Utah 12 begins near Bryce Canyon National Park and ends, 125 miles later, near Capitol Reef National Park. It is a road for slow driving, with inviting stops that offer wide views over colorful sandstone formations, deeply carved canyons, some with lazy creeks that give life to trees and shrubs, a bit of green that lives precariously in this arid land. Some canyons accept the road itself for a while. The curvy road is not heavily travelled, at least it was not in September 1999 when I was there.

Utah 12 is a friendly road. It lets you take part in the wilderness without threatening you, because it, the road, is there to carry you back to civilization. You hardly ever think of the eras when wilderness was threatening. In those days, you better shared the experience of your fear, shared the danger to achieve a brittle security. You either crossed this wilderness with others, or you didn’t cross it.

But no longer. Utah 12 is a civilized undertaking.

2. Romantic Bryce and Bryce, the Farmer
The towers of Red Canyon at the southern end of Utah 12 prepare you for Bryce Canyon, which is actually not a canyon, but a cliff with colorful sandstone formations filling the foreground. The sandstone has eroded into shapes that challenge your imagination. Beyond, you glance over a fertile valley until you meet far-away cliffs. All the colorful towers and various formations of Bryce Canyon’s fame would be much less beautiful without the wideness of the view, the distance. What is this beauty? Does it come from the rocks?

The farmer Bryce who lived in the fertile valley and who gave Bryce Canyon its name was once asked what he thought of the place. He supposedly answered: "It is a hell of a place to lose a cow in." He lived in a different world. And you realize: the beauty of the place, the beauty of the wilderness is a class-phenomenon.

The beauty we see today did not exist for the farmer Bryce. His>education had not included Romanticism, the movement that discovered the beauty of nature. Unlike the tourist ambulating along the rim, looking out to the distances, he did not have leisure time. It was people with leisure time, people who had other people to look after the cows, plow the fields, weave and sew the garments, it was the people who invented Romanticism more than 200 years ago who transformed the fear of a powerful God into the enjoyment of beauty in nature.

For the Romantics, mountains no longer were impediments to be circumvented but objects of awe. The word "awe" is of Scandinavian origin and originally meant fear. Today, "awe" is a word we associate with religion: the awe of God is the fear of power, the ultimate power over life and death.

Romanticism historically reverted to religion, disputing the rationalism of Enlightenment. This can be healthy as long as the powerful are enlightened. Yet Romanticism, the cult of genius and of irrationality, without rational balance, can be fearfully destructive. Awe is tamed in beauty but it still contains its fear, hidden fear, hidden danger. Beauty compels you out of the ordinary. The ordinary is security. The beauty of the wilderness lies in its not being civilization. Without the counterbalance of civilization, the wilderness would be frightful, and frightful it can become at any moment.

3. Fear and Beauty
When my eyes take in the stony and lonely vastness from the high points on Utah 12, my car is near me, the car that has brought me and will transport me out of that stony desert, on the paved highway that is Utah 12, burning substances derived from beings that lived millions of years ago. No longer do I have to walk the arid desert, sweating during the day, shuddering at night, expecting an enemy at every turn. Civilization made my being here possible: the workers who made my car, the workers who built the road. Civilization is security in industrial society, with its heritage of exploitation and violence.

And yet: I enjoy the view with, and as a sense of, freedom, the freedom of distance from civilization, away from other human beings, nobody telling me what to do. The freedom from civilization is also a freedom by civilization. That is where the awe and the fear have gone: into the contradictions of life. But there they are. Life’s very own contradiction, death, is there. Seas once existed where the sandstone is now, seas full of living beings, gone now, as we will be gone. And yet plants, lizards, life springs from the rocks while vultures float overhead, waiting for death.

Freedom in this great country of ours. Won from tribes who did not understand that soil is property. Settled by Europeans, Chinese, Japanese who fled the narrowness of their homelands for the freedom of acquiring property that had eluded them in their homelands.

This land of the free, busy building more and more prisons. This great power capable of sowing death everywhere for the sake of freedom. This same land lets me have this view, my freedom. Mine?

Religion, before it was civilized by competing with civilization meant the fear of the gods who held the power of death. Modern religion derives its power by promising to make you feel good and not noticing the hypocrisy. Facing the contradictions of life means accepting paradoxes.

Perfectionism kills. Rationality and Romanticism. Life and death. Uncovering the fear hidden by civilization and not being overcome by it. Perhaps that was the "it" of Utah 12.