SWELL COUNTRY (Excerpt)

It happened while I was in the San Rafael Swell in central Utah during the great uranium boom of the 1950s.  The period was one of high romance as it seemed that nearly everyone had a Geiger counter and spent weekends hunting "yellow ore".  We did it for a living.  The San Raphael Swell was the desert; yet, it was different from what one might imagine a desert to be.  There was no endless vista of rolling sand dunes, but cliffs of yellow sandstone rising hundreds of feet that circled and enclosed a central area of red rocky siltstone.  This area was dissected by the Muddy River and its tributary gullies.  This isolated central area was fittingly called Sinbad, after the sailor and his hideaway.
The first surprise to me was clouds.  Actually, there were lots of them.  Mornings were clear, but you could see the clouds forming to the south, and, if you were high enough on the cliffs, you could see them to the west over the Wasatch High Plateau.  By afternoon, they were over Sinbad.  There is an old saying in this country that it never rains in Sinbad.  The statement is not strictly true, for, on two occasions, I experienced what was called a Mormon thundershower (12 drops per square foot).  Perhaps this was an unusually wet season.
A second surprise was the spectacular number of flowers.  I am sure that areas such as Sinbad have the highest flower density that I have ever seen.  Following the flowers were hummingbirds.  Over that one period of three months, I saw more hummingbirds than I have seen previously or since.  As many as a dozen in one day.
The third surprise was sunsets.  Every night was christened with a fabulous sunset.  I suppose that in a desert this should come as no surprise because there is so much dust about; yet, the extreme of their beauty made it so.  The colors would rise through a rose color to vivid red.  Then, in the waning stages, overtones of blue would increase until finally there was darkness.
Our camp was above 6000 feet in elevation so that it really did not get too hot.  We were living in house trailers.  One could hardly say that we were roughing it what with gas stoves and refrigerators, a prefabricated office, a washing machine, an electricity generator, and a hot water heater for washing and showers.  Most of the time, however, we would leave water in sealed five-gallon cans out in the sun to warm for use as shower water.  It could get hot enough to burn you, so some cool water had to be added.  Our water supply was a 300-gallon water trailer, however, that did not allow nine people too much cleanliness.
The most interesting feature of the camp was the pavilion.  The pavilion consisted of a huge tarpaulin supported by two by fours which shaded an area for camp chairs and a table.  The chairs were of the large canvas bucket type and were very comfortable.  It was a nice place to take a can of beer on Sunday after the weekly shower.  A nice place to sit and read or just stare into the distance.  Reading matter is precious in the desert and none is ever thrown away.  Ours was kept in a big box in the pavilion.
It was on such a Sunday that my beer and I were reading one of the lesser-known works by Hemingway called The Green Hills Of Africa.  In this story, Hemingway describes various scenes and events on one of his hunting trips.  Once I looked up.  It may have been something about the pale blue sky and the big puffy white clouds that I saw, or the low rolling hills covered with piñon and juniper and cactus with the cliffs of sandstone looming in the background.  It may have been something about the pavilion or the book or the beer drunk in the heat of the day.  It may have been the sun.  It may have been all of these things which made me give a start.  For a split second I trembled because I could not figure out how I had gotten to Africa.

1955