Tourists

I spent these last two days in and near Moab, settling into ordiary activities of a tourist.  I joined likeminded travelers at the Jailhouse Café, where they arrived in RV’s, SUV’s, jeeps, and cars with mountain bicycles high on their tops.  They came on motorcycles or pulling trailers loaded with ATV’s and river rafts.  

No longer is Moab a hub for cowboys and uranium prospectors.  The Ute Indians have left, and the Mormon missionaries have withdrawn into their private places and even allow hard liquor.  Today Moab serves tourists at a profit.  No other town is so well located that visitors can reach three national parks, each on a day trip.  (Canyonlands is really two parks, unjoined by any road.)

 

They file into the Jailhouse Café in litters spaced 1.5 years apart, in heights of 4.5’, 4’, 3’, and 2’ all in matching T-shirts.  Two families come in together and ask for a table for twelve.  I sit surprised at how well they and their young parents behave away from home.  They will circle the parks of Utah, ten parks in two weeks, stopping in Moab for perhaps three days.  I join them, well behaved and polite as I know how in the Jailhouse.  

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Last evening I did the expected of a tourist—an evening cruise on the Colorado River.  A man narrated the sights along the banks, pointing out faces in the vertical rock walls, which we can recognize with only a little imagination.  Our brains seem best with faces.  We can recognize a face in almost any configuration of rock if we stare long enough.  Kids on the boat were finding them unassisted, while I was seeing buffalos, elk, and mac trucks in the same rock.

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I did another sane and near-tourist thing today in riding the Moab Valley Bicycle Path, an uphill journey through red rock on a paved trail completely free from cars.  There I took pictures of sandstone, which you can see above in horizontal layers where it settled to the bottom of a great sea some twenty million years ago.

This sandstone is not in horizontal layers.  It was deposited by wind in the form of sand dunes.  So how did an ocean and dry sand get placed one on top of the other?  Well, the tectonic plate moved both hundreds of miles horizontally and thousands of feet vertically, and did so several times.  Inconceivable!  Yet all the fossils and other evidence point to a conclusion of unimaginable time in which deposition and erosion slowly created what I see by simply looking at these rocks.