This site is synergistic with Skyebox at www.exurbaneye.blogspot.com. So, then, there's this:
Tumbled lines of grey stones nestle in feathered weeds, tucked under clinging vines of raspberry and poison ivy, running the borders of New England exurban roads, silent in the face of the early morning commuter engines. The early sun is warming up the cold apples in the small orchards behind the rock walls. Yellow school buses roar by scattering clouds of school-bus yellow leaves. Change is ordained by the beginning of school.
Here in the exurbs, we have the comfortable outlines of rural suburbia and its lovely, seasonal accoutrements. We also have the internet and access to the wider world and its reality and points of view. It is a challenging mix. Returnees from years abroad, we are still looking for place. Last summer we took our once expatriate children west from this American east, to air them, to push back the boundaries, to show them what was at that end of their country.
We started on a plane to San Francisco, traveling back to our family epicenter. The girls relished the hills and the light and the Bay area elements. We tooled the bending roads to Sonoma and up through the back hills of Vacaville. On a friend’s porch perched on a canyon, the girls jammed on keyboard and drums along with supporting guitars, playing riff rock like a millenial sixties band. In this penumbra land of the Grateful Dead, they lay down under blue sky with baby horses, and swam in a real mud hole. They sang high soprano Layla along with Eric Clapton in concert on a brand new wide flat screen TV. Ah, California. (Northern.)
But then we drove through the limbo foothills into the sudden mountains and on to the hidden, soaring awe of Yosemite, starting our three weeks in a tent, braving vertiginous hikes and recovering in oases by the Merced river. Then on through the higher mountains and Tuolumne meadow plateau, turning right and south at the vista of Mono Lake in the tufa distance, down a fast hot highway to the California cowboy west on the east side of the Sierra to Whitney Portal, Mt. Whitney’s forest gate, prefaced by the Alabama Hills, a molten lumpen surrealscape of brown rounded rock, foreground to most cowboy shows and movies ever made, with Mt. Whitney’s jagged triad as backdrop. Test pilots at night at a small remove in the Nevada desert, insistent technology over our most primal campsite. Down and through the back door cactus flats of California to Death Valley, so easily reached in the face of such historical adversity.
With Breakfast at Tiffany’s on the backseat DVD player and the air conditioning on high, the heat and truth of the place hit only in small bursts by stopping for a vista or the visitor center and the car doors opening on all that thick heat. Borax mines and the sagas of Chinese labor bracketed by the luxury spa and its imported palms baking in the rear view mirror, we wound up through the Funeral Mountains and on to the bewildering significance of Las Vegas.
For all the hype and celluloid legend, Las Vegas is a banal and inexplicable sprawl nearly meeting the surrounding hills for the first time, a terrine terrain filled up by new housing development and commercial enterprise to service them. Somewhere beyond, in the middle, are the relatively squat towers of the strip, most of them mundane and dowdy and nonsensical in the sun. It was not hard to find our way in, tracking the skyline and aiming for our room at the MGM Grand. The parade of hot seekers and hapless sinners in shorts and t-shirts on the strip took our attention till the parking garage and the sorting of tents and camping equipment from our hotel baggage. From the pedestrian and ignominious entrance from the garage with our backpacks, we hiked through the mini-mall of souvenirs and smoothies into a large, modern, and graceless lobby dominated by video screens playing ads for Vegas shows and the looming smoke stink of the casino planted in front of the elevator bank.
Our room was air conditioned and worn in that big hotel way that new sheets didn’t disguise. But old vents and slightly stained rugs and cursorily cleaned bathroom were still the portals to the swimming pools and dinner in a restaurant and later the “O” show, a Cirque de Soleil amazing grace note at the disneyish Bellagio. The Hoover dam was our day trip away, with its turquoise waters and art deco towers and security alert that kept us from going down the elevators to tour the turbines. As always, there was heat.
Showers later, on to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, a clean pinyon smell first obscured by drifting smoke from days of Arizona wildfires. A national forest of shrubs and rolling hills transmuted into taller trees and an ongoing spectacular alpine meadow rolled out to the gates of the park itself. Then, the first simple impressions of pleasant pines and unmomentous views of forest and the odd park building. And then our North Rim campground with the friendly ranger who gave us a great site at the edge, yet still no sense of this vast epic gouge in the earth we came to see. And yet – just beyond, through the trees, a sense of huge space and different light and a gigantic drop. Lulled by ordered campsites and bathrooms and camp store and one-way road system, we slept comfortably, not unsettled by the immensity that was just there beyond the trees.
