Nathan Waggoner, guide, outdoor retailer, Escalante, UT — a Dispatches follow-up

“It hurts the economics of this town and it crates emotional turmoil amongst neighbors — that’s a terrible thing to do to a small town in America.”

Monday, Dec. 4, 2017 was a long day for Nathan Waggoner. As owner of Escalante Outfitters in Escalante, Utah, he had watched, and helped, as his community put to use in creative ways the great resource that surrounded it — Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

President Donald Trump shackled the town’s autonomy when he proclaimed, just after noon, that he would break apart the national monument. Waggoner felt that that his community had been completely left out of consideration.

“It hurts the economics of this town and it creates emotional turmoil amongst neighbors — that’s a terrible thing to do to a small town in America,” Waggoner, 39, said inside his shop a few hours after Trump’s pronouncement, wearing a sheepskin jacket and his favorite faded fishing hat.

Waggoner said that Trump sent the myopic message that difficult to market reserves of coal are of greater value than the inexhaustable resources of scenery, science and solitude. It seemed to him like Trump wanted to force Escalante — which has a sign on Main Street that boasts that it is sustained by ranching, farming, and also “lumber production, guide services, hotels, restaurants, arts and crafts, and public land management” — to be just a coal company town. No matter what the residents of the town want.

“They’re stealing that power away from us, that’s the hardest part right now,” he said. “That was the blow that was delivered today.”

In the summer, Waggoner had said he had worried about the effects on the land itself of the national monument being reduced. Those worries that still wrack him. But on this day when Trump made his proclamation, the calm eloquence with which Waggoner usually speaks flashed angry when he talked about his town. He felt Escalante had been dictated to.

“This community has really done a great job of picking itself back up using the resources it has, which is spectacular scenery,” Waggoner said. “And this proclamation doesn’t help us, it’s a very intentional and politically driven manipulation of our public lands.”

He added that Trump should not be, “trying to tell us what our industry should be.”