If ever an atheist wanted to believe in a god, Bryce might be the place to start. For all the Grandness of THE GRAND CANYON, the pounding thunder of Niagara Falls, for every grand place on this Earth...Bryce has got to be both the weirdest looking and beyond AWESOME place to have a zip code. As you enter, past the usual
concessionaire crap of gas stations, horsey ride stables, ATV rental places and beyond the antelope grazing at the National Park entrance, nothing on God’s green earth is going to prepare you for the fact of holiness beyond the asphalt parking lots. Your freaking cranium is about to have every neuron lit on fire like the space shuttle lifting off into the stratosphere. Woo-hoo space cowboy!!!
Some things are best left to pictures than worlds, and so help me, even Emerson and Theroux would have crapped their pants at this sights of this park and their pens fallen silent. This is not some placid Walden Pond, with ducks and birds chirping in harmony with the earth. There ain’t no water here for miles partner. Mid-summer, this is a dried out corpse, left with only the flesh-less marrow-less ribs of
blood-red spires poking into the cosmos blue.Something was here, that is a FACT. Mountains of sandstone wasted down into ridges, now fed upon by time immeasurable, left with glory in decay. Like the magnificent maple, turning blood-red until final rot of brown.
I can only say that we spent two days there, time had left me and I wished all methods of time keeping had been destroyed. Oh to sit naked under a juniper tree in the red sand, like an indian brave and watch the eagle soar the rim’s currents, until the moon slid into it’s place and paced it’s course beneath the watching stars, to the chant of the Ancient Ones. As a youth I remember sitting on the roof of our New Mexico house, peering a the stars, the desert night warm with cooling breezes. What child would not dream under the stars of the Milky Way? Vacations sometimes stir adults the same way; wondering ‘what if’s’ and ‘with whom’ and ‘maybe if there and then’? I try not to live in regrets, but live in the NOW and not the then. But desert vistas and starry nights make their stirrings without permission, and emotions make us wish for a personal cosmos, not one of numbers and probabilities, but a love and purpose to our being. We each have that inner poet and songwriter in the desert-scape, words played on the heartstrings.
One such poet we met in Bryce played in a punk band. But he was in a more of a blues mood when we greeted him across the campfire. He had just been dumped by his fiancee, jilted a month before his wedding, the Hawaiian honeymoon called off. He rode a scooter too. Our Vespas brought a little balm to his wounded psyche, and we talked gently, as if to a scared child, pacing and moving to avoid the fire’s smoke and his smoldering hurt. No advice was given, except on the best views on the road ahead. He was in a long haul mood though, touring the west at breakneck pace, and not really there for the sights. I think he wanted to hide from friends back home, hide from the hurt in his face, in his food, in his clothes, and in his being. He was so numb even Bryce slide off his back and back into the desert dust with little mention. I’m not sure anyone recovers from hurt like that. I wish you PEACE brother.
We scootered away from Bryce one cool morning, still wild-eyed, in general hippie bliss. This is Nature’s Mecca or maybe it’s freak show; come to worship or to be amazed, but whatever you do, trek there before you die, or you have not lived pilgrim.
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