Finding the body was a jolting experience.
The skull was facing upwards. He had a full row of upper teeth, but the lower jaw was gone. What might have been a t-shirt covered his upper rib cage, but it looked like animals had been gnawing. Arm bones stuck out the left sleeve, and some lower vertebrae were exposed. It looked like the pants were blue jeans, but now they had many holes and tears, and bones whitened in the desert air. His hiking boots were of the common design.
Later, a sheriff’s deputy would find a .22 pistol under the corpse of Professor Jerry O. Wolff. He had killed himself about ten months earlier, in May of 2008, here in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. His body was zipped up and placed in the back floor. We were five men, one dead, crammed into the little helicopter, with my feet on the bag. We took off, on perhaps a last adventure, for the well-known and broadly published professor.
Just prior to setting off on his final hike, he had left behind a worrisome email, asking that no one look for him, as he wanted to return his body and soul to nature. The national parks, increasingly, have become a common place to intentionally end one’s life. Wolff’s last email had been read broadly, in certain circles, and it was worried that he might provide some rather appealing words to people who might want to end their lives; sort of a cult of “returning body and soul to nature” in a national park. This is not, understandably, a reputation that the park service wants.
There are countless other details to this story, but I’ll forgo them for now, because here I’d like to say something about suicide by gun. In fact, Mr. Wolff was the second body of suicide by gun that I have found.
Looking for elk antlers and Indian petroglyphs, above Interstate 70’s Exit 171, just west of Vail, Colo., in May of 2003, I came to a sleeping bag and some camping gear tucked under a cliff overhang. I’m often perturbed by the way people sometimes leave behind trash and gear. Usually it’s just a situation, I think, of bugging out because of a snowstorm or something, and feeling too overwhelmed to pack up; but then they rarely come back to clean up.
I kicked the bag and it crinkled. That’s when I realized something was in it. Just then I glanced to the other side of the bag to see neatly laid out shoes, several large-capacity clips of ammunition, and miscellaneous gear.
“Hello. Hello, are you OK,” I think I said. Stepping gingerly over the bag I knelt down to unzip it. A horrible smell rose as I threw back the cover. An automatic rifle was revealed over a rib cage. It was pointing upwards to where the head ought to be.
This is where Gary Harp came to his end. Exactly what he might have planned with all the ammunition, and several hundred feet over a busy, twisting and steep portion of an interstate highway, is too chilling to contemplate.
Connected to my writing about these two suicides, there are several points relevant to Wyoming.
First, you can see by the settings that they could have happened almost anywhere in this state. Secondly, we’ve been having around 125 suicides per year, and mostly by the quick, easy, and usually certain method of a gun. Thirdly, other states, in an arc from Alaska to New Mexico, which are in some ways similar to Wyoming, like the ease of buying guns, also have a lot of suicides by gun. A final point is that both of the bodies I’ve discovered were found at the bottom of really tall cliffs, which they could have jumped off of to kill themselves, but I doubt they would have had the courage and determination to do that. Instead, they shot themselves at the bottom.
In conclusion, and let it be known that I own guns, although I am often told that guns are for protection, I think of the images of Wolff and Harp and I ask myself, “What the hell kind of protection is that?”
All states need at least some gun control. There should be a waiting period on gun purchases, which would have saved Wolff. Automatic weapons with high capacity magazines should be illegal, which could have done so much damage at exit 171.
Reader Comments(0)