From Tonopah, NV, the small town where young Wally Wanker lived, it’s a 150 mile drive in any direction to find a place with more people than jackrabbits or rattle snakes. In such a remote place, he couldn’t take refuge in anonymity like he might have in the city. Everyone knew everyone and everyone knew Wally, the weird, overweight kid with the thick black-rimmed glasses, the flat nose and the C+ IQ.
He was a voracious reader and when he was 11, he discovered the western writer Edward Abbey, who had a tremendous influence on young Wally. Most of his days that summer were spent hiking through the sagebrush of the high desert around Tonopah. He discovered its stark beauty and began to see himself as a creature of the desert like the snakes and reptiles that managed to make a living in this dry, seemingly empty place. He and they were survivors in a harsh environment.
When he was 13, his father took him on a raft trip down the Colorado River in Southern Utah. For ten days they floated down Glen Canyon, shooting the white-water, sleeping along the red-rocked banks of the mighty river and eating trout that they caught themselves, while retracing the steps of John Wesley Powell.
The diversity of the area amazed him; from red-rock cliffs and natural arches cut in sandstone to gentle river beaches and narrow canyons with walls rising hundreds of feet on either side. And the colors, the infinite shades of ruby and creamy coffee and sandstone contrasting against the light blue sky like pastels in a watercolor painting. In the castle rocks rising from the desert floor, he could count the layers of sediment, one on top of another in varying shades, as if God himself had written the area’s history there for all to see.
The fertile images and the experience of living in the delicate ecosystem made a profound impression on young Wally. They were ten of the best days of his life; ten days in a place where, for the first time, he knew he belonged. Ten days when his universe was just as it should be.
On the last day of the trip, they sat by the fire at Kane Creek Landing and Wally’s father said “Take a good look around son; you may never see this again.”
“Oh, I’ll see at again, alright, I’m coming back here every chance I get. When I grow up, I’m going to live here.” Wally replied.
“You won’t see this if you do. They’re building a dam a couple of miles downstream from here and they’ll flood this all out.”
“What!? All of it?”
“A good portion of what we’ve traveled on this trip will be under water, part of a huge lake they’re going to call Lake Powell, after the explorer that discovered Glen Canyon, Major John Wesley Powell. The dam’s been under construction since ‘56 but the area won’t be flooded for another 3 or 4 years.”
Wally was crushed. He’d finally found where he belonged and it was about to be destroyed. How could he have seen all the construction going on during the trip and not even wondered what it was about? He felt foolish for not questioning and vowed to be more observant and more curious from now on. He had never heard of John Wesley Powell or of Glen Canyon Dam, but you could damn sure bet that he would find out about them real quick. They were naming after Major Powell, the very project that would destroy his discovery? It made no sense to him.
The call of the nearby river moving steadily downstream had lulled Wally to sleep every night since this trip began but this night Wally slept fitfully, tossing and turning in his sleeping bag. He dreamed that he was standing on the Kaiparowits Plateau, two thousand feet above Glen Canyon, in the bright sunshine, looking down at the steadily flowing river below. The peace was shattered by a tremendous noise as a huge wall of water came crashing toward him, ready to sweep him away and drown him in his personal apocalypse.
He woke with a start, gasping for breath, heart pounding. He lay still in his sleeping bag for a long time, waiting for his heart to return to a normal pace when, in a moment of clarity, it hit him. He knew what he was supposed to do with his life. In 1962, at thirteen years old, before the world even knew what one was, he had become an environmentalist, and if necessary, an environmental terrorist.
By the summer of 1964, construction on the Glen Canyon Dam was rapidly approaching completion. Early one June morning, just days after school ended for the summer, Wally packed his backpack and quietly slipped out the back door while his parents slept. He walked down to the highway, stuck his thumb out and two days later he was on top of a hill north of Page, Arizona, looking through binoculars at the activity below as Glen Canyon Dam neared it’s final form.