In the morning, overwhelmed by choice, we actually drove to the first vista – the Old Grand Canyon Lodge mounted up on a precipice at the canyon edge, with a vast stone patio and a rock perimeter wall for sitting on or staying safe inside of. Our first view was through the giant picture windows in the vista-dominated, leather couched-filled tall-ceilinged rustic lobby, each sofa and fat brown chair set to look out, speechless, not turned in for chat. Because of the wildfires, the view was hazy and the import seemingly diminished. That changed when we walked out along a narrow path to a further precipice bracketed only by hurricane fencing and an informative plaque.
California Condors were wheeling just above our heads, we on a level with them that seemed impossible. Seeing them so close seemed like the first real thing ripped from nature and held right up. It was ironic that a living, winging animal would be that in this most utter and non-negotiable of natural, immutable stone places. Unsettling, too, was how the canyonscape was made distractingly accessible by paved paths and asphalt drives along the edge. The warning signs along the way did not do justice to the possibility of imminent death by long fall and the simmering fear of losing one of the girls in their heedless running to get to the end and “see.”
For all the compromise with the ultimate made by tarmac and low fences and common sense, there were many places where the missteps were too possible and the possibilities too real for joy in the view. At least for me. Husband and youngest child were oblivious – thrilled. Eldest child, surprisingly, felt what it felt like to be overcome and had genuine vertigo that marked her memory of the first path to the end of an illogical high promontory of crumbling rock sealed at the top by asphalt.
Then the real car tour began, with winding roads through pine and aspen forest and high meadows with purple flower carpets, like the English bluebells in the Kent woods, but too high and too faraway from that to justify the comparison. For each vista point there was another visual punch in the eye – each corner and angle and endless horizon line meant another reckoning with the size and fact and eternal insistence of the place.
At one spot we stopped and saw a group talking to a ranger, who had grinding stones and a few other native tools to show and talk about. After encouraging us to picture the ancient people who lived down, down by the river way down there, he had us imagine them coming up to this edge of the canyon to live and build. He waved us across the road and we walked into small woods, where there was the stone outline of a series of houses and a place where some of the ancient people hand been buried. He told us how the wall on the other side of the road had been lovingly built by the Civilian Conservation Corps folks who had done such hard and good work in making the parks accessible to us.
But he told us they had picked the rocks from this ancient building site to build the wall, casually unpiecing the structure of lives lived inside them. He showed us footprints of heedless visitors in the dust inside the outlines of the grave area, and asked us to understand the unconscious disrespect and to be careful ourselves of showing the same. And then we few who were left went a little farther into the woods and the ranger showed us an adl adl, a kind of sling and short spear the ancient natives used to hunt or defend themselves. We got to throw the spears using the arm sling and take in how that mechanism helped propel and aim the spear more efficiently than just hurling it.
Later in the days that followed, the same ranger resurfaced, dressed as an alter-ego forest ranger “brother from Maine” who had come in 1906 to what would have been was then the National Forest. This ranger spoke as that ranger in an eloquent soliloquy of life virtually alone in a cabin with his wife to manage the vastness of that space, protecting it from poachers and interlopers and turning a blind eye to the dwindling natives who still hunted on what had always been theirs. Speaking as a guardian of the land from times past, this ranger epitomized the many cultured, educated, passionate, decent, and wise rangers we met in the national parks. They ranged from young women to older men, and knew everything about everything from sticks to stars. The rangers and the parks themselves showed us an integrity to our complicated country that nothing else has for a long time. We need that park system to tie our past to our present and to safeguard chunks of life and land that are otherwise prey, and gone. If you can, go to a national park and still find some wonder preserved – the thing itself and the thing you realize you can still feel.
There was a night out with the stars, a massive firmament above the black gulf below, pinpointed by a ranger’s laser, highlighted and amplified by his stories and science of the night sky. Even the more casual and crass onlookers, hanging out with their beer and loud chatter on the patio on the edge of a cliff, were muffled by the enormity of what was above their heads and off to their side. And in another park later, there was another night with a different ranger in Bryce Canyon, with the blackest sky in the western hemisphere. She talked about her childhood nights in the backyard with the stars that led her to respect and campaign for the diminishment of light pollution, a kind of glowing sickness that reveals our sprawl and consumption and denies whole populations for generations that chance to see stars. But that is getting ahead, because before Bryce there was Zion, and before Zion, the mule ride into the Grand Canyon and giant black sentient ravens on a wall at the rim, and nights of campfires and reading by flashlight in the tent.
