On Any Monday, in Moab...2011

 

On Any Monday, in Moab...

On Monday, August 1, 2011 a U.S. congressional mandate to allow the world to go on spinning was still one day away. If agreement on raising the artificially contrived federal debt ceiling could not be reached by the following day, the sky would fall and the world would revert to being flat. That prospect seemed like a big setback to most conscious humans.

 

However, sixty or seventy Flat-Earthers recently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives seemed to relish in their power to send us all back to the economic Dark Ages. Like petulant children playing with a new chemistry set, “So what”, they said, “If we explode society as we know it?” “Not our fault”, they assured us. “This has been going on for years…” Since I began writing this story, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tanked by over 500 points and then rose by an unreassuring sixty-points the following day.

That evening, rather than dwelling on such morose potentials, I clicked on an unpublicized webpage, which commands a simultaneous view of all nine Moablive.com Utah webcams. Viewing the scene across my own personal energy bridge, I found myself looking through the front office window at the Moab Rim Campark. Suspended there, over Moab's Slickrock Trail I saw a webcam image of a double-rainbow. Looking in turn at each of five webcams in the Spanish Valley, I could see different slices of the scene. Stitching it together in my mind, I watched a summer storm hit Moab and then dissipate on the slopes of the La Sal Range.

If we are to believe what the mainstream media tell us about our world, it is a sad and dangerous place. If we believe our own eyes, we know that our world is a wild and wondrous place, almost begging for our attention. As heat and drought imperil crops and lives throughout the middle section of the U.S. this summer, Moab has recorded several substantial rainstorms. Airflow from the northwest has vied for position with a strong monsoonal flow from the south. During July 2011, storms from the south followed storms from the northwest. The combination kept rivers running high and replenished the local water table.  

In this world, one Moab was located in ancient Syria, near the Dead Sea. The other, manifested more recently in Southeastern Utah. The name “Moab” means “the far country”, and each Moab qualifies for that title. When we are not there to witness events firsthand, forgotten is the beauty of those wild places. On this page I compiled a slideshow of webcam images captured that evening. Even if our economy grinds to a halt, we can live in hope that such beautiful weather events will continue to sweep through the far country each summer, and forever.

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By James McGillis at 04:44 PM | | Comments (0) | Link