A Place to Remember

BY ANNE MARIAH TAPP

My dad is eighty years old, about two decades too old than I’d like. Over the last two years, an essentially ageless father has finally gotten older. I didn’t think it was coming because his seventies were an extension of his sixties and that decade inseparable from his fifties. As a late-in-life child born when my dad was fifty, I thought he’d managed to escape the aches, pains, memory lapses, and general malaise that seemed to visit his peers throughout my teens and early twenties.

Now, hikes are harder, reflections are more intense, and our time together is interwoven with a growing realization that there’s a dwindling amount of time left for him to share his experiences and for us to create new memories.

My dad loves the Colorado Plateau. He’s as new to this region as I am; his visits started when I began working here. He comes to visit from his home in Houston, Texas and together we try to explore places that are new to both of us. My memories and experiences on the plateau are inseparable from memories of my dad.

Now when I go to Zion to climb, I remember driving through the tunnel in a convertible we rented in Vegas five years before, on my first visit to southwestern Utah, both of us craning our necks at the glowing red walls rising to the clouds.

It’s a gift that I never expected, and one I’ll never stop being thankful for.

Getting old is hard. Reflecting on the ending curve of your life is hard, no matter how well you lived it, and my dad has lived his life as well as anyone I’ve ever met. The last few years have been darker, with conversations touching on failures, a fear of no new beginnings, and the struggle to find real meaning in the long days of retirement. It’s much like the dark and anxious conversations that we all have about the future of the plateau—about our future—if we do not avert the climate crisis.

My dad came to visit last fall, rising out of a depression perhaps borne out of these reflections or perhaps just a product of being human in this sometimes dark world. I wasn’t sure how the trip would go, but I knew that southern Utah in October never hurt anyone.

We drove from Flagstaff to Escalante, where we hiked to Calf Creek Falls. It’s a six-mile roundtrip hike in the Grand Staircase-Escalante that I wasn’t sure he could finish, and that I’d never done. The air was cool, the trail friendly, and we reached the falls cascading into a round green pool in one of Utah red-rock desert country’s most perfect fall days.

Driving the next day across a vast stretch of the plateau, my dad commented on a sense of renewal, of faith in our society’s ability to do the right things, and the gift that our leaders give us when we protect these places. I remembered that all across the plateau, the West, and the world, we are working–out of love for place and community, in ways small and grand, creative and conventional–to solve our climate crisis.

And I could feel Stegner’s “surge of inextinguishable western hope” rising like the Kaiparowits Plateau in the distance.

As our parents and grandparents age, they need the Colorado Plateau protected as much as anyone, maybe more. A place to remember, reflect, heal, experience joy, create memories, and hold space for the questions that come later in life. What greater gift can we give to those we love than our work to protect this landscape capable of restoring spirits weary after long years?

Anne Mariah Tapp directs the Grand Canyon Trust's Energy Program. 

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