Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward

phone service, electricity, and television within living memory. Prompted by tourists who became apoplectic and hyperventilated when their cell phones could not pick up a signal, cell service had only recently been enhanced by the addition of a cell tower disguised as a gigantic flagpole. It stood on the bench above the Six Shooter Motel. Residents could see Old Glory from most vantage points in town. Even so, Stony Mesa was on the edge of technology’s reach. Venture five miles down the road and you leave the digital realm and enter the primordial world of silence where one must navigate by one’s senses alone. A GPS device may tell you where you are in a maze of wilderness canyons but it doesn’t tell you how to get out. The county’s search and rescue budget was often overdrawn.

      A handful of families endured by running cattle on public land and growing fruit to sell to miners in the next county, fifty miles away. Homes were modest and the general store had a front porch where tourists on mountain bikes rested, sipped lattes, and soaked in the quaint atmosphere. The town hall was barely more than a closet and the post office was in the back of a gift shop. There were three motels in town that opened seasonally but they had fewer than thirty rooms each. In the past few years a couple of bed-and-breakfasts opened and there were two RV parks. There was a single restaurant and a couple of places to buy burgers and ice cream except in the winter when everything closed down. The town’s most memorable feature was not its enterprises but the thick and venerable cottonwoods that lined the road through town and cast welcome shadows in July.

      The Wild West Museum and Mall was so out of scale with the rest of the town that it made nearby buildings look like Munchkin architecture. Out front was a neon monstrosity that could be seen for miles. The marquee in the middle of the blinding beast featured a bucking stallion and snorting bull that pulsed incessantly. Locals referred to the Wild West Museum and Mall as the “Bull and Stallion” based on its neon sign. On the very top of the structure was a crown of light so bright that townsfolk joked it could be seen from outer space. But the place provided jobs selling cheap cowboy hats and gear to tourists so most residents conceded that although it looked like an invasion from the planet Neon, it was one more draw for tourists in a town that depended on seasonal traffic to survive.

      Stony Mesa was a gateway to a national park that drew a million tourists annually to its honey-and bone-and amber-toned canyons. In all seasons but winter they stumbled from tour buses, transfixed by the wonders of light on stone. Several times a year motorcyclists missed turns on the twisting two-lane blacktop through the park, mesmerized by a landscape of naked rock in pastel shades unlike anything they had ever seen. They discovered abruptly that the buff-colored rocks and faded sagebrush were not nearly as soft as their colors suggested. The more fortunate visitors carried away cameras stuffed with digital beauty that would inspire them long after they had departed.

      The trick was to get the tourists to stop along the way. By winter the tourists would be gone and the town shut down. Many of Stony Mesa’s residents would leave for warmer destinations, too. Those who stayed would have to drive twenty miles for a jug of milk. There wasn’t a traffic light for a hundred miles in any direction. So you had to make your nut while the traffic was heavy.

      Bo discovered that doing business in Stony Mesa was cheap and easy. There were few rules and the ones that had been passed couldn’t be found since the storage shed where the town’s records were kept burned down when lightning struck a nearby pinyon tree. If there had been rules, they would be hard to enforce. Stony Mesa didn’t have a real cop, just a dummy that sat in an old police car parked on the side of the road at the entrance to town. People saw the cop car and the figure sitting inside and they slowed down. When they realized the policeman was actually a mannequin they often stopped and took photos. Locals referred to the dummy as Officer Parker Dolittle. There were no lawyers in town and people generally shopped and did their banking “up-county” in a town not much bigger than Stony Mesa. The nearest Walmart was fifty miles away over a mountain pass that could be treacherous in winter.

      Tourism and recreation kept Stony Mesa going while the rest of Boon County raised cows and grew alfalfa for cows. Some timber was cut and milled locally but most of the nearby forests were protected by the feds. There was a uranium boom long ago and some old-timers hoped mining would come back but it never did. Greasing the skids with county commissioners on any project Bo wanted to pursue was easy. Any questionable enterprise could pass unquestioned by commissioners starved for revenue and desperate to create jobs for the children of large families, including their own, who had to move away to find work. Most of the local politicians had never seen so much as a power-point presentation and were impressed by a man who dressed and talked like them but swept in on a private jet. Stony Mesa was easy pickings for a man of Bo Hineyman’s power and stature. Until, that is, he crossed Otis Dooley.

      Otis was mayor by default. Nobody else in the town of a few hundred wanted the office. There was no pay and little status attached to a job which was widely regarded as thankless. Being mayor meant that your neighbors constantly complained to you about low water pressure, barking dogs, and abandoned trucks in weedy yards. Then there was Crazy Kitty who was convinced that whenever a new town ordinance was introduced it was an attempt at imposing Sharia laws designed by secret Muslim agents aimed at taking over the town. Kitty binged on Fox News and had a rude streak whenever she sensed the black helicopters were about to land.

      There was not much that could be done to keep Kitty from endlessly bringing up her complaints about the Muslim conspiracy at town council meetings and so most of Stony Mesa’s citizens stayed away. There were other eccentric people in town who were also tolerated but not pleasant for a mayor to handle. Like old Ezra Pitts who was convinced the Earth is not round but flat and Theda Bringhurst who belonged to a rattlesnake handling cult and spoke in tongues whenever she felt the spirit. Otis had concluded that Stony Mesa was too small to have more than one town idiot so they had to take turns.

      There were several competent people in the community who could be mayor but they lived outside the town’s narrow formal boundaries and so were legally unqualified. A small retirement and second home community had sprung up on the outskirts of the village. The few retirees who actually lived in town moved there to relax and escape such mundane matters as refereeing squabbling neighbors and keeping the town’s one fire truck running. They could care less what happened on Main Street.

      Except for that sign in front of the Wild West Museum and Mall. The sign was an affront to all who lived there. Otis Dooley hated that sign more than anyone. Otis was an amateur astronomer. His days were consumed by plumbing and carpentry but his nights were devoted to stars and Stony Mesa had more stars gleaming in the night sky than almost any place on the planet. Far from a city and sitting beneath black-shouldered mountains and rimmed by tall canyon walls, Stony Mesa had almost no ambient light. The desert air was dry and clean.

      On most nights one could easily see an awesome lattice of pulsing light divided by the faint phosphorescent trail of the Milky Way against an obsidian black sky. Otis converted a small cabin behind his home into an observatory for a large telescope that was his pride and joy. He named his telescope Spock after the television character in Star Trek.

      Otis might be on his knees with dirty hands during the work day but at night he could shed his coveralls, sit back and squint through Spock at the sublime heavens. Most nights he floated out of himself and into a universe of stars, galaxies, planets, comets, and nebulae. He marveled at the vast array of color. Yellow, red, and blue are most common but the deepest views Hubble allows reveal giant clouds of interstellar dust and gas that shimmer like the inside of a lustrous abalone shell. During the Perseid meteor shower, scores of shooting stars slid across the summer sky. Full moons were so bright he needed sunglasses to look at them.

      There was always something new to see and yet the night sky had fixed points that had been emitting light for a billion years. In fact, he knew that the light he saw when he looked up at stars had been traveling toward Earth for so long that anything he might see through Spock today actually happened before he was born, maybe thousands of years ago. The scale of time and space was humbling.

      When Otis mapped the heavens with his eye, he saw the same night sky that the ancient Pueblo Indians saw. To think that he was linked to the mysterious strangers who had littered Stony Mesa’s landscape with arrowheads, shattered pottery, and shards of stone tools was humbling. A black stump of