My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3, #45, May 18, 1998

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION

Travel. Arrival.
Years of an inch and a step
Suzanne Vega

I just got back today from a trip to the Rocky Mountains, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon, and while I am still sorting through my thoughts on what I've seen and breathed and felt, there are a few things I can tell you now.

The short version is as follows: O-oh My-y God!

It is apparent to me that God is unclear on the concept "Enough, already." The mountains just go on and on and on, and just when you think nothing can be more gorgeous, oh, wow! look, there's another one. It's like those late night ginsu knife commercials--you know: "What would you pay for a dozen of these knives? But WAIT, there's MORE!" There are no stretches of boredom in between, and you never have a chance to regather your capacity for awe.

My friend Mark and I began by taking Amtrak through the Rocky Mountains, so that we could just sit and stare without worrying about little things like whether our car would fall off the edge and plunge a few thousand feet, and whether our shredded remains would be found first by humans or bears. It was spectacular, of course, which made me wonder how it was that in the early accounts of this land by our explorers and adventurers, there was so little sense of awe. We concluded that, hard as it is to believe that one could look on those mountains and think only about what they might be useful for, what we are able to see is affected by our world view, and until the romantic view of nature had been articulated, people simply did not know how to look at that view and say "oh, wow!"

The next day we went through the Colorado National Monument. Like the rest of the National Park Service's roads through the mountains, the road was narrow, twisty, and straight uphill, and had very few pullouts. As we approached in the morning light, the sun and shadows were playing on the stark craggy bluffs, while the colors of the rocks were as delicate a palette as I have ever seen, shades of amber and ochre and tawny and green. I asked Mark why there were no "O my God" pullouts, and he remarked, with the snootiness of a transplanted born-again Coloradan, that by Colorado standards, this was not yet "Omigod" country. Sure enough, what was yet to come was even more breathtaking.

This was, of course, May, at least in Grand Junction where we started that morning, but the mountains did not know it. As Mark's sturdy little car climbed steadily up to 11,000 feet above sea level, we saw deep blue-gray clouds merging eerily with the mountains, and knew that we were moving into storms, which turned to snow. But it was May enough that the snow was lazy, half-hearted little flurries, as if God had put teenage boys in charge of the job. By the time we arrived at Mark's home outside Durango, a mere 7,000 feet elevation, it had become May again, the sun was out, and loads of sage and a few hardy flowers showed themselves.

Mark took me to Mesa Verde National Park, and again, were it not for death-defying hairpin turns, we would have been going at an 80 degree angle straight up. We took one of the Park Service tours, climbing down the rocks and through narrow crevices, following a trail which was mercifully paved, scampering up and down ladders the Forest Service provided, to arrive at ancient cliff dwellings, beautifully preserved, some 8,000 feet up, with nothing but canyon below if you made one false step. It filled me with awe, this slice of life some 800 years old--you could not help but wonder at what hardships on the ground could have made life on the edge of the sky seem safer to these ancestral Pueblans. It certainly didn't seem a great place for raising adventurous toddlers.

We traveled to high desert country then, which in many obvious ways was less spectacular--a sandy, mostly brownish landscape, filled with jutting crags and mesas, though again the absolute determination of life forms to exist in these hostile landscapes was amazing. Pines were growing out of bare rock at flat-out impossible angles, with God knows what in the way of soil to nourish the roots.

But viewed close up, the colors were subtly astounding, and they changed from moment to moment with the light--shades of pinks and lavendars and golds and greens that the Crayola makers never envisioned. Had Monet but known about these mountains, he could have spent a lifetime here instead of at Rouen cathedral, painting those changes.

And then came Monument Valley. I believe I have seen every John Ford western, and Monument Valley was what I had come west to see. And while Ford did as much justice to this natural temple as a camera can possibly do, he didn't begin to get it right. There is simply too much of it, formation after formation that all seem handcarved out of rock. I don't know how even the most confirmed scientist can look at this place and see nothing but the random workings of wind and water erosion and volcanic eruptions. If ever a place seemed to shout "Designed by..." it is this valley. In fact, the whole of the Rockies and the desert country seemed as if some unimaginably gigantic child had gone to bed without putting his toys away, his paints, his clumps of modeling clay, his half-finished buildings and his random unused blocks left lying on the ground.

