A Sense
of Place: Echo Park
Dinosaur National
Monument, Colorado
…round apples glowing red in the
orchard and the rustle of the leaves
make me pause to think how many other than
human forces affect us…
I respond – how?
Virginia Woolf - “A Sketch of the Past”
Echo Park is the center of the
Universe, where the veil between earthbound reality and the eternal world of
spiritual truth is as thin as a cobweb.
But
would there be an end to a hellish descent? Six miles so far in first gear over
washboards and gullies, sometimes careening, then skidding to a stop and
sending a cloud of dust and rocks over into an abyss. Next, an open stretch
across a bench several acres wide. Maybe there’d be an easy down grade at some
point, but no, the road narrowed and plunged into a funnel yet again. The creeping
and tumbling and inching down began anew.
My
uncomplaining truck clutched and shifted and braked, enjoying itself I imagined,
wanting to test its tipping point. On we went, over the worst patch of treacherous
road I could recall, with another six or seven miles to go and another thousand
feet down.
More
falling into the Earth until at last we emerged into a quiet and majestic
riverside park — a broad expanse of rolling gardenscape of juniper and box
elder and deer brush and sage surrounded on three sides by thousand-foot
cliffs. The towering monolith of Steamboat Rock loomed straight ahead. Its brawny arms, several million years’ worth
of red-stained sandstone, are crossed over its massive chest like a colossus.
I’m
in northwest Colorado — Dinosaur National Monument —high on the Uinta plateau
above the confluence of the Yampa and Green Rivers. I was told this would be
worth it.
I set up camp. I stake down a
simple two-person blue tent, toss in a pillow and sleeping bag, set my camp
stove on a fire pit grate, and suspend a white rope and ever-so-handy orange
rain poncho between two thin pines for shade. The weather pattern starts to
change. Earlier, it was hot and still.
Now, I hear the wind coming, loud on its way, before feeling the gusts. It
tunnels down from the mesas far above and into the valley floor. It’s capable
of uprooting a fully loaded and tied-down tent and sending it flying across the
field. A minute later, a 180-degree different gust slices up from the river,
catches me broadside, and I sway for a moment like a drunk in a crosswalk.
Just as quickly, the wind stops,
but the midday desert sun disappears behind a flotilla of black clouds. Like an
alien spacecraft, the heavy mass parades overhead — advance guard, it turns
out, for an even larger and darker mother-ship of cumulonimbus that appears
next from behind the escarpment. It pauses, gauges my insignificance, then
drifts on in the ephemeral and unfocused way of clouds.
More
than a visual message, Echo Park is history and prehistory. This was the place
of refuge John Wesley Powell found and christened in 1869 after surviving the
treacherous Lodore Canyon upstream on the Green River. Powell’s party rested
here before moving on through Whirlpool Canyon and the improbable gorge of
Split Mountain downriver.
Before Powell, General William
Ashley’s party floated down the Lodore chasm in bullboats — dried buffalo hides
stretched over willow branches, keelless, rudderless, and as unwieldy as
steamer trunks. Ashley hauled out by a rock wall, climbed it, and inscribed
“Ashley 1825” in black letters. Powell spotted the graffiti some forty-five
years later.
In 1776, Fathers Dominguez and
Escalante sought a way west from Santa Fe, by then a town over 150 years old,
to California. They followed the Old Spanish Trail which veered north in order
to skirt the Grand Canyon. The intrepid padres continued even farther north up
the Green River. The party crossed the Green not far below Echo Park where the
spent stream flattens out. They named the river “Rio Buenaventura” believing it
to be the rumored westward passage flowing to the Pacific. The myth held until
the 1840s when John C. Fremont proved conclusively that there was no such
waterway.
Before these seekers of Spanish
fortune and Catholic converts, the resident Crow and Shoshone called the river
the “Seeds-ke-dee Agie,” Prairie Hen River.
Lost
to recorded time, a thousand years earlier, a people archeologists call the
Fremont Culture knew the oasis at the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers.
Watched over by the Steamboat Rock massif, they irrigated fields, grew corn, beans, and
squash, and feasted on berries and cactus fruits and piñon nuts. Wild game was
abundant: mule deer, bighorn sheep, small mammals, and birds. High on
the surrounding canyon walls, they sketched petroglyphs and pictographs, spiritual
language I hoped to hear if I listened carefully.
