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The Justice Department's lawsuit, filed last March in Las Vegas federal court, could be decided next month, but any decision is certain to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Roger Marzulla, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney General who is now defending Nye County, calls it one of the most important cases of the century in shaping the role of the Federal Government, and likens the bulldozer incident to "Rosa Parks' saying, 'I'm going to sit in the front of the bus.'" Carver, even less modest, calls it "the shot heard round the world, but fired with a bulldozer, not a gun."
NYE COUNTY'S LEGAL ARGUMENTS MAY BE open to challenge, but its disaffection is real and deep. The third largest county in America, Nye is an immense wedge covering more than 18,000 sq. mi., about the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, but is occupied by only 20,000 people. Plenty of elbow room--except for the fact that the Federal Government owns 93% of the land. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) controls most of the valleys, the U.S. Forest Service most of the uplands. The Defense Department too claims huge chunks of the county, including the Nevada Test Site, where it detonated hundreds of nuclear devices, and the Tonopah Test Range, the darling of paranormal buffs, who know it by the nickname Dreamland and suspect that all manner of spooky events have occurred there. Even the airspace over Nye is largely restricted to military aircraft. Jet fighters scream up Carver's Big Smoky Valley, occasionally roaring past cars at sagetop altitude. A bank of nuclear-radiation sensors, still religiously monitored, stands outside the county's old courthouse in Tonopah, the county seat. The ultimate metaphor for federal intrusion is the Energy Department's hotly controversial proposal to use Yucca Mountain, in Nye, for the nation's first high-level radioactive-waste dump.
"It really is like being in a colony," says Trish Rippie, a Tonopah real estate agent. What makes this presence particularly stifling, she says, is that it runs directly counter to the independent character of the region and of the people who moved here for the low taxes, the lack of rules--Nye has no zoning laws--and the overall sense of freedom. "I think just about everybody here would like to see a revolution and have the Federal Government washed away," she says. "But nobody really wants a shooting war. We'd be annihilated."
Hostility toward the Federal Government suffuses Nye County to a degree that an Easterner might find hard to believe. Even though most of the county is under federal control, residents still have more breathing space than most Americans--only one person per square mile, in contrast to 3,000 per square mile in California's Orange County. And despite federal regulations, Nye Countians can still graze the government-owned meadows, fish the lakes and hunt the forests. But these days the climate is such that every incident, however minor, seems to reinforce the case for rebellion. Jim Merlino, director of the Tonopah Convention Center, says he used to be able to get a BLM permit to cut a Christmas tree anywhere. Last year he learned he could cut his trees only from specific areas. "That's just a really little thing," he says. "But what are they going to do next time--tell me this is the one tree I can cut?"