I used to be too afraid to go…to travel alone to a new place. Just before I turned twelve in sobriety, I decided I couldn’t put traveling on hold any longer. I couldn’t wait because I’d been waiting all my life. Waiting for somebody to hold my hand while I stuck my big toe in the water, so to speak, to see how cold the water might be. Waiting for permission to do what I wanted. Waiting. For somebody to go with me because I am a woman and so people would frown up and tell me it’s too dangerous for a woman to be traveling alone. Waiting. For permission. For a proper time. For a proper companion. I was fed up with all that waiting. I felt like I should see and experience the world outside of my “comfort zone.” So I began. I kept journals of my travels because my friend, Maria Lyons, gave me my first journal to write down what I saw, heard, felt, did. I’ve written in many journals since then. What follows is taken, in bits and pieces, from my Traveler Journals.
In Red Rock Country
Red Rock Country is also known as The Four Corners—Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado. It’s home to many natural wonders in the western United States. I saw some of them. My journal helps me to remember.
July 15, 2001-The Drive to Flagstaff, Arizona
On my Sunday drive from Phoenix, Arizona to Flagstaff, Arizona, I was a bit nervous leaving the rental car place, trying to remember the verbal directions from the staff person. I’d never been in Arizona before and when I emerged from the Phoenix airport, the 101 degree heat slapped me hard. I’d never been in that kind of heat before. It is, after all, the desert, but it had never occurred to me that July was not the best month to be traveling in Phoenix. In the rental car, I turned on the air conditioning quick, fast, and in a hurry, then successfully made my way to Interstate 10 West and to North 17.
Phoenix is at 1000 feet elevation and as I drove, I realized I would be climbing up during the three hour trip. The climb showed me wondrous things. They were wondrous to me because I’d always lived (before I moved to California) in The Midwest and in The South. The land is so much different there. Anyway. In the distance, I spotted brown and black mesas dotted with green, flat-armed cactus. (A mesa is a Spanish word for a sheared off mountain that looks like a table rock.) Lots of mesas along the way. The wind rocked the small car I was driving with strong, unexpected gusts from time to time. That got and kept my attention on the road. I climbed 6000 feet to Flagstaff. (Maybe that’s why I was soooo sleepy when I got to my motel bed.) As I climbed, I saw (and couldn’t believe it) blonde grass blowing in the wind. I laughed aloud. Bleached, silver-blonde grass looking, for all the world, like a woman’s thin, silky hair. What next?
While I drove, I kept telling myself aloud that I was doing fine so that my head’s toxic voices—the monkeys I call them—wouldn’t take off with my self-confidence and scare the bejesus out of me like they always try to do. The monkeys kept me nervous, but they couldn’t take away the exhilaration I felt because of what I was doing. I was alone and I was doing fine, I told myself as I descended into Verde Valley; there, the earth turned from golden desert to green fields flowering with Ponderosa Pine trees. I smiled. Yeah, I was doing fine. Flagstaff and The Grand Canyon weren’t far.
July 16, 2001- Arizona, The Grand Canyon
Who would imagine that the Grand Canyon is in the middle of a national forest of Ponderosa Pine and Scrub Oak? I didn’t. We shuttled on the tour bus up 7000 feet. Once there, the air was cool. Pleasant. I hurried through the trees with the rest of the tourists to the Watchtower, a lookout shaped like a round kiva with a platform circling it. We scurried to the platform, anxious for a first look. It took my breath away. My head kept swiveling round from one place, perspective, angle to the next, trying to take in everything. But you can’t, they say. It’s just too big to take in all at once, all at one time.
The Grand Canyon is a giant gorge cut out by erosion and The Colorado River. And that’s the way it looks. Only it’s the mother of all gorges. So big. It seems to fill the sky with its bigness. Erosion has cut its walls into plateaus, into levels that go deep, deep. The reddish-pink-brown-white stone walls run down so far that you can’t see the end to them from The South Rim above. It’s fascinating to me, this place. A holy place, I’m sure to the Indians who lived here first. Before the White man came and made it a tour. In a way that seems a sacrilege against nature, but if they hadn’t done it, I would have never seen it. And that would have been my immeasurable loss. For seeing The Grand Canyon, I have no doubt—not one—that there exists in our universe a power greater than me…greater than all of us puny human beings.
