Zion National Park is the only major site I have visited at high season, and even then it is just after Labor Day, when most kids are back in school and fewer families are on the road. Germans, however, abound, and I march around to the tune of their Teutonic tones. But since Zion thrusts upward a kind of Wagnerian landscape, my first impulse is to wonder “Why not?”

Then it all starts to seem out of whack, like the place names themselves. “Why am I thinking of Wotan in Zion?” I wonder; then “Why am I thinking of any gods at all?”

The Germans and I aren’t allowed to drive into the park very far – not even those of us with handicap plates – so we board a series of shuttles that run up and down along the Virgin River, dropping us off at places named for the Virgin Mary, the Old Testament patriarchs, and the angels (Mormon and otherwise).

It’s all kind of embarrassing, and I remember having the same reaction when I visited the Grand Canyon. There the buttes in the big gap are named for religious figures ranging from ancient Egypt through the New Testament and on into the Rama cycle of India. Standing in front of these monolithic pieces of earth, first at the canyon and then at Zion, I am unconvinced both up and down.

Up in the sense that the names hardly seem worthy of the rugged force behind the rocks, and down in the sense that the plain solidity of the rocks diminishes the legendary figures for which they are named.

Standing at the Court of the Patriarchs, I can hardly tell Jacob from Isaac. Nothing about one of them seems any more or less Jacob-y than the other, and it’s only on my second outing that I realize that what I thought was Isaac is actually Moroni, named for the bringer of the book of Mormon.

“What would you call them then?” my friend asks me later over dinner. It’s not an unexpected question, and I know what he’s driving at: That these inspiring structures make the people who name them reach for the highest superlatives they know, and that I can hardly improve on it.

Which is true enough.

“Bob?” he asks. “Would you name one of them Bob?”

I assure him I’m not on a revisionist crusade, and frankly I begin to suspect that I wouldn’t name them anything at all. I’d much rather admire them in silence than I would like to christen them (so to speak), but other folks are going to call them something, so why not something grand?

My favorite sites are more descriptive anyway: The Emerald Pools, Weeping Rock. Zion is unusual for Southern Utah in that it is so green and lush, with water everywhere. Standing in the cool, shallow alcove of Weeping Rock, while water drips around me not so much like tears as like a blessed rain, I realize that if I had been an Indian in prehistory, this is where I would have wanted to live. I don’t know what I would have called it. Maybe “home.”