One

Glenn Canyon stepped down out of the trailer and into the cold morning of his fifty-second birthday. The only other vehicle in the park was a light blue Chevy pickup, old but not rusted; spared the cancerous metal rot by its apparent years in the arid wastelands of northern Utah. His namesake, a few hundred miles downstream, was as full as it ever was, evaporating daily the lifeblood of a tired civilization for whom milking the fresh water of the Colorado was barely an afterthought. Glenn had visited the dam once, as a child. Today, he celebrated alone. He drank to celebrate, but drinking was more a reflex than a decision. He shook until he drank, he drank until he slept, he slept until he hurt. He sloshed whiskey into a mug and topped it off with black coffee.

Glenn's own truck, a faux wood-paneled chevy a decade older than the one parked near him, rattled to life and carried him towards work. The scrapyard was unbearably loud to unconditioned ears, but after twenty years the metal grind and crunch lessened its assault on the hearing--Glenn hardly noticed. It was January--cold as death in Hope Springs Utah, the red rocks and sand held heat in the summer, ice cold in the winter. The scrapyard appeared organized; in fact it was. Piles of discarded refrigerators, iron pipe, the colored metal of car bodies crumpled by force, all lay about in sprawling heaps. That morning snow fell slowly from the gray sky, drifting in small whirls and eddies around the collected debris of the scrapyard.