Travels of a Wizard—Part 2
I had a strange night. I woke up in the middle of the night, with all of my muscles and bones aching. Performed LBRP, and went back to sleep. When I woke in the morning I was fine.
I love eating at local establishments when I travel. I went across the street of the motel and ate in the restaurant. Pancakes as big as a dinner plate! I couldn’t finish them.
So I left Beaver, Utah, and cruised down I-15 to I-70 and travelled across the rest of Utah. There’s a turn-off to a town called Loa. I wondered how the Voudoun deities had made their way to Utah.
The travel across Utah is amazing. The land is so beautiful and, well, enormous. Yesterday I thought I might take photos on the way back, but I only have the camera in my phone, and there is simply no way that any camera phone can possibly project the majesty, beauty, and enormity of this beautiful land. Sharing photos would be almost sacrilegious. So I’ve decided not to take photos because it would simply misrepresent and mislead. I drove by Arches National Park, and I know you can find lots of images on the internet of those amazing natural stone sculptures. Photos simply don’t come close to the reality.
When I was little, my parents used to watch travel shows on our little black-and-white TV. I found it boring because it didn’t really reveal the beauty of the places. If anything, they hid the reality of the beauty. Similarly, I could never photograph or really describe places like Devil’s Canyon or the Ghost Rock. You have to visit.*
As I travelled, I tried the radio. Nothing on FM. AM had only one channel with a political host spreading fear and hate for everything he didn’t like. My mouth was agog hearing what is going on the airwaves. I finally started to lose the channel, moving away from the source. I scanned the AM band. Another channel came in loud and clear. It was the same guy! That’s all you could get in the area. My guess is that only having access to one side, one view, and one that spouts so much anger actually exacerbates the political divide in our country. As Rodney King said, “Can’t we all just get along?”
I finally crossed over into Colorado. The 70 followed the Colorado River which at times was glassy and calm and at other times filled with white water rapids. The mountains were large and jutting. They were amazingly vertical in places, and out of them grew thousands of trees (mostly pine, I think) some of which were well over 50 feet tall. How they could grow so tall off of a vertical incline is an amazing example of the ingenuity of nature.
I passed a town called “No Name.” Doing some research, I found that the town has a population of 123. The exit sign from the freeway was used in the famous 1971 film “Vanishing Point.”
The temperature yesterday, crossing the desert, got up to 116. Today it was a bit cooler, and as the road got higher, the temperature dropped by over 40 degrees. I finally passed the ski-town of Vail. From the freeway it was a melange of apartment buildings squashed up against each other. Very unappealing.
The road moved higher quickly. A row of large trucks filled the right lane of the two-lane highway. I thought of them as “velocity challenged.”
Finally, I pulled into Denver. Tomorrow I go to INATS. And how was your day?
* Year ago, when I was a member of AMORC, I was told that the founder, H. Spencer Lewis, started out in advertising. I was told that his most famous ad was for American tourism. It was simply this: “See America First.”
I don’t know if the story is true, but I do believe that the U.S. is worth seeing and is far more amazing than photos of videos/films can possibly present.
