Political Quotes

“there are lots of different stories around the country and around the world as to why people feel so strongly about the environment. My story I think is similar to others but just in a different context. As most everyone knows by now, I grew up in a little mining town in southern Nevada--very arid, no water anyplace around. Had it not been for the discovery of gold, there would have been no Searchlight. To get water in Searchlight, you had to go deep into the bowels of the earth-- 500 feet, sometimes deeper than that. I didn't travel much at all as a boy. I was a teenager before I went 50 miles to a place called Needles, CA. But three or four times during the time I was growing up, we would travel out of Searchlight right over the California border, about 20-some-odd miles from Searchlight, of course all on dirt roads, to see a freak of nature: these mountains, volcanic black mountains, out of the side of which gushed water. It was called Piute Springs, Fort Piute. The reason we called it Fort Piute is during the Civil War, the U.S. Government built a military outpost there. When I was a boy growing up, you could see these big rocks they had built and spent 8 or 9 months building this place, and it still had the holes where soldiers could stick out their guns. For a young boy, this was about as good as it gets--to go up into that fort and pretend you were one of the soldiers looking out one of those little windows.”