Southwest Reflections

Though I returned from the trip to the Southwest Monday night around 11, this is literally the first opportunity to sit down and hammer out a few lines. I had to be in Richmond early Tuesday morning to give a presentation and have subsequently been occupied with work and classes and homework and everything else. I met up with a couple new friends last night which was good fun and a much needed break from the rushing about of this past week.

The Southwest trip was a lot of fun and as always on such adventures the time passed too quickly. In a span of five days, we toured Las Vegas, drove across Arizona to the Grand Canyon, then spent some time in Flagstaff. Along the way we saw some pueblo ruins, Sunset Crater volcano, Meteor Crater, and other natural history attractions. We also spent some time wandering around on the Navajo Reservation. So it was certainly a very full vacation.

I was not particularly fond of Vegas. I had fun and it was certainly worth seeing, but it just symbolized many of the darker elements of human nature which I hold in contempt: greed, crass materialism, and so on. This bothered me to no end, particularly when juxtaposed to the visit to the Navajo reservation two days later. In this context, Vegas was sickeningly opulent. And since I've been asked about this by everyone since I've been back: I didn't gamble at all, not even a quarter in a slot machine. It's not my thing and I can certainly find better uses for my money.

The Grand Canyon was impressive and humbling and truly gives one, at least casually versed in the subject, a good sense of what constitutes geologic time. The stratigraphy was visually wonderful; all those various sedimentary layers laid down over millions of years subsequently and gradually cut over time by the Colorado River and now exposed. The scale of it all is certainly humbling both in the sense of nature's beauty (to which the most glitzy hotel in Vegas could not even begin to compare) and the sheer antiquity of the Earth. Certainly the processes of nature have been cycling long before humans ever arrived on the scene and will continue to do so long after we're gone.

We arrived at the Grand Canyon shortly before sunset and I wandered off from the group in search of a quiet overlook to observe and contemplate all of this. With field glasses worn from many such adventures, I scanned the layers and outcroppings and the sliver of the Colorado meandering below. A few patches of snow clung to sheltered ledges on the cayon walls, tucked away behind scrub of brown and green. Off in the disance was a trail and on this rough zig-zagging path along the Canyon's wall a handful of people were making their way out in the waning light of day. Even at high magnification, they were the smallest of specks, perceptible only by movements of colors brighter than the surroundings. As the sun set, the sky and the Canyon became alive with orange and red; shadows crept out of dark recesses below and gathered and grew in the fading twilight until night fell and all was quiet on that ledge under the stars winking brightly above.