On this long, bright eve of a new year, the blue moonlight casts a neon glow on the snow and I am restless for a new beginning. The media’s incessant cataloging of the triumphs and misfortunes of not just the past year but the entire decade has sparked me to reference my own. But I cannot summon the thoughts hiding in the shadows of my mind to become words on the blank page of my notebook. So I look into my old journals and see fragments of my life before me in random, descriptive scrawlings that sum a cathartic snapshot of my life in the Grand Canyon.
Joan Didion advised to “keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. We forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
Heeding her counsel I page back 10 years to the eve of a new century at the bottom of the Grand Canyon at Phantom Ranch where we partied as if the world might fall apart in 2000.
For some reason it didn’t and I hiked out of the canyon with an urgent calling do something different with my life. I was nearly 30 and moving wheelbarrows of dirt and rocks on the Bright Angel Trail, writing the occasional poem between loads and sharing the bunkhouse by night with several raging alcoholics. I had fallen deeply in love with the Grand Canyon and could not imagine a job outside of its walls, but I seriously wondered if I could continue to brutalize my body in this manner. And then this quote by writer Janisse Ray would not leave me alone:
“What would you do today if you knew, beyond a doubt that you would not fail?”
These words circled me like the ravens catching thermals as I worked. I was afraid of what “success” might look like and dreaded leaving the home I had discovered in this vast, rugged place that offered a steady supply of wondrous moments. I wanted to do more for it than just cleaning waterbars and hauling dirt. What did the world want from me? I seemed to shout this question day after day and listened in earnest for the echo of an answer on canyon walls.
I wondered how people became dedicated to something in this whole wide world and sustained that passion for years and years, lifetimes even. What I did know was in the wild, the stillness of nature consumes us and we come closer to ourselves and everyone we love. I knew I could dedicate my life to preserving this landscape.
I enrolled in graduate school, terrified that I would never be able to choose a path of study that would lead me to gainful employment. I discovered conservation biology and learned that the discipline of botany could grant me time outside in service to plants. I had faith that I would at least make a difference in one small thing besides water drainage on the Bright Angel Trail.
So much has changed since the dawn of the last decade when deep silence and wind accompanied me on the trail: the debilitating reign of the Bush administration, the attack on the World Trade Center, the increasing urgency of climate change, the Iraq war and now Afghanistan coupled with a tanking economy. Even the spark of hope that Obama’s election offered at the beginning of 2009 has grown somewhat dim. My homemade snow globe crafted by a friend from a pimento jar with his presidential face at the bottom, glitter bits falling all around his certain smile leaves me sorrowful at the enormous obstacles we must overcome to create positive change.
On this bright night I sit for a rare, solitary moment and stare out into the near future, unspoiled and placid like the surface of a lake. I get ready to dive into the glassy water of the new decade ahead, swimming into it newborn, unmarked and ready for anything we want to make of it.
