‘When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you’ll see something – maybe.’ So wrote Edward Abbey in his book Desert Solitaire; a Season in the Wilderness, which is an account of his six months as a ranger in the later 1950s in Arches National Park in south-east Utah. This book, a passionate defence of Utah’s wild spaces begins with the words – words I was to come to find credible in relation to Arches – ‘This is the most beautiful place on earth.’ Abbey argued that of the oceans, mountains and deserts, the latter come closest to fulfilling humanity’s basic need for wilderness. After seeing the deserts of Morocco, Iceland and Utah, I can see what Abbey meant, and I can no longer – as I once did – agree with the dictum of the Victorian critic John Ruskin that ‘Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural beauty.’ Mountains now have a rival for my affections. I am falling in love with desert, the place where life continues to exist, despite all the objective conditions, as a metaphor and an inspiration.
Seeing the blood on my arms from the scratches of the juniper and aspen scrub I was battling through, I had a less philosophical concern, which was whether my own immediate life would continue to exist. I was on the Syncline Loop of Upheaval Dome in Canyonlands National Park; it was February, and I had not seen a soul all day. The normal egress from the canyon was iced up and impassable, and I was attempting to force a side exit onto a high sandstone ridge, which I hoped would allow me to return to my original starting point. I was aware that no one would come looking for me if I failed. In the event a two-mile detour brought me back to the trailhead, chastened – and recalling Abbey’s dictum quoted at the start of this chapter.
After my whistle-stop tour of Arches with Burt and Lindy in ‘99, I was determined to come back and explore the park, and the rest of south-east Utah, as soon as I could. This determination was increased by a reading, and re-reading, of Abbey’s book in the interim couple of years. Mikel had gifted me a copy of Desert Solitaire before my leaving Utah, with a strong recommendation of both its literary quality and its environmentalist message. He did however add wryly, ‘He’s a bit hard on the Mormons, though.’
I did not find this in Abbey. He was an interesting character, from an Appalachian family with strong socialist traditions, and he had moved out west attracted by the remaining wilderness, gaining the sobriquet of ‘Cactus Ed’. Here in the South-West he had retained his background radicalism, though it was modified by adjuncts of American individualism, nurtured by the West, which made him a complex and contradictory character. He united many strands of left-wing thinking (anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism) with those of the right (he was against gun control and in favour of compulsory birth control for Native Americans and Mexicans, for example). But my various sojourns in America had already showed me that ideas that were mutually exclusive in Europe, were not so over here.
Abbey found his Mormons hospitable, peaceful and with a strong sense of community (a quality not widely apparent in the United States), aspects which attracted him, whilst being aware of the generally limited intellectuality and curiosity of the Mormon psyche. These attitudes to the Saints on his part I could empathise with, as I could further with his assertion that there was nothing more or less absurd in Mormonism than in any other religion. Buddhist Reincarnation, Catholic Virgin Birth, and the Mormon belief that Jesus came to America after he died, are all absurdities in equal measure, without a shred of evidential basis and therefore beyond the bounds of rational discussion, none more or less so than the others. Amen.
Abbey was, long before it became fashionable, an advocate of the value of wilderness and a defender of it against its violation and exploitation. When he became a warden at Arches in the mid-1950s the US National Parks had just stopped a policy of massacring any wildlife that might frighten the tourists (such as cougars) or interfere with the grazing profits of the ranchers (cayotes) – which latter group (ranchers, not cayotes) got dirt-cheap access to parklands for grazing, causing untold ecological damage. Accessibility to the parks was then, and sadly remained for many decades afterwards, the keynote for car-addicted America, and roads were still being bulldozed into previously pristine corners of wild land, followed by the erection of campsites, toilet facilities, barbecues etc for the great American picnic. When Abbey took up the job of warden at Arches, the road to the park’s trailhead was still unpaved, and he lived in a house-trailer at the end of it. Many days, not a single tourist came to his place whereas today they are counted in their tens of thousands. Abbey wanted to keep it that way and vowed to leave when the road was tarmaced, and he kept his word.
