If I had just three minutes
I'd tell you about Escalante, Utah
This past March, I stayed for a few days in Escalante, Utah. I wrote this in honor of my time there — which I had won through a silent auction as part of Elk River Writers’ Workshop. My goal here was to sum up the experience — in three minutes or fewer — to read at Elk River this summer. Last summer my reading went way beyond the limit, so in this instance, form truly follows function. I’m straying from my usual preference for the essay in order to give myself (and my listeners!) a time constraint.
Escalante Grand Staircase, March 16th, 2025
If I had just three minutes to tell you about Escalante, Utah,
I’d distill my thoughts
down to just a few things.
the Zebra Trail, for example,
off a washboarded BLM road,
ten visitors that day including us.
The stone is striated like,
well,
a zebra.
But, instead, I saw
layers of petit fours,
dispatched to our
childhood home from my grandparents,
and now into my own.
even as adults, we savor them for weeks,
taking turns who chooses
which pattern to devour.
These rocks, though, are giant!
Grand fours? Big ovens?
But I cringe at all that
anthropomorphism,
naming things
after other
things we know.
Why not just wonder
about the forces
and movement
that made these rocks,
striated like petits fours
or zebras?
Are our minds that small
to do anything else
with all this wonder?
If so, instead of just
staring in slack-jawed awe
mouth agape,
fingers pointing upward
at this creation,
I’ll think ahead
to December,
when Swiss Colony
sends their wares
to our stoop,
and we alternate,
each night,
picking which patterns
to devour.
In three minutes,
an age.
Thoroughly enjoyed this!
Extraordinary!!