Pecked to death by ducks (5 page)

I argued that even the most infinitesimal chance of drying up Yellowstone's thermal features was a chance not worth taking.

Edwin said, "The Bible says man shall have dominion over the earth."

And that was that. Man shall have dominion over the earth. It's in the Bible. CUT intends to go ahead with its plans to pump water from its well, and I had a column to write about a church that understands it doesn't exist in a vacuum. They even have a mailing address: Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Box A, Corwin Springs, MT 59021.

Author's Note:

This story was written in May of 1987. In the following months, the Church Universal and Triumphant was bedeviled by allegations that it had been stockpiling guns in anticipation of a coming apocalypse. In order to ease tensions in the community, the church held an open house, where I had the opportunity to meet Ed Francis, who complained that he had received over ninety letters in response to the above article. Mr. Francis accused me of stirring up hatred for the church because of its unorthodox beliefs.

These guys, I realized, just didn't get it.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, relying on astrology and advice from "ascended masters," was able to foresee a coming nuclear holocaust, and church members began building bomb shelters in May of 1989. On October 13 Ed Francis plead guilty to a charge of conspiring to buy guns illegally and began serving a jail sentence.

The church's main bomb shelter, designed to house 756 people, was buried, secretly, in a pristine mountain meadow hard by the border of the world's first national park. It was about the size of a large suburban high school. In mid-April of 1990 underground fuel tanks at this shelter began to rupture in the spring thaw. More than thirty-one thousand gallons of diesel fuel and gasoline polluted soils and groundwater only three miles from Yellowstone Park.

It was the first instance of armed pollution in the 1990s. Saddam Hussein bumped the stakes up to global levels about a year later.

The state of Montana charged that the church had established "a pattern of secrecy, deceit and intentional evasion" in dealing with state agencies.

Meanwhile, Montana congressman Pat Williams introduced a bill to ban geothermal development in the area surrounding Yellowstone Park. The bill passed the House on November 25, 1991. As of April 1992 the bill had yet to go to the Senate floor for final approval. Ed Francis—who had served his time in jail and was once again handling church affairs—announced that the church was investigating other ways to tap hot water from the naturally occurring outflow of La Duke Hot Springs.

Done properly, this is acceptable. Mr. Francis is to be applauded. It appears as if the well I wrote about in 1987 will never be tapped. It only took a federal law to stop it.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 34

Since the oil spill two years ago, the church has been remarkably quiet and has, it seems, attempted to mend its relations with the local community. I have a number of acquaintances and friends who are members of the Church Universal and Triumphant. I wonder though: Do they still find my outrage over the oil spill and the geothermal well an instance of religious bigotry? Or—Jesus, I'm naive—maybe their religion is big enough to encompass the faith expressed in those ninety letters.

I suggest that we all keep an eye on them.

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He squatted so that he could look directly into my face. The mottled light hit his eyes at an odd angle.

"David," he said fervently, "is God's executioner."

The desert is hateful.

There are those who can make you love it. Edward Abbey, Joseph Wood Krutch, even Zane Grey. But you love it from a chair.

In the desert, at high noon, there are no shadows, and the sun weighs on you with the weight of centuries. The land seems dead or dying, and the desert is like an aging movie star, under merciless light. Oh God, look at those dry washes, that eroded landscape.

Try walking through any major desert in the season of its fury, and you can learn to hate the land. It is not the heat, the great convection oven of desert valleys, that kills so much as the ground temperature. Like a sidewalk under the midsummer sun, the ground collects heat, radiates it. In Death Valley ground temperatures as high as 200 degrees have been recorded. Don't fall here. Don't faint. A few hours lying on unshaded ground can kill very easily. It can literally bake the brain inside the skull.

Even walking—slow, steady walking—can become painful. A burning plain is not kind to the feet and gives great and literal meaning to the word "tenderfoot."

