Utah Travel Diary 8

Posted on October 29, 2003 in Anthropology Biomes Vacation Fall 2003

The fire in my hometown caused me to set this series to one side. I’m still far behind on photos, but linking back to the appropriate diary entry.

October 11, Torrey, Utah

I open my eyes slowly. There’s an arch, a curve of awakening. Lynn takes her first shower of the vacation and sings. Out there, the cottonwoods bend to the wind. She comes out and I explain that it takes a couple of minutes before the hot water finds its way to the pipe.

Blue sky. Our last day in Torrey. Two hikes and it is finished. Tomorrow we take a brief run to Fremont Indian State Park which is filled with petroglyphs. A cave of a hundred hands.

We came back from Upper Muley Twist to discover that the maid had left us a gift, a petroglyph of a cougar. We miss our cats. Yesterday we saw a tiny kitten, a smoky tortoiseshell, quite a pretty thing. I picked it up and cooed over it, then set it down ever so gently. I thought about that cat last night as I worked on other things, about how life is so unlike the rocks. You come back in two years to find the rocks pretty much the same and the cat will be larger or gone. I suspect that instead of fixing the pets around here they rely on the hawks, the coyotes, and the winter to keep populations down. Smokiness in a cat’s coat may grant a survival edge, allows it to blend in with the low shadows of the scrub.

Lynn sings in the shower….The cottonwoods undulate outside….the blue light from without. How wonderful it would be if it flowed and had substance. How great it would be if you could have Crater Lake in a cup.

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Later

Hickman and Nels Johnson Natural Bridges. This second time struck me familiarly. The last time we were in too much of a rush and pushed ourselves too hard up the intial switchbacks so though we made it to Nels Johnson Bridge, we failed to get any closer to Hickman. This time, better conditioned, travelling more slowly, we attained both. I stood beneath Hickman’s arch and looked up at a pale orange cliff fact that resembled a tablet waiting to have edicts inscribed on it. Hickman did not move me to thinking about my place in the universe and how atoms could disperse and regroup as did my viewing of Saddle Arch. I treated it in the language of the canyons, which is silence. I notd how the creek had changed course, leaning its old run hanging high above and slanting away from the new.

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Grand Wash. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I could hear you clear up the canyon! I could see the dent your rock made against that wall from fifty yards. This is a national park, dammit! It’s not just your’s. It’s mine and everybody’s and you’re wrecking it. Just who the hell do you think you are?” The mean old man — me — yelled at the kids and then at their parents. The pot-bellied father scratched his gut and the mother smiled at me. They said nothing. Perhaps they were grateful that I’d come by.

Aside from that incident, I have these memories of the place: The Grand Wash is the Virgin River Gorge of Zion for those who want to keep their feet dry. You enter it from either end and find yourself clamped between stupendous Navajo sandstone walls. It’s all rock and shadows when you get to the place where I spied a boulder that was spiked like an old floating mine. Sharp angles and rounded curves reminded me of a beautiful, naked human back. As for colors, you had both the deep ferruginous red and the blinding white that makes the rocks around Hell’s Backbone look like a snowfield. I smelled nothing, even on the sand benches where I spied flowers and spindly shrubs whose names I did not know — and needle grasses. When I stopped in the arid center of the Narrows, I heard only the throbbing of the veins around my ears and a distant ringing deep inside my head. It was silence as pure as I could know it, which is part of the reason why I yelled at the kids as I said above and scolded their parents.

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Cottonwoods. I expected these trees to be useless, weak as the name suggests. You chop into it and out comes fluff instead of chips. That would be hell on a lumber company dependent on them and maybe the name has saved the cottonwood from exploitation. They gather in creek bottoms and washes because they’re guzzlers. You see them where the ground is stable….Half of them are green now, and half of them banana skin yellow as the chill hits the air.

Big gnarls bulge out of some of them. I found an owl’s face and a grotesque tongue suitable for a melting dragon.

This is a settler’s tree. I suspect a few of the cabins, some of the furniture in these lands, have parts made of cottonwoods.

Some facts: there are male and female cottonwoods….When people choose to plant them as windbreaks or shade trees, they use cuttings from the males. The females litter their fluff all over the freaking place.

Pioneers loved cottonwoods because they meant shade and water. If there was no juice to be seen on the surface, you could dig down for it.

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Cinquain:

Stripe down
your nose, oh sweet
kitten. If I had known
your predicariment, I’d have brought
a cage.

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Bedtime

Petroglyphs. Tomorrow we’re swinging by Fremont Indian State Park to see them. I looked for them in vain today along canyon walls near Hickman Bridge and in the Grand Wash but I did not see any. I hunger for the shapes of men, of big horn sheep, coils. I want to see the Beast Men with their squared bodies, broad at the shoulder, narrow at the hips where their stick feet run down to the ground. I made Lynn promise that the next time we came here we’d go to the Great Gallery and see the paintings and incisions in the rock that the previous occupants left for the seeing. Were they attempts to make cathedrals, temples, or mosques out of these natural pediments? I would be happy if they were just decorations. The need to tag, to commit random acts of graffiti in protected places — “show us the face that you had before we were born” seems to be another possible motive….No one likes the stories that I tell because they want there to be spirits in the rock. I can say for certain that a spirit, pulled together by DNA reorganizing the stuff of the universe…made these works of art. I celebrate their crudeness. I applaud as they dance while the sheep bound over the invisible abyss, jumping over the red wall face while being on the red wall face. If the men who made these knew how to laugh — I believe that they did — I think I would have liked them.