'Clinging hopelessly to the past'

Jim Stiles and I are bouncing down a dusty dirt road in the heart of Arches National Park. It’s late April, southeast Utah’s most-touristed time of year, and the traffic along the one paved road is thick. Almost every parking lot and pullout is packed with the kind of vehicles that make Stiles — founder, publisher and one-man staff of The Canyon Country Zephyr — grit his teeth and long for the good ol’ days. Motorhomes and station wagons spew forth the corpulent masses, and the roofracks of the SUVs overflow with mountain bikes.

Suddenly, Stiles’ expression lightens. "Do you want to see where Abbey’s trailer was?" he asks conspiratorially.

He is, of course, referring to Edward Abbey, who lived and worked as a National Park Service ranger in Arches in 1955-’56. Stiles bounds from the car and leads me to a nondescript spot (as nondescript as a spot may be in a place as awesome as Arches). "Here it is," he proclaims.

We have been on a daylong memory-lane tour that’s a show-and-tell for Stiles’ first book, Brave New West: When Worlds Collide in Moab, Utah, which is under contract from the University of Arizona Press. The book ties together 30 years of experience and observation into what Stiles calls "a chronicle of Moab’s demise." It is, truth be told, more a chronicle of his love affair with the town.

Stiles has already pointed out where an old cottonwood tree, which served as an orientation point for Moab for more than 100 years, once stood. He showed me Dave’s Corner Market, once a locals-only gathering place before mountain bikers and off-road enthusiasts descended on Moab like cash-bearing locusts. Here was an old cow pasture that the town could have purchased for open space but instead was sold to a developer for a tacky condominium project. There was an old diner, before the fast-food chains arrived. South of town was the house Abbey lived in when Stiles first came to Moab. And over there was Jim Stiles’ house, which he bought more than 20 years ago for $18,000, where he has put out issue after issue of The Zephyr, by hand, using technology so out-of-date it seems premeditatedly retro.

Finally, there is the site of Abbey’s trailer in Arches, the place where the writer penned his 1968 book, Desert Solitaire. There is nothing left, save the remnants of a rusty sewage pipe, leading off into the sage. And a lot of memories. In Jim Stiles’ life, this is spiritual Ground Zero.

Stiles first met Abbey in 1976. He’d come to Moab because he’d read a copy of Desert Solitaire; it was given to him by a coworker of his father’s at a Sears and Roebuck in Louisville, Ky. "Like a lot of people, Abbey crystallized my feelings about growth and change," he says, "and I wanted to see his country." Shortly after arriving in Moab, Stiles landed a job — and a trailer — in Arches, just like Abbey two decades before.

"I had done a drawing of Glen Canyon Dam disintegrating, and I wanted to show it to Abbey and to tell him what a profound effect Desert Solitaire had had on me," he says. "I had tried to hunt Abbey down in Wolf Hole, Ariz., which is where he always wrote he lived. Turns out, there was no Wolf Hole, Ariz. It was just a fabrication. So I just hung out on the North Rim (of the Grand Canyon) for a solid month, all by myself.

"Ends up, he was living the whole time right outside Moab," says Stiles. A mutual friend took him out to Abbey’s house and introduced them. They soon became fast friends. "We spent a lot of time just hanging out and talking, and we did a lot of trekking around Moab."

Stiles returns to the subject of Abbey’s trailer. "Ed and I talked once about cutting the sewage pipe into three-inch sections and mounting them on cheap wooden plaques with the message, ‘Edward Abbey’s Shit Passed Through This Pipe,’ " Stiles says. "He would autograph and authenticate them. We’d sell them for $50. I’d handle marketing, and we’d both be rich! Somehow, we never got around to it."

The Park Service eventually hauled the trailer off to a boneyard, and then sold it. "It was later junked for axles," says Stiles. "But the trailer should have been preserved as a shrine."

To Stiles, the trailer’s fate is just another example of all that has gone wrong in the Moab area since Abbey came and went. In fact, three decades after having a "this-is-the-place-I’m-going-to-call-home-the-rest-of-my-life" epiphany, Stiles has pulled up stakes and moved to another town.

But he hasn’t fled Canyon Country (he asked that I not reveal his new town) and he sure as hell isn’t backing down with The Zephyr. After 17 years of publishing, during which time he has tackled almost every imaginable issue in this poster-child region of the New West, he has found himself in a heated in-print brouhaha with the environmental movement. Specifically, he’s wrestling with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) — a group he once championed with enthusiasm. The resulting fracas has been downright ugly.

"Jim looks at the environment like a religion, and he is a fundamentalist," says longtime friend Rich Ingebretsen, a board member of SUWA and president of the board of the Glen Canyon Institute. "He has been preaching at the environmental movement lately, and most people do not like to be preached at."

As we travel even deeper into the Arches backcountry, it strikes me that Stiles does indeed look like a Southern Baptist minister, descending from the pulpit to journey into the land of the infidels. These days, the infidels are wearing Lycra.

• Communities
• Utah