We had a lovely daytrip the day before Easter. Full of rock-climbing and cairn-finding and climbing to “the top of the world”.
As we hiked through this strange landscape, it’s beauty so harsh and striking we talked to the kids about the importance of not stepping off the path and damaging the fragile soil (the crust…can’t remember now the name) that is actually full of tiny organisms slowly, slowly building themselves, that one false step can damage years worth of their effort. We stopped along the way when Wendy found a caterpillar and the three joined forces to make it a caterpillar castle out of pebbles and dirt. Scott and I started noticing that some over-exuberant hiker that had come before us had felt it necessary to carve the fish emblem into the slick-rock…over and over again we noticed this unfortunate “litter”. And toward the end of our hike that same someone had carved “Jesus Lives” on the final descent. I made some sort of annoyed sigh toward Scott and commented something along the lines of “Don’t they think that if He wanted His name carved into these rocks He’d have done it Himself?” to which he replied, looking out at the natural arches of rock, orange-hued and marbled by the sun and shadows, the blue sky, the perfect day , “He already did.”
Too bad that overzealous someone didn’t seem to notice the overwhelming evidence. Too bad they thought to vandal such a perfect work.
Beautiful, where did you go?
And some people just don’t get it, do they.