There was far too much of the theme park about US National Parks, far too much emphasis on development over conservation back then. Abbey called it ‘The Industrialisation of the Wilderness’, and wrote a quite famous novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a disparate group of outcasts who take direct action against the spoilers of the wilderness. But Cactus Ed was much too careful to get involved in such activities himself, and ended up in a cushy desk job teaching literature at a South-Western university. He was a fun guy, but not the stuff of martyrs. In the last few years I have noticed that there has been a reversal of National Park policy, that automobile use is actually being restricted with many areas being given over to walkers and bikers only, and attempts made to reverse the environmental damage of generations.
But before I maganged to head south to Arches, I had had to pay my dues in Ogden. Mikel had managed to get me some lecturing at Weber State University which would pay my fare for the trip – and leave a decent surplus besides. I became a Visiting Professor of History and Literature, and as such – and like all such – I am commemorated on a plaque in the department. Go and look, if you don’t believe me. This enormous inflation of status was hard for a Scot like myself with our typical national diffidence, to come to terms with, especially when Mikel would invariably introduce me to classes as ‘a former professor from Clydebank University in Scotland.’ I protested to him that I was merely a lecturer and that Clydebank was only a further education college, not a university. Yea, but you’ve got to translate for these guys’, he said, ‘They wouldn’t understand if I told them what you just said.’ And so I resigned myself to being a professor for a couple of weeks, and bathed in the admiration. Of that there was certainly a lot, but of comprehension, I’m not sure there was quite as much.
To Mikel’s mountain literature class I again gave a couple of lectures and readings about Duncan Ban MacIntyre. He was an 18th-century Gaelic poet, who also – and unusually – climbed for pleasure many of the mountains around his native Glen Orchy in the Scottish Highlands in latter 18th century. I had had someone make literal translations from the Gaelic, which I then made into English poems and which Jack (the singing partner from my last visit) rendered into songs. We did some ceilidhs and shows round these poetic-musical productions in Scotland, to the great delight of most of our audiences, but to the ire of the occasional Gaelic scholar who would turn up and storm out when he found that Duncan was being travestied in English. Now, I made the pretty safe assumption that there would be no experts in Celtic literature or language in my Ogden audience, when Mikel introduced me as exactly one such expert myself, and I decided to brave it out, and to go with the flow. They liked it (even my English versions can’t totally destroy the fascination of the content of Duncan’s poems, though not matching the literary quality of the originals) and they even asked some questions – not tricky ones about Duncan’s place in the bardic tradition, but thankfully ones I could answer, such as: ‘Does everybody in Scotland speak Gaelic?’
With my lecture to the history department I was on a lot safer ground. I had just written a book about Queen Victoria’s travels and mountain ascents in the Scottish Highlands, and this was a subject I knew back-to-front. No thin ice to be skated on here. Illustrated copiously by 19th-century mountain paintings, this lecture was an exposé of the illusory world which romanticism had created out of the Scottish Highlands, and the stamp of Royal Approval given to this by the phenomenon of Balmorality – the creation of a neo-feudal virtual reality at Balmoral Castle by Victoria and her consort Albert – an imagined world of loyal serfs and noble lords, where the grouse moor was the metaphor for imperialism and the subjection of the coloured peoples to British rule. I am not sure if my message was grasped, and there was a longish silence until Mikel prompted the audience. The first comment was one you always get, even at home.
‘Do you think Victoria and John Brown were lovers?’
I could answer that with agnosticism, but the next comment threw me a little and left me initially speechless.
‘I guess you are right in what you say, but gee, I kinda like all that tartan stuff. It’s a shame in a way to spoil it.’
