Next Stop:  Paradox
A meditation on the magic and madness of the West

By Mary Sojourner - Flagstaff Resident

I drive home from Black Hawk, a little Colorado mining town turned Vegas. A dozen glittering casinos are crammed into a half-mile wide canyon along the bank of a creek whose name no one seems to know. What casino workers and players do tell me is that Black Hawk is taking down the local mountain to make room for another casino The mountain, a third gone, is granite; pine, fir and wildflowers grow on its steep sides. Everyone who tells me the story says, “Isn’t this bizarre?”

Because I’ve left a few hundred dollars with the enterprising business folk of Black Hawk and wonder how much granite that will remove, I take the long way home, hoping the road will bring me clarity. The road skirts the northern edge of the Uncompahgre Plateau, curves gently along the Dolores River, through red rock canyons, past the remains of the Uravan mine. My head begins to clear.

I think about dying mountain towns and what we do to revive them. Tourism. Skiing. Golf. Gated second and third home fortresses. And, what the Nouveau West delicately refers to as “gaming.” Transfusions that become the sucking of vampires. Pure paradox.

I consider the river below me. The Dolores, in early June running the brown of dried blood. It twists and curves like the veins on the backs of my old hands. I am deeply sad. My heart lifts at the pomegranate rock rising around me, the silvery mountains. Welcome paradox.

Then I am there. At a turn that will take me to Paradox. I stop and study the map. The town of Paradox lies 23 miles to the west. I want to be home. I climb back in the truck and imagine I leave Paradox behind.

Between Kayenta and Tuba City, a huge column of smoke rises in the distant Southwest I wonder if Kendrick Mountain is still burning. I think about fire and how I love it. I think of the animals trapped in its flames. My heart lurches, the hard beat of paradox.

Just before Tuba City, I see a second drift of smoke off Kendrick, and realize I’ve been watching the North Rim of the Grand Canyon burn. The sun drops behind the column of smoke, goes gold, copper, bronze. I think of Tater Point, of watching night move out over the land far below, waking to see stock tanks shine silver in the coming dawn. I remember the man who sat by my side. I think of his betrayal, his death and how I am still both angry and sad.

The hard road from Cameron to Flagstaff holds my attention. Two people I love died on this highway. A cairn marks the spot. Their death was a terrible loss to all of us who loved them, and a wondrous gift. The rez glows golden around me and I think of the people who live here, how they must walk with one foot in the old path and the other in the new. I watch the long sweet lines of the San Francisco Peaks and think that only the sight of them could keep a person steady on course.

Driving into Flagstaff, to my home in the heart of paradox, I remember the writing circle I taught a few weeks ago under the shade of a ponderosa near the old homestead on the Flying M ranch southeast of Flagstaff. Not one of the 11 writers in our circle was a native of the west. And, we were welcomed. By the ranch owners, by the sight of the Peaks on the far horizon, by light filtering through the green pines.

We were in the heart of another paradox, a family ranch struggling to stay alive, not just alive, but in right living. All around us, ranches were for sale, sold, gone to developers who divided them into piles of cash. A web of governmental regulations bound ethical ranchers in dilemmas that could only be solved by infusions of labor, costly labor, and costly decisions. Around us, the West transformed into a virtual reality of ranchettes, gated villages and those who occupy them. $150,000 kitchens. Thousand-dollar stetsons. Stone-washed denim cowgirl outfits, the wearer zooming 50 miles an hour on a one-way street, suffering from amnesia for turn signals and common sense.

We wrote – we were graced with stories, with companionship, one of us with a single owl feather lying on the forest floor. I remembered that some of the native people believe the owl is a harbinger of death and her finding it seemed right to me. The old ways of living with the West are being killed. The new ways are not yet born It is here, in the heart of paradox, that we must, as oldtimers, as newcomers, as grateful and baffled residents of our fragile home, bring them through.

Mary Sojourner is a professional writer whose work has appeared in High Country News, Flag Live!, the Arizona Daily Sun, and on National Public Radio, among others.