Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Utah Travel Diary 3
Posted on October 16, 2003 in Biomes Vacation Fall 2003
October 6, Springdale
I’m here, half awake. Utah time is an hour ahead so that while it is seven in my California, it’s eight here. The people upstairs are clunking about, mighty thunks that start up, travel across the white ceiling, and stop at a point only a few feet away. I cannot see them, so I cannot tell you what moves them or where they go.
I took a lot of acetominophen last night, so I’m not in much pain from yesterday’s wade. I must confess that I haven’t gotten up yet, so I haven’t put my back to the test.
Lynn’s reading Gideon’s Trumpet at long last. I’m reading nothing, forcing my mind to create it’s own reading which seems to have worked so far. No keyboard, just these pens that I keep moving over the page….
My mind keeps taking spoonfuls of sleep, stalling me in this early effort. I’m slowly waking up, rubbing my eyes to grease them. The right eyelid keeps wanting to shut, the left is active or passive in that it is more willing to open to a command than its reflection. I spent too much time watching television — The Crocodile Hunter and then Midway, the film that played for most of the summer when I worked at the Studio Theater in San Bernardino. Twenty seven years later, I still remembered lines and speeches that we mocked and parodied: “It doesn’t make any sense, Admiral. Walter Mirisch had everything going for him: Sensurround, Henry Fonda, Tora Tora Tora outtakes. Were we worse than the other chains or just stupider?”
It was a job that I wanted to do like so many other movie and literature fans. Just a way to get close to the art and the people who appreciated it.
I remember how the Sensurround speakers just appeared: big black boxes at the front of the theater that rumbled a deep bass every time a bomb hit. It was supposed to feel like you were actually there on the carriers or in the cockpits of the planes, feelings the bombs burst on the flight deck or the turbulence of the mid-Pacific air. It was a fad that didn’t last: six story screens and 3-D glasses have fared much better, but Sensurround is gone….
I wonder if we feel the rumble, does it bring the idea of war closer to us? Do we appreciate that things fall apart when the full metal-jackets bounce?
I think I shall nap for half an hour after I finish this page. Zion’s out there and the trails will be there for me until the end of our visit. Landslides in Sensurround? Huge rocks falling off the cliffs as they shear off. They say it is the wind, the rain, the frost, and gravity that tears these mountains down….
Later, Emerald Pools
I’m sitting on a natural sandstone bench about four feet from the edge of Upper Emerald Pool. We haven’t been to the Lower pool yet because we slipped around by way of the Kayenta Trail…The water’s not quite emerald, more of a murky pine green. This could be a trick of the overcast sky. The sun is hidden behind a splinter spire to the east of us. Maybe if it rises slightly more the pool will show more of the brilliance of a gemstone.
…A blue damselfly just patrolled here, hovered like a helicopter (Mom always calls them “heliocopters” as if they were sun gods), then buzzed off, destination unknown. People keep coming and going. Lynn’s off behind a rock which is well-varnished along the side facing me, brick red where it snapped off from the main cliff. For sheer whim, I look up to see where it broke from the water-streaked cliffs.
No luck. No certain luck that is, though I fancy I see a match where I could fit it should I have the power to levitate and heal stone blocks.
Sounds: the buzz of the dragonflies. Low voices of hikers. The chirp of crickets or frogs. The burble of the water dripping down the talus slope.
An elderly hiker examines a boulder. Another fellow says “Very nice, actually. Very nice.” He tries to circle the pond by way of the talus.
At the top of the slope, a lush growth of maples and oaks mixed with a few pines prop up a white wall with black streaks. Two blind arches.
Back on the pond, water striders skiing on the film and ripples from the trembling of their needlepoint feet.
People talk in low voices. If Holy Jim Falls is a chapel, this is a cathedral or a great mosque. I like the term Great Mosque for this because there’s no pulpit. The sand is flat enough for prostrate prayers and the sound of the water cools the mind. You can easily bow, facing the splinter spire which stands roughly in the direction of Mecca. The abstract decoration suggests an Islamic Holy Place….
Two dragonflies dogfight or mate a couple of feet off the sand. Black flies torment those who walk around or sit. Overhead, the pathetic rumble of an airliner, screaming “I am so large!” and yet were it to crash into this, so small it would be, so quickly lost among the trees once it hits the wall and splatters into thousands of burning aluminum scraps….
Let me not forget to mention the small pine cones littering this end of the lake; an old woman laughing and coughing; the scent of the pinyon and ponderosa pines; and the soft sand, formerly imprisoned in the rocks for the crime of heaping in a dune, now liberated once more to be free silica — pale rose, malleable, plastic, independent to the grain, and just wet enough to keep from blowing away.
Some things seen along the trail
- Junipers growing tall and straight like the pines
- People who made it their goal to get places as swiftly as possible: baseball hats, packs, t-shirts, flat bellies, flat affects when it came to greeting others or appreciating the environment. We met one as we descended from Upper Emerald Pool. Mere minutes later, he passed us coming down. Must have spun on one toe and turned around as soon as he reached the water’s edge. I looked at Lynn and spun my finger next to my temple.
- The views of the eastern walls were worth being winded to see.
- Rogue growth of canyon grape overpowered the oaks near the lower pool.
- When I pointed to the traces of the dune in the rock and told Lynn about their great age, a man gave me a dirty look. Creationist?
- A nearly black lizard, not three inches long, carrying a yellow butterfly in his mouth. The big meat kill of his life. He scrambles up what is for him a massive face of rock and mud, what is for me the smallest piece of the Kayenta formation.
- At Zion Lodge, I have a little fun with the tourists who walk around wearing their name tags. “Hey there, Bibi. What’s happening, Mary?”
Wild turkies congregate around the Zion Lodge, begging for fast food handouts, FRENCH FRIES, chips off ice cream cones, bread. I chase a few around for photographs. They give a puffing hoot and a pitiful, pumping caw, something like an engine that you motivate by hand. When the shuttle bus driver points out a flock, I cry “There’s Ahnold Schwarzenegger!” and the whole bus laughs.
Later, Springdale
Still in Springdale, beneath the west-facing face of a remnant of the Zion Canyon wall called The Watchman. It blushed pumpkin to pomegranite before it hid behind the night’s wall….I loitered quite a bit along the Emerald Pools trail, taking pictures of gnarled roots, lichens, and rock piles arranged by tourists for no explicable reason.
I watched one fellow build such a cairn, balancing odd-fitting stones in defiance of all expectation until he feared to go any further. He told me about a rock shop owner in San Diego who did this as a sport: the old timer knew how to balance sharp and ungainly stones so that pyramids stood on their apexes, pebbles supported modest boulders. His work remained until a wind came and then he started all over again, rebuilt his foundations with each fall until he finished the construction.
These monuments do not last, but that didn’t keep this guy from building his own tower. I rested for several minutes; finished my ascent to the Upper Pool; loitered around there taking photographs; wrote two pages in my trail notebook; and, after eating trail mix and refilling my Camelback from my canteen, went down the hill to find those stones perfectly stacked. I didn’t dare disrupt it. I decided to let that monument of mere hours last as long as there were no breezes. He accomplished something that accentuated the silence. I celebrated that, marked his accomplishment here….
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