Favorite Places

This is one of my favorite places, where I had the pleasure of hiking this weekend with my dad and my husband, two of my favorite men.

This is from Devil's Garden, which I have decided is my most favorite hike anywhere. The three of us hiked out to my family's old backcountry camping spots, our secret arch, and the breakfast rock that we used to salute the rising sun when living out of our backpacks.

And, if you're craving more detail, sense, and emotion about this place, you can read my personal essay on it here.

When Something That Makes You Happy Goes Away

I love this lamp on my work desk. It's new. It was inexpensive. It's a red shade with pink, red, and yellow beads. It's fancy and feminine. It emits a soft, home-like glow. It makes me relaxed and happy while I work. When I got it, I showed it off to everyone who came to my desk and told them how happy it made me.

This lamp has been difficult for four days now. That is this entire week. It won't work. I've unscrewed and screwed the lightbulb probably over 100 times, this lightbulb that is two weeks old. I've checked its connection to my powerstrip. I keep flipping the switch off and on. Off and on. It won't work. I work in a dark cave. I am not happy.

Nor Live So Long

I'm going to interrupt the Hawaii travelogue to talk our Cedar City trip last weekend. It was a brief trip, just two nights, for the Utah Shakespearean Festival. Usually we like to stay longer and do more hiking and see more plays, but the Hawaii trip ate up a lot of our vacation. Also, we really missed our friends, the Billings, who weren't able to make it with us.

We saw King Lear. This has been my favorite play for about five years now. I fell in love with it in my graduate Shakespeare class, where we focused on the Puritan influence on Shakespeare's plays and were required to read the original quarto and folio play versions from Early English Books Online (EEBO). King Lear is generally to considered to be in Shakespeare's top four best tragedies (with Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet being the other three), and for me it generates emotion like no other play does. Each of these four tragedies seems more focused on the psychology of the human mind than the outward action or plot, which also happens to be reason that I don't care that Shakespeare borrowed almost all of his plots. His characters, and their ways of expressing themselves (including what John Keats called negative capability), are what truly matters. In addition to this type of play reading/hearing, King Lear provokes emotions in me that seem outside reason and analysis.

Take the first scene, for example. In the past, I've been annoyed by Cordelia and her refusal to play to her elderly father's wishes to publicly proclaim her affection for him. But the way this was played Saturday, I believed more that she believed at that time that she could not utter vain falsehoods—that it was too much against her nature. And Lear himself is another issue: I have a friend who is amazed I can sympathize with Lear after his hubris is so blatantly exposed and wrath so easily kindled against those who love him most. I mean, in the first five minutes he's disowned the only child who loves him and banished his most faithful counselor. But it's because of these fatal errors, and the way Cordelia and Kent forgive him so easily and so completely, that I gain hope for the general situation, and it is that hope that is shattered at the end. There's nothing as depressing as saying that even forgiveness, loyalty, and understanding won't be enough in the end.

I think what makes King Lear so appealing is the way that characters who are so unlike me are able to draw me in and make me empathize with them. Edmund is very funny, and I feel bad for him after hearing Gloucester talk about his illegitimate condition in such a mocking way. Goneril and Regan have some legitimate reason to fear their father's rash judgments and orders, Lear and Gloucester both trust and disown too easily, and the others are just trying reclaim a situation gone completely wrong.

When I watched the Ian Holm version at my professor's house years ago, the most emotional scene for me was the last one, where Lear brings in his beloved daughter and seeks to see her revived. The utter despair of that moment when he realizes that she will no longer live: "Never, never, never, never, never!" was almost too much for me.

In the performance last Saturday, another moment in the play surprised me with its emotional density. It's where Lear and Gloucester meet in their torn-down states and finally recognize each other. I had been watching carefully to see how Gloucester's role was treated. He was played by the same actor I'd seen play Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor last year, and I was wondering how such a good comic could pull off this tragic character. He was amazing. The agony I was in as I watched him get his eyes poked out, and the sorry state of his blindness and attempted suicide, combined with the caring of his disguised son Edgar, made Gloucester's condition so sweetly sad. And at last, when Lear and Gloucester, these two great ruined men, recognized each other in their horrible state and came together in understanding, it was truly an amazing experience to witness.

