Paradise and Its Parking Lots

Mon Oct. 13

After a late start in Las Vegas (are there other kind of starts in Vegas?), we headed back into the desert, leaving the Strip behind us first, and then slowly the rest of the city, the buildings flattening out from mega high-rise casinos and convention centers downtown to the squat houses and strip malls of the massive suburban sprawl that surrounds it. The Interstate crawled Eastward across the seemingly endless barren plateau until finally reaching the giant mountain gates that let you know you’ve left Nevada and its flashy come-ons behind you and have entered the sacred fortress of the Southwest. Where Vegas entices you to believe that you are the most important life form that ever walked the Earth (for the two and a half seconds before the city pinches your wallet), the high desert Mountains are quick to remind you that you are just one small walking sausage casing, unfit to survive in anything but the mildest of climates and terrains.

After winding our way through the first of the great red rocks of the West, we arrived in Springdale, UT, the town whose sole purpose is to be a welcome mat to the famed Zion National Park. The town was a wash in tourists. Not really our kind of tourists either, if there could be such a thing. Some were RVers, while some were the kind of campers that don’t actually camp but stay in nice old inns with canopy beds and six types of soap in the bathroom. And they were everywhere. The two campsites within Zion proper were full for the night. Good, I thought. From the looks of them, it would have been a miserable kind of camping, crowded, right next to the highway and a high chance that there would be screaming kids within earshot in the pre-coffee hours of the morning. The kind of hotels and bed and breakfasts in Springdale looked pricey as hell, at least given our standards. With the sky growing darker, we needed to figure out what we were going to do. Since starting the trip, we had oft repeated the old refrain, “worst case scenario: we can always sleep in the Kia,” but now that that prospect was becoming more and more likely, it sounded less and less appealing. That is when we were struck by the miracle of BLM land.

The Bureau of Land Management is a government agency responsible for the administration of large swaths of land throughout the country. They put up signs around these parcels of land that you can see from the highway that say (or sing) things like: “This is your land!” Our host back in Idaho had clued us into the idea of camping on some of this BLM land. You are allowed to camp on any of this land because, heck, as an American citizen, you actually own it! Having spent the last couple weeks thinking I was just the renter of a passenger-side seat in a Kia, it was quite a wonderful shock to realize I was, in fact, a landowner.

The sun was already changing into the proper coloring for its descent over the Western horizon as we scrambled to find cell coverage that would lead us to this BLM promised land. Through a mix of luck and some primo mobile Internet sleuthing, we stumbled across this blog post that apparently listed several good spots to camp in the area that had been used before and were known to be more than sufficient for our needs. We turned off the highway onto a lonely side road, headed up that for a ways around a small mountain side, then turned off a dirt road that hid itself by a corridor of small trees until we came to the spot listed on the blog. The link had included some exact GPS coordinates, which made it quite easy to find actually and so there it was: a cleared out space with a fire pit already waiting for us. We quickly set up our tent, threw together our fire, and we had ourselves a home, for free, and just in time to see the sunset. It turned out to be a pretty sweet spot. Thanks a lot, guy from the Internet!

Reading my book, alone, by the fire, without anybody for miles, I wondered, just for a moment, why I had ever spent so much money renting out an apartment when I could be doing this for free. (Still, I kept a hatchet by my feet, because, you know, the boogeyman.)

Tues Oct. 14

I had a vague memory of a dream. I was in the bleachers at a minor league baseball game, listening to advice from Giants manager Bruce Bochy, who sat next to me for a couple of innings. What he said to me in the dream and what it means for what’s really going on in my subconscious were lost (you tell me, psychologists!). I had woken up in the night several times from the cold, but now it was uncomfortably hot and I began shedding my many outer layers before getting out of the tent to greet the day.

Let me start by saying Zion National Park is a beautiful place. From the first step inside the gates, you can tell this is a unique and magical environment with views I will no doubt remember for as long as I live. That being said, this was the most touristy, overcrowded park we have been to yet. The main attraction is the Zion valley, carved out of these giant hulking orange mountains by the Virgin River over hundreds of millions of years. The valley and the cliffs that tower over it are covered in green a blanket of green. It is shockingly green, actually, given the desert habitat surrounding it. In the olden days before air conditioned Kias and cutesy Springdale B&B’s, this place was a sanctuary for desert travelers, from the native Anasazi to the Mormon settlers who posted up here in the 1860’s for awhile before they moved into the more comfortable digs of suburban beehives.

Today, the floor of the Zion valley is a paved highway traversed by park-owned buses that run the tourists up and back in an almost never-ending loop. Most of the park is rather flat, which means it’s a perfect place for those breed of park tourists that demand exclusively horizontal movement in their vacations (if any kind of movement is necessary at all). Many of these people are old (I am aware that, at 25, most people deserve this classification, but these people were, you know, old old). It was at this time that it occurred to us that these people had waited their whole lives to come here, waiting year after year until they would be freed by the mythical “retirement” in which all of their life’s dreams could finally be realized. In Zion, I became exceedingly more grateful that I could be doing this trip now, seeing these sights as a young man. I certainly wouldn’t mind going back and doing it again once I get my AARP discount, but I am glad I didn’t have to wait my whole existence to search out life’s meaning in the canyons and mountains of God’s country just to realize that they had paved paradise and put up a…well, you know.

The next stop East on our original schedule spreadsheet (since betrayed for a sidetracked trip to Nevada) was Grand Staircase–Esclalante National Monument. Grand Staircase is not really a set attraction as much as a massive chunk of Southern Utah claimed by the federal government as “too awesome” to be eaten up by private enterprise. After a brief respite in tiny Kanab, UT, for a bite at the Three Bears Café (“famous for our homemade bread!”), we headed almost blindly further into the desert on Route 89 looking for another BLM miracle motel.

