Through Another's Eyes

This is why I woke early: to sit tall and alone in the desert; to understand that I am not separate from the vastness that surrounds me, from the ancient seabed that supports me; to sit open eyed and open-hearted to what this landscape has to offer—patterns of light and shadow, unwary movements of animals, the slow passage of time. This is the second gift of the desert: Solitude.--Jennifer Randall

This summer, my niece Jeny blogs as she makes her first solo cross-country journey (you’ll find a link to Cricketeer on my “I follow” list to the right). In her classes in environmental studies at Antioch East, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, written assignments were seen as “creative writing,” not merely “reports.” She wrote essays about lichen, vernal pools, a Manhattan “green” market, in the language of poetry. She brings that same voice into her blogposts as her world widens to, first, the big farms of the Middle West and then to the grasslands of the plains, the back country of the Rockies, and the arid lands we call “desert” in the Southwest.

Between 1996 and 1998, I made a similar voyage in a driftwood-colored Dodge van named Willa II, almost twice around the United States. Jeny, insomuch as she traces my tire tracks from time to time, rouses my love for the road, and my memory wakes up. Jeny, at Capitol Reef, explores the heart of the country of my heart, describes a desert shower that might have been a flash flood, basks in the flow of time.

I remember, years ago, my friend Moh--a musician/songwriter from N. Carolina—and I spent 6 (platonic) weeks at Capitol Reef. We stayed in Teasdale at the red-rock four-room schoolhouse friends and I had bought, three rooms still under a leaking roof, one dry and facing the view. We could see for 150 miles or more, from the irrigated fields around us, across the Waterpocket Fold and the Henry and LaSal mountains beyond, and into Colorado, where on a clear day, we could spot Mollie’s Nipple, a landmark for pioneers on their cross-country wagon rides--considerably slower than Jeny’s or mine. (Once, flying cross-country, our pilot announced, “Starting right now, I’m counting a minute. I’ll be back.” We waited. “Folks, we’ve just covered so much country that it would have taken a wagon train ten days to cross it.” A fine lesson in time, space, and willingness.)

Moh and I went out every day to the places I knew. My friend Mark Larsen took us by Scout, four-wheel driving, into places I didn't know. On a dirt road—actually, a couple tire ruts through the South Desert—Mark found the unmarked side ruts that interrupted the high plateau we drove across. We descended to the Dirty Devil river through various layers of canyons, across more and deeper plateaus and into even lower canyons, surreal from beginning to end. The land was opening itself, and we were traveling through a crack as the landscape repeated itself at each layer: new canyons, new plateaus, and, on one wall at river level, a perfect watermark in the shape of the head of a deer. The river at the bottom was gray, and even its slow, muddy flow broke off its gray sand walls in chunks—more silt to thicken the dense water.

While Mark and I waded in temporary quicksand up to our thighs (firm riverbed beneath, although we never knew for sure) Moh climbed a cliff above us with his recorder to compose this Place. As we slogged through the quicksand, more alert than I have ever been, we could hear him shaping flute songs about the river and the wind, songs that caught the silence, too, between notes. (Weeks later, back at home in Berkeley, Moh brought the music and his recorder and we played the composition, written for two instruments. Though he had not yet heard it except in his head, the two notes we played created, between them, a third unwritten note, a whisper of the indescribable.)

We built a campfire that night and slept on the shore. The gray sand was firm, and our fire perched above it, separate, as though a Surrealist had painted it. All night the sides of the creek fell into the river, kerplunk, kerplunk, and the stars were as bright as I've ever seen them. Not much sleep among the three of us, listening, watching, deep in the canyon the river had cut...

***

In Berkeley, back then, before we head out, I spend a month preparing Moh to face the summer heat of the desert. There is no water, I say, except in the rivers, which run low in the summer. It will be over 100 every day, I tell him. Minimal clothing with a long-sleeved shirt over it but long pants for the avoidance of thorns. Dryness will creep into your bones. The heat will expose you to all the borders of yourself. Your ears will fill with biting gnats that you can’t swat and their singing in the silence.

That summer, though, rain falls for many days. We sleep in the back of the van in the Blue Hills of dust in the vastness at the foot of the Henry mountains, out where no campgrounds would think of living. Lightning flashes all around us, so close that we can we see it strike. We can count no time between the flash and the thunder. As we drive, over every cliff wall tumbles a waterfall. We watch flash floods at every bridge we cross, whole cottonwoods afloat, and juniper berries a long black edge of every wave. We fear sometimes that the bridge itself will wash out as we stand on it.

At night we sit, warm and dry, in my VW van. He plays the guitar and teaches me Carter Family songs. We sing harmony, as though practiced professionals, in a perfect blend.

We camp along the Colorado then, in the dry heat I'd promised, and at the Great Mistake, Lake Powell, at the foot of the damnable Glen Canyon dam, and swim from a rented boat under spirals of wind-carved rock. The desert lake is starkly beautiful, even if you know the magnificence of the canyon it flooded. (They said then, those who protested the damn dam, that it would silt in and be useless. Perhaps not so blatantly as the Dirty Devil, which flows at its confluence into the Colorado, the wide interruption of the river that sculpted the Grand Canyon has indeed begun to thicken.)

Then, under the heat, skin heavy under the weight of sun, we head back to the Reef, to the end of one of the few canyons that cut through the Fold, to a valley that contains the summer hunting grounds of the Anasazi. The walls hold their petroglyphs, their “blogposts,” left 1200 years ago. We wade in the creek at the foot of the cliffs, in the afternoon shade.

For an eloquent vision of the destruction of Glen Canyon, see Richard Shelton's long poem "Glen Canyon on the Colorado," in Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah's Wilderness, first published and distributed to all members of Congress as they debated the fate of these lands and available here and there as a Milkweed Editions publication.

Aerial photograph, Waterpocket Fold, by Bobak Ha'Eri, September 14, 2008