Ripple

“I wish I could make my camera see this the same way I do,” she said, and I nodded in agreement. We were at Mesa Arch, one of the remarkable viewpoints in Canyonlands National Park. I had walked out alone but joined this nice young couple, Ellie and Jonathan from Provo, at the end of the trail.

It was windy and cold but I was dressed for it. There were patches of snow on the ground here and there, not enough to make it hard to walk on, just enough to remind you that it had been below freezing every day the week before. The sky had some clouds but they were high and appeared to be hundreds of miles away, they did not obscure the view.

We traded some trail niceties — where are you from, how long are you here kinds of things, then Ellie and Jonathan left me at Mesa Arch alone. I sat under the arch and gazed across the distance into the deep canyon below, out toward the La Sal Mountains on the horizon.

It was disorienting, this great distance from such a great height. I have had this feeling repeatedly as I explore the landscape around Moab, a feeling like flying. The space is so vast, the mesas, the buttes, so tall, the texture and shape and color so unreal. It feels impossible to walk from an asphalt paved parking lot, your feet on the ground, and then to find you are so very high up.

Today I walked down into a canyon in Arches National Park; it’s called Park Avenue. The trail drops about 300 feet to the red sandy floor. To the right and left you are surrounded by steep stone walls, pale orange and brown and rust red and streaks of black in places. But if you face forward, that dizzy feeling comes back. The vista opens onto more mesas, more rock walls, more of this endless sagebrush scrub. It really does feel as though it goes on forever.

This morning, the sky was rippled with clouds that reminded me of the ripples in the water as waves recede from the beach. The light was soft and gray and even, and it was surprisingly warm out. I unzipped my jacket and traded my knit cap with the earflaps for a baseball hat. I walked out to see the petroglyphs at Wolfe Ranch, so sharp even though they are an estimated 500 or so years old. When I looped back around on the trail, I mistakenly looked right into the sun. For the next half hour or so I had a ripple in my vision; it only served to make the setting more unreal.

I was alone at the bottom of the trail into Park Avenue canyon for some time until a couple of hikers shook me from what felt like a landscape hallucination. “I just keep looking up,” she said, “it just … doesn’t get any better than this, does it?” His face was bright joy, truly, they could have been sitting in front of a candlelit birthday cake, both of them. Everyone I talk to is universally stunned by the splendor of this place.

Every time I end up alone in one of these nothing short of magical settings, I feel like I’m getting away with something. I was alone at Mesa Arch, alone at Sand Dune Arch, alone at the petroglyphs, alone at the bottom of the canyon named Park Avenue. I’m never alone for long, there are others around, but they are just passing through. The silence in Park Avenue was so overwhelming I thought for a minute that I’d lost my hearing. There was no wind. No birds. No people. It was not until that pair of hikers crunched by that I realized I had not gone deaf.

I’ve been thinking about this compulsion to photograph these places, as though it were possible to squeeze the expanse of the Utah plateau into the tiny black box that is my camera. I’ve also been thinking about my compulsion to use words to describe what it feels like to be so small under a rippled sky. It’s exhaustively documented, in words and pictures, but I still have this desire to capture what it feels like to be on that red sand under the watchful silence of the towering stone walls.

About a month before I left Seattle I had an attack of cold feet. Was I making a mistake coming to this remote place in the middle of winter? It’s hard to get here and none of my friends could swing it to come visit. (Last year at Joshua Tree I had lots of visitors, they only needed to get to Palm Springs, which is so easy in comparison.) I shook sense into myself and loaded the car and here I am. Some days I work — I have a little bit of freelance work — some days I swim at the community pool and wander in town.

Some days I go out into the landscape. While I am there I try to bottle a little bit of what it looks like, what it feels like. I like those short interactions at the viewpoints, out on the trails, where strangers want to tell me what awe they feel. I agree, they’re right, it’s awesome in the truest definition of the word.

It seems like we’re all trying to get our hands around how something as grand as this place can exist. The twisted Utah juniper, the hoodoos, a bright patch of white snow tucked in a bowl of rust-colored rock. The eternal horizon framed by a stone arch. A rippled sky above, the sun punching through in a bright white burst. Why wouldn’t you want to put that in your pocket as a souvenir?

If I knew the way, I would take you home.