Day 2: The North Rim of the Grand Canyon via Zion National Park

The morning in St. George is still hungover from last night's monsoonal rain, and waning storm cells found us as traveled into more distant regions of the Southwest. 

Remote - is there a more tantalizing word? It describes places that are special, unused as icon or totem, but perhaps more deserving.

Earth people make pilgrimage to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the first natural wonder of their world.  And so I have, several times, but never to the distant North Rim. 

We pass through Zion National Park, all the wonder we knew from past visits returning even more fully to us. 

The coral cliffs are limned with long sweeping horizontal scrapes, carved like a router by furious passage of water tumbling rocks on  the sides.

  Down from the tops, where water has seeped constantly, dark charcoal-purple stains bloom.  

The color is caused by a complex interaction between manganese and/or iron oxidized by micro-organisms  combined with grains of sand and atmospheric dust.   

Time is on my side in this, though not in other quests, and as we drove east, we gained elevation over 8,000 feet, 2,000 feet higher than the South Rim. 

The aspens were a surprise to us - we love them in the Eastern Sierras and an autumn trip to Bishop Creek Canyon has become a ritual for us, both from winter climes and nostalgic for fall color turn. This year we missed that trip, but were richly satisfied with the visions of aspens we found throughout Utah's mountains.


The North Rim Lodge, a fine example of national park vernacular architecture, is set nearly on the rim. I scored a last minute cancellation and our luck won us a cabin just steps from the east rim view and Bright Angel Trail.   

No serious hiking required here, the views were gained easily, though the trail was steep.  Again, a sense of off-balance, a warning to step with care and accept the gift of heightened awareness.

Dinner was a barbecue cookout with cowboy entertainment.  What was advertised as a train
ride (I'm imagining narrow-gauge steam train) to the picnic spot turned out to be a tram that jerked and swayed alarmingly  When it wasn't doing that, the engine stalled repeatedly. This gave the entertainers lots of material for jokes about longevity, which were appropriate for his audience, average age about 75.  

We enjoyed this event more than we'd thought, listening to perfect western songs: "They call the wind Maria", "Rawhide", and enduring corny jokes. The barbecue brisket, two styles, was marvelous.  Barbecue is my new favorite food.

That night we stood outside our cabin and the ink velvet sky above us gave us a privileged view of the Milky Way. 

TRAVEL: Day 1, St. George, Utah

We've begun a long-dreamed of trip, a circle tour through the red canyons of Arizona and Utah. As we left Las Vegas, the road began climbing through the spectacular Virgin River Gorge. A sense of pleasant disorientation, notification of being Now, came to me.  

   We'd been watching monsoon clouds the color of bruises and finally caught them, or they us. Nickel-size raindrops began plashing the windshield in the canyon and rain continued intermittently throughout the next day.

 That evening, John the hublet wanted to return to the restaurant he loved when we came to St. George years ago.  And he found it, in Ancestral Square near Zion's Bank.  We dine on pan roasted pomfret, pesto-stuffed chicken, and lovely wine. 

Canyon country begins definitively here. The cliffs and gullies are chili-pepper red, paprika, cinnamon, claret, russet, terra cotta, sometimes burnt chocolate. They flame, they glow, they hold and give way to the power of erosion and time. 
   

MUSIC: History's Content of Profound Grief

In 1964 I was 18 and a poster-child wanna-be for all things '60's: peace, justice, civil and human rights, pacifism. I listened as my parents, from a bootstrap generation that suffered the Depression, express personal prejudices and harsh judgments about race that stunned and made me ashamed of and for them.

After a while, I couldn't talk about politics or religion with them.  A cone of silence was the kindest way to go, and remained in place until inescapable dementia and illness dissolved the need. That silent circle was replaced by a hard core empty with loss and memory, and full with a most complete silence.

Now, solid and quiet, I have taken their place in family life: the oldest one left - yet.  

It's hard to go back, though I want to. Remembrance, of course, is  part of keeping the faith. So I deliberately listen to certain music, and my memory is freshened, and a flash flood of sorrow is injected, like some geologic process that leaves layers of sedimentation in granite.  

I think we each have our own songs; whether we listen to them purposely or they play on the radio driving, a random event that one's ears can't escape, even if one punches up the station selector.

So, I listen to The Edwin Hawkins Singers, humbled by the glorious arching hope that exists in deprivation and injustice.  I hear Johnny Cash sing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", and burn with shame, wondering how the sins of American history's exploitation can ever be made whole. Look at that flag on the Brooklyn Bridge and see it as a burial shroud huge enough to wrap millions, including me.

For me, the answer always comes back, "Never. Not ever".  Only the personal moment can be clean.   

TRAVEL: The California Delta

The go-to place for L.A. when we need water, right? Family recently moved to a delta town and gave me a chance to discover this fascinating part of our state.

 The California Delta is formed by the Sacramento River in the north and the San Joaquin in the south.  The rivers enter a massive placenta of sloughs, streams, and levees before broadening into bays and lakes to reach the Pacific. Fitted between them are islands, some reclaimed, that are among the richest agricultural land in the U.S.

It's 1,100 square miles, and over 50% of California's water passes through it. The islands and streams have over 700 miles of levees maintaining water levels.  Pumps called "spuds" pipe water into ditches that spread  over the 57 islands.

A wonderful old rotating-style drawbridge gives entry to the town of Rio Vista. 

Large, flat areas seem to be mainland but are actually large islands.

PRO photo

The road is a ribbon atop the levees.

PRO photo

 Several small ferries go back and forth across them

making it easy to cross the waterways rather than drive to the end of one and go back along the other side, though that's fun, too.