That night he slipped through the darkness, down the hill, armed for assault. With his knife, he cut hydraulic lines. He brought sugar for the fuel tanks, knowing that it would cause the massive engines to overheat and seize. With his hammer, he flattened connections, damaged bolt heads and smashed gauges. He opened hoods and poured sand into crank cases. When the sun came up he was five miles away, asleep in a cave that had been carved in the sandstone by the Colorado River in its glory days.
Over the next two weeks, his continued this nocturnal pattern of wreaking mayhem in the moonlight, striking in different places and adding new twists to his repertoire of destructive tricks. One morning, after a particularly productive night, he woke with a start. He was being yanked by the foot of his sleeping bag into the daylight. The harsh sun stabbed his pupils. His back bruised and bled as he bounced off jagged rocks and he felt a warm stream on the back of his head where it had struck a piece of sandstone.
“Alright, you little piece of snot, the party’s over.” A burly man in a Sheriff’s uniform yelled. He rolled Wally over and handcuffed him. “You’re coming with me, you little delinquent.”
Wally was taken to the Kane County jail in Kanab, UT because the little cave he’d been sleeping in was on the Utah side of the border. For 18 hours he sat, speaking to no one, until he was called in to the visitor cell where his father waited, white faced and sullen. He expected to be yelled at, screamed at, knowing that his father couldn’t possible understand.
“You look awful.” His father said. “Are you OK?”
“Nothing that won’t heal.” Wally said quietly with his head down.
“Son, I brought you up right. I taught you to stand up for what you believe and I know you think that you were doing just that, but there is another way. We have a system of laws in the country. They aren’t perfect and they don’t always work, but without them, we are cavemen.” A sardonic smile crossed his lips; the irony of where his son had been hiding wasn’t lost on him. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
“I’m not sure.”
“If you really believe in your cause, learn the law. Beat these people in court, it’s the only chance you have. Otherwise, you’ll spend your life in jails like this one and the dams will still go up. Son, I’m proud of you for standing up for what you believe, you just should have found a more appropriate way to do it.”
The fifteen year old in Wally bubbled to the surface and his eyes began to water. In a shaky voice, he asked, “What’s going to happen to me, Dad?”
“I got you an attorney. He tells me that, because you are still a juvenile and have no history of being in trouble, they’ll probably let you off pretty light this time. If it happens again, that’s another story.”
In a matter of days, Wally was driving home with his dad, having learned his lessons well. Wally had decided to become the first Wanker with a college degree.
His college years were pretty uneventful. He worked hard and spent his summers hiking and camping in Southern Utah. Many nights he slept on the shores of Lake Powell, trying to picture the canyons below in massive, calm surface.
It could never be the same, now that the dam was in full operation. If he blew the dam to smithereens, as he often fantasized that he one-day would, it wouldn’t matter. A piece of history was gone, lost forever under a layer of silt. Knowing that the water and electricity that the dam generated went to Southern California was like salt in his wounds. Glen Canyon was gone so that lights stayed lit in Hollyweird.
Just after Wally graduated from law school, he got married. His new bride was a working class girl who was mostly attracted to him because he was about to become an attorney and everyone knew that attorneys made a lot of money. She expected a carefree life on easy street but, even after he passed the bar on his third try, Wally wasn’t that kind of attorney. She packed her bags once it was clear that the easy life she’d dreamed of was not in the cards.
It wasn’t that Wally didn’t have clients; he had more of them than he knew what to do with. It was that most of his clients couldn’t pay. He had a strong sense of compassion for anyone in need and their ability to pay just didn’t factor in.
What money he did make, he spent on his favorite environmental causes. He was a man driven by his passion for just causes and there was no cause more just than preserving the earth for future generations. The big money that he was always fighting in court could afford batteries of lawyers and it was tough for a lone attorney to take them on. That didn’t stop Wally from trying and he won more that his fair share of cases, all things considered.
As the seventies wore on, his frustrations grew. Despite winning a few battles, the war was slipping away. Emotionally, Wally had always lived perilously close to the edge, but in 1975, when Ed Abbey published “The Monkey Wrench Gang”, he slipped over.
