homecoming in the red rocks

Today I became one of those people who take pictures out plane windows.

I've made the flight from Chicago to Las Vegas three times now in the past year {and by this time next month, I will have made it four times}, and every time, I've looked down at the red rocks and desert below me and thought: I know I must've been there.

My family spent most of our vacations camping out West, perhaps because it was as different a landscape as you could get from Iowa. My parents have given me many things, but every time I come back to Utah and the desert, I am grateful one more time for their gift of travel.

They made sure we saw the world beyond the cornfields, and now seeing the red rocks feels like a homecoming. On the plane today, it felt like the great, expansive landscape below me was welcoming me with open arms.

And so I had to take a picture. It's like seeing a friend you haven't seen in a long time: you want to document the moment when some part of you you didn't know was lonely suddenly felt full again.

The desert doesn't make me feel lonely so much as aware of my own smallness. Even looking at it from 35,000 feet—high above and through the scattered wisps of clouds—it makes you realize how you take up one speck of the world and how surrounding you are other little specks trying to make the most of where they are.

These are the kinds of thoughts the desert brings me. {I never think of it as me bringing anything to the desert.} I wanted to share it with someone, and so I turned to the girl sitting next to me on the United flight.

She was watching a subtitled British show on her iPad—subtitled into Chinese. At the moment I turned to her, Stonehenge was exploding in the show and she was laughing. I thought something might've been lost in translation and decided to leave my desert thoughts in my head.

And on my camera. I took a picture of my homecoming to the red rocks and wondered if my dad, looking at this picture, would be able to tell what I was flying over. His memory for our vacations—his memory for everything—always makes me jealous.

I wanted him on that plane with me so he could lean over and say, "Right there? We were camped there when you were 7 and your sister was 9. We spent the day hiking [fill in the name of a trail I can't remember] and then the night was so clear we decided to sleep under the stars."

dinner alone with annie dillard {part 1}

In my summer writing class, I get to write a book report. This is, in fact, the third time I've taken this class, so for the past three summers, I've been able to delve back into that particularly primary school-sounding "book report."

Two years ago, I wrote about the book Nothing Remains the Same.

And last year, it was Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had to Ask.

Don't get the wrong idea here: these are not five paragraph essays about character, setting, and dialogue. We're supposed to choose books in genres that we write in, so I choose personal essay books, and then use the book report to work out my aggression toward the author.

About how they're funnier than me.

Or sharper than me.

Or had a book published by the time they were 30.

Or say things that I have most definitely thought before—but they have said it better.

My book reports are really more about catharsis and working through my issues, so when it came time to do this year's report, I thought—why change that approach? It's working so well!

My target this year: Annie Dillard. Darn her and her Pulitzer Prize.

I've written about Annie before—I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while vacationing out West with my parents a few years ago, and it's hard to be surrounded by so much expansive nature, be reading Annie Dillard, and not write these reflective, searching for meaning essays.

Hiking in Zion National Park and reading Annie is basically the perfect set-up for a nature essay about seeing beauty everywhere {you can see me attempting this here}.

Earlier this summer, I picked up another Annie Dillard book at a Friends of the Library sale: a quarter for Annie? Oh, yes.

And look what I got from my quarter: a book report and a chance to work out my envy of Annie Dillard. Money well spent, I tell you, money well spent.

What I Read This Summer: Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

I was in an Argentinean restaurant near the Galleria in Houston, but that’s not where my mind and heart were.  I had come in from the heat, the oppressive, pushing heat, into this cool, dark place with red accents to catch the eye.  Come in to the hostess asking, “Just you tonight?

A table for one, please, and I held my held my head high and my Annie Dillard book tightly as the hostess—a tall girl made taller by her black heels; she should be dancing a tango in the streets of Buenos Aires—took me to a tucked away table in the back.

I chose to sit not facing the wall as the hostess had offered, the chair pulled out for me so I could easily sit down and then avoid eye contact with anyone who might look with pity on the girl eating alone.

Instead, I told her I’d rather sit facing out, facing everyone, facing the eyes.  I am not bothered to be eating alone, I wanted to convey.  This is what happens when you go on business trips alone, but I’m not lonely.

The waiter made a show of removing the other setting at the table, and I made a show out of opening Holy the Firm after asking the waiter to recommend a good glass of Malbec.

And then.

