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Castle Valley, Utah
In Abbey's Country, at least one place is hanging desperately onto the ideals of self-determination. Castle Valley's eclectic residents are learning how to strike a balance between leaving each other alone and organizing to protect their natural treasures.
Aaron was just returning from three-weeks of rafting through the Grand Canyon. A peripatetic mountaineer and educator, he indulges in southern Utah's vast desert landscape in as many ways as he can. Originally from southern California, he made the shift a decade ago from metropolitan madness to small-town solitude. He seems to have adjusted well.
A few hundred years after our mutual introductions, and a comfortable silence - it's hard to carry on a distracting chatter when the backdrop is so dramatic - Aaron and I discover that our destination is the same place. He's on his way home; I'm on my way to find out about his home. It isn't so unusual, I suppose, that we are heading toward the same place. After all, it seems that this type of chance meetings is how Aaron and is neighbors come to know one another.
A couple of years ago, Aaron tells me he was sitting in the Boston airport. A friendly woman approached him, initiated a conversation - the theme of it about the land, places we call home. Nearly a half-hour later, both Aaron's and the woman's flights were announced and they each had to get on different planes. The woman introduces herself. She's Terry Tempest Williams. She lives in Castle Valley, Utah, she says.
Aaron does too.
And off they each go, on separate journeys but neighbors in their own hometowns. It's the only time, Aaron says, they've seen or spoken to each other.
Castle Valley is a small town. A very small town. With a population hovering somewhere around 350 people. It is a desert community sunk deep in Abbey Country. Castle Valley sits a couple of miles off the busy state Road 128, where scores of tourists travel to and from their recreational destinations, be it to enjoy the whitewater of the Colorado River, hike the canyons or cycle the celebrated trails. Fronted by large slabs of sandstone and slickrock, the small town is insulated from the noise, blocked from the busier energy of a resort town 20-some-odd miles down river.
On one side of the valley is the giant Porcupine Rim. On the other side are two of the area's most fascinating and legendary rock formations: Castleton Tower and the Priest and the Nuns. Look south and you see the rising La Sal Mountains. They provide the stark contrast for winter. Atop their pine-tree peaks, white snow - the look of salt, if you were an early explorer - sits idly for several months, while the ocher of the valley floor pops out.
It is difficult to understate the landscape of this town. Try to write about it without using one superlative after another. I'm not sure it's possible.
Though Castle Valley is small, the homes here are spread out on acres of land. There are few places where there are clusters of homes. Each is unique in its own way. No one brought the cookie-cutters when they built this place. Just below Porcupine Rim - if you look intently and have light in your favor - you can see the tops of tepees. Or yurts. Primitive housing of one kind or another. You may also see an ostentatious home or two.
More importantly, you will see a lot of open space in Castle Valley. That is because nearly 9,000 acres of land, owned by the state, surrounds the town. Specifically, these acres are Utah School Institutional Trust Lands - represented by blue squares on maps. These blue squares checkerboard state maps across the West. They represent a creation by the U.S. Congress to set aside land that could be sold to generate income for education. In the West, the blue squares are providing some of the last open spaces of an ever-expanding region.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, known or unknown, actual or visionary....There's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space.
"It's the aesthetics of the place that is so appealing," Aaron says. "For a lot of us, it gives us the lifestyle parallel to place and home. It's important to have a home you enjoy coming home to."
Because of its size, many people living in Castle Valley rely on their personal spaces as a means to make an income. There are several cottage industries here. There isn't a convenience store, a gas station, a bakery, nor a grocery store. There are only two commercial businesses in town that generate any kind of traffic, so to speak.
Depending on who you talk to, the lack of amenities is just fine. Naturally, it what keeps this place quiet and unspoiled. That adds to the mix of people that live here - some well-known, some unfamiliar. Author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams lives here. Respected rock and ice climbers/alpinists Kitty Calhoun and Duane Raleigh live here. There are musicians, artists, farmers and environmentalists. There are attorneys, Mormons, Libertarians, teachers and old hippies. One resident built her home in a rock. Even members of the headbanger band ZZ Top called this place home. It's an eclectic mix.
At the town's entrance are a block of mailboxes, a community message board, a fire-danger indicator, and a triangular yellow sign that reads: "Caution: Falling Sky." The sign is a vestige of an episode of political strife several years ago. But that it remains in place - and to an extent relevant - is important.
With all of it eclecticism and the common thread of an ecology of place, Castle Valley is a funny little town that puts a different spin on "community." People largely leave each other alone, allowing each other to live a peaceful and unassuming life. For its size, some would think that it's a tight-knit community where everyone knows everyone else's business. Or a place where everyone shows up to participate in town meetings. Or a place where you can stop along the road and ask a person where someone else lives.
