Moonlight Buttress

If walls could talk, I would tell the human race of their insignificance. Here I stand, a sentinel to the works of ancient nature, a sandstone wall that has seen the passing of time, and every bipedal creature fumbling at my foundation can never comprehend. With a great sigh, the golden morning light touches upon my fractured rust-colored face. Dew collects upon the cottonwoods below and deer, foxes, and wild turkey forage in the yellowing grass. Calm and settled, the sediment rich turquoise waters of the Virgin River flow and wind past my majesty around the bend and disappear behind the great bluff the human’s call Angel’s Landing.

Today, I’m unlikely to be left alone to the subtle ecosystems of my home, the one I’ve watched for millenia and continue to marvel at how much it has changed in one hundred and fifty short years. Indeed, even as the sun burns away the shadows of the night I already hear the hum of buses winding up the black scar they consider a road. The natural processes of rain and flood have nearly destroyed this fixture many times over, but the humans return with their refined metal machines and repair the thing. The air grows thick with carbon refuse from the oils they burn.

In the cold autumn morning, the leaves of the cottonwoods are shifting yellow. I expect a line of humans at my feet stringing up ropes and metal and rubber. They squeeze into my fractures, slipping their toes and fingers upon every groove and notch they find. None of it hurts. I am rock. I am Navajo Sandstone, a mixture of heat and pressure pressed iron rich sand, anciently forged and slowly carved by ice, wind, and rain. They sleep upon my ledges, hanging and defying gravity. They’ve grown smarter too, waiting after storms, after the water I’ve absorbed evaporates.

Oddly though, there is only one human who approaches my base. The weather, judging by the thin sheds of white hanging in the yellowing sky, will be clear and mostly still. To have only one approach is abnormal. They always come in pairs or trios. It has been a while since a single person attempted my face free of their protective gear. I wonder if yet another soul will succumb to the forces of nature, and I will have another human corpse at the base of my cliff.

The boy is young, perhaps of an ancestry similar to the people who once roamed these mighty mazes, exploring the narrow slots and towering canyon walls of my brethren and sistren. He snakes up the narrow, sandy trail until he stops at the base breathing heavily.

“Good morning, Moonlight Buttress,” the boy says. He touches my gritty surface with calloused hands. As he says this, there is something different about him from the rest of his kin. I feel his spirit through my rock. “Put me to the test. Am I going to live or die today?”

“I cannot tell. I am but a servant to nature, and nature will remain its course, apathetic of life and death,” I say, a deep rumble from my Kaibab roots.

The young man removes his hand and tilts his head. He had heard me. Indeed, he is unique. An anomaly. None ever heard me. I may be impartial towards his fate, to take on the thin cracks and overhanging bluff that is my face, but I shall, in a sense, enjoy his company.

“Great canyon wall, I hear your voice,” the boy says. His breath shudders and takes a deep breath and stares up my redrock face. “I understand, this is my trial.”

The boy pulls his dark hair into a knot in the back of his head, slips on tight rubber shoes, a harness and sling, and a water pack. Prepared, he touches off the ground. At first, he climbs a sandy slab up to my main crack and slides his hand into its gritty interior. Now at a fatal height off the ground, unlike many unfit humans who desperately clutch to chains secured along the spine of my sister, Angel’s Landing, this boy is calm and focused. Those who have dared my climb free of their protective gear are often like this. Finally the boy reaches the first ledge of many to rest. The boy sets his feet and shakes his hands. Leaning against my now sun warmed face his heart patters and reverberates through my structure.

“Moonlight Buttress,” the boy says, hands flat against my grainy face, “Am I welcome, or am I a parasite?”

A parasite? Often, if the biological life of this canyon could speak, I’d think they’d scream that answer. Indeed, they have carved tunnels out of my sibling walls, they have made roads, taken our blocks and made buildings. They come and consume and move on once the land is deprived of resources. But here, perhaps in this sanctuary riddled with half-minded tourists, there is hope.

“Do you mind me being up here on your surface?”

