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Do I start with the Mormons, Germans, or Americans?
Well, first I will start with a location and it will lead on from there. I am in the small town of Hurricane, UT (it is pronounced "hurric-n" and not "hurri-cane" for no good reason other than to hold on to ridiculous redneck drawls...the same reason that Del Norte County in Northern California is pronounced "del nort" instead of "del nort-ay" as proper Spanish would dictate). I am in the library here in "Hurricn", and lucky for you all their internet site filter is down for the day. Apparently Myspace.com is even accessible, "but don't tell the teenagers" the librarian tells me. God only knows what might happen then! Literally, only God knows. I don't know, and you don't want to know. It's the same sort of paranoia that kept me from posting an entry a week ago. When I tried to access my blog at the St. George library it wouldn't let me. Why? Because this is Mormon country, and God only knows what might be on personal blogs.
And it really is Mormon country. Men in suits abound everywhere waiting for eye contact and a chance to chat. All around is a sea of children and pregnant women no matter where you go. On a hike anywhere else you might see a family, and normally you would expect, you know, mom, dad, a kid or two (maybe). Here I am terminally confused. There will be a young couple on the trail, and maybe an older couple obviously associated with them but following a ways behind, and then something like 10+ children inbetween. What is going on here? A school outing? No, it's Saturday. Let us hope that the next president reverses this stupid "abstinence-only" sexual education crap because the whole country will end up looking like Utah, except without all the wedlock and money. It's an ugly thought.
And there are no bars in Mormon country. There is no place where you can go sit at a traditional bar, on a stool, and bullshit with random people. No. There will literally be, maybe, if you're lucky, a single restaurant that can serve beer in an entire town. And you can't just order a beer, you have to get food as well. Utah law. This is a serious trip coming from the land of beer in Oregon. The upshot to Mormon country is that on Sunday, no one is out. Most businesses, especially small ones, are actually closed all day. The trails are empty except for the cool people who don't have 10 children and don't want to spend a full day a week in one of the most beautiful places on earth locked up in some ridiculous brick building.
I've also been trying, unsuccessfully, to do some "couch surfing" through CouchSurfing.com. The premise here is that if you're cool enough to crash on a random couch, and someone else is cool enough to put up a random person on their couch, you'll probably get along well enough. There's a lot more to it than that in terms of compatibility but simply put, that's the essence. The computers were blocking that website too. And when I explained to the woman running the computer center what the website was, and asked if it could be unblocked, she hesitantly did it for me but added "just make sure you don't look at anything inappropriate". WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!? Honestly, who wants to look at internet porn with a 400lb sweaty guy 18" away at the next computer? Do people really do that? I doubt it, and certainly not in a rapidly aging, very wealthy retirement community like St. George. So now that I'm in Hurricn, and I can finally get on CouchSurfing.com, I find that most of the people on the site around here are outspoken Mormons. I'd rather pay $22/night and get woken up at dawn by a jackhammer 100 feet away like I did this morning at the RV park, thank you very much.
Now, don't get me wrong. I know that comes off as really harsh, but the obscene level of paranoia this culture carries around with it is the kind of stuff that builds up to terminal illness after a few decades. Overall I am viewing the entire spectacle as more of an anthropological study than anything I really care about, but when it starts interfering with simple daily tasks it gets very obnoxious very fast. I am just thankful my conception of the world has been proven accurate time after time on this trip: The bad people don't want to mess with you unless you mess with them, and almost everyone is more than willing to help out in any way possible. People are overall very descent, always friendly, and often absurdly nice. I was offered not less than three rides yesterday. I have been given all sorts of food, firewood, maps, I even got $20 from the poor bastard I helped dig out of the sand on a random 4x4 yesterday. Basically I am offered way more help than I need, much more than I expected going into this trip. The world is a beautiful place if you want it to be, it's all about attitude. And to the Mormons who live in one of the most scenic, affluent, and recreationally-intense areas in the world, there's apparently a lot to be paranoid about. I haven't seen it yet, but certainly, somewhere, in a van down by the Virgin River, sits a man who aspires to gawk at porn (certainly of virgins) in the library computer lab. And since I'm headed to find a random campsite by the Virgin River myself immediately after posting this, I just might meet him. Although I'm almost positive he'll cook me dinner, offer me a beer, and tell me about a rad hike instead.
