Moab- installment one of the desert memoir series.

Moab

As I sped over the Colorado River, I was too fixated by the towering dark crimson canyon to my left to notice the small trailer-truck that had pulled in front of me.  I caught sight of his bumper a moment before I would’ve plowed through it; I slammed on the breaks, flopping forward against the seat belt as I cut my speed from eight-five miles per hour to forty.  He indignantly flipped me the bird out the window of his too-wide truck; I was equally unpleased with him and his fat trailer for inhibiting my direct view of Moab, which I’d been anticipating the whole eight hour drive from Sun Valley, but I withheld my road rage.  There was, after all, an off chance that my vaguely dangerous driving is more deserving of getting flipped off. 


I’ve barely entered the town before the streets are lined with river guide services, mountain bike shops, four wheel drive rental dealerships, and canyon-rim zipline centers.  Tourist-luring, money-sucking novelty shops dubbed as such-and-such Trading Posts are scattered amongst it all, advertising navajo jewelry and “dirt-shirts,” t-shirts washed in the local red mud.  All four lanes of main street are packed with jacked-up, open-framed jeeps splattered with mud that falls from the wheel wells and leaves the pavement with streaks of orange sand.  Mountain bikers wind alongside the cars, still cut-up, dirtied and bruised from their last ride, peddling their fat-tired bikes with massive grins painted across their faces.  Every now and then, a climber could be spotted outside a guide shop, given away by sharply-defined, lean muscles, deep bronze skin, and medical-taped mummy-wrapped fingers.  The trip down main street alone will make you understand why Moab’s called the Mecca of red rock adventure.


I was bristling with excitement—a raw-edged, adrenaline-filled anticipation had been building since I first started catching sight of red sand in the hills nearly fifty miles back.  I loved this region, and I loved this funky little tourist-trap town.  The funny little community consists one part good-to-do Mormons (original settlers of the town), one part descendants of Uranium miners and prospectors (responsible for growing the population by 500% in the fifties), a quarter-part leftover Native Americans, and three parts extreme sports enthusiasts—all thrown together to create an oddity of a town.  The one thing the whole community has in common?  An obsession with the land surrounding them.  In that sense, I fit right in.  


I pulled into the official “Canyonlands Best Western Plus,” my base camp before heading into territory the hotel was named for.  Upon checking in, I was informed that I was not allowed to smoke or bring my bicycle into the room—apparently a common place issue.  Those damn mountain biking bums. I took enough time to drop my goliath backpack—containing food, shelter, water, and clothing for the next four days—in my room before taking off to explore downtown Moab.


I wandered the streets aimlessly, ducking in and out of every single gallery, souvenir shop, bookstore, outfitter and studio, unable to shake the smile from my face that’d first appeared when I pulled into town.  Happiness, I thought to myself, is being a stranger in a strange place.  The self is a two-fold construct—composed partially by how it chooses to present itself and partially by how the surrounding community reacts and labels that presentation, which in turn molds original product.  Depending on the person, these two components fluctuate in dominance.  For myself, they’re fairly evenly balanced—which explains the anomaly of feeling that I posses multiple different selves in different companies, yet that all selves are authentically me.  What gives them their dissimilarities is the change in surrounding community, how they react to my personality, and in turn how alter it in accordance with their reaction.  That being said, the closest my internally-defined self gets to unrestrained dominance is in a community that has no prior knowledge to project onto my personality.  Therefore, I take delight in the ambiguity of being a stranger. 


My first stop on my expedition around Moab was a shop I’d been referred to by a friend who’d promised I’d love it.  Just off of main street, Lin Ottenger’s Rock Shop is an unsightly shack planted in the middle of a junkyard-looking plot of land.  The driveway was filled with long, rickety tables scattered with uncut rocks and signs that read their name, place of extraction, and price (some for as much of a steal as three for a dollar).  Towering above the tables was a massive, conspicuous yellow sign advertising for rocks, fossils, and dinosaur bones, complete with a wire dinosaur head protruding from the wood.  I spent an entire forty five minutes milling about the oddities and wonders of the store, inspecting the fantastical collections of petrified sand dollars, three-foot-tall amethyst geodes, trilobite fossils, megalodon shark teeth, and chunks of local radioactive ore.  My jaw dropped slightly at a pile of Rose Quartz crystals, each easily bigger than my fist, priced at a meager ten dollars per stone.  I scooped up one from the middle of the pile, feeling inexplicably drawn to it.  The cool, rugged surface fit nicely in the palm of my hand. I set it down and turned a few others over, prepared to walk away and continue going about my day—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’d be a mistake to not to hold onto that particular stone I’d first picked up.  Despite utter lack of logic, I followed the intuitive order.  I ended up picking out one other gem, but mostly for its looks; I also settled on amethyst crystal keychain and an Anasazi Indian pottery shard magnet.  I checked out for a grand total of $31.79 (including tax).  I sent a text to my best friend, a practicing yogi with some knowledge of the more woo-woo, supposed powers of crystals; I hoped she’d have some insight as to why a rock seemingly picked me.
I made a stop through a bookstore recommended by the same friend for its “shrine to Edward Abbey,” although it turned out to be something like six different special shelves, all of which could’ve passed for a shrine, in different corners of the store dedicated entirely to the man’s literary works.  I picked up a journal to bring into the backcountry, as well as a pen and pencil that were supposedly weatherproof, and headed for the checkout counter—but stopped to examine a title that had caught my eye.  The Man Who Quit Money, subtitled with “in 2000, Daniel Suelo gave away his life savings.  And began to live.”  I’ve never been a fan of biographical works, especially the inspirational, self-help-y types—I prefer uncovering such things on my own, without someone else demonstrating how I should be doing it.  Yet I was met by the same strange feeling that had caused me to buy the quartz.  So intensely caught between being opposed to buying it and feeling as if I needed it, I picked up and set down the book over three times before finally resigning to taking it to the checkout counter.


Around 6 PM I found my way to a dinner cafe, where I uncomfortably asked the host for a table for one outside on the deck.  Having nothing better to do, I decided to crack open my new book as I waited for my chicken-avacado-bacon sandwich.  I barely put the book down to eat—I found myself connecting with its contents on far deeper levels than I could’ve possibly imagined. I learned about a man, who in earning and spending absolutely nothing, exists as possibly one of the biggest givers of our time—a man with obscure insights and answers to questions I’d always had regarding what it means to live an ethical life.  



Not long after, my best friend responded to my earlier inquiry: “of course the rose quartz called to you.  It has a lot to deal with love—self love.”  My one permanent affliction: figuring out how to like myself.  I hadn’t even begun my main journey I’d set out for, but between my connections the book and the rock, I decided that whatever higher knowledge I possess seemed to already be operating on higher frequencies.  I left a ten dollar tip on my thirteen dollar meal, walked back to my hotel, and read my new book until I fell asleep.