Utah Travel Diary 4

Posted on October 19, 2003 in Vacation Fall 2003

October 7, Springdale, Utah

….Thinking about a guy who came by Localhikes.com two or three weeks ago, to express his upset at a review I gave of his favorite trail. I gave it only three stars and he vented not only at that but at several other pieces, accusing me of not actually walking the country which, of course, was untrue. I found his venom laughable. He was too eager to bring me down and it was obvious that he didn’t have a freaking clue about ecology, denying, for example, that Aliso Creek’s excessive algae was a sign that the water was polluted, something known to everyone in Orange County except for him.

I thought of him as I hacked and gasped my way up the sides of Zion Canyon. I wanted to dare him to declare that his barren Aliso Canyon and Dripping Cave equalled this. What would he say about my Narrows Adventure? Probably that I faked it. These feet and these shins know that he has all the gush of a sand slide, that he has only a name, which is Gary, and in the words of a fellow report he doesn’t understand the meaning of the phrase “trail review”. Attack the messenger when you have no message of your own is how I would describe his style….

….the recall is a flash flood in desert country. So many Californians here, almost as if they were fleeing before the terrible onslaught of blind rage that is the recall election. All heading east. Even people in Utah understand that Ahnold’s simply not the kind of man that you want as governor. How can we be so blind, they want to know? This terrible rain may swell anger and bring us to a divisive crossroads….how a man treats his underlings is a mark of how he will regard the little people, the average dependent voter of his state…it doesn’t matter how many times he’s speared Maria and brought forth a baby. What matters is where he keeps his hands, where he keeps his compassion.

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Later, along The Watchman Trail

The Watchman Trail doesn’t actually lead up The Watchman. It climbs to a finger mesa jutting out of the eastern wall close to the name of an unnamed peak to the south of Bridge Mountain. The Watchman stands to the southeast of the point. Bridge Mountain looks like a jagged cone, a whipped and swirled lump of ice cream that has been left in the refrigerator long enough to gather a flakey layer of frost.

Pinyons, junipers, and squawbrush surround us. Squawbrush has triplet leaves that look more like oak leaves than those of the scrub oaks that are everywhere in the lower part of the feeder canyons around Mount Santiago. You get boxelders in the moister runs and ponderosa pines way up the cliffs on the very rim of the Navajo sandstone and sometimes on ledges in the cliffs themselves. No climbers on these slopes. I guess the steep talus covering the Kayenta shale and limestone makes them unattractive to climbers. Most go for the quick fly up the walls at Big Bend or above where they can start right at the Navajo sandstone and chimney up.

I like the low bulges that spread out from the Navajo on this trail. They remind me of the alluvial hills of home though the vegetation is much more sparse. The joy is that most of what I see in the grasses and the flowers are true natives. Pristine America.

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Later, Weeping Rock

We’re inside what there is of a waterfall — a natural, blind arch that reminds me of the overhangs at Mesa Verde. Water that they tell me is 1200 years old trickles down around me. [Note: I noted a spot in the middle of that sentence as caused by an “authentic 1200 year old drip”] That’s a long time for moisture to percolate through. The rock weeps not for any particular sadness but because the water trapped in the Navajo sandstone meets the hard-hearted, rejecting shale and comes out the sides. Weeping Rock’s not really a rock in the sense of a pebble or a boulder, but a gouged out cliff face. I’m seated right under a drip but it takes three to five minutes for the rock point to collect enough liquid for a bomb and it falls dead on my hat.

I’m waiting here, tolerating the flies and the tourists, for a view of the Great White Throne without the orb of the sun blotting out the view. Green-backed swallows fly about catching bugs in a sloping swamp overgrown with maidenhair ferns, scouring rush, and box elders. A tall green grove of ash rises just in front of the curved indentation where I observe and mark what I see. An Admiral butterfly sweeps by, maneuvering not as you might think, away from the drops but through them. He finally flits into a fist-sized grotto behind the most active of the trickles.

A photographer has caught his perfect moment. He folds up his tripod and carries it like a dead calf down the stairs.

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Later, before dinner

I tested the odor of squawbrush and rabbitbrush today. The leaf of squawbrush looks more like oak than the native scrub oak, though none were larger than my thumbnail. It seemed like an intense deodorant, mechanically fragrant. Marketers would package itin dark, ice blue.

I tested rabbitbrush twice today, once on The Watchman Trail and once along the Pa’rus. The first sampling smelled like rosemary, the second like skunk. Was it the situation of the plant or the time of day that made the difference? As the leaves heat, it could cause a temporary chemical shift.

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While hiking on The Watchman Trail, I thought about composing A Service in Memory of an Agnostic. “Whether or not God exists, my charge and my advice to the living is to live and do good by one another. Speak truly, do not tell lies.”

I also realized that Love can be physically proved in many ways — heart rate, EEGs, all testify to physical states in the body. (A friend tried to say that Love and God were both unprovable by Science.) The mind may flutter in the belief that there is a God, but that does not capture the physical entity purported to exist. Love exists inside of us, God permeates all if God exists. There’s no comparison.

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On the night of the primary, there were no turkies to be seen around Zion Lodge. I don’t dare take that as a positive sign.

An oldtimer, who referred to the election as “the Wreckall” suggested the bumper sticker “Recall Enron”. Maybe we will have a use for that in the Spring.

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Later, Bedtime

I neglected sounds today….Aside from the fall of water droplets off Weeping Rock, the call of a canyon wren cloaked in a pinyon, and the dim two-lined roar of the bus, I don’t remember anything other than a woman from California asking in a loud voice if we thought Utah allowed political asylum for those fleeing the Schwarzenegger reign of error which seemed so brutally possible.

We hiked three trails today: The Watchman, Weeping Rock, and the Pa’rus. I enjoyed the third the most because it opened up such splendid vistas among the yellow grass and inverted pyramid splotches of brush that people named sage though it bears no relation to the herb.

I remember the streaked walls at Weeping Rock: magenta, forest green, yellow and ferruginous, running down from the Navajo sandstone across the puffy mud rock face of the Kayenta formation. I would love to live in a house with a room painted to match those walls, a sitting place bare of all furniture where I could enjoy a vista. Somewhere there should be a mud house under an overhang, its outer walls streaked like that, my own Mesa Verde. I would write novels on a simple oak table — pad and pen for the origin, computer for subsequent rewrites, and the precious final draft.

I shall miss Zion — the name means “sanctuary” and for the last four days it has been such to me. Relief from the news. Relief from the menacing shadow of Schwarzenegger. Will people ever see how much some of us detested him? I fear him more than I fear a rock fall from these cliffs not because of any direct act of violence that he might do to me, but because I fear the jovial apathy of his supporters who don’t seem to care if he hates women and comes up with horrid ideas of things to do to them. About how his violence towards women, I must say that the only part of his theatrical career that I worry about more is what he does to men….Men should be as outraged as women are about what he does in his characterizations to them. They’re not getting that violence is cruel, that it ends lives, that Ahnold’s films promote violence….I go to bed here in Zion Canyon not knowing the results of the recall.

The other night, Lynn and I met a deer crossing the road. It stopped for a car, got better sense, then moved to stand us off. When I said “move on, sweetie,” it jumped into a pasture. Whatever tomorrow brings, bright news or dark, help me find beauty.

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While at Zion, we stayed at the El Rio Lodge, a pleasant, simple, family-run motel with reasonable rates and easy access to the shuttle bus system.