This time I was staying with Mike and Janis, in their fine house with its staggering view of the Salt Lake gripped in winter. Behind were the cliffs of various canyons leading up to the Wasatch mountains, but I could see that there was even more snow than there had been the last time I had been over. Then I had found it so frustrating to be here, as a sun-starved Scot in winter, and find that the mountains of Utah were covered in deep, dry, powder snow, with many access roads closed and avalanche a constant danger. But I had also discovered on the last trip that in much of the desert walking was possible for most of the winter. And there I was now, headed south, for sun and sand – but it was snow, eight new inches of it, that greeted me on the morning of my departure as Mikel drove me through a blizzard to the airport at Salt Lake to pick up a car.
I won’t deny that my resolve faltered as I sat in the parking lot, trying to work out how an automatic car worked (I eventually asked a passing cleaning lady, who showed me), and watching the snow fall outside. I crawled out of the airport and onto the freeway, but took the wrong turning, finding myself heading back northwards to Ogden. After 25 miles I worked out how to get the other other side of the freeway (my friends will tell you I’m not the world’s best driver and it wasn’t until I eventually got to Moab that I discovered that the acrid smell in the car was coming from the handbrake I had left half-on) and back south to Salt Lake. From then it got easier. The snow abated, and I knew the way, just follow the Burt and Lindy trail, I told myself, passing again through Carbon County and coming to Green River and eventually arriving at Moab. Here I thought I might spend a couple of days, but I ended up passing the entire week I had left at my disposal in that town.
Moab was an original Mormon settler farming outpost from the later 19th century, founded on a fertile stretch of the Colorado River. Its name was possibly badly chosen as in the Bible the Moabites are the enemies of the Jews, whose travails the Mormons like to compare with their own. (And like Jews, Mormons call non-believers, ‘Gentiles’). In the last half century Moab has lost a lot of its Mormon identity, first as a uranium boom town in the 1950s and subsequently as a Holywood film-making outpost before finally assuming its present identity as the outdoor capital of Southern Utah, and today the LDS are a minority in the place, compared with the Gentile incomers over the last decades. It is also one of those few, isolated, Democrat-voting places in Utah. When Abbey was here in the fifties this was still a mainly Mormon town with no bars and no pubs.
The place now has a very young age profile, due to the amount of climbers, rafters, mountain bikers and others who have come to live here for the climate and the scenery. It is a bustling town full of eateries like the Jailhouse Café, bookshops, outdoor equipment shops, restaurants and micro-breweries. Since the liberalisation of drinking laws in Utah for the 2002 Winter Olympics, it is not a problem to buy a drink in Utah almost anywhere. Even the lingering requirement that alcohol must be served with at least a token amount of food has gone – though it may be served with an accompaniment of a homily from your server, to the effect that excessive consumption is harmful. On the other hand the Mormon war on tobacco has intensified rather than abated over the years, and it is almost impossible to light a cigarette in anywhere place deemed ‘public’ without fearful consequences. I’m with the Saints on that one.
To the north of Moab lies the staggering Arches National Park, where Abbey worked and which contains the most astounding scenery I had yet witnessed. To the west and south lies Canyonlands, which Desert Solitaire described as containing some of the wildest, most rugged and stunningly barren country in the whole of the United States. ‘closer to anything else in the forty-eight United States to being genuine terra incognita,’ in his words. The town is thus the ideal location for an exploration of Abbey Country.
In February Moab is fairly quiet. There’s not a lot of skiing around here, and it’s a bit cold for the most of the rafting, rock-climbing and slickrock-biking fraternity at this time. Someone had recommended the Gonzo Inn to me, and, though my guide book gave it a guide price way beyond my budget, I was advised, ‘See if they’ll do you a deal.’ Europeans associate haggling with underdeveloped countries, like Morocco where I had experienced its necessity, and we – especially Brits – are no good at it. I gradually realised that in Merka you don’t have to be. Just stand looking uncertain, say little, and often both sides of the bargaining get done for you. The place was seriously stylish, a boutique hotel in that tasteful ‘South-Western’ style that sounds, but isn’t, an oxymoron. Solid wooden furniture, patchwork quilts, hard crafted lamps … it was also clearly seriously empty. The counter clerk offered me a price and my bargaining was limited to saying that that was too expensive. Without having to say much more, and do more than back off a little, I was eventually offered a suite for the price of a room, and five nights for the price of three; I was to be the sole Gonzo guest that week. And on my walks I was often the sole walker.