With that first crack of Holy the Firm, my mind and heart were elsewhere.  I was no longer worrying about projecting the careless, independent air of the nonchalant solo diner—I was on Puget Sound with Annie Dillard, rejoicing in how the act of stringing together words can bring meaning, beauty, reflection, and the ability, for just a short space of time, to be elsewhere.

Annie Dillard’s writing is transcendent; that’s the best way I can describe it.  When I read her, time slows, my breathing deepens, and that thin veil between us and the eternal is pulled up just enough to make me aware that this side of the veil is the temporary one, a mere blip in time, a shadow of the other side.

How does Annie Dillard do it?  I’ve been wondering this since I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while in Zion National Park and wanted to award her, if I could, a million more Pulitzer Prizes for it.  Holy the Firm is shorter—but not less dense yet ethereal in true Annie Dillard style—so it gave me a chance to study her craft (over a glass of a good Malbec in Houston).

I’ve come up with three lessons on writing from Annie Dillard that I hope to apply to my more reflective pieces.  When I write about nature and really taking notice of it, I’m invariably thinking of Annie Dillard.

Notice Small Things
This lesson reminds me of that gift/self-help/encouragement book you often find in the checkout line at Barnes & Noble:  Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all small stuff.

This is:  Notice Small Things…and it’s all small things that make up big things.  By paying attention to the little things in her day, Annie Dillard is really saying something about the bigger things, about that thin veil, about how every tiny created creature is just that:  a creation.

For example, she writes about a moth.  An ugly, drawn-to-the-flames moth.  More specifically, she writes about the death of a moth she once witnessed while camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held.  I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all.  A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke.  At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. […]

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick.  She kept burning. […]

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled […]. (pp 16-17)

Reading this, I am watching the moth’s death with Annie Dillard.  I am drawn in like (forgive me) a moth to the flame, and in two short pages, she conveys the fragility of life and the beauty and dignity possible in death without saying:  Now, here, I will talk about death.

She’s just writing about a moth.  She’s just opening her eyes to the small things that make up the big things, and she’s writing.

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There are two more lessons from Annie Dillard that I learned by reading this very thin book.

If you're eager to learn from Annie, too, you can jump ahead to the lessons here.

spontaneity and winging it are not my strengths {running of the bulls, part III}

This is the continuation of my story about going to the running of the bulls in Pamplona with my friend Amie. You may be confused because nothing in this section is about the actual running.

You should probably read part I and part II—and then wait in anticipation for part IV because that might have some bulls in it.

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I started planning.

Ran cost comparisons of doing point-to-point train tickets or getting a train pass.

Researched hotels on Ile de Ré, this little island off the Atlantic coast of France I’ve wanted to go to for years, ever since I learned that they dress up their donkeys in pants {that’s a story for another time}.

Realized that it would be nigh-on-impossible to get a hotel room in Pamplona.

I emailed Amie to mention this slight complication, and she wrote back, “Yes, in my readings, the hotels in Pamplona will be very, very full. Booked a year in advance. At 8am the Running of the Bulls takes place, so we would need to be there the night before as no train arrives that early. They say many people sleep outside which I am okay with, but I know most people would not be. How do you feel about that?”

How do I feel about that? I feel nervous, not okay, anxious, scared, the opposite of good, and like I want to bit all my nails down to the quick. That is how I feel about arriving late at night in an unknown town where they speak a language not known to me.

Spontaneity and winging it are not my strengths. Making labeled file folders, schedules, and binders filled with sheet protector-encased notes are. I thank my father for these traits, especially when I apply them to planning vacations.

I grew up taking three-week long camping trips out West every summer. Through the long, cold, dark months of tax season my accountant father would look forward to nights spent under the starry Utah sky. He’d plot our route through the backcountry, read up on hikes to take, and tell my sister and me that every child in America would rather backpack through a redrock canyon than go to Disney World.

While my dad obviously wasn’t gifted in interpreting the wants of the Millennial generation, he was (and still is) a very detailed, very skilled planner. His strength lies in the ability to make a plan not seem like a schedule.

Think of tour groups at the Grand Canyon: they file off the bus, blinking blankly at the bright sun, cameras dangling from their necks, and a guide sweeps them over to a viewpoint.

“Okay, here we have the Grand Canyon, a beautiful hole in the ground. Look at all the colors—makes for a great picture! You have 10 minutes here, and then it’s back on the bus because we have lunch reservations at this place where you get to eat inside a real Indian teepee. But we’re running behind schedule, so go, go, go—take your pictures! Make memories!”

