DAY 43: Failures, Water

WENDOVER, UTAH | Wednesday, April 21, 2010 | King Regency Inn, Room 121

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Life is too full, too beautiful. Maybe it is only in the West, so colossal. Every mountain, every lone, lit tree, hillside, valley, late-day ridge. Again and again down another stone-still, wind-loud road, down Desolate Road No. 846. Maybe only for someone from the East it is this way. Some newcomer. Some parachuter. Doesn't know the boredom and paralysis of day by day after day. But it isn't as dark as this, living. It is infiniteness. De trop. Leftovers again. I try but cannot document it all, not even some. Cannot keep up with the beauty and pain flowing through.


Getting and spending, we lay waste our days...a poet said that. But it is not that at all. It is more: Breathing and being, we fill infinite seas.

*


From the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, we wanted to head to Bryce Canyon. There were three ways. The longest, 391 miles, the northern route, was the shortest in time. It went by highway, at speeds of 75 mph and higher, looked to pass through the most mountainous zones. The southern route, slightly shorter, at 377 miles, went through Navajo reservations, low desert, next to no towns of any size. And then I found a dirt road through the Paria Valley, 46 miles of dirt road, a shortcut along the southern route, the third way, that could get us to Bryce in 307 miles. We could outsmart all the highway rabbits with this route. The turtle could come through. And besides, dirt road would be more adventurous.

We drove through the morning and into the afternoon along 160 West to get to the dirt road, to Cottonwood Canyon Road. It was that same thing. Photos taken at top speed, hurtling along at 62 mph, through the windshield, through the rear view mirror, out the open side window. We passed a man in street clothes riding a horse bareback on the far side of a wire fence, galloping in parallel with the road. And then one more. And then a housing development over the flat high plains, one hundred houses with roofs of green, red and blue. Then more desert. 

And high tension wire towers. Marching across the stubbled valleys, earth a magenta red, carrying the power lines, looking like primitive skeletal representations of human god forms. Every twenty miles or so, the path of the road passing underneath the draped power lines, until it became a diagram of a weave, of a DNA strand, the road and the electricity continually crossing paths, until the towers converged with others from separate hills at a massive factory. The factory had three smokestacks, two of the stacks pulsing white exhaust. We approached the way you do everything large in the desert. You drive for miles, approaching it, but still it recedes, enough to defy total comprehension for awhile longer, you watch until it seems you will never actually reach it, until suddenly, if you are lucky, the road passes at its feet, it soars up, engulfs you and then is gone. Other factories, pushed back from the road, you never know. They slowly revolve, always facing you, always retreating. But this was big. Big power. More than colossal. And after another mile or two, round a bluff and down the hill, the sources were there, the Colorado River and Glen Canyon, and the dam built there. We drank in the deep green, slowly churning, sparkling of the river water from hundreds of feet up, through chain link fence humped over the bridge. We got back in the car and kept going.

At Cottonwood Canyon Road, there was a sign put up by the park service, for the Grand Staircase national park or something, saying fourwheel drive and high clearance recommended. We discussed. I of course said not to worry. Adrienne worried aloud but went along with it. A guy in a big new pickup, sunglasses, tan, came along in another minute. We slowed and I asked him How is it? Fine, he said. Forty-six miles, about two hours. Some washboarding. There's some sketchy parts. But it's fine. You'll be fine.

So we kept going. It was not a bad difficult road. Just a dirt road, hardly separated from the landscape around us. It was beautiful, passing longhorn cattle, right there, chewing, scratching, giant sandstone mesas eroded and flung high and flat and bare above them, stone above green earth and grazing animals, dust billowing in the rear view mirrors. I was gloating. The road was better than the one into Chaco Canyon, very little of the shuttering of the washboarding actually, and more curvy, more humped, and through geological terrain that hid and revealed the path. I said how with Venice, a person wants to arrive by water. It is the way, better than by train or plane or car. So with Bryce Canyon, I said, the way to arrive must be this way, by Cottonwood Canyon Road.

We got about halfway, a little over an hour in. We'd passed mostly trucks, waving, friendly, but there'd been a Lexus all-wheel drive sedan, too, driving too fast, a yahoo, and another nondescript two-door sedan, just cruising along. So it wasn't that bad a road really. But there'd been at least one warning. I'd already had to drop Yellow Truck into first to climb to the top of one hill, as we passed two photographers with tripods, and he'd been boggy, almost running out of reserve steam. It should have given me more pause. But of course I wouldn't have turned round. So about halfway, we came to a particularly picturesque spot where the road dipped down and then shot back up between red rocks and scrabbly juniper trees. The road jumped up so quickly, before veering off to the right, that it looked almost vertical. We stopped. I took a photo. Adrienne got the movie cam going. I remember thinking it was like a fairy tale hill, so picturesque. 