The whole of Southern Utah – including Arches and Canyonlands – is part of the huge eroded sandstone Colorado Plateau, an area the size of Scotland at an elevation of around 4000ft. But don’t be intimidated by the idea of winter at this altitude. In February there were light snowfalls, and temperatures fell to −15°C at night, but in the daytime I faced almost constant sunshine and temperatures in the 60s Fahrenheit, which quickly melted most of the snowfalls. Even in February sun-shield is necessary, and winter desert-walking is still dusty, thirsty work; they say a gallon of water a day in the summer heat, and I would recommend at least half-a-gallon even in winter. If you are looking for isolated emptiness then Utah’s National Parks, especially Canyonlands, offer just that in winter sunshine, which they would not in the bustle of the baking summer heat. But be warned, fill your petrol tank – and take plenty of spare water. And, unlike myself, let someone know where you are going. First, I was going back to Arches, where Abbey had been the park ranger 50 years before.
When Abbey was warden here, as already noted, there was no paved road. Now one goes almost 15 miles from the park entrance to the Devil’s Garden trailhead, passing 100-foot-high eroded sandstone formations at Courthouse Towers and elsewhere. Arches is accessible, and busy in summer, although only four cars were at the trailhead in February. The Devil’s Garden hike loses nothing on a second visit, as I found. The round trip, taking in all the loops, and returning by the primitive trail, gives a walk of eight miles, and adding Delicate Arch makes a further four. There are 2000 arches in the park, and this walk will enable you to see some of the best of them, including Landscape Arch, the gravity-defying arc over 300-ft long, and thin as a rake. This is reached about a mile from the trailhead, which continues past the window on the desert given by Partition Arch (on a side loop) and reaches Double Arch and the trail end at the Dark Angel monolith, with views north over the Colorado plateau.
On return at Double Arch there is a sign towards a ‘primitive trail’ through Fin Canyon, with grave warnings attendant. In actual fact this is an easy, well marked trail, which would require navigational genius to lose, and which at Black Arch gives one of the highlights of the trek, and takes you back in a loop to Landscape Arch, and should not be missed. As well as sticking religiously to marked trails, American walkers I met were slow, and you will easily knock a third off their guidebook times. On the return route take the side road to the Delicate Arch (of Indiana Jones fame), which goes past the ruins of a squatter’s cabin c1880 (grandly named the Wolfe Ranch) and through moonscape scenery to a location of unsurpassed grandeur. Seeing the snow-capped La Sal Mountains through Delicate Arch was one of the visual highlights of my entire outdoor experience. In America words like inspirational, world-class and awesome are so over-used that they are devalued as verbal currency, since they are used to describe events and experiences that are often banal and mundane. Despite the rather philistine crowds you would meet in summer, despite the road and other associated developments, Arches is awesome, inspirational and truly a world-class experience. Clichés can occasionally be justified.
The microbrewery which lay south down Main Street from my hotel was quite quiet, the folk looking mostly like they were regulars, locals, when I ventured out that night, not the hard-drinking, hard-fighting uranium miners and prospectors of Abbey’s day, but the outdoor set, fit-looking young people who all seemed to know each other. The background music was great; folk-rock, country, jazz. I was studying the menu when the server came over for my order. I was about to order a Polygamy Ale (‘Why have one when you can have six?’ it said in an ironic reference to a former Mormon custom now statutorily illegal in Utah), when the server offered me the Night’s Special, a pitcher of their own-brewed stout, four pints for the cost of two, too good to refuse. The stout was as delicious as the nachos and tacos were bland. My resolve to not finish the pitcher fell as the level in the pitcher itself fell, and I staggered out into the starlit night, cayotes calling in the distance, listening to the strains of the country songs behind me and thinking,
‘Yes, I’ve arrived. This is My Own Personal Utah.’