I thought we couldn’t have found a better spot than the night before. It wouldn’t be possible. Using a super vague map as our guide, we ditched the highway for a red dirt road that led straight into the brush. At this point, it was darker than it had been the night before when we had begun the first stages of panic, but I guess our previous night’s success had strengthened our resolve. We could always drive 40 minutes back to Kanab and stay in a seedy motel (*shudder*). Continuing on down the road away from the highway only 15 minutes (or a dozen “should we-keep-going?”s) we found our oasis. A clearing on the right side of the road had all we needed for the night, as if we had custom-ordered a campsite. We had the lone shade tree in a wide sea of shrubbery. Someone had made a fire pit out of rocks to keep us from burning down what vegetation there was. Despite the luxury of such a campsite, it looked hardly used and the two old cans we found while out looking for firewood had definitely been rusting in the desert for over 50 years. Other than the cliffs and the Kia, we were completely alone. No tourists. No RVs. No park rangers. No city lights to distract from the stars. No check out time. No weird smells. No stains on the carpet. No awkward conversations with strangers. No tolls, fees or rent. But somehow, miraculously, through the powers of the beneficent gods and their communications company, there was perfect cell phone reception. After calling our families to tell them we were alive (although thrown off once because the cell reception in Berkeley was, in fact, inferior to ours), we lit a fire and watched From Russia With Love on a laptop, as the moon rose to cast its mystical glow over the entirety of our desert resort.

Wed Oct. 15

(For the sake of your time and my own frustration, I’m going to omit a story here about traveling far too many miles down a gravel road far too uneven for our poor Kia thanks to some totally off-base advice from a guide at the Kanab Visitor Center, who obviously thought we were driving a full-size pickup truck even though I specifically told her we were driving a beautiful, expertly-crafted, yet definitely front-wheel-drive automobile.)

Finally, we had found the road to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I did not expect to find a herd of buffalo on the way there, nonchalantly grazing in an open prairie that ran parallel to the road. There were over a hundred of them, some full-grown with long, shaggy beards, others were babies, young calves that kept clumsily bumping into each other. You could stop your car, as almost everybody did, and walk up pretty close to them. They did not care. I guess, after centuries of unadulterated slaughter upon their species by ours, the few remaining buffalo were intent on enjoying the land’s bounty come hell or high water. I don’t know if they were wild. I assume they belong to someone. Or the state. Or the park service. I suppose, as the hippies would say, you can’t, like, own a buffalo, man.

The approach to the canyon from the North was far more wooded than I would have imagined. Even arriving at the Grand Canyon lodge, a hotel surrounded by a small village of elegant log cabins and their guests, it still seemed awfully more forest-like than I had remembered from every picture I had ever seen of what the Grand Canyon was supposed to look like.

The Grand Canyon is hard to describe because (a) it already has a pretty accurate and all-encompassing name, (b) every person reading this blog has seen a million pictures of it, and (c) it is not so much a singular sight (i.e. “Hey, it’s the Statue of Liberty!”) as it is a four-dimensional experience. While standing over the Grand Canyon, out on Bright Angel Point, it is all around you. It is to your left, stretching far beyond your view both Eastward and downward. It is to your right, stretching even farther beyond your view Westward and still farther downward. But, as the minutes become hours, you gaze longer, and its magnificence becomes even more overwhelming, its scope so very far beyond your comprehension. You realize that the time it took to make this canyon is far greater than even the time it would take to construct a million skyscrapers, where every floor was filled to the brim with the most amazing human craftsmanship our race has ever designed, all of our computers and literature, all of our castles and artwork masterpieces.

Somehow, my brain was not crushed by such magnitude and we were able to get back into our Kia and ramble onward, back to endeavors fit more for my puny human consciousness.

We came down into the middle of a sweeping plateau, the only visible geological formation being the Vermillion Cliffs to the north. I must have thought I knew what the word “vermillion” meant before this time, but it was not until I saw those blood-drenched bluffs towering above me that I knew the word’s true meaning. Awash in the colors of a setting sun, the cliffs gave the unique impression of being on another planet. This otherworldly feeling was furthered by a stopover on the roadside to gaze at these incredible looking boulders. We were maddeningly brought back down to Earth by the intrusion of a hideous, bloated family of three, who had also stopped their vehicle, a Hummer monstrosity blaring the disgusting belches of what only a true philistine would call hip hop, to take numerous selfies in front of what they were no doubt convinced was an actual dinosaur’s discarded skull.

It was completely dark when we set up our tent at a sleepy campground in Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, already inhabited by a few campers and RVers. The campground bordered the Colorado River, a few miles from one of the only crossings of the river this close to the Grand Canyon. After dinner, I took a stroll among the snoozing campers, turning off my flashlight in the pitch black. Keeping me company, I had an earpiece tuned to Game 4 of the National League Championship Series. The Giants scored the go-ahead runs in the bottom of the sixth inning on a couple of groundouts, which, in a baseball game played by humans, is about as close as you can get to a celestial miracle. I circled back to the campsite, my eyesight now good enough to see the surrounding cliffs again, effortlessly replacing my mental images of the Giants pitchers closing out the game with six scoreless innings of relief.

There was something special about being in this spot and the others I’ve been in the last couple of days. There is a reason people travel miles and miles and years and years to see them. But it’s more than just the beauty of it all, more than just a visual pleasure. It changes your perspective I guess, and at least tugs at your priorities. Why exactly it does that to us, I could speculate at reasons, but I don’t necessarily expect to find out for sure until retirement or the next ice age, whichever comes first.