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A Skeptic's Pilgrimage to Powell

by Ken Wright

"Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded. "

- Yogi Berra

I AM UNMOVED.

Oh, it was a generous gesture, a friend offering to take me out onto Lake Powell for a day. She knew my disparaging feelings on this body of water, despite my otherwise water-loving ways, so she challenged me to come see what Glen Canyon had become after being flooded, rather than continually moaning over what it had once been.

So that's how I got here, on this lovely and cold wintery day, sitting on this spit of sand pushed out into the lakewater by the wide wash to my right. And around me is what my friend had promised: The still-remaining sandstone bluffs and walls and mounds and endlessly diverging canyons of the greater Glen Canyon area above waterline. And it was, as so excites my friend, remarkably easy to reach this place, which at one time would've taken a week or weeks of floating and walking to access.

But I am unmoved.

Still, I want to honor my friend's gift of this day, so I sit here and take in the redrock views. I endeavor to appreciate being here, despite the barrier of my bitter biases. I remind myself that I am deeper than I have ever been, geographically speaking, into the heart of my personal heartland, the Colorado Plateau.

And it has been, as she had assured me it would be, lovely and dramatic. Our 80-mile, several-hour boat ride out here from the marina in Page, Ariz., was as curious as it was glorious, surreal as it was real. We cruised wide expanses of open water encircled by low bluffs and tall buttes. We swept across the hem of the deeply crevassed bedrock skirt of Navajo Mountain. We shot across near the top of the Crossing of the Fathers, and flew past the steep notch of the hand-chiseled Mormon Trail. We floated over the submerged bedrock ballroom of The Cathedral in the Desert, and bobbed up to once-inaccessible ancient pueblo remains.

Yet even here, even among these mythic and powerful landmarks, I just ain't feeling that redrock love. And it's not because of where I am, but because of how I got here. It's because of what getting here that way says: That no matter how much leftover prettiness there is here above Lake Powell, this is what Glen Canyon and hundreds of miles of its side canyons have become: paved.

I don't mean that as mere metaphor or analogy. Yes, the pavement in this case is water, but that doesn't change the essential fact: What Glen Canyon has become is a major highway system piercing what had not very long ago been some of the most remote, yet accessible, wild country in the continental U.S. Now it is just another big road for those who can afford the big machines now required to journey here. Yet another weekend getaway for the bettering of the motorized recreation industry, and its remotest treasures cheapened into so many more mere roadside attractions. (On this day we traveled in a $50,000, 360 h.p., 18-foot powerboat ? which was the smallest craft we saw all day. More common were houseboats by the dozens, even here in the "off season," many pulling behind them ski boats and jet skis, like RVs hauling jeeps and motorcycles.)

I must here admit, of course, that I never actually experienced Glen Canyon before Lake Powell. I arrived in the West after that battle was lost and the invasion complete. And I will also admit, after a day out here with my friend, that I have come to appreciate and respect her affection and caring for this place, so full of meaning and pleasure for her. Even if it is Lake Powell.

But today has also shown me that regardless of either of those things, I remain unmoved.

And today has made me realize that it's not because I can't get over it, but because I don't want to get over it.

I don't want to get over it, because somebody must remember. Somebody must remember not just what was, but why what's still left elsewhere should stay wild and remote. Because when everything becomes like everything else, when everything is paved and accessed and marketed, we lose options of how to live, how to be, of where to be.

And somebody must remember what could be again: Remote, wild, mythic, sacred spaces for those willing to make - and not just those who can afford - the journey required to get there.

Places to be moved by, and not just move around in.