That’s a schedule, and it’s no fun. It feels like you’re perpetually five minutes late and always leaves you wishing for more time and like you just missed out on something that could’ve been really cool, the kind of thing that could’ve made it into your one-minute summary of your vacation.

When travelling, my dad never makes me feel like we’re on a schedule—but I know there’s a plan. My dad taught me that if you can figure out in advance where you’re going to be sleeping, then you can enjoy every day more: you know you won’t be homeless come that night.

This not-being-homeless thing is key to my calmness level on vacations. I’ve also learned that it helps me to research ahead of time what I want to see or do in the area; then when I get there, I can just jump right in.

So you see, I don’t demand an hour-by-hour itinerary. I don’t need to have every meal figured out. I don’t even need to know what precisely I’ll be doing every day.

I just like to feel prepared. And I like to make binders. Binders are like my love language for travelling. As I pull together a trip, I can see in my binder so much to anticipate.

So there’s really why I like planning: because it helps me anticipate. It stretches out the fun of vacation, but of course this kind of fun only works if you actually like making binders.

a swath of land

The word "swath" was created for the amount of land you can see driving across Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.

You look out to the end of the world, and there you are, miles and miles from the edge. In between are canyons, rattlesnakes, cowboy dreams, sagebrush, flash floods, and layers of geologic wonder.

You hear in the videos they show at national parks and national monuments that a lot of the West used to be sand dunes, and before that, an ocean.

Numbers like 100 million—as in 100 million years ago—are thrown around, but there you are, driving on an asphalt highway, flying through time and history at 65 mph.

The West puts you in your place, your little dot of a place, and it makes you thankful that you have a place.

pennies from heaven

Part 2 of a two-part series on a hike my parents and I took in Zion National Park. To read the beginning of the story—to find out how we got on top of this mountain {although that seems kind of obvious}—you can read "where angels fear to tread."

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On our hike down from Angel's Landing {well, as close as we got to it}, the rain started again, and we stopped in another alcove to read more {you can read about the other time we stopped to read on this hike here}.

While it's true that there comes a point you can't get any wetter—the practical side of me speaking—there also comes a time when you're on vacation and you aren't hurrying towards something. Why rush through the rain to get down a mountain?

Waiting in the alcove, I tried to focus on Annie Dillard and not on how quick-dry hiking shorts are a good idea in theory, but when you're in the middle of a rainstorm that will eventually dump 1.22 inches on an area that gets 8 inches a year, they feel clammy and are somewhat see-through if you have them in khaki.

“There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises,” I read in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is all about noticing nature. “The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? […] But if you can cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see it what you get.”

I looked up from the book and saw a penny, an unwrapped gift, a free surprise. It was still raining and I was still chilly wet, but across the way, there on another cliff, was a row of waterfalls. They hadn't been there on the way up; the mountain had become saturated and water was escaping whatever way it could.

I'd learned earlier in the day that the sandstone in Zion works as a sponge, soaking in the water, a feature of its porous surface. Scientists have tested the water that seeps out of the sandstone in places like Weeping Rock, and they say some of it is over 1,000 years old.

Both ideas still toggled around in my brain, running into each other: that scientists can give a birthday to water and that a rock can hold water, shoved in there between very dense rock molecules.

I wondered if any of that ancient water was mixing with the new rain as it fell down the mountain. Ten waterfalls—some no more than a trickle, some thick rushes shooting over the cliff—were my ten pennies, my ten proofs that the grayest day can bring the brightest memories.

The rain slowed but the waterfalls roared. They hit rocks in their path—water takes the path of least resistance—and changed direction, gave off a spray, a splash, a visible flash that it was here, changing the mountain a little.

“Ready?” My dad had put away his Kindle and was looking down the trail, judging how wet it was. “You can lead the way.”

With another marvelling glance at my pennies, and I stepped out of the alcove, onto the trail, and took the lead.

where angels fear to tread

We hiked to Angel's Landing in Zion National Park. Almost to Angel's Landing, in reality. That last half-mile along a razor's edge was too dangerous in the wind and rain.

Even in the sunlight, beams streaming down from heaven in a “this is the place” kind of way, even then, I might have been hesitant. Climbing up to the Landing I could imagine: holding on tightly to the chain anchored in the rock, stepping precisely and looking diligently before every step, never leaping.

It was the coming back down that made me practice my deep, calming breaths. Would it be better to back down, squeezing the chain so hard it becomes twisted, stepping just so and never looking to the right or to the left? To the right, an 800 foot drop. To the left, a 1,200 foot drop. I couldn't face forward on that descent from Angel's Landing; every step would look like a free fall.