Nick Nichols and I had started walking from Death Valley, in midsummer. My boots gave out the first day. They were light ankle-high canvas affairs, and the glue that held the thick Vibram soles to the body of boot had begun to melt. I took the boots off and doctored them a bit with some tape from the first-aid kit. This was a mistake. My feet had expanded a size or so in the heat, and I couldn't get the boots back on. After some time sitting on the burning ground under the burning sun, it seemed a good idea to keep walking, no matter what. I used my knife to cut several portholes in the canvas to make the boots somewhat wearable.

Originally, we had planned to sleep during the heat of the day, but our tents tended to concentrate the ground heat and

baked us until we felt woozy and barely conscious. It was safer to walk.

So there we were, Nick and I, limping down the western flank of the Panamint Mountains under a cloudless sky at high noon. Nincompoops in the noonday sun. Little else seemed to live on the face of that burning rock and sand.

To pass the time, we began playing the Game of Living Things. We were moving due west, and Nick had the entire world to the south. The north belonged to me. One living creature was worth one point. I had seen a dull-gray sparrowlike bird in a stand of sage and was way ahead, one to nothing. We had argued fiercely about ants. For the purposes of the game—this was an hourlong debate—a man had to stop and count precisely one hundred ants to make one living thing. This was an uncomfortable process, hot and boring. For all practical purposes ants didn't count in the Game of Living Things.

Suddenly, a rabbit—more properly, I suppose, a hare— gray as the dull desert rock, burst out from under some sage between us. It broke northwest, nearly crossed my path, then cut south into Nick's world.

"My point," Nick said.

"That was my rabbit," I pointed out. I noticed that my teeth were tightly clenched. "I scared him up."

Half an hour later Nick said, "The rabbit ran south. It's my rabbit."

Half an hour after that I said, "He ran north first." The tape had come off of my right boot so that the rubber sole flopped annoyingly. My feet were being chafed badly by the holes in the boot, and I was walking in a sore-footed shuffle, rather like Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp except that I had to lift the right foot high above the ground to avoid getting burning pebbles in between the flopping sole and my foot. If I had that shuffling, hopping walk on videotape, I suspect I'd be able to see some small comedy there. As it was, the sun had baked me sour.

"So it's one to one," Nick said some time later. I could feel the muscles bunching up in my back and found it necessary to shuffle-hop a hundred paces north into my own world and out of easy

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 38

conversational range. An hour later, I heard myself shout, "]UST SHUT UP ABOUT THE DAMN RABBIT!"

The desert is a lover.

At dusk, when the sun sets and the sky explodes into gaudy pastels, when shadows mirror the colors of the sky, when the breeze is a cooling purple caress, the desert is beautiful.

We were eating, Nick and I, laughing a bit about the Game of Living Things. Amazing what the desert does to you: It focuses wants and needs. At noon I had wanted no more than shade and water. It was absolutely all I could think about, and I knew then that if I had a cool place to sit and jug of water, I would be happy.

Now, with both water and the blessing of night, I felt certain new needs creep into the equation. Nice to have something better to eat than another chili mac. A soft drink would be nice. Well-chilled champagne: If I had that, I would be happy. A chair to sit on. A table with some proper utensils. A white linen tablecloth. A house with a pool. A certain woman . . .

Before our little stroll through the desert, I had read some books on desert survival and had come across something called The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk. The book is a collection of the sayings of the Desert Fathers, men who had gone into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia to meditate: Christian hermits of the fourth century A.D. There was absolutely no desert lore in the sayings of the Desert Fathers: They were concerned entirely with an interior landscape.

"Abbot Pastor said, 'Get away from the man who argues every time he talks.' He also said, 'He who gets angry is no monk.' "

I began to see some of the desert peeking through the sayings I recalled. Nick and I were no monks, but we were good friends. Friends who had been about to come to blows over a rabbit a few hours before, in the season of our least want.

I prattled on a bit about the Desert Fathers, committing some fractured theology, I imagine. It seemed to me that the twenty-four-hour cycle of waxing and waning wants suggested a spiritual

significance in the calculus of human need. Something. I was still trying to work it out.

