Dear Editor:
News arrives with the birds: you’re getting your bike bridge back. It won’t be the little steel bridge through the tunnel of Russian olive you remember. It will be a large cement structure with railings to contain flopping kids, and a long scar of rip wrap to throw a pill at the moods of Pack Creek. No more beavers to maintain the pond. No more safe haven corridor for the deer, raccoon, cats and snakes. The city is moving the entrance to Bullick Cross Creeks Park to avoid our driveway and we are supposed to be thrilled that there will be a new trailhead with a fence that will require cyclists to dismount. The wetland below the college is to be filled to create a short, steep section of trail crossing the creek at the same place where the old metal bridge was. Children will faceplant on the hill and wildlife will suffer. We will have to worry about floods caused by the structure and this letter serves as public notice to the City of Moab that it will be held liable for any damage caused by floodwaters diverted onto private land to the east by the construction and/or bridge structure.
Just last week, while clearing Russian olive next to the creek, we discovered a fair-size pile of bear feces, further confirming Pack Creek to be a lifeline all the way to the Colorado River from the base of the mountain. Some time ago we heard an elk call back there. The accelerated use of the La Sals for recreation means more and more wildlife forced away from traditional breeding and nesting grounds in search for a new home — just like us. We are looking forward to getting the hell out of here, riding the wave of real estate values to surf our way to Colorado.
Recently one of the candidates for mayor (there are no winners here) bragged that while working for the city he reduced the size of the floodplain by so-and-so percent. That is American thinking in a nutshell and the peace and quiet that once made Moab a wonderful place to raise kids is slipping away as every week there is another event drawing tens of thousands of people who think just like that into town. Moab is a trough and a toilet for millions of smelly tourists and their doomed children. My kids have grown up and left this place, and we plan to sell out and move away from here when the moon turns brown and the frog boils, and before the radioactive dust kills us.
There is an oblong monument across from the BMX park where white Rastafarians practice walking on ropes, just below 500 West next to that useless concrete bike bridge over Mill Creek. The monument claims a certain white family first settled this valley. I recently came across a man from the Ute people who was reading the plaque on that stark monument and shaking his head in disbelief. I told him I got it, and asked him what he did. He said he was working on the tailings pile, and was barely making enough to pay for a place to stay — he had a family to support, and they couldn’t live here, so he was basically working for nothing. Such is life in Moab.
Lee Bridgers
Moab
