The National Park Supertour

    I took a 12 day road trip around the west.  My plan was an ambitious one; I visited 12 National Parks and met my father for the first time.  Rachel, as he's now known, friended me on Facebook about a year ago, and we hit it off.  We click on just about every topic, suggesting environmental factors during one's upbringing might not be as important as I thought.  Our chemistry seems to be purely genetic- pretty awesome when you consider how rare it is to find someone who can go off on theoretical physics and the depravity of society the same way you can.
    In 1985 my father came back to Seattle after going to Israel.  He'd tried to convince other Jews that he was the Messiah, or mashiach, as they call it.  The idea of a "Messiah" which comes to Earth and saves humanity by sacrificing his or her self is an entirely Christian concept and has no basis in Judaism.  Nowhere in the Torah does it even mention the term; scholars think it was later introduced because the concept was too abstract for new followers.  Mashiachs were never thought of as demi gods, only as the Kings of Israel, or "the anointed ones", which is literally what the word means.  It’s thought that this special being will gather all the Jewish exiles, bring an end to sin and wickedness, rebuild Jerusalem, and restore the line of David at the End of Days.  A new age will begin once the Masiach returns to Israel; a great utopia will be established in the promised land, which ironically has seen the most warfare in history.
    In Israel he’d been assaulted by a gang of Palestinians, and was largely rejected by the Jewish community because of his delusions of grandeur.  Prophets and Messiahs don’t generally believe they are the chosen ones; the people they influence are the ones who praise them as such.  After he returned he contacted my mother without knowing she was married.  He’d wanted to see his only son, but she wouldn’t let him because she thought it would confuse me, since I was being raised by my stepfather, whom I thought of as my real one.
    Then he asked Julie for a place to stay and she’d essentially told him to beat it.  That’s why he lives all the way in Santa Fe now.  I’m not sure when he had the sex operation.  My mother has told me that he did it to appear androgynous, that having no sex might convince others that he was above them.  This plan must have backfired, because when I first saw “her” picture I thought she looked like a mental case.  And if she’d really wanted to be androgynous then why did she change her name to a woman’s?  Things didn’t add up for me and they still don’t.  Her psyche is like one big salad of uncertainty, and it’s difficult for anyone to understand how she really feels about things.  Nonetheless, I was looking forward to meeting her because the missing father in my life was a demon I had to confront.  To anyone who goes through life without seeing the face of their father, even if he thinks of himself as a woman, they feel as if they are missing a piece of their soul.

        I started off driving down the coast, making it all the way to California on the first day.  If you’re ever going to take a coast drive, Oregon is the place to go.  There are fantastic views all along it.  I spotted several eagles that were perched on rocks down on the beach.  One of them lifted off and flew right above my car, into the thicket of timber that dotted the mountains above the ocean.  I tried to take a picture of it, but I wasn’t fast enough.
        On the second day I walked around the Redwood forest, mesmerized by the heights of the trees.  These trees are the tallest on Earth and they lived “up” to my expectations.  The tallest of them reach heights of up to 380 feet.  During the California Gold Rush they were harvested by loggers who’d failed to strike it rich in the mines.  It wasn’t until the 1920s that major steps in preserving the Redwood Forest got underway.  In the forest I remember coming to a place where the trees had formed a circle, looking a bit like an organic La Sagrada Familia.  Later I learned that it  was a fairy ring, which happens after a parent Redwood dies.  The tree reproduces asexually, meaning that baby trees sprout up from its parents' roots.  These babies in turn create more trees after they die, and so forth.  The idea of roots becoming a subterranean network of life suddenly blossomed in mind.  It’s like a cardiovascular system that keeps the heart of a forest beating, or a subway system that transports all the phloem and xylem that created these natural cathedrals for smaller life forms to live inside them.