Monument Valley was also where we had an authentic adventure, with a Navajo man, native to the Valley, who took us on a tour in a well-worn Chevy truck. We got to see some of the less familiar treasures, including a cavern in the rock that formed a natural amphitheatre, where he chanted two of his religious hymns, the sound reverberating around the valley. We visited a hogan and watched an elderly woman carding wool and spinning it.

We were far off the usual trails--which turned out to be a problem when the Chevy got buried up to the hub in sand. Mark and I crawled under the truck and started scooping sand away from the tires, and from in front of the transmission, and I scoured the road for rocks to put beneath the tires. And every time we had cleared some space in front of the tires, our guide would gun the motor and mire us deeper into the sand. At last we gave up, and started walking toward a visible point where other tours were stopping, and we were rescued by another tour truck. The temperature had taken one of those sudden drops I had become used to in these mountains, and the wind was fierce and biting. I have no doubt that whoever invented sand blasting got the idea from being similarly caught in Monument Valley. When we arrived back at the visitors' center, no parking lot had ever looked so good to me.

The next day we went on to the Grand Canyon. If you take everything I've said so far and multiply it by a factor of ten, you might get the idea. Which would be just as well, because we had finally came to the only place on earth where words fail me. We walked along the rim trail a long ways, and even ventured a few turns down the Bright Angel trail into the Canyon itself, just to be able to say we'd done it. It did give a different angle on the scene, as did the visible and smellable reminders that people went down these trails on mules and burros as well as on foot.

The whole trip seemed oddly out of time and place. For one thing, I, a news junkie, saw no newspapers and watched no news programs for about 10 days. But even more disorienting, though welcome, was the fact that the land I traveled through was either part of the National Park Service or a reservation, and because of that, it was almost entirely devoid of advertising. I know that there are those who criticize the National Park Service, but to appreciate what they have done, you have only to descend farther into Arizona and New Mexico and see garish billboards and ticky-tacky little shops, sitting at the base of splendid mountains like so many pimples on the nose of God.

I finished my trip in Albuquerque, a town that is at peace with its surroundings. It's a flat town--as in most western towns, the impulse, given infinite space, is to build out, not up, and no skyscraper could compete with those mountains anyway. The houses and public buildings are mostly adobe style, looking like they simply grew out of the brown and beige and ochre ground.

The other thing that blew my mind is the size of the sky. Where I come from, the view is always blocked by trees and rolling hills. Out there, the view is blocked by nothing, including the air, which is thin and light. Once I found myself humming something, and realized it was Jimmy Webb's "And the Yard Went On Forever." I don't wonder that my niece, who has lived in Denver for the past 12 years or so, feels claustrophobic when she goes back home to Michigan.

But this trip was really not all about scenery. I came to see friends and relatives, and in many ways the most important things that stick in my mind are the new friends I made, the relatives I had a chance to get to know better, the great conversations, and the shared jokes. How rewarding can all this scenery be without somebody to share your delight with, somebody to giggle with when, at the Grand Canyon, the hotel's guest survey card asked "Did you have any unforgettable moments? If not, why not?" (My answer was "I forget." Mark's was "I was attending an Alzheimer's conference.")

I was traveling with a man I knew through e-mail and have thought of as a separated-at-birth twin, and I was pleased we got along as well in person as in cyberspace. Certainly, if you're going to get stranded in Monument Valley, it's important to do it with somebody as good-humored and adaptable as he is. And I enjoyed getting to know his wife and all the friends he had told me about in his e-mail. It wasn't just an important part of America's reality I visited, but his reality as well. Next time, I get to show him and his wife my reality-- Iowa.

OK, admittedly it won't take ten days to see Iowa's glories. But you know, I was glad to get back here anyway.