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COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
One winter afternoon a few years ago I was standing by a highway outside Gallup, New Mexico, admiring the scenery. The vista before me was a classic of the American West: red sandstone buttes rising from a valley floor, made redder still by the setting sun. It was the kind of landscape we all know from films and paintings and postcards. But this particular vista had something more. In front of the cliffs--and in fact rising to greater heights--were several cylindrical spires that I recognized as petroleum distilling columns, the kind of equipment that dominates the skyline of oil refineries. Off to one side were dozens of gleaming white storage tanks, some of them spherical, some lozenge shaped. The towers and tanks belonged to a plant for converting liquefied petroleum gas into propane and other products.
Many viewers of this scene would consider the industrial hardware in the foreground to be an intrusion, a distraction, perhaps even a desecration of the landscape. But it was the propane plant, rather than the scenic buttes, that had induced me to pull off the interstate and pull out my camera. For the past twenty years I have made a project of documenting the industrial artifacts that are so much a part of the modern landscape--from the most mundane bits of infrastructure (fire hydrants, manhole covers, traffic stoplights, utility poles) to those titanic installations that transform the terrain (landfills, mines, power plants, steel mills). Often I find myself making a pilgrimage to places that other people go out of their way to avoid, and I struggle to get an unobstructed photograph of the very things that everyone else tries to crop out of the frame.
At Gallup, I found the propane works interesting and worth a stop, but even I had to ask: Why here? The man-made elements of the scene--the cylinders and spheres and other simple geometric shapes--seemed to clash with the softer natural landforms, as irreconcilable as stripes and plaid. Couldn't they have found a better place to put all that? History may provide a partial answer. The plant, at the terminus of a pipeline that originates ninety miles to the northeast, appears to have been located for convenient access to major east-west routes over which the gas products can be distributed--the railroad and Interstate 40. Before the highway and railroad were built, a stagecoach line followed the same route, which crosses the Continental Divide. Running parallel, thirty miles to the south, is the scenic road, State Highway 53, also known as the Ancient Way. That route follows a trail that, centuries before the arrival of Europeans, connected the pueblos of the Zuni and Acoma...
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