Travel Photography > Great Basin > Escalante, Utah

Paria's elevation and geography make it hot, dry; filled with flys. I am walking down the canyon, looking at the pink and gray canyon walls, the slots, the cracked mud and flooded riverbanks, dreading and desiring the coming end of my solitude, dreading my approach to the Grand Canyon. I stay here for a few days, just kind of wandering about, sitting in my chair, swatting flies.

I am tired, weary. I have no desire to see the Grand Canyon. I thirst for beer, and leave Paria for the North Rim parking lot. Here I begin drinking, watching the people from all over the world march to the view of the Canyon. Many of them walk with their head down. Pale, unsuitably dressed. In a few minutes they will leave again, driving the two or three hundred miles back to wherever they came from.

A man in an outback hat - "Name's Dave." He wants to talk about Escalante, seeing the dirt on my truck. "I got maps," he said, coming back with an armful. I pull out my maps. We sit on the ground. He says, "I've been here for twelve days."

"What do you do?"

"I'm independently poor. I film everywhere I go. Super-eight."

"What do you want to do with all these films?"

"I watch them, listening to music. I really like music. Classical. New age. Jazz. I have a new Astro-Van. Souped it up," he says, pointing to his raised van. "It's got four-wheel drive. Satellite. Cable. The Weather channel. I got cellular. Been working on it. Everything I need. Got a laptop in there. I can pull up maps from this website, print them out."

He added, "You look at all these people. It's always the same story. Families and all their problems."

I said, "As a solo-traveler, you have the luxury to see those sorts of things."
"Absolutely," he said, but I was already wondering why he was traveling alone. "I go everywhere," he says. But he had also mentioned bad times. Had his wife died? Did some lawyer get a hold of him and sue him broke?

When Super-Eight Dave leaves, a young man walks up to my truck, inquiring into the dirt. I say, "Want a beer?"

"Sure. Name's Leo."
"Take a seat, Leo," I say, referring to my cooler, "You got a bad sunburn."

"I'm black."

"I know you're black, look at your arms."

"I've been on the road a while," he said, "too much sun. Sometimes we forget we can get burnt too." And, "Air Force, discharged. Taking some time off."
He said he had served in the Philippines. I asked why he was traveling alone. He said he had a girlfriend in Arizona, and one he met in Manila. "She was from Malaysia. When I found out her family ate monkeys, I left her."

"What happened to the one in Arizona?"

"Gone too long, I guess. Maybe we'll get back."

I said, "see that couple there." It was a family from Texas. The wife is pale, with a short haircut and a long face. The husband, with a squat face and Oakley sunglasses, looks like a bulldog with a moustache. A keystone cop without a club. He is yelling at his children.

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