The Hawk, the Rainbow, and the Secret Mission

In the mid-1980s, I drove an aging flatbed truck through the isolation of southern Utah, hauling deflated river rafts along an unpaved desert road. The truck could barely hold 25 miles per hour. Then a huge bird folded its wings and dove directly toward my windshield. By the time the truck shuddered to a stop, the bird had climbed toward the Valley of the Gods—where sandstone spires appeared beneath a brilliant rainbow. It became one of those rare moments when machinery, danger, history, and landscape converged into something almost impossible to explain. But the drive also concealed another story. Our wilderness river crew was participating in a covert Earth First operation intended to disrupt mining claims being placed throughout remote tributaries of the Colorado River. This Google Me episode reconstructs a personal memory of raw natural beauty, mechanical vulnerability, and the lengths people believed they had to take to protect a threatened wilderness. ABOUT GOOGLE ME Google Me is an evolving AI-assisted autobiography assembled from more than sixty years of personal memories, photographs, journals, notes, correspondence, maps, videos, and surviving digital records. The project does not attempt to produce a perfect chronological history. It explores what happens when the scattered artifacts of a human life are reassembled—allowing forgotten connections, recurring themes, and different versions of the same memory to emerge. Some episodes are told through Stephan, my evolving digital counterpart. Others use AI-generated narrators, reconstructed imagery, or dramatized scenes to help recover the emotional context that the surviving objects alone cannot preserve. This episode is based primarily on personal recollection. Human memory is imperfect, and some names, dates, locations, and historical details may require additional verification. AI-assisted visuals and narration should be understood as interpretation rather than documentary footage. Explore more Google Me stories and experiments on Untangling the Web:    / @untangling_the_web   Subscribe to follow the continuing reconstruction of one life—and the larger question behind the project: What remains of us when our memories become searchable? #GoogleMe #DigitalAutobiography #SouthernUtah #ValleyOfTheGods #PersonalHistory #ArtificialIntelligence