W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #eliotporter, #coloradoriver, #glencanyon, #utah, #wow

“Wow” seemed unequal to the landscape, an inadequate judgement or assessment — not big enough. But we all seemed to mouth that as we encountered the river and its walls. “Wow” happens when your jaw drops, you lips make an “O” and sound comes out. It is an exclamation. Primal. 

This is my report on a recent adventure, journeying down the Colorado River, rafting and camping for six days and five nights from a landing near Moab, Utah and to a take out 80 miles down river in Lake Powell. 

Finding language to describe this experience has been difficult. Words like astonishing, stupendous, epic, and seismic come to mind, but it was more and better than that.

Here is what I saw. Chaos. When I look at ART I look for the artist’s ability to bring order to the unconscious. Nature is different. There is no design. Time is infinite. The forces forming the earth’s crust are unknowable because they are so massive.  

Initially you anthropomorphize the view. You see rows of patriarchs, and then busts. I spent one evening transfixed by the seeming face of Jesus looking down on our little group.  

But that’s not it. There are rocks and rocks and rocks. And they are in crazy messed up layers and not in layers, and there are all sorts of colors.

The colors change constantly. You’re rolling through the show on both sides of the river, and nothing repeats. One afternoon I goofed on garnets — reddish-browns — but all different, an infinite spectrum of one shade. The next day it was a celebration of buff brown.  

You cannot get it into your head; it is so much to take in and attempt to process.

Then there is the in and out, convex and concave, and the sun starts to play tricks on you and your not sure what’s what. It’s as if you’re suddenly confronting every possible abstract sculpture and trying to sort through them.

We were a group of twenty civilians with six river guides or oar persons. That crew was already blissed out on the river; that’s why they come back. Something about the canyon has cleansed their souls; they were earnest and indefatigable. I’ll go back too.

We started at Meander Canyon and floated into Canyonlands NP, with Lathrop Ruin, Indian Creek, Pyramid Butte and Dead Horse Point, and the confluence of the Green River where Cataract Canyon begins, Spanish Bottom, white water at Brown Betty, Mile Long, Capsize and Big Drop Rapid. Take out at Lake Powell at Hite.

We slept under the stars on the sand banks of the river.  

I mean this short essay as an elegiac paean. To oddly paraphrase Dr. M.L. King, you go up to the mountain and look over, and it’s glorious.

WOW. Wonder of the world.  

Eliot Porter fits into the story because he made the photos that we saw that made us want to visit these wonders. He loved the canyon and the river too.

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