It hadn't been raining when we started the hike from the Grotto. It started around lunchtime, and we'd stopped in a rocky overhang to eat our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, stuffed into the bread bag and then stuffed into a backpack.

Rain soon paired with thunder and lightning, and I diligently counted the seconds between flash and sound: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three...it's five seconds to the mile, my mama taught me, and so I measured how far away the storm was.

It was very close.

We stayed in the alcove, pressed up against the red rock, reading. I had Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, my mama read a Barbara Kingsolver, and my dad had his Kindle with that day's edition of the New York Times. It seems a technological miracle, or perhaps just a sign of the times (or the Times), that he could read about the Supreme Court's first day back at work—during a thunderstorm on the side of a mountain in Zion.

The three of us reading got plenty of comments, mostly about the Kindle. One woman even asked for a summary of that day's headlines. No one commented on my Annie Dillard.

Eventually, the storm moved on, as they always do, and we moved on, as we often do.

It was still raining, but rain we can deal with. Lightning on a mountaintop, though, is something better reserved for the Bible.

You reach the almost-summit of Angel's Landing by going up 21 switchbacks, this part of the trail called Walter's Wiggles. I thank Walter and whoever helped him carve that wiggle into the mountain; I do not want to think about climbing straight up there, scrambling over rocks. I do not want to think about that, just as I do not want to think about coming down from Angel's Landing; I'm starting to sound anti-thinking and anti-fear.

My dad took to calling the switchbacks Wally's Wiggles, and when he'd stop to catch his breath every few switchbacks, he'd still have enough breath to say, “Wally, what are you doing to me?”

We made it to the top during a break in the rain. There wasn't a corresponding break in the clouds, but as inspiring as mountains are, seeing them draped in mist makes them more mysterious. Now you see it; now you don't.

Mighty mountains that they are, a little water has the ability to change them—and I'm sure, buried not too deep in that mountain/water image is a lesson about perseverance, or perhaps one about how a gentle spirit has a more lasting effect.

There's probably also something symbolic in this: the mountaintop experience isn't what I want to tell you about. All you need to know about that is that we were high up, but the real point of the hike was on the way down.

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And you can read about the real point here, in Part 2 of the story {not that reading this was a waste of time}.

it rained here last night

It rained here last night.

When I opened my eyes at precisely 7am, as if I'd set an alarm, that phrase opened up in my head. It's true and now it's echoing.

It's echoing like the beginning to different stories, to different poems, but I think I'll just start with the poem.

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It rained here last night,
and there is nothing wrong in
talking about the weather.

It changes so often and
we all go through it.
We should talk about what we have in common,
and sometimes that may be that
the sun is hot,
ice is slick,
and rain comes
whether you're expecting it or not.

I have heard some people say--
complain--
that weather talk is avoidance talk,
a way to protect ourselves from
discussing deep stuff
feelings
ambitions
hopes
plans.

And to them I say:
It rained here last night,
and I was sleeping in a tent.

In a tent, only a few millimeters of fabric separate you
from falling nature.

You're in this 4 x 6 bubble of dry isolation,
and the plip-plip of rain on the fly is the
only reminder you need that
no matter how important you think yourself,
you still live by the whims of weather.

when words aren't necessary

the watchman watches

I'm sitting under the watchful eye of the Watchman Tower at Zion National Park. The setting sun, until about 5 minutes ago when it disappeared behind the other canyon wall, was making the Watchman burn red-orange, brighter and steadier than fire.

Now, though, the sun has set for those of us in the canyon, but the Watchman still watches.

In this place that immediately brings to mind time immemorial, God's finger pointing in creation, and our particular smallness of existence, in this place, I'm using the Internet.

I know why this astounds me. I want to feel disconnected from modern life, but even here in a canyon, surrounded by millions of years of erosion, even here I can be connected.

This is the beauty and the beast of the 21st Century. I'm in a place of breathtaking sights, but if I wanted to, after catching my breath, I could call my best friend and describe for her what I'm seeing.

I would say to her:


Everywhere I look out here, my little eye lands on something else to describe, and my little eye is on overload.

On the hike today to the Emerald Pools, up canyon from our campground, I went around a bend in the well-traveled path and there, rising in the distance ahead of me, surprising me, was a white cliff. It sat on top of the red rock, and there was a transition section of pink-streaked rock. On top of the white peak, there were trees growing, scattered about as if they were thrown by a careless child. How do the trees grow out of the rock like that? Where do the roots go? How deep can they reach into the mountain? Is the tree always a split second from falling?