So what, exactly, am I doing in Utah anyway? I started a few weeks back in Valley of Fire State Park, about 60 freeway miles northeast of Vegas. My Thom (pronounced "Tom"...people ask about the "h" in his name, but once you meet him and see how freakishly intense, energetic, and intelligent he is, it all makes a lot of sense actually) dropped me off there, thankfully helping me to avoid riding through Vegas, and there I stayed for three nights. Basically I spent my time getting prepared for solo rambling in the still, quiet nothingness of the wilds. This time with no timetable at all and no destination. You see, the first leg of the trip was different. I had to get somewhere near Vegas, and I had friends coming--both destinations in their own right. But after 10 days with good friends and the insanity of Vegas, I had some readjusting to do. I was alone again, completely alone, in the middle-of-freakin'-nowhere with absolutely no direction. Where would I head, and more importantly, why would I go there? I spent my days rambling around in beautiful off-trail red rock canyons with walls that seemed as though they were sculpted during the Gothic ages of architecture. Ghoulish faces--weird eye sockets, bizarre mouths--were everywhere and accented by the black desert varnish covering their surfaces. The canyon bottoms were filled with a verdant canopy of Catclaw Acacia, and every once in a while, if you were paying attention, it was possible to catch of glimpse of a long-forgotten petroglyph. What does it mean, and why is it here? Why this canyon, on the north side? And of course I asked the same of myself standing there. Why here, now, alone and off-trail?
Inevitably my solitude did not last long. As usual I met people; I was staying in a campground after all. After I was dropped off and feeling very alone, I fortunately had two very crazy women camp next to me. They were older, although I don't know how much, and they had an adorable two-year-old girl with them. I instantly thought they were lesbians (of course, after my experience in Palm Springs, why else would they camp next to me? They knew!)--but no, just good friends. They had a cheap, terrible tent that I tied down against the strong desert winds, and the conversation carried on from there. One worked for a few years as a wedding photographer in a chapel on The Strip and she would do like 10 weddings a day. She is also a Buddhist, just to really complicate things. We stayed up talking about her experiences with Eddy, the Elvis impersonator, about how obnoxious he was and how much money he made. Apparently Elvis weddings are huge with the Brits. Go figure. The woman with the two-year-old daughter, she grew up in Poland. Communist Poland. She had crazy stories about waiting in line for hours at the rumor of milk and bread, and watching a guy get beat to death by the Polish secret police while she was running from a riot when she was six-years-old. It was--without a doubt, hands down--the most bizarre and dichotomous campfire conversation I have ever had. Here I am, in this awesome place newly rejoined to my solo adventure, and I'm talking about Elvis weddings on The Strip and growing up in Communist Poland. What the hell?!? And what does this have to do with the petroglyph? It is not a question that can be answered rationally, it is something that can only be understood. And I am beginning to understand.
But I didn't begin to understand in Nevada. I had to come to Utah for that. I got to Utah by the way of a German guy who called himself Ralph, the only other touring cyclist I have met on my trip. Certainly his German name was not Ralph, but whatever. He was weird, as all Germans are (see, for example, the entirety of German philosophy). I was in the middle of doing some yoga in this little rock cove near my camp and he interrupted to BS with me about my bike tour. Certainly it could have waited 20 minutes, it was weird he interrupted me. He invited me over for dinner, so we chatted. He was only out here for three weeks. His job back in Germany was to translate patents from English to German. That's it. He was basically not much more interesting than his job makes him sound, but he was bike touring through Utah so I picked his brain as much as I could. Turns out that the next day was supposed to be a tailwind, and the day after a windstorm-strength headwind, so hey I might as well take off (once again the bad weather comes to my knowledge without any effort on my part). It was getting hot anyway. The day I left I got up at 5:15AM and it was over 80 degrees out! We parted ways permanently that night after dinner but then met again early the next morning on the road. I ended up riding with him to Mesquite, Nevada which included 20 miles on I-15 which wasn't nearly as bad as you would think. It was a 58 mile day, and there was no freakin' tailwind. It was mostly a headwind! We parted ways in Mesquite because he thought that he might carry on into Utah (that day) by way of old US 91 into Snow Canyon State Park. I was exhausted so we parted ways. I spent that night on a beautiful bluff overlooking the Virgin River shortly before it is muddled by the massive waters of Lake Powell. However, the wind developed intensely while I was screwing around in town. Now it was a constant 25-30MPH with 40MPH gusts, and of course NOW it was a tailwind. I was on a completely exposed bluff, so I threw up the tent and battened down the hatches. I made my way down to the Virgin River, stripped completely naked, and immersed myself in the first free-flowing body of water I have encountered on the trip. It was truly magical, this river in the middle of the desert. But it is all lost on the town of Mesquite, basically a last-ditch gambling outpost before the iron-clad border with Utah. I asked a teenage girl, the kind of girl that should be going to the river with her friends, where a good swimming hole was at and she said, "Well, the public pool is right down the street". Wow. Really?
