The Canyon of the Dying Arches, part two

Dear Danarel,

The next day the Rolling Stones team split.  The youngest member, K. expressed vehemently the desire to undertake a thrilling ride upon parts of the canyon from above. It seems that the mighty seven years old knew that a local company (Zip line something),  for a decent retribution, offers these harnessed bullet slide trip from one ridge to another for an amount of time that is ninety percent physical and mental preparation and ten percent actual glide. The issue is harmless with the condition that the parcel, the flying package, has a fair control upon his digestive tract at both ends. I was concomitantly uninterested to participate and extremely curious to know from where the young son of a gun got his information taking into account that his parents raise their kids in a TV less environment. At the beginning the father pretended that kids should have a nonverbal system of communication like the big drum  in Oceania or the smoke signals of the north American Indians (I may say indigenous, but it sounds funny) but after that he  meekly advanced that kids talk among them. See if you are curious: http://www.ravensrim.com/fullscreen-page

So while they had a fool proof substitute of an Icarus glide I went back to the Canyon and had some glorious initiations of my own. Four orders of experience- geological, conceptual, biological and aesthetic suddenly intertwined into a mighty hyper conductor cable attaching me to the site in time and across time. I will try to sound less nebulous and more down to earth because it is the earth which is the matter.   I stopped the car at the entrance of the Park Avenue  a  stupendous wide canyon with amazing sharp cut,  vertical, three layered high walls, directed north east and reflecting the various stages of the arch formation for the understanding of the commoners. The beauty queen shines here and enhances everything. At the eastern end of the Park Avenue one is confronted with a second miraculous formation, a colossal coliseum type expanse,  called  Courthouse Towers,  an even wider contained space,  flanked north by the Tower of Babel and south by the Organ. Glorious reliefs, what can I say and it is still an understatement. The various strikes of sandy ocher and the infinite, dominating scale of deep brick red are of such levels of saturation  and intensity  that their souvenir  will stay with one even beyond the Alzheimer phase. And now I will tell a secret. If someone is looking for some kind of enlightenment, not me, but people who are hopeless believers,  this is an extremely favorable spot especially early in the morning when detestable tourists are rare or even absent. To make this circus of pure metaphysical vibration even more tense, more acute, a giant finger like protuberance is surging out of the earth, a mighty one,  called for some strange reasons the Sheep Rock!  I was informed that  the geologists pretend that from this mighty natural tower one or more  huge arches,  today transformed in dust, time is a terrible rodent,  were going, spanning to  reach the northern wall of the Park Avenue. I was so pleased of what I was seeing that I didn’t feel arguing with anybody and if someone is looking for a boon, of the kind of the old Hindus were asking from their multi-membered gods, there is also a Baby Arch in formation at the end of the same northern wall of the Park Avenue. Now here I have to take some distance because the span of our life is so ridiculous short that we cannot check thoroughly the issue and be sure that the arch today a hole will survive and develop or miserably collapse.

Not less important my amble on the primitive trail of the Park Avenue brought me into an encounter  with a 1000 years old juniper of the endemic specie juniperus osteosperma.  There are all over, but this one was a dandy. It had plenty of gorgeous blue berries, which I said already are modified cones, and eventually bays. One part of the trunk was doing a conspicuous ARCH, sorry I am for nothing, a  kind of python coil, probably because the mighty durable vegetal, an evergreen conifer shrub or tree of sorts, according to sources  with scale like leaves  keeps replanting  itself continuously! This over ground curl is probably a good indication of the vegetal age. The bays have dozen of utilities going from gastronomic condiments

and essential oils  to reliable  poison. I had some great fun thinking of what life on earth could be if we should live some thousand years and of  the quite impossibility to board, check the Tokyo subway or the Indian trains,  anything on wheels except a hearse. There are some hundred more interesting things that I may tell now like the visit to the unbalanced rock or the stupendous effect that one night of rain could have in this dry rocky  area but because of a sudden access of  brotherly love I will  leave to the future visitors something to discover too. Better let the photos doing the talk.  Then the team met and left for the shop of rocks where I made some serious acquisition of petrified trees pieces while displaying a total lack of interest for anything thing having to do with the atrociously ugly saurians of the Jurassic. I think that a human skull is much more inspiring, see Hamlet, that all the ungracious skeletons of these enormously overgrown reptiles with such little heads and quite not brains at all. It is true that if human race or something like this will continue to grow in height, as we do,  we may overcome the Gothic aesthetic canon, and end with a head the size (proportionally) of a grapefruit, or God forbid, an orange. There is some urgency of genetic engineering to avoid or postpone the slide into a vegetal state and preserve our ANIMALITY!

With respect,

The Wanderer

THE CANYON OF ARCHES 2