“The raptor nests within my bosom,” I speak. “The canyon wren calls to the setting sun, protection from the predators. As do the snakes and spiders and lichen. All are, in a sense, seeking survival but respecting the balance. Humans. They are unique. You do not come here to protect from predators or create shelter or scavenge for food. What are you here for? Why risk your existence in this manner when it does not protect your life?”

The boy pauses at the question and looks down at the desert floor, the steep embankment of cacti and brush and red soil. Why is he up here with no safety hundreds of feet above the floor?

“I will think on it,” the boy says and resumes his climb. He continues up in a methodical approach until he hits the first difficult section. My system of cracks and fractures he follows curves and dips leading to a series of delicate up and down movements, but after some thought, the boy navigates with ease and continues up my crack lying back for another couple of hundred feet. He wanders through these two to three hundred feet with more grace than the roped up ones, navigating overhangs and jutting blocks which often snag climber’s gear. He gets up to a point where there is a glimmering bolt in the daylight. He looks at the oblong piece of metal drilled and embedded into my surface. He takes a sling and attaches himself to it and rests upon the bolt. Next is the difficult sections for many but he doesn’t seem worried, only contemplative.

“I climb, because I feel close with you,” he says. “I must understand your weathering to survive. Every hold and crack in size and scarcity I guess. I do it for the challenge and the thrill. I want to be outside where I hear the canyon wren’s call, or hope to see the raptor circling overhead in search of mice. I hope to get away from the clogged roads of cars and diesel and buildings. There’s a lot of noise beyond your canyon, where people fight and lie and, and lie.”

“So you climb my wall, with no protections?”

He rubs his finger over the bolt. “Did this hurt?”

“It did not. I do not feel pain. At least, I would say this was in the sense of when you humans stick metal in yourselves.”

“How about the Mount Carmel tunnel?”

“Oh yes, that is my brother, and it was painful in a sense. Still the animals and the trees are adapting to the footfalls of people. It is amazing all that has happened in such a brief time, how fast you humans change and destroy and shape for your benefit.”

“So we are parasites?”

“No more in the sense a rabbit burrows, or termites hollow out trees. Yet, indeed, this feels different, for this is not a shelter, and this is not for survival and food and reproduction. I must think on this.”

“Wish me luck.”

“Have you climbed me before?”

“Oh yes, I have been on your face many times.”

“Then how do I not know you?”

The boy thinks a while. For his age, perhaps a mere twenty-year blink compared to me, seems to consider more than those on my face do. Most who come are wild and free and though they may care for the space in which they tread I feel many seek the spike of adrenaline at the feat they intend to accomplish.

He continues the climb, but now my smooth but fractured surface brings him challenge. Almost immediately he finds himself on a large block where the next thin finger crack is a jump or a precarious lean. By now, he’s three hundred feet up and prostrates himself, deep breaths, tense then loose muscles as he balances and slides his body across my surface. He latches his fingers in and brings his feet and hands over as his last foot slips from the block. He doesn’t yelp but takes a stuttered breath as his body tenses, the canyon floor a waiting grave below. But he catches himself and works up the next face with shuddering careful moves until he reaches a big hold and takes catch.

After careful breaths and clearing his head he finally says, “I was a different person then. A lot has changed. Perhaps I was that parasitic human you disliked before.”

“I do not like or dislike.”

And the boy continues up, straining and breathing but moving with grace as he switches to another crack system and fights with just his fingers and his toes as I angle over and make him exert for ten, twenty, fifty feet. He finds another bolt in my face and quickly tethers and hangs.

“What am I doing?” he says with heavy breaths. “This was stupid.”

This time I do not reply. He came very close to his end, and I must stare on with impartiality. If he cannot keep hold to my face, if he cannot sustain his energy, he will die.

He drinks from the small pack on his back and consumes a small morsel.

“This is easier than with the ropes and partner,” he mutters, “don’t have to hang and place gear.”

And with a series of deeper breaths he shakes his hands out and continues up the face. He wedges and grunts and his body shudders and those tender fibers and muscular sinews strain to remain under tension. The desert heat builds as the morning lengthens towards the afternoon. He reaches another anchor and tethers in and hangs and breathes hard with his body flat against my face. Next up above him, more than halfway is the greatest separation upon my weathered and worn face. A wide split which his whole body will enter.