The wind was so intense, the air so dry, and the sun so hot that my body was entirely dry in under a minute without using a towel. I couldn't believe it. I spent the last hour before sunset in my tent listening to the wind howl outside. I was sick of it by now, just hoping for it to subside after sunset. It didn't. And unfortunately my camp site felt sketchy. The remains of parties were strewn about and I wasn't comfortable there. I packed up the next morning not sure what I would do, but at the very least a new campsite was in order. Preferably one actually on the river instead of a few hundred feet above it. Maybe I'd hitch a ride into St. George, because the freeway was too sketchy to ride on through the canyon. The wind had calmed, but amazingly it was still a tailwind. "Weather forecasters wrong again!" I thought. So I started off, flew by the river campsites, and just kept riding because I felt great. I met a guy outside Subway the night before who offered all sorts of information about the ride to Snow Canyon, about how beautiful it was, so I ended up doing 44 miles with a massive 3000 foot climb in the middle, but the light tailwind made it a nice ride. I brought 2 gallons of water with me up to the summit expecting to actually camp on top and enjoy the great view for a change, but there was no view and it was all devastated and privately owned ranch land for cattle. Dammit! The wind shifted after the summit, becoming a bursty wicked crosswind. I ditched my water to increase my stability and thankfully I did because immediately after getting back on my bike, when I was just getting back up to speed, a microburst hit me so hard that it literally blew me off the road!!! If I was at full speed it could have been catastrophic! For most of the descent I was distracted immensely from the road because in front of me, miles away, sat a massive glowing red rock wall thousands of feet tall and several miles long. "I AM IN UTAH!" I thought.
And it was at that moment that I realized just how tiresome the Mojave desert had become to me. The lack of water, the absolutely insane winds, the unrelenting heat--out of nowhere I started screaming and laughing with joy, staring in awe and extreme excitement at the red cliffs, all the while trying to get the cars flying by to give me enough room that the next gust wouldn't shoot me off the road to my death on a barbed wire fence. I rolled into the absolutely beautiful Snow Canyon State Park completed elated and completely exhausted. 102 miles in two days with 4000 feet of climbing thrown in for good measure. I threw up my tent, ate dinner, and watched the sun set behind the unnaturally swirled orange-and-white rock cliffs around me (it really looks just like ice cream, very crazy).
And then everything changed. About a half hour after sunset the wind shifted direction 180 degrees. "Weird..." I thought. Within about 5 minutes it had built up into 50MPH gusts. My campsite was exposed on a hill, not near any rock walls, and it was surrounded by sand. My long day of riding and complete exhaustion became irrelevant to my need to put the rainfly on my tent to protect me from the wind and more importantly flying sand. For those of you who have not tried to tie down what is basically a sail in a massive windstorm, by yourself, words cannot describe this activity. The closest thing I can come up with is that it's like trying to tie a cherry stem in a knot with your tongue while a hose is blasting water full-force into your mouth. "Hopeless" might be an accurate word. It took me a full hour to get everything set up appropriately. And then, for the next six hours, sand literally rained on everything in my tent, including my face. I slept with my jacket over my head; I remember at one point turning over and moving my jacket and feeling sand fall all over my ear and neck. Thank god for ear plugs!
