At day’s end, I hike back toward camp, down the red clay of Hole-in-the-Rock Road. Another storm rolls off the Straight Cliffs which loom in the west, taking up half the sky. Lightning strikes to the south along a flat expanse of rangeland dotted with sage. I climb down to a low spot. Black veils drip with mammatus clouds overhead. A barrel of thunder. Once the darkest clouds pass, I get back on the road and hike toward camp.
On one side of the road, the sun returns to the summit of Navajo Mountain. On the other side, Fifty Mile Mountain steps up in four tiers. The first stair, the Straight Cliffs, parallel Fifty Mile Mountain for the whole 57 miles of Hole-in-the-Rock Road. An unbroken wall when viewed from the east, Fifty Mile Mountain is known as the Kaiparowits Plateau when seen from the west. It’s the heart of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, nearly 3,000 square miles in extent.
Fingers of white fog crawl over the cliff tops, darned with claws. Above them, gleaming thunderclouds, like white light, let in shafts of sun. Sleet stabs my cheek. Windows of light, the clerestory of a cathedral, leak fallstreaks through the storm’s ceiling.
Amid all the starkness and storm, between old drops of rain driven like shrapnel by gales, beneath the ferocity and darkness, a gentle yet brilliant light pours out.
And I wonder what I’m supposed to do with my life. For years, I’d been asking that question, as if the answer would rain down on me in wings of light and rest itself on my shoulders, bestowed like knighthood through the sword’s blade. When all the while, the answer is given, yet only in the moment that passes like sun shafts before my eyes just now, and never any further. Never guaranteed into some future in which I’ll know my path until my dying day.
The sun settled in a plane even with my eyes, sinking behind the immense plateau. The jagged rim of Fifty Mile snagged and smeared the clouds streaking across the sky. The world was in my mind, always. The cold, fiery beauty of a world in storm; a blazing, fatal ecstasy. Painted with the light in which every made thing is brushed and seen, and yet which shines from within all things. Who made the thing seen? God, or my eye?
Off my other shoulder, near the base of Navajo Mountain, the sun angled below the clefts of cloud, and its lowering light dodged the intervening buttes and mesas of Glen Canyon, roving in the distance between the southeastern end of Kaiparowits Plateau, Dougi Butte and Nasja Mesa, where it set Cha Butte on fire. The sunlight made it through the graveyard of formations and burnished only the red and ivory sandstone, while the summit of Navajo Mountain fell back in shadow. I couldn’t escape the raw beauty.
The miracle of now is that it always was and ever will be. Enfolding this feared, fearing world of pain and death, what truly embraces it is an infinity of moments. This eternity, discovered only in the instant, is somehow, for some inexplicable and miraculous reason which defies all reason and the laws of probability, benign. And it accepts me even more in my smallness and blindness and ignorance than in my victories. The feeling that I’m loved intrudes like water into the sinking vessel that I am, and in my drowning, floats me.
My life’s work is just to acknowledge this, and then, to accept it.
Fifty Mile Mountain and the Straight Cliffs stepped below it wander, in the foreshortened perspective drawn by the escarpment, until the horizon swallows them. The cliffs wander out and step back, until they winnow down to a faint blue line. Like sea cliffs, like a front of storms, becoming smaller, shorter, terracing in, meandering out, until they dissolve into the earth.
To get to Hole-in-the-Rock Road: The way is easy. As you head into or out of the town of Escalante along Highway 12, take the well-signed Hole-in-the-Rock Road which comes in on the south of the highway about 5 miles east of town. Do not confuse this site with the tourist trap of the same name along Highway 191 just south of Moab.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s short story collection, Canyon Calls, was published by Zumaya Publications in 2009. You can purchase is at his other website, https://canyoncallsthebook.com or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase The Dirt through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including his novels, The Crippy and The Mind Altar are available through this websites, https://justmikejust.com or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Five of his short stories have been published:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within
You Get the Two has been published by Hellbound Books and is available in print, eBook, kindle or audio format at Kids are Hell!- Anthology (hellboundbookspublishing.com)