Development News

LONELY IS THE BRAVE NEW WEST

After 20 Years, ‘Zephyr’ Blows Out of Moab

By David Frey, 1-29-09

Jim Stiles. Photo courtesy of High Plains Films. Click here for more on High Plains Films' documentary about Stiles, Brave New West.

They met at a poker game in an old brick house on the edge of Moab, Utah. Jim Stiles was a young volunteer at Arches National Park, a sometimes-artist shacking up in a desert trailer owned by the Park Service. The grizzled man across the table, wearing a furry state trooper’s hat, had done the same years before, and he nodded at Stiles choice of semi-employment.

“Good,” the man growled. “We need more radicals at the Park Service.”

Stiles tells the story driving through Moab behind the wheel of his Subaru Forester. As he talks, he imitates his mentor and friend, legendary desert crusader Edward Abbey, with a gruff voice and furrowed brow. Stiles had come West in search of this curmudgeonly conservationist. He looked for him first in remote Wolf Hole, Ariz., where, in a mischievous author’s note, Abbey once claimed to reside. Stiles found no Abbey, no wolf, not even a hole.

Eventually, Stiles adopted Moab as his home, where, it turned out, Abbey already had done the same. The two became friends, and co-conspirators, and long after Abbey’s death in 1989, Stiles has become the torch bearer for Abbey’s firebrand environmentalism.

Stiles hasn’t hoisted a monkey wrench, not lately, but for 20 years, he published the Canyon Country Zephyr, an alternative bimonthly newspaper famous for Stiles’ opinionated screeds and iconic caricatures.

The February-March edition, the paper’s 20th anniversary issue, is its last, in print at least. After railing for years about the amenity economy eating away at this desert town’s dusty soul, Stiles says, Moab’s New West mentality killed the Zephyr long before the economy tanked. New businesses just weren’t advertising and old businesses weren’t keeping it afloat. “There just isn’t the support for it in this town anymore,” he says.

Stiles is taking the newspaper strictly online, and making its message global, as he splits his time between Utah and Perth, Australia with his bride-to-be. “The Planet Earth Edition,” Stiles says.

Abbey died the day the Zephyr’s first copies rolled off the presses. Its inaugural issue carried Abbey’s last published work. “Every issue of the paper, I always think about Ed being part of it, but he never saw it,” Stiles says.

Over the following decades, Stiles’ took on old-guard extractive industries and new-school environmentalists with equal wrath. His rage against Moab’s resort economy alienated friends. He lost allies by accusing conservation groups of looking the other way while the desert was trashed by sprawl.

“Some people would call him just a pain in the ass,” says Dru Carr, co-director of a documentary on Stiles, Brave New West. The film, which debuted at the 2008 Telluride Mountainfilm festival, takes its name from Stiles’ 2007 book, a diatribe against Moab, “morphing,” as Stiles says, “at the speed of greed.”

“He is a thorn in the side of an environmental movement that has become a little too complacent with itself,” Carr says. “The environmental movement started out as a grassroots movement, and it still is in many ways, but it’s also a movement that has been heavily influenced by money and possibly has made some sacrifices along the way. That’s where Stiles comes from, and that’s an important role to play.”

From behind his windshield, Jim Stiles points to barns replaced by shopping centers and swanky subdivisions sprouting from red dirt. As he drives, the car stereo spins the soundtrack from Lonely are the Brave, the 1962 silver-screen version of Abbey’s tale of an old cowboy refusing to bow to civilization. Staccato strings play a soundtrack to this cow town plunging endo into a world of T-shirt shops and real estate.

Stiles confesses a love for old cowboy movies, and for old cowboy towns. If he managed to alienate both Old West miners and New West greens, he managed to befriend them both as well. The Zephyr’s tag line has been “clinging hopelessly to the past,” and though Stiles says he regrets that motto now, it captures his style. He longs for the old days of Moab, when miners, ranchers and hippies got along because they shared the same tiny streets.

“What I found here was all these misfits like me,” he says. “There was sort of this family of misanthropic crazy people, and I think we all felt like we had this secret that nobody else knew about.”

Five years ago, Stiles became so fed up with Moab, he moved 54 miles down the road to Monticello. “I got so I couldn’t stand it anymore,” he says.

His rage against myopia has brought a different set of vision problems, though. As Stiles cruises past the new billionaire’s estate on one side of town, he doesn’t see – doesn’t notice at all – the horses frolicking in the pasture along the highway that serve as a reminder of Moab’s yesteryear. The dazzling canyon country in the distance, a view that remains untouched, blurs by unnoticed.

“I love coming here to reminisce, and I hate seeing what it’s become,” he says. “I just feel so disconnected. I don’t know where I am anymore.”

The house he met Abbey still stands, but it’s no longer on the edge of Moab. It’s dwarfed by new “luxury condos” and a line of motels stretching past. Moab is no longer the sleepy uranium town it was when Stiles arrived in 1975. It’s an adventure Mecca for tourists with RVs, ATVs and mountain bikes.

When they met, Stiles handed Abbey a drawing he had made of Glen Canyon Dam blown to bits, a la Abbey’s ecoterrorism tale, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Impressed by the spirit, Abbey drafted Stiles to illustrate his next book.

“I guarantee you, if Abbey was writing The Monkey Wrench Gang today, they would also slash the tires of Hummers,” says Stiles.

Stiles drives past the rusting VWs outside Tom Tom’s garage, whose “mechanic/philosopher” always reminded Stiles of the Wizard of Oz. On the other end of town, the old diner still hangs on.

As Stiles drives, mountain bikers and Hummer tours whiz past on Main Street. It’s a version of Moab that Abbey never lived to see. Abbey welcomed the pioneer mountain bikers who arrived in town before his death, Stile says. What could be wrong with pedal power that brings more people in touch with nature? If he saw the new Moab, Stiles says, “he would be absolutely appalled.”

The town’s tourist mentality has taken “commodification of nature to its limits,” Stile says. “It can’t be any more extreme than it already is.”
Stiles turns down a lane past the plumbing shop, where, ironically, a metal statue hoists a giant monkey wrench. He ends at Abbey’s former home, a white ranch house down a lane, forgettable except for its views to the snowcapped La Sals.

Stiles used to defend his outrage as the product of optimism, tilting at bulldozers, Don Quixote-style. Over time, though, the optimism has faded; too few others shared his wrath for consumerism and greed. Case in point: his 20-year-old newspaper shedding its paper skin for lack of advertising. If no one cares now, though, someday they might, he says.

“Maybe I’m writing for kids who are 3 years old,” Stiles says, “or who haven’t been born yet.”

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