Essay #2
THE WONDERS OF UTAH
"Awe is the single most-needed emotion in the world today."
Photo courtesy Utah Office of Tourism (Frank Jensen)
Driving onto the entrance ramp of Interstate 70 East at Salinas, Utah, I felt a pang of sadness at the thought that the wilderness was behind me. I had crossed Nevada and part of Utah on desolate Highway 50. Tourist dives were even selling "I Survived The Loneliest Highway In America" t-shirts. Far beyond survival, though, it had been a great pleasure to find a little breathing room in this world.
Then, as I got my car up to Interstate speed, I read a quickly-passing road sign: NO SERVICES FOR 108 MILES. Yippee, I thought.
And as the black asphalt of the perfectly-graded road began snaking its way through the miles that followed, I found myself on a high-comfort, armchair tour of the most amazing fairyland of natural wonders my eyes had ever seen! At times the highway carved its way through sheer rock walls of towering height. At times it followed a river gorge, or ambled through rolling hills. And then, for the longest time, it gave me a perfect vantage point on a series of natural sculptures of every color and shape imaginable, on a scale of the vastest grandeur, that carried my imagination to the highest pitch of wonder it is capable of.
The name for the emotion I felt for this prolonged period is awe. Awe is the natural healer. Sufficient awe would resolve most of the problems in the world today. It is why, or a big part of why, the Outward Bound programs are so successful with inner city children.
photo courtesy Utah Office of Tourism (Frank Jensen)
I drove through maybe fifty miles of towering rainbow canyons, mighty mesas, and more rainbow canyons with totally different color schemes and textures! There were variations of shapes I never knew canyons, pinnacles, and towers of rock could have. And somehow there was no repetition. Every "work of art" was utterly unique.
All this was magnificent, and yet I was also haunted by the fact that so many of these formations, conceived by something, or Something so much greater than a human mindwere obvious metaphors for forms in the human world. It's no accident that some of these structures are known as "Cathedral Rocks" or "Organ Pipes"; that one magnificent area of Bryce National Park is called "The Silent City".
Driving along Highway 70 I saw a city of stone huts where you could imagine dwarves living. I saw praying nuns and a Madonna and Child. I saw the Sphinx, and a great Sea Elephant; a group of hooded men; tribal Elders squatting on the groundthe Titanic sinking!
And the thought that teases the mind: Is this "just geology"? There is an undeniable interplay of these mighty forms and colors with the archetypes of the imagination. Whether even a dropped bowl of clay resembles a great mountain, or is "just a blob on the floor" says more about us than the object. We are the myth-making creature, and when we stop imagining, we are dead. But here the imagination soars!
The scenic overlooks along Interstate 70 in Utah are perfectly placed, I thought, for the best views of the most inspiring sights. Let us make no bones about it. Call it what you will, the people staring out in awe are not really "tourists"they are pilgrims! We artists can rail about phillistinism ramant in America, but the man with that camera around his neck has parked here to appreciate poetrywhatever he may call it!
photo courtesy Utah Office of Tourism (Tom Till)
Precisely what is it about these phenomena that inspires such awe? Their gigantism seems to put the mind in mythic mode. A place in Colorado, for example, is called "Garden of the Gods". In such places, we see the vastness of ourselves, projected outside ourselves. That is what myths do, whether in literature or, as here, in what can only be called sculpture. "It does not require a large eye, to see a large mountain," an Eastern proverb says. "The soul is greater than all it surveys."
The final question suggested by these Utah views, and which I've already alluded to, is: who is the Sculptor? A great Artist, to be sure, but is the Artisthere more of an Expressionist like Jackson Pollack (fittingly born in the West, in Wyoming) than the gentle Desert Impressionist I had seen earlier in Nevadaa cosmic principle of geologic time and cataclysm? or is it God, as a religious human being might understand God?
The thought "even an atheist would be in awe" kept coursing through my mind in Utah. And I suppose that is the point. If we experience ourselves in the presence of something vastly greater than ourselves, it may be almost immaterial what that something is! The experience of feeling dwarfed may itself slim down the human ego and prepare a person to live life in service to that "something greater".
I think that were a religious person to look at the Cathedral Rocks or the Organ Pipes of Utah, and exclaim, "You see, there is evidence of God! He made the rocks to look like churches," such a person would be putting the cart before the horse. For cathedrals are built to mimic awe-inspiring qualities of Nature, not the other way around. It is Nature that is God's House.
photo courtesy Utah Office of Tourism (Tom Till)
An interesting anecdote: At one of the overlooks, I followed a path past the parking lot to find a bathroom, and kept going afterwards, along the pleasant, pebbly, dry earth thickly studded with bushes. We, and the entire Interstate highway, were actually atop a canyon that dropped off suddenly a couple hundred or so feet back from the parking lot. As I approached that drop-off, beyond which was a chasm and then another mighty cliff structure, I saw a solitary woman gazing worshipfully at the view.
I suddenly understood a disturbing news story I'd heard on National Public Radio earlier in the week: a lady in Yellowstone National Park, there with her husband and children, had fallen 500 feet to her death! It would be easy for anyone so awed by a view, and standing on such bone-dry soil full of tiny, round pebbles, to roll off the precipice a few feet away, I realized.
I meant to gently warn the woman. But as I approached her, the meditative atmosphere enveloping her was so strong that I didn't want to disturb her, and never said a word.
I started seeing these structuresthis was past Green River
and thought, "Hey, they look like arches!" And then, a split
second laterthis sign! Needless to say, I felt validated.
I arrived at Green River, near the Colorado border, changed. This essay has been my witness to that change. I wrote it so others will be moved, as I was, to visit this territory of "rocks and desert", this place I mistakenly believed to be "nowhere", which Brigham Young and his intrepid band trekked through a century and a half ago, and which the Indians too recognized as holy.
If you want to see more photos of Utah, try Utah Pictures.Com But come back!
(Note: My camera was broken in Utah, but I have great photos, commentary,
poems and stories from the rest of my trip. And there's a long ways to go!)
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