When we did leave the Grand Canyon for Zion, we wound back down to heat and a shift in perspective from looking down to looking up, even though the looking up was not as high as the down was low. We passed back out through the national forest of shrubs, and soon crossed from a ghost town on the border of Arizona to a relatively more prosperous town on the Utah side. This one had a grocery store and a huge Mormon church, and no explanation why its poorer neighbor was so markedly wretched in comparison to this one. With Zion so close and the Grand Canyon not far behind, there must have been some story of sad politics to leave a point of opportunity so abandoned. I wondered if it was not the Native American reservation on its border that explained the Arizona town’s glaring neglect, with an inevitable back-story of human despair. The Native American story was omnipresent in all the parks, but only as history. Its present seemed invisible.
The Mormons had center stage at Zion, their rapturous encampment and naming of the peaks and valleys a compelling settler’s tale, with its marginal yet powerful religious affiliation that permeates Utah past and present. We entered the canyon from the Checkerboard Mesa end, a tall jutting hillside symmetrically crosshatched by time into a cliff-face of giant squares. We followed the winding road through a six-mile tunnel with huge stone windows that mirrored the massive red rock overhangs creating hollowed giant shelters or gargantuan altars beyond. The heat was intense and the waters were high, so the Virgin River, which carved the canyon, was icy and rushing and where we spent much of our time. We camped next to it and rented big tubes to ride on it, a touristic synergy that would have made the old Mormons gape.
One night in a conjunction or combustion of cultural experiences, we ate Thai food and watched the latest and most violent Star Wars movie. We did do some small walking in Zion, but not hiking, as the heat was intense, most of the landmarks off limits to us because of temperature. But we lolled on the maintained green lawns under spreading cottonwood trees in front of the Zion lodge, which allowed for a lazy picnic in company with a hundred other hot visitors in companionable lethargy. Our July 4th there was silent and dark and quiet because of the fire hazards that time of year, another time out of time from all the hubbub that must have been happening elsewhere in the country that night.
Time was calling, however, and we headed to Bryce. The intermediary land between the two canyons was low, rough and scuffed, desolate, stretched out, and dotted with western, rural have-lessness. More vast stretches of lack, rather than a tumbledown of need. Still, red mesas and the resolute simple grandeur of a timeworn butte were the stolid earthworks of seemingly hard-won human living. We easterners in our minivan felt again and again how big the US is and how big the compromises are required to govern it, or even to live in it as one identified nation. In the midst of all the hallmarks of immutable time in the west, our government’s polarizing catastrophe and self-aggrandizing ideological certitude seemed all the more desecrating. The ice-cold arrogant manipulation of people’s need to believe took away too much from our national sense of self, fragile as that is. The truths we hold to be self-evident do exist, if we are not too angry and lost to relearn them.
So! At Bryce, at whose gates we were greeted by Ruby’s Inn, or rather Ruby’s resort empire, with cottages and campground and swimming pool and teepees and trading post and helicopter rides. We had had a reservation there sight unseen (for a teepee), but declined it as we passed. The girls were understandably disappointed, but don’t yet overrule. In Bryce itself, a simple visitor’s center with the introductory movie, but in the lobby great haunting piping sounds on CD, played by a man selling them in front of a display of pipes. The best of another commercial synergy, a portion of his profits to the park, and we transported later to some old other world as we listened to him play live at the edge of the canyon at sunset that evening.
Bryce is surreal, yet fathomable sitting at its edge. It is filled up by rank upon rank of wind and water carved hoodoos, tall, bulky but delicate obelisks of reddish stone, descending down the sides of a wide canyon bowl into winding sinuous stands of looming rock, here in near human form, there perched as a impossibility, interspersed by thousands of blackened lightning-struck trees, testament to Bryce’s bizarre and radical weather extremes that created the park. We had a mule ride down and through and up its twist and turns, all pink and gold and orange in the morning. The canyon is almost a cliché of fairyland in stone, except that nature asserts it own logic and power, without the guided tours. That morning ride came after the clear black night of the brightest and most manifold stars. Somehow, this spot on earth has stayed its own priceless black hole in the western hemisphere’s sky, reason alone to go and see it.
