A Walker in the Suburbs

Utah has five national parks. There is Bryce with its hoodoos, Zion with its waterfalls, Arches with its, well, arches, and Capitol Reef with its domes. And then there is Canyonlands, the park we visited yesterday. 

I expected fewer people and a longer drive from Moab. What I wasn’t expecting was grandeur to rival the Grand Canyon. There were mesas and buttes and the Colorado River. There were rim walks and steep drops. There were vistas beyond vistas, and a view called Grand. Maybe not the Grand Canyon, but pretty darn close.

I told myself I wouldn’t take many photos yesterday when we toured Arches National Park. I’d visited five years ago, on a blue-sky May Monday, and snapped plenty of pictures then. Surely I didn’t need anymore.

But the index finger gets peckish in the presence of great natural beauty,. It wants to preserve the vistas. It hovers and snaps, almost without my permission.

I’m telling myself that every photo was justified. Yesterday’s weather was more dramatic. Dark thunderheads, lightning, and a driving rain (conveniently timed for our drive out of the park). But I took sunny shots, too. 

We arrived yesterday in red rock country, Utah, USA,  Moab to be exact. 

The drive from Pagosa Springs took us through passes and canyons, mountains on the horizon.When we arrived I could almost hear the collective sighs escaping from visitors to this magical place. 

It’s grandeur on a galactic scale. It reminds me of what our youngest daughter used to ask us on her first trip out west. “What country are we in?”

Can it possibly be the same one that includes Virginia? Doesn’t seem possible. 

We reached the Lobo Pass overlook on our way home from Creede, a quick detour. We piled out of the truck and into the pure air, dark clouds building and rain visible miles away. 

Once again, I tried taking a panoramic photo of the view in front of me, and once again I failed. Instead I tried to memorize what I saw from the pass: the never-endingness of it, dark forested hills in the foreground and sunlit peaks behind. A parfait of mountains, sky and clouds. 

We took turns guessing the elevation. I low-balled it at 8,800 feet, a rookie move since we’re staying above 7,000 and this was much higher. Others estimated 9,000 or 10,000. Then we looked it up: 11,700. Almost 12,000 feet above sea level. No wonder it felt like we were on top of the world. 

Today we travel west to Pagosa Springs, Colorado. There’s family there, and a lot to explore. 

It’s been a while since I’ve driven through the American West, and I’m looking forward to the feeling I get there, a sense of limitlessness, of big skies and possibility. 

As a daughter of parents who drove across the country on their honeymoon, who thought nothing of cramming four kids into a station wagon and heading from Kentucky to California, skipping any part of a land journey feels like cheating. 

I should be driving to Colorado, a part of me says.  But the older, wiser part disagrees. Are you kidding, this is what you always wanted when you were a kid, to skip ahead, to forgo the tedium of familiar landscapes for the crisp, pure difference of western terrains. 

Skipping ahead is what we plan to do today.

(Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes, 2019.) 

The rocks appeared when we were told they would, a half mile into a fern forest. They seemed to emerge from the center of the earth, massive shelves of rock, dim and cavelike, green with moss. 

Rhododendron trees twined their roots around and through the rocks, and fissures erupted where you least expected them. It was an accidental discovery, a place found while looking for somewhere else. It was eerie and awe-inspiring, a glimpse of another world. I’m so glad we explored Maryland’s Rock Maze.

A favorite children’s book on our shelves is Paddle-to-the-Sea, a delightful tale of an Indian boy who carves a wooden canoe and paddler and sets them free in the headwaters of the Great Lakes. The little boat has many adventures, even crosses the Atlantic Ocean. The grown-up boy discovers it years later.

One of my favorite experiences on this trip was also a paddle. Not a paddle to the sea, but a paddle to see. It was just a kayak trip across a small lake, but the leisurely pace allowed for an exploration of lily pads and a tall-pine forest where low boughs kissed the water. 

I felt like I was seeing the lake for the first time. Dragonflies sipped water from my toes. The blue lake reflected white clouds. I thought about the restorative value of time on the water, of being adrift on a distant pond.  

Mountain Maryland, it’s called, and yesterday I had a good taste of it, having turned left instead of right at a crucial juncture. No matter: all the better to explore this slice of heaven, this melding of lake and hill and sky. 

This is the fourth year for an expedition to western Maryland, which is as different from D.C. Metro Maryland as one can imagine. 

Here there are fields of daisies and roads along ridge tops with views of barns and corn and cows. There are shady glens, broad vistas, and lakes with lily pads. It was love at first sight, and later visits have only confirmed the initial attraction. 

Mountain Maryland is a place for me.