An outsider in God's country

Wilderness advocate sess parallels between ancient and modern ctltures

Sandy Nelson | The New Mexican

3/2/2008 - 3/2/08

Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

By Amy Irvine

North Point Press
352 pages, $25
Being accepted as a "local" is almost as difficult in southeast Utah as it is in Northern New Mexico, where even descendants of 15th- and 16th-century Spanish colonialists are relative newcomers. In Utah, only Native Americans and descendants of settlers who arrived by the Hole-in-the-Rock route in 1879 qualify as locals, and the rest of us will always be "outsiders."

So being a native Utahan and onetime member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints didn't open any doors for Amy Irvine when she moved from Salt Lake City to the small San Juan County town of Monticello in 2000 to be closer to the landscape and the man she loved and to heal from her father's suicide.

As Irvine says in Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, San Juan County is a public-lands playground. Only 8 percent of its 7,884 square miles is privately owned, and the rest is federal or tribal property. It's also a battleground for environmentalists and those who value public land according to its usefulness for ranching, mining and motorized recreation.

Shunned for her work as development director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Irvine finds solace in the canyons and mesas of the Colorado Plateau and among the ghosts of the ancestral puebloans who left their marks here thousands of years ago. She eventually retreats to a cabin south of Monticello, becomes pregnant and marries her boyfriend, Herb McHarg, whose work as a Moab-based environmental lawyer leaves him little time to spend at home.

As her solitude intensifies, Irvine begins to see parallels between her individual meltdown and that of the ancestral puebloans, whose communal lifestyle appears to have imploded with the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture — an iffy means of survival where the soil is poor and precipitation unpredictable.

"Mass ritual activity and violence came into vogue — indications that desperate measures were needed for any semblance of order," she writes. "And suddenly the culture was too far gone, its infrastructure too complicated, and everything it held as beloved or necessary was now inaccessible."

To Irvine, the environmental, spiritual, nutritional and social crises that preceded the ancestral puebloan exodus from the Four Corners area seem analogous to contemporary divisions in human society — from full-scale wars in Iraq and other global hotspots to territorial hostilities closer to home. She writes: "Old-time Mormons: mostly ranching families, righteously entitled. The New West: subdivisions of 'ranchettes,' extreme motorized sports, and tourism — a fate worse than cows. And the tree-huggers: frantically trying to save the desert, but pissing everyone off in the process. Highly defensive postures. Dualities that get more divided, more rigid, every day. Meanwhile, the landscape that everyone loves — in one form or another — is almost beside the point."

She cites the Zuni perspective, from River Flowing From the Sunrise by James Aton and Robert McPherson, that the ancestral puebloans left to find "a center place where they could regain spiritual balance." Irvine sought such a place in southern Utah, but failed to find it. After the birth of their daughter, Ruby, she and McHarg moved east to a small community near Telluride, Colo., in 2005.


Nelson is a former New Mexican copy editor who lives 12 miles northeast of Monticello, Utah.


Amy Irving will read from and sign Trespass at 4:30 p.m. Saturday at Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St. Call 986-0151 for information.