A limber-up day at Arches had prepared me for the much harder terrain of Canyonlands. This really is the Marlboro Country of the once ubiquitous cigarette adverts, and if it seems familiar, it will be because many of the fifties’ Westerns were shot on location here. Arizona’s Grand Canyon may be the deepest and most famous, but the much remoter canyons gouged out by the Green and Colorado rivers as they meander through the high plateau of Utah are more than worthy rivals, up to 1500-ft deep, covering a more continuous area and more varied topographically and hence more visually tantalising. From water-eroded canyons gouged hundreds of feet below the plateau, to mazes of mesas, bluffs and gulches, to the superb eroded sandstone architecture of natural arches, the contrast is endless.
The road to the Big Spring Canyon Trailhead leaves the Moab – Monticello road and goes for 35 miles through semi-desert country where there is one habitation, a farm in an oasis amongst the slick-rock skyscrapers. The trail itself follows a confusing country of gulches, washes and bluffs, but is well marked throughout. After four miles it crosses a couple of the 4WD road tracks that have been made to allow this dubious sport to take place in the park, but in winter that irritation is generally absent. This high vantage trail gives great views to the Needles district, until it reaches the end of the trail, with, again, a rest room. A further mile takes you to the Confluence Overlook point; be prepared to be astonished by the view, its drama, its symphony of browns, greens and reds framing the point where the Green River meets its bigger sister, the Colorado.
The first white man to see the Confluence, and descend to the river (though he had only one arm, having lost the other in the Civil War) was John Wesley Powell in 1875, who described ‘a wilderness of rocks and deep gorges where the rivers are lost below cliffs, and towers, and pinnacles and strangely carved forms in every direction … ’. From their junction the rivers flow south-west to what must be one of the world’s greatest environmental and ecological disasters of the last century – Lake Powell. Powell, a man of sympathy for Indian culture and the South-Western environment, would have undoubtedly disapproved of the dam which created this artificial lake, and of the taking of his name in vain upon it.
This scheme blocked the Colorado River for electricity generation; further downriver was built the equally destructive Lake Mead reservoir for no other purpose than to divide the Colorado River’s water supply between Utah, Nevada and Arizona. If you are wondering what the Mexicans get, the answer is a dessicated river delta – so that the Las Vegas fountains can flow. The Glen Canyon dam is silting up and water evaporation loss is huge. In addition Glen Canyon, one of the wonders of the natural world was lost forever. One of the most poignant chapters in Abbey’s Desert Solitaire describes a boat journey down the Colorado to Glen Canyon just before it was drowned; ‘Down the River’ is a deeply moving piece of nature writing, with an elegiac quality. The ultimate irony was that this atrocity was carried out under the auspices of the US Bureau of Land Reclamation.
On the return to the main road from the trailhead you will see a sign for Newspaper Rock, so stop and marvel at the 2000 years of pictographs carved by the subsequent desert cultures, including the Anasazi (who disappeared about 1200AD but whose granaries are still around the canyons) and the later Ute Indians. These people showed respect for the previous vanished cultures’ hieroglyphs, and the pock marks you will see on these and other carvings are the ‘creative’ work of passing gun-happy cowboys.
The second night in Moab I decided to visit the rival microbrewery, a bit nearer the hotel – and a shorter staggering distance home afterwards. A whole new crop of beers was available here and I tried one or two in moderation; the food could have been served from a giant underground kitchen that served both microbreweries – and probably all eateries in Moab. But it filled a canyon in my stomach. It was quiet, with myself as the unattached outside observer, a situation which I like on my travels. Though, it being – as I noticed – Valentine’s Night, meeting the Lustful Moabite Woman might have been more in order than my semi-inhebriated state of celibacy. A light smirr of rain – rain! – greeted me on my exit, and I noticed a café still open on the corner, and decided to go for something wholesome and moral – like a hot chocolate – before bedding down. The place was jam-packed and lots of noise and music was coming from it. When I got to the window I realised that it wasn’t a Valentine’s Party as I’d thought at first, but – rather belatedly – A Burns Supper Night, just about to start. Rabbie Burns in Moab! I am sure Cactus Ed would have approved. This was too good to miss. I entered.
