Capitol Reef is Utah’s unfairly forgotten National Park, not as famous as Arches or Zion but just as spectacular. Jagged spines of rock (the titular reefs) abut and collide; monoliths and spires tower over lofty mesas; the rocks glow a Martian red. There’s a darkness, though, a sinister quality to Capitol Reef’s grandeur – like the place is trying to lure tourists into its lovely recesses, only to leave them dead of thirst in a remote canyon.
I get there at the worst imaginable time: noon. A thermometer at the ranger station tells me the temperature’s 102 degrees. That sounds conservative. When I get out I can almost feel the desert drawing my bodily fluids from me, greedily drinking my evaporating insides. A small refugee camp of motorcyclists sprawls in the shade beneath the ranger station’s awning, gulping sodas desperately.
Right now all the scenic hikes are out of the question – no way am I tackling anything involving an elevation gain. I consult my map. Only one hike seems tenable: Sulfur Creek, a sinuous canyon with a stream coursing along its bottom. The map forecasts constant fresh water (potable, despite the creek’s ominous name), shade from the canyon walls, and a downhill pitch. What could be more perfect? I park my car at the Chimney Rock trailhead, where the stream originates, and plunge into the canyon.
It’s a great hike, everything I dreamed of and more. Unfortunately my camera has developed some focus issues and is in the untrustworthy hands of a Panasonic repairman, so there’s no photo documentation, but rest assured the canyon is beautiful, a maze of orange sandstone walls and wild rock formations. I take my shoes off and walk in the streambed. It’s at least twenty degrees cooler down here, and I hardly break a sweat. In a couple of places the canyon walls narrow into a kind of chute, and the only way to proceed is to slide down a short waterfall into a pool below. At one of these falls I encounter the only human I meet on the hike: a stout German man walking upstream. He’s hurling himself against the face of the waterfall like a crippled salmon, in desperate search of a foothold with which to climb the falls. I ask him how long he’s been trying to climb and he tells me twenty minutes with a sad shake of his head. I ask him how much longer he plans on keeping it up and he shrugs – discouraged but unbroken.
***
The stream eventually peters out in a culvert beneath the highway, about six miles from the trailhead. Now what? I don’t feel like walking upstream to my car, and those falls seem impassable anyway. I pause to assess my options, then clamber out of the streambed, cross the highway, and stick out my thumb.
***
A steady trickle of cars rolls past me, about a vehicle a minute. None of them stop. The asphalt is sticky with heat – if it was 102 at the ranger station, it’s 110 here. Not a chance I’m walking six miles over this desiccated, deadly road. Unremitting slickrock flats peel away from the highway and stretch into the distance – there’s not enough shade to shelter a lizard. Sweat dries as soon as it appears on my arms, leaving behind a white skein of salt. Minutes tick by – ten, fifteen, twenty.
I grow accustomed to the different forms of rejection. Most common are the SUV-encased Midwestern families whose burly, mustached fathers give me apologetic waves as they pass: I’d like to pick you up, but, you know, we’ve got five tons of luggage and two sleeping kids in the backseat, and besides, my wife, well, she’d never have it. There are worse ways to get shot down. Some cars accelerate when they see me, cross the meridian to give me a wide berth, their drivers doggedly avoiding acknowledgment of me behind their mirrored sunglasses. Others slow down as if mulling it over, cruelly raising my hopes before dashing them by cruising past. I’m not the ideal hitcher, I know: I’m too big, too unkempt, too male. Hell, I wouldn’t pick me up.
Rarely in my life have I wished I were a petite girl. Now is one of those occasions. I throw down my pack and sit on it. I’m destined to be here a while.
***
I stick out a disconsolate thumb, more out of habit than hope, at the next car that comes growling up the hill. And, holy shit, miracle of miracles, the right turn signal flashes and the car pulls to the shoulder. I’m saved.
I spring to my feet and reach for the passenger’s door but the driver, his face obscured by tinted glass, waves me to the back. Fair enough. I toss my pack onto the backseat and slide in after it, babbling my thanks.
Where are you going? asks the driver in a clipped Japanese accent over the roar of the air conditioner. The car is freezing, maybe sixty degrees. The man doesn’t turn around, but I can see dark hair gone gray at the temples above a stiff white collar.
Only going a couple miles, I assure him, and explain my situation. Just a few miles, the man repeats, and he sounds relieved that he won’t be saddled with me for too long, though maybe a little regretful too – as though picking up a hitcher frightens and intrigues him at the same time.
Too hot to walk, he adds, turning around to give me a sympathetic half-smile. I take stock of my Japanese benefactor. He’s wearing a freshly starched shirt tucked into slacks flawlessly pressed, and not a hair is askew on his neatly waved head. He looks like he’s just emerged from a business lunch.; there’s no way he’s stepped outside of his car today. He looks sixty years old, but thin as a fence post, and, from the ungainly way his legs are folded beneath the steering wheel, very tall. His watch glitters.
This man and his ensemble couldn’t be more out of place here, in this land of beefy, rumpled Americans sporting sweat beads on their bald spots and chocolate stains on their cargo shorts. My driver is the Ted Williams of tourism, cryogenically preserved by his humming air conditioner, perpetually immune to the desert’s powers of dishevelment.