        Next day I went through the interior of California, to an obscure place called Yosemite- a place I’d missed seeing with my family a few years ago.  It was a beautiful day.  I drove up a mountain across from El Capitan and took in the sights.  People were hang-gliding off the mountain, all the way down into the verdant valley.  Yosemite Valley looks like a giant’s hand reaching out of the Earth, its fingers walls of granite, its forests nooks of dirt.  There’s no place in the world quite like it.  Waterfalls could be seen tumbling thousands of feet to the valley floor between the edges of its fingers, even in the dead of summer.  The mountainous monoliths reached for the sky as if they were fingers grasping for the surface of a light blue sea.  I drove down into the valley and around the base of El Capitan before heading up over the pass.  At 3,000 feet, El Capitan is the largest of the monoliths, and a favorite destination for rock climbers.  I saw many people daring the climb on that fine day; they looked like little ants crawling up the sides of a building.
        After the mountains came the rolling sprawl of the Mojave Desert.  It was a scorching day- well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  I left as early as possible to beat the heat of the afternoon.  It was a good idea to say the least, seeing as Death Valley is the hottest place in North America.  I’d been there before, on the Nevada trip, but I hadn’t been able to explore it as much as I’d wanted.  The valley is beneath sea level, which means that it wasn’t created by a river or glacier like Yosemite.  There's actually a huge fault line that widens the valley whenever there's an earthquake.  The erosion that settles into it can't keep up with the ruptures that widen it, so the valley is still sinking.  In the valley I drove through the appropriately named Mustard Canyon, which had rocks as yellow as any I’d ever seen, but certainly no mustard.  Then I saw Badwater Basin- the lowest point in North America- but there certainly wasn’t any water.  I was beginning to feel like the whole place was playing tricks on me, or that the heat was making me dizzy and creating mirages.  The best place in the whole park was Dante’s View, which offers extensive views of the entire valley.  If it’s named after what Dante might have seen when he’d looked upon the nine circles of the Inferno, then I wouldn’t be surprised.
        That afternoon I had a hike scheduled with a tour group inside Antelope Canyon.  The reason you have to schedule with guides ahead of time is that sometimes an afternoon thunderstorm will create flash flooding, which drains out the shallow canyon and everything in it.  Especially helpless tourists.  If a thunderstorm is seen to be approaching on radar, they’ll  pull the plug on the hike.  But there weren’t any storms in the forecast that day.  Antelope Canyon is as surreal as they come; all the water that rushes through this narrow slot canyon erodes its sandstone into curvy bands of sediment, giving it the appearance of naturally formed pottery.  Sunlight comes in through a fissure above, creating spotlights that go spelunking over the sandy ground.  When I put my hand on the walls and it gently crumbled beneath my fingertips, I could tell just how sensitive the stone of it was.
        On day nine I headed east on old Route 66.  I saw a gigantic meteor crater that had been caused by an impact about 50,000 years ago.  This wasn’t the same meteor that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs; that one’s down in Mexico.  Heading east the route, there was a thunderstorm that billowed up dust from the ground, which reminded me of The Nothing from The Neverending Story. It rained so hard that the car went hydroplaning over the freeway for a few brief seconds.  I almost had to pull over and wait for the storm to pass, but nobody else was doing it so I just kept on going.  It’s a good thing that bad boy hadn’t been around the day before, or else I wouldn’t have been able to see Antelope Canyon.
        After braving the storm and cruising my way through the Painted Desert, I stopped in the Petrified Forest, where there is crystalized wood.  Centuries ago, water filled this dead wood with silicates and other shiny embers.  Then during winter the water froze, allowing the wood to become crystallized.  It was then that I had a vision of an entire planet that had once been warm and brewing with silicates, only to become an orb of glittering castles of crystal after it had cooled over the eons of its geologic history.
