Utah Travel Diary 5

Posted on October 21, 2003 in Vacation Fall 2003

October 8, Springdale

Goodbye to Zion — moving on to Capitol Reef.

Lynn tossed and turned from muscle pain last night. I told her to take a tylenol if it hurt so bad. She told me this morning that she’d taken a couple of iron tablets by mistake.

Four hours to Capitol Reef today, through country I do not know, probably vallies of a shade of green that will seem unnatural to me….

The sun came up and I suppose there is news of the recall. I think I will return to California before I dare to ask. There’s no seeing the darkness while on vacation. I would rather that I didn’t. Even so, worry about that bastard has been on my mind every day. People keep expressing their fear of what will happen when he becomes governor. Older people see right through him. It’s the young ones who cannot fathom that looking good on the screen does not equal statesmanship…There’s a cyclone of rage sweeping across the nation, but will it be enough to save it from the rising aristocratic class?….What happened in the election has happened. I’ll do my best not to exist here in Utah. A slit-dot pocket across the face of the Navajo sandstone, moving slowly over the slick rock.

I want to think of pinyons and shadscale. I want to finger the jointed branched leaves of juniper, squeeze their berries, and dream of sloe gin….Those and the spread of the plains and plateaus enliven me. There’s a mossy cave enroute almost in Bryce. I’ve seen enough of dripping rocks and pubic clusters of maidenhair ferns….

The names of the trees growing in the Narrows are ragged leaf-maples. Will it be cool enough to see the aspens gilding, I wonder? It’s a strange season, summer has stretched itself into October. A man from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina told me that they’d had only three days of sunshine in July and August. What is happening to our world? This isn’t a cycle because thirty years ago or more we had heavy flooding. Where is it?….

The Miles are calling, white chocolate bars on a licorice strip.

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We stopped off to pick up some groceries just outside the Zion park entrance. I peeked at USA Today and swore when I saw the headline. Damn! The cashier chuckled and said “You must be from California. People have been coming in all morning and saying that.”

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Later, Torrey, Utah.

The east side of Zion: fossilized, swirled sands, strata rippling across each other, not unlike the way waves collide into each other on the beach, except the flow comes from top to bottom. Suddenly we come to a park entrance booth. The white of Checkerboard Mesa and the East Rim become nothing more than a reflection in the rear view mirror. A horizon of pale turquoise shadscale erases that after a few minutes.

We enter the Panguitch Valley. The Mormons put up historic monuments nearly everywhere it seems. “Brigham Young stopped to piss here,” I think as I pass a block cairn with a plaque attached to it in a canyon where a volcano flooded the valley centuries ago, where the river has undone some of the lava spew by a more persistant flow of cool water. Young’s yellow piss filtered through the soil. The cleansed molecules seeped through until they became one with the river.

There are lots of log cabins along the highways. People move out of the cabins into modern houses, but they keep the cabins, the pole fences, the crumbling barns, and broken farm machinery. I see a tractor broken down at the far end of a farmer’s range. Just left where it died and allowed to fall to pieces. He salvaged the rear tires.

Winter is coming despite the unnatural heat. The grasses have paled, the aspens have turned to gold. All the way up from Zion.

We veer off Highway 89 into a desolation. No houses, just shadscale and long alluvial fans coming out of basaltic mountains. The only living thing we see for twenty miles is a magpie who flaps over the road and shows us his shining cocktail olive green back for just an instant. Sagebrush that looks like hair implants and bunchgrasses. A low lake. A man running a mowing machine, so lonely that he waves to us as if we were long lost friends.

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We picked apples in the orchards of Fruita. The NPS preserves the orchards and a few of the cabins of the Mormon settlement that used to be here at the junction of the Fremont River and Sulphur Creek. We found several apples including a gnarly one that touched me because it looked like a blushing buttocks. I ate six or seven pieces of the fruit and we bagged two pounds to eat over the next few days.

The orchards are arranged in neat rows across irregular plots, compulsive geometries that conformed to the lay of the land rather than any utopian Mormon perfection as you get to the west of here around Loa. Each tree was protected by four posts and two strings of barbed wire. When we came back from an expedition to Capitol Gorge and the Tanks, I spied two mule deer munching on the apple cores that we and other tourists had thrown to the ground. Capitol Reef has no fine lodge and I’ve seen no tour busses passing through, but it’s a fine park for the simple pleasures it bestows to those who do visit.

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Bedtime, Torrey, Utah

….We moved along the front of the Waterpocket Fold to Capitol Gorge where domes bunches up like elbows, knees, hands, feet, and shoulders beneath white sheets — a long whiteness behind the pumpkin face of the western cliffs. I especially enjoyed The Golden Throne. I treasure the discovery of the Tanks and the view of the sun descending behind the sulphury prominence. My favorite discovery was of a tiny natural bridge not mentioned on maps, in the guidebooks, or by trail signs; and I value my discovery of the Beast Men, a series of petroglyphs which I’d missed in my last visit down the canyon.

What would the men on the red rock wall say to me if I could pass their test of doctrinal devotion? I see creatures of the rocks hopping about. Why the dance? So many guesses and in the gorge there is no sound except the wind, the crunching of our feet in the sand, and the conversations we hold with people passing in twos or more.

The desert wind of Autumn carries no scent. I would not touch my tongue to any surface to know it. Oh for a magnifying glass so that I could look closely at the cryptobiotic crust!