Wally read the book over and over until he could recite entire chapters. The book was about a group of people who try to stop the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam by sabotaging, or “monkey wrenching” the construction equipment. Wally was convinced that Mr. Abbey must have been inspired to write the book by reading news accounts of his escapades years before. It was obvious to Wally that the Hayduke character was himself.
Hayduke was an ex-Marine just back from the war. He was an earthy, even crude character with no social skills and no sense of purpose until he fell into The Monkey Wrench Gang. The gang and their work gave meaning to an otherwise meaningless life and Hayduke became the most fearless, single minded warrior they had. The parallels Wally saw between Hayduke and himself were uncanny.
Wally thought about the book constantly and began to emulate Hayduke. By 1980, he was wearing camouflage clothing and a bandana and driving an old, beat up Jeep, just as Hayduke did. He practiced law less and less and drank beer and slept in the desert more and more. When he lost his house, the only asset he had, the transformation was complete. He didn’t think of himself as homeless; his home was the entirety of Southern Utah.
Wally slept under the stars and pondered what to do next. Maybe his Dad had been wrong all those years ago. Maybe his little exploits had been more than the pranks of a misguided fifteen year old. They had inspired the greatest writer of all time to write about him, hadn’t they? One thing was clear, terrorism got attention, and court action had gotten him nowhere.
As the days and weeks went by, he pondered such things, until, in a moment of clarity just like so many years before, he knew what he had to do.
The damn dam had to go.
It made a great visual.
Just like the dream he’d had so long ago, about being swept away by the waters of the mighty Colorado, he pictured all those Southern California assholes learning to tread water as the liquid wall swept down on them like the wrath of God. All eight or ten or twenty million or whatever there were of them; Wanker Stew. His favorite thing about Hollyweird was that it was downstream.
His time as an attorney had taught him a little. He knew that he’d have to steal whatever he needed to accomplish the job. Otherwise, it would be too easy to trace the goods back to him. The key to successfully accomplishing his little plan was the same as winning in court: Preparedness, research, doing your homework.
He drove his old Jeep into little towns all over Southern Utah and broke into Farmer’s Co-op stores, stealing a few cases of fertilizer and whatever other provisions he happened to need at the time. He stashed his little cache in the desert, making sure he wasn’t followed. Having learned from his first crack at terrorism, he made sure that he slept somewhere far away from his cache of stolen goods.
Before every job, he spent many hours casing the joint and the town. There were few cops in most of these small towns and most had a routine. He made sure that he knew that routine before every job, he never struck in the same town twice and he never got greedy. Quick in and quick out, take only what you need; that was the key to remaining a free man.
When he finally had enough fertilizer and diesel fuel, he stole a houseboat and loaded it all on board, hauling it in on a stolen two-ton flatbed GMC truck. He worked through the night loading the fertilizer and barrels of diesel fuel onto the houseboat, then returned the truck with a full tank of gas to the farm that he’d stolen it from. Farmers worked too hard to steal from them without returning whatever he’d taken.
It was risky, leaving the loaded, stolen boat unattended in the daylight, but he had no other choice. There was simply too much work to do to accomplish it all in one night. Nor could he risk sleeping on the boat during the day and being caught red handed, so he returned to the coolness of his cave in the sandstone for one last days sleep.
Tonight would be the culminating event of his life. When he was in college, a friend had asked him what he wanted out of life. His answer had surprised even himself. He said, “I want to do something important, that people will always remember me for. Just one thing to make sure that people will remember that Wally Wanker once lived on this planet.”
Wally’s fantasy was about to come to fruition. If he died in the process, it didn’t matter, he would die fulfilled. The flat nosed misfit from Tonopah was about to give meaning to his life.
At midnight, Wally crawled to the edge of the butte that overlooked the little cove where the explosive laden houseboat waited. Lake Powell was full of tiny, hidden canyons, some still uncharted all these years later. Some only existed when the water level was right. He pulled his binoculars from his backpack and surveyed every inch of ground and water as far as he could see from his vantage point. This was one of those occasions when he wished he had better eyesight.
Once he was convinced that the coast was clear, he climbed down the hill and slipped quietly onto the boat. He wired the timer onto the starter caps. The initial explosion would set off the fertilizer and diesel fuel and, in theory, Wally would have his own Big Bang.
