Utah starts like Colorado. Ground is scrub covered. It’s rocky. There are mounds of trees where cattle cluster. A large Welcome To Utah sign greeted us. Delicate Arch from
Arches National Park beams from Utah’s incongruous sign. How can this scrubby country become red rocks sculpted by wind, sand and gravity? Context can be tricky. Looking at Utah’s Colorado entrance Delicate Arch’s hollow stone arch seemed inconceivable. We had to see this change of landscape mood for ourselves so we took a right at Monticello Utah heading for God’s sculpture garden.
Coming over a verdant mountain there was a strange sensation. The land settled down into long flats, green all but disappeared and sphinx like stone faced an unending time. Dislocation was my first reaction, dislocation because these sandy red stone surroundings seemed familiar. The Jungian thing would say these monuments are recalled dreamscapes, but my memories seemed earlier and more active. Films started to play: John Wayne’s tall Texas Ranger in Comancheros (1961), John Ford’s Rio Grand (1950) and Sergio Leone’s long masterpiece Once Upon A Time In The West (possibly the movie whose timing is closest to these timeless Utah landscapes).
Walker Percy discusses dislocation of real life when seen on film. His book The Movie Goers’ protagonist only understands life via film. I was having a Walker Percy moment. One alien landscape replaced another. We habituate to alien things fast. Then we left the highway to drive up the steep slope to Arches valley of the giants. There is no way to prepare for such natural force. Arches hits eyes, brain and heart in immediate succession. Favorite artists came to mind:
Alberto Giacometti’s slender balanced figures in towering angelic spirals,
Richard Serra’s bending, rusting, graceful, ponderous steel sculptures in each wall’s oxidizing belly and tilted head. We walked the mile and a half to Delicate Arch and it reminded me of
Alexander Calder’s Stabiles.
Isamu Noguchi’s smoothness surrounded us.
Arches National Park is God’s sculpture garden and God’s been busy. Millions of years, water and gravity create something no museum or sculptor can. Time is trapped smoldering, changing and powerful. The only constant in this rock world is slow burn. Rocks fall. Water falls and things change. Change happens achingly slow or devastatingly fast in this stone heaven. Time is not measured in human scale or understanding. Time evolves, changes and shifts tons of stone and sand in a million ways every moment of every day. Like much of art and almost all philosophy (lol), what we see and understand is tiny compared to what is.
Walking to Delicate Arch I felt contrasting ideas and emotions. What is a tiny human in this million-year-old garden? Life, all life, is connected. This land demonstrates connection in interplay. Sky, stone, earth, wind, rain, animals and dirt create an amazing sculpture garden on a blue marble floating through infinite expanding space. People trekked a strenuous path to reach Delicate Arch. Like Jeremy, Brian and me they were called by a need to see, stand inside the arch’s invisible hand, shoot pictures and marvel at nature’s art. How we understand each other and experience our world is forever changed after visiting God’s sculpture garden. We simultaneously understand how tiny and important we are. Importance comes from connection. Connection is our collective need to seek, climb rugged trails and stand inside Delicate Arch.
Picture is Martin and Brian at Delicate Arch taken by Jeremy. More picture on
Martin's Ride Flickr.