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The Madness and Memories of Cisco, Utah
Most of Cisco's buildings are in ruins. The wind has knocked all the right angles out of those still standing. The town's broke-down vehicle-to-human ratio must be 50-to-1. Housewares are scattered across the desert. Amtrak's California Zephyr still passes through town, though passengers and their dreams no longer make a stop here.
The only dreamers left in Cisco are oilmen. And the oilmen live elsewhere.
TODAY, MOST PEOPLE FAMILIAR WITH CISCO know it as the dilapidated town-turned-junkyard south of Interstate 70, on the way to the Westwater river takeout. Some of the more curious travelers stop to poke around, to take photos, to retrieve relics of a bygone era before moving on. The adventurous ones enter residents' homes.
"I have to keep the doors locked - in Cisco!" exclaims 63-year-old Sharon Dalgleish, a town resident since 1970. Though a new car sits in her driveway and a satellite dish on the roof, people assume the town - including her house - is abandoned.
Dalgleish moved to Cisco long after its heyday. By 1970, water had to be shipped into the parched town and its children shipped out to attend school in Moab. However, there were still two cafes and bars, a service station, an operational post office (Dalgleish was the postmistress for 18 years), cattle and sheep outfits, and the ever-present oil industry. It was still a community.
"It never was quiet here. The McElhaney clan lived across the road, and they were like family to us. The kids rode four-wheelers, motorcycles, bikes . . . there was always somethin' goin' on. The kids didn't miss out on anything."
Dalgleish is petite, and her face bears the patterns of Cisco's harsh weather. Her eyes speak to strength and playfulness despite hardship. She likes to laugh, though she self-consciously covers her smile with her hand. Many of her teeth have been pulled in anticipation of dentures, but it's tourist season. Her job cleaning rooms at the Comfort Suites in Moab will keep her too busy for the dentist until this winter.
"I've watched it deteriorate here more each year, but there's more traffic all the time," she laments. The outside world continues to pour in as Cisco itself hemorrhages out through the many cracks of its weathered being.
Yet Cisco holds its stories close - both the tales of a vibrant history and the current stranger-than-fiction reality - as if by not revealing its identity, it will better protect it. But as I walk the empty and disappearing streets (half have faded back into the desert along with the buildings), I long for a glimpse of who this town was before it wasn't. Someone needs to learn its memory before it is forgotten.
DEAN CHRISTENSEN ALSO HAS TIES TO Cisco dating back to the early ' 70s. That's when he began operating oil wells in the Cisco desert, including the highest producing shallow well in the state.
"The geologists proposed it, I found some investors, and I've been stuck here ever since," he laughs. However, he's only "stuck here" a couple days a week. He makes his home in northern Utah.
Christensen is affable and likes to make jokes at his own expense. Though he's been a highly successful operator for decades, he's down-to-earth with more of the look of a man in agriculture than drilling.
Though he is generous, Christensen doesn't give an inch when it comes to his oil interests. He's battled the Bureau of Land Management over his leases for 35 years. He's been to court countless times to defend his business practices and his right to operate. He claims to be the Utah BLM's worst enemy. In fact, he once almost found himself in a courtroom fistfight with a federal attorney. He's now writing a book about his battle with the government titled My Country, My Enemy.
He feels that the BLM is overly protective of the Cisco desert. "I once had a guy say that this land was worth more as a visual resource than all the gas it can produce." He briefly surveys the empty landscape and gives me an incredulous look. "This area has no use! They just don't want this land developed for anything."
This conflict strikes me as a new take on the range wars of old. Cisco is familiar with this story. And its rhetoric.
"I was flying helicopters in armed combat when I was 19. Don't think you frighten me," says Dean to an invisible federal employee.
CISCO HAS GONE THROUGH many incarnations over the years. It sprang up as a railroad town in 1883, serving as watering hole for the steam engine and its thirsty travelers. Saloons were plentiful - replete with "friendly" women - and card games often lasted until dawn. For decades, it was a town of the Wild West with shootouts, bank robberies, bootleggers and range wars.
Ranching was the most important industry in Cisco at the turn of the century. Though it is difficult to imagine now, looking out over the barren and cracked Cisco Desert, old-timers claim that the grasses once grew belly-high to a horse. The town became the biggest shipping point for wool in the state of Utah. Hundreds of thousands of sheep were sheared each spring, and the parties were wildest during this time. In 1910, the population topped out at 323.
In 1924, as the range became depleted, oil was struck in Cisco and the area was Utah's best producing site. If there is one constant in Cisco, it is oil. It is the subterranean thread tying today's tatters to yesteryear.
Next came a small mining boom when vanadium and uranium were discovered in the area. Charlie Steen - who developed the Mi Vida mine that put Moab on the map as the Uranium Capital of the World - was living in Cisco in a tarpaper shack when he made his lucky strike.