Furguson Canyon (and Top Five list)

This last weekend I went hiking with my dad and one of my brothers up Furguson Canyon, just south of Big Cottonwood Canyon. It was just a short hike, a couple of hours, but enjoyable to do a little mountain hiking so early in the year. I was amazed how quickly the canyon descended on us, how soon the rocky cliffs seemed to form around us. I grew up looking into this canyon, and never realized how navigable it was, as I was always more focused on the larger Cottonwood canyons. The house I grew up in had a swing set in the backyard, a real park-style swing set with tall metal poles that were buried in the ground. To unwind after school, I used to take my walkman out and swing on the swings, facing east, looking straight into Furguson Canyon.

I had been up this canyon before with my dad, when I was 8 or 9 years old. I remember the rock climbers there--there are some excellent beginner rock climbing spots not too far up where it's not too difficult to reach the top of the cliff through other means and secure the ropes before the climb. There were rock climbers there again, and it looks like a lot of fun. Made me think I need to start developing additional upper body strength if I'm going to attempt that.

During our hike, we each discussed our favorite Utah hikes. I am not a huge fan of top five lists because I dislike picking the last two and leaving everything else off the list, but my brother pressed me to come up with a list of my top five Southern Utah hikes. Here's what I came up with on the fly:

1. Fiery Furnace, Arches National Park
2. Chesler Park, Needles District, Canyonlands National Park
3. Devil's Garden primitive loop, Arches National Park
4. Bell's Canyon/Little Wildhorse Canyon loop
5. Peekaboo/Navajo/Queen's Garden, Bryce National Park

I had forgotten about Calf Creek in Escalante, which really should be there as it is an amazingly fun hike. Also, I'd have to do Coyote Gulch and Upper Muley Twist Canyon in different weather/hiking conditions to see how I'd fare when more prepared.

My Original Favorite Place

A couple of posts back, I talked about favorite places. These are places that feel
so much like home that they almost hurt to leave. I recently acquired a photograph of the place that first made me feel this way. This is a picture of Courthouse Towers in Arches National Park. You can see the Three Gossips on the middle left with Sheep Rock to their right. On the right side is the Organ.

I love this picture, and I have it taped up to my bookcase at work. This is the scene that I'd always anticipate on my family's trips to Arches. I never felt like we were actually there until we had ascended the hill from the visitor's center to the main level of the highway and travelled long enough to see these familiar features. My dad taught us to recognize these features instantly, and I see my brothers passing on this tradition with their own kids. A few years back, my oldest niece could point to the 3-pointed fin and identify them as "the Three Gospips [sic]."

I acquired this picture on a trip to St. George. I think this picture is particularly good, taken at sunrise and with a rare set of rolling clouds in the sky. The ground is relatively green but frosty, suggesting it was taken sometime in early spring, and there's a sense of stillness to it. When I look at this photograph, I feel like I'm the only one there.

Places we never want to leave

"I wish I were in Chesler Park" is the statement I currently have under my name on IM. A couple of friends have asked me about this, and Heidi took the challenge to come right back: "I wish I were in Canada... Alberta." She followed with:

"Oh, I always wish I was in Canada. And when I'm there, I never want to leave. The grass IS greener there. It always has been, always will be. Have you ever been to a place that it hurts you every time you have to leave? I mean, really... you want to cry and you feel like part of you has been torn away every time you have to drive away?"

Yes! This is what it is like for me when I have left Devil's Garden after sleeping there a couple nights. This is the feeling I immediately had when I visited Chesler Park for the first time two years ago. This is how my favorite wilderness spots and hikes become my favorite spots and hikes.

And sometimes they are good spots because they come to you at the time in your life when you need them. Two years ago, I went down by Hanksville to Little Wildhorse and Bell's Canyon, with a stop off at Goblin Valley. It was just me, Kevin, and our friend Mike, but it was a President's Day that was desperately needed (I would be defending my graduate thesis a couple of months down the road). We drove our crappy '89 Dodge sedan from Provo through all those miles and then wet dirt roads. It was totally worth it. We got mildly lost and went through Bell's Canyon first, which was a fun twist. The hike was pretty much deserted. Then we went to Goblin Valley, where the playground that existed there was as fun to me as Devil's Garden when I was a kid. Solitude. Brisk air. Red rocks. It was amazing.