We didn't make it. Yellow Truck reared, third, down into second, then desperate, first, nothing, stalled. The road was too steep and sandy, deep and powdery there for some reason I don't know why. Yellow Truck just didn't have the torque to turn his wheels in all the loose soil. We backed down the hill, tried a hard run. Denied. Tried slow from the start. Denied again. Humiliation is the short version. Supremely pissed. Then shaky. Remembering one particularly steep hill we'd come down, ever so gingerly. Possibly we were stuck. Yes, we had everything we needed, as Adrienne said. We could camp there if need be. We sat there in the road, pulled off to the side, next to a parked SUV with no-one inside. I checked the oil, trying to gather my thoughts. We would wait until someone came by. Someone did, in a Subaru Outback or something. They didn't have cell phone reception either. I'm not sure even what our plan was if they did. Then another vehicle eased over and down the hill, a four-door Jeep of some kind, with Australians inside. Once the guy figured out we thought we might be trapped between two hills, he smiled, said good luck, and put it in drive. Gone. Alone again in the picturesque gulley. Ridiculous. 

Well, we turned around. We got back to the other steep hill, the one we'd come down. I'd remembered it as being full of soft holes, as awful as the one we'd not been able to get up. The switchback scared Adrienne. What if we couldn't get up it, had to back down. How would we get around the corner. I was scared and mad, biting my tongue said don't worry we're going to get up it. And the ground was hard packed mostly, still steep, at the switchback I dropped into first and punched it and Yellow Truck whined high revving, spitting, spinning the tires over the hard dirt, bounced us up to the crest and over not too too bad at all, free to return all the rest of the way we had come, back past the longhorns still grazing the same place, the same beautiful valley, tack on another 97 miles, the shortcut of 307 blown out, out to 404, transfigured into a route about 13 miles longer than the northern highway route we'd been so clever were going to circumvent. It was one thing, I said finally, to be slow. That I could live with. But if you can't complete the task. Then what. Then what. I could see, I was furious, I could see Yellow Truck and I parting ways. And Adrienne defended the truck, which was good of her, but didn't help me much, so I shut up and dug deeper and darker and more foul.


Eventually we made Hatch, Utah, pretty much according to plan, just quite a bit later, after nightfall, and in silence. For awhile, I'd been joking about it, trying to find the redeeming metaphor in Yellow Truck's failure at Fairy Tale Hill. But after awhile, I couldn't. And I soured. Adrienne turned silent and stoic. And I hated this moment, wanting to rise above it. But I couldn't accept the limitations this time. Lack of speed, fine. Unable to complete task, unacceptable. So what if we had a bed full of tools and everything else. A little pickup, any pickup worth its name, should have made it up that hill on that day in those conditions, even if the sand was deep and fluffy. 

Anyway, next day, after changing the oil around seven am, another three thousand miles behind us, while packing up, ready to head into Bryce Canyon, while packing the bags I threw out my back. 

A twist, a slight searing dull pain at the small of my back. Immediate significant loss of strength, ability to move. Fear. Then shift into a rage. Shouted a few regrettable things. Stalking off. Going for a walk, I said. Only now, walking like an old man. Slow. Dinky uncertain shuffling steps. So unacceptably slow and without strength. And like in illness, now suddenly in this weakened state, time and schedule slipped away. I was alone on this residential rural side street in some foolish town, blue sky, cold morning, in sneakers for the first time in weeks, high desert mountain town, elevation 8,000 feet, my fingers still cold, still glistening from the oil. Alone. Eaten up. Everything suddenly on hold, and who knew, in an hour or two, would I be on my back, unable to move.


*


Together, a few hours and several pain pills later, driving with one fist jambed into the seat and an elbow on the door handle to ease up the weight, after a few quick stops to let me limp around parking lots while Adrienne went inside stores to find food for camp, we made our way down into Bryce Canyon. Amazing. In winter. Never seen it this way. This sandstone canyon like no other. Walking down from the canyon rim among all the terracotta hoodoos, in the hot alpine sun, the breeze cold from blowing over all the melting snow, greeting all the French and German tourists, them smiling and talking loud in spite of themselves, the place so utterly unearthly unlike anything.

When we go running, it is me beside Adrienne, taking my time, pacing her. Now she was pacing me. We took photos of ourselves. I took a photo for a trio. They took a photo of us. Down we went into the canyon. My back warm as pie with pain, but not bad at all. And I took a million pictures and Adrienne waited each time. She somehow is able to take just a few pictures. And even though she loved the place. She said so. We were there, making our way among all the crumbling beauties, they've been crumbling for thousands of years. We bent down by a small terracotta creek of snowmelt and pulzerized sandstone, little more than a foot wide, but busy loud, collapsing its own banks with intermittent splashes. I lowered myself, down into a sitting position. We touched the water. Held our hands in it, let it wash over, set in. Adrienne and then me. It's so cold, she said, content, filled with it. Cold. Cold, good. Water. I wiped my wet hands on my forehead, under my eyes.