Utah Travel Diary 9

Posted on October 31, 2003 in Biomes Vacation Fall 2003

Note: I’ve learned a lesson in patience here. I’ve not been able to get this done in the one-two-three assembly line ordering that I thought possible at first, but it’s coming out nonetheless. I’ve posted it when I could. But never have I stopped writing.

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October 12, Torrey, Utah

The last morning, the morning of the hurry. Though they are distant, beyond the cottonwoods, I can see the light banding across the tops of the Navajo sandstone. The white rock. (There’s a project: List all the synonyms that I can for “rock” and for “wall”.) The walls of the canyon are buttressed by their own weight as they sink into the earth. Yet here at the Waterpocket Fold, deeper forces confound the natural gravity and shove them up.

There are no cathedrals in Switzerland in the style and ornamentation that fills the need of people in the lowlands. Perhaps we build them in flat places because we’re lonely for the spires. Manhattan, for example, might be “mountain envy”. The only beautiful rocks there are in Central Park. They’ve buried the rest and they’ve entombed the rivers, too, all in coffins made of quarried stone. Oh look, they cry, we have mountains of glass. None of their stacked boxes comes close to the volume or the loft of these rocks that have been raised up by the strength of the burning within. I love places that are free of mechanical locomotion, where silence dominates, where I cannot hear the zeer of the aluminum locust.

I am the explosion, the magma in the earth, rising indignantly against my own exhaustion.

What I want for myself is to be a part, to be an influence among the Southwest school of writers, the ones who come here from other parts. Here’s my personal paradox: I love the vitality of my chosen city, the place of my birth with all its diversity. I love her long avenues that stretch out to the sun and I love the desert, the silent places, the places where chaos has shaped the land, the pockets withou people. Except when I enter them, I initiative the paradox. I say that there are no people around and I am there. If a piece of a cliff falls, it makes a sound whether or not I am there because the world does not depend on me….Such a question can be posed only by the self-important who believe themselves to be the end of the processes that made and sustain the world. They would say that animals run into little closets of nonexistence when we do not see them and that the backdrop of the rocks gets shunted into a backstage area or dissolved entirely. Such is the arrogance that I do not buy. It is the same that cannot see the suffering of the synthetic covered man who we do not see sitting on a bench at the base of Bunker Hill or that reconstructs the moment when a brute on steroids crams his hand into the blouse of a woman so that he becomes the victim and the woman the temptress.

We build the Creator out of parts that we have seen. Euro-Americans make him white. The canyons were not chipped and planed by the hand of a divine workman. They happened and so do we who have senses to detect them.

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Bedtime, Cedar City, Utah

Cinquains:

Spreading
olive slop in
the trail’s middle part.
I am doomed to dance around fresh
cow dung.

Olive
stars spread over
the tufa litter….I
dance around the slop, keeping my
shoes clean.

Dull head
after a day
of discerning pecked spirals
and beast men on the tufa at
Clear Creek.

Wind down
the canyon like
laughter in another state
goes unheard by California
voters.

Hands in
wrongful places
are called ‘smears’ when the
dark angel passes and saints a
monster.

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I’d rather not see a good park closed down, particularly when the subject is ancient rock art. We skipped out of Torrey by nine and were at Fremont Indian State Park by ten thirty. It’s a land where the cliffs appear to have melted in spires. Formations resemble creatures reared out of cow muck, of which there was plenty on the trail. I discovered an instinct for herding bovines when I startled five in an ash grove near the Cave of 100 Hands. I jeered at them and menaced them with my walking stick. They stood their ground for less than a second before they fled. One, I think, was a mother cow. She always positioned herself between me and two smaller ones. I have no quarrel with cows other than their habit of manufacturing fuel for fires in a most unappetizing display of foot-wide olive galaxies. A little black fellow left a constellation of exploding stars on a high stretch of trail beyond the Cave. I saw them watching me from there and from several other high points. I lost them after the trail descended to meet a turnaround….

This is a sacred place. I can’t say that I felt any special in my bones other than the muscles resistance to gravity, but the spirit of the people was evident in the doodled icons they made in the remnant ash of a great volcano.