When everything was set, he pulled on his life jacket, opened the fuel cocks and pushed the start button. The sound of the starters cranking over the two huge diesel motors seemed enormous to Wally and he felt a chill creeping over his body. His scalp tingled and his hair felt like electric current was running through it. He took the steering wheel in his sweaty, fat little fingers and eased the huge boat out of the cove and onto the open water for the ten mile trip to the dam.
As he neared Glen Canyon Dam, he cut the engines, set the timer for fifteen minutes and dove off the back of the boat into the warm waters of the soon-to-be-former Lake Powell. The boat would drift the last two hundred yards under its own inertia, he figured, allowing him to make his exit before it got too close to the suction from the huge turbines for him to swim away. If he tried to swim too close to them, he risked being sucked into the current caused by the AC generators, smashed against the debris screens when he would surely drown.
“Oh well,” he sang to himself as he swam away from the boat, “it’s been a good day in hell.”
The water was moving faster than he’d expected, even this far away from the turbines and he’d put a good deal of weight on by 1982, all of which mean that he was in danger of not making it to shore before the houseboat blew. Despite nearly two years of work and careful planning, he hadn’t realized how tough ten minutes of hard, nonstop swimming was going to be. He was barely conscious when he finally reached the shore and he’d swallowed a great deal of the soon-to-be-former lake.
He laid on the shore for a few minutes and then forced himself up and he staggered toward the dirt road a few hundred feet away. His heart was pounding and his chest felt like it was going to explode. He could see the road only a few more feet ahead but he didn’t make it. He fell about ten feet from the road and laid the for a few minutes drifting in and out of consciousness, when he saw headlights approach. He rolled over onto his large belly and crawled toward the roadway.
The Toyota pickup stopped, engine running and headlights piercing the darkness, and two men climbed out.
“Whaddya think, Pete,” the passenger said, somewhat sarcastically, “is he alive?”
“Yeah,” Wally groaned, “get me outta here.”
The two men helped Wally to his feet and got him into the cab of the pickup, which was no easy feat at his size and in his condition.
“So what happened to you?” the one called Pete asked. “Your boat crash or something?”
“No, but it’s about to.” Wally said, slurring his words like a drunk. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Huh?”
“DRIVE.” Wally shouted with every bit of energy he could muster.
Reacting to the urgency in his voice, Pete put the truck into gear and took off in a shot. A few seconds later, they saw a small flash, followed by a huge one. A second after that there was a boom, then a deeper BOOM that shook the ground and rattled the windows of the little pickup.
“Holy Cow!” Rudy shouted, “What in the ever-loving hell was that?”
“Wanker Soup” Wally muttered, grinning to himself in the dark cab. “Start swimming mother fuckers” he mumbled too quietly for anyone else to hear.
“Where you guys headed?” Wally asked.
“Salt Lake.” Pete replied.
“Perfect. Wake me up when we get there.”
Pete and Rudy looked at each other and shrugged. Neither of them had any idea what to make of their passenger or the explosions. The sun was coming as they neared Salt Lake when they heard the first news reports on the radio.
“A house boat exploded on Lake Powell, near the Glen Canyon Dam during the night. The boat, which was reported stolen on Thursday, was loaded with a makeshift bomb of fertilizer and diesel fuel and was completely destroyed. Authorities say that it appears to have been an attempt to disrupt the operation of the dam by a radical environmental group, though no one has yet claimed responsibility for the blast. The dam was not damaged and there were no injuries. Police have no solid leads at this time, though they speculate that this may be connected to a recent rash of burglaries throughout Southern Utah.”
Wally could feel the eyes of the two men on either side of him. He opened his eyes. “Don’t look at me; don’t know a thing about it.”
“What do you think, Rudy, do we believe him?” Pete asked.
“Do pigs have wings?” Rudy replied. “Think we should turn him in?”
“I’m thinking no harm, no foul.” Pete answered.
Wally took a deep breath, not sure if he was more relieved or disappointed. One thing he had learned over the years was patience and he knew that Hayduke would ride again.
