Grand Canyon: Eight Days and Counting

Not exactly, but you get the idea!

The clouds over the mountains have morphed from billowing white--shape-shifting, growing, traveling morning clouds--to layers of gray.  Rain is already falling over Rocky.  I can see the sheets of white-mist covering distant peaks as if films of plastic have been dropped out there, not quite obscuring my view, but blurring it.  It is raining on the hikers trekking upward.  It is raining on boulderers carrying elk saddles.  It is raining on climbers dangling from ropes anchored into granite.  It is raining on the Rangers and volunteers working in the Park.  It is raining on the funny looking bull elk with their shreds of velvet hanging from antlers that are red raw in spots.  It is raining on cows and their this year’s calves just growing out of their spotted coats.  The rain is coming closer now and I must remember to bring my iPad in.  It is strapped to the deck railing, where it is faithfully shooting pictures every five seconds.  A time lapse of the changing light and morphing clouds.

I’m writing on my computer.  This morning, from Canada where she is attending the Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada with her dear friend, Pam called me.  They are having a fine time and have had lots to do and talk about.  Later on, she texted me...instant messages complete with photographs of Pat dancing, trying on a feathered mask, and then a beautiful water color of a raven.  I say this only because in one week, we will be without any of those electronics.  We are going to raft the Colorado River, down the Grand Canyon for seven days.  No computer.  No iPad.  No iPhone...and cameras only as long as batteries last.

It has been a summer with much to think about, talk over, argue some, and work through.  I haven’t thought much about this river trip.  That’s nothing unusual for me.  Pam plans, refines, reroutes, gets tickets.  I pack for both of us, and then the trip opens before me like some magic carpet ride.  A book has been lying on one of our tables for some time.  Writing Down the River, photographed and produced by Kathleen Jo Ryan.  I gave it to Pam for her birthday in 1998...part of a “someday we’ll go...” and then I forgot it.  Pam didn’t.  I have neglected looking at much of the information sent to us by Western River, our rafting company.  I haven’t opened the gift book at all.  Why?  I don’t know.  Other things to think about, work through, do.

Our rafting companions, four others, send occasional emails about what gear we should have, what shoes, what clothes.  Last week I started to think about all of that.  I’m the packer, after all.  There has been obsessive festering over how one bathes on the trip, how one pees in the night, what to do if you really “gotta go” when the raft is on the river.  People we know who have done this trip or others like it, have given volumes of advice.  “Sarongs are essential for bathing.”  “Only wear long pants and long sleeved shirts.”  “Bring hiking shoes.”  “I only wore sandals.”  “Take a fleece for cold nights.”  “Get one of those female pee devices.”   The only time I have spent thinking about this trip is time I’ve spent listening to worries about peeing, pooping, and bathing.  Fortunately, two of the people we work with on Fridays, one a Ranger, one a volunteer said, “Relax.  Don’t bring much of anything.  The rafting people have all that other stuff worked out and so will you once you’re on the river.”  I remembered hiking the Inka Trail and for four days, without a bath, I wore the same clothes.  Yep. Never changed (except underwear).  I hiked, ate dinner, slept in the same outfit I started in.  I was pretty comfortable.  I was very happy.

This morning because it is quiet, and the coffee tastes especially good, I pick up Writing Down the River.  I don’t know why I hadn’t really looked at it all summer. Whatever my reasoning, this morning is the time and the place.  

     ...I can’t help wondering how many ways water shapes the body, 

how body shapes desire, 

     how desire moves water, how water stirs color…

how a stream that carves through rock is shaped by rock…

the river is celadon with red silt mushrooming up 

like boiled, unspooling brains.

    The shadows sink.  They lie on green water.  

Then the whole canyon goes black…*

     Gretel Ehrlich, Foreward.  

     
   When life rolls boulders in your road, be the river…roll on, seek new ways to go forward...BBeach

           The Grand Canyon has been--and continues to be--formed by cataclysmic events as well as millions of momentary changes.  Still the whole is ever-present:  changing yet undiminished. 
I ask myself:  Why are we afraid of dramatic or devastating change in our own lives?  In ourselves?  Is it possible to recast what we perceive to be negative as something beautiful, something sculpting our lives, our psyches, our souls?  Aren’t we, like the Canyon, made new again and again, yet always infinitely whole?  Kathleen Jo Ryan, Introduction.

I sit weeping quietly, tears running down my cheeks.  This is why we, Pam and I, wanted to go to the river.  This is what we both need:  to be split-open, doused, reawakened, soul-shocked.  I am packing--lightly.

*Apologies…this was not written as a poem, but as prose.  However, this seems to be the only way to get the text to read correctly here.