Zion National Park

10 July

Elevation: 5,900 ft/2,800m

Hot above the canyon; fresh in the Narrows

Zion National Park and its canyon remained suspicious to me. The photos were too grand, too colorful, too other worldly. Of course, our vistas didn’t match those perfectly composed photos, but the colors are simply glorious. The canyon walls jut up, draped in florific ochres, reaching up to the sky like they own it.

The park was crowded and I felt that the throngs of young people were carriers of all kinds of disease, including Covid. We went hiking up the Narrows, a place where the canyon curves and turns into a proper slot canyon, with the Virgin River running along its rocky bottom. Remember, these places, Zion, the Virgin River, were named by a Mormon explorer, Nephi Johnson, who made friends with the locals, the Paiute. They call the area Mukuntuweap which sounds much cooler than ‘Zion’, when you say it a few times, but it is also a bit unimaginative and inaccurate—it means ‘straight canyon.’ I wonder what the Paiute were comparing it with? In any case, there were no Paiute there today, so far as I could tell. It was dudes and dudettes punching their way through the shallow currents, most un-masked and oblivious, standing around in crowds and challenging each other to various feats.

My brother, who has gone through his own Covid hell for the last three months, was furious, telling people who walked by to wear masks and taking various routes to try to avoid the crowds. He snapped at his daughter, us, them, the world. He was right, of course, but it is also one of those Gordian knots associated with Covid: you weigh various risks and then decide to do what you want in any case. This is what these kids were doing here and, really, across the Sun Belt where Covid has spiked in recent weeks. They decided to say screw the risks and to do what they want, flaunting flimsy justifications as they pounded their chests and jumped into swirling canyon pools.

We weren’t that far off from these kids. We didn’t decide to leave the Narrows immediately, draping ourselves in masks and hand sanitizer. We worked our way up the canyon for a good five hours, trying to avoid the crowds and the noxious passers-by, but we didn’t stop what we wanted to do with our day in the glorious Zion.

Covid-19 is devastating lives around the world. It is also a mighty lesson for how to cope with diseases that we can’t’ control, do not understand, and that threaten our lives in so many ways. It is mother nature’s ways of ‘tsk-tsking’ us that we have become too self-centered, too ignorant, too selfish. We need to live with this and other diseases. This does not mean barricading ourselves in our homes and never partaking in the glories of the world. It means being more aware and respectful of the impact we have on others, of recognizing how much is enough, of thinking about the consequences of our actions, of being, dare I say, better humanitarians.