We settlers have often described the landscape of the American West as “empty.” Then, once we became sensitive to the way that that hard-edged Old English word erases the peoples who lived here for millennia before we arrived, we migrated to the more sophisticated, Latin-derived “desolate.”
But “desolate,” its Latin root meaning “abandoned” or “thoroughly alone,” is arguably no better. Nor is “lonesome,” with which we project our own internal emotional state onto the land, or “God’s country,” with which we assign ownership of it to a deity we imported.
Driving through the stark landscape of northwest New Mexico a few weeks ago, I thought that perhaps “alien” is a better way to describe it, not knowing at the time that the word originated in a term meaning “belonging to another.”
Taking advantage of the fact that my body was still more or less on Eastern time, I got up at 4:30am local time and drove from my Airbnb in Moab, Utah into Arches National Park, evading the requirement to get timed entry tickets to this incredibly popular park between 7am and 4pm.
About halfway to my destination, the trailhead for Landscape Arch, my headlights illuminated a sign warning “congested area” — which was immediately proved to be the case when a deer appeared on the road, making me glad that I had, in fact, slowed my rented car to the prescribed 30 miles per hour.
Probably, though, the sign was because I was approaching Balanced Rock, one of the more popular attractions in the park. The sky had lightened ever so slightly, from pitch black to darkest blue, and I could just barely make out the rock formations to the right of the road, looming ominously. I was reminded of The Night Land, which I have not yet read, but the premise of which has fascinated me ever since I learned about it on the Weird Studies podcast. The book — first published in 1912 — describes a future Earth in permanent darkness after the extinguishing of the sun. The remaining humans live in a giant metal pyramid, using a form of geothermal power to keep themselves alive. The darkness outside is stalked by inscrutable beings with names like “The Thing that Nods” and “Watcher of the Southwest.” These things in the night live and move at an entirely different scale of space and time than humans, with our puny bodies and our brief lives, and our intense needs, for heat, for light, for water, for naming things.
My drive across New Mexico and early morning in Arches were both part of a weeklong vacation I took in mid-April in the “Four Corners” — or, geologically speaking, the Colorado Plateau. I visited the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, hiked in both Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah, and stopped by Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado on the way back to Albuquerque, the city I flew in and out of.
Chaco Culture and Mesa Verde preserve the remains of ancient dwellings, erected over a period of more than five centuries by the Ancestral Puebloans, whose descendants still see these sites as sacred. While there is probably an argument that they should be closed off entirely to the rest of us, they are at least reasonably well protected by the National Park Service, whose guidelines strike me as basically respectful.
However, it would be easy for a visitor to Canyonlands and Arches to miss the way the land itself is held sacred by the Zuni, the Ute, the Hopi, all descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans, unless they closely followed the controversy over former President Trump’s attempt to reduce the scope of Bears’ Ears National Monument (which you have to drive through to get to most of the hiking trails in the Needles District of Canyonlands), or happened upon the interpretive display at the Windows Arches titled “Windows in Time.” As former Hopi Cultural Preservation Office Director Leigh Kuwanwisiwma explains on that display board, “To Hopi people, the cultural landscape is inhabited.”
Although it can seem empty and desolate, not to mention alien, to the eyes of people from more verdant locales, the desert teems with life. (As, in fact, do most ecosystems on Earth, even the harshest-seeming. A book widely assigned and perhaps even widely read at my alma mater of Grinnell College, titled The Crystal Desert, is about the abundance of life in Antarctica.)
Displays in the visitor centers of both Canyonlands and Arches warn guests to stay on the trails to avoid disturbing “the biological soil crust ... a complex mosaic of microscopic organisms that grows on or just below the soil surface” in the parks and “in other dry regions of the world where precipitation and soil nutrients are limited.”
That soil crust is full of algae, lichens, mosses and fungi. Cacti, flowers, grass, blackbrush shrubs and juniper trees grow out of it, creating homes for yucca moths, kangaroo rats, scrub jays. Temporary ponds called potholes, created when the infrequent rain flows across easily-eroded sandstone, provide a place for spadefoot and and red-spotted toads to lay their eggs, and an aquatic nursery for their tadpoles, provided they mature before the short-lived pools dry up.
