Utah Travel Diary 1

Posted on October 14, 2003 in Cats Myths & Mysticism Neighborhood Vacation Fall 2003

October 4, Trabuco Canyon

A dog’s barking at nothing. The pound of its voice is the squeal of a gate. Diligent, broken only by her need for breath, the beagle keeps to her duty, informing the world of her concern that all is not well enough enough to suit her. Someone’s brewing coffee: the air’s thick with the flat percolated smell of cheap grounds. It’s gray outside and as soon as I finish my morning writing duty, it’s into the shower, finish the checklist, load the truck, and be off for Day One of Yosemite in Sandstone, Zion National Park, by way of Las Vegas and the rift of the Virgin River Gorge….

The alarm went off, just in time to frighten Boadicea who was coming after my pen….Bowie and the other cats will be needy. They all gathered around the food bowl at four thirty and whimpered. None, except Ms. Mew, understands that we’re leaving, that the bags on the floor and the gear stacking up means our absence for an indeterminate number of days. I’ll give this one [Bowie] a special hug if I can catch her. Then I will set off, over the Irvine Toll Road, up the Cajon Pass, over the desert, gas in the City of Sin, and, at last, into spiritually regulated Utah by way of the thinnest slice of Arizona. The cats apply themselves to the eating of the stinky stuff I have squeezed out of aluminum packages. How come we have never managed to communicate with cats? We pride ourselves on mastering different human languages, but we do not speak cat nor cow nor dog nor any language known to domestic animals. No chimp or gorilla. So why do we think we’re so damned important, that we have dominion over the beasts?.

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I remember asking someone — was it a nun or my father — whether the astronauts could enter Heaven by means of their rocket ships. I looked into the blue past the clouds, wondering if all it took was an aluminum tube and a whole lot of kerosene to get me up there. The answer I received was that God hides Heaven from the astronauts. He pulled a piece of the blue over it so they couldn’t see it. I looked up and wondered why He’d do that and I couldn’t come up with any explanation.

Astronauts were like saints. You couldn’t believe that they had evil intentions like sex.

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A warning stiffness shoots up the back of my neck. Last night, our truck was towed from in front of our house and we scooted down at 10 pm to ransom it for $140 cash. It was my own fault: we parked it in a fire lane while we were busy packing. We always seem to begin our vacations with some kind of car trouble, tickets or breakdowns or this.

I worry that there might be more trouble, that I might run off the road into a canyon on this trip. I can assure you that if I were to die, my mother would burn all my notebooks and protect the world from the secret of me. Oh let me live to speak of the wonders of southern Utah and show them to my friends!

The first shout! The road is ahead!

Later, Springdale, Utah

We left late, nearly 9 am. Nevada came up suddenly after a long straight line of freeway across a shallow sage valley. Plastic towers and bizarre facades drew up precisely against the line between the Silver State and crazy, Puritan-Hedonist California. We crossed Nevada without incident. Past Las Vegas, we throttled through flats and craggy mountains covered with sage and blonde bunch grass. Then several cracked mesas heralded our impending arrival in Mesquite, the last stop before the utter Puritanism of northwest Arizona and Utah. The Virgin River cuts a gorge through muted pink and bruise mountains. An amazing freeway overcuts the riverbed, like one level of a parking structure over another….

We’re in Zion Canyon now, along a long highway lined with motels, bed & breakfastes, a few odd shops, junk stores, and a theater where they show films of people flying about the red rock on a giant screen. Looking up the canyon, past the pumpkin colored walls of the lower gorge, is like seeing hot glaciers capping the red rock.

Outside the Zion Visitor Center, as I was telling a fellow Californian that my wife and I were two of the only liberals in Orange County, Lynn walked up with Sherry, a Friend from Quaker Meeting. “And there’s the third one,” I quipped. She invited us to camp with them at Indian Cover in Joshua Tree National Park, a place that I used to go in the Boys Scout. I told her daughter about the time when, waking in the middle of a February night, I reached for my canteen and found it frozen solid.

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We went part way up the Watchman Trail, but turned back when we saw the sun falling behind the Towers of the Virgin….Tomorrow we confront the Narrows on stomachs that have been emptied of the buffets we ate enroute.

Cheap food and cheap gas are what Nevada is good for.