We got into Darwin after dark, slept on the street near an abandoned gas station, and woke with the sun. There were people in the town—about forty of them, I learned later—and we moved into the old barroom for a little privacy. An hour later I was awakened by God's executioner.

Nick was sitting on the bar itself. "I met David on the street," he said. "David is a preacher."

David shook his head violently. He was not a preacher. He had strong beliefs; he didn't mind talking about them, but he wanted to be careful. "People around here say I preach too much," he explained.

There was the mechanical click of a camera shutter, and David literally jumped. He turned to face Nick, who was composing another shot. "Don't," he said. "I don't like pictures." He squatted again and stared into my face. "They took my picture in Colorado," he said. There seemed to be tears in his eyes. "The police." David was a stout, solidly built man—he walked around in the desert barefoot—and I felt the unmistakable presence of something powerful and out of control.

Nick did too. He said, "Well, I think I'll go walk around a bit."

"And they hit me with their sticks," David said. "For no reason. I wrote the president. I said that I was willing to renounce my citizenship. All I wanted was five thousand dollars and an airplane ticket somewhere else. Anywhere." David was trembling with some powerful emotion. "He never wrote back."

"Uh, Nick," I said, "maybe you should stay here. This is fascinating stuff."

"I want to shoot some pictures," he said. David turned and glared at him. "Outside," Nick added. I struggled to my feet, just in case I needed to protect myself. David, it seemed, was highly sensitive to what I had thought was a secret defensive posture. "Powerful emanations," he said, not at all taken aback.

"See you guys," the traitor, Nick, said lightly. And then he was gone: I considered his exit the Revenge of the Rabbit.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 40

David had a triangular shard of glass in his hand. I stepped back. He held the glass to his eye and peered through it. "This is on the dollar bill," he said. "The all-seeing eye. In the pyramid." David's blue eye seemed to spin wildly behind the broken glass.

"God tells us not to forget our first love. Doesn't he?"

"Sure He does," I said, not at all sure.

"And what is our first love?"

I said I didn't know. David seemed to lose control of the muscles of his face. He dropped the glass and stared at his hands in wide-eyed wonder. He gurgled happily. I realized that David was showing me an infant.

"Our body is our first love," he said.

David discussed love, as he understood it, for three more hours.

Five miles outside of Darwin, in the purple breeze under a setting sun, Nick said, "You know, there are about fifteen artists that live in that town. Do good work, too."

After a time I said, "You left me alone with David."

"Well, people said he's all right, just a little intense."

"A little?"

In The Wisdom of the Desert Thomas Merton said of the Desert Fathers that "if we were to seek their like in Twentieth Century America, we would have to look in strange, out of the way places."

I wondered if the Desert Fathers, concerned with their own Game of Living Things, seemed just a tad mad to those who encountered them. In the distance we heard the nightly concert begin. The coyotes were yipping and baying, howling in the wilderness.

but it was my impression that he expected to find some cultural correlation between those great staring heads on Easter Island and the ancient stone gods of the Marquesans. These gods, called tikis, can be found in dense groves of coconut and banyan trees, usually atop an overgrown stone terrace, a me'ae, like the one I saw on a hill rising out of the Taaoa valley, near Atuona. It was an impressive ceremonial place that lay just above a rich grove of mangoes, bananas, and coconuts. The terraces were two feet high, one rising above the other, and all were thirty-three feet across. The side walls of large, piled rocks were three to five feet high. The ground had once been tiled with stone so there was not much vegetation, and one had a sense of the place as it must have been.

Six terraces rose to two short ones that were both about ten inches high. Precisely in the middle of the eighth terrace was the tiki, a squatting, scowling god carved out of a single piece of nearly triangular basalt about five feet high. The face was three times the width of a man's shoulders, and the tiki was almost all face. The arms and legs were tiny, deformed; the eyes were huge, with no pupils; and the mouth was a single angry line. It seemed to have erupted out of the earth in rage and fury.