The Night Sky

14 October, 2012

Drinks Canyon

Moab, Utah

“This is Frank Zappa, and you’re listening to the best radio station in the world, because of its location: the city that God built.”

I knew it was a good station, KZMU, a public, community-sponsored, commercial-free platform, with an array of music crossing most ethnomusicological barriers, and 100 percent solar-powered. The first track I tuned into was Traffic’s Glad.   It gets hokie-level  local as well, Friday lunchtime featuring a call-in trading post, where one guy had 15 sheets of sheetrock leftover from a project, free to anyone who would carry it down from the second floor, “Bring a helper and a truck.”  Another had parts for a Toyota truck that sounded like it had been rolled in one of the extreme 4-wheel drive tracks that circumnavigate the parks, and occasionally pass through Federal territory.  Rolled like my borrowed ipad.

It was just like Frank to do a radio promo and never mention the station, or actual location.  He had a thing about commercialism.

Yesterday, warned by my well-traveled Winnebago friends that the parks would be packed through the weekend, Kaya and I decided to play low-key, muck out the truck after the first ten days on the road, engage laundry and recycling facilities, succeeding with the first, in a spotless, wifired net-laundry with a private bathroom where I could shave and brush my teeth.  As there is no shower in a Utahn park, being desert and so forth, I purchased a solar shower from the thrift store, where I had ventured to find a bag to protect the already-compromised ipad.  I was able to synch some devices and submit travelogue #4, possibly forgetting the subject, Superlative Squared, but I can’t check that here in the canyon.

As the afternoon approached Golden Hour, after reading park literature and studying the colorful maps for a while, we decided to go back into Arches, and explore our way to Devil’s Garden, a contrast to Garden of Eden near Window Arch, where we frolicked Thursday, unknowingly violating an impressive portfolio of federal statutes.  Again the landmass formations were stunningly breathtaking, though some of the tourists were aggressive, rushing their way through another expensive experience.  I wound up with some photos of Edward Abbey’s nemesis, the road-locked flotilla of Winnebagoes, and could not help but consider how the last Cheney administration put money into the National Parks, to expand parking lots.

 I also got some spectacular amateur footage and stills, still working on my technique and patience in creating panoramas.  Slowing it down, steadying the camera and moving the feet ahead of the direction of the camera have become key.  Lacking a tripod or turntable, I have been standing on the tailgate to be able to shoot continuous film 360 degrees without the truck appearing in it.  Kaya has several cameos, some quite uncanny. (Most of my moving footage features hitches where I move my feet and trip over something, such as a prickly pear.)

Kaya has proven a great traveler, providing her soothing balm and earnest eye when I get bent, befriending man and beast alike, though she prefers females, and even got to meet a beautiful white Akita, a male, 50 percent larger than she, in complete civility, if not dignity.  She was super squirrely in town this morning, as we finally sought out the elusive, anti-google recycling center, to find it closed, and settled on a watermelon and provisions for super rice, one of her favorites and a constitutional formidifier.

I dumped two bags of bottles into a utility recyle bin at a day-care center nearby and left feeling quite the criminal.  I kept the other two, which probably dated back to Indiana, purely out of shame.

So the tooth grows long, the reader weary, the rice burnt (checked it, not quite there- it takes longer at higher altitudes, though we are nowhere near as high as we were the last few days, 5600 feet at Grandview Point when the storm hit yesterday,) but the focus here, if you hadn’t noticed, was to describe the night sky.

  As Moab has strict night lighting ordinances, and is the only major outpost for a hundred miles in any direction, the sky is not only crystal clear, but the constellations may be viewed in three dimensions, defining the closer stars from those further out.  I can actually make out the Andromeda Galaxy and star with the naked eye, having forgotten binoculars. Whoever said that it gets darkest before the dawn wasn’t talking about Utah, as it begins to lighten over the ridges about four in the morning, a prime viewing hour to enjoy the meteors.

Oops! The rice is surely burnt this time.