In Moab, Utah the tree covered mountains give way to sun drenched mesas and baked sand without the sea. Dry brush and shrunken trees, low-lying and scrubby, intensify the contrast and extravagance of Colorado’s nearby Tolkien trees. America is made up of little kingdoms, some modest like the dusty arches of Utah, some excessive like Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
The Rockies don’t look as ancient as they are because of the green trees that seem so shiny and new, like bright young things. Moab actually looks its age with wrinkled rocks and trees like dry bones, balding and withering; but, just as a face worn with age is lovely for what it has seen and known, this Utah land glows like a wise, old woman.
Desert colors are calm and soothing, the buff and sand paint colors you would choose for sleep, bedroom colors. These desert colors speak to me of solitude and introversion, quiet colors that mirror my soul. While Moab is not the Sahara with its expanse of swirled sand dunes, still it evokes that same golden atmosphere and memory of the sea. And for me, desert-like Moab evokes a smoldering Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient dressed forever in khaki and carrying his love wrapped in white gauze through miles of sand. The desert, though harsh and dry and devoid of lush luxury, still holds romance for me when I think of Ralph Fiennes writing in his desert journal that “the heart is an organ of fire.”
It is in Moab where we abandon the consistency of hotels for the adventure of camping under the desert sky hoping for stars and an infinite quiet without the hum of air conditioning, the background noise of the tv, or the thump of closing doors and creaking ceilings of a hotel hive. We arrive at Moab Under Canvas and I am immediately impressed and give props to Chris as if he pitched the tent himself. He made this reservation during the dreary winter days of the hectic school year months before our arrival. The backdrop may be The English Patient, but the tent is my Out of Africa dream with its king size bed, wood furniture, canvas chairs and throw rugs and the world coming right through while I sleep. I am Karen Von Blixen looking for adventure but keeping my amenities close by, my Limoges porcelain and gramophone.
The warm night falls like a beautiful shawl around my shoulders, and I read just outside the tent while the kids spy jackrabbits and chipmunks, Henry’s cartoon favorites come to life. Later, we cook smores at the communal fire pit, and I long for stories to be told, but there is only American small talk. I sit quietly watching the flames soften the darkness and illuminate my surroundings. I am not used to such darkness, the unfamiliar blinding blackness. In my night life, there are always porch lights, streetlights, headlights. The firelight is comforting. I watch Chris chatting and keeping Henry close when out of nowhere a memory from long ago resurfaces.
I am 15 and sitting around a campfire at a retreat with all my friends. We are one big whispering urge to find boys we like. I can’t find the details in the memory, only impressions of my best friend beside me and the warmth of the fire mixed up with the cold of the autumn air. I remember covert talk and cupped hands around ears and giggling and passing messages to certain boys through other boys, like spies trying to figure out who likes whom. We all wanted assurances before we risked anything. In the haze of memory, suddenly Chris, my love of a thousand years, is beside me at the fire. I remember shivering and our bodies shifting closer to each other for warmth. He is 16 and full of easy jokes and a kindness that he wears like a second skin. At this Moab campfire, several decades later, he is still the same boy I met in high school. He is funny and kind. I catch bits of the conversation he is having with the neighborly campground strangers. He asks questions with interest, tells jokes about our trip, and plays with Henry. In high school, I never thought of what kind of man Chris would be or husband or father. I only loved the ease of sitting beside him and really never wanted to be anywhere else.
In the morning in Moab, he will wake me for the sunrise. I resist at first longing for more sleep, but he persists. He carries the canvas chairs out to the flat rocks near our tent and wraps me in a blanket from home and sits me down under the early morning stars. With the kids asleep, the world asleep, Chris sits beside me and brings me the day. The light is so gradual and yet so sudden. The sunlight stretches like Henry upon waking on an early school morning with arms taut above his head with fist hands and eyes flickering and his little body pulling itself from sleep with a tug. Darkness leaving is a beautiful thing. Nature teaches us to hope, to believe in the certainty of sunlight each morning.
When we take a road trip, we come to believe in lots of things. We trust that truckers will stay awake and will stay in their lanes, that the weather app on our phone will keep us ahead of storms, and that Siri, the oracle, will explain the world to us as we drive. We have faith that Google Maps will show us the way and that our stack of Lonely Planet and Moon Guidebooks will help us find what we didn’t know was just beyond the main highway. Our belief, faith, and trust are rewarded when we discover things like 150 million year old dinosaur tracks and a phantom Jurassic world just a mile or two off Highway 191 at Copper Ridge, Utah.
Encouraged by the guides, we drive off the main road in our Toyota Highlander which in our normal life is relied on for grocery store runs, soccer practices, and careening into the school parking lot on late, hectic mornings. As the Utah asphalt disappeared and the dust kicked up, my oldest son, a Jurassic Park junkie, started humming the John Williams score. For a moment, we all expected the earth to give a T-Rex shudder and a sudden velociraptor to keep pace beside us.
But we were alone and feeling satisfied to find a site that has resisted spectacle in favor of preservation and observation. We hiked a short distance and relished our role as trackers looking for signs that the Great Lizards had once passed by this place. Then, clearly before us we saw signs that the earth had in fact been stomped by something massive, a water-trembling kind of stomping. If not armed with an informative brochure, I would have thought we had stumbled upon one set of giant turkey prints and one set of something elephantine.
Bygone eras for me are the Roaring Twenties or the American Revolution. I can maybe stretch to Ancient Greece and Caesar, but The Age of Reptiles is out of reach for me unless Steven Spielberg is conjuring it up. That dinosaurs roamed here seems fantastical and to think their tracks remain intact seems impossible. I think of all the traces I have left along the way on our travels, tire tread on highways, strands of hair blown and caught in the wind across rivers, flip-flop footsteps on sidewalks and trails. None of it leaves a lasting mark like these paleontological wonders.
In fact, I’ve been here before to Utah with Chris before we had kids and I left my tracks all over Arches National Park. My twenty-something footprints walking with Chris with no kids to herd or to protect would indicate my carefree spirit enjoying my own Jurassic period. We were newly married high school sweethearts who had excavated every part of our hometown and were in search of new lands to explore together. Married life was a sudden, exotic adventure leaving the boundaries of city and state together on some kind of rampage of experience and memory-making. We rented a red convertible Mustang and drove through the West discovering new lands with our youth and exuberance breaking behind us like a ship’s wake. It was a short time period in the overall timeline of our lives much like so many eras of Earth’s long and varied history full of stories and experiences that will one day be mostly forgotten.
I guess if scientists can recreate the story of the dinosaurs in Utah by studying fossilized footprints perhaps our future grandkids and great-grandkids will be able to tell our story by the footprints and travelling tracks we have left behind. I hope they will at least give it a try.