Utah Travel Diary 2

Posted on October 15, 2003 in Vacation Fall 2003

October 5, Springdale, Utah

OK, we’re here — Springdale, Utah where every few seconds a flying bird casts a shadow over our drapes and Lynn panics for a moment because she can’t find her sweat pants. “Didn’t you pack them?” Then she lifts the pile of clothes and there they are.

It’s not as cold as it was two years ago. We’re early and the season is unusually warm….We’re here, along the road to Zion, I’m trying to figure out exactly where but that doesn’t matter too much except that I can’t see where we catch the bus to Zion Adventure Company. The bold, crew-cut painted buses rumble up and down the street every few minutes. We will be out of cell phone range in a few minutes when we get into the heart of the canyon. No North Rim or South Rim here. You’re in the gorge and getting an overview is a matter of climbing the walls on either side. It’s not very flat up there or easy to get glimpses of what they have up there, except that you can see a few ponderosa pine trees like early morning stubble on the tops where the rocks aren’t so steep. We’re down at the end where the rocks are red and the “ice” has “formed” only at the very top of a few crags towards the back.

I’m blinking and trying to see past the little islets of morning fuzziness, thinking about the rocks, the fierce red at the canyon mouth, the white as you go farther in. The Virgin River is a muted turquoise, turgid and warm enough for people to bathe their feet. Maybe we won’t have to worry about renting thermals. This remains to be seen….

Outside there’s a green lawn and a dog who comes to homes when someone is dying of cancer. He seems to sense where he is needed. The owner’s husband died three months after the little dog showed up last winter. Before that, he lived in another home where the owner also died of cancer. This is the land where the radioactive fallout clouds seasoned the land with its special pepper that not only spices, but cooks the meat that walks around here. We’re here for only four days and there’s not a lot to worry about since the above-ground testing has stopped.

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Later, the Narrows at Wall Street

On a sand bar next to the green Virgin River, a girl with hennaed hair walks past with her two men. We’re going to be among the last out of here. Still some coming up the river. I never saw the thin little boy who splashed from pool to pool come back. Maybe he hid in the bushes or kept going.

There’s a constant gurgle, like water going down an infinite pipe. The walls are scarred and hoved out. I can see a hole in the rock across from my seat that’s maybe five feet over the surface of the river and it is full of fist-sized rocks of all colors. It’s all downstream from here. I went a little farther, to the last bend of Wall Street where it was too dark for pictures. I saw a log that looked like a body at first glance. Couldn’t understand who’d be so hateful or unimportant that they’d just leave him on his back like that here, three miles upriver from the Temple of Sinawava.

Canyons bend hard, undulate — a word that I use too much to describe this sinuousity. There’s the taste of kippered beef in my mouth. Sandstone — you can see the layers of the dunes that formed them, blown over, petrified, blown over again, petrified. Pot bellied men like me coming up the river. Stones here are mostly gray, beige, muted rose bruised by the gray. The gray and the rose fell the farthest from the walls. The man coming by is whistling, wearing shorts with a stripe of white hibiscus on navy blue. Lots of long-haired girls with slender legs. Though there is whitewater among the rocks, the Virgin’s not a river for rafting. Big toothed maple trees sprouting here. (I mistake them for alders when I first write about them.) Bunch grasses. Horsetails past their fuzzy season….

A teenager pointed out the potholes in the side of the canyon to me, explained that the waters had to be high and going at least 100 mph to do that. Scrapes and hoves. How I love to run my eyes over all this.

Downstream from here I see the smallest of arches — a mere window — shaped like an ear, held up by a reticulated column. Next to my feet, four stones set in a row: gray, beige, gray, bone white. Quartzy reddish sand, the color of a baby whose made a pig of himself.

Downstream I saw a section that looked as if it had been painted. “Merely painted” is what Bill J. would have called it: green, pale yellow, green, maroon, dark green. Perhaps the First People saw these stains and were inspired to paint their own visions of the world on the rocks. If they painted here, those visions are gone, washed out by high waters.

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Later, Springdale.

Mystery Falls do not drop: they dribble down a humping slope that end in the greenish blue waters of the Virgin River. If the falls have a sweet song to sing, they are drowned out by the vigorous gargling of the stream. It doesn’t take long to get to Mystery Falls from the seven pale rose stairs that lead to the Virgin River at the end of the Riverside Walk. I feel a bit like a Baptist gone to irrigate his soul and purge the sins away….Maybe it is the names of the rocks that were given to them by a Methodist minister while World War I raged in Europe. He couldn’t hear the boom of the guns and the flacking chortle of the machine guns running their slaughterhouse of mud and barbed wire. He gave Zion over to God: Angel’s Landing, the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), the Towers of the Virgin, and that grand name for a massive white sandstone block, The Great White Throne….God himself could sit on the block and hold court — there’s a rock called the Pulpit and another called the Organ, all for the entertainment of the invisible Divine.

Could an atheist fail to admire the rocks and see the Hand? God in her/his majesty is about as grandiose a concept as any I’ve given thought to, as any imagined by the human mind. In these chunks we see what is larger than us. The contradiction is that by placing our Omnipresent spirit in such as chairs, we reduce it far beneath what it must be if it exists in the Universe. All this, I think, for the sake of enlarging the human soul’s faith in itself. We want to be at least as tall as the Pulpit. We want our God to be small enough to notice us.

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Every now and then I see a dipper — a small Quaker gray bird — air-skating over smooth spots and rapids on the water.

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We ran into some stupid people as we came down river. Rain had started to spot the beige rocks that had tumbled off the white sandstone up high and onto the sand bars that the Virgin had laid down in her slow cracking and rasping off of the layers of sandstone….A couple of crossings just north of Mystery Falls, we ran into two teenaged girls who waded the river barefoot and had no poles. Twenty to fifty steps past the crossing, we ran into their fathers who stank of beer. A few paces beyond them, the mothers and wives. We told them about the rain up canyon and reminded them that it was nearly sunset. There was no light, not even licking the snow-gray canyon rims. Hadn’t they stopped to think? How did they expect to come out of here in the dark?

It was bad coming downstream….I figured out on the way up that the smart thing to do was to keep the point of your pole downstream at all times. If the water flipped you, you had a third leg. Just above Orderville Canyon, I lost my footing. I spun around, thrust my pole three or four times into the bottom and kept my butt, my noggin, and my back out of the water. Lynn thought I was lost. Somehow I knew not to give up….I could handle this river. It wasn’t from dodging blows: it was from being clumsy all my life. If my feet sometimes betrayed me, my arms and my head made up for it….I can’t hit a fucking baseball, but I know how to keep from losing my footing, keep from cracking my head.