I spent no less than six nights in Snow Canyon State Park, all of which were infinitely better than the first. There is a very secluded section of the park with tons of amazing off-trail hiking through phenomenal canyons with no one else around. I basically had my own Zion National Park, and therefore had no motivation to leave! I fully entered into a sort of dream time, where days would pass without notice and time itself lost meaning. I spent entire afternoons watching the shadows play on canyon walls, not moving an inch. I watched Blue-Gray Gnatcatchers stealing feathers from a Broad-Tailed Hummingbird nest, I saw Lark Sparrows for the first time, every evening as I ate dinner I watched Sphinx Moths pollinate the vibrant purple Desert Four-O'-Clock flowers around my camp, and I watched Gray Vireos building their nest. I snagged a free campsite just down the road from the real campground where my bed for the night was a small, perfectly-human-sized depression on the top of a massive slickrock outcrop. I slept with no tent, just the clouds, stars, a gentle breeze, and spectacular sunrises on the cliffs around me.
And it was here that I started to understand the petroglyphs. Not their content, but their intent. I started to meld into the canyon, the line between me and the lizards and birds blurring very dramatically. Next to my lone set of footprints sat those of a few lizards and the scat of bobcat, all around were wildflowers being worked by flies and hummingbirds, and above the clouds threatened the rain necessary for it all to exist, including me. The rock walls provide the home, the base, the center for everything. On the geologic timescale they grow, move, and decay just like all life forms do on the biological timescale. Einstein's Theory of Relativity (E=mc^2) states, in essence, that matter is nothing more than energy condensed to a slow vibration. If biological life is energy then matter is geology. We might never have an explicit equation that relates geology and biology like we do for matter and energy, but certainly in the canyons of Southeastern Utah I have come to understand their intense and very tight relation for myself. The difference is merely one of perspective and scale. The petroglyphs, the human desire to build insurmountable and forever-lasting structures and symbols and marks, is our way of tying together the differing scales of matter and energy. That is the uniquely human pursuit on earth, to tie everything together. Our
telos, our ultimate purpose, is to coalesce.
I thought I started out in the Mojave desert to deal with my demons. We have, throughout the history of our species, always flocked to the desert for personal discovery. I have never been any different; I consider the desert my second home. But it turns out that my trials and tribulations in the Mojave were a purging, a cleansing process, a relatively simple and necessary preparation for things to come. Although it was difficult for me, I now realize that it was just the beginning. My time in Snow Canyon was intensely introspective. It was not all fun by any means; in fact most of it was fraught with frustrations and self-loathing interspersed with periods of elation and bizarre psychospiritual revelations. It was, honestly, neurotic. I left Snow Canyon because I felt the need to regroup, relax, let my transformations and realizations sink in for a while.
And so it is that my good friend Josh Foss is coming out from Corvallis this weekend on a whim and staying with me for two weeks of mountain biking and bike touring. You see, the St. George area happens to be home to mountain bike riding comparable to Moab, UT--which is to say that it's some of the absolute best in the world. So, I have a few weeks left in this area, doing nothing but enjoying the fruits of pure hedonism. In fact, I came to Hurricn after meeting up with four mountain bikers from Maryland at the laundromat who bought me dinner and spun tales of glorious trails accessible right from town. This is how things go, paths present themselves when I need them and I simply follow their lead. I have no idea what is in store for me next. After Foss leaves the weather will be outright hot (probably 100+ every day) and I will have an amazing and vast expanse of lonely, desolate, and beautiful canyon country to cover as I head east--my tentative destination. Until I am led otherwise.
Until next time, take a deep breath and relax. Before you get worked up about something or even give it any headspace at all, please ask yourself if it's going to matter to the rocks beneath your feet. I cannot even begin to describe how absurd almost all customer service encounters seem to me. None of this shit matters people, really. It's not like we'll be on our death beds reminiscing about that one time we made sure they got our order right! Spend that extra 5 minutes watching the birds at your feeder instead, notice the pecking order, and then realize...yup...it's just a metaphor for your own existence. All life is a big metaphor of itself, see what you can learn from it.
Keep up the messages and emails. I don't have time to respond to them all but I enjoy receiving them.
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kirkley
non-member comment
there are no birds in new york city, but starlings and chickadees...and pigeons, if they qualify. the customers are restless, i can barely eat. let another breathe. brother, the system might be unreal, but it can crush you. so godspeed! i'll see you in mali.