July 17, 2001- On the Way to Sedona, Arizona
I got a shock on the drive from Flagstaff through Oak Creek Canyon to get to Sedona, a shock when the forest of pines standing along each side of the switchback road fell away. What I saw was so different from any landscape I’d ever known or seen that I almost drove off the mountain trying to get my brain to understand exactly what my eyes were seeing. Like some exotic magic spell suddenly manifesting before my eyes, the red rocks of Sedona appeared, it seemed, out of nowhere. On either side of the road, the pines had been replaced by astonishing, mystical shapes of red rocks, like something out of a fairy tale. In the far distance, I could see the red-orange shape of a mountain of rocks that looked like something designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the visionary architect. He hadn’t though. No human had. Later I found out that it was Cathedral Rock. Just below it, there was a sweeping panorama of humpbacked mountains covered by green pines and dotted with outcrop boulders.
As I drove, I was so awed and overpowered by the sight of Cathedral Rock that it was hard to concentrate on the road; soon, I found a spot, a park, to turn into. At Sliding Rock Park, I got a chance to really see why people have labeled The Four Corners states as Red Rock Country. The sight at Sliding Rock Park was so magnificent to me that tears popped into my eyes. Although I’d seen the redness of The Grand Canyon only a couple of days before, this was the first time I’d ever seen these weirdly shaped, red beauties up close—mountains that had eroded into walls, buttes, spires. I gaped at them, amazed, beguiled…so many shapes, so many sizes, so many odd designs wrought by the hands of erosion, the hands of wind and of water. Designs so gorgeous that I would never have imagined them. Right then, I think, I fell in love with Red Rock Country.
2002, June 28 - Solitude at Snow Canyon, Utah
I found Snow Canyon quite by accident on my trip to St. Geroge, Utah. I came here to see Zion, Cedar Breaks, and Bryce Canyon. They are magnificent, but Snow Canyon has taken hold of me in a unique way.
I look around me sensing this place—Snow Canyon—in a way that is quite beyond my ability to describe. My five senses struggle to send my brain information to make sense and order of my surroundings. The first thing that strikes me is this. Except for the occasional buzz of a flying insect or a random breeze cutting through the heat to flutter the leaves of a few, young aspen trees, there is, I realize, no sound here. No sound. You hear the absence of sound. Absolute, utter silence. I have never experienced hearing no sound...nothing at all.
It takes some getting used to. Because it’s spooky for me having come from Los Angeles, a city that is thoroughly, stridently urban with all the various and sundry noises: Music blasting…jazz, rap, mariachi, golden oldies—music and the sky filled with airplanes whistling in for a landing, helicopters whap-whap-whapping, bus engines roaring, car horns blaring, people chattering in the street, on cell phones, via radio talk shows—having come from such unrelenting, ever constant noise to complete and unbroken silence unbalances me for some moments. It’s as if I’m experiencing a break with reality. That there is, in this day and time, a place such as this where you hear no sound at all is almost unbelievable. It seems a “fantastic” place to me. A fantasy out of a movie. Otherworldly. Alien. And in a way, frightening.
The thing that floods my senses, my sight is Redness. On the horizon, there rises one massive, white, limestone mountain… a lone, ghostly white figure surrounded by a forest of red, stone giants. Everywhere I look I see the color red. Everywhere. Red is the landscape. Red is cross-bedded into sandstone mounds that rise from the ground. Sometimes, bands of white limestone are imbedded within the red. Underneath my feet, the sand is red, too. My tennis shoes are covered with the red dust. I wonder how everything could be naturally so red? Blood red. Scarlet red. Orange-red. Red of such vivid hue that it seems unreal, as if someone took a brush and painted the rocks, the sand, the mountains.
In this place called Snow Canyon, I actually see my tiny-ness—see that I am so small…so insignificant beside the MASSIVENESS, TALLNESS, BIGNESS of the mesas and mountains. It’s overwhelming. Humbling. These rock formations that make up Snow Canyon—walls, mountains, buttes—are a massive presence. At first, I feel awe in the presence of such as this…where age and time seem to have no meaning…where change is majestic, visible. You see and you sense that change is an ongoing, natural force. Something you cannot alter. Something you cannot stop. Something entirely beyond your pitiful, human delusion of “control.”