In a space comfortable for 20 were double that number of people. I paid my entry fee and was asked by the woman at the door, ‘Whereyafrom? Scotland! Wow, that’s where Burns came from, wasn’t it. Hey, we gotta Scotsman over here!’ – and turning back to me, ‘You can explain what all this is about.’ She was as bemused by the event as were, I realised, most of the participants, whose enthusiasm was, as I was often to find in America, not matched by any sympathetic comprehension. By the end I was wishing I had come earlier, taken over the bloody thing, and made it into an educational experience; but that wouldn’t have been very Scottish of me.
A woman recited some Burns poems which could have been in Hindustani for all the audience could get of their meaning, as she didn’t translate or even summarise their content. Then there was a break for drinks, accompanied, as was compulsory in Utah at that time, by snack food. This time, however, it was haggis, over which the words of the celebratory poem To a Haggis were read to an audience as confused as the group of Chinese students I had once seen at a Clydebank College Burns Supper. Importing ‘live’ haggis to the USA is illegal as it contravenes lots of food and drug regulations, so this was doubtless tinned, but tasty nonetheless. Very few of those present – liberal, cultured people – would even try this culinary object which was unknown to them, so great was their fear of anything unfamiliar.
Things subsequently improved as the singer appeared with a couple of backing instrumental soloists, and began a rendition of Burns songs which I was prepared to be horrified by, but which was actually excellent. Though still not understanding a word, at least the audience could now enjoy the music. The diction was (almost) perfect – and for an American to manage the Scots dialect is a rare feat. Maybe it was Burns’ love songs, maybe it was St Valentine working overtime, but I felt myself falling in love with the singer. In addition to my faults as a poor driver, I also have the tendency to fall hopelessly in love with anyone who flutters a pretty eye, or flashes a pretty smile, in my direction. I just felt I had to tell M. at the end of the evening how much I had enjoyed her singing, and especially her command of the guttural Scots pronunciation in Burns’ lyrics, and her ability to roll the Scottish R. She was possibly used to hopeless admirers, and with a pleasant smile, and a fixed stare, said, “Yes, I work hard on rolling my R’s. I get complimented on that a lot.’ Taking that as an indication that M., like so many before, had failed to realise my unique qualities and be impresssed, I slunk home to the hotel, clutching copies of her CDs, to dream hopeless dreams of unrequited love. Next day I got back to what I was good at.
Upheaval Dome is a huge crater a mile wide and 1000-ft deep, about whose origins geologists still debate; its powerful visual appeal is however, undebated. North of Moab one turns west towards the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands National Park, which again lies at the end of an uninhabited 30 miles at the Crater View Trailhead. The Syncline Loop is a nine-mile circuit through canyons encircling the dome. This can be extended by either a short walk of half-a-mile from the trailhead to view the dome itself, or much more interestingly by adding a three-mile round trip up a canyon halfway round the loop, where the crater’s majesty can be viewed without the awareness of barbecue pits, picnic tables and the ubiquitous loos just behind you. The trip can be done in either direction, and involves a 1500-ft drop, and then a climb back up whichever route is chosen. (Climbing down, then up, is common in desert hiking.)
I went north (right) at the trailhead and followed a dry gulch through scrub forest to a dramatic descent between gorgeous red slickrock walls covered in black streaks called ‘desert varnish’ (the combination of rock moisture and airborne organic materials) and soon was in a canyon so deep the sun clearly did not reach it in February, as there was crisp snow on the trail. There followed a scrambling descent with a section of fixed rope into the dusty Syncline valley, where the snow melt created a trickle of a stream; (there is giardia here, a water-borne parasite that attacks the gastro-intestinal system, so avoid the water, and carry your own.). This is the halfway stage and as usual there are signposts for reassurance, including one towards the crater rim, 1.5 miles and 300 ft of a rise away. It is not worth coming all this way and not going to see the huge hole with a confused mass of rocks inside, which might be the result of a meteorite collision 60 million years ago.
