Windwalker's Mountain Post: River: Into the Grand Canyon 6, Reflections

We have been off the river for 37 days. Every time I close my eyes, I see the river, a campsite, canyon walls. It amazes me. I listen to the sound track I created in memory of the trip, and I am taken right back to the river. I feel the water surge, the boat lift, then crash down on a rapid unnamed in my mind. I hear Annie's laugh. See Lee's smile. Wish, as the full moon eclipsed this morning, that I was back in a rock-strewn wash in a slot canyon, watching the moon through a break in the canyon rim.

Off the river, I have time to reflect on parts of the trip that grabbed my attention but defied immediate exploration. As we floated downriver, nearing the site where we would find potsherds exposed by recent flash floods, I recall Travis' explanation about why the prepuebloan peoples are no longer called Anasazi. That name, used by white people, actually means "enemy ancestors." Most tribes call themselves names that simply mean, "The People." I think about the right and yearning we all have to name and define ourselves.

As I walked on the good, red dirt of an ancient village, picking up pottery remnants, I wondered if thousands of years from now there will be anything of me that the then people will find. Will they wonder about our people? What will those future ones make of our culture? We will be the primitives then. The backward ones. The ones who were not advanced enough to live in peace and care for our planet in a lasting way. I will leave no potsherds, or marks that someone might discover. I make words, mostly. Words that will drift and fade, electronically vaporizing in some not so distant time.

Pam and I have spent a good amount of time talking about what it was like for each of us to be on the river for seven days. We were certainly pampered in that we never had to prepare meals or paddle. Yet the trip did take us out of our comfort zone: living with grit in our teeth and drawers; sometimes sizzling hot, at other times chilled to the bone; plunging and bucking down rapids; bathing in fifty-degree water; sinking knee-deep in mud.

Seven days off the river I wrote: It is fine to have had this experience. To listen to the river at night, to lie under the stars with no tent and no blanket, receiving a shower of blessings falling from distant stars and the moon. I think it is good for us to remember that we can still "tough it out." This is a good thing…to be jerked from our everyday, easy routines and left mostly dependent on our ability to cope with the extraordinary at 67 and almost 70. Would we do this again? Pam says no, once was enough. At day 37 off the river, I think, perhaps…

Actually being on and in the Colorado River brought the whole issue of water very up close and personal (up my nose and in my ears as well). Due to the demands we make on this great and mighty river that has tossed us about like so much flotsam, it discharges into the Gulf of California as a relative trickle. We humans have done a great deal of harm to the land and water on which we depend for our very survival. We wonder what will be the world that our grandkids and their children inherit?

Denise Chavez's invocation from Writing Down the River:

A Litany for Sentient Beings

Blue sky. Bless me. Wall of rock. Bless me. Animal friends: Red Ant, Blue Heron, Raven, Bighorn Sheep, Chuckwalla, Canyon Rattlesnake and Spiny Lizards. Bless me. Plant friends: Desert Willow, Brittlebush, Snakeweed. Bless me. This is your home. I am merely a visitor. Bless me, be gentle with me. Let me pass through your beauty unharmed. Let me pass through your world not harming any as I go.

Weeks ago, I began this blog with thoughts from its first recorded explorer, John Wesley Powell. I will conclude with the words of Theodore Roosevelt, who loved this land and realized that we must treasure and preserve it:

"I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature [the Grand Canyon] as it now is. I hope you will not do... anything...to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."