Arches...Some Years Later

 

One of the first sights one sees upon entering Arches National Park

    So here I was, back in Arches some 40 ýears later and still awed by the cliffs and red hilltops that had ignored the many scratches and markings that humans had tried to carve in the forms of roads and bridges.  It had taken us over five hours to get here, mainly because we thought we would stay to the larger roadways, ones which still shrank down to a single lane in each direction as if builders eventually came to think that the hard scrabble was simply not worth the effort; that thought became something that made the existing rail line that paralleled us all that more impressive.  How did those early builders (mostly Chinese illegal immigrants and treated as little more than slaves, as it turns out) haul in all that gravel bedding and railroad ties (themselves rather heavy if you've ever tried to lift one) and of course, those steel sections of track.  As our car veered passively down the roads I couldn't help but wonder at the despairing thoughts of workers who must have occasionally glanced up and looked further down the designated pathway, peering at that horizon of uneven rock and loose scree that waited for them and appeared to be without end.  It was 91° F on this early evening and summer had yet to arrive, our hotel insulating us from the extremes of sun and temperatures and work, unlike those workers.  And even amongst all of this, the now-ancient sea bed before us, temporarily dry, didn't appear to notice; we were apparently just another set of pesky gnats, of a different size perhaps and with different machines, but in the time frame of the land we would also soon pass and the ocean of soil would continue to move on, ever changing even if our shrunken human eyes couldn't capture it.

On the path to Delicate Arch

Delicate Arch

      We had somehow joined the Everest-like throngs of people marching up the path to Delicate Arch, one of the most photographed and recognizable natural formations.  It was just before 8 am and we somehow nabbed the last, and I do mean last, parking spot.  There were people of all ages and shapes and nationalities, each determined to make the three mile roundtrip loop and return home with the feeling that it was more than worth it.  Later in the day we would venture over to Devil's Garden, the area that had stunned me in my earlier years and was so noted in a post some moon's ago, one of which described the drilling threats near the area and the other talking about my first experience visiting the park and how the arches are formed; my wife had never been to here, a common trait of so many of us who live for years or decades in an area or state or country and yet have explored so little of what's outside our backdoor.  And while we had seen about five "arches," three of them really up close and two from a distance, we were well short of the remaining 1900+ arches that have been officially recorded in the park.  My memory was vague but I remembered the petrified sand and the ancient oceans that came and went, memories that caused me to reach down and pick up the occasional white fragment that peppered the red sand below.  Was it a shell or a fossilized bit of life, I wondered?  But each proved to be only a piece of weathered rock, itself a fossil before it too dissolved into a part of the soil.  The park's brochure described it more succinctly, describing the park as "...lying atop an underground salt bed that is responsible for the arches, spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins, and eroded monoliths of this mecca for sightseers."

Some of the "fins" that await at Devil's Garden

Entering one of the "fins"

   It went on: Thousands of feet thick in places, this salt bed being deposited across the Colorado Plateau 300 million years ago when a sea flowed into the region and eventually evaporated.  Over millions of years, residue from floods, winds, and the oceans that came and went blanketed the salt bed.  This debris was compressed as rock, at one time possibly reaching a mile thick.  Salt under pressure is unstable, and the salt bed lying below Arches was no match for the weight of this thick cover of rock so the salt layer shifted, buckled, liquified, and repositioned itself, thrusting the rock layers up as domes, and whole sections fell into the cavities.


    Nature had forced this give and take, this constant evolving and changing of shapes and sizes, just as we were seeing in the million+ people that visited each year.  There were no complainers among the hikers that we saw, despite the heat and despite the cluster of RVs and the difficulty in parking if you hadn't entered the park by early morning (meaning around 8 AM).  One woman from Germany told me of her own caravan and how her group had flown into Las Vegas, then drove to Death Valley, then San Diego, then up the coast to Sequoia  Park, then Yosemite, San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, Lost Dutchman's, and now Arches.  The next day they were headed for the other parks: Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, Bryce, and Zion.  But not before coming to the ranger lecture that was scheduled at the Arches' campground later that night.  "We only have five weeks," she told me, as if justifying the rushed schedule.  They were doing more than most, I told her, seeing more of America in one fell swoop than many Americans.

Landscape Arch in Devil's Garden

    It all reminded me that no matter the distance or the time, the era or the ages, the super-fit and the not-so-fit, there was one thing driving everyone and it was a curiosity to see more and to connect more, or perhaps to reconnect more with the outdoors and with our planet's natural wonders.  And perhaps in the process, to connect with ourselves.  Author Neil Gaiman, on introducing the book All These Wonders, True Stories About Facing the Unknown, wrote: ...none of the tricks we use to make ourselves loved or respected by others...the tales of how clever we were, how wise, how we won, they mostly fail...Honesty matters.  Being open about who you were...telling your story, as honestly as you can, and leaving out the things you don't need, that's vital...Because we all have stories.  Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories.  And the gulf that exists between us as a people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don't see, we can't see, the stories.  And once we hear each other's stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

    Editor of the book, Catherine Burns, added her own observation: We live in a world where bearing witness to a stranger's unfiltered story is an act of tremendous compassion. To listen with an open heart and an open mind and try to understand what it's like to be them --why they think like that, dress like that, made the choices they did-- takes real courage...we look away at our own peril.  For what wonders await us when we don't turn away.  Sometimes it is easier to make sense of the world one story at a time.  And when we dare to listen, we remember that there is no "other," there is only us, and what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us.

A portion of the right side of Landscape Arch broke

 away in 1991; it was estimated to weigh 160 tons...

 
   What was so good to see was that the park was so crowded.  It wasn't that I cared for the busloads of people and the constant search for a parking spot (everything does seem to ease up around noon when it gets rather hot), but rather that so many people were coming out to see these wonders, to express their own sense of amazement at how grand nature was and perhaps to also see how little all of us humans were, both in size and in time.  It was both humbling and for my wife and I, necessary.  The events of the world mattered, but here was an isolated and desolate part of the land, just one part of many such areas around the world; and it was standing still before our eyes, petrifying and breaking away, caring little for our politics and grumblings and binge watching.  Over a million people were still arriving to see these monoliths, driving hours and making the rounds, climbing up sometimes steep ledges or trudging through soft red sand, wiping their brows and searching for more.  And everyone had a story, even those on the bus.  Even after leaving for the day, my wife and I seemed to echo the general feeling...we were glad that we had made the journey, had taken the time, and were fortunate enough to glimpse yet another marvel of our planet, our home, and one even more obviously in need of preserving.

Just some of the people completing the hike to Delicate Arch