Retracing steps to the main trail, it continues easily along dry river beds (in summer flash floods can be a problem), and then begins climbing again. About a mile from the end of the trail there is a jumble of boulders, which would usually prove no obstacle. I pondered the consequences of a fall from their snowy icy tops, and opted for an exit from the canyon to a high skyline slickrock ridge, which map and compass told me would take me back to my starting point. Occasional cairns reassuringly showed me others had come this way too. Neither on this walk, nor that to the Confluence Overlook, did I see a single soul.
The next day I did my last big hike in Canyonlands, a ten-mile loop called Murphy’s Trail, named after the rancher who built it about a century ago to take cattle in and out to the sparse grazing. This activity has thankfully declined, though not ended, to be replaced by other threats to the cryptobiotic crust on the desert, such as all-terrain vehicle sports. This layer holds in moisture, prevents erosion and allows flora and fauna to flourish, and, once broken, takes decades to re-form. Again it was a long drive to the trailhead, 50 miles from Moab, the last 30 of which were totally uninhabited. The walk started off downhill, over 1300 ft of it on a man-made trail with some of the bridging planks still there – nothing disappears in the desert, it just slowly dessicates. Once at the bottom it meanders along the Murphy Hogback which gives you fine views across towards mesas and pinnacles of which the famous Candlestick Tower is the best. On this part of the route the old cowboy camps with barbed wire, corrals and shelters can be seen.
The turning point comes at Murphy Camp where you come to what appears to me an abomination. A picnic site with barbecue places and a toilet – which stank. Americans appear terrified of shitting or even peeing outside, preferring to congregate their waste toxically thus. What was worse was that at this point the walking trail joined a 4WD trail for a couple of miles before heading back to the trailhead by Murphy’s Wash. Not only walkers and mountain bikers, but 4WD vehicles have general rights of off-road access in Canyonlands and other parks. Even supposing they kept to the dirt-track roads (some dating from the uranium boom times) this would destroy any sense of wilderness. But looking at the tracks in the desert which go everywhere shows that the drivers do not stick to the dirt roads. This – and the arrival of a convoy of 4WD vehicles announced by clouds of dust – rather spoiled the pleasures of my return route to the trailhead. Such was the kind of access Abbey was against in the National Parks, unlimited car access, arguing, ‘Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs – anything but keep the automobiles out.’ It is just possible, however, that the tide is finally turning in this battle against the car in the parks.
This had been the hottest day. I had taken the usual half-gallon of water and had used it by the time I came back out to my car. The sun beat down on my back as I made my way back up the trail, slowly and increasingly feeling the dehydration. I made the car, feeling that maybe I had rushed the walk, taking four hours against the guidebook’s six – rushing in the desert isn’t a good idea. And it was a 50-mile drive before I could get a drink. I think I rushed that too. After a quick bite to eat I crashed out in the hotel room, tired from the day, and the long drive. I switched on the TV to see what was available. There were well over 100 channels, but not one had anything worth watching, it seemed. Eventually I found one programme on an evangelical channel, which was casting doubt on the US moon landings. It was such a marvellous example of circular logic and paranoia that I watched it to the end. I was then asked to send money to help in God’s work. I switched off and went to sleep.
My time in Moab was over. It had been a great success, confirming my resolution from two years before to come back here, and I knew I would be here again. Now there remained only the drive home, another pleasure. I am a man who dislikes driving – except in America, or at least in the South-Western States outside the big cities. The roads are wide and straight, you just point the car and off you go with Americana on the CD player. The drivers are almost universally polite, and they drive at a fairly middling speed. And, in this part of the world, there are not very many of them, so you can at times drive 100 miles and not see another car. I followed the less direct route back to Salt Lake City that I had taken with Burt and Lindy two years before, thinking I would stop at Mom’s in Salina again for lunch. One day the world will discover Salina, but it hadn’t then – and still had not on my most recent visit in 2011.
