By Carolyn Keogh

Close to the end, a holistic nurse from whom my dad had received great comfort gifted him two origami paper cranes, hand folded in patterned paper and deposited on his hospital tray: a final gesture of care. She shared that she folded them while reflecting on hopes for his next phase. Before his passing, I’d booked my own bucket list trip, layering overlapping if incongruent hopes, optimistic he’d be well and stable by the time to travel.

Utah: a place of geologic time, where human existence becomes a wide expanse, the fabric of landmarked events and moments spread out, the space between threads widening to further imperceptible reaches. At the Arches Visitor Center, a man points to an infographic and asks, “How can you even comprehend 300 million years?” In front of the park’s display case, he grasps to understand how a millennia of salt, gravel, and sediment fashioned the earth before us, windows and arches alien and everlasting. I share his confoundment.

In Salt Lake City’s Temple Square the scale shrinks. I learn about venerated 200-year-old prophecies distributed on disappearing gold tablets, paradoxes of belief spanning a mere 20 decades. Church museum artifacts are presented in silent vitrines, silver spoons impossibly polished, 1800s wagon wheels miraculously and suspiciously intact. Such a little length to aim for spiritual legitimacy: the scale of human time imperceptibly small and blown out of proportion.

At an edge of the Great Salt Lake, Robert Smithson’s hired workers take 6 days to build a concentric jetty, rocks extending from the shore into pink and auburn water in 1970. By the time of my visit, the waters have receded, a drought plaguing the lake. A further artifact of human intervention. More than 100 yards away, red brine shimmers in the distance. But the jetty sits on dry earth, sand collecting on its rocks’ edges. Walking to the center of the spiral, the surroundings are glacial. Mammoth mountains on all sides appear again and again. Following the jetty allows a return, repeated views are a benefit of walking the circle. I walk it twice, sitting in the center thinking of my father. He won’t hear of the trip, or learn of future droughts and storms, but the Salt Lake in the far distance—beyond the red salt and sediment—reminds me of his eyes’ own blue hue.

At the Tracy Aviary, the oldest freestanding aviary in the US, confined keas and peacocks walk in circles in their cages. The aviary opened in 1938, 94 years after Mormonism’s Joseph Smith died and something around two hundred ninety-nine million years after salt formations created arches in the fabric of cliffs outside Moab. In their enclosures, owls, toucans, and vultures perch silently, their claws and beaks otherworldly and prehistoric, the slow thrust of evolution bringing them to a sort of stasis. A duck paces a fence perimeter, mindfully tracing my movements back and forth.

A guide says in the ‘70s a flamingo escaped. The bird, aptly named Pink Floyd, had uncut wings and would break free again and again, eventually making it routine. Each season he’d migrate north to the Great Salt Lake, joining a flock of geese in their travels. I imagine the group, a haphazard skein with one rose-colored outsider, flapping just northward every year in formation, the space between their wings varying in speed and distance, a clumsy cluster up close. But from a distance, a seemingly organized V, pushing through air in a graphic gash, operating against gravity.

Like the paper cranes, folded with the meditative attention of the Aviary’s own thoughtful fowl, going through metamorphoses over time. Like the birds, the rocks, religion: my father, operating on a different scale of time now. Neither human nor geologic.

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Carolyn Keogh is a writer and art historian who explores the intersections of queer identity, spirituality, and the performance of womanhood. Her poetry and nonfiction has been published by Midway Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Chronogram, Moonstone Arts Center Anthologies, Rip Rap (CSU Long Beach), and others. She lives in Hudson, NY, with her wife and her dog.