On Clocks and Cameras, Arches and Attractive Archaeologists

Moab, UT (July 2nd)

“Those were all good times, especially the first two seasons when the tourist business was poor and the time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious, and free as the summers of childhood. There was time enough for once to do nothing, or next to nothing…”

--Edward Abbey on life as a ranger in Arches National Park, from the author’s introduction to Desert Solitaire.

***

Reading E.A. in his natural habitat, atop Whale Rock at sunset.
Not depicted: an exquisite swiss cheese, turkey, and avocado sandwich.

Arches National Park, for the unfamiliar, is the most aptly named park in the country. Its defining features are, yes, arches: natural sandstone structures, over 2,000 in all and no two alike, ranging from the slender, majestic Landscape Arch to portals that stare like eyeless sockets from red stone. The Park’s most famous construction is Delicate Arch, the Rock That Launched A Billion Postcards, and which now graces Utah’s license plates.

Each arch, though, offers unique aesthetic pleasures. A few I encountered while hiking the trail called Devil’s Garden:

Landscape Arch, which could fall at any time. Holy crap that would be cool.


Double-O Arch.

Broken Arch

And for good measure, a different flavor of geologic oddity, Balanced Rock:


Crazy place, eh?

***

Most tourists (including yours truly) arrive at Arches believing that its topography was carved by water, but pamphlets at the park’s gate quickly disabuse visitors of that notion. Although wind and water did (and do) contribute to some erosion, the park’s iconic structures were formed by the pressure of heavy sandstone upon the less stable, underlying salt bed, which buckled, shifted, and thrust up those notorious totems. (There’s the ex-Geology TA in me.) Wait long enough and, even in the absence of other elements, time will forge strange beauty in Arches.

A few thousand years is nothing to ANP, of course, and so it’s a place meant to be absorbed as Abbey did: at leisure. Only by watching the unchanging arches for six months at a time, several years in a row – like Abbey – can one begin to appreciate the infinitude and inexorability of geologic time. To comprehend the place, one must defy any impulse toward haste.

But the hordes of tourists aren’t interested in unhurried observation. All visitors to ANP, in fact, act like they’d rather be anyplace else – logical, considering that Arches is not their destination, but a mere detour in a two-week RV expedition making stops at Zion, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, etc. These people are busy: if they don’t make Bryce by sundown the itinerary is shot, and by God they’d better not hafta skip Lake Powell - you can rent speedboats there, and how sweet is that?!

And so they scamper from arch to arch, two panicky minutes at each, documenting their pilgrimage with point-and-shoots, their bleary kids dragging feet through the sand.

***

I’m throwing stones from within a glass house, I’m ashamed to admit: I spend a day and a half at Arches, and the same embarrassingly brief interlude at Canyonlands. Hell, in Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey spends that long observing the courtship rituals of two gopher snakes (incidentally the most enthralling depiction of bestial romance this side of Lady and the Tramp.)

My own gopher snake, evidently enjoying bachelorhood.

Still, my stay feels interminable compared to the sojourns of other tourists. An unwritten social contract does not allow visitors to remain for more than ten minutes at any given site within ANP. After those ten minutes – during which sitting, relaxing, and silence are not permitted – it’s time to move on, to check another icon off the National Parks scavenger hunt list.

I violate that contract a few times, most memorably at Navajo Arch, a crescent doorway in the rock that shelters a snug, weather-proof grotto, complete with fine-grained sand floor and stunted, Banzai-esque pines. Nature has never created a more perfect hideaway, and I make myself at home: the boots and socks come off, the peanut butter and jelly come out, a book (Desert Solitaire, as if you had to ask) unfurls itself on my lap. Of all the regionally specific experiences I’ve had on this trip – listening to Buddy Holly in Texas, drinking Keystone in Colorado – reading Abbey in Arches is the most authentic, and evocative.

View from within Navajo Arch grotto, world's greatest lunchbreak

***

No sooner have I made myself comfortable, prepared to drink in whatever inchoate wisdom Navajo Arch cares to impart, than I’m joined by an insufferable family. A loud and adenoidal wife, a rude and overbearing husband, god knows how many destructive little kids looking to yank the legs off some hapless whiptail lizard. Immediately – before even exploring this idyllic harbor – they begin arranging themselves for the photos. The father’s camera whirs to life, and the rest of the clan assembles itself in every conceivable permutation of siblings: Okay, Alex, stand next to your sister – no, dammit, your other sister – and Louise, why don’t you switch places with Kristin, and now let’s get one of just the girls, and how about one where you’re all making funny faces, and Perry, you’d better stop screwing around because we still have eight arches to see and it’s already –

“Four-thirty,” I say, checking my watch, and they all notice my presence and stare at me, palpably mistrustful of the strange man with his shoes off and a book out in the middle of the desert. They find my nonchalance bizarre, even unnerving – my breaching of aforementioned social contract must hint at sociopathy. What kind of idler would dare relax during his vacation?

***

The car may be the piece of machinery that has most harmed the way Americans interact with nature, but in the wrong hands the camera is deleterious in its own right. Abbey’s essay, “Industrial Tourism and the National Parks,” details the automobile’s damage so perfectly that anything I add would be redundant (amazing how prescient that piece feels, thirty years after its penning). So, confident that Ed has eviscerated the car, I’ll say a word about the camera.

This trip has been my first experience traveling with a camera, and I'm thrilled to have it. The pictures have turned out beautifully, although the scenery gets more credit for that success than any latent talent I might possess. There’s no question that taking pictures, and later reviewing and editing them, has been pleasurable; furthermore, pictures tend to appreciate in (sentimental) value, so I view my shooting as an investment.

