| Dear
Mike,
Juuuuust
got back at 11 pm, Saturday night after leaving Hurricane,
Utah about 8 am on a blue-skied cloud scudding wet morning.
We started out with a Burger King breakfast croissant sandwich
w/hash brown potato rounds and a cup of coffee. We would later
graduate to crackers, salsa and beer.
Prior
to this desert crossing, my best pal, Rodger Jacobsen, a highly
experienced mountain bike rider, had organized this expedition
w/three of his biking companions: Bill Abright, art teacher
of ceramics and techno-wizard; Ben Darche, international financial
advisor; Sam Wilson, wetland restorer and photo/writing journalist.
Rod, an excellent sculptor and drawer, was the primary inspirational
force behind visiting the area known as Canyonlands. He and
I had biked into the same region in 1983 and ‘86 visiting
Ernie’s Country, The Land of Standing Rocks, and The
Needles.
This
primarily inaccessible area had been of interest to me since
first visiting it in 1964. Though not as isolated as my near
death hike into the Elves Chasm area of the Grand Canyon of
two years ago, it is stated by the National Park Service to
be the most isolated wilderness area managed by them outside
of Alaska… so, the territory is very wild, tough and
difficult. However, 4 wheel drive vehicles, including the
latest American fad called SUV (sports utility vehicle) bring
clean families of husband/housewife types with young children
and shopping mall wanderers within reach of true wilderness.
In fact, while biking into the Doll House area, a group of
two SUV's w/families eating licorice whips and drinking Coca
Cola, drove past us, hulloing and handing out licorice vines
as they crawled past us, for a 4 hour visit just to see what
it looked like. For that reason, it is easy, and, in another
(ours) it is very difficult. For instance, after all the one-two
day trippers leave, who is there to save you if a problem
arises? Nadie amigo! Temperatures can reach well over 110°
F and you'll fry to death. Fortunately, for this trip, the
weather was the coolest in 65 years, barely climbing above
90°.
However,
we carried 3 gallons of water on the bikes + sleeping gear
+ food + cooking gear + amenities of soap, clean socks, comfort
food, binoculars, camera and film. I had a pump to purify
water found
at seeps in various rock formations.
A
large slice of geologic history is available out here: from
our present era in the Holocene back two
billion years to the Vishnu schist at the bottom of the Grand
Canyon, which is Proterozoic. Those are the oldest rocks (deepest
exposures) in northern Arizona. Most of the Colorado Plateau
consists of layered sedimentary rocks intermediate in age
between Proterozoic and Cenozoic - i.e. Paleozoic & Mesozoic.
It is water and wind etching a history of time and we were
bicycling into the heart of the matter.
Though
I am calling it wilderness, due to it being virtually the
same place as millions of years ago, there is an uncanny sense
of it being home: as a habitat fit for humans… that is,
if you know what you are doing and hold a deep appreciation
of the relation of land to life and are cocksure of yourself.
Luther Standing Bear, an Oglala Sioux stated in the 19th C:
"We
did not think of the great open plains as wild. Only to the
white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was the
land infested with wild animals and savage people. To us it
was tame, earth was bountiful and we were surrounded by the
blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy men from
the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon
us and the families we loved was it wild. When the very animals
of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was
for us that the Wild West began."
On the
route out to 'wilderness', we quit the town of Moab, today
festooned with boutiques, zealot bicyclists, German tourists
and a flooded Colorado River. Appropriately named after the
account in Genesis where Lot fled the iniquity of Sodom:
“Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay
thou in all the plain lest thou be consumed.” Subsequent
to his wife’s saline alteration, their daughters fed
him liquor on successive nights to fornicate with him and
preserve his seed, the youngest, birthing first, named the
son Moab. Whatever irony in this was soon to be encountered.
Pushing
to the north a dozen miles, a sudden spiraling and expanding
black cloud abruptly rose. Around the next bend we encountered
the head-on crash of a pickup which had blown a left front
tire causing it to careen into a motor home, killing
five of the six people. There had been less than a second
to make a decision as the vehicles impacted at a combined
speed of over 120 miles per hour.
The
truck was driven by 29 year old Fawnda Lynn Evans with four
year old Sierra Dawn and fifteen month Case Morgan. Traveling
in the motor home were Jean Paul Weber, his wife Chistiane
Kessler and his brother Roger, all of Luxembourg. Whoever
was driving was decapitated and both vehicles erupted in flames
while the camper portion of the motor home separated from
the cab, flew over the truck and crashed onto the road allowing
Christine to escape with only scratches.
A
highly distraught truck driver met us with waving arms held
akimbo and a narrative of attempting to rescue the two children
from the fire, one still in the child's seat, but the swirling
flames kept him at bay. He was terribly tormented not being
able to aid in any way. Overwhelmed with emotion and shocked
beyond sensitivity we stared into the cab of the burning truck,
the young woman already a charred figure with fat from her
body dripping in flames to the highway surface. It was essential
to NOT stay there. We drove around the flowing heat, on the
wrong side of the road, past Christiane sitting dazed in one
of the motor home’s chairs and pushed mindlessly and
deeper north. This was not a propitious initiation and reflection
of this tragedy remained for the balance of our expedition.
One
hundred and twenty miles of silence followed, interrupted
by occasional comments on a speculation as to how it
happened, and which saw us noisily bounce over the last 45
miles of dirt road to our point of departure known as Hans
Flat. As each of us prepared the bikes and packed gear, Rod
unearthed a platinum engagement ring with a centered diamond.
Was there some metaphor in this discovery? Were we indelibly
wed to calamity? Perhaps this was the message: beware, all
ways, of bad fortune, yet wed yourself to the heart's desire.
Yes, but the real is individual, not universal.
With
accouterments now packed, we rode about a dozen miles to make
camp on the rim, peering down and into the distance of The
Maze.
From
a plane, The Maze appears similar to the convolutions and
lobes of a brain. It is a depression, within the geologic
region known as the Colorado Plateau, of rounded sandstone,
gypsum, rock salt and dolomite formations interconnected by
serpentine canyons some of which are boxed in while others
can penetrate to the other side. Knowing of English gardens
w/hedge mazes, of Lewis Carrol's Alice playing croquet with
the Queen of Hearts using flamingoes colored my curiosity
of the place.
Deep
in the heart of it is a wondrous pictograph known as The Harvest
Scene or Reapers: a transcendental clear depiction of the
relationship of humans to Nature. The figures float on the
wall like ghosts in that they are long and thin w/antennae
or configurations above their heads and some have large Minoan-like
eyes. In studying them since first visiting in 1983, I've
come to the conclusion they are perhaps drawn to closely resemble
the spiritual aspect of water. Water, during rain, leeches
minerals from the earth, and flowing over cliff edges stains
the walls with black streaks bearing a resemblance to long
thin creatures. Too, wispy streaks of rain which fall from
cumulus clouds are called vegas, and also resemble the water
marks on canyon walls. Since water is the most precious commodity
to life in the desert, the relationship to the figures does
make sense. However, none of us really knows why the figures
are drawn in that long thin style now called Barrier, and,
certainly they predate the Anasazi, perhaps going back over
seven thousand years.
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