About This Work

Maybe it was just for this that God pulled water from dry land: to rescue hoodoo after hoodoo. That’s what they’re called— a bastardization of voodoo— these unrepeatable needles of rock, geology’s answer to flakes of snow. A sound enough hypothesis: dark magic. But I like God’s approach—so straightforward: the light, the land, the sky, each feat of handiwork a matter of a single uttered word (that’s the first version; the clumsy second was more hand’s on, with dust and ribs required) though it’s a stretch to claim this place was planned. Maybe, just like us, God was stupefied; He rarely knew how any day would end, had to see things finished to call them good. Here, He might even have done without the bric-a-brac of the days that followed except the fourth day’s (bodies of light) essential for the colors of the stone, the greater light especially adroit. Just watch it nurse a puny flame at dawn —purple with an edging of vermillion— by sunrise to a full-fledged conflagration then temper it to golden-rose by noon, darker still as day begins to fail. The oranges go bronze, the reds, maroon, the whole place solid indigo by nightfall, except on nights when a full or near-full moon applies its inlay—mother-of-pearl on a lamina of coral and carnelian— or the moon’s a no-show, no stone visible, just black on black, spikes and spires gone. That’s when you look up: the sky’s Grand Central (no light pollution; no clouds; conditions ideal), rush hour’s hubbub irresistible, the stars its thronged commuters, check by jowl. The Park has telescopes (I once saw Jupiter) but I prefer an open free-for-all, the peripheral inkling of a meteor (or was that a satellite?) or diving owl. Some flora and fauna did make their way here eventually, swashbucklers all: Rattlesnake. Manzanita. Prickly pear, its shock of blossoms at the end of April slow-motion fireworks, the canyon floor lost beneath magentas, yellows, reds or bristle-cone pine, launching spectacular high-wire acrobatics off the cliff sides, where that gifted horticulturist, the nuthatch, a glutton for its seeds, disseminates them when it stops to rest— quite ingenious of God, if oddly fanciful for so inveterate a fatalist, that is, if God’s mixed up in this at all. The Park prefers the Piutes’ explanation: the hoodoos were once the legend people shape shifters, native to this region, turned for some unnamable transgression by vigilant Coyote into stone, their face-paint still intact, their tradition of shape-shifting now upheld in unison, a nonstop frenzy of dissimulation: now a storm-tossed, now a tranquil, ocean flocked by scarlet ibis, pink flamingos, now dreamscape, now valley of the moon, now ransacked cathedrals’ lost rose windows now an amphitheater’s hushed proscenium, now leafless aspens, elms, catalpas, willows now phantom hollyhock, delphinium, now flashback, now panicked premonition, now truce, now skirmish, now pandemonium, now parachutes (a daredevil battalion floating toward an ill-fated attack) now blushing debutantes (their first cotillion) now parched oasis, now bivouac, close by each golden tent a golden torch, now red-robed Russian choirs, now ecstatic ovations from thick stands of golden birch, now burnished temple, now tarnished city, now bands of acolytes—in mosque, in church or here, assembling legends of Coyote— scrambling to get down on their untriedknees and thank someone—anyone—for all this beauty, though maybe it’s the frost they ought to praise, the real creator, according to science, how it would melt and freeze, melt and freeze and then, in a matter of mere eons (no wind involved, windy as it is), chisel what must be earth’s most flimsy stone— limestone, siltstone, mudstone—into this. Not surprising, really, when you think what frost can achieve, in seconds, on a pane of glass— always a revelation, when a miniaturist takes his genius for precision large-scale: the landscape behind the Mystic Lamb as Christ in the Ghent altarpiece, for example, an exhaustive primer offloral specimens, rendered in botanical detail, art both mainstay and intimate of science – think Leonardo—and science of art. What fools we were to leave the Renaissance behind us, to tear ourselves apart into more and more obscure specialization. Not that it matters here. Science and art, even in conjunction with their on-again off-again confederate, religion, are speechless in the presence of this canyon. Even God needs two versions of Creation at the start of Genesis. Some things defy a single overarching explanation. Maybe everything does, if you look carefully. And what’s a day exactly, when the sun hasn’t yet been added to the sky?