Window To The Sky: Arches National Park
August 2nd 2022
Newly wed, we waste no time with for better or worse. You traverse with me twenty thousand leagues under a phantom sea, where all water save the orange puddles from yesterday’s storm has since been dried up, leaving behind a vast expanse of warped sandstone shaped by millennia of erosion, appearing to melt under the burning summer sun that presently beats down upon us.
Like the Israelites in the desert, we wander in the direction we think will take us to the iconic postcard-depicted Delicate Arch, but the massive flat rock we climb offers no assurance that we’re headed in the right direction. Nor does it offer footholds to assist my aching legs. Our only relief is a 20-degree dip in temperature found by crawling into the tiny shadows of occasional twisted shrubs of St. Patrick’s Day green.
We follow the crowd of hikers like sheep, assuming they will lead us to our destination. My face and arms burn. Sweat drips down my back; and I am grateful for every slight breeze that wicks away the flame. Puffy blue and white clouds peek out from behind the swirling sandstone horizon, and I wonder how something so grand as the arch could hide in such a vast open space. You tell me it’s just behind this wall, so I trustingly take your hand and follow. As we round the corner, I see it. Not a postcard, but real: Delicate Arch, protruding out of the ground like the ruins of a fallen cathedral.
But the postcards do not show the smooth crater like a black hole threatening to suck the arch away into the center of the earth; nor the breathtaking and treacherous view beyond its keyhole. A rounded frame, it holds within itself the desert’s deadly beauty, which—akin to Galadriel in Lord of the Rings—bellows, “All will love me and despair!” My awe is tempered by caution as the empty deadness warns us of what we’ll become should we get lost or misstep.
We stand in line with the people who once looked like ants from afar, and wait our turn to perch beneath the arch. It grows at our approach, and as we pass one of its legs, I touch it. My own legs are shaking, natural instinct rebelling as I turn my back on the sheer drop behind us for the sake of a photo. Your arm loops around my waist, and we look out over the view beyond. It is beautiful. I long to stay, but we leave to offer other tourists a turn.
It is called Delicate for a reason: one side is precariously balanced on an ever-shrinking steeple, impermanent as the rest of the landscape, perpetually progressing from pocket, to arch, to collapse. It occurs to me that I’ve now borne witness to an icon that may one day be nothing but a memory. My children’s children might gape at me as they ask, You were there before it fell?
All will fall in time, like everything else. Like you, and I. It is in Earth’s nature to die, and change, and become something new. Whatever comes after us will bear equal beauty. Perhaps future travelers will say, Can you believe this used to be a desert? as they pick wildflowers from a lush and lively field that used to be Window Arch, through which nothing but the sky and its secrets presently peek out at me. Or they’ll swim in water high above Double Arch, a cathedral ceiling with windows to heaven where I currently climb like a goat on untamed rocks. The stationary tumbleweeds that float on sand as soft as Florida beaches, the yucca sprays and twisted bushes cluttering red slabs pushed diagonally by tectonic plates—will no longer be. Like the hazy blue mountains on the horizon, all will fade, and all will be well.
