The Biblical account of the Sermon on the Mount includes the parable of a man who built his house on the sand. When the rains came and the winds blew, the house fell.
But another man's house, built on the security of rock, withstood the storm. There's a message for all of us in that simple story.
It wasn't all that many years ago that Utah—along with nine other United-States-to-be—was an undisputed part of Mexico. And yet, there were few Mexicans who found reason to venture north into its deserts, prairies and highly-saline ancient lake beds. Unlike the many settled parts of our Mexican mother-country, most of what would become America's great Southwest was largely viewed as too harsh, too barren and too dry.
It wasn't that Utah and its Four Corners neighbors didn't have water. There was plenty of it. Typically, heavy snowfalls blanketed the Rocky Mountains each winter. And, when the warmth of spring returned, swollen streams gushed down the massive collector drainages, merging into mighty, churning rivers.
Those rivers created deep scars in the tablelands, tirelessly cutting channels that left the water ever-deeper and, without today's inventive devices, inaccessible. That left the parched high plains and deserts dry as bone. Governed only by gravity, the seemingly unlimited water of the Rockies emerged from the canyons it had created and spilled its silty loads into the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific.
When Brigham Young, sick and weary, looked out across the magnificent lake and the Great Salt Lake Desert, water was no concern. He said, "This is the right place." In Young's prophetic mind, he undoubtedly saw the prospects of that great inland sea—sport fishing, waterskiing and lovely all-inclusive beach resorts. The water was everywhere, and he predicted that the desert would "bloom like a rose."
But the beauty of the lake failed to betray its secret. The salt content was too high for all but the tiniest forms of aquatic life. Sand flea carcasses left a horrible stink and the water was "hard" enough to give water-skiers concussions.
And yet, Young's predictions of a blooming desert were spot-on, and Utah's inhabitants came to believe that it was, indeed, a chosen land. Transitioning from the widely-scattered groups of Native American nomads to a megalopolis, the remnants of the Great Basin and Lake Bonneville are now home to millions. Most of them are not plagued by the nightmares of the desiccated, possibly uninhabitable land that Utah may be destined to become.
Of course, just like the people who inhabit various other places on our planet, population centers all have their Achilles Heels. For Pompeii and Herculaneum, perched on the picturesque shores of the Mediterranean Sea and surrounded by the richness of volcanic soil, the location was superb in every respect—until it wasn't.
We all know what happened. In A.D. 79, Vesuvius—though a lovely spectacle—spewed instant death on thousands of residents, many of them toasted and roasted while sitting safely in their homes.
Likewise, the great farmland of America's central plains attracted thousands of farmers, whose productive spreads supplied much of America's food. But a fickle Mother Nature turned on those intrepid people as well.
Years of drought beset the area, and the fierce "black blizzards" blew away the topsoil from a million acres of ground. On April 14, 1935—a day that became known as "Black Sunday"—a single afternoon storm blew away the equivalent of all the dirt removed in the building of the Panama Canal.
Chicago and New York City were blanketed with dust. Almost like a preview of our recent pandemic, people were forced to wear cloth masks or face the consequences of dust-pneumonia. With the farmland destroyed, the farmers of the Dust Bowl—a quarter million of them—simply packed up and headed west.
In some areas, the "Dirty Thirties" continued for most of the decade, but the drought finally ended and the typical weather patterns returned to an area that would never really recover. The Dust Bowl is considered the worst sustained natural disaster in our country's history.
Then there are the relatively recent tragedies of Katrina and Ian. Those storms hit some of America's most "desirable" areas with unbelievable devastation. From the standpoint of damages, Katrina—with its near-2,000 dead—claimed the most lives in recent history. But Ian is the most financially-devastating storm to ever make landfall in America.
Ian killed more than 100 people, and countless homes and other buildings were destroyed. If the winds didn't destroy them, the 15- to 18-foot storm surges did. Thousands have lost what took a lifetime to create.
Sadly, there has always been a calculated risk associated with living in low-lying coastal areas. But the beauty of the sea and sands, and the easy access to recreational joy, draw people into Mother Nature's traps.
Though we credit much of the destruction to global warming and the resultant super-storms, the wise may have safely predicted that it was bound to happen. Allegorically, homes had been constructed on the "sand." That makes it no less of a tragedy.
The reality is that every desirable place also has its Achilles Heel. In a very real sense, we've all built our homes upon the sand. And, we know from experience that even solid rock will fail during seismic events.
There are endless examples of how mankind, with its amazing ingenuity, has been able to create huge civilizations in places that were once considered God-forsaken. That doesn't mean that luck will always hold out. I can't help but suspect that the environmental, water and seismic threats—which have always been there—will take their tolls in the foreseeable future, forcing civilization to use more care in the places it chooses to live.
Utah and the Southwest need to figure out the answers now. With our seismic, climate and toxic dust concerns, we have plenty of threats to address.
Mass migration is not yet an imperative, but without serious plans to avert the natural menaces of our region and state, we could become another Pompeii.
The author is a retired novelist, columnist and former Vietnam-era Army assistant public information officer. He resides in Riverton with his wife, Carol, and the beloved ashes of their mongrel dog.