You'd think.
And you'd be partially right, partially wrong.
"Some people like to be hermits," says Jazmine Duncan, a 28-year-old and rare Castle Valley native. "It's a quiet, somewhat isolated community where people don't get involved much."
Indeed, it is well-known that some outsiders call this place the "People's Republic of Castle Valley."
Duncan's grandparents and parents homesteaded here. When her grandparents sold their farmland, they worked for others in the valley. The story is the same for her family. Duncan left Castle Valley for some of her adult life, to travel. Ultimately, she ended up back here 10 years ago because of a beauty she doesn't even talk about. Instead, she points to front of her house, where the big, square front window perfectly frames Castleton Tower.
Castle Valley became an incorporated town in 1985. Duncan recalls it being a contentious issue. Only recently they built a town building that is home to town administrative offices and the library. It, too, was somewhat of a touchy venture. Residents represent this admixture of "leave everything the hell alone" and "let's sustain ourselves and drive our own future."
"There is a variety of opinions on what Castle Valley should be," says Jeff Anderson, co-owner of Round Mountain Vineyards & Winery.
Anderson and business partner Mark Webster started the wine business in 1993. Round Mountain is one of the two commercial businesses that generate traffic. And only then the winery is limited to having six visitors per day. Their tasting room is tiny, but fresh and new. Visitors get a quick tour of the small winery, which so far produces only Chardonnay. Cabernet and Shiraz grapes are up-and-coming.
Though Anderson says the amount of customers they get is equivalent to what the business can handle, he believes Castle Valley could be better served if the town and its residents supported themselves.
"If there were a bakery here I'd go buy my bread from it," says Anderson.
He'd rather residents have businesses in town, where money is being injected to its own micro-economy instead of tax dollars and income going to support the town of Moab. Evidently, not everyone, even town administrators, glom onto that idea. Anderson doesn't get worked up over it. He shrugs his shoulders at the mention of dissent.
In recent months, Duncan has been encountering the dissentious element of Castle Valley. Earlier this summer a lightning-caused wildfire scorched just more than 200 acres of land on the perimeter of the town. The burned acreage is SITLA land. Shortly after the fire was put out, Duncan wrote the state of Utah administrators and implored them to create a fire line on the edge of town, to protect the valley's residents from spreading wildfire. Duncan says she advocated a low-impact, minimally-intrusive line that would be dug by hand, done by volunteer residents. Instead, the state reacted under the assumption that she advocated a bulldozed swath that would mar the scenery, destroy delicate and critical cryptogamic soil and, officials argued, encourage the spread of non-native, noxious weeds.
Town administrators sided with the state. In response to Duncan's request, the town asked the state to leave well enough alone. Duncan says she was frustrated with the town's attitude toward the idea. "Some people have seen this whole valley on fire," Duncan says. "I think that whatever we can do to make ourselves safe from fire is important."
It's more than worthwhile to illustrate the flip side of Castle Valley's coin. Though Duncan's rallying efforts haven't led to a unifying action, town residents do rely on the pure idea of community when required.
Such a requirement came in 1999. A crisis woke them up. At a public auction, SITLA sold 80 acres of land at the base of Parriott Mesa. Castle Valley residents didn't know about it. The state failed to notify them. The land was sold to a developer from Aspen, Colo. He and his business partner in Moab told the town that they bought the land to build a house for one of their daughters. But soon after the sale, residents noticed a "for sale" sign pop up on the land - advertised at triple the price for which the developers paid. Residents quickly figured out that "a house" was a developer's locution for "a subdivision."
The thought of seeing a subdivision at the base of the mesa drove Castle Valley residents to swift action. It would drive up property taxes and pinch an already scarce water supply. It would mar the landscape, fill the air with noise ? and, well, many other things that would send Chicken Little running with the warning of a falling sky.
After hard work and unification, Castle Valley residents, with the help of an anonymous donor and Utah Open Lands, bought the land and put it in a community trust. Since that time, Castle Rock Collaboration, the nonprofit group that formed to protect Parriott Mesa development, has grown tentacles that reach beyond those 80 acres. The group has since protected more than 3,000 acres and raised millions of dollars to save more land.
Author Williams writes that from the process Castle Valley learned that "a community engaged is a community empowered."
And that is the beauty - the other kind of beauty - of a place like Castle Valley. Residents live their quiet lives in various ways, secretly watching out for one another, defending their terrain, tolerating each others' lifestyles and being, sharing their stories, whether in the Boston airport or in the front seat of a hitched ride.
They are even there to catch the sky when it begins to fall.
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