Beyond the Setting Sun

Red Moon Rising

'It's Sat'dee afternoon when you wake up in bed,

Your mirrored face looks awful and yer eyes are red,

There's only really one place to go,

I'd like to go there with you.

To the Cafe Open,

Come to the Cafe Open, yeah, yeah, yeah

Come to the Cafe Open,

With Nick, Mike, Rich and me.

The condensation runs down the window,

The frothy coffee swirls in the cup,

There's only really one place to go,

If yer wanna pick yerself up...'

I sang into a tape recorder as I walked along through a land of red sandstone cliffs and dark green juniper bushes.

The landscape was like nothing I'd seen before.  Red, brown and yellow sandstone, of all different shades was eroded into curious shapes.  I would look at an outcrop of layered rock standing on its own in the middle of a flat plain and wonder how it came to be standing so high when all about it was flat.  Giant stone mushrooms, with cap stacked upon cap, rose up to the top of cliffs hundreds of feet high.  The cliff faces were marked by water-cut gullies and some of the red sandstone was covered in swirling patterns, where wind or water had worn it down.  Heat, cold, wind and water had crafted a world that looked totally alien.

The colours were made more stark by the white snow, which lay between the reds, yellows and browns of the rock and the dark green of the desert plants.

My route passed between Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks and I was heading for the Grand Canyon and the desert beyond.

The last hospice had been Cedar City in Utah.  Noel and Winifred Taylor had picked me up at Panguitch on the freezing cold day when I'd headed out of Circleville.  At Cedar City I talked to hospice voulunteers and gave interviews to the local newspaper.  After a day's rest the Taylors had dropped me back at Panguitch with the temperature at 29 below zero.  Luckily there was no wind that day.

The small red tape recorder I now carried came from the Edwards family, who had connections with the Cedar City Hospice.  They lived in Glendale and had given me the tape recorder so I could play music and record messages as I walked on.

At Kanab I had stayed with the family of Mike Skinner.  The next hospice stop was Page and after that there were no more hospices until Las Vegas.  My days of having places to stay look numbered.

As I walked along the long flat highway, I read a Stephen King novel called 'The Stand.'  The story was about a post apocalyptic America, in which survivors of a plague divided into two sides, one good, in Colorado, and one evil, in Las Vegas.  In the story, a crazy man was heading towards Las Vegas through the desert and a character called The Walking Man was also making his way there.  In the book they talked about ravens and the desert.  As I walked I saw ravens, flapping overhead or standing by the road.  My journey and surroundings made the book come to life.

Up ahead of me Lake Powell shimmered, silver in the sunshine.  It looked vast.  Patches of snow lay dotted around the scrubby desert and two huge columns of steam appeared to rise from the earth, up and up into the clear blue sky.  The columns of steam came from the Navajo Power Station, not far from Page.

I entered Arizona and headed for the Glen Canyon Dam over the Colorado River.  New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ontario, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Utah and now Arizona... only Nevada and California lay ahead.  Behind me were over 3,800 miles and there was only just over a thousand to go.  That thousand miles, though, would take me to the Grand Canyon, Death Valley and The Sierras.