Huge pumps at the southern end withdraw millions of gallons of water daily for delivery to the Central Valley and Southern California. Their suction disrupts the natural east to west flow of the water to north to south.  This increases water salinity and is endangering the Delta smelt, as well as degrading soil quality.

Agriculture is a $500 million a year industry in the Delta. Sugar beets, alfalfa, safflower, onions, tomatoes, asparagus, walnuts, corn, fruits. Former walnut orchards are now being removed for vineyards.

And it's windy. The hot interior valley's proximity to cool San Francisco Bay creates dependable breezes, and clean white windmills seem to be everyplace: visible from restaurant windows, the golf course, and home kitchens, Somehow, despite the futuristic look they give the farm landscape, the turning mills are clean and attractive.  They seem steady and positive, the whirling blades hypnotic.

A few old towns remain, and one ghost town, Locke. Locke was built by Chinese immigrants for themselves, after their settlement in Walnut Grove burned. It's tiny, one narrow street set down below and parallel to the levee. Mostly empty now, there's a gambling house, Chinese school, an herbalist, and other shops.


Besides the ghost town, there's a mansion, built in Italian Renaissance style by wealthy San Franciscan Louis Meyers, an orchardist, and his wife Audrey, heir to a department store fortune.  

Guests motored up the delta waterway from San Francisco in summer. Now it's a wedding site and Sunday brunch can be had.  



On the way home, I spotted a farmer selling corn off the back of his truck.  I insisted we stop and for dinner that night we had some of the best corn ever.




  

  

PRE-RAPHAELITES: Seminal Reactionaries, 1848

"The more important question is whether The Love Song is the nostalgic, wistful kind of painting that only a kitsch-lover, hopeless romantic, or deep reactionary could really love."

The Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau were taught to me in art history class  as a reaction to modern industrial capitalism.  I missed the designated bromide: create art from the seminal early Italian Renaissance before Raphael, viewed as the purest high artistic and moral achievement. 

Now, I'm a Raphael fan; I think he's neglected because he died too young and his synthesis of Renaissance values has a balance that escapes modern viewers.  Much easier to find Da Vinci's scope and Michelangelo's power than consider Raphael's summative celebration of Italian humanism (the Raphael Stanze). 

When I went to the Sistine Chapel I waded through crowds being warned to hold silence (hopeless) and moved into Pope Julius II's magnificent library.  No one there.  All to the good for me, as I spent hours reading and looking. 

Morgan Meis writes in his blog about the Met's exhibit, "the Pre-Raphaelite Rebellion and It's Legacy", and discusses the artistic rebellion against stultified academic art values at its core.

I'm interested in this because I'm still hopeful that someone will let me live guiltlessly in what's seen as escapist genre kitsch.

It's valuable to have the accomplishment of the pre-Raphs describe so fully.  But I just can't drink the kool-aid. I have to put them into my category of attempted recovery art.  They're like a space capsule that is returned from the sky with the people intact, but missing the propellant rocket that took them there.  You get the nugget, not the chicken.

It's heroic to stand against the magnitude of historical atrocity. But all those brave positions remind me of the futility. German Expressionism and Kathë Kollwitz summon better.  

I'm done here; I'm going to declare genres to be my eternal fadeless summer.   



  

FILM: Witness for the Prosecution, directed by Billy Wilder

Tyrone Power, Marlene Deitrich, Charles Laughton in a film based on a Broadway play by Agatha Christie. It's got a "spoiler alert" at the conclusion to the wonderful plot twist.  

The film is like a lot of play-to-movie adaptations, talky and now dated; we're so familiar with courtroom procedural drama now that the trial, set in the famous Old Bailey London courtroom, seems improbable.

Tyrone Power was in his 40's when he made this film; his last - he died of a heart attack soon after. It's poignant to see this performance. In this film, he looks sleazy and unhealthy.  His face is fleshy and carved with lines, and his presence is disturbing.  Is he a whimsical charmer or a clever and evil criminal? 

Charles Laughton is the perfect curmudgeon, blustering and yet poignant, as the lawyer who defends Power at the risk of his own health. He's a kind of caricatured Churchillian Brit.

Marlene Dietrich plays the truly clever yet unsympathetic wife who schemes to testify to prevent her lover-husband from conviction for murdering a rich widow.  Her face is glowing, iconic, and polished, her eyes seem all-knowing in her Germanic iciness. 

It's Billy Wilder, but I find it off; Agatha Christie's powerful writing and plotting really muffle and dilute the themes that haunt me after seeing a great Wilder film. It's the fully complex ambiguous characters that are best about the film. The war has drained any moral blood left in them, and it's shadow is long.  It's up the Brits to restore a lawful world, not the old central European nexus. 

MEMENTOS: Old sweet possessions

I think she made this one - the letters WAC
 are embroidered with red-white-blue tatting
from the days wen she was in the Army
in World War II.

My mother was born in 1910, lived a life eroded into rigid vigorous strength of character as she worked fiercely to make a secure life for herself.  These are her cloth handkerchiefs; I found them wadded up and unpressed when she closed her home and moved to an assisted living facility. I kept very little, already feeling the shadow, but I had to have these.

I have hung them on a "clothesline", remembering the days when washday meant carrying heavy baskets to the line, worrying if they would freeze or be caught by a sudden rain.

I like to look at the hankies, and wonder what Mom wore with each, or what the day was like she had with the purple violet hanky.  Sometimes they were decorative; a flutter of color bursting from a shirt or dress pocket, secured with a brooch.

They are rather garish and cheaply printed, but enjoyably bright and gay as zinnias marigolds, the flowers she loved.