High Country News - For people who care about the West

As the Bible says, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” A football player in his senior year at Mesa State College in western Colorado didn’t die for his teammates, but he willingly sacrificed his right pinky finger. After offensive lineman Trevor Wikre broke the finger during practice, he was told he needed surgery to repair it. Knowing that surgery meant foregoing the season’s last few football games, Wikre decided on amputation. “I love everybody on the team like a brother,” he told the Grand Junction Sentinel. “I told them all before the Western New Mexico game that I would have no problem taking a bullet for any of these guys. I love ’em that much. This is my bullet.”

Teri Paul, the director of a state park museum in Blanding, Utah, found herself the victim of a surprise attack recently. The cause? An anatomically correct statue of Kokopelli, a fertility god of ancient Indians, which has greeted visitors to the Edge of the Cedars Park Museum since 1989. Kokopelli, a well-known denizen of the Four Corners area, is usually portrayed on 800-year-old rock-art panels as a humpbacked flute player with a formidable male appendage. These days his profile has become a tourism cliché — you can find his image on everything from dangly earrings and place mats to coffee mugs. But to a Blanding group of women calling themselves the “Values Committee,” the Kokopelli statue had — after 19 years — suddenly become an embarrassment. As state park director Mary Tullius put it, the group complained that the statue “is too phallic.”  Park manager Paul was about to banish Kokopelli and his offending member from the park, reports the Salt Lake Tribune, when another group of locals protested that the banishment amounted to censorship. Paul then tried to compromise, moving the fertility god deeper into the park and away from the committee’s sensitive eyes. But one of the counter-protesters, Bluff resident Susan Dexter, found the flap overblown and thought park officials were too quick to capitulate: “Kokopelli is just a statue. Give me a break. It’s not like a massive erection like some of the ones you see on the panels.” Dexter suspected the women of the Values Committee were out of touch: “These poor ladies have never been to Florence or Rome or any actual art museum. They would be scandalized.”

Tiny toads, each only as big as a nickel, got a little help negotiating a bike trail at the Sunriver Resort in central Oregon. The Western toads were migrating from a man-made pond to a pine forest behind a line of condos. But first the little guys had to hop across an asphalt bike lane, and many were getting squished. Volunteers from a nature center came to the rescue, ferrying the toads in buckets across the path to relative safety. Some bicyclists and passersby also pitched in: “I had 16 in my hand,” boasted one child. Four years from now, reports the Oregonian, fully grown five-inch-long female toads will commute back to the lake to lay their eggs.

It was Aug. 8, 2008, in high-altitude Evergreen, Colo., and Mike Speck was in a hurry because — at 8:08 that evening — he was going to be married. Speck, a 54-year-old contractor, was filling a camper with water and didn’t notice the black clouds building above him, until, wham! Lightning struck, the charge going through his finger, arm and stomach, and igniting the attic of a nearby house. Speck, miraculously unhurt, immediately grabbed a hose, and with the help of a friend, doused the blaze and saved the house. In all, five homes caught fire from what people assume was one lightning bolt that spread through power lines. Paramedics say Speck’s blood pressure surged to a dangerous 250 over 180 after the lightning hit him, but the groom-to-be refused to go to a hospital. By evening, he was ready for his wedding to Dawn Williams. “It rained,” reports the Canyon Courier, “but when it was time for the wedding march, the sun came out just as the Beatles song, ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ started to play.”

A Republican businessman from the town of Scapoose in northern Oregon is running an unorthodox campaign for Congress: He’s publicly backing Democrat Barack Obama for president as well as Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Merkley. “I’m sure I’ve been branded by the GOP base as some sort of heretic,” says Joel Haugen. “He’s got that right,” reports The AP. But Haugen insists he represents fiscal conservatism and other traditional Republican values: “The whole anti-abortion, anti-gay focus seems to be the litmus test for Republicanism these days. I don’t think that’s good for the party, and I don’t think that’s good for the country.”

Lest we forget, as the feisty environmental writer Michael Frome reminds us in his book, Rebel on the Road: And Why I Was Never Neutral, environmental reporting was sparse back in the early 1960s. Turner Catledge, then managing editor of the New York Times, was urged by one of his editors to create an environmental beat, but he dismissed the idea, saying, “When there’s a story there, we’ll cover it.” But the Times ran away from serious environmental coverage, ridiculing Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s bombshell book on the dangers of pesticides, as a “wholly inaccurate” account that would “unnecessarily frighten the readers.” Time magazine took the same tack, assuring readers that accidental poisonings from pesticides were “very rare.”

Muhammad Ali Hasan, the Republican candidate for the State House in pricey Summit County, Colo., told the Vail Daily that, as part of his campaign, he’s taken a vow of celibacy until January. His Democrat opponent, incumbent Christine Scanlan, commented, “Oh, my goodness. That probably falls in the ‘too much information’ category. Yeek.”

Homeowners in Englewood, a suburb of Denver, now have to scoop the poop in their own backyards, reports the Denver Post. A task force that met for over a year came up with the new law that gives people 72 hours to remove dog-door face fines from $50 to $999. The town got tough on backyard dog poop for sanitary reasons, said deputy manager Mike Flaherty, who acknowledges that enforcing the ordinance presents problems. How, he wonders, will officers determine the exact age of the poop in question? Especially in winter, when, as he pointed out, “It’s going to be frozen.” Warnings are more likely than fines, he said, unless there’s a complaint. Homeowners, meanwhile, are calling the law a tad intrusive.

A chicken named Thelma laid a gigantic egg that might have set a record,reports Capital Press. It was eight inches in circumference and the size of a small ostrich egg. “’Ouch’ was my first reaction,” said the chicken’s owner, Margaret Hamstra. Unfortunately, Thelma died a few days later, which, as Hamstra sadly noted, “kind of puts a damper on the story.”

The Durango Herald called it a “car chase,” but for it definitely wasn’t a high-speed one: For 25 minutes, Samuel Luna, 62, drove a less than speedy 3-to-5 miles per hour while trying to escape police. The pursuit in southern Colorado’s Montezuma County began when Luna refused to leave his car even though he was sitting in the middle of a road. “He said he was waiting for traffic to clear, but there was no traffic,” said Undersheriff Dave Hart. Police pulled out all the stops to get the car to halt, including laying spike strips, busting the car’s windows and stunning Luna with a Taser gun. The driver was not thought to be driving under the influence, but he was charged “on suspicion of vehicular eluding” and resisting arrest.