Utah Travel Diary 7

Posted on October 25, 2003 in Vacation Fall 2003

October 10, Torrey, Utah

To the east, the sun gropes the horizon, wondering if it is time to undo the blouse of night that shrouds Fern’s Nipple and show the body of the Fold to the world. We’re waking up early so that we can drive down a washboarded road to “Upper Muley Twist Canyon”, reputedly a stream course so sinous that mules become corkscrews. Drifting off, dreaming of past sins….Waking up again, staring at the smoke detector in the ceiling. All naked battery and mechanism….Fighting my eyelids here. I could give them a brief rest because the PDA is set to go off again in a few minutes.

A second summons to the sleepers. The second awakening. The dim outlines of cottonwoods through the maroon curtains. Female trees give birth to white shaving brushes, hence the name. I stretch and take deep gulps of air while Lynn sleeps a little more.

We walked through Fruita yesterday, picking and eating apples, peeking into historic buildings, exploring the old tracts of land. Seems that you didn’t have to keep many trees to ensure a horticultural utopia once you surpassed the hardships. I read a plaque that described how one couple lost an infant daughter to a scorpion. I can see the baby swatting the creature repeatedly with her little pink hands until the yellow-green critter throws away all patience and wastes its hunting charge to envenom the girl in self defense. Oh the howl! The arachnid’s survival gambit ends when the mother wails and the angry father puts his leather sole down hard. Dominion! he thinks and the tiny girl is still dead. He can do nothing about it. The family must start anew. He must cut a clearing from the cottonwoods and the ashes, build a cabin, plant trees, and set his seed inside the grieving woman. Dominion over scorpions and this green fold in the red rock must be established.

I eat a tiny apple taken in yesterday’s harvest and think of my naughty foolishness about Fern’s Nipple.

….They say that it will be cold today. No more classic searing desert but the desert of the winter when temperatures drop and the trees that gave a little shade cannot be counted on for shelter against the wind. Does ancient wood, propped up like the corpse of El Cid against the chilling charges of the invisible, give much heat? The pinyons fall overand break up a coil at a time or is that the fate of the junipers?

My father liked junipers. He had an unfriendly hedge of it to shield us from the people in the yellow house at 1255. We never knew much about them though several families moved in and out. I even had a teacher living there and we didn’t know her well. Why did my father insist on that clawing hedge? Did he want to suck the sloe out of the berries? Or make bathtub gin? Remember his childhood in Eureka? Did he fancy himself a lone shrub rising above the dotted shadscale? Or were those bushes like his temperament, his isolationism? Did he show the world that he had talons? Were they vegetable quills pointed at people he didn’t want to know?

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Later, Upper Muley Twist just past Saddle Arch

Upper Muley Twist Narrows. White upper rim. Red rock low, pockmarked. The only sounds are the wind tumbling leaves, combing the grass, shaking the trees, squalling as it goes through the narrows — and Lynn’s cough. We’re sitting in shade where the creek scooped out an underhang. The creek is dead, the rocks have a few yellow hairs and pinyon pine tumors growing out of them. Clouds float in a sky of a blue impossible in Southern California. Streaks down the wall. The streambed filled with rocks of all colors, blues, pale pale turquoise, red flat stones, and bright yellow stuff pitted like petrified dinosaur bones. I dare not touch the yellow because I’m afraid it might be uranium ore.

The first arch past the Strike Valley Overlook was barely worth seeing, the second surprised us with its slice, the third, Saddle Arch, bucked. Two strong supports at either end, limber in the stoniness, one higher than the other, the saddle at an angle, daring you to ride.

The Strike Valley Overlook: like the back of a rainbow alligator stretching for miles. So many pictures, so large a park to explore. Still the silence, the leaves, the buzz of a single fly that almost sounds like singing? Or is it a real child trying to keep her legs snapping along the trail?

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Later, Torrey

Fern: Our waitress’s name was Fern. Pale red hair, blue eyes, breasts that didn’t look quite as delicate as the singular landmark, sides that ran down straight from the shoulders but not fat.

“I wonder if she was born locally?” I ask Lynn.

“She probably moved here,” said Lynn.

“Do you want me to ask her if she moved here?”

“No.”

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A cinquain:

Miss Fern:
your breasts are not
lean like your sloping butte.
Did you strip at a younger age
for God?

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Sights of the day

• A roadside cleanup volunteer sign declaring that a high stretch of Utah 12, going over Boulder Mountain, was picked up by “Boulders Supporters of Freedom from Religion”.
• Two black bulls, their heads low to the ground, their horns curving into the blank before their foreheads in a pasture across the road from their cows. Two bulls alone.
• People waved as we met them on the Notom-Bullfrog Road.
• I could not resist leaving the old Miami-fasted geezer who tried to drive his petroleum-eating Dodge Intrepid on the Burr Trail in a cloud of dust. I left him well to my rear, stumbling over petty stones.

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Across the top of Boulder Mountain, I saw aspens spread like a lovely sponge of golden Negro hair. They gave the mountain the powr to think about things that lived instead of about those that just merely existed. Lynn, I asked, do these trees make you remember New York or do they stand for themselves? Do they represent something better than all that past? At first she said that they made her think of New York, but later, uninvited, confessed that no forest she had ever known in New York or Maine or on the high sharp banks of the San Gabriels could ever equal the yellow squash and pumpkin colored biomass nestled in the many laps of Boulder Mountain.

We’d always come through here in this season. Always through these trees.

Qualities of the aspen: twists in the stems makes the leaves tremble, flutter in the slightest wind. A characteristic pattern of degree marks and barcodes in the white bark. A member of the willow family that does not weep.

Beloved of the hardworking beaver for its delicious bark, twigs, and heartwood. The only reason I can think of to hate the beaver’s Protestantism is this: it kills aspens.

Tomorrow I shall write about cottonwoods.

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Another cinquain:

No tree
can take Lynn back
to New York. These aspens
bring her to now, in the lap of
mountains.

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Bedtime

The big accomplishment of our day was the conquest of Upper Muley Twist Canyon as far as Saddle Arch. “Insert mule here and twist” went the repetitive joke of the walk. We parked the truck at the first parking lot, where hikers signed the trail register and revealed where they were going in the land beyond the drop. The road plunged immediately into a dry wash into which we descended as soon as I signed the book and Lynn locked the Frontier.

Only one truck — a four wheel van of some order — passed us and that was from the front. I kept stopping to examine the flowers — which included paintbrush and the strange, spidery Virgin’s Bower — and to take pictures of the rocks. Lynn followed, tapping her pole in the sand with each step. I often got far ahead of her, but I stopped at important landmarks, stream confluences, and the upper parking lot. It seemed silly to rush through all this scenery.

Among my discoveries was an overhang with a sooty roof. In the back was a mud wall pierced by square holes. Had a found a den of the Anasazi? I scanned the walls inside the cave and out for petroglyphs — pecked figures of beast men, spirals, mountain sheep — but found nothing. I didn’t crawl back to poke at the crumbled wall or sift for artifacts. The soot could have come from hikers or a cowboy line camp. I trudged on, thinking about the Spirit of the Land, realizing that in time, despite the stillness of the sandstone buttresses and fins that everything would be released and, perhaps in another time and place, a something of what was me would blend with the stuff of the stones. The swirl would reunite energies that had passed each other.

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Note to readers: I have been combining two notebooks throughout this series. If some items repeat, that is why. I’m an old dog and this is my bone.