articulate
Expedition Leader
If you haven’t been here, you must go. And not just to Monument Valley, but also upward to Utah to see Goosenecks State Park, Valley of the Gods, Natural Bridges National Monument. The problem with Utah, is that when you hit one site, it’s soooooo easy to go hit another, and then another, and then another. Utah. Utah. Is there a better word for it than Utah? It’s the crux of adventure and beauty, where they mix into something that you never want to leave.
Being on the reservation gives me several feelings. On one road trip, I laughed with a friend about how when we were kids we wondered about Indian reservations, “Why would anyone want to live here?” We laughed at us being naïve kids, not at the fact that people live on reservations. Now that I’m sort of grown up, I like the reservations for the open space, the mountains, the sacred spaces. Sacred. As a white guy, it’s real work to try to understand sacred. But also as a white guy it’s really dangerous territory to navigate because you’ve got to be careful not to come out the other side unsophisticatedly thinking, “Ohhh, Indian stuff is so cool. Where can I buy a giant kokopelli to hang on my wall?”
I’ve read Sherman Alexie books, and maybe learned a thing or two about reservation life since then: “Thomas was not surprised by Victor’s sudden violence. These little wars were intimate affairs for those who dreamed in childhood of fishing for salmon but woke up as adults to shop at the Trading Post and stand in line for U.S.D.A. commodity food instead.” (Reservation Blues) We’ve all woken up as adults doing something far different from what we dreamed as children.
Well, so I get in the car and drive. Hokey? Another idiot pretending to be enlightened? Sure, but I’m comfortable with that. And this time we ended up on the rez, and I was working again not to be an Indian-loving yo-yo or another obnoxious white guy. Don’t know how it came out, though.
So, we declined a $200 escort service and decided to just visit the sights on our own. And when we returned to camp, my $200 Paha Que shower tent was gone. The floor still held down by rocks, the stakes in the ground. The wind, we figured, picked it up and took it away as some sort of sacred payment for turning down the $200 Indian guide. It seems that the gods of all religions have a sense of humor.
Camp was on the San Juan River, at Goosenecks State Park. We virtually had the place to ourselves. And we chose a spot on a peninsula-type mesa with a massive cliff facing west. “Westward I go free” wrote Thoreau. This is what we needed, see. KC’s been on the road; the long road. He’s out here trying to figure some stuff out.
Here, his figuring out how to take a pee in secrecy:
View from camp:
Someone say something funny, because I’ve carried on too long….
