Our final port-of-call in Utah was Zion National Park, a hilly, green oasis in the middle of the waterless desert, and also the place where they filmed 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid', if that helps you to picture it. We hiked alongside the rushing Virgin River, skimmed stones, and stood (and got soaked) underneath 'Weeping Rock', a big round, you guessed it, rock out of which trickle big droplets of water at a steady but relentless pace. Apparently it takes over 1200 years for each droplet to percolate down through the rock from the top to the bottom. Think on that. So the water that drenched us entered the rock in 809 AD, the year when Emperor Saga succeeded Emperor Heizei as emperor of Japan, as I hardly need to remind you. I may or may not have consulted Wikipedia to find that illuminating nugget of information.
Apparently Zion National Park is so named because the Mormons, trekking wearily across the desert in search of their promised land, thought they had found it when they reached this place. Brigham Young, one of the leaders, declared upon his arrival that, although he agreed it was very nice, it was 'not Zion'. The name 'not Zion' stuck and, over time, the 'not' part fell by the wayside. It's now one of the oldest and most popular national parks in the country, with over three million visitors per year. That weight of numbers has apparently encouraged them to pay lip service to eco-friendliness, as in a message on the hand-towel dispensers in the restroom they had advised us to use the electric dryers. Next to the message someone had scrawled, with admirable succinctness, 'why don't you just not put this here?'. Fair point, I think.
On Saturday we drove a hell of a long way back to Los Angeles; it was the first time in the whole nine-week
odyssey that we had returned to any given place, and it felt a little weird. Tony and Erica once again were generous enough to put us up, and put up with us, as we recuperated before flying back to Boston on Monday. It would be going too far to describe it as a culture shock, but Boston really is quite different from the West Coast. There are still Starbucks' and McDonalds', of course, but then they exist in Tokyo, too. Coming back to the East has underlined for me the astonishing diversity of this nation.
America is a country the size of a continent (if you ignore Canada, which most people seem to), and it is geographically, topographically and climatically extremely varied. Landscapes exert a tremendous pull on the people who live in them, so it is no surprise that the people of the coasts, the people of the mountains, the people of the humid South, the people of the desert, and the people of the stultifying, waving-corn flatness of Middle America should be so utterly different in so many ways. On top of that, there are pockets of disparity so drastic that they are practically nations in their own right, like the Mormons and the Navajo Nation, and of course, huge and rapidly expanding populations of minorities. It has been said before by people vastly more qualified to talk about such matters than me, but I think it's true so I'm gonna say it anyway - America is a land of contrasts; almost anything you say about it is true, and the opposite is true too. It's extremely rich and extremely poor; it's the model of federalism but also highly regionalised; it's a place of immense hope but simultaneously full of anxiety and nihilism.
And yet, given all that, it is a much more harmonious place than one might expect. The country could comfortably envelope Europe, a continent (if you want to call it a continent) of countless, often incompatible, cultures, languages, and world-views, yet America is, to a large extent, unified. The 'American Dream', for want of a better expression, is responsible for a great deal of heartache (if 'Death of a Salesman' has taught me anything...), yet there is something to be said for it as an agent of uniformity. Everybody in this country has a shared ideal, something with which to relate to all those around them. The slightly unattractive side-effects may be introspectiveness, isolationism and, sometimes, superciliousness, but the trade-off is a pretty robust sense of national well-being; the people know what their country is about, and that has to be a positive thing, at least as far as individual happiness is concerned. There is no equivalent 'European Dream', or even 'British Dream', which perhaps explains the correspondent identity crisis in those places.
This could all be changing. One of the reasons for the aching void in the British national consciousness is surely postcolonial guilt - Britain used to be exceedingly confident in what it was and where it was going, but this jingoistic attitude died with the empire that fostered it, and was replaced by frantic soul-searching. If I might dip my toe into the murky waters of current affairs, it would seem that America could be entering a post-imperial (certainly post-Bushist) age, in which the old certainties are disappearing. Whether this will precipitate the disintegration of the American ideal, or serve to reinforce it, remains to be seen. It should be interesting.
After that thoroughly unwarranted pseudo-intellectual digression, back to the real world. So, yeah...we're going home tomorrow. It's very bizarre. There are lots of things that I'll miss about the States - the food, the friendliness of the people, the landscape, the lemonade. But it will be nice to be able to pick up a sports section without being bored to tears; nice to be able to ask for 'water' without being stared at/misunderstood/laughed at/all of the above (delete as appropriate); nice to watch programmes on TV rather than adverts.
What have been my highlights of the trip? I know you didn't ask but I'm going to tell you anyway. It's literally impossible to pick just one, so I'm going to throw a tedious, disorderly and inevitably incomplete list at you that will probably just be confusing:
hiking to the top of the waterfall in Yosemite, taking the paddlewheeler on the Mississippi, going to the baseball in LA, cycling by the Pacific, the 'Bean' in Chicago, Capitol Reef, hiking amongst the Redwoods, swimming in Lake Michigan, the Grand Canyon, having a great time doing nothing in Charleston, Universal Studios with the Vickers', the enormous buffet in Las Vegas, Guys and Dolls on Broadway, watching the breakers roll in off the Pacific in Gualala and Bandon, Slide Rock State Park with Crawfs and the gang, Point Lobos State Reserve, skimming stones in Zion, swimming in Yosemite, Monument Valley, Six Flags Magic Mountain, the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the whole train journey, eating Wendy's in front of 'Walk the Line' on our final evening with the car, Canyon de Chelly, my first swim in the Pacific, driving Highway 1
Still awake? Good. That's about all from me, and from this blog I'm afraid. I hope you've enjoyed reading it, at least more than we've enjoyed writing it, because it's been a right chore to be honest with you. I'm joking of course...but you knew that. It's time to go home. Take care y'all.
- Adam
