10 April, Hatch UT

A little too cranky to write well last night. Something about the crowds there after climbing Angel’s Landing tried my patience. New hatred for digital cameras as they are the occasion for countless arguments. In retrospect, sitting before coffee and a greasy spoon breakfast I appreciate the opportunity to observe human ethology but I wish its volume was a little lower.

An amusing scene on the shuttle that runs up and down Zion valley: normally full of the usual NP crowd – parents, kids, retired folks – but the climbers ride, too, and when they get on the shuttle one wonders if the planet isn’t inhabited by two different sentient species. Quilting is discussed in one corner, children are angrily shushed in another, cragging and arcane strings of letters and numbers in a third. Attempts at conversation (‘Were you really up on them cliffs?’), mostly one-sided. Admiration, somewhat involuntary, from the earth-bound mortals; disdain or just oblivion from the climbers. My own admiration (as if I were some third species) is rather evenly split. There is something a little godlike about the climbers, their dedication and athleticism: but there is something a little inhuman about that insular vocabulary and the one-track minds that are generally (I note some significant excpetions, including a former housemate) necessary to process it. My sympathies are ultimately with the human, though. Loud though they may be, and often enough deliberately ignorant, the ones who started conversations were not the climbers, but the ordinary people, revealing in them an unconscious sense of fraternity that goes beyond shared interests to the truly human.

- * *

About 15 mi east of Bryce Canyon NP, in the Dixie NF. Views of Grand Staircase/Escalante. Camped on a sandy bluff above a river, a quarter mile off the highway near the pass. Someone pulled up in a truck, saw me walking up the road, and then left. Hope there isn’t trouble, it’s incredibly isolated here.

Yet another new ecosystem for me here. Cedars and pinyon pines, none very tall, all gnarled withy age and weather. Little groundcover, a few cacti, and some smallish shrubs that look like desert holly. The ground is cracked from a recent rain: still a little muddy in spots. Must get very dry and hot in the summer.

The wilderness here confronts me with my own frailty. As the mind begins to recognize its beauty it becomes clear how inhuman such beauty is. Correspondingly it is inhumanly cruel. How does anything survive without all the tools of civilization? The answer of course, is that it does not. Death is always near, for the tree that fails to find a source of water, for the sparrow that fails to notice the falcon overhead. It becomes clear that life is not merely the antithesis of death, but engages it in a complicated dance. Birds live without (we can reasonably conclude) knowledge of their own mortality, but they experience its fruits: hunger, fear, and lust.

I am not sure I have adequately expressed the nature of this realization. But I point out that Thomas Mann observes that the ancients adorned their caskets with symbols of fertility, and thus must have known that love and death are inseparable. I recognized the truth of this when I read it, but not until I came into the wilderness did I perceive it directly. It may be necessary to come out here to see it. City life surrounds us with so many protections, or at least so many appearances of protection. So we never learn to see certain things about the world and our own natures (and they are ultimately connected). We get so little information from our own experience. Nearly everything comes to us second-hand. And there are some things that simply cannot be known in that way.

(cdm, in ContinuingEastwards | 10April2006)