“Why do this alone? You have no technology to call for aid like some do,” I ask.

“I have no one,” the boy says, now trembling. “I only have you.”

“You ask if you are a parasite, why?”

“Because I am a parasite.” There on the floor people have emerged from one of the shuttle buses with cameras and awed speculation. A lone man, they exclaim. Someone climbing with no supports. There are jives at his stupidity. Others marvel.

At this I, a wall who has only watched, observed and let things that dare scramble upon my face, do wonder at what this specimen means. He will live, at most, a hundred cycles with the sun. I have lived hundreds of millions of years. I do not fret as the earth changes. Even when smoke hung thick from the extinction of the early age creatures from some catastrophic, extraterrestrial disaster. I stood resolute when the world froze and thawed, time and time again, all of which, from the seismic uplift of the earth to the sweeping floods and boulders carrying away piece after piece until I became what I am now. Now the world is stuffy, the air is thick with carbons, the canyon either dries up and blooms bacteria or floods and floods and floods.

“I should just disconnect and fall. I have no one. Everyone has left me, or wants nothing to do with me,” the boy says. “All I did was consume and consume and consume. I didn’t care. I just wanted more and more and more.”

He’s rambling, mostly to himself, but I, an impartial wall, do not interfere.

“My parents won’t talk to me. My friends are leaving me. I have nothing. I walked here. I’ve tried to pretend I’m one with nature. I try. But here I am, hanging from a bolt, a defilement of nature. Not surviving, I don’t deserve to survive. I deserve to die. Why am I here? I’m five hundred feet above the ground. I’m going to die. I’m going to fall. This next section, I’m terrible at. I can’t do chimneys, I can’t do the off angle cracks above. I’m going to slip. I’m going to fall. Why did I even try? I may as well just die.”

“Then why didn’t you?” I ask.

The boy is broken from his spiral of dialogue, staring at my face as though he forgot he can hear me.

“Up in my chimney a starving wren flew in. You may see its remains,” I explain. “It curled up too weak yet too full to move. I was curious as its slow breaths led to its death. It starved yet its stomach was full as though it had been eating rocks. As the fungus broke down the creature’s organics it left behind the bones, feathers, beak, and the contents of the stomach which no amount of mites or bacteria can touch. Those small colored pieces will sit within the deep clefts of my flesh for perhaps another several thousand cycles.

“I wondered how a creature could do this to itself. How could a creature willingly eat these colored bits? Yes, they were the size and brightness of seeds, but shouldn’t it know? In the end, you are right, you humans have been on this earth a short span. But it doesn't matter. You are only a small phase of my existence. I shall continue to stand even as your roads splinter and wash away, even as the synthetics you toss to the ground eventually break down back into their oils. I will still remain long after your race has likely killed itself.”

The boy blinks. His hands and feet are raw. He rubs the white tape he had wrapped around his palms, the red chalk dust he uses to dry them out, the rubber on his shoes wearing and leaving black scuffs upon my surfaces. I likely didn’t help his mental quandry, as he thinks he’s a parasite. There may be a day when the humans come and drill into my surface placing more than chains and bolts and safety devices, but cleave out my flesh to build and refine.

“I find it curious how despite your claims of dying,” I say, “That you still fight to survive.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you almost fell two hundred feet below, you could have let yourself fall. You could have died. But you clung to with life. Why?”

“I, I don’t know. I was afraid of falling.”

“And yet that is your species. They are the only species who will kill themselves willingly. The only species that will summit my sister mountain, Angel’s Landing, and for what? To stare at the canyon. You do things beyond the basic survival needs of biological life. It is quite perplexing. A creature will only climb my face for shelter, yet you climb here to toe with death?”

The boy doesn’t respond. A cool breeze comes and tickles the nape of his sweat slicked neck. He grits his teeth and stares at the remaining six hundred feet of unrelenting obstacle. I did not choose my shape, I did not choose the cracks and the blocks, but humans accepted the challenge of a climb.

“Why do you climb me?” I ask one more time.

“Because I don’t want to die,” the boy says, “But I don’t know where else to go. I got obsessed with money. I did things, I did some awful things to my family and friends. I guess. I guess I came here to either starve like the bird or… maybe.”

