As I promised a few posts back, here's my own epiphany story. I wrote this personal essay at the end of graduate school, so its present-day references are a little out of date. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.
Natural Home
“This is the most beautiful place on earth,” declares Edward Abbey. “There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary… For myself I’ll take Moab, Utah. I don’t mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it—the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky—all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.”
My father has such a passion for the wilderness, both for Abbey’s desert, and also the looming and ominous mountains that grace the landscape along the Wasatch front and high Uintas. “The Winters,” I called them as a child, which I had interpreted to be an appropriate name for the place with clear wintry lakes and muddy meadows—meadows where my dad once tied some fishing line to a big stick so that I could “fish” my five-year-old heart out. I didn’t know for myself what magic, what deep intrinsic value these places held, but I could always sense from my dad’s excitement that the Utah wilderness was someplace special. It was his enthusiasm, and not my own, that reflected in my young countenance.
Saying that as a child I did not quite appreciate my natural surroundings would be an understatement. Yes, I often played along to the family’s excitement to go to “the Winters,” or Moss Ledge up Big Cottonwood Canyon for a picnic, but when it came time to actually leave the car behind to walk a mile or two beyond the end of the road, I would begin to loathe the whole experience. My legs would ache, sometimes with dull pains and sometimes with sharp ones, and I’d long to lie down right there on the trail or be carried. My dad would try to distract me with his wild observations. “Look at those holes in the sandstone cliffs, Alisa,” my dad pointed out on one desert hike in Arches National Park. “Those are made by little birds. You know about woodpeckers? Well, those holes are made by rockpeckers.”
Honestly, I didn’t know what to think. Rockpeckers? If there were so many holes in those rocks, how come I’d never seen one flying around or drilling into a rock? But my dad wouldn’t hear my objections. He insisted on their existence and talked about them ad nauseum, maintaining that if a rockpecker stayed in one place too long, it would create one of the famous arches. So I gave up and believed him, all the while forgetting my tired legs. Instead, I remembered the fun I had had back at the Devil’s Garden picnic area with my brothers, using small worn holes to climb up onto a fin where a large empty pothole was exposed, baring the names of many narcissistic tourists. No, it wasn’t glamorous. But to a young girl, I thought it was as cool as stitches, Nintendo, or anything else that was possessed by only a privileged few. Thinking of the fin and my newly discovered pothole, I sighed and said, “I wish there were something to climb on this hike, Dad.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “We’re climbing right now, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, but I mean climb. Like with my hands and knees. You know, getting close to the rock and finding new places.”
“But there are lots of places on this hike to do this,” he insisted. He pointed to some little places on the trail where the sandstone naturally formed some layered steps. I tried to get down on my hands to climb them, but, as I had suspected, the inclines were far too shallow to require the use of all fours. Pretty soon I just gave up and began walking with my head down, my eyes pointed only at my feet, thinking again of how tired I was, how hot the desert sun beat down on me, and how long it was taking to get to this stupid arch.
I continued hiking this way for some time on the vast mountain of slickrock, when I was interrupted by my dad. “Hey Alisa, here’s a good place to climb.” I looked up from my feet for a moment. The trail had swung around a large fin: to my left was a steep drop off, and to my right was a sandstone wall, pretty steep, but concave and curved out like a little bowl.
“Oh, Dad, I don’t want to climb anymore,” I whined. “Let’s just keep going so that we can finally get to the arch.” I sensed this journey to be the longest of my existence.
“Just try it,” he insisted.
Through talking on and on about rockpeckers my dad had already proven that he could outlast any of my objections, so I decided to humor him and climb up the silly wall. He gave me a little push, as I struggled to find hand and footholds that would give the needed stability to my climb. After climbing up just a few feet, I realized why my dad had sent me up this wall. There was an arch up there! I scrambled up to the arch as fast as I could. It wasn’t very big, just an “Alisa-sized” arch, as my dad would say, and I couldn’t wait to get up and sit in it. As soon as I approached, I realized that there was even more than one surprise in this wall. The arch that I had just climbed to held a perfect view of another, more magnificent arch—Delicate Arch, to be precise. From my little Alisa-arch, I could see the majestic and freestanding arch sitting perched, like a small and obscure fin, over a huge, large, and deep sandstone bowl. For the first time, I was struck by an odd feeling, a feeling of deep awe, quiet reverence, and understanding. This is why my dad loved this place.
Where would we be without fathers—those to guide us, to show us the true and beautiful, to teach us to love and appreciate the weathered trail, the craggy landscape, the dry, desert air? My dad used to tell me about how his dad brought him to these places, to Arches, to the Uintas, and how these early beginnings planted in him a deep-rooted love for the wilderness. I believe that this love takes root when we realize that “home,” in its ethereal and metaphorical sense, is not four walls: it is often what lies where there are no walls except the dome of the sky and the edges of cliffs, where we are exposed to the elements, to feel, to see, to look beyond ourselves; where we allow ourselves to be taught by the true guides, the ones with which God has provided us. Abbey was right. We all have in our minds an ideal image of home. As I look around my humble cinderblock apartment, my present home, I realize that it would not be complete without the visual reminders I have placed in each room, the pictures of my favorite wild places, where I first learned what is was like to truly understand.
I have never met someone who cared more about people than you did. You had friends wherever you went, and you did much more for your customers than sell them cars: you befriended them, you gave them your favorite books, and you often covered a car payment for them. As one person remarked on your obituary guestbook, "Is there anyone in Southwestern Utah you haven't sold a car to?"