Pies and Petroglyphs; Capitol Reef National Park, Day Four

The highlands near Grand Escalante, on the way to Capitol Reef

The fact that this land is a study in contrasts helps highlight my investigation of Space. 

A flowering fruit tree pressed against a tan and gray canyon wall is

far more beautiful than its counterpart back home; in the north-east,

flowering trees, Fruita area, Capitol Reef

plants run apace.  Nature moves, if not in harmony, than along the same trajectory.  But in Capitol Reef National Park, plants and rocks stand in marked dissimilarity to what grows around them.  We find singularities. 

Take the Fremont River, which meanders through the valley (named after the early western explorer and failed Union general). Flowing, undulating water cascades between walls of tan and brown stone.  Space here, at least in this part of the park, has been partially tamed by this river, and by people. The net result is not negative. 

The valley was inhabited until the 1920s, and orchards of fruit trees

the Fremont River

still dot the landscape.  They are flowering now, in late March, great buds of white that smell like clover honey.  I fall deeply in love with these trees; back home it is snowing, the cold is soul sapping, but here, in the desert west, the season of life has commenced.  I practice a hand wringing rapture among these groves.

There is yet another human  element in the valley that tames space; this one to protect and preserve what would otherwise be vandalized and ruined.  A boardwalk snakes along a cliff side, which with the aid of signs, and close observation, reveals Native American

glyph in the center

pictographs (painted) and petroglyphs (carved).  People have inhabited the park for 10,000 years.  These renderings are from the so-called Fremont Culture and Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloans) - and date from about 300 – 1300 CE.  The signs tell us that there is no way to assign a meaning to the different pictures.  We will never know that intent of those who created them.  But there is no need.  The impulse to do so is a distraction from the simple pleasure of viewing.

The people who rendered these images inhabited a world of boxy figures with elaborate headdresses and fanciful tails.  Signs and symbols of both an earthly and astral nature. These figures are

glyphs on high

the filtered spiritual dream  world of people living so close to the land, they are the land. Our search for meaning in these images is fruitless for we are not only divorced from the land, but the food we eat, the water we drink, and even the weather outside our window.  

We are all deeply moved by the rock pictures – our first.  Later, when we see more recent Indian drawings, the aspect of time is a corrosive marker.  More recent drawing feature men on horses; they are smaller, stick figures, more approximate renderings of what a person is supposed to look like.  Western thinking has made the old gods and spirits tamer, more realistic – or effaced them entirely.

But we don’t feel sorrow now. Awe fills us to the brim.  We hike a short trail to Hickman Bridge.  On the map it is a tiny spur of a line.  But that line conceals dazzling diversity.  The trail moves up a

smaller caves, bunk style

slope surrounded by black, igneous rocks.  They are out of place around the sedimentary, tan cliff faces, as if some great, deliberate hand took a flame thrower to each, until they were charcoal black. At the crest the hill the trail descends to a dry stream, a wash.  

The wash is dry, although the sand is damp to the touch (or perhaps it is just cool in the deep shade).  The sides are pocked with divots and holes, some so large we lay down in them.  The

the "big cave"

wash twists and turns and reveals its secrets: a cave, flushed out by water, smack in the middle of the wash. Water flows through, but it never erodes the roof.  We stand on the roof; we sit in the cave.  I see the traces of maidenhair ferns in cracks.  They do not cease to amaze me – these beings of shade and damp in the desert.

The trail ends (not an accurate word, for it only really ends for us) at Hickman’s Bridge.  Like so many hikes in the west, we move from a confined space of rock, pinyon pine trees, twisted spruces and boulders, to abundant and sweeping space at the turn of a bend.  This produces a shock:  God, you think, this space has been here the whole time.  The narrow space of the wash was just a temporary form.  Space is protean.  Think you have it nailed down with your elbows and it shape shifts out of your arms.
     

The bridge, really an arch, is sturdy, monumental, and in deep shade.  My son scuttles up the side.  I no longer offer admonishments for these stunts.  At 15, I would have done the

not my photo!

same thing, and he knows the cardinal rule of climbing:  don’t move from one secure perch until your foot and hand have found another.  He  follows this rule, and always remains on his chosen perch.

That night we stay at Austin’s Chuckwagon Motel in Torry, Utah. We eat dinner at a pizza place.  On the door a sign explains that patrons are allowed to bring their “carry and conceal” weapons into their established – but they are kindly asked to keep their firearms holstered.  We are in Utah.  That night, as cold rises with the setting sun, we soak in the motel’s hot tub.

The next day, on the way out of the Chuckwagon, we must drive through Capitol Reef again for our next destination.  We swing through

my last sniff

valley once more, over the Fremont River, passed the Indian paintings, and in and among the edenic rows of fruit trees.  I take one more sniff of blossoms. This park hides one more secret.  Pies are sold at the house of the last settlers.  

We no longer concentrate on Space.  We buy four small, individual sized pies. With one bite my wife tells me that I must drive the car, and concentrate only on a long silver of concrete, and not the expanse of reality - this medium we swim in but seldom notice - as my wife and daughter must eat the best cherry pie they have yet to taste.