A screech filled the air. A falcon lifted off from a nearby cliff, circled, then dived down. Tucked its wings and plummeted at fatal speeds until it arched, spread its wings and lifted back up. A puff of sand lifted from the base of the buttress and the falcon disappeared with a mouse in its talons.

“Finish my climb,” I say.

And the boy nodded. He shook his hands and got back on his feet. He unclipped his sling and resumed into the chimney. He squeezed and jammed and grunted. His hands split. His knees split as he finished the last move out of my chimney and pulled up onto a larger ledge where many of the other climbers sleep the night on my face. But this boy stood and gathered his breath. The wind blew and whipped his wild black hair. His sweat and blood splattered my rock and his breath drew in sharp as he beheld the twisting land below, a land of disrupted harmony.

He took a few breaths then started up the final stretches, wedging his fingers into the final lines and crevices I had. At this point the cracks scattered and potentially loose blocks of rocks brought an uneasy edge as his shaking body pushed through pulling and pushing and straining with every move. He was getting tired, but our conversation gave him some renewed vigor.

Eventually he reached the final stretch, before coming upon a sand blown roof, a horizontal outcropping of rock, he wedged his trembling knees into a cleft and went hands free, over a thousand feet from my base. Breathing heavily took another sip of his water, swished it in his mouth, spat it upon the sand glazed stone then took another pull to wet his throat.

Then he heaved over the roof and reached the final stretch. Careful feet, careful hands over the sandy slab with only nuanced divots to balance one’s weight. But as he huffed and wheezed, mind swimming as the warm autumn air pushed on his skin, he grabbed my precipice and lay prostrate over the lip.

I waited a time as the boy simply lay there, breathing heavily. The sun baked his skin, waning low in the sky behind him. He had been in shade for a time, and now in the sun he took deep breaths. The entirety of the climb took him from morning well into the afternoon. But he did it, did it by himself.

“So you have climbed my face. What are your feelings?” I ask once the boy stirs.

“I want to thank you for this opportunity.” He slips his rubber shoes off and wiggles his toes. “I tried to invest some money into a business. It was supposed to yield profit. I pressured my family and friends to invest. I was too excited. The first paycheck came in, I made more money than my father likely did in five years.”

He sighs as he stares up. Rubs his hand against my surface. “I used to come here to climb before. My friends and I did so many routes here, and down in Hurricane and over in St. George and even down to Red Rocks. I was one of those climbers who were haughty. I blew all the money. I bought a nice car. I put a downpayment on a house. But then the business tanked. It had taken our money, many other people’s money. The owner bailed, having only given us one payout. I had a car, a house, I couldn’t afford. In the process of a few months my family, friends, myself, all went from potential cash to nothing.”

The boy sighs.

“Now they hate me.”

I say nothing in return. First, I don’t understand what he’s saying. I understand house. I understand car–the loud rumbling, gleaming line of metallic machines spouting noxious fumes between our walls.

“But you gave me perspective, Moonlight. You gave me such good perspective. I am just a blimp. I am nothing. In sixty or seventy years time, I will be ash. You will remain. Hell, I’ll probably be some decayed matter floating down the Virgin and you’ll be none the wiser.”

He sits up and backs away from his feet dangling over my precipice. “Thank you for the climb. I came to climb this with the idea that if I slipped, my family would never have to face me again. But you were right. I don’t want to die. I didn’t really want to die.”

As he is about to leave he looks back at the edge and kneels and touches the sandstone. “Is there anything you’d wish of me?” he asked.

I think for a fraction. Deep within my crevice are the bones of the wren. The air choked with combusted fossil fuels. The river tainted. The climate… different, so quickly, much faster than each time the Earth froze.

“Protect this domain,” I say. “You lose the biological life. You lose even me and my siblings, your species and its brief existence will not last long.”

The boy nods eagerly. “I understand.”

Barefoot, raw, and tired with cracked hands and split knees, covered in sand and sweat, the boy turns and leaves. And here I remain, another buttress, another towering wall that had a unique encounter in my long existence. As much as these beings have muddled up the world, there are sure some gems walking among them.