LITMIR.BIZ

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one of those cases.

      This magnificent land deserved to be protected. Sometimes, he would sit quietly high on a plateau and look across at the grand vista with awe and reverence. At those times, he could almost understand why people assigned such beauty to God, though there wasn’t any reason one could not have beauty without God. Beauty was a learned response, it was in the eye of the beholder, Sean reasoned, and not in the eye of some imagined God.

      Sometimes he wished he still believed, even though he knew the idea of God was silly, invented by man’s own insecurities. Other times, he wondered if the president was really a believer, or if he was just being politically expedient. Caving in and going to church because that’s what the majority of Americans expected from their president. You didn’t need much political savvy to know that translated into millions of votes. But after all, the president was a Rhode’s Scholar and arguably, the most intelligent president we’d had since Jefferson. No way, Sean thought, that a man like him really believed in the naive concept of God.

      As clearly as if it were happening today, Sean saw himself standing in the human line that snaked for at least a hundred yards, inching slowly forward to shake the president’s hand. What an honor, it would be—to shake this great man’s hand. Whenever he heard the back stabbing of the republican conservatives attacking this man, Sean turned livid. To his way of thinking, if Mount Rushmore was being sculpted today, William Jefferson Clinton’s handsome profile would surely grace the mountain’s face—though he really did not believe in defacing mountains in that way.

      The only slightly disconcerting thing was, well—to be honest—was all the credit he had heaped on vice president Al Gore in the speech. Not that the vice president didn’t deserve some of it, he had written a book and had always been a good friend of the environmentalists, but he had a knack for usurping credit, stealing the limelight, so to speak. Remember that internet fiasco? And certainly, Gore hadn’t done all the leg work, the grunt work that Sean had. It had been Sean who had slugged it out in the trenches and fought the dirty little secret war. The war politicians, by inference gave their blessing, but didn’t want to know the gory details so they could distance themselves. They had to keep their hands clean and reputations spotless so they could continue to captain us toward more lofty goals.

      Not that Sean had expected the president to actually mention his name in the dedicatory speech, but it would have been—

      “—So, will Monday be all right with you, Sean?”

      “Huh? I’m sorry.”

      “For God’s sake!” Brisco exploded, her small frame shaking. “Could you pay attention?”

      “I said I was sorry,” Sean snarled, his normally docile ruddy countenance now blazing bright crimson with anger.

      “Can you start to work on my inventory project this Monday?”

      “Yeah, I guess that will work for me. Monday’ll do fine.”

      “Where do you want to meet, Ron?” Brisco asked the deputy manager.

      “You can call me Sparky,” Ron said as he faced the group with a smile. “How about the Escalante office?”

      “Okay, then we’ll meet on Monday,” Brisco confirmed, “at the BLM office in Escalante, just on the east end of town. Any other questions?”

      Slowly, Brisco surveyed the room. “I want you to know I take my mission as steward of this land very seriously. President Clinton put me—uh— us in charge of this fine monument and in twenty years, I want Americans, when planning their summer vacations, to mention the Grand Staircase in the same breath as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone or Yosemite,” she paused and looked them each in the eye.

      “It’s a big task and we will have our share of problems and maybe even a couple of setbacks, but let me assure you, I know we are up to the task. Someday this will be one fine national monument.” She paused again for effect, gathering her papers. “Well then, I have one last question. Does anyone here play chess?”

      “I beg your pardon?” Ron Sparks asked, not sure he’d heard her correctly.

      Puzzled, the rest of the group stared blankly back at her.

      “Does anyone here play chess?” Brisco repeated, glancing over the room. “When I’m not working, I like to play a little chess—for recreation. How about it, Sean?”

      “Nah, I’m not much into games,” Sean replied, “never held much fascination for me.”

      “Monty?”

      “Never had the time.”

      Brisco looked over the room again. “Well then, let’s adjour—.”

      “—I used to play a little,” Roper said hesitantly.

      “Excellent,” Brisco said, pleased. “We’ll have to arrange a game sometime. Well then, if there’s nothing else, let’s adjourn.”

      “Could I have you all stay for a couple minutes,” Sparks grinned as Brisco got up and left, “and we’ll go over specific assignments.”

      As he watched the manager leave, Sean couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong with the monument the way it was. Briefly, Sean saw in his mind her vision, another Yellowstone or Yosemite with throngs of people, inundated lodges, congested hiking trails, trash littered roads, thick foul air and noisy traffic jams. It made him shutter.

      Brisco had her agenda, he had his. For now, he would help, as long as their agendas ran parallel courses. But another Yosemite—no way!

      3

       THE CHOCOLATE CLIFFS

      With its genesis roughly 240 million years ago in the early Triassic geological period, the Chocolate Cliffs are the granddaddy of the Staircase’s terraces and form the first and lowest rung. Created from brown mud deposited on the fluvial plain of an immense pre-historic lake, the rocks produced are mudstone and siltstone and these stones, along with a thin layer of beige sandstone, make up the Moenkopi formation. As a signature feature of this layer, erosion occasionally exposes large sheets of fossilized ripple marks.

      Capped by a mosaic of Shinarump Conglomerate, the Chocolate Cliffs are the oldest, least visible and most deeply buried of all the Staircase cliffs. Only on the very southern border of the Monument, east of Kanab, is a comparably short shelf of Chocolate Cliffs that erosion has unearthed for inspection.

      Judith Brisco fought the unfamiliar knobs and ridges of the lumpy mattress, then rolled over and once again tried to go to sleep. God, how she hated these motel beds. In the lodging business, there seemed to an unwritten but almost universally adhered to code, furnish your rooms exclusively with stone-hard mattresses. Try as she might, Judith could think of only two possible explanations: one, long ago, someone must have decided that hard mattresses were good for the back and that theory was still popular today. If true, whoever that person was, had obviously never studied the normal spine curvature. No way was the spine straight as a board, so why should beds be? Two, hard mattresses were more cost effective. They were cheaper to manufacture or less likely to sag under body weight and hence would not need replacing as often. Regardless of the reason, Judith sighed, now one could hardly stay in any motel without sleeping, or at least trying to sleep, on a concrete slab.

      At least her own bed was on the way, arriving today she hoped. She had rented a small one-story bungalow in the Ranchos section of Kanab. It was a wonderful house in a picturesque location just across the Kanab Creek and right smack up against the looming Vermillion Cliffs. This setting, up against the cliffs, was a constant reminder of why she was here. Here in this God forsaken little Mormon town without so much as a Wal-Mart, a Macy’s, an opera house or even a movie theater. She was here to forge a national monument out of a mishmash of raw materials, whereas

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