    In New Mexico I first went to the VLA Observatory, which has a succession of 27 satellites in tandem that detect signals from outer space.  What they do is map all the known galaxies by using radio waves.  Now it makes sense as to how scientists know the colors and shapes of different star systems when they can’t even be seen with the naked eye.  A lot of New Mexico is like that, having remote areas where extraterrestrial communication may be possible (as evidenced by my father’s choice in living there!).  These saucers on Earth that broadcast their signals into deep space may imitate those that fly above.  The beings that operate them may be monitoring us from their own elliptically shaped shells of communication.  Maybe it’s the fanatical paranoiac in me that insists on aliens existing, but how could we possibly be alone in a universe as vast, complex, and undeniably alive as ours?  If God could create one planet for consciousness to materialize on, surely He could create others.  I was going to Roswell the next day; perhaps my question should have been answered there.
        All that cosmic thinking was making my head drift off into the stratosphere, so I brought it back down to Earth by turning on the radio.  Unfortunately, radio out in the goonies is nothing but country music and conservative talk radio.  Well, I don't think anyone's surprised by that.  Over the years, the heartland of America has become a cesspool of people who cling to tradition as if nothing in the world should ever be capable of changing.  Ginsberg said it best in Wichita Vortex Sutra, with its powerful critique against the institutions that keep industrialization and war the cornerstone of our nation.  He uses Middle America as a perfect allegorical backdrop for the vortex of Kali Yuga- a spiritual age in Hinduism which passes as the lowest and most destructive in a cycle of other Yugas.  How right he was, because the Kali Yuga is exactly the age we’re living in, and I can’t think of a more Godless period of history than this one.
        I put on some of Julie's old road trip music to drown out the nimrod on the radio.  It was a perfectly suitable mix-tape featuring the futuristic soundscapes of 808 State and Delerium.  These electronic jams that feature angelic vocals and Gregorian Chant made it feel like the very soul of the natural world was being heard as I explored its body.  Sometimes when you’re driving in a beautiful landscape and listening to some profound music, the effect makes it seem like the land itself had composed it.  It might sound odd that electronic music could do that, but it really does have the same affect that any classical composition would.
    I spent that night in Los Alamos.  The next day I trekked over a sea of white sand in an area outside of Alamogordo.  Apparently the mountains nearby have an extraordinary amount of gypsum.  Winds from the south blow this mineral off them, creating the white dunes in the basin below their ranges.
    It was with great apprehension that I hiked 800 feet down into the famous Carlsbad Caverns.  The path was stable, so it wasn’t like I was doing anything dangerous.  It was a bit creepy, even for me.  A tour guide had been walking up the path alone, and when I encountered her it looked like she’d seen a ghost.  I heard strange noises in the distance of the cave; they were probably just the sounds of dropping water echoing off the many-walled chambers of the caverns.  About 250 million years ago, the area around Carlsbad was on the shore of an inland sea.  After the sea dried up, it left behind a large reef that eventually became buried by sediment.  Over millions of years, water that drained through the reef carved out the large caverns we see today.  They can still be heard sculpting the interior of the Earth if you listen carefully enough.
    When I reached the bottom, the path wound through several stalagmites that appeared to be melting where they stood, like ice cream.  In the walls of the cavern there were little cubby holes where smaller stalagmites grew in communities.  Some of them would intermingle with stalactites that hung from the ceiling, giving them the appearance of ominous teeth.  The rest of this cathedral of chalky Earth was chilling in its mystery, one that was sharpened by an unfamiliar mixture of fear and color.  I was a bit tired, so I settled on taking the elevator back up, where the good air greeted  my lungs with a welcoming breath.
    In Roswell I visited the UFO museum and I bought my father some green alien sunglasses to give her on the morrow.  (How ridiculous it sounds, referring to my father as a “her”).  The museum was very convincing in providing evidence for the existence of UFOs.  If only they had a real UFO or alien to display- that would have settled the dispute for good.
    Next came the most nerve-wracking part of the journey: meeting my father the first time.  We met at a Sonic of all places.  My father drove up in her beat up Vanagon and took me out for some Mexican food.  As usual, we got along and spoke about unusual stuff.   The nervousness I’d felt gradually wore away, until she told me a few strange things, such as holding me in her arms when I was a baby and forcing a shockwave through me.  So I’d been galvanized?  Maybe that explains why I tend to do things faster than the average bear.