Major
Powell’s epic journey made history and made his name. Miles downstream from where I sit today and
off any map Powell had, the Grand Canyon waited. Here at Echo Park, the veteran
who fought with Grant at Shiloh rested by a fire and stirred his beans with his
only arm. He mopped the broth with sourdough and listened to his men bounce
their voices off the canyon walls. Next day, the troop put in and went on to
make history down the West’s most adventurous river.
Today, nearly a century and a half
later, John Wesley Powell’s presence in Echo Park feels as real as a slapped
mosquito. I relax amid the scent of warming boulders and cottonwood. Pushing
into history is a favorite pastime of mine. No one
has sent me here. It's my attempt to puzzle out unstructured time, measured
only by daylight and shadows, to take a routine camping trip and season it with
a touch of simple fear of the unknown. I feel a tiny ache in my belly reminding
me of free-climbing granite cliffs on family camping trips in the Sierra Nevada,
scaring the hell out of my mother.
Echo Park stands as a monument to
the efforts of an aroused citizenry in the 1950s which, urged on by the likes
of Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and the Sierra Club, stopped in its tracks
the Federal government’s attempt to dam the Yampa and Green Rivers and submerge
Echo Park forever. The tragedy would have been profound. The efforts to save
other places that have failed — Glen Canyon, Hetch Hetchy — tear at the heart
in places like Dinosaur all the more because of how nearly the battle here
might have been lost.
Echo Park and the others like it have
in common a dead-on honesty of place. Each makes an unforgettable statement,
sometimes stark and sometimes subtle: “I am beautiful and unique. My essence
will seep into your soul, and you won’t be able to forget it, or want to.”
But here lies a paradox: Staggering
natural beauty and timeless messages — essences of a place — are not reckoned,
let alone understood and wondered at, other than by the very humans who
encounter them and, even innocently or barely perceptibly, begin their
despoliation. As Stegner observed, places are not places except as our senses
take them in. Yet it is we who have often destroyed them or allowed them to be
compromised.
Worth
noting is the fact that today the once-abundant prairie hens cannot be found
anywhere nearer the Green River than isolated populations far to the east in
Kansas. A scant nine of the thirty species of fish in the Green are indigenous;
tamarisk and cheatgrass are crowding out native horsetail and other riparians
faster than they can be checked. Native chokecherry, box elder, and cottonwood
are also threatened.
Is
there a resolution of this dilemma? Perhaps my latter-day pilgrim soul can find
one.
The
first night, like all nights in a wilderness campsite, I lie in my tent alert
to every sound — every snap of a twig, every nighthawk's bzzt, every whisper of a breeze, every rustle of some night
creature. At some point, sleep happens. I awake refreshed and hungry. I eat a
lazy breakfast— bacon of course, eggs and hash, firepit-charred toast, and camp
coffee — and clean up. The sun is painting the top reaches of Steamboat Rock
and starting to climb the taller pines in the valley. It will be hot today.
The
day before, after I arrived, a group of college kids doing summer conservation
work told me about a loop trail that circled the bluffs above the valley. So
around noon, daypack over my shoulder, I set off toward the river. From my
camp, a path leads away through an aspen grove. It widens and is well-trodden
but feels close under a green canopy. I catch a whiff of the river, its fecund
smell of welcome, well before I step out onto a sunlit beach. The Green River
is all strength and sound. Across the way, Steamboat Rock’s wide toe pushes the
entire wide sweep of river toward me with no effort at all. It's a good thing I
don't have a boat. I’d shove off and live a childhood dream of running the
Colorado with Powell — map my "experience onto a waking dream," in
the words of the writer Jonathan Franzen.
Fascinated by the exploration
of the American West, I get to explore my fascination, to actually feel sand
tug at my boots, to use both hands to brush aside tall grass, to feel the
scratch on my face of tall sage branches as I squeeze through them. The sand is
flatter and hard near the river. Upstream a quarter mile among willows and
sandbars, the eponymous Green River, dark and strong, meets the Yampa coming
from the east, light blue and rippled. The two rivers combined drain half of
Wyoming and much of western Colorado.
I
follow a faint trail upriver along the Yampa past bleached driftwood and
boulders. The path narrows and begins a climb along a slope that tests the
angle of repose. At a hundred feet or so above the river, I hesitate and take a
breath before clambering along a narrow, hot path. From time to time, I steady
myself by reaching out to the surface of the mountain on my right.
