Days 10 & 11: Utah

I spent a leisurely morning at the hotel with my dear friend Kelly in order to feel that I’d had some semblance of a Vegas time. We talked and relaxed poolside, gawked at gamblers who were clearly still there in the morning, and headed north to St. George, Utah for breakfast. She is working on an interview project as well at the moment and we talked about leadership. It was interesting for me to be on the other side of the table after so many years of interviewing others and I was able to share my true thoughts about leadership. In short, I have a pretty harsh critique of the concept and I believe we should strive for a society in which we share leadership based on our personal interests, strengths, and networks rather than building so many hierarchical systems that need to be maintained and stocked with trusted people and yet always seem to fail on some level. We talked about the very real old boy’s club in our home city and I was pretty frank about my desire for them to just go away already and make room for the excellent ideas of different people. I will link to her project when it’s more publicly available. I was glad to spend some time in familiarity and camaraderie with one of my favorite Spokanites and one of my favorite anthropologists.

It’s a long drive north to Salt Lake City, where I had set up my first real Couchsurfing stay of the trip so far (which must mean I have a great friends-of-friends network in this country!) and I arrived there in the early evening to meet Jay. He was a great host and took me into downtown Salt Lake City which is epic at night. We talked about the Mormon church, the weird ways that the country’s history is told, particularly around settlers and pioneers, and the bizarre and impressive things that humans do–like build a massive temple by hand over the course of forty years.

In the morning, I drove east to meet with Donna Young, an incredible woman whose story you’ll hear shortly. I managed to get a few photos of the huge refinery that sits, bizarrely, just outside downtown Salt Lake City and continues the skyline while adding a weird dystopian twist to the scenery. While waiting to hear the details of where we’d meet, I found a lovely park in Roosevelt, Utah and had some quiet writing time interrupted by a massive thunderstorm. I went to meet her at the library in Roosevelt and we talked about Vernal, Utah. Donna has been a midwife in the Vernal area for 20 years and has recently been profiled in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and beyond for her insistence that we look at what is causing spikes in miscarriage, stillbirth, birth defects, and infant mortality in her area. A condition of our interview was that I not join on the bandwagon of blaming fracking exclusively for the spike, as, by her reckoning, there is not conclusive proof that it is the case.

While fracking is obviously a toxic process that releases pollutants in many forms into the area surrounding, including known carcinogens, Vernal has many more potentially deadly neighbors to deal with. She told me about the Simplot phosphate mine just outside of town, long term concerns about radiation in the broader area, and the ways that the deaths could be influenced by the air, by the water, or by a combination of the two. Her story, which you can hear in part on Praxis this week and in full here on the blog quite soon, has been met with silence or threats among the local medical community, the oil companies, and the city, county, and state governments. Talking with her left me shaken and angry and in admiration of her steadfast desire to protect these mothers and children. She shared her plan to install her own system of air quality monitors at the ground level (something the county and companies refuse to do) on private land. I asked her, “You’ll do it without their permission?”. Her answer gave me goosebumps and it’s echoed all throughout the country in places, usually poor places, where toxic projects are sited or where their waste is dumped: “They didn’t ask our permission to poison us.” You can read more about her independent research into this death spike at her website here.

She recommended that I drive through Vernal and see the newest of a series of evaporation ponds, where the chemical slurry that’s injected into the ground during the fracking process is set in a massive pond which is lined in black plastic to draw in energy from the sun, which evaporates the chemicals–illegal to dispose of in other ways–into the air and, in theory, away. “Away” is a problematic concept in industries of all kinds. On a spherical planet of interconnected systems, does “away” or “elsewhere” even exist? She warned me not to go close to the pond and I stayed in my car to photograph it. Just rolling down the window to shoot a few quick cellphone photos though was enough to lodge the scent in my nose for over 24 hours. The entire drive into Colorado and most of the next morning I battled a bad headache as well. The smell was definitely the worst aspect, though, an acrid, chemical, burning smell that affected my sense of taste and lingered on much longer than anything similar I’ve experienced.

I was left, literally, with a bad taste in my mouth as I drove the final hours from Vernal into Colorado. Donna suggested that I take a route north over the Flaming Gorge Dam and then cut through southern Wyoming to get there. Under different circumstances, it would have been a beautiful drive, but I was not equipped to enjoy it. A car in front of me crushed a young rabbit under its tires on the way north and seeing that, after hearing this heartbreaking story about four of five of the women Donna coaches through pregnancy losing their babies before their shared December due date was just too much for me. This trip has largely made me very hopeful about humanity and it’s been inspirational to meet the people who dedicate their lives to understanding how we might shift our way of being on this planet, but the darkness is always present at the other end of the story, too.

As night fell, I was the only normal-sized vehicle on the highway, which was also riddled with nighttime construction and a great deal of stress for a driver with bad night vision blinded by industrial-sized lights. The only infrastructure visible in that darkness was, you guessed it, oil related. Gas stations and the flames and lights of oil refineries were the only things I noticed next to the road. I’m sure it’s a beautiful area in other ways, but I won’t get to see it that way. I made it to my host, Karen’s house around 11:30 that night outside of Fort Collins, CO more disoriented and emotionally overwhelmed than I’ve been in a long time. At her house, there were more stars than I’ve been able to see in a long time and after such a day it was all I could do to sit there and look up. And keep looking up.