How To Become a Goblin
A cautionary desert tale
It’s 57 degrees outside, and the sun has just begun its ascent into the already cloudless, blue sky. She greets me first with a friendly wave, and an extra loud hello from beneath her floral cloth face mask. I introduce myself and we bump elbows, as she pulls me inside the quaint, and well-kept Goblin Valley visitors center. Ranger Brooke, she says, I’ve never done an interview before, but I’m sure happy to help answer any questions you have about the park. Folks don’t seem interested much beyond a few pictures and pretending they’re in Galaxy Quest”.
She’s about five-foot-five, sandy blond waist length hair, and the bridge of her nose and forehead are covered in tell-tale Irish heritage freckles. She’s awfully young to be a ranger, but then again I only have experience with Smokey the Bear, and the one that Yogi and Boo Boo would terrorize in my childhood cartoons, so maybe she isn’t so young after all.
It’s nice to feel like my generation is showing up for the environment she offers alongside a small glass of cool water she’s poured for me. “Why is that?” I ask, my curiosity levels rising as I reach into my bag for my pad and pen. So many young people are raised here their whole lives, and never step beyond their familiar routines. Oh sure, they’ve been up Little Cottonwood, or maybe to Timpanogos, but this state has some of the most beautiful and rich natural history, it’s a shame more don’t experience it. She follows with a long sigh and I sit while she quietly ruminates, lost in thought of what, I could only imagine.
“Tell me about how you came to be here”, I say, trying to warm her to better memories. She recalls growing up in California, and moving to Utah when she was six. Her parents instilled a love of the outdoors, and camping every weekend until she was almost out of high school. “Seems like being a ranger was destiny for you” I chime in, as she is laughing telling me about the time she played hide and seek in the woods and scared her parents so bad they nearly called in a search and rescue team. You’d think that, but I originally planned to go culinary school. She tells me the story that she enrolled for a semester and convinced some new friends to go camping a few times together. She loved the conversation, and the fun of making things together over a campfire, but she found herself policing the group. Keeping the campsites tidy, teaching them all about fire safety, how to start a fire (without matches and lighter fluid), how to build makeshift shelters and even basic foraging. Ranger Brooke became a nickname started by those friends, but by the start of my second semester, I knew I wanted something different.
Living in West Valley growing up, she saw many places where natural lands were disrupted and destroyed by careless citizens. A whole section of road was closed, because of people dumping trash into undeveloped land. Turns out it was a wetland habitat that was nearly destroyed. “So you wanted to save the environment?” I ask her. Not just save, but help people learn to appreciate and love the nature they live in.
After high school, she studied at the University of Utah, applied for an internship working for Wild Utah in her second year. It was there she made connections, and within six months of graduating, had submitted her application to work with the National Parks.
“Did you start out here in Goblin Valley?” I ask her. She laughs a little and reaches into her wallet, pulling out a crinkly, well-loved, printed photo and hands it to me. See the wild eyed excited kid?, she asks me in earnest, and the giant mountain behind her? That’s Bears Ears, and that’s me on my first day. Apparently Bears Ears is known among the Diné tribes (and many others) as a place of feminine healing, and her boss, the “female Ron Swanson” sent Brooke there first because she thought they “needed one another”. “That must have been incredible” I say, still holding the worn out polaroid. It was until they [redacted] ruined it.
Brooke visibly shifts her weight forward now, her elbows on the small steel table and head in her hands. She tells me about the love of the land, and the rangers who worked there. The tribes she interacted with. The (mostly) wonderful public, who meant well, but occasionally had to discipline for trying to get onto reservation land to forage for fossils and artifacts. She’d never taken back more than a few arrowheads from patrons, but the black market sale of Native American artifacts is something the Parks service has had to deal with in the past.
It’s here that the whole tone of our conversation shifts. While she is here at Goblin Valley, a mostly clean and quiet state park, her heart goes out to local parks, and national Utah lands that have suffered at the hands of the public and at the national government. That video, the one where those people took explosives and destroyed a natural arch and hoodoo? It’s things like that that make my heart sick. It might have been faked, but the destruction of Utah land’s is all too real. “I take it you’re not a fan of the current administration’s decision to” — she cuts me off before I can finish; To literally cut Bear’s Ears down to nothing so they can mine it into oblivion, for capitalism? Yeah I’m not too happy about that.”
The hard part, she expresses, is that while many Utahns love the outdoors, many have never experienced them. Choosing to stay indoors and ignorant of the changing landscapes around them. Folks don’t think about their single use plastics, their garbage from their camping trips, taking ‘souvenirs’ from their hikes, swimming in reservoirs when nobody is watching.. Little things add up over time, and our home is suffering because of it.
She motions to me, and we get up from the little table we’re sitting at. She says for me to grab my gear, and I pack up my bag and my son and we start walking into the valley. The “goblins” are everywhere. Rock formations shaped by wind, rain, and eons of erosion, they look like rock gnomes. Some are small, like the size of a playskool buggy, some are massive, like the Three Sisters, as big as houses. We walk for twenty or so minutes, in the complete silence of the desert. No wind, no cars, no cell phones. Just the soft thump of our feet on the dried mud ground. She stops after some time, and after a quick drink of cool water, and letting my little guy down, she walks us the rest of the way to the Goblin Cave, an incredible rock formation she explains that formed over a hundred million years. Recently there was some vandalism to the cave; a little goblin was pushed over by some teenagers a week or so ago. It’s one of my most favorite spots in the whole world, and yet it wasn’t safe from the cruelty of someone’s greed, she quietly, somberly tells me. She hopes that by educating people in the parks, and online, that she can impart a curiosity to explore the land around us so that we may come to love it, appreciate it and protect it.
She grabs a little dust off the biggest goblin in the cave, mutters some words quietly and sprinkles a little bit on me and my son. You’re now officially a goblin too; you must protect this cave and these lands at all cost. And even if you stray, you must always return and pay your respects to the goblin family to which you know belong. My son yells excitedly, and tries to say the word Goblin, but his command of language isn’t entirely up to par at eighteen months. The crackle of radio static comes through on Brooke’s radio, and she nods, heading back out of the cave and back to the station. We stay a little longer and dance like wild things amongst our new family.