Then, continuing through the time that Dalgleish raised her children and buried her husband, it was an era of quiet community and slow decline. Families celebrated marriages and births together, town dances were organized, kids ran through the streets, houses were cared for and neighbors welcome inside. But the railroad was now diesel-powered and didn't need Cisco as a watering stop. The pumps were turned off, and residents had to find their own water. The interstate then passed it by. Businesses vanished. Residents slowly scattered like the omnipresent tumbleweeds. The only bright point was that Hollywood took an interest in this small emblem of the Old West. "Vanishing Point," "Thelma and Louise," "Pontiac Moon" and many a Western were filmed here.
And what of today's empty era? Lunacy fills the void.
WE TOOK THE CISCO EXIT off I-70 on a July evening. This route connects with Highway 128, the most scenic road home to Moab. We stopped to walk the desolate streets and were surprised to find a young couple approaching us. He was 20. She was 18. Travis and Brennan. In love. Living in Cisco. He was there for the oil industry, and she was there for him. They needed a jump for their long-dead truck, Bessie.
Travis seems to have sprung from these desert soils. He spent his childhood here. He's as rough-and-tumble as Cisco itself. He tells me that his dad used to own 12,000 acres here but recently sold it. Brennan stands quiet, small and spunky. She used to race dirt bikes growing up. She was #11. It's painted in Bessie's back window.
"You must really like this guy to have moved out here for him," I say.
She smiles timidly yet defiantly. "He's my other half."
Three days after our encounter with the young couple, Travis led Grand County deputies on a high-speed chase through the Cisco Desert, somehow exceeding 100 miles per hour in the beater truck we unsuccessfully attempted to jumpstart. Brennan sat at his side. The transmission eventually died. Travis is in jail - again. There were warrants out for his arrest in both Utah and Colorado. He just got out of prison this spring. He's a sex offender, among other things. He was hiding - a modern-day outlaw - in Cisco.
According to Sharon Dalgleish, he's a chip off the old block.
"His daddy's never owned anything in his life 'cept a criminal record!" She scoffs at the false claim that Travis' father, Wayne, once owned Cisco acreage. She then details all that Wayne has stolen in the town of Cisco over the years, including her tractor and Stairmaster. Once, out of spite, he brought his chainsaw to the post office and cut down the flagpole as she watched. Dalgleish also claims he ran a "house of ill-repute" down the road in Thompson Springs in the '90s.
Then there's Butch and "his nutty girlfriend" who ran the Cisco Landing Store until recently. Butch died this spring when his trailer burned to the ground. His girlfriend was shipped off to the mental ward sometime before that. They enjoyed more than their share of drugs and alcohol.
"When she was drinking, if she could get a hold of keys - anyone's keys - she'd take 'em and drive drunk as a skunk," says Dalgleish. Last spring, the woman was pulled over for driving down the I-70 median.
Butch didn't make any friends in the small town, either. He was known for being antagonistic and sending his dogs out to eat the neighbor's chickens. Says Dalgleish, "I didn't much care for him, but I didn't want to see him dead, neither."
It's a hard life in Cisco.
I wonder if the settlement's dilapidated state of dissolution attracts this element of madness or if the madness is to blame for the town's slow demise. It seems like a life inside a museum-turned-mental-ward, where the inmates - and the ghosts - run the asylum. When this energy dissipates, what will be left of Cisco? And what will remain of our memories of it?
CISCO'S FUTURE IS UNCERTAIN. There was an attempt to rezone the area for heavy industrial use last year. The Grand County Council voted against it. Members noted that there is no electricity available because the power lines are at capacity. The roads into Cisco are decaying and weight limited. There is no fire protection service or water supply. These are severely limiting factors for both growth and dreams.
So the train will continue to pass by without stopping. The tourists will continue to snap photos and move on. But Dalgleish, the postmistress without a post office, remains.
"'Fore you know it, time slips away. I was 23 when I come here, and that's hard to believe. Sometimes I get to thinkin', ?What the hell am I doin' here?' But you just get in a rut, and even though you get fed up with it a lot, it's your home."
She smiles with resignation behind a work-hardened hand.
"Maybe before winter, I'll move into town. It's time. Husband's gone, kids are all gone, I'm all alone. You keep telling yourself you gotta do somethin' to get on with your life, but it's hard when you're so used to somethin'."
I have a feeling she's resolved to move before, yet here she stays. It's Cisco. It's home. Madness, sadness, memories and all.
Jen Jackson, a contributing editor of Inside/Outside, writes from Moab, Utah, about 60 miles from Cisco.
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Saturday, September 18, 2010
at 10:48:44 PM
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