With heaviness of heart

This has been a most difficult of days. Something of a surprise, given the beauty and memorability of yesterday. And, one would think that a day long cruise on Lake Powell would be a highlight rather than a challenge. Too much reading, perhaps.

We were up incredibly early. Breakfast at a great little diner, the Glen Canyon Steak House, across the street from the hotel before 6:00 and on the bus by 7:00 in order to be at Wahweap Marina before 7:30 to board our boat. Getting there from Page required crossing the Glen Canyon Bridge and a good view of the Glen Canyon Dam, a long-time controversial project. (Go to the link for a really great photograph.)

The marina is beautiful and so is Lake Powell. For most of the morning I listened to the on-board commentary through my headset, but could not bring myself to venture outside the cabin, not wanting to find the 186-mile-long reservoir alluring.

As I have written before, through this trip I have been reading "Desert Solitaire," by Edward Abbey -- an outspoken, abrasive misanthrope who loved and advocated passionately for the environment. Following is a paragraph from the essay in "Desert Solitude" about Abbey and a friend traveling the through Glen Canyon on the Colorado River before the dam was finished.

Once it was different there. I know, for I was one of the lucky few (there could have been thousands more) who saw Glen Canyon before it was drowned. In fact I saw only a part of it but enough to realize that here was an Eden, a portion of the earth's original paradise. To grasp the nature of the crime that was committed imagine the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud until only the spires remain visible. With this difference: those man-made celebrations of human aspiration could conceivably be reconstructed while Glen Canyon was a living thing, irreplaceable, which can never be recovered through any human agency.(152)

All I could think about as we moved up the lake was all history, the art over which we were moving.

We were headed to Rainbow Bridge National Monument, the largest natural bridge in the world -- 290-feet tall, spanning nearly 275 feet across, a spot long-sacred to the Navajo people, accessible only by water or a long, difficult hike. I realized that refusing to see Lake Powell, hiding from it, couldn't make it not exist, wouldn't lower the water. My heaviness of heart is something of a gift, requiring engagement, inviting introspection. I certainly didn't want to miss Rainbow Bridge, a treasure that because of its elevation survived the rising water.

On our trip back to Page we stopped at the dam for a turn through the desplays in the visitor center. It's quite an impressive structure, that dam (check the first link above). Five million cubic yards of concrete which took 24-hours a day, 7-days a week for three years to pour. Enough for a four-lane highway from Phoenix to Chicago. It was a subdued location today, law enforcement chief for the Glen Canyon Recreation Area and another National Park Service ranger having died in a small plane crash over the weekend.

Subdued. A good descriptor for the day.

Among the arches

I know this is going to sound irreverent, but it is the truth. Since Tal and I began planning to come on this trip I have not been able to think about Arches National Park without having Jean Stapleton's Edith Bunker invade my head, that signature, fingernails-on-chalkboard, "oh, aaa'-chie." I got over it today, though, as we immersed ourselves in arches (with the requisite "R" inserted in the word) and I was infused with a huge dose of awe.

This is the view back toward the Visitor Center after the long climb (by coach) into the park when we stopped to see the view and for a geomoment. US191 and the Denver and Rio Grand Western railroad tracks come through the Moab Canyon -- a major fault.

North Window and South Window









Turret Arch viewed from the North Window


Double Arch is a pot-hole arch, formed by water erosion from above rather than the more usual erosion from the side.

The park, today being Sunday in a holiday weekend, was very busy. Geri had gotten permission for us to eat our lunch and have a geomoment in the solitude of the Amphitheater near the campground. Skyline Arch formed a stately backdrop for all that nourishment, the back seats in the amphitheater meeting the dead tree in the foreground of the photograph.

A very obviously "in process" Pine Tree Arch, losing squared-off chunks and slowly forming a rounded arch.

Landscape Arch and contrail. Newsworthy as the longest arch in the world, Landscape shed a few pounds in the 1991 -- an over 7o-foot piece from its underside, making it even more graceful and a little closer to the end of its existence. The link in this caption is to a great photograph, my efforts hampered today by the angle of the sun.

We viewed Delicate Arch from the lower viewpoint -- very far away. Our day by this time had grown long and hot, the hike up to the arch over three miles with an elevation gain of 400 feet and exposure to unprotected heights. This arch is the last one standing in what was once a long line.

This spot is called Park Avenue, reminding the person who named it of the building-lined street in New York City, I suppose.

At the end of the day, even though I was weary, it was hard to leave this park. I don't think it's my favorite -- I still have fresh in my mind the drama of Dead Horse Point, but there is something haunting here. I'm reading Edward Abbey's book of essays, "Desert Solitaire," written during and about the first summer he spent at Arches as a ranger, predating its development for "industrial tourism." Here's a bit of what he says about Delicate Arch, a few words that I think hold true for the experience of wilderness in general and more generally and universally for life itself:

For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous that all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures (37).

Enough for today. Tal and I had more of our fabulous and generous lunch for supper here in the hotel, since we shared one at mid-day in the presence of Skyline Arch. Our after supper stroll along the main street of Moab as dusk draped itself across the desert was a quiet end to a good, tiring, satisfying day.