I would tell her about the wildflowers, yellow and looking like black-eyed susans but I don't think they are, swaying in the canyon breeze.

There are fruits on the prickly pear cactus right now, these bulbous purple fruits, and bulbous, a word usually applied to noses, really is the right word to describe them. They look like the nose of a cartoon character known for his sense of smell, a superhero trait that doesn't seem all that exciting.

I'd mention the sky. The blue of the sky out West always makes me blink more than normal. Blink: how can that blue be true? Am I seeing the same color blue as everyone else here? How can they all stand such a blatant reminder of goodness and beauty? Blink. The blue makes me think of that line from Our Town: Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?

This place makes me yearn for connection. I just didn't know that there would also be an Internet connection.

the morning sun in utah

We walked the puppies in the early morning light, when the sun had not yet made it over the mountains.

When we came to Cedar City and the Utah Shakespeare Festival before, so many times when I was growing up, we'd camp up in the mountains at a place called Cedar Breaks. It was a half-hour drive from the Festival, and after seeing Much Ado About Nothing or Merchant of Venice, up the mountain we'd go, late at night. I'd fall asleep imagining I was Beatrice with Benedick so in love with me that he writes embarrassing sonnets.

On top of the mountain at our campsite, my parents would wake me up, and I'd stumble out of the car and into the cold. Smell the cedar, the campfires; feel the quiet, the hush, the sleep. Curling into my sleeping bag, I'd say good night to the family and will myself back to the dream where I got to wear a pretty dress and dance around.

The next morning up on the mountain, we'd eat a breakfast of instant oatmeal, dressed in multiple layers and still shaking a bit from the cold and the shock of no longer being in the cocoon of a sleeping bag. Then we'd head down the mountain, into the desert of a valley, and gradually de-layer. By the time we were at the Festival—in time for the Literary Seminar where we got to discuss the play from the night before {me practicing up for my English degree, I guess}--we'd be in our t-shirts and shorts, having completely forgotten the freeze of the morning.

This time at the Festival, we aren't staying at Cedar Breaks. We're staying, actually, in a parking lot across the street from the theatre, a benefit of travelling in a camper. The transition from the theatre to bed is much shorter this time around, but that doesn't mean I don't go to sleep dreaming I'm someone else on the stage.

This morning, we walked the puppies in the early morning light, and I'd forgotten how quickly it becomes bright day here in Utah.

The morning sun is soft, twirling, gentle. A waltz of light, highlighting now this, now that. The side of the mountain is in the spotlight, but then there's a quick shift and the tree in front of me is where the show is.

As soon as that sun tips over the mountain, though, it's full, blaring day. Immediately. It immediately looks like mid-afternoon, even if it's only 8am.

At home, at home in the flatlands, there is a more sustained crescendo of light. The sun comes over the horizon, and you see it right away; there is no hiding behind the mountains, sneaking up on you. While the sun still plays momentary favorites with what part of my view it highlights, it is a slowly growing intensity, that light at home in the mornings.

By the time the sun shines directly here, it's hot, ready for the day. And it makes you feel that you should be ready, too.

go to utah

If you want space, go to Utah.

This is a line from a song from my childhood.

Other children, children who had more normal childhoods and probably went to Disney World for vacations, remember songs like, "The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round..."

But I—part of a family that has never been to Disney World and instead headed to the desert for vacation almost every year—I know songs like:

"When I woke up this morning, things were looking bad / Seems like total silence was the only friend I had."

and

"I told my mama on the day I was born / Don't you cry when you see I'm gone."

and

"If you want space, go to Utah / If you want time, pal, you got the next 50 years."

These were the kinds of songs we listened to on our long car drives on vacations where we camped our way across the West. It was either folk music or NPR, and I think I was the only kid in my 3rd-grade class who could recite the number to call for Car Talk, a feat that didn't increase my popularity, for some reason.

I'm about to get on a plane to Utah, so of course the "If you want space" line is running through my head. It won't stop, in fact. No matter how much I think about other things, other states, other songs, my head keeps coming back to: "go to Utah."

I'm meeting my parents in Cedar City, Utah, tonight, and I'll be spending a week with them camping and generally re-living my childhood vacations. I hope they have those old family-sing-along tapes.

Otherwise, I'll have to resort to singing the songs a capella, humming through the words I don't remember. That won't be annoying at all.