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| Cholla, Virgin River Gorge, Steve Brown 2022 |
1.
The sun blasted the east-facing, chunky walls of the Virgin River Gorge and threw blue shadows over a canyon so deep, narrow, and twisting that during the winter months there are some places the sun never reaches.
If you think such a place would be sacred to all who encountered it, and that we were either hiking on some trail through protected back country or driving lazily down some two-lane road with a 35 miles per hour speed limit in a state or national park, well, you are wrong.
Like millions of others before us, we were powering though this magical place on an interstate, curving this way and that way, trying to get a glimpse of the amazing terrain above us without flying through a guardrail and into the Virgin River, which though small, drops 70 feet per mile, a rate ten times as steep as the Colorado River does through the Grand Canyon.
In 1973 this section of Interstate, the most expensive of its day, opened in a canyon no highway had known before to shave off about 30 minutes of drive time between St. George and Las Vegas. What was lost in the trade cannot be measured in time or money. A canyon to match the beauty and significance of Boquillas and Santa Elena Canyons of Big Bend National Park was reduced to a quick, exciting drive. What should exist instead is a slow journey to be savored mile by mile.
As often is the case when atrocities to the landscape are committed in the name of interstates, the powers that be created a park here, the Virgin River Canyon Recreation Area. Even so, all hikes in the canyon are accompanied by the sound of traffic. Trails can give access to the wilderness. They can't restore what has been removed from the wilderness experience forever by concrete rivers wild with the roar of traffic. No matter how good looking your trail signs are, you can't squeeze an interstate into a narrow gorge and retain anything remotely resembling the wilds.
I'm glad, however, for the guilty attempt. Having a park designated requires access, and so the park provides places to get off the freeway and picnic, camp, or hike, which would not otherwise be there. I especially love the little campground. Crime with guilt is better than crime with no guilt at all. Half-hearted apologies are better than no apologies at all. But how amazing that canyon must have been before they blasted an interstate through it.
2.
Twenty-five years ago, Marci and I went through here on our honeymoon, and I wrote about it--sort of:
I took my love and drove her down
to Mesquite through a heat deep
and white, walled-up against the last black
shadow of Virgin River Gorge, my head thick
with need. She spoke of Alabama mud
and the magnolia trees that bloom along Sestina Road.
The poem is a fictionalized account of our honeymoon. Though beautiful, I now find it strange. Marci is from the desert. She knows nothing of Alabama mud and magnolia trees. The woman along with me for the ride in that poem clearly is not her. Why?
Some of that, I'm sure can be chalked up to the creative process. I randomly picked words for the sestina form and created my first stanza, which to some degree, directed the rest of the poem. Also, artistically, I would have been drawn to the contrast between the parched desert dirt and slick Alabama mud. Even so, I now realize it was fear that made me write the poem somewhat distanced from reality. I jumped into my marriage believing Marci couldn't love me for long. 25 years later, I'm very glad I did that. Sometimes you have to take a risk and be more than you believe you can be. I'd received so much rejection up to that point, I simply did not believe my marriage would last. Fictionalizing the poem gave me some emotional distance, a road out, should things not work out.
There is a beauty and a yearning that comes through the writing when a writer isn't quite ready to name his subject, as when I wrote "Sestina Road". There is nothing wrong with that. That's the power behind Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The first brave step to name a fear is a powerful one, cloaked though it is, in metaphor.
However, there is also something to be gained from writing clearly and simply without guise, what you see and name along the way--the blatant is of the experience. Hopefully, what is gained is a solidity that cannot be denied. As I mature as a writer, that is what I'm after: the undeniable rock of reality beneath things, the is of the moment striped of artifice.
I pulled off the interstate to see where the bones of the earth uplifted and punctured the skin of our planet to rub the sky--as well as view the river sharp enough to slice through it all. No story needs to be added. Rock in sunlight is all a moment needs.
3.
The campground sits high above the Virgin River in a wider area of the canyon before everything funnels you towards the deep shadows and narrow spaces that is the gorge. Here things are softer, more relaxed, which you would not know if you never left the interstate which focuses your eye only on what's ahead of you--that great gouge in the upheaval.
Here though, along this quiet, little loop, you notice smaller things, like sunlight behind the sharp needles of a cholla surrounded by small sunlit yellow flowers shaking in the morning wind. You also notice the glisten of polished stones in the desert pavement and hear birds chirping somewhere down by the river. You feel sunlight seep in deep to bone. Life is good.
Then you get back in the car and head back towards the interstate. Death Valley pulls you forward.
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| Flowers, Virgin River George, Steve Brown 2022 |