The road out of Bryce followed a low brown rubble canyon, utterly prosaic after the pink fantasy behind us, but we had the haunting pipe CD in the car and we flowed around every corner of that ride, the searing heat outside, the girls quiet and sleepy in the back seat, us driving on the top of every note, the music literally taking us north to emptier spaces. In the biggest of the small towns we passed, there was always a Mormon church, a communal connector between tiny outposts. Our goal was one last campsite before Salt Lake City and our flight home, on some lake some mule wrangler in Bryce had told us about. It turned out to be one more cultural remove, a high hidden earthquake-cleft lake, a watery mass in those scrubby desolate hills, which looked unlikely on approach to hide any giant natural jewel we had been urged to find for our last night of camping.
But there Fish Lake was, a mundane name for a vast Scottish loch in the hills of Utah. And for all its remoteness, Fish Lake has been found, attested to by the several campgrounds and many holiday cottages lined up on the hill along one side of the big blue expanse. We found a great campsite tucked in a grove of miniature tufted pines, the lake just visible between tree trunks. Then we explored Fish Lake Lodge, site of our dinner we didn’t have to cook on the fire, and a movie set waiting to be discovered. The lodge was an endless wooden rambling rickety building, morphed from a small fishing lodge, now connected and amplified by a giant eating hall and soaring wooden ballroom and hundreds and hundreds of feet of tall covered porch running alongside a long green lawn by the white capped blue lake. Inside the lobby, a nice older couple who gave out Forest Service information told us about local moose sightings and the 1000-person Mormon Sunday service that had been held there last week, in this isolated and seemingly forgotten place. Taking nothing for granted was one of the lessons of the summer.
There was a last night of campfire and the girls climbing trees and spying for deer and moose, a last morning of tea boiled on the fire. We rolled up our tent and sleeping bags for the last time and met our campground hosts. This nice Mormon couple told us about the London tube bombings that had happened during our night. The sense of disjunction between that violence in a familiar city and this lake stopped in time with locals with such other perspective was palpable. Our hosts were sad about the state of the world outside and told us how they would never leave the US now. They talked about land management and how the environmentalists didn’t have a clue about the western states. We talked about Kerry and the elections and told them that we were from a proud blue state, but that they shouldn’t give up on the east coasters, as we were churchgoing Democrats and liberals and that they would even find in our little Massachusetts town many people who shared their views and voted for Bush. Then we gave them our food and cooler and camping pads and other paraphernalia to give to the needy or homeless their church served. With another reality check that morning in this big, complicated country and world, we headed to Salt Lake City.
The mountains that bracket one side of that city and call the skiers in the winter look like afterthoughts in the summer, the powerful and overwhelming impression being of the heat and sprawl and industrial approach to the Great Salt Lake. We spent little time in Salt Lake City, but in the axis between our worn out hotel by the airport and the main squares dominated by the temples of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, there was poverty and a ground down infrastructure. Maybe it was the oppressive heat that flattened everything’s aspect, but any glory the city claimed seemed well hidden in some inner sanctum. The Tabernacle was closed for repairs, but we were invited in the air conditioned visitor’s center to learn more about Joseph Smith. We took a pamphlet and I was intrigued to find he was from Vermont and had had his religious experience in the woods of Palmyra, NY. We are connected as a country in many ways. There were “sisters” outside giving tours, but we moved through the crowds of a barbershop quartet convention back to our minivan and our motel and our takeout pizza.
Our trip was poetically prolonged the next day by a hurricane in the south, with its harbinger of the fall and the hurricanes and political storms to come. We were routed through Chicago in the end and made it back to our exurb, late at night, in the pouring rain.
Now it is a clear December solstice morning, sun in the grey fluff of a squirrel’s tail as it runs vertically up the tall bare tree trunk out my window. I can just see the long red ribbons of the bow my youngest put on the mailbox, and the stone wall and too green grass of our neighbor across the road. The earth is rather warm this year, off kilter and supersaturated with our global waste. Bears aren’t hibernating in Spain, millions of frogs are no more, the ice caps are melting, and the planetary heartbeat is being drowned out by the drumbeats of doom sounding from the deeps. Like Tolkien’s fellowship of the ring caught in Moria, we can hear the drums – it is coming. What do we show the girls next?
