Gift of the Desert, I

When I began this blog, I didn’t know I’d signed up to describe Capitol Reef. Driving along Rte 24 I began to understand why my father is passionate about geology. The road parallels the Waterpocket Fold, and I stopped to gawk; huge slabs of rock stories high thrust out of the earth like a line of spears aimed to stop the oncoming cavalry.

Driving through the reef itself, I shook my head in disbelief and wonder at the spires, cliffs, domes, fins, hoodoos, and chimneys all layered in red, green, grey and white. In places they rose three thousand feed above the valley floor where the Fremont River wove a thread of lushness. At Fruita, an historic Mormon settlement, the confluence of the Fremont and Sulphur Creek offered enough water to sustain orchards: apricot, pear and apple. I bought a bag of apricots, Apricots! In the desert! and savored each juicy mouthful.

I found a trail to a band of petroglyphs and hiked out through the canyon. A Towee sang, but otherwise the land was still and quiet. Clouds massed overhead. I crushed a sage leaf between my finger and thumb and brought the scent to my nose.

I had the petroglyphs to myself, miraculously. Horned faces hung above me looking down, a bighorn sheep leapt from one absent rock to another, bear prints crossed a sinewy line of river. But there were other markings too, names of travelers beginning in 1902, bullet holes riddled one spiral shaped glyph and other shapes, mocking the ancient ones and mutating them. My stomach tightened in anger and grief.

Thunder rumbled overhead: my cue to hike out, and fast. At the first flash of lightening, I began to count hoping I had time to reach my car, and looking for a safe place in case I didn’t. I saw the rain before I felt it, moving in sheets across the canyon – the sound undistinguishable from wind in the cottonwood leaves, but the leaves were still. I reached my car peppered with the first thick drops.

Have you ever smelled the desert in a summer thunderstorm? The bruised sage I had smelled earlier infused every inch of the land around me and mingled with the scents of juniper and grateful soil. It is the smell of things coming alive, of reckless abandon, of elation.

The storm was brief, enough to make the washes run, but not to fill them. Enough to send Black-throated Sparrows flitting from shrub to shrub across the desert. I ate another apricot, window down and rain splashing in. What a gift, water in the desert.