Trespass

Prologue My home is a red desert that trembles with spirits and bones. There are two reasons I came here: my father's death, and the lion man who prowled my dreams. Perhaps it was coincidence, but a manhalf wild, ravenous beyond wordsslid from the dream world into the mud of the waking one the same year my father left this world for another. Ghosts. Paw prints. I have tried to stay put. The lion man is Herb. His name, his grandfather's. It doesn't quite suit him, but then, nothing about the civilized world does. Even my mother, who prefers all things tame, cannot accept it. Instead, she calls him Red for his long copper curls, for the heart pulsing on his sleeve. His eyes are a piercing topaz. And he purrs of dimensions other than this onesays he sees and hears things differently and that's why he makes up his own rules. Me, I am at a loss for words. After contending daily with the lion man's incorrigible ways, I still don't know what to call him. If Herb is red, then my father was blue. Perpetually immersed in water and nostalgia, to the point of inertia, he passed the days huntingmostly in cattails on the edge of the Great Salt Lake, just outside Salt Lake City. There he sat motionless, as if he could halt time. It was his attempt to deny the seductive sirens of civilitytheir incessant beckonings to behave, to belong. He acted as if all that mattered was the water, and the sound of wings flapping overhead. He was a good shot. But he lost his fluidity. The lake swelled, then retreated. Constrained by convention, dulled by bourbon, his primal reflexes failed. When the banks of soft marsh mud imploded beneath his feet, he simply could not respond. Finally, on the first night of the new millennium, as the rest of the world toasted a new era, my father put a bullet through his own heart. the redrock desert where I made my home sits on a tall, arid land mass called the Colorado Plateau. This physiographic province sprawls across northern New Mexico and Arizona, western Colorado, and nearly all of the southern half of Utahmy home state. Perhaps the most isolated portion of the Plateau falls within the boundaries of San Juan County, in Utah's southeastern corner. After my thirty-four years in Salt Lake Citythe state's urban capital, at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, in the northern region of the statethis remote and rural portion of the desert was a welcome change. San Juan County is the size of three small New England states. And of its 7,884 square miles, only 8 percent of the land is owned privately. The rest is either Indian or federal landmanaged by the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the Forest Service. Included within these federal jurisdictions are Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and Hovenweep and Natural Bridges National Monuments. Also included are two million acres of BLM lands with hardly any special designationsloosely managed for "multiple use," which means they can be utilized for grazing, mining, logging, and nearly any form of recreation. So scenic are these lands that if any of themany at allcould be acquired, they would be considered prime real estate. But San Juan County, by and large, is not for sale. The result: Less than two people per square mile. Not one shopping mall or gated community. Only two stoplights and a single liquor store. But there are eleven Mormon churchesthree of them built right on Indian lands. In the late autumn of our first year in San Juan County, Herb and I hiked into a deep canyonIrvine, Amy is the author of 'Trespass', published 2008 under ISBN 9780865477032 and ISBN 0865477035.