Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Zion was incredibly beautiful. Whereas at the Grand Canyon you are on the top looking
down, at Zion you are at the bottom looking up. It is just a long, lush canyon, dense with
cottonwood trees along the valley floor, hemmed in by towering copper-colored walls of
rock-the sort of dark, forbidding valley you would expect to pass through in a hunt for the
lost city of gold. Here and there long, thin waterfalls emerged from the rock face and fell
a thousand feet or more down to the valley, where the water collected in pools or tumbled
onward into the swirling Virgin River. At the far end of the valley the high walls squeezed
together until they were only yards apart. In the damp shade, plants grew out of cracks in
the rock, giving the whole the appearance of hanging gardens. It was very picturesque and
exotic.
The sheer walls on either side looked as if they might rain boulders at any moment-and in-
deed they sometimes do. Halfway along the path the little river was suddenly littered with
rocks,someofthemthesizeofhouses.AsignsaidthatonJuly16,1981,morethan15,000
tons of rock fell i,ooo feet into the river here, but it didn't say whether there were any
people squashed beneath them. I daresay there were. Even now in April there were scores
of people all along the path; in July there must have been hundreds. At least a couple of
them must have got caught. When the rocks came tumbling down, there would be no place
to run.
I was standing there reflecting on this melancholy thought when I became aware of a
vaguely irritating whirring noise beside me. It was a man with a camcorder, taking footage
of the rocks. It was one of the early, primitive models, so he had all kinds of power packs
and auxiliary paraphernalia strapped to his body, and the camera itself was enormous. It
mustbelikegoingonvacationwithyourvacuumcleaner.Anyway,itservedhimright.My
first rule of consumerism is never buy anything you can't make your children carry. The
man looked exhausted, but of course having spent a ridiculously inflated sum to buy the
camera he was now determined to film everything that passed before his eyes, even at the
risk of acquiring a hernia (and when that happened he would of course get his wife to film
the operation).
Icanneverunderstandthesepeoplewhorushtobuynewgadgets;surelytheymustseethat
theyaregoingtolooklikeidiotsinaboutayearwhenthemanufacturerscomeupwithtiny
lightweight versions of the same thing at half the price. Like the people who paid $200 for
the first pocket calculators and then a few months later they were being given away at gas
stations. Or the people who bought the first color televisions.
One of our neighbors, Mr. Sheitelbaum, bought a color TV in 1958 when there were only
about two color programs a month. We used to peek through his window when we knew
