Go back to Words & Wit pageHere's the tourist scoop on Monument Valley, that otherworldly hunk of southern Utah where all the John Ford movies and Jeep commercials were shot. It's a national park, yes, but it's a national park inside the Navajo Nation, which makes it a slightly different deal.
(Not all of Monument Valley is an official park, by the way -- some of it is just a roadside attraction. There's even a place called Valley of Gods further up the road, which has no entry fee and no tourist kiosks. It's not quite as spectacular as the official area, but it's cheaper and less crowded and you get to name attractions -- Devil's Dessert Fork, things like that.)
You may take your own vehicle into Monument Valley. The road is quite amusing, especially the first three miles, but it is passable. Because people still live in Monument Valley, you may not set off cross-country on a lovely hike. You may not picnic nor linger in undesignated areas. Since there are no instructive signs or knowledgeable rangers, you cannot learn more about the whatness or whyness or whenness of Monument Valley.
Indeed, you can't really do much of anything except park at the designated vista points and say, "My, that is a vista. Look at that vista, will ya? Vista vista vista. Uh-huh."
Also, you can buy jewelry. That's how a Navajo National Park differs from other national parks: access to jewelry.
So Tracy and I decided to just sit at one of the vistas and watch it change in the afternoon light. Occasionally we said something to each other, but mostly we just stared. Our brains were in neutral, so they tended to roll to the lowest point in the mindscape.
The thing we chose to watch is called the Totem Pole. It looks like a totem pole, only 100 feet high and made of weathered red rock. It is near another formation called Praying Hands, which looks like that devotional painting seen in finer church basements everywhere.
So we sat there. And here is what we saw: people taking photographs.
Here was the standard narrative, true in more than 50 per cent of the cases. We'd hear the car pull into the lot behind us. We'd hear the motor cut off. We'd hear two doors slam. Momentarily, two people would walk by us. One would be carrying a camera.
They would walk to the ledge in front of us. About half of them would stand on one specific rock. The person with the camera would take the picture. Then they would turn and walk back to their cars.
Two doors slam, motor on, bye-bye.
There two important variants. In one, favored by older travelers, only one person would get out of the car. The other would stay in the car, motor running. The lone lensman would snap the picture, walk back to his car, and roar off.
Then there was the video variant. A person with a video camera would sweep the impressive landscape with his appliance. He would zoom in on the totem pole and zoom back. Then he would rewind it, and he and his companion would stare into the eyepiece viewing the scene he had just shot, the scene that was available in living reality all around them.
When they saw the video images, they would smile. They would not smile at the scenery itself.
Maybe it was Plato's Cave out there among the sandstone spires. The geometrically unlikely buttes and mesas are hard to comprehend; the blasted landscape can be overwhelming to the faint of heart or to the overly imaginative. It was in its sunset splendor beyond words, and the travelers needed a way to take it down a few orders of magnitude.
They needed the shadows on the cave wall and not the fire itself; they needed the world through a viewfinder and not the world laid bare; they needed a movie of the place they had seen in the movies.
But it was strange to sit there in the gathering twilight, watching people concentrate on the capture rather than on the butterfly.
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