Here and there slender desert plants with lacey green or gray arms reach out of the red rock landscape, reach out to grasp onto something to survive. Scattered about—as if some giant of old accidently spilled them onto the red, red ground—I see pieces of black lava coal changed now into solid rock from the scalding, hot liquid spewed up from volcanoes that lived here before time began.
After a while, an hour or so, I begin to feel at home with the solitude. This is a place that allows me the silence to reflect on what is living…what has lived before me and will live after me. The things of this place…lava beds and buttes and mesas and rock mounds and sand are the ancient ones. Old beyond measure. And alive. This canyon because it forces me to recognize how temporal my physical being is… that my birth, life, and death are a blink in the universe. It is disconcerting.
Yet somehow reassuring.
(end)
Southern Sampler - Atlanta, Georgia
July 10, 2008
Thunder rumbling. White streaks of lightning. Sporadic rain: spatters or showers or sheets of it coming down like manna from heaven. Though rain has been coming for the last week, has come every day this week, and is expected for the next seven days, it’s not enough to stem the drought Georgia is in.
It's hot. Hot that feels smothery because of the humidity. Hot with water hanging in the air. Steamy. Thick. Clammy. I get used to it fast enough because I lived in the midwest for years. In fact, the heat-humidity here reminds me of Indiana. Thick pine trees crowd the sides of Georgia's highway. You can’t see past them. They obstruct the skyline, my vista—my long, far view of the land.
I do miss the unobstructed vista that Los Angeles presents to my eye. Miss that long view sweeping my eye west to the ocean, sweeping it north to the mountains, or east to the deserts. When I compare Atlanta to Los Angeles, it’s safe to say this: It’s another country here. At night you can hear the cicadas calling—rubbing their legs together to sing each other a song. My friend lives in a suburb outside of Atlanta, in a place that reminds me of a forest. Her back yard disappears into a thicket of trees and underbrush. It’s green here. As green as Seattle. As green as fine emeralds. Or the sea in Hawaii. Life-giving green.
Atlanta. December 17, 2008
Being outdoors delights me. I’m an earth sign so maybe that explains my affinity for the outside. Not long ago, I found a park near my friend’s home. Because of my childhood, I developed into a sort of solitary soul and I’m used to doing things alone though I do love the company of my friend.
But she had to go to work, so, today, I went walking in the park alone. For the past couple of days, it’s been unseasonably warm. In the mid sixties and humid. The sky has been a patchwork of gray. Today, the clouds knit together in a kind of quilt with outlines of little or no definition. Instead, clouds of various hues—milky gray, slate gray, blue bellies, and angry, thunder gray—seem to flow one into the other.
I’ve brought an umbrella on my walk, just in case. And at one point, the jaws of heavens opened to show a faint, baby blue sky with a gloriously bright bauble pinned to its chest. Ironically, tiny drops of rain spattered down as the sun glowed and glimmered for few moments, but the rain wasn’t worth my opening the umbrella I was carrying. It refreshed me for a few seconds, and, then, along with the sun, disappeared.
I looked at the trees and ground as I walked. It’s winter and the grass, so green last summer, has turned dishwater blonde. At its roots, you can see red, red dirt. Iron-rich red. Very much like the red colors of Red Rock Country in the southwest. The trees are bare now. They’ve dropped leaves that cover the ground in layers of browns—cinnamon, sandy, beige. The leaves look like little brown hands to me…some with 5 fingers, the middle one being the longest… some with 7 rounded fingers…some with tipped, pointed fingernails. I don’t know if these are maple or oak leaves. Maybe neither.
But I do know pine trees. I look up at them. Tall, regal, they, too, have done a strip. Their remaining pine needles only crown the tops of their heads. Without the thick branches of pine needles in the middle and near the bottom, I can see through the groves of trees to spy previously hidden homes that snuggle the park’s perimeter.
It takes about thirty minutes to walk the whole park, unlike the huge Kenneth Hahn park at home. You pass a large pond as you go the two mile (or is it a mile?) trek; you pass two generously large, fenced dog runs; you see that they’ve made a space for kids to jump, climb, swing, and spaces for tennis and volleyball courts; there’s also something that looks like a giant gazebo that’s under construction. A nice park, this one. Quiet. Clean. Serene. It’s a favorite.
(end)
