Painted mountains, trees of jewels Special

Mr. Canvas, my sixth-grade teacher, never knew how much I enjoyed his travel anecdotes. He would show us films of his vacations weaving personal anecdotes of American history and geography into his lessons.

As a sixth-grader, I believed it was my job to talk in class, flirt with the girls and answer questions incoherently when caught daydreaming, a frequent state of semi-consciousness that made me an easy target. Nevertheless, I listened intently when Mr. Canvas talked about his travel adventures. Some of his stories were about visits to the Petrified Forest in Arizona’s Painted Desert. He told how dinosaurs once roamed there and how ancient Indian tribes wandered the desert and made it their home. He spoke of ongoing discoveries of dinosaur bones, Indian artifacts and incredible fossils, and how the entire region was a geological storybook on time. Pictures of the Painted Forest in our text books could not fascinate and color the mind like Mr. Canvas’ travel tales. Mr. Canvas was a good teacher who used his own travel experiences and adventures to teach his students about our world. He told how petrified forests that sparkle like diamonds had resurfaced on the desert floor after millions of years and illustrated the size of Arizona tarantulas with his hands like a fisherman measuring his catch. I still remember being unable to disrupt the class for as long as an hour at a time while fixated on some anecdote about enduring flash-floods while hiking and tent-camping in Arizona deserts. As Leigh and I drove through the Painted Desert east of Holbrook, Arizona, I thought about Mr. Canvas for the first time in years. We stopped at every chance to take photos and gaze out across vast colorful scenes. Erosion, water and silica over millions of years have morphed trees of ancient forests into enormous desert gems. Each year, bone-diggers and archaeologists announce new findings as the desert gives up new evidence of life through erosion caused by water that once filled the expansive void. The Painted Desert is named for the many hues of color ranging from lavenders to shades of gray with vibrant colors of red, orange and pink. The austere phenomenon meanders for 160 miles, ending near the Grand Canyon’s south rim. The barren hills, buttes and canyon walls look like moonscape, but with vivid rainbows of color stretching as far as the eye can see. It is definitely cool to finally lay eyes on the places depicted in old geography books long put away. Seeing such wonders of our world up close is far more fascinating than studying them from the pages of text books. Perhaps the only thing as intriguing as actually being there was listening to Mr. Canvas describe Arizona's Painted Desert while showing slides of his own visits on an old 8mm projector back in 1962.