This week’s edition of main/menu comes to you from Monument Valley, Utah. The photo above is what I’m looking at as I write this newsletter.
It’s completely fucked. It is unreal. I cannot believe that this is so close (relatively, I guess) from where I live. It is like looking at Mars out there. The ground is red, all of the rocks are red, the plants are weird. I love it so much.
On Monday, my partner Kati came to me and was like “Alright, hey, let’s go on that road trip you’ve been wanting to go on.” I’d spent the last few weeks (months) bitching and moaning about how sad I was and being like “hey let’s go on a trip or something via car we can rent a fun car and go to Hoh Rainforest or something.” We have a National Parks Pass, which lets you get into any National Park for a year (it’s $80, which pays for itself if you go to two parks. It’s a stupid good deal. The National Parks Service is the only good federal agency.
Anyway, Kati kept saying “No.” And then I reminded her that we had a super long weekend (thanks Fanbyte), and she said yes. Over the course of the next 18 hours, we planned a trip to the
Hoh Rainforest. We then realized it was going to be freezing and raining the whole time we were there, so we pivoted to a journey Eastward.
We didn’t end up going to Four Corners because it would’ve been closed by the time we got there because we spent so long looking at the Grand Canyon.
Have y’all seen this thing? The Grand Canyon? This thing is fucking wild. It’s an incredible hole. Just a big hole. And the hole has a river in it, and you can see the water moving in the river at the bottom of the big hole. Look at this. It is unreal. I lost my mind. I’d never been here before but the majesty of it is breathtaking. It goes on and on and on and on. It’s unfathomably large.
There is something to me about the scale of the Grand Canyon that makes it feel bigger than the ocean. You know how if you’re at the beach you can obviously see the ocean and the width/length of the beach? And if you look at the water, you can see the water go over the horizon and you know that the ocean (any of them) are really fucking big. You literally can’t see both sides of the Pacific Ocean unless you’re in space. It is huge.
But that vastness somehow makes it hard to conceive. The Grand Canyon, though? I can see the other end, and it’s so fucking far away. It is so deep. It is so big and so wide and so deep that there is a raging river at the bottom of it.
It is beautiful.