We felt an odd sense of displacement at New Mexico’s White Sand National Monument near Alamogordo. Here sparkling white dunes made of gypsum crystals borne on the wind made the park look like a winter wonderland, especially with children sliding down them on sand discs, only they were not burdened with winter wear, but were barefoot, wearing shorts, and sweltering in the heat. We even met a family from Ottawa there, identified by their Honda in the parking lot as a purchase from a local dealership here, and driven there. The mother of the family turned out to be the sister of a student I had taught in high school ten years earlier!
Utah is even richer in sites of outstanding natural beauty and outlandish outsize sandstone sculptures shaped by natural forces, particularly in the state’s National Parks, among them Zion Park, Arches, (as its name suggests, a cornucopia of some 2,000 huge sandstone arches formed by millions of years of weather, rain more than wind), and Canyonlands, all of which we visited, with extraordinary rock formations and spectacular views everywhere. In Zion Park, we walked in the fast-flowing Virgin River Narrows in our water shoes for one and a half hours, between sandstone cliffs on either side at one point. We visited Salt Lake City with its Mormon heritage, and even swam, or rather, floated, in its eponymous salt lake’s strangely dead waters: no fish, no waves, no aquatic life, but plenty of buoyancy. Four rivers flow into it, but it has no outlet, so the water must evaporate slowly. In all of these outdoor activities, we inevitably acquired sunburn and were forced several times to languish in the shade by hotel pools to recuperate, smothered in aloe vera gel.
On our way to Nevada’s Las Vegas, our last stop before heading home, we drove along the treeless, shrubless, and apparently soil-less Mojave Desert past a ramshackle Paiute community of trailers with all of the signs of neglect and hopelessness that we had earlier seen in a host of failed fast-food restaurants and decrepit abandoned motels near Green River, Utah. We had also, sadly, seen poverty and neglect in a Navajo community near Shiprock, New Mexico.
The temperature that day, my diary tells me, was 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The less said about Las Vegas itself the better, but we needed to catch our flight home from its airport. It was then, and is now, with its casinos, easy marriage-and-divorce boutiques and meretricious showplace attractions for the deluded and the gullible, a man-made tinpot temple to greed, the very antithesis of the natural beauty we had been so privileged to admire for two weeks.
That last evening, we were fortunate enough to find a Mexican family restaurant which served authentic nutritious food at reasonable cost cheerfully in a clean, unpretentious dining-room in the midst of the shallow ephemeral glamour of the city surrounding it. The next day we flew home, profoundly affected and enriched by our experience in the foreign country next door.
El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
