High Desert Barbecue Read Online Free PDF Page A

safety of a ridge to their ravenous handiwork below.
    I t’s not easy being radical green, Jason thought to himself.
     

Chapter 9
     
     
    T wo days after Jason looked out over his handiwork, Martin Van Kamp sat sweating and uncomfortable in a stuffy motel room. The diminutive Forest Service administrator sipped at a paper cup of tepid tapwater while trying to find a non-lumpy spot on the bed. His feet barely touched the floor, giving him little leverage to shift his position. So, in his search for a soft perch, he had to hop on his buttocks from position to position, probing for a few square inches that didn’t feel like a sack of old laundry. The room in the low-rent motel jammed in along Flagstaff’s Route 66 strip of cut-rate conveniences for travelers on a budget certainly smelled like a sack of old laundry, or at least like a high school locker room.
    L ooking equally uncomfortable, Van Kamp’s counterparts from the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service leaned back in the small room’s two rickety chairs. In rumpled uniforms pasted to their bodies by the ongoing heat wave, and unrefreshed by even the slightest breeze—the room’s one window was sealed tight, with the blinds closed—they glanced occasionally at the TV whispering softly on its veneer tabletop, but clearly preferred keeping an eye on Van Kamp’s acrobatic antics.
    S urrendering to the inevitable, Van Kamp ended his search for a soft spot on the mattress, preferring a measure of dignity to a quixotic quest for comfort in a room that seemed to stand as a shrine to the motel management’s relaxed attitude toward housekeeping.
    H is colleagues were clearly disappointed, and the three turned their gazes to the television.
    T he screen was occupied by a lined, bearded face haloed by a spray of graying hair and partially obscured by the word “LIVE” in excessively large, fire-engine red letters. He looked like a biblical prophet who’d been tracked, sedated, and stuffed into an off-the-rack Sears sport coat.
    T he screen briefly flashed to a pretty, redheaded interviewer who appeared to be crowding the upper end of her teen years, then switched back to the bearded face.
    “ Absolutely!” the face said in a voice that, even at the volume’s lowest setting, caused the three men in the room to glance warily toward the door. “The tragedy in Williams proves that there are places where human habitation is doomed.” He dragged out the “oo” in “doomed” like an actor in a late-night horror movie. “The high desert is no place for crowds of people in their houses and SUVs. The forest needs to burn to refresh itself, and it will burn no matter who is there and no matter what is in its path.”
    “ So, do you expect more wildfires like this—?”
    “ Nobody can predict the future,” the face answered, leaning forward and shaking his head with the certainty of his prophetical demeanor. “But the human population of Arizona’s rural areas has hit critical mass and that means more fire started by nature and by people who have no business in the wilderness, and more homes to be burned by that fire. Nature will take its own course, and that portends an end to mammalian dominance in northern Arizona.”
    “ Oh shit,” the BLM official muttered in the fetid motel room.
    T he interviewer blinked blankly with her mouth half open. The moment drew out, uncomfortably long.
    “ Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Greenfield. Now, back to—”
    A few seconds later, the motel room door opened inwards, revealing the bearded man and a brief glimpse of the TV interviewer chatting with a cameraman in the motel parking lot. The three men in the room all leaned forward for a glance at the interviewer’s legs below her skirt, Van Kamp almost toppling from the bed in the process.
    “ Holy shit,” the bearded man said, stripping off the sports jacket and tossing it toward the head of the bed. “If the TV crews around here get any