of people, but this bear was too near me and my child. My body felt suddenly hominoid, fleshy and horribly clawless.
Playing dead wouldn’t work: If I did, would the bear want to play with me again?
Out of my terror welled a savage, unexpected delight as the light broke on the mesa. The bear skated around the yard, moving as easily as she had on top of me. The smell of wet sage, the wet tips of grass, the dank odor of bear, the softness of my son’s body and my own became fused in that moment. In the morning breeze, we heard the dirge of birds just beginning to stir, the wind rising in the cottonwoods around us – everything alive, everything wild in the blue light.
I finally whispered, “Walk, don’t run, to the house.”
We made it to the back door, locked it, and savored, for a half hour, an adolescent bear at play. She knocked the peaches off the picnic table, hung on the swing, climbed on chairs, even rolled around a pink beachball.
Days later, the bear wandered into the town of Mesa and was shot. Not long afterward, we moved to Grand Junction. When something happens to wake you up, German author Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, you must change your life.
In the early mornings here, the Grand Mesa shimmers like a transparent blue cloud. In the desert sunset, its ancient volcanic rock glows red as fire. We live under the swell of this flat-topped mountain, one of the largest in the world, and it’s so beautiful here that, as my mother would have said, it’s almost a sin.
It’s shameful that the north face of this mountain should be permanently defaced to feed a wasteful Congress and administration bent on ignoring conservation and sustainability, and intent on stripping Western lands just as its predecessors leveled the old growth forests that once reached across most of our country. We’ve lacked national leadership on energy policy for more than a quarter of a century. Why not subsidize technology that’s already 30 years old? Why not build energy-efficient schools, city halls, universities and courthouses?
Why not use our resources wisely?
I don’t want to be the biggest remaining predator. What I want to guard is not only the open, singing wilderness, but the place in my heart where the bear lives, the strange wild place that still knows what’s right.
Poet and fiction writer Sandra Dorr (sandydorr@bresnan.net) teaches Women’s Wilderness Writing retreats in Colorado and Utah.