After a half a mile or so, the path
descends back to the water’s edge. There I find my destination, the entrance to
Sand Canyon, a now dry tributary of the Yampa. I was told the loop trail would
pass through the small canyon’s confines to high bluffs far above. The mouth of
the narrow canyon in front of me, however, is blocked by a dry fall maybe
twenty feet wide and more than head high. Above the fall and beyond, striated
contours, yellow and ochre and crimson, typical Southwest canyon walls, lean
into each other and curve and bend into a hidden distance. The disappearing
landscape feels ominous and a little scary. But a path leads somewhere, doesn't
it? I do register how completely alone I am.
How to climb up and in? I am not an
intruder, but a friend. There are no foot or hand holds on the rock face that I
can see, only a shrub or two at the top that I might be able to grab if I can
somehow ratchet myself up the eight vertical feet above where I stand. The
summer crew did say the gorge was accessible. Only later, do I learn they’d
made the trip in the opposite direction.
Suspension of disbelief is my only explanation for what I do.
Often, as a small child, I dreamed
of being able to fly. Didn’t we all? Knowing I could not soar like a bird
didn’t mean that, in the privacy of my backyard as a youngster, I wouldn’t
stand on my porch, flap my arms, and pretend to jump. Maybe what re-emerges now
is an echo of childhood, re-energizing long-dormant synapses that defy or deny
unacceptable obstacles.
I back up several paces. The idea
here will be to gain enough forward momentum to jump and plant a foot against
the face of the wall, then propel myself upward. I will redirect my forward
inertia vertically, grab a branch, and pull myself up. Maybe.
I cinch up my small pack, find a
starting block of sorts in the sand, take a deep breath, and run (make that, “lumber”)
forward. At the wall, I reach my right leg up and plant my boot against the
surface, clench my toes inside my boot, and thrust upward.
A
Vibram sole is no match for alluvial sandstone. Disbelief can be suspended; the
Law of Gravity cannot. I start to skid back down slowly, leaving skin from my
right forearm on the rock. For reasons I’m unclear about, I somehow push my
body away, achieving a forty-five-degree angle from vertical (not sustainable
on our planet) and somersault backward. Soundless and in slow-motion, the
awkward and backward rotation of my body in the afternoon sun is a rag doll's
spiral. For a fleeting instant, I imagine unvoiced mirth in the ancient souls
still living in the pale sandstone walls. I continue through the air. The
silent, wide flow of the heedless Yampa pays no attention. Neither do the
whispering aspens, nor the passing breeze, nor the pied grebe shooing her brood
among the reeds. Two deer across the way look up, then go back to drinking at
the water's edge.
My only thought is to protect my
head. I tuck my chin to my clavicle and accomplish a reverse tuck and roll,
pack and all. Lying face-down, tasting dry and pebbly sand, at least I’m
conscious but in pain. My neck isn’t broken; my shoulders, arms and ribs seem
to have survived. Looking around to be sure there are no witnesses to my folly,
I sit up and drag myself to the river’s edge. Blood oozes from the scrape on my
arm. First-aid consists of opening an ointment tube with my teeth, applying it
left-handedly, and covering the wound with a laughably inadequate swath of
gauze and tape. I breathe and begin clearing my mouth of grit.
Earthbound
reality, indeed.
Back at camp, I lie down in my
shorts and t-shirt on top of the concrete picnic table by my tent, arms and
legs akimbo, and stare straight up into an endless sky. I hear warblers,
buntings, swallows, sparrows, towhees, and the scree of a hawk. I hear no people. Tiny wisps of my campfire smoke
tease my nostrils. The breeze is languid and warm.
The dull pain in my arm is
delicious, bought at a price I might have decided I was no longer willing to
pay, but did. It is also a fact that I can subsist in timeless Echo Park only
by virtue of meals concocted out of foil packets; a plastic bottle or two made
from petroleum polymers; a tent, fly, tarp, ground cover, sleeping bag, and
mattress — also jacket, daypack, and boots — made of state-of-the-art nylon,
polyester, or Gortex; tent poles, canteen, lantern, camera, binoculars and camp
stove (with throw-away propane canister), made of aluminum or even more exotic
materials at who-knows-what environmental cost in extracting, smelting, and
molding. I drove here in a truck that gets lousy mileage. Without these things,
would I even be here? Should humankind simply not invade this space?
But
for now, I decide I will not solve good Professor Stegner’s problem even in a
week. My solitude and the grace bestowed upon me is the result of no little
denial, to be sure. But this I banish into the silence and the stories that surrounded
me. For that matter, I can place the blame elsewhere: in spite of itself, Echo
Park is its own worst enemy.
I
will stay here forever, I decide. I close my eyes, and off I go into the
eternity of rivers and rock escarpments and lost languages, and the truth of my
transience.
