Whispers

In March of 2008, a friend and I made the long haul from Omaha to the Grand Canyon, via Breckenridge and then Durango, arriving as a snowstorm pushed dramatically up over the canyon wall, blanketing the rim. I strained to see into the expanse as the waves of precipitation rolled past us, the sun intermittent, fighting to burn through. For scarce seconds, the inner canyon could be seen, the river a distant sliver amongst the riddle of buttes. We stayed in a room perhaps a hundred feet from the edge, and during the night I rose and tiptoed outside, across the snow that had fallen. The canyon was silent, eerie, perfect.

The next day we took the rarely-traveled 89A bypass up through Marble Canyon to Lee's Ferry, nestled along the Colorado just downstream of the towering walls at the end of Glen Canyon, before pushing on to the remote Wire Pass Trailhead on the Utah/Arizona border. It was almost warm out on the hike into Brimstone Gulch - the world's longest slot canyon - wading through shady, near-freezing waist-deep pools before reversing our way, detouring south over hills of rock, sand, and sparse brush towards The Wave, a rock formation in an area known as Coyote Buttes. We trekked cross-country, across undulating sandstone, past all manner of surreal rock formations and sandstone patterns, finally believing ourselves to have found it nestled atop a hillside. Plains stretched out to the east, dotted by cartoonishly round rock outcroppings. As the daytime waned, we negotiated a slope a bit too steep for comfort, back down a different direction and scampered down a streambed and back to the car, driving on to Kanab in the dark to find a hotel. It was St. Patrick's Day.

It was good news, bad news with the innkeeper, who informed us there were no bars in Kanab, but gave us a room next to two girls that had just checked in - probably the hotel's only other customers. We went over and introduced ourselves. They welcomed us in and shared beer they had brought and we all watched the World's Ugliest Dog competition on TV. I tried not to laugh as much as I really wished to. We chatted and got to know each other. We staged a picture of them laying in the bed with Samuel, our mannequin head, surrounded by empty beer bottles. We laughed some more. They were headed for the Grand Canyon. It was the opposite of every St. Patrick's day ever, and it was great.

I had discovered in mid-December that I was too late to reserve us permits to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon that March. It was something I had wanted to do since my grandmother had died. The place had been special to her and I wanted to understand, to feel what she had felt. We had gone, anyways, because my friend had never been there, and because I was in love with the road, and in love, already, with the west I had seen, and the idea of the Great American West, pastoral and free. There was no place too far.

I had also run into a well-traveled acquaintance at a friend's party that past fall and had found out that, in her job with the NPS, she had been stationed at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. I sent her a short email when I got the news about the permits, asking her advice for other places we might go in the area. She sent me a wonderfully long response, overflowing with suggestions for both hikes and food. She suggested the Escalante river area, Brimstone Gulch and Lee's Ferry, at the other end of the Paria river canyon. We could, she said, hike through from the one to the other, but it'd be "a marathon trip." She told us to skip Page. She called Boulder, Utah, "heaven." We were on her tour! On we drove towards Escalante.

The ranger at the interagency visitor's center convinced us not to hike the Escalante river - too muddy in the spring - instead suggesting Coyote Gulch. "Is it as scenic?" She let out a mild chuckle at the question, then gave us directions. We drove Hole in the Rock road until we were bored, until we were sick of it, further yet. We stopped at the Hurricane Wash trailhead and set Samuel in the window. We hiked the wide, sandy wash. Over miles, it closed up into a shallow canyon, occasionally slotting up. It was just the beginning. A stream eventually came in from the north, after which the river meanders started cutting into the canyon walls. The progression was inexorable. Before long there were 500-foot high ceilings of rock hanging over our heads as the river twisted back and forth, down through the sandstone, at once dramatic and serene.

It was much colder at night than we had planned for, much colder than was appropriate for our sleeping bags. I didn't sleep much. It didn't really matter. I couldn't believe what we had seen. We didn't make it down to the river - so what? There was so much - I could hardly comprehend it. It felt, even then, like I had discovered some wonderful secret, like my luck was not just excessive but conspicuous. Walking out the next day, I felt the sort of joy that overflows into grief - that bittersweetness, born of the knowledge that I had missed out on this wonderful thing for all the years of my life, until then. We finished the long slog back out the sandy wash, the sun beating down, the way out so much harder than the way in - was it really more than a trivial slope we were climbing? It felt like it. The temperature swings in the desert, where there was little humidity, were tremendous. There was a note on the car referencing Samuel. They knew he was from Iowa. But that's another story...

We drove out to the end of the road, to Hole in the Rock itself, my car negotiating what ceased to be a road, what was merely a path over the raw, slickrock terrain - severe approaches and departures, nerve-racking obstacles. It was evening when we walked from the parking area up to Hole in the Rock, our first sight of Lake Powell on this trip and my first sight of the lake in five years. It felt, at the time, like half a lifetime, as if I had last left it expecting, perhaps, that I might never see it again. No, I suspect it was having dreamt of it so many times in the intervening years which made this moment powerful. Is there a word in the English language capable of conveying the way a person or a place or a time, can  remain so unresolved, can unconsciously pull on us? Or, the way we can see something we know, and yet, having ourselves changed since then, have that thing conjure something significant of who we then were?

We departed after the sun, finding a roadside campsite not far away. You see, out upon Hole in the Rock road, everything appears flat, until you stop moving. I had never seen, or dreamed, such a landscape as this area suddenly becomes at "human scale", on foot, wandering in any direction. What was this place? All I knew was that the time I had spent walking through the sand, through the scrub, across the rock, had felt right - like I belonged there. In the night, a tremendous wind woke us, suddenly flattening the tent down against us. We lay, unmoving in our sleeping bags, for a long moment before either of us dared speak. Before and after that phantom wind, the silence of the nighttime was complete.

We drove past Calf Creek the next day, up through Boulder for lunch, back to Grand Junction, and in time, back to Denver, back to Omaha. I went back home, back to work, preoccupied, utterly infatuated by what I had seen. It was spring. I seem to remember being happy, in general, that year, and hopeful. I was confused, only, about what I wanted my future to be.

I think the trip inspired me in that regard, shook me out of my stasis. This was before I had gone part-time at work to return to school that fall, before I had gone to school in Europe that winter. I am so glad I did those things, as I would later repeat to myself endlessly, "before it was too late."

People aren't good at remembering who they were "then," whenever "then" may be. It means little, by itself, to say I drank less coffee and more beer. How did I think, and what about? It takes a lot of effort for me to reconstruct, even generally, what must have been going on in my head. I had different worries than now. I was a different person. To a large degree, it has been lost to the past, and I will never really know. And, time will only widen the gulf.

I wish I had done a better job then of recording what I was going through. It's unfortunate, because I have kept a journal or blog for most of my life since I was fifteen. The majority of those things, though, have been lost to the past - the Word document I kept in high school; the webpage I journaled on in the early 2000s, countless half-written stories that attempted to capture some moment, some feeling, some sense of who I then was.

I have gone back to Southern Utah many times, and have had many wonderful experiences there. None of them will equal that trip in 2008, though, when I witnessed the snowstorm at the Grand Canyon, and discovered southern Utah. I was inspired, and my eyes were suddenly opened, and hiking - as a means not only of exploration but a manifestation of freedom - quickly became a passion. I return to those places because I miss them, and though they bring me joy, the feeling of serendipity has gone away, as it is apt to do. Today, a whisper of it returned. I grew immediately quiet, trying to listen, trying to return to that first time.

I try, always, to remain grateful for the experiences I have had.