It’s easy to keep the identity of my beloved spouse a secret, even if I post pictures of her. Why? Because she usually looks like this, a sexy figure behind a cyclops-esque device that swallows landscapes and portraits:
And it’s a virus that’s spread to her daughters:
Karyn’s in the hat and behind the camera in the foreground, and the girls are pointing their lenses down towards her. And me, I’m behind all this, pointing another camera back up the slope.
This is all from our weekend away in Southern Utah, bouncing around the Moab area. The skies were just that blue and the rocks are just that red. Karyn’s own pictures show this much better than mine, but you get the idea.
These trips to these places are kind of cathartic for us, not just a family escape but a spiritual revival. We don’t find ourselves speaking in tongues or emerging from rivers with cleansed souls, but there’s definitely a recharging. Others have written about this and others will continue to. I’m not really sure what else I can add to that discussion.
I’m usually reminded of other trips with each new trip. I knew I’d been, but I’d forgotten about Navajo Arch in Devil’s Garden until we stepped into it. I’d remembered the walls of sandstone above the Colorado River, but I also didn’t remember it. I knew that I could climb up the impossible inclines of slickrock, but I didn’t believe it until my feet were on those slopes again.
A few things I remember very specifically, like this particular Juniper tree:
There’s an essay in there somewhere about the arrogance of the Juniper tree, offering to hold the sandstone fin in place. Who’s leaning on whom? I imagine that the craggly old wood is going out of its way to hold the stone in place; but the stone has seen that type before, come and go, just a passing fad of the millennium.
And then I get caught in the quandary: Are the rocks built out of sand, or does the sand get eroded out of the rock? On my last visit to this place with teachers, I sat in between some fins working on a piece about the erosion of each piece of sand until a grain, previously buried in the Entrada layer, suddenly sees the light as its neighboring grains get whittled away, a whole new world that is not really so new; and a moment later it’s adrift in the wind, renewed as a dune.
I know that we tend to over-anthropomorphize inanimate objects like grains of sand. I also suspect that sand is bitter about the fact that we over-relate our human selves to the trial of sand grains. It’s all fair.
Regardless of any of this, it was a good trip. Necessary, even. Like the final escape of a grain of sand from its sandstone fin; or the helpful nudge of the juniper against the rock wall; or neither. Sometimes it’s good just to go on a walk.
1 Comment
12 November 2009 at 11:39 pm
When are we meeting you guys there?? So beautiful!!