Despite the warnings in the visitor centers, it is unsurprisingly easy to wander off the trail in pursuit of an interesting view or a photographic angle, mindlessly crushing those we do not know beneath our heels.
Seeing the Needles District of Canyonlands from the air as I was flying to California in the fall of 2022 is what first prompted me to start the “Southwest Bucket List” Google map list that became this vacation. The “needles” that give the district its name are towering rock formations, some rounded at the top like mushrooms, some worn to sharp spires; some are formed into walls, some into massive cathedrals of stone.
On my first full day in Utah, I did an 11-mile hike in the Needles District, up the canyon that leads to Druid Arch and across a rocky ridge to Chesler Park. The whole district was awash in color: the needles themselves are made of alternating bands of rust-red and sand-beige sandstone, laid down over hundreds of millions of years of sedimentation; the canyon washes, when they are not covered with beachlike sand, are a grey stone with an almost bluish tint; the whole area is filled with the dark green of scrubby pines and junipers; you can see white-topped mountains off the in distance; and above it all, the intense blue of the cloudless desert sky.
Arches is no less spectacular. Landscape Arch stretches an improbable 306 feet — slightly longer than a football field — over a slope of boulders and junipers, and the sunrise makes its delicate span glow like copper. Delicate Arch (the most iconic arch in the park, which ironically seems much more solid than Landscape Arch) stands watch over a massive stone whirlpool, which threatens to swallow the preteens who, ignoring their parents’ concern, leap across the slickrock to get the best Instagram angle.
In the center of the park, maybe a mile of trails branch out from a sizable parking lot to the arches known as the North and South Windows, Turret and Double Arch, and numerous other spectacular rock formations. I got there in the middle of the day, and even with all of the people, which made it feel more like visiting patriotic buildings in DC than like communing with nature, I was still awed by the scale.
Double Arch — the centerpiece of a complex of rock whose many lesser arches, and brick-red color, make it reminiscent of a romanesque church — amplifies the voices of the visitors who seem from afar like a line of ants climbing into its bowl-like chamber. Following them up, I lay down on some shaded rock, still unheated by the sun, and felt the welcome coolness preserved from the desert night on the back of my arms, legs, torso. I looked up between the two vaulting arches, a gallery carved through more than 100 feet of rock by potholes that once, maybe, briefly sheltered tadpoles.
At the end of my last day in Utah, I hiked out to Tower Arch, which is in the far north-west corner of Arches, the trailhead accessible only by driving some eight miles on a dirt road. I had the trail more or less to myself and when I got to the arch, the sun low in the sky, there were just two other people there, a woman meditating beneath the arch while her partner strolled about, taking in the breathtaking view out into the Utah desert.
As I was putting together that Google map bucket list, and playing with different routes between its various markers, I noticed that the drive from Chaco Culture to Moab would take me through the town of Shiprock, New Mexico, and that I would likely be driving close by the geological formation from which the town takes its name.
The Shiprock first entered my consciousness well before the internet1, when I saw a New Mexico-based singer-songwriter named Tim Keller2 at a small coffee shop in my home town in Lawrence, Kansas in the late 80s, and impulsively bought one of the 12” LP records he was hauling around on tour in his Mazda hatchback. The best song on that album is called “Sailing the Shiprock.” In the song, the narrator describes his plans “to make a new start,” to take his “old bones out to the red hills” and his “feelings where there is no trail.” Although his interlocutor is unspecified, the implication from other songs on the album is that Keller is describing a breakup.
After my visit to Chaco Culture, I spent the night in Farmington, an oil town which is about an hours’ drive east of Shiprock, both the town and the rock. As I walked from my Airbnb into downtown for dinner, I could make the latter out on the horizon, an anomalous shape against the evening sky. Even in this land of buttes and mesas, where all manner of things protrude unexpectedly from the earth, it cuts a unique profile.
Shiprock was formed from the remnants of magma that hardened within the neck of an active volcano some 27 million years ago. It lacks the flat top characteristic of buttes; its sheer walls of igneous rock, frozen in the act of erupting from the roiling layers of molten lava that lie below the earth's surface, still reach for the sky, forming a jagged, irregular crest.
Heading west before sunrise on U.S. 64 the next morning, I kept scanning the horizon for a first glimpse as it became light. But in the hazy blue predawn all I could make out were the lights and plumes of what was either a power plant or a refinery.
