Zion’s gleaming yellow cottonwoods on Veterans Day: Light of unspeakable richness

“Never shall I forget my baptism in the font. It happened in January, a resurrection day for many a plant and for me I suddenly…. overflowed with light…Light of unspeakable richness was brooding the flowers. Truly, said I, is California the Golden State—in metallic gold, in sun gold, and in plant gold. The sunshine for a whole summer seemed condensed into the chambers of that one glowing day. Every trace of dimness has been washed from the sky, the mountains were dusted and wiped clean with clouds. To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual powers and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends…You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a campfire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.” – John Muir, “Twenty Hill Hollow in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf,” 1916.

A new measure of light and force

Zion, Utah — Watch the gleaming, quaking aspens and their orange glow leaves perk you up. Stunning cottonwoods are nearby with blinding sunshine gold leaves. You feel so stunned by the onslaught of bright yellows; it confuses you for a while.

 Which tree should I take a photo of? Then, as you walk, the cottonwoods are framed by a backdrop of red iron oxide mountains, quite majestic – you wonder how were these sculpted? Who made it possible? Whose mighty force was it? The winds? The waters? God?

By the river walk, the gentle murmurs of the river water and the sunlight backlighting the cottonwoods and aspens make you gasp for air. You walk and the energies imparted by these yellow cottonwoods uplift your spirit. Even more so as you see the cyclists, the runners and trail walkers pass you by, until nature’s sculpted tree bark looks like kissing large owls.

On the opposite side, you see a man doing his morning walk by the river. There are no birds to be heard in this trail, just the gentle murmur of the river water sounds. Perhaps they are sleeping or hibernating somewhere?

Meanwhile, you hear the sounds of the children so excited from finishing the trails and loudly say: “Dad, imagine we saw 9 deer. Nine, Dad!” It was a volume of excitement one can hear many yards down as the canyons echo the sounds.

But mind you, this Virgin River, though looking mild, tiny and gentle, belies its strong carving force of the canyons. “Virgin River has been at work, cutting the canyons, which took millions of years. Tons of rocks have slid over the centuries. Even as recently as 1995 folks were stranded in Zion Lodge, and another close call in 2010, when its Virgin River waters rose twenty times its current volumes, with flash floods eroding the highway. Over the centuries, the Virgin Water cut through seven tons of sedimentary rock, including two thousand feet of solid sandstone,” according to the audio tour of Zion Shuttle Bus, Nov. 9, 2018 and “it still does its work of canyon cutting, and it carries away a million tons of sediments a year, mostly during flash floods as the waters move boulders and tall trees.”

By the Zion Gorge, where you are warned of miles and miles of crosswinds, I felt in awe of the towering beige colored canyons surrounding both sides of the highways, towering to heights of skyscrapers. How did God create this magnificence?

After a seven-hour drive from Los Angeles to Hurricane, 30 miles outside of Zion National Park, we found a campsite with a frontal lake view. Bingo, I told myself, I feel rich to be camping with a frontal view of the lake.

The blue waters were calm and the area hosts a ramp for boating. About mid-afternoon, the winds started howling. We figure it would stop but the 23 mph winds got even stronger and persisted until 3 a.m, rocking our van, like a crib. Not just the wind force, but also the sounds remind you of a greater force: “The Holy Spirit is around.” In doing so, I relaxed to a new sense of calm to sleep through the night, but it was too cold.

A new measure of cold

Have you tried making coffee in the evening and had leftovers? The next morning, about to sip,  you could not, as it has been transformed into brown crystals. 

“This is a new measure of cold,” Enrique (my husband) said, who likes to chase after the aspens and cottonwoods’ fall colors each year, despite the freezing conditions.

This cold weather makes for challenging trips to the bathroom, and you end up sprinting back to the sleeping bag to warm up your frigid toes.  You start imagining, “Who was that who came in, but did not make any peeing sounds, yet flushed the toilet and closed the door?” Was it a ghost or did that person really was quiet?

On the way back to the van, I asked permission to pass by the tree, after, there were no more strange happenings. In rushing to climb back into the sleeping bag, my husband offers his right hand to hold my left and the new cold has unexpectedly become new warmth. Hubby really loves the wild and his good-natured self readily comes out.

The new cold brings more incentives, as cooking a hefty breakfast: a well-seared rib eye with broccolini, fresh pineapples and papaya, eggs, toasted sourdough with carrots/pear/green apple/ginger juice.  That hefty brunch is equal to many energy bars that no trail mixes were needed, just water for the river walk.

After a mile of walking,  surrounded by shimmering bright yellow cottonwoods, you re-live what John Muir refers to “you bathe in the spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming in a campfire.”

But we do have a real campfire, proactively set up by Enrique ahead of our needs in the evening. They appear as if towering pancakes, that slowly burn for hours until it is time to call it a night. By 8 p.m., lights are out, until nature calls.

As you make another bathroom break, you pause and look up. At first, the sky has a litter of stars but, at dawn, a gleaming constellation of stars, you wish you could identify each one that you see. The next day, Stan Monitz’s Instagram post identifies it as the Andromeda Galaxy and a shooting star.

Oh my, God’s abundant grace is magnificently on display, the dippers are readily recognizable, and you gaze some more, even as you shiver in the cold.