    For all her strange theories about the universe and corpo-religious conspiracies, the thing that I’ll always remember most about her is her hair.  It poofs out the same way Einstein’s would during an electrical storm, only hers is longer and and even more curly than a witch’s.  And that parrot who rested on her shoulder the first time I saw her gave her the amusing appearance of a pirate practicing wizardry.  She is like a living caricature of the misunderstood, mad scientist who everyone’s afraid to talk with, too dangerous for faith and too untamed for reason.  Will I ever see her again?  I don’t know.  I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders, and the strength to forgive someone who abandoned me has increased my spiritual awareness.  This could lead to bigger and better things between us, but it’s too early to plan any future trips here.
    I was given a substantial amount of money from her, but when I got to my hotel room I couldn't find it.  I looked everywhere and the search became hopeless, so I called her to see if I’d left it in her van.  She said that I had, but assumed I’d left it there on purpose in order not to accept the money.  The funny thing about this is that neither of us care about money that much, and I knew before calling her that she’d think I’d left it there on purpose!  Talk about genetic foreshadowing.
    In Yellowstone I drove through a caldera that was fifty miles wide and venting smoke at hundreds of different places.  Being the largest super-volcano in the world, it’s the home of many geologic treasures, such as the shooting spires of Old Faithful; a sapphire sinkhole that looks like a portal to a subterranean world; golden travertine terraces that seep calcium carbonate from chambers of magma below; and a green-tinted river that shoots up hundreds geysers, enveloping the valley it winds through in eternal fog.  On my drive through the park, an obnoxious bison decided to block the road and make everyone wait a good 20 minutes for it to move.  It amused me that some people might remember an incident like that more than any of the natural wonders in Yellowstone.
    My final destination was Glacier National Park in Montana.  As I came upon it from the east side of the Rocky Mountains, the hills of the Great Plains looked completely barren of human activity.  The jagged ridges beyond them posed as a throwback to centuries past, when  Blackfoot Indians used to roam the land on their mustangs.  Montana is an enormous state with a very small population.  You can go to many areas of the state and it will look just as secluded and scenic as this one.  Now it makes sense why Paul said, “I’ll never leave Montana” in A River Runs Through It.
    Glacier might be the most beautiful place in the world.  When I was a child we came here from Kalispell, on the west side.  I can’t tell you how excited and mesmerized I was by that experience.  When you’re a child and you’re about to see the biggest mountains you’ve ever seen, much less in a location so famed for its beauty, nothing takes the fun out of it.  Not even hitting a deer on the way there, like my stepfather did.  As we approached the Rockies from Kalispell, I knew in my heart that I was about to witness something incredible.  In the park there are lakes of the finest turquoise, which meander through massive snow-capped peaks that look like they were etched by a master sculptor.  Tall grass and Douglas Firs grow down-slope from their glaciers, where mountain goats bay between the cascades formed from their melting.  These waterfalls make their presence known all along the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which climbs its way up a ridge to Logan Pass, offering some unforgettable views in the heart of the park.
    I did a 15 mile solo hike along this ridge, and it’s probably the best hike I’ll ever take.  There is a side-trail that takes you to the top of the ridge, where you can actually look down on a glacier from the other side.  The hike took all day and it left me dead tired, but it was well worth the strain.  At that point I just wanted to go home.
    I spent my last night in Kalispell, where I bumped into someone who looked like Denise.  She was a fast food worker, who took my order and served me.  Unlike Denise, she had a gloomy, troubled expression, which might have been how I looked when I fell in love with her.  I was wearing yellow and light blue- probably looking and feeling as upbeat after that amazing hike as Denise ever did.  A Denise look-a-like in Kalispell, who might have been seeking an escape from a place of incomparable loveliness.  It was an odd contrast that made me feel a certain sense of victory in getting over her rejection.  Before I left the place I looked back in her direction and caught her glancing at me.  That glance took the dark years away from my past and replaced them with some overdue bright ones.