by Jen Nordstrom

Terry Tempest Williams writes “If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found.”

I remember kneeling on the wet ground, the reddish-brown earth painting circles on the knees of my favorite jeans. Dew was everywhere and the smell of wet sagebrush seemed to soak into every pore. We sat watching the sun slowly begin to rise, sending streams of orange and pink light cascading over the Lost River Range. Then we heard it, the first “boom.” I remember being so disappointed with that sound. There had been all of this hype over the ‘booming’ the night before at the dinner table, and now it just sounded like my brother had popped his knuckles.

Then my dad handed me the binoculars. As a ten year old somewhat prissy girl, even I was impressed. Three or four male sage grouse were strutting back and forth on the lek in the distance. They would puff up the sacs on their throats and chest, and I just knew that if they had arms they would start beating their chests like King Kong atop the Empire State Building. Instead, they would kind of bob their heads and a hollow sounding ‘Pop! Pop!’ could be heard. Their tail feathers were fanned out in a magnificent array, looking almost like black spears against their reddish bodies, the same color as the circles on my knees. I watched the hens peeking out of the sagebrush seeming to hide just like us, not wanting to interrupt the magnificent display.

This is the same desert where my dad would turn my brother and me loose, and we’d spend hours looking for arrowheads among the chips of obsidian that was everywhere you stepped. On a year with good rain, the bunchgrasses would sometimes be taller than we were, and in places the sagebrush was as tall as my father. When I was young, the Big Lost River even made its way out to the desert to run through steep and narrow basalt canyons, feeding lush vegetation that provided the perfect hiding place from the scorching summer sun. We would jump from the cliffs after catching a limit of a trout, and return home to mom red from the sun, covered in mosquito bites, and smelling like the river. For us, unlike most of the people we knew, the wild places we visited didn’t provide us with a place to feed our livestock or harvest trees; these places were home.

I never really knew how much the desert defined me until I returned in my early twenties seeking solace from a broken heart. I hadn’t been to our place in the desert for years, but I thought that it could bring back the parts of me I had lost over the years. I knew I could find peace and solace there in the midst of my memories.

Even though I knew there would be no water in the river, I was not prepared for what I found.

There was no tall, shiny, green grass, no sego lilies, and the lupines were chewed to stubs. A few cacti remained huddled to the desert floor, blooming in spite of the devastation. But there was no purple, no white, and not even the skeleton of a willow remained along the river bed. Every step I took resulted in a poof of dust that covered my toes and open sandals. Pooch dust, everywhere, and cow dung, and silence. I stopped to listen for the tanagers and the crickets; nothing. I walked around the dry river bed, over a small hill to a sheltered cove in the lava rocks. My dad had taken me here years ago to show me where ancient people had sat and chipped the obsidian to make arrow heads.  Round rocks had been hauled up from the river bed and lay among bleached bones that had been broken with those rocks to access the marrow within. I crested the hill and hopped down into the dent in the rocks. Everything was smashed, the ground littered with cow pies.

I felt anger surge within me, then I sat down in the dust, looked around me, and cried. I cried because I had come to this place to be reminded of what it was in myself that I was trying to save, what I was trying to heal, but it was gone. I found out later that the lek where we used to go sit on spring mornings had been abandoned, along with almost all of the others in the valley. In a meager ten years, everything was gone. I sat and wondered where my daughter would go to remember herself. Where would I take her to find the things I remembered so vividly? Where would she find solace when so much had been taken away?

That is the day that I realized the silence of the desert was an echo of the silence we as a people had embraced by failing to stand up for the places and things that cannot speak for themselves. I vowed to not be quiet anymore. I knew I could be viewed as a radical by most of the people I had grown up with if it meant saving what remained of this place. I found my voice that day and a direction. I have spent the last seven years trying to keep the livestock industry from ruining other places, and I am thankful that groups like the Western Watersheds Project refuse to remain silent, taking on the fight for protecting the west’s last great places for those of us that are unable to do so.

Jen Nordstrom is an Idaho native living in Twin Falls who works for WWP writing comments, protests and appeals of Forest Service and BLM grazing decisions and planning documents.

Check out WWP’s archive of our semi-annual publication, the Watersheds Messenger