Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward

domestic disputes, rescuing stranded hikers, and rounding up horses that got loose and ventured too close to roads. The accidents they responded to were few and far between but tended to be gruesome given the high speeds that desert drivers are accustomed to, the unforgiving landscape of rocks and ravines, and the too frequent presence of deer, elk, and cows in the middle of roads at night. The previous week Ula May Bostick superglued her husband Frank to the toilet seat and beat him with a broom handle for having an affair with Myra Gundy. That was about as exciting as it got in Boon County. Compared to that, the tar sands protest was epic.

      The morning after the protest, Gif Hanford called Orin Bender. Gif was the foreman on site. He’d been out of work for months after a shoulder injury and looked forward to a long, secure, and lucrative run as a field manager with Drexxel’s tar sands project. The prospect of losing that because a bunch of loonies with dreadlocks and backpacks got in the way was alarming. His sister’s kid had cancer and he was helping her pay medical bills. There was credit card debt and he owed child support. He had too much at stake to let a bunch of damn freaks stop work. He knew that the suits who ran Drexxel avoided embarrassing confrontations with the public and would try to PR their way around any ensuing controversy. No, Gif thought, this calls for someone who knows how to play hardball. Orin could do that as well as anyone Gif knew.

      Meanwhile, the thirteen ardent members of the Seafold Ledges Tar Sands Alliance were whiling away in the Boon County jail. They were crowded together in a single holding cell while Sheriff Taylor figured out what to do with them. He called and consulted with the county attorney, Lawton Hatch, and argued that keeping them cost money he hadn’t budgeted for and there were not enough cells to handle them according to state standards.

      To make room for the new inmates, he considered releasing Ike Mooney, who was arrested the day before. Ike was a driver for the state fish and game workers who were poisoning and draining Circle Bluff Reservoir to scour out invasive populations of zebra mussels and bass. Ike was supposed to haul a load of dead fish to the landfill but stopped at a tavern in Junction and got soused instead. He ended up at the home of his ex-wife’s boyfriend, Cecil Barney, who arrived home later to discover a truckload of stinking fish piled up against his garage door. The sheriff felt it would be best to keep Ike until he was completely sober and give Cecil time to calm down. He could release the woman they called Meth Head Mona but she’d only be back tomorrow.

      Lawton Hatch interrupted him. He was adamantly opposed to an easy release. “These are the same damn people who shove every federal law protecting endangered species down our throats and keep us from getting jobs and getting rich by tying up oil and gas so we can’t get to it. I intend to make an example of them, not coddle them!”

      So the prisoners stayed while the lawyer who volunteered to represent them bargained over charges and bail with Lawton Hatch. Luna Waxwing had three days to reflect on the events that put her into an orange jumpsuit several sizes too large and landed her next to a cellmate named Mona who had lost her teeth to meth. Mona was caught shoplifting cigarettes, her tenth offense. Luna had lots of time to converse with Mona and the others in the lock-up who were not there for protesting the strip-mining of the Seafold Ledges. She wanted to hear their stories. On day three she had a revelation.

      “I get it!” she told Mona. “Addiction, alcoholism, self-sabotage, laziness, rage—they’re not just bad behaviors but ways we withhold our participation from a world that makes no sense, that cannot sustain us psychologically or spiritually.”

      Mona cackled, coughed, then reached down into her jumpsuit to scratch her crotch. “You sure is funny, girl!”

      Mona notwithstanding, Luna thought she was onto something. She herself had succumbed to drugs, failed, and raged because she just couldn’t belong to the program that her teachers and counselors, her mom, and her peers handed her. Why accept a way of life that is coldly competitive, even predatory? Why is it so important to own things, to have more, always more? Are the so-called successful happy?

      In her teens, she looked around and saw judgmental hypocrites in charge at every turn. Greedy pigs wrote the rules. And the rules were imposed in an ass-backward way that offended her. Pink hair was criticized but it was okay to flaunt a diamond that was mined by workers who were essentially slaves. You were mocked for being a vegan but it was okay to eat calves that were trapped in huts and overdosed on milk so their flesh was pale and tender. People give their dogs Christmas presents and then eat ham from a pig that is every bit as intelligent and sensitive as their pets. Stealing millions from widows was punished lightly if you wore a fine suit and silk tie but rob beer from a liquor store and you could be killed, especially if you were born black or brown or red. It was all so transparently bogus and contrived to her but nobody else agreed. Lose the attitude, they told her. Liz, don’t be such a downer. Grow up!

      Her search for a North Star to guide her took her to church where, again, the contradictions were ripe. Killing a fetus the size of a thumb that had no relationship beyond its host was a sin but it was okay to bomb cities full of whole people with parents, siblings, neighbors, and co-workers. Masturbation was a sin but the addictive consumption of wasteful bling passed for normal.

      “I can use my two fingers to get off,” she told the pastor, “and you use your wallet, so my pleasure has a smaller ecological footprint than yours.” The pastor was both baffled and alarmed. She was asked not to attend the youth retreat that summer and so she left the church and never returned.

      She didn’t stand a chance, Liz Waxwing with her poems and paintings, her guitar and her hand-colored scarves, her notebooks covered with drawings of fairies, horses, and snakes. To top it off, the American Way was boring. Boring! She rejected it.

      At seventeen she was busted a second time for a purse full of pot. She failed to appear at her court hearing and a warrant was issued. Unfortunately for Liz Waxwing, a cop was sent to serve the warrant just minutes after Liz dropped three hits of the best acid she ever had.

      Unfortunately for the cop who served the warrant, Liz was lean, supple, and so tripped out that she thought she was being abducted by an alien from outer space. She was pretty sure the shiny thing on his chest said “Pluto.” Ummm, maybe “Polite.”

      When the blue uniformed space monster stopped to eat a whopper and fries, she managed to slip her cuffs and squeeze between the metal netting separating the back seat from the front. There was just one way out, she reasoned. I must steal this car and escape.

      She was easy to catch, especially after she turned on the siren and lights. At ten miles per hour, a speed she considered dangerously fast, she was only a few blocks away when a cop on foot managed to reach past her and grab the keys.

      She was appropriately contrite after the LSD wore off. Her father, whom she had not seen for years, paid for the best lawyer he could find and several teachers came forward to testify that Liz was a bright, creative, and sensitive girl who could be redeemed. The judge sent her to a wilderness therapy program in Boon County, far away from those hippies and punks who were a negative influence. Years later, Liz returned to the back-o-beyond desert that was once the scene of her exile, this time to sit in front of a bulldozer while chained to a gate.

      Jay Paul Ziller was arrested, too. He went by the name Hip Hop Hopi, a reference to a maternal grandmother who was half Hopi and his childhood in Oakland where his parents taught in an inner-city school. They named him after a character in a Tom Robbins novel. It could have been worse. His sister was named Rosy Dawn and he had a brother named San Gabriel after the mountains his parents were camping in when they conceived him. Most people called him Hoppy.

      Throughout his inner-city upbringing, Jay Paul Hip Hop Hopi Ziller expressed a primal urge to rush straight into danger. This tendency may have been reinforced by the frequent need to defend himself and his sister in schools where they were, ironically enough, a small white minority. Although their best friends were non-white and treated them well, Rosy Dawn was widely regarded as a honky name worthy of ridicule, especially by kids who relished the opportunity to give back to whites the hard time they got from them. Hoppy was her defender and jumped quickly into fighting mode whenever she was harassed. He took risks so often that it became habitual. His attraction to action also made Hoppy attractive to young women who had yet to discover that dashing