The fog came up to the road
Fog does not arrive at Bryce the way weather usually arrives. It does not blow in. It comes up off the ground, from somewhere below the rim, until the air is the same color as the rock and then the same color as nothing. By nine that night the only thing in the campground with an edge was the tail of the truck in the next site, and even that was going.
We had driven in that morning in rain. The visitor center was the first stop, because Big and Little had decided on the way up that they were going to finish their Junior Ranger packets, and they wanted the booklets in hand before we did anything else. The ranger handed over two and a pencil each. Big found a table by the window and started. Little needed help with one page and then did the rest of it herself.
By the time we went back outside, the amphitheater had gone. Not dark, not hidden behind a hill. Gone, the way a word is gone when you look away from it.
We drove the rim anyway. There is one road and a handful of pullouts and nothing else to do in the rain, and standing at a railing in a wet coat is at least a thing that is happening. At Inspiration Point the whole bowl opened for maybe forty seconds. Enough to see that it goes down, and that the hoodoos are not standing on anything — they are what is left when everything else came off. Then the rain came across the gap and it was a white wall with a railing in front of it.
Bryce Point was the same in the other order. Nothing, then a hole in the weather, then a view so wide it made the park map look wrong. Somewhere out there was Rainbow Point, eighteen miles south, and the whole Grand Staircase, and the five cliffs that stack up to the sky in that country. We saw a piece of it for about a minute and then the hole closed.
We gave up on the view and went to the lodge, which was warm and full of people with the same idea. There is a pizza counter beside it, and we got hot chocolate and sat at a table by the window. Big finished his packet there. Little finished hers, then went back through it to check her answers, which is either diligence or a sign that she has met a Junior Ranger before. Nobody was in a hurry to go back out.
The other thing we lost to the weather was the sky. Bryce is an International Dark Sky Park, and on a clear night the Milky Way comes up over the amphitheater hard enough to throw a shadow. We had a Night Sky booklet in the bag and two kids who would have stayed up for it. Instead there was fog on the glass and a lamp post somewhere out past the next site, and we went to bed.
Then the short drive to the campground, and the fog, and the end of the day. Everyone was tired and wet. The rain drummed on the roof for a while after we turned the lights off, and then it was just the fog, and the fog does not make any sound at all.
The morning was no better. We packed up in a mist that soaked everything we had not already put away and drove out, north toward Kanab, and the rain let go somewhere around the state line.
Kanab was dry. If you have spent a day and a night inside a cloud, a dry town is a physical relief, like taking off a boot. We found the Halloween stuff early — the store on the main street had gone all in, and Little took her time choosing — and let the day be about that. Big and Little went out at dusk and worked the blocks until their bags were heavy. At seven the rain caught up with us and the street emptied in about ten minutes. They came in soaked, counted everything on the floor, and did not mind at all. It was one of their favorite holidays and they had not missed it.
In the morning we drove north out of town, up into Angel Canyon, to Best Friends. The sanctuary holds up to 1,600 animals on any given day — dogs, cats, birds, horses, pigs, and rabbits — and one of its areas is the Bunny House, which is where we had signed up.
Erika and Big took the shift. They worked through the rabbit enclosures with a cart and a hose: sift the litter, scrub the surfaces, reset the hay. Each enclosure is twenty-five square feet or more, which sounds small until you are the one leaning into it. Big did not complain, which surprised me a little and pleased me more than I let on.
Little was too young for that shift. So she and I ran errands in town — the hardware store, the grocery, the kind of list that piles up when you have been living in a van in the rain. We got back at lunch, ate with a member of the staff, and then we were on the road again.
The road to Zion goes west and then north, and the rain had finally stopped. The rock came up on the right the way things look when you have been promised them for a week: bright, dry, impossible. We had not seen that color once at Bryce.
Where this happened: Bryce Canyon National Park