I arrived in the town of Shiprock just as the sun began to light the face of the rock. For brief moment, as I drove through town on the stretch where 64 runs concurrently with the otherwise north-south U.S. 491, I looked at it and could, in fact, see a ship, once I remembered that the bodies of 19th-century sailing ships — the kind the European settlers who first called it “shiprock” would have been familiar with — could rise well above the water, with the sails towering further over them.
I turned south on 491 to make a closer approach, turning my head constantly between the (thankfully flat, straight, and mostly empty) four-lane highway in front of me and the view to the right. I could see how the sight of “los viejos [old ones] sailing the Shiprock so far from the sea” could inspire Keller’s narrator’s determination to “go until the light finds me.”
The Navajo call the peak Tsé Bitʼaʼí, meaning “rock with wings” or “winged rock.” (To be honest, I can’t really see that either.) Climbing this sacred rock has been strictly forbidden since 1970; non-Navajo are not really supposed to drive the tribal roads that would allow you to get closer than a couple of miles away; and drone photography requires a permit from the tribal government. I thought about looking for a creative commons-licensed photo to include in this newsletter but decided against it. You can look up photos on the internet yourself if imagination isn’t enough.
After maybe five minutes of driving south along 491, I turned around and headed back north. Turning east on the merged 491/64 I saw the winged rock glowing again in my rear-view mirror. My final glimpse of it was over my left shoulder as I headed north on 491 towards Moab. Somehow, it seemed largest as I was leaving it, quite possibly never to see it again.
I never saw the Druid Arch — before reaching its destination, the trail ascends through a steep chute of slickrock, and, halfway up, I simply couldn’t muster the courage to scale it. Returning back down the canyon, I came across a rock formation that, with its wild curves, its bands of ochre, beige, and white, and its decorative pockmarks, seemed like it could have been designed by Antoni Gaudí and sculpted by the finest Catalan craftsmen.
Standing before it, I thought of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in which, famously, an inanimate object, the marble torso of the title, inspires the instruction “you must change your life” in the final line of the poem.
I took German (the language Rilke wrote the poem in) for five and a half years in high school and a year in college; I can’t really speak it or comprehend it when spoken, but I can pick my way through a text. One of the things I found interesting, comparing the original to several English translations, is how all of the translators render the first line, about the statue’s missing head, as “we cannot know” or “never will we know.” However, the German simply uses “kannten,” the past tense of the verb können (to know) — i.e., “we did not know.” Our lack of knowledge of the head is not so much a grand cosmic tragedy as a prosaic historical contingency: we simply were not there, we did not know.
The other thing that struck me, reading the original German, is in the penultimate phrase, “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht” (usually translated as “there is no place / that does not see you”). This phrase is the fulcrum on which the poem pivots, suddenly and surprisingly, from a description of a physical object to the command to change your life.
Rilke uses the German noun Stelle, which means “place” or “position,” instead of Plätze, which also means “place,” but only in the sense of a physical location (and which, like the English word “place,” derives from the Greek plateia by way of the Latin platea). Stelle, instead, derives from the Aryan root stel, “to stand,” a verb whose subject can be animate or inanimate, an indeterminacy suggesting all the ways that the universe is alive with subjectivities we do not, or perhaps cannot, know.
You can find more photos from my trip to the Colorado Plateau on my Instagram account.
While driving around the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, I mostly listened to three marvelous pieces by the American composer John Luther Adams: The Wind in High Places, Become Desert, and Canticles of the Sky. They make up the bulk of this issue’s playlist:
If you’re not on Spotify, you can listen to the same recording of Become Desert, by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, on YouTube here:
And “Sailing the Shiprock” here:
Yeah, I know the internet — a distributed network for exchanging data between different computers — was officially invented in 1983, but practically speaking it wasn’t really available as a means of acquiring knowledge for most people until the invention of the “world wide web” in the 1990s.
So far as I know, no relation to the current mayor of Albuquerque.
Thanks for taking us along on this roadtrip. The landscape in this part of the country is beautiful and alien to me. I've traveled through, but not in awhile, and have not spent much time among these canyons. Reminds me how much there is to explore.
I have seen and briefly felt some of these truly awesome, spectacular, reverent places and fully appreciate your much more indepth descriptions. I stayed on the trail though.