Late on a Friday night last
October, word came to me that my best friend, Bill Benge, had died
suddenly of a massive heart attack in Moab, Utah. He was only 60.
We had both come from large cities to Moab as young men, more than
30 years ago, and had chosen, for our own reasons, to make a life
in this once rural and largely unknown community.
Bill
was a lawyer by trade, and in 1974, he became the youngest person
in Utah history to be elected as a county attorney. He served as
Grand County Attorney for most of the next three decades. After he
retired, he moved briefly to Salt Lake City but came back to Moab
less than a year before his death and opened a private practice.
In the last year of Bill’s life, we spent a
significant amount of our time together reminiscing and lamenting
the changes that had transformed Moab in the last decade. We were
very good at it. It had been, for years, a quiet, albeit oddly
diverse little community; now, in little more than a decade, Moab
has become just another real estate market to be exploited and sold
off in quarter-acre parcels. We barely recognized our old town
anymore.
We often had breakfast at the Moab Diner, one of
the few cafes left in Moab that didn’t exist merely for the
tourist traffic — it was still affordable, and the waitresses knew
our names. On one of our last trips to the diner, however, we found
our café so crammed with strange faces that we had to take a
number and wait for a table. Bill turned to me and said,
“It’s over, Stiles.”
A couple of weeks later, I
found myself driving north to Moab, to Bill’s funeral. Along
the way, I passed all the faux adobe condo developments in various
stages of completion. Moab, even in late October, was busy, even
hectic, with tourist traffic and the effects of a seasonally
bloated residential population.
Yet again, I found myself
cursing this New West phenomenon that had robbed me of the quieter
world I still treasure, if only in my memory. But as I sat in my
chair at the funeral home and waited for the service to begin, I
looked at all the faces around me and was struck by the fact that
so many of us were Moab’s first New Westerners. Many of us
had come from urban areas across America to Moab, decades ago,
seeking a simpler and quieter life; no one was more prototypical
than Bill.
Bill Benge grew up in the San Francisco Bay
area, and as a young man, embraced and absorbed the many cultural
opportunities that an international city like San Francisco
offered. His taste in music was eclectic and extensive, he read
constantly and he traveled the world. Bill was my walking, talking
encyclopedia. He was often faster and more accurate than a Google
search. I liked to call him Renaissance Man — Ren Man for
short — and he appreciated the title.
Despite his
erudite ways, he preferred the quieter life that he found in Moab.
He never wore his sophistication on his sleeve. It was simply who
Bill was and in that spirit, his friends were as broad and diverse
as his vocabulary. He counted among those closest to him, teachers
and artists and writers — he was Ed Abbey’s attorney while
Ed lived in Moab — and also ranchers and miners and carpenters and
short-order cooks, and even some of the men and women he’d
prosecuted over the years.
His talents and his
personality enriched the community, but Bill never wanted his town
to reflect himself. He loved and reveled in its differences. And
more than anything, he loathed the bland homogeneity that has
infected so much of the rural West in recent years.
Today’s latest New West immigrants could learn something from
Bill. They might try embracing a small town on its terms, not
theirs. They might consider that different values can often
complement each other, instead of conflict. And that in the end,
the New West should strive to be the sum of its many different
parts, and not an exclusive and regimented and inflexible culture
determined to rid itself of the very qualities in a small town that
brought them there in the first place.
I miss my buddy
Bill. And I’d like to think that somewhere, out there, he
misses us too. But at least he doesn’t have to take a number
to get a cheeseburger anymore.
Jim Stiles is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He publishes
the Canyon Country Zephyr in Moab,
Utah.
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