But I’ve noticed, too, that my interactions with my surroundings have become slightly less contemplative. Too often on this trip, when I come across a gorgeously backlit rock formation, is my first thought not “How does this make me feel?” or “What incredible geologic process created this?” but rather “What’s the best angle to photograph this thing?” I’ve had this camera for barely a week, and already I’ve begun to see the world through its tiny window, at the possible expense of my own senses.

Other tourists are infinitely worse. It often seems – forget seems, is the case – that the sole reason many people travel is to prove to other people that they travel. “Wish you were here” is both an expression of longing and a subtle rubbing-it-in. Photographs, along with postcards, drive this culture: tourists come to National Parks so they can show off their snapshots to jealous relatives who haven’t so carefully hoarded their vacation time. They’re also documenting their trip for their future selves, in expectation of sitting around in their dotage and remind themselves that they weren’t always sticks in the mud.

The result is maniacal, ceaseless, artistically void picture-taking: photo albums that are nothing but the same five people lined up shoulder to shoulder, grimacing into the sun, as iconic backdrops flicker behind them. See? Look where we were! Such photography also dampens experience. When the cameraman is pondering how best to preserve a moment for posterity, he is not enjoying and fully processing that moment. Contemplation in the present is sacrificed for reminiscing in the future; thus tourists cheapen their emotional connection with, and intellectual understanding of, the places they visit. (The digital camera, by the way, has made all this worse, since it has allowed amateur shooters to spend more time screwing around behind the lens, and also sucked out much of the artistry that made photography so worthwhile in the first place.)

Many people, of course, possess no appreciation for the intrinsic value of nature; nature exists for them only so that they can experience it. I may have caught a mild case of Photo Fever, but I, at least, have the good sense not to pose in front of every landscape I see. When you visit a National Park, or any beautiful place, by all means take many, many pictures – I don’t intend this post to be a polemic against cameras as Abbey’s essay was against cars. Simply, allow nature to be the subject of your pictures, and not their object.

This picture of Partition Arch might just look better without me in it.

***

Thankfully, there are people in this world who are still pressing upstream against modern tourism’s trends, and I am fortunate enough to be joined by two of them in my Navajo Arch haven (after the abrasive family has made its ungracious departure). Two good-looking women in their late twenties wander into the grotto and set their packs down, and it’s clear from their reverent murmurs that they’re tourists of a different, more thoughtful breed. (While they’re pondering cosmic time or the existence of a divine creator or whatever, my mind plummets, inevitably, into the gutter. Two girls, one guy, a secluded grotto in Arches National Park: if the Outdoor Life Network showed late-night adult entertainment, this could be the premise for a pretty sweet movie.)

Alas, nothing so dramatic transpires: they lean against their rock wall, and I lean against mine, fifteen feet away. Still, I’m glad to meet them. It turns out they’re vacationing archaeologists working over the summer in the Grand Canyon, studying the Pueblos. Could any gig be cooler?

“Are you sure you’re not arch-eologists?” I blurt. No reaction. “Because, you know, of the arches,” I add lamely, in vain hope that they’d missed the joke.

“No, we gotcha,” says the taller of the two. They smile patiently.

“So have you guys, uh, discovered anything yet this summer?” I ask, trying to salvage this interaction.

“Not much,” says the other girl from behind chunky sunglasses. “Just an eight-room.”

“Eight-room?”

“An eight-room house,” she explains. I must look impressed, because she adds, “It’s not that a
big a deal. People have found twenty-rooms.”

I don’t know about you, but I want a job where finding an ancient eight-room Pueblo house is considered just another day at the office.

The conversation turns somehow to our mutual hatred of the tourism paradigm, and they feel much as I do. “Yeah, it’s shitty,” the sunglass-wearer says. She’s the more voluble of the two.

“Have you been to Delicate?”

I tell her I haven’t. She says she’s been many times, and that the place is always packed, noisy, and generally spoiled.

“That sucks,” I say, eloquently.

“It does,” she agrees. Then she leans in conspiratorially, and, as though imparting a secret pertaining to national security, hisses, “Get there for sunrise.”

“For sunrise?”

“Yep. All these people, they’re lazy. Nobody gets up early enough for sunrise. If you’re there by seven you’ll be the only person there. Guaranteed.”

I’m skeptical. My informant turns to her friend for confirmation. The taller girl gives a laconic nod. “There before sunrise,” she confirms.

We chat a little while longer, but they grow less talkative and more attentive to their sandwiches, and I start to wonder if I’m an irritant, much as that family was to me – through no fault of my own, perhaps; merely by being a desecrating human presence in an otherwise untouched place. I can’t stand the thought and I leave, thanking them for the tip on my way back out through the arch.

***

I dutifully hike the two miles to Delicate Arch before sunrise the next morning. Sure enough nobody's there, with the exception of a few giddy swallows cartwheeling through the open sky between the arch’s legs. And I guess as an aspiring writer I should try to articulate the experience as best I can, but somehow I don’t feel up to that task, to doing justice to that strange cocktail of beauty – equal parts alien, eerie, sublime, even sinister. It’s ironic, given the content of this post, that all I can offer are, yes, pictures. Thank god I have my camera.




After I take a few photos, though, I put the camera away and watch the swallows, watch the sun creeping higher along those red rock legs. Not for another fifteen minutes does the first tourist, panting with altitude and the day's burgeoning heat, poke his head over the slickrock behind me.

End.