Between Urban and Wild: Reflections from Colorado

Love Letter to a Sewage Lagoon

47 Love Letter to a Sewage Lagoon Folded mountains are the topography of home. To my eyes, the horizon is properly serrated by peaks, and the dominant background color is the black-green hue of conifer trees. The scents of pine and spruce, sharp as their needles, are comforting , as is the soft rustle of wind through their branches. Shadowed creek beds, wildflowers crouched in the understory , the chatter of birds hidden in crisscrossing branches: such details are so familiar that I sometimes have to remind myself to notice them. During childhood camping trips, I slept under tarps in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, near lakes or rivers where Dad led the family on his time off. In the mid1970s , when my parents were able to afford a boat, we began to also camp on the rocky shores of Navajo Lake, a nearby reservoir. We ate catfish and crappie rather than trout, the ground was sun-blasted and rocky rather than shaded and padded with duff, and the sky when I stretched out in my sleeping bag was a broad expanse of stars unfringed by pine love letter to a sewage lagoon 48 boughs. Even so, the landscape was pretty familiar, since Navajo was barely an hour’s drive south of where we lived. Lake Powell was another matter entirely. Powell was a half-day drive and another world away. I remember jouncing over the dirt roads that accessed Hall’s Crossing on those first trips into Utah, the bow of the boat jiggling in the dust out the rear window of the camper shell. My brothers and I rode in the back of the pickup, reclining on sleeping bags and camping mattresses amid the rattle of chuck boxes, ice chests, cases of beer, fishing gear, and cans of pop. Through the side windows, the view shifted from forested mountainsides to sandy flats flecked with piñon and cut by dry washes , then finally to a landscape dominated by sandstone. A sea of rock spread around us, rising and falling in rounded waves. Cliffs rose up like islands, or the sides of huge ships. We watched hoodoos, mushrooms, domes, cones, cracks, buttes, and notches roll past the windows, all composed of bare sandstone, pink and tan. The black streaks of desert varnish staining sheer rock faces were a visual echo of the streamers of virga trailing from distant thunderheads. Amphitheaters arched across rock faces like eyebrows. Green tufts of cottonwood gleamed incongruously in canyon bottoms . Holes opened on cliff faces, sometimes grouped in rows like choruses of singing mouths. We arrived at the boat ramp at Hall’s Crossing, where a flat expanse of blue-green lake stretched before us: the ageold miracle of water in the desert writ large. When the boat sliced beyond the broad bay on which the marina was situated , we entered a canyon where walls of solid rock rose straight up from the water’s surface. There were no trees, no distant vistas, nothing but planes of liquid and stone intersecting at sharp angles. As we rounded each curve in the watercourse, the walls closed behind us and a new segment love letter to a sewage lagoon 49 of the canyon opened: the long narrow lake revealed itself like a scroll. Aside from the twin white lines of distant vapor trails and the occasional passing boat, it seemed that the vessel I was riding in was the only manufactured thing in a world otherwise composed simply of water, sky, and rock. In the impressionable brain of my preadolescent years, the contours of this landscape pressed in deep. In the mountains , with their fur of evergreens, I had always felt soothed and at home. But the desert’s undisguised geography was a new kind of terrain, a place where the land was not hidden by a pelt of grass and trees and was flayed, even, of all but occasional patches of soil skin. In its strangeness, the desert called attention to fundamental details about my surroundings : the smell of water, the blare of sun against my skin. The whispers and chatters of foliage were absent. Hiking across slickrock, I left no tracks. In the canyons or from the bottom of a split of stone, the sky was a ribbon instead of a dome. Climbing out of those rock notches sent the horizon into a dizzying retreat, as the press of rock around me was abruptly replaced by vastness. I don’t think there’s...