Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward

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       Chapter 2

      Luna Waxwing tried not to tremble. Her voice cracked when she spoke so she stayed silent and pretended to be brave. The bulldozer with its enormous gleaming blade looked like a wall bearing down on her and a dozen compadres who sat chained together in front of the mining site gate. She noticed how the cobalt blue of the desert sky reflected in the mud-spattered blade that was about to chop and crush her. As the yellow monster closed in, she caught a fleeting glimpse of the maniac who was jerking levers back and forth in the bulldozer’s cabin. He wore a white helmet with a faded logo. The blade dropped and the helmet disappeared behind it.

      The bulldozer growled forward and the crowd gathered at the tar sands protest screamed and waved their arms frantically, imploring the driver to stop. Some covered their eyes or looked away. Luna stifled a sob and whispered, “Please, God, no!” a moment before the machine stopped inches away from the chained protesters.

      When it was clear that the dozer operator meant to scare them, not kill them, the protestors resumed their chant; “Tar sands no! Drexxel go!” Jacked up by the near slaughter, they shouted louder. Sheriff Taylor saw how the charging dozer infuriated the large crowd that had made the arduous trip to support those blocking the mining site with their bodies. He trotted over to the dozer and grabbed the sleeve of the man in the white hardhat. He ordered him to get down before he made the situation even worse. The driver walked away but not before flipping his middle finger at the chained demonstrators.

      Most of the protestors had been camping nearby at High Hollow Springs for two weeks. The strip-mining had not begun but heavy equipment had been moved in so that the site could be prepared. The road would have to be upgraded and a parking lot for work vehicles scraped out. They needed a warehouse for supplies and equipment, an office, a repair shop, a pad for fuel tanks. And that was just the beginning. Eventually the mining site would be an industrial island squatting in the center of the once-wild Seafold Ledges with massive pipelines radiating out from a gouged and scoured landscape. It takes a lot of infrastructure to scrape a thousand acres raw and then boil the soil into oil.

      The Seafold Ledges Tar Sands Alliance was a loose grassroots group that aimed at drawing attention to the toxic and water-wasting nature of tar sands production. They had a website and a Twitter account, an office in a converted storage shed, and an ad hoc staff that conveyed compelling information about the massive amount of water that would be needed to process the tar sands and the scary brew of toxic chemicals that would go into the soil and eventually into the groundwater. They posted photos of the apocalyptic destruction of northern Canadian landscapes wrought by strip-mining the tar sands there. They had demonstrated against the project at several public appearances of Drexxel’s corporate officers but this was their first act of civil disobedience at the tar sands mining site itself.

      Luna took three deep breaths to calm herself. She exhaled slowly and checked to see if she had wet her pants. Dry so far. Her confidence returned, she reviewed the reasons she found herself on a dirt road thirty miles from the highway, joined to a chain-link fence with twelve people who shared her noble convictions but at the moment looked like a discarded charm bracelet of disheveled campers.

      The Seafold Ledges was a remote landscape of broken cliffs and wide arid valleys that could only be reached by primitive dirt roads. You had to swallow a lot of dust to get there. The dozens of archaeological sites that were scattered across the high desert testified to a time before cows and sheep replaced elk and bison and the ancestors of today’s so-called Pueblo people could hunt and gather there.

      After the original human inhabitants left, the Ledges saw few visitors: the occasional cowboy looking for stray cows, a few geologists who found fossils and mapped the tar sands below the Ledges, and a team of Army surveyors looking for a place to blow up bombs and practice war. The Sea Ledges was never adequate for their needs, an also-ran in America’s epic race to exploit its deserts.

      A couple of times each fall, van loads of college students visited. They would burst from their dusty vehicles, their knees cramped from the long ride, and blink at the bright sky. Many had never experienced a sky so blue. They would be led by their professor to areas rich with fossils where they could paw and poke at the layers of rocks that were uplifted and exposed like the pages of a book. The ledger of the Ledges told a story punctuated with mollusks, trilobites, walking fish, and dinosaurs, a kind of evolutionary braille embedded in stone. In the winter, ice and wind scraped across the bare pinnacles and made a mournful song unheard by all but antelope and bighorn sheep.

      Deserts are generally abused and abandoned or simply ignored. That was true for the Seafold Ledges, too, until humanity’s insatiable appetite for oil meant that even dirty tar mixed into sandstone was valuable. The fossil fuel industry had already picked the low hanging fruit and technology made possible the recovery of oil from even the crappiest scraps in sand. Suddenly, the Seafold Ledges held something that was wanted.

      The Drexxel Development Corporation had bet that tar sands were the next big thing. They had been to Canada and the same landscape laid to waste that horrified ardent conservationists was a source of inspiration to the Drexxel team that surveyed the massive strip mines there. The scale was mind-boggling and they speculated that the profit to be made in a world addicted to carbon was limitless. A Drexxel scout told his employer that the Sea Ledges could be “better than Alberta.” They surveyed the empty landscape of the Ledges and dreamed of trucks the size of buildings moving the raw material of the world toward their bank accounts.

      Drexxel’s scouts were leasing land and buying mineral rights in places like the Seafold Ledges. Most of it was public land, so leases were cheap. But their plan to dig up thousands of tons of sand and then boil the gooey crude out of it faced major hurdles. One, squeezing oil out of rock is expensive because it is also energy intensive—it would take almost as much fuel to produce the fuel as the fuel produced. Two, they needed a way to get the product out—a pipeline was another big and complicated expense. And finally, there were those crazies with their signs about pollution and global warming who showed up at every public meeting, chanting and yelling and now, damn it, chaining themselves to the mining site gate. Mining had not begun but the big machines were on hand to prepare the site and that cost plenty. Tar sands mining is marginal and risky enough without adding in such unnecessary delays. Something had to be done about those eco-freaks.

      One by one the thirteen chained protestors were separated from each other by bolt cutters wielded by Sheriff Taylor’s deputies. They were arrested for trespassing and resisting arrest, read their rights, and carried one by one to vans, the one police van in Boon County and another borrowed from the senior citizen center. A deputy named Eldon Pratt found the entire operation baffling. Who were these crazy people, he wondered, and what are they doing so far from the highway? Why are they so mad? There is nothing wrong with mining, without mining there would be no cars. How do they think they got out here?

      Eldon had only been out of Boon County a few times in his life, mostly when his uncle took him cross-country in his truck to deliver shipments of refrigerated meat. They didn’t tarry along the routes they followed and Eldon was left with the impression that the rest of America looked like truck stops, which were pretty much the same from one place to another. His fellow Americans were motorists just like him. The people he saw shuffling in and out of rest rooms or feeding СКАЧАТЬ