Patriotism to protect future generations

Ansel Adams reflected on: “The American Pioneer approached the Natural Scene in a very different way than we must now. The land and its provisions were seemingly inexhaustible. The problems of existence were more severe. The Pioneer undoubtedly cherished his farm, his ranch and his range – representing something almost infinite in extent and bounty —young, vibrant, ever enduring. Now, as the blights of over-population, over-exploitation and over-mechanization encroach from all directions, we come to love our land as we would love someone very near and dear who may soon depart, leaving naught but the recollection of a beauty which we might have protected and perpetrated. We must realize — and with desperate conviction –that it is truly later than we think,” in a charter day address at UC Santa Cruz, 1965.

 Veterans Day came and we head back to Los Angeles driving down Highway 15, a stretch named Veterans Memorial Highway, in Utah and Arizona, going to California.

I recall the sacrifices made by Eleazar, my father, an orphan of two veterans, his mother (Josefa Aquino Abarquez) and his father (Maximo Abarquez) and his three brothers (Angel, Constancio and Norberto) all Philippine Soldiers, who all died after they were killed by Japanese soldiers and while defending freedom and democracy in the Philippines, during the Japanese Imperial Army Invasion of the Philippines, during World War II.

I did not learn of his sacrifices until he died in 2000. At the time of his passing, I encouraged my mother to write about the love story of my dad and her to assuage her grief.  After the tragic losses of his family, my father persevered through law school after which he served as a government employee, enforcing the labor codes of the Republic of the Philippines. He taught me to be more humane, to be generous and to be kind, especially to the poor.

I also reflect on the sacrifices of Enrique, Sr. (Enrique’s father), who survived the Bataan Death March, walked over 200 miles (a distance from LA to San Diego) day and night, counting all the unburied dead along his path. He negotiated with his captors and appealed to their human needs to eat, offering himself and his team of soldiers to cook for them, as he claimed that they, the Japanese soldiers would need strength to do their tasks. He and his team of soldiers were spared as a result. He went to law school, each day, walking miles and miles. He became a country lawyer, and sometimes his fees were paid in the form of eggs, chickens, pigs, and even milking cows, which Enrique, Jr. learned to milk, as the eldest in the family.

A new measure of art in the canyons

I still remember the violin music that Enrique Jr. played, Yesterday a familiar Beatles tune, and Ang Bayan Ko. He kept fiddling that night while the surrounding trees in Mount Rainier gave such an echo, a resonance that beats an amphitheater in the national park.

 I was washing my hands several feet away and I could hear the sounds of the violin music. The next day, campground guests complimented him for their concert treat, they jokingly said.

 This fall 2018, we walked to the amphitheater and two flutists were playing Note E Native American tunes. Bob is 83 years old, but looking like 60 years old, carrying a fleece blanket with individual slots to house eight flutes. One had a distinctive bird design at the top and Bob explains what the wind barrier does: it controls the ingress of winds as one blows on the flute, gently, not hard he said.

 His companion, Carey is an equally energetic flute player in his 70s and he too carries a backpack with eight flutes. They reside in Hurricane, where we found a man-made lake. Together, they make their occasional trips to Zion to look for canyon spots to echo back the flute sounds they make. They referred us to YouTube for beginning lessons on how to play the flute, specifically Native-American sounds and soon, mobile flute players.

A descend from the amphitheater to the river walk, we chance upon Mary Piaget, a watercolor painter capturing the Zion canyons on her canvas, while taking art classes from the legendary Carl Purcell. The cold outdoors are their classrooms and their paintings warm people’s hearts.

 God’s grace is indeed abundant: from a “dance in spirit-beams” surrounded by gleaming yellows of the cottonwoods and orange-brown aspens, to the golden sunrise that bathe the canyons, to the howling winds at 23 mph in our first evening to 32 mph the next, to frigid cold weathers that morph into the warmth of human hands, resonating flute sounds that warms one’s soul, family of does without the buck (family of deer) amazing muted watercolors of Mary’s painting of the Zion canyons that make you say, “Oh, for with the grace of God, all are possible, including the miraculous last camping site that we got for three nights. Thank you God Almighty, Your Nature is unspeakably abundant!”

But not quite, as John Muir would say, “A very fine blacktailed deer went bounding past camp this morning. A buck with widespread of antlers, showing admirable vigor and grace. Wonderful the beauty, strength, and graceful movements of animals in wildernesses, cared for by Nature only…Deer, like all wild animals, are as clean as plants. The beauties of their gestures and attitudes, alert or repose, surprise yet more than their bounding exuberant strength. Every movement and posture is graceful, the very poetry of manners and motion. The more I see of deer the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canyons, roaring streams, and snow fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.”

Happy Thanksgiving to Asian Journal’s readers, and I am grateful for our upcoming eleventh year of writing for this fine publication come 2019. May you all have a wonderful get-together with your families! 

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Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz, J.D. writes a weekly column for Asian Journal, called “Rhizomes.” She has been writing for AJ Press for 10 years. She also contributes to Balikbayan Magazine. Her training and experiences are in science, food technology, law and community volunteerism for 4 decades. She holds a B.S. degree from the University of the Philippines, a law degree from Whittier College School of Law in California and a certificate on 21st Century Leadership from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She has been a participant in NVM Writing Workshops taught by Prof. Peter Bacho for 4 years and Prof. Russell Leong. She has travelled to France, Holland, Belgium, Japan, Costa Rica, Mexico and over 22 national parks in the U.S., in her pursuit of love for nature and the arts.