Way too hot, I agree, and launch into a spirited discussion of the weather – how it’s hotter down here than it is up in Boulder, and how it’s hotter today than it was yesterday, and how it’s hotter on the road than in the canyon. If I’ve gained no other skill from my month of farming, I’ve mastered the art of banal weather-related chatter. For the farmer the weather is life and livelihood, and every staffer at Hell’s Backbone – me included, now – monitors its fluctuations obsessively. We spend our mornings analyzing the meteorological implications of every flock of clouds scudding across the eastern sky, and our afternoons in meta-analysis: how we thought those clouds portended rain, but, wouldn’t you know, they just missed us to the south, and, well, you never can tell with weather, can you?
When my monologue – punctuated by my driver’s bewildered nods – has run its course, I ask him where he’s from, where he’s going, how long he’s in the States. All the relevant particulars. He grips the steering wheel with two hands and answers tersely. He’s from Tokyo, here on vacation. He doesn’t know where he’s going, maybe Salt Lake. And how long is he in the States? He tilts his head. Until I leave, he says.
I get the impression that he doesn’t feel comfortable speaking about himself, and as soon as he’s answered my questions he asks me where I’m from.
New York! he exclaims, turning suddenly voluble, after I tell him. New York man! You must be very rich man, from New York. He’s mocking me a little, but good-naturedly.
If I was rich I wouldn’t need to hitch rides, I say.
Maybe you lose all your money on Wall Street. Economy very bad here. Very bad.
That’s why I’m in Utah, I say. And not New York.
You travel alone? he asks me. You have no wife?
Me? Ha. No.
That’s good, he says. He nods solemnly, at the sagacity of bachelorhood. You are free agent.
I laugh. That’s right, I say. A free agent.
Lock up daughters, he says, chuckling at himself, and he glances at me in the rearview mirror to see if I appreciate the colloquialism. I do, and laugh and nod. He grins back.
And what is your career? he asks me.
My career? I barely have a job, I say. No career.
He looks at me in the mirror again. What you doing out here? he asks. He adjusts his glasses on his nose, and says, with incredible perspicacity, You are walking around all day and thinking about your future.
I laugh and look out the window, the aloof slickrock flats whizzing past, almost too bright to stare at without sunglasses. Walking around all day and thinking about my future. Man, I say, that’s exactly what I’m doing.
***
We crest a hill and the valley unfurls below us, scarred with canyons that twist and writhe their way toward an orange horizon. An immense fang of blood-red sandstone juts from the earth a mile down the road: Chimney Rock, where my car is parked. In a minute I’ll be back in my own iron capsule, and my mysterious patron will vanish into the desert in his.
What about you? I say. You have a job? Family?
We plunge into the valley, the car gathering momentum and speed, and the driver doesn’t say anything. I’m not sure if he’s heard me over the AC, and I’m about to repeat the question, when he draws a weary breath. I wait for him to speak; I realize I'm holding my breath.
I am finished, he says at last, and the exhaustion and melancholy in that finished is tragic – a quiet, dignified, Willy Loman brand of tragedy. An ultimate finish. A finished that implies that everything, everything, is behind him.
Two kids, he says. We’re getting close to the Chimney Rock turn-off; he shows no signs of slowing down. All grown up, he says. I retired job two months ago.
I almost say congratulations but the word dies in my throat.
Wife, he says… and then he doesn’t say anything. I wonder if they’re divorced, or something worse. I do not ask.
And that, maybe, is what he's doing here, incongruously dressed in the American West - all those things that have provided his life meaning for the last sixty years are defunct, expired, depleted. He needs, I think, a new reason to live. And this trip is a (perhaps desperate) attempt to find one. My driver stares blankly out the windshield and the car thunders downhill.
The turnoff is fast approaching, but he shows no signs of seeing it – he’s in some sort of trance, some blind reverie. At the last second, when we’re almost past it, I blurt out, Here it is, and he comes to and jerks the wheel and swerves into the parking lot, trailing a plume of dust. I see my car, and it’s strangely comforting to find it so unchanged: tattered road maps on the rear window ledge, stalactites of dried mud hanging from the wheel wells.
I thank him for the ride and jump out, my keys already in my hand, pack again on my shoulder. Then I glance back, I don’t know why, and he rolls down the passenger’s window.
Can you hike up there? he asks. He’s pointing at the ridge, sheer and exposed, that runs up the fins adjacent to Chimney Rock. A narrow ribbon of trail switchbacks up those rocky spires and vanishes around their side. Beyond the fins lies wilderness, stark and murderous. Hot, barren, unforgivingly dry wilderness.
Looks like it, I say. If you wanted to.
The driver stares past me at the perilous, strenuous trail. Maybe I do, he says, and rests his fingers on the door handle, about to disembark. I imagine him climbing those spires, his collared shirt and pressed slacks gathering red powder and turning shapeless. I picture him alone at the summit as dusk gathers, his gangly frame silhouetted against a fat yellow moon like Ichabod Crane, blundering cavalierly into the night with a whole troop of Headless Horsemen – his obsolescence, his loneliness, his ghosts – in close pursuit. If he goes up that trail, I think – and I’m not being melodramatic – he doesn’t come back.
He hesitates a moment longer, and then takes his hand off the handle, stays in the car. Take care, he tells me, and swings out of the parking lot back onto the highway, disappears over the next rise. The miasma of grit kicked up by his tires hangs in the lot.
***
Whatever he’s looking for, I hope he finds. Maybe, too, he’s wishing similar luck for the not-so-rich New York man walking around, thinking about his future. I have more confidence in my own soul-searching than I do in his, though.
End.
Keep it up Ben. I enjoy reading about your adventures.
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