131 - One Hundred Thirty One

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Breaker, breaker, this is Whiskey, calling out from Zion National Park. I found an old guidebook to the country’s parks a while back—and some history books too, figured I’d finally give myself that higher education I never got—and while I haven’t exactly shaped my trip around the thing, I like to take a gander every now and then and figure out if there’s anything off my route worth taking a detour for. And while I might be on more of a mission than I have been up to this point, I still  think this detour was worth it. 

It’s as stunning as the book says it is. And I’d heard about it of course, it’s probably one of the more famous parks, but I’m not sure I had any idea what it was supposed to look like. Not that knowing would have prepared me at all. 

It’s enormous and colorful and…overwhelming. That’s the only word I seem to have. Like so much of the land out here—the grand canyon, the pacific coast—it feels like the land of giants. Like I’ve been shrunk down and need to be careful where I tread, in case I step into the shadow of a canyon and become invisible to the giant stomping around above me, ready to be crushed under its foot. 

Zion means something, I think, to people, but hell if I know what that is. Aside from the occasional holiday or, I don’t know, food, Harry and I never talked much about religion. But it is a religious word, I’m pretty sure. Or a political one? I remember it being in the papers a few years before everything went all wonky. I never spent that much time on the news beyond who was running for President and lord knows I haven’t thought about any of that stuff in years. There’s no more news now that there are no more people.

I wish I’d paid more attention. 

But anyway, I guess it meant something to the Mormons, because that’s where the park got its name. Or, something like that, the guidebook doesn’t go into detail beyond saying that it used to be called the Mukuntunweap National Monument, which is a Paiute word—and I’m probably butchering both of those pronunciations. But they changed it because it was too hard for people to spell and because the Mormons looked at the land and saw some kind of holy temple, I guess. 

I’m not sure what to make of any of that, if I’m honest. Other than to say that I sort of get what the Mormons were feeling about this place—it is so beautiful, I think I would see God in it if I believed that He existed. And I’m glad that people thought to preserve it, make it a park; I’m glad we didn’t stick a highway through it or tear down the trees to build a suburb but at the same time…

Well, was it holy to the Paiute people too? Did we drive them out before declaring this place ours and worth protecting? That sounds like something we’d do. Were the Paiute the ones that named it Mukuntunweap in the first place or did we do that after we took it from them? I doubt they found that word hard to spell, so why is it that the name had to change? Who gets to make these decisions? And why?

I keep thinking about what you said. That I don’t belong. And maybe I don’t. Maybe I don’t belong in Los Angeles, maybe I don’t belong in Pennsylvania or New York or America or anywhere. I’ve talked about my fairly itinerant life and what it means to build a home and maybe home where you hang your hat or maybe it’s the people you belong to. I belonged to my parents, I belonged to Pete’s crew. I thought I belonged with Har—

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All I know is that you don’t get to decide where I belong. And maybe I don’t get to decide either, maybe no one is the master of their own fate, or maybe all of us are. Maybe the earth decided that human beings didn’t belong in it at all anymore, and like a New York City exterminator trying to get rid of cockroaches just…missed a few.

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