in gentle curves, as in a fountain; and on the river tumbles and roars.
The two prospectors never got through at all. Near the very beginning their boat overturned, cast them out, and went down the river on its own. The men managed to get ashore still alive. But they could not agree on the best way back to human settlement. One hiked up a side canyon and struck off west across-country toward the hamlet of Hanksville, some forty miles away by airline. The second man, thinking it wiser to stay close to water, trudged northeast along the Colorado back toward Moab, their starting point. He had twice as far to go, taking into account the meanders of the river, but was in no danger of dying from thirst. Neither had any food.
But the first man had all the luck. Soon after the organized search began he was spotted from the air and promptly rescued. While his former comrade struggled on mile after mile and day after day through the willow thickets and over the talus debris on the river’s shore. Search parties in powerboats cruised down the river and back again but incredibly failed to see him. He saw them but was too exhausted to shout, lacked matches to start a fire, and apparently was too frightened or too delirious to stay at one spot and construct some kind of distress signal. “They never looked in the right direction,” he would later explain, bitterly. And therefore crawled on over the rocks under the desert sun. Now and then catching a lizard which he ate raw and whole. “Tasted like tuna,” he reported. Finally he was discovered ten days after the search began near an abandoned miner’s shack below Dead Horse Point. They found him sitting on the ground hammering feebly at an ancient can of beans, trying to open the can with a stone. Hospitalized for exposure, shock and malnutrition, he urged that the entrance to Cataract Canyon be somehow chained off, closed forever to human exploration.
(Some present-day Moabites have suggested that the Federal Government take atomic bombs and blast a straight deep channel through Cataract Canyon so that they—the Moabites—can pilottheir new cabin cruisers without hazard all the way down to the new Glen Canyon reservoir.)
In all those years of feverish struggle, buying and selling, cheating and swindling, isolation, loneliness, hardship, danger, sudden fortune and sudden disaster, there is one question about this search for the radiant treasure—the hidden splendor—which nobody ever asked. It is necessary, therefore, to relate one more story concerning the uranium strike, a story based on events which may or may not have actually happened but which all who tell it will swear is true:
Among the thousands drawn to the canyon country by the publicity of the boom was one Albert T. Husk of Star Route 2, Box 17, Flat Rock, Texas. He brought with him his young and pleasant-looking (if somewhat thin and anxious) second wife, his eleven-year-old son Billy-Joe, and two little girls younger than the boy. He had left behind a seventy-acre farm in the East Texas pinelands, a Fordson tractor and lesser implements, two purebred Blue Tick coondogs and his father, A. T. Husk Senior, to look after things. All except the old man had been mortgaged to finance the hunt for new wealth and a new life. For Albert Husk was a man of vision.
The Husk family rattled into Moab one blazing hot day in June riding in a jeep pickup which looked as if it had been rolled down a mountainside and towing without safety chain an antique housetrailer of the type which only sheepherders live in these days: plywood and tarpaper, a thin coat of aluminum paint, tires worn down to the threads (purchased from and guaranteed by a dealer in Lubbock named Sharpe). Husk found a vacant spot in the mouth of Courthouse Wash where, under a splendid cottonwood tree, he set up his base camp. There was a spring nearby, with a pool below it large as a bathtub where his new wife could bathe and wash her flaxen hair. With two
The two prospectors never got through at all. Near the very beginning their boat overturned, cast them out, and went down the river on its own. The men managed to get ashore still alive. But they could not agree on the best way back to human settlement. One hiked up a side canyon and struck off west across-country toward the hamlet of Hanksville, some forty miles away by airline. The second man, thinking it wiser to stay close to water, trudged northeast along the Colorado back toward Moab, their starting point. He had twice as far to go, taking into account the meanders of the river, but was in no danger of dying from thirst. Neither had any food.
But the first man had all the luck. Soon after the organized search began he was spotted from the air and promptly rescued. While his former comrade struggled on mile after mile and day after day through the willow thickets and over the talus debris on the river’s shore. Search parties in powerboats cruised down the river and back again but incredibly failed to see him. He saw them but was too exhausted to shout, lacked matches to start a fire, and apparently was too frightened or too delirious to stay at one spot and construct some kind of distress signal. “They never looked in the right direction,” he would later explain, bitterly. And therefore crawled on over the rocks under the desert sun. Now and then catching a lizard which he ate raw and whole. “Tasted like tuna,” he reported. Finally he was discovered ten days after the search began near an abandoned miner’s shack below Dead Horse Point. They found him sitting on the ground hammering feebly at an ancient can of beans, trying to open the can with a stone. Hospitalized for exposure, shock and malnutrition, he urged that the entrance to Cataract Canyon be somehow chained off, closed forever to human exploration.
(Some present-day Moabites have suggested that the Federal Government take atomic bombs and blast a straight deep channel through Cataract Canyon so that they—the Moabites—can pilottheir new cabin cruisers without hazard all the way down to the new Glen Canyon reservoir.)
In all those years of feverish struggle, buying and selling, cheating and swindling, isolation, loneliness, hardship, danger, sudden fortune and sudden disaster, there is one question about this search for the radiant treasure—the hidden splendor—which nobody ever asked. It is necessary, therefore, to relate one more story concerning the uranium strike, a story based on events which may or may not have actually happened but which all who tell it will swear is true:
Among the thousands drawn to the canyon country by the publicity of the boom was one Albert T. Husk of Star Route 2, Box 17, Flat Rock, Texas. He brought with him his young and pleasant-looking (if somewhat thin and anxious) second wife, his eleven-year-old son Billy-Joe, and two little girls younger than the boy. He had left behind a seventy-acre farm in the East Texas pinelands, a Fordson tractor and lesser implements, two purebred Blue Tick coondogs and his father, A. T. Husk Senior, to look after things. All except the old man had been mortgaged to finance the hunt for new wealth and a new life. For Albert Husk was a man of vision.
The Husk family rattled into Moab one blazing hot day in June riding in a jeep pickup which looked as if it had been rolled down a mountainside and towing without safety chain an antique housetrailer of the type which only sheepherders live in these days: plywood and tarpaper, a thin coat of aluminum paint, tires worn down to the threads (purchased from and guaranteed by a dealer in Lubbock named Sharpe). Husk found a vacant spot in the mouth of Courthouse Wash where, under a splendid cottonwood tree, he set up his base camp. There was a spring nearby, with a pool below it large as a bathtub where his new wife could bathe and wash her flaxen hair. With two
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