Mom’s was as it was on my previous trip. Mom was there as were an array of waitresses who could well have been her daughters. The décor was still original 1950s, and the menu the same. The local clientele that I had encountered last time, were still the only customers. If you avoided the gunk-covered salads, the coffee was good as were the burgers. In fact I was realising that burgers in this part of the world were often the best, and the safest, gastronomic bet. I decided to take a stroll after lunch to stretch my car-stiffened legs. You can do Salina in 10 minutes maximum and I was headed back to my car when I found myself passing a barber’s shop. Its crude adobe front had, in cruder hand-painted letters, ‘Hatch’s Barber Shop’ etched on a sign. I peered into the interior and saw someone who looked like a faded version of KFC’s Colonel Saunders. The shop was empty, I was needing a haircut, so I went in.
‘Well, hello,’ Hatch offered, ‘Whereyafrom? Scotland? We don’t get a lot of customers from Scotland here. There was a guy a few years ago, an engineer he was, came to work on the machinery at the mine way over yonder. He came in for a haircut. Can’t remember his name. You might know him?’
I assured Hatch that I knew no other Scot who had told me he had ever been to Salina; I would definitely have remembered had that been the case. I looked around at the flaked paint on the walls, the tattered linoleum on the floor, and the ubiquitous newspaper adverts from the 1950s – originals, not reproductions – for haircuts (crew cuts, DA’s), along with faded photographs of the same vintage. The pride of the place was the barber’s chair, it was a chrome and leather throne, and into it I was deposited. Hatch was getting on – his hands shook a little – but he was a thorough professional. From the disinfection of his barber’s tools, to the almost manicuring of my head hair by hair, to the applied pomade afterwards (which I normally refuse, but felt was appropriate this time), the whole affair took almost an hour. For that he charged me $8, and was part-pleased, part-embarrassed when I gave him $10.
Hatch chatted about himself during that hour. (Americans, once they have asked ‘whereyafrom’ don’t tend to ask any more, instead just tell you about themselves.) And lulled into a trance on the barber’s chair, I was content to listen, with only the occasional interjection. He had been in the air force during World War II, but ground-based in Hawaii, and set up as a barber here in Salina afterwards; this allowed me to work out that he was at least 75 years old. He took two weeks holiday every year, and used that time to visit the other states of the USA; with his recent trip to Alaska, he had now visited all of them. Then he announced that he had never visited a foreign country. I suggested that he must have gone through Canada to get to Alaska, but there were no flies on Hatch, even if there were on the old-style flypapers hanging in corners of his shop.
‘I flew. I drove to all the rest, ’cept of course Hawaii, but I flew to Alaska. I think if I ever retire, I might go to Mexico, but then again you hear such stories about there with the violence and everything, and anything you can get in Mexico I guess you can get in the US.’
As I left I doubted if Hatch would get to Mexico, or ever even retire: more likely he would die in his shop, possibly in the middle of a haircut. And as I drove back to the airport I thought Moab was fun, but Salina was boondocks America. I not only felt that I’d see Arches again, but also that I’d meet Mom and Hatch as well – though, alas, probably not M., the Burns singer. (All three expectations came true.) Leaving the desert behind after Salina, I gradually dropped into fertile, irrigated Mormon farming country, neat and well-ordered, until that was consumed by the Salt Lake conurbation, where the airport waited, and – next day – home. As I said, I did see Hatch again. On three more occasions I routed my journey past Salina for one of his haircuts, and on no occasion did he remember me from the previous time. Maybe he was just getting old and forgetful, but I think having a Scotsman in Salina for a haircut must be a pretty unusual experience, and it occurred to me that, over there, out of sight is out of mind.
But out of sight of southern Utah is never out of mind for me.