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On the Right Track
By Tom Miller, May & June 2006
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The train pulled out of the station on time at 8:35 a.m. Sunday. An hour later the whistle seduced me. The honk of a car implies a driver's irritation, a ship's horn might tell you the captain's off course, but a train whistle has a reassuring lull to it, conjuring up effortless travel and the timeless romance of the rails. I was returning to my cabin from breakfast in the Zurich dining car as we emerged into daylight from the six-plus-mile Moffat Tunnel, one of 29 tunnels between the Denver suburbs and ski country. It was then that the high moan first sounded. It declared satisfaction with having crossed the Continental Divide midtunnel, and when we chugged through Winter Park, light snow fell to celebrate the occasion. Amiable ski bums hoisted drinks from the decks of their lodges as we continued to roll west.
We docked in Grand Junction, Colorado, that evening after logging some 273 Rocky Mountain miles. The next morning after breakfast—this time I chose to eat in the Chicago dining car—we boarded motor coaches for a day trip to two national parks, Canyonlands and Arches. (In the tourist industry, buses are euphemistically dubbed motor coaches to convey a sense of well-being.) "This is what they call the wide-open spaces," a man a few rows back exclaimed with satisfaction as we crossed into Utah desert land. Enormous outcroppings set back from the highway dominated the view. "The landscape here looks like rhinoceros skin," another passenger remarked.
We had entered the Colorado Plateau, a massive four-state stretch of sandstone mesas, bottomless valleys, and seemingly endless canyon land covering some 130,000 square miles. Canyonlands National Park was windy and chilly, but the spectacular view from the Shafer Canyon overlook was worth any climatic inconvenience. To the far south we could see red-rock mesas, below which the Colorado River and the Green River merged. "Looks like there's a lot more sky here than there is back home," marveled Gordon Petersen from Milwaukee, adjusting to the wide-open desert. Off in the distance we could make out the La Sal Mountains to our east, the Abajos to the southeast, and the Henrys to the southwest. But the most stunning view was right in front of and below us as we stood on the lip of a promontory, looking at "the colored walls of stone," as Zane Grey describes the area in Robbers' Roost, "the buttes standing alone, and the red and black mystery of the mountains."
Cash Stanley, a good-natured retired urologist, chose this moment, as we stood in silent awe of the landscape, to offer us all a look at Christmas cards he'd made over the years, each with him wearing a goofy Santa cap in an unlikely setting. He had carried the cap with him all the way from his home in Macon, Georgia, to the Utah desert, pulled it out of his pocket, produced a camera, and on this remote patch of America at its harshest beauty, asked a fellow passenger to snap the picture sure to be featured on a future Christmas card. Dr. Stanley seemed surprised that no one wanted to borrow his cap for a similar shot.
Between Arches and Canyonlands national parks—stomping ground of the real-life outlaw Butch Cassidy—we stopped for lunch at the Bar-M Chuckwagon, an agreeably hokey joint seven miles north of Moab that stages mock gunfights and serves decent food. Most notable, though, was a beer it sells, Polygamy Porter, with its slogan: "Bring some home to the wives!"
We drove the remaining four miles to Arches, where the guides who had pointed out geologic features to us in the morning stayed with us through the afternoon. The inaccessibility and distance of Arches have served it well, keeping the hordes of day-trippers far away. Certainly this would satisfy the late Edward Abbey, who served as a park ranger here for a few years in the 1960s and wrote about it in
Desert Solitaire, one of the great books of the wilderness West.
Desert Solitaire, which thrust on Abbey a loyal following of eco-purists and others who appreciated his joyful and anarchic veneration of the natural world, is required reading for anyone attracted by the land of this region. Certainly that was true of Sarah Sidwell, one of our guides, who worked part-time at a Moab bookstore and had read all of Abbey's works. She wore a straw cowboy hat and a black eye, which she explained away as the result of her face hitting the rim of a coffee cup when she fell out of a boat in Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River early one morning. Like good guides everywhere, Sarah knew to bury her facts in a story or a joke rather than recite them naked. A formation called Martini Rock? "We call it that because it's always hung over."
Sarah had a routine of one-liners; yet—between puffs on a hand-rolled cigarette along the trail to Delicate Arch, a much photographed formation not far from the paved road—she joined the rest of us in silent admiration of the jagged geography. Edward Abbey himself listed the variety of ways you can look at Delicate Arch: as "the eroded remnant of a sandstone fin, a giant engagement ring cemented in rock, a bow-legged pair of petrified cowboy chaps, a triumphal arch for a procession of angels, an illogical geological freak…a frame more significant than its picture."
The rock formations had been given conventional names to make them slightly more accessible and less mysterious—Three Gossips, Parade of Elephants, Tower of Babel. The odd natural shapes reminded me of buildings designed by the outrageous
Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí.
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