Birds could
fly over the rainbow and you
could walk over it, but be careful, it's a high bridge. To get
there we left our boats where Aztec Creek
joins the Colorado River and took off on the six-mile walk, up
an exquisite little stream you could dip into when you got too
hot, or cool yourself by sipping from one of the ice-cold dripping
springs along the way.
Where a deep gorge entered Aztec Creek
we switched to the smaller Bridge Creek excited, because we knew
the sacred Rainbow Bridge was about to reveal itself. It challenged
me to climb it, which Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall
and I did, and I had the pleasure of teaching him how to rappel
so that he could get back down easily. Then came the real treat,
one more icy spring, dripping directly just under the bridge.
You needed was a cup to catch the wonderful drips in.
Take your time and wonder how such a
marvelous structure ever happened. Sure enough, are were the
old meanders, deeply incised, and the stream that has built them,
and probably is not yet satisfied with what it has accomplished.
Henry David Thoreau had it right:
The
finest works
in stone
are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air
and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance
of time.
And there, in due course, water had
found a meander with a weakness, had rallied around a century
or so of air, and together they punched through and there was
Rainbow Bridge. How much water? It should have taken a lot of
it, a few raging flash floods or so, when you look up at the
grandeur of the great arch. Or maybe not. Thirty years ago I
made a film that concentrated on the delicate handiwork of that
same stream, allowing it to fashion a little series of oval pools,
each two or three inches deep and two or three feet long, every
one pleasantly carved in its own way, and I could imagine that
Michaelangelo must have paused there once, and the stream showed
him what stone was for. I lost the film, and just rediscovered
it. I think you can still get a copy of it from the Glen Canyon
Institute, which is doing its best to get those pools, and similar
treasures, restored. Come by after the draining and check them
out, and see what this part of the world was like when Congress
voted to protect it at Rainbow Bridge National Monument, then
welshed on the deal. They can unwelch, and restore what Wallace
Stegner was talking about:
