by G.K. Dickey

Created on: June 10, 2009   Last Updated: June 16, 2009

Fully anticipating that his focus on Bennie Shipman's murder, at least in terms of his role as a journalist, would only last up until Jake's likely arrest, Bud was already turning his attention to the Jarbidge story and the upcoming congressional hearing.

He could hear Sarah talking to Roberta on the telephone in the living room as he ran water for a pot of spaghetti.

"Water," he thought.

During Watergate, Deep Throat gained a lot of dramatic mileage in print, in the movie, in history by telling Woodward and Bernstein to "Follow the money."

Cherry Creek Springs, the glory hole gold mine, the Jarbidge River, which jumped its banks, washing out the road that the county wanted to reopen and the Feds wanted to keep closed. Jenny's spring-fed farm and the glory hole pond below. Jarbidge's road and the flood: Keeping it closed would mean losing access to one of the most remote canyons in America. Government roadblocks. Lost freedoms. Lost land.

"Follow the Feds." "Follow the land." "Follow the water."

"Follow the damn law," Bud thought, standing over the kitchen sink.

This topic, no matter how it was framed, as he promised to remind himself each morning, looking into the mirror as he shaved, preparing for the many mundane tasks awaiting him at the newspaper, was why he had returned to Cherry Creek Springs in the first place.

Bud worried, from a journalistic standpoint, that he was ahead of the issues in America, but not far enough ahead to ignore reporting the news. A congressional hearing, whatever the topic, is "news." He was confident, and determined, to provide in his reporting a sense of perspective and urgency that he was sure few of his colleagues would be able to bring to the hearing with a clear national impact.

A salmon swims upstream because its instincts dictate that it must. Bud knew people of the American West were only now becoming more aware of the region's own ugly past in the murderous ethnic cleansing of the natives who had inhabited the Big Wide Open for many generations as European "settlers" staked their own claims to the land. This era of rape and pillage was but a few generations old.

The Hollywood mythology of the Old West remained largely glorified, distorted by a cultural prism validating the "Cowboy" conquest over the "Indian." The violence and carnage was still too young: Its reality had been subverted to avoid its proper place in the culture of a land founded in the name of freedom yet so violently obtained by stealing freedom

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