The Grand Canyon swallowed me whole. It was as if one day I descended beneath the rim and emerged more myself. Being outside for me has always been like buying back the unhappy moments in my life, minute by minute. As a child I sought refuge exploring the wilderness of my Vermont back yard. Today even the smallest escape to the forest or canyons can restore my sense of faith in the world.
There is something about rock and rushing water, intense sun and bitter cold that feels like redemption. Like a confession, I am released. I am granted permission to be removed from the impatient pace of humankind. Distressing thoughts float away as ravens call out to me as if to a neighbor met by chance on the street; their black wings brush against empty spaces in the wind, against a late afternoon indigo sky. My feet negotiate the steep switchbacks of Kaibab Limestone as I try to understand how I might tailor my life around a vast ditch in the earth. Like Jonah who lived inside a whale, I must find a way to live inside its walls or at the edge of this abyss.
For most of my 20’s I staved off big career decisions by making a living with jobs that had definitive end dates and carried me season to season. When I landed at the Grand Canyon I felt compelled to dig in. Beginning with the shovel on trail crew, I discovered not only a spectacular place, but also an unfolding map to myself. I was granted the freedom to explore an immense wilderness by living inside it and making it a home.
But I wonder, are we unfaithful to the landscapes that created us when we relocate from east to west, prairie to mountains, rolling green hills to rugged canyons and deserts? Or does our loss become powerful, deepening our connection with the new places we make for ourselves?
I traded the lush, mossy deciduous forests of my Vermont homeland for the sparse beauty of the desert. My yearning for my childhood landscape is a mixture of my parents’ pasts. For my father, the loss of his prairie roots occupies a place in his psyche, a dreamy darkness that both engages and disappoints him. And my mother’s blazing will was fueled by the defeated mining landscape of Franklin, N.J., where women hung laundry behind tiny houses in silence, choking on emotions they could not express. My parents now cling to the beauty and safety of their Vermont community with a fierceness only now can I begin to understand.
Yet, I do not live in the same world my parents did when they were in their 30’s. The community to which I have devoted myself is not one that passes the peace on Sundays and hosts basement church suppers. We share fellowship on trails, in narrow canyons, and in the intimacy of the river kitchen, bound by our connection to the fate of a wild landscape. I dare myself to be faithful to this place, like a marriage, where knowledge and commitment deepen with time. As the years pass, I find reasons to keep giving and I encounter abundant belief in a future that is unmade.
Who do I want to be? What does this world want from me? These abiding questions loom over me like dark storm clouds as I dump wheelbarrow loads of dirt on the Kaibab Trail. I dream about what surprises my life might hold, like the dark bellies of monsoon clouds hold great secrets. They rain down on me in the dusty heat of July like a piñata full of candy. I get down on my hands and knees and pick them up, dust them off, and put them in my pocket for later.
