The Fruited Desert
In a well-named place called Fruita, there are orchards bearing peaches, cherries, apples, plums, and pears. Depending on the time of year, the fruit may be fully grown or a mere idea sitting in the center of a flower.
Nothing remarkable about an orchard except it’s in the middle of a desert. The town was originally called Junction, but a place that holds improbability should have a little more zing. It’s a rare example of good rebranding.
The old homestead sells pie made of the orchards’ fruit and honey from the bees that pollinate the trees. People line up before the door opens and depart clutching paper bags with a whimsical sticker over the fold. Most stickers don’t make it past the nearby picnic tables without being broken.
“In maritime terms, “reef” is a place impassable by ships and this enormous stone shelf was considered just as impenetrable by the pioneers”
The reason for the settlements (and thus the orchards) is the river that helped create the only passage alongside a giant stone reef. The area’s recent name was given by settlers at the time the Capitol building was constructed in Washington and there’s a formation that bears a striking resemblance. Thus, the Capitol rock and its Reef backdrop meant the odd name now stuck.
In maritime terms, “reef” is a place impassable by ships and this enormous stone shelf was considered just as impenetrable by the pioneers. In our modern age, pass-ability would seem to exist in the eye of the beholder and the hands of the billionaire. But even with bulldozers and asphalt and everything else now available to re-form the earth, the National Park’s road only extends a third of the length of the reef. The only way to cross West-East is by hoof or by foot and even that requires fortitude beyond most of us.
We got closer to those colorful formations by approaching on horseback. I asked our guide how often those visible configurations change and she said there’s a fall about every hundred years. She would know as she rides that loop almost every day under intimidatingly massive cliffs made no smaller by the height that comes from being astride a horse.
“The salt evaporated in lines thick enough to be visible even now atop a moving horse, under the brim of a hat, on a day with plentiful reflected sun.”
While we wandered the desert on our mounts, she helped us understand more about what grows in the skirts of those eroded cliffs. She pointed to a tree – those are Russian olives. She pointed to a bush – that’s a buffaloberry, used to cure buffalo meat. She pointed to the stream – this river is like Gatorade for the horses because it has dissolved salts.
Those same salts drew thin but obvious lines within the red crumbly mudstone of a formation I love. Not only because its stones were knobbly like a growing child’s knees but also because of its name: the Moenkopi. The geologist we heard speak the previous day said it used to be a shallow ocean and we know that in part because of those lines. The salt evaporated in lines thick enough to be visible even now atop a moving horse, under the brim of a hat, on a day with plentiful reflected sun.
We left the next day. As we drove north, the rock smoothed and the stone’s fold came to an end. The jagged became sanded. There was enough space for soil to settle and establish large swaths of grass. Trees took root, not just the pinyons and junipers with their aged, gnarled trunks and ascetic existence. But trees with soft green leaves and weeping sap not dried to a crisp by the twins of sun and wind.
I was a little sad to leave the orchard oasis, but glad to have seen it in the first breath of spring and in full flower. Part of why it would stick in my memory was because of it’s moniker; sometimes a name means what it should, like an orchard by a river in the middle of the desert.
