After Grand Canyon

Well friends,

Since we last talked, I actually did get a camping spot at Mather Campground, inside Grand Canyon National Park. I just walked up to the window, without an advance reservation or anything and asked the ranger lady about vacancies. She said, “sure, last week was spring break, but now its kind of emptied out.” Well, there was a place for me all right, but the place seemed far from “emptied out” to me…

Thinking my luck might hold, I reported to the Backcountry Information Office and was given a place in Saturday’s walk-up line—number 8. I reported, as ordered, at 8:00 a.m. Saturday, and what do you know, the guy says, sure, you want to spend one night in the Canyon? How about the Bright Angel Campground? I says sure, why not? So he gives me a campground permit and I am good to go for Sunday morning.

So I walked around the rim trail and read poems and Buddhist books and wrote a little letter sending some receipts to Tommie. And made dinner, and read some more and slept in the back of my truck. The overnight low was 21 degrees, and when I woke up to light my burner and make coffee there was frozen condensation inside the roof of my camper shell. But old B.A. had been toasty warm all night in his Marmot Helium goose down ultralight bag. You simply cannot beat goose down. It is the warmest stuff in the universe if you keep it reasonably dry. Like laying down and going to sleep on the very clouds in heaven.

Sunday morning after coffee and yoga and breakfast and packing up and leaving the truck at the Backcountry Information Office parking lot, I caught the Hiker Express Shuttle to the South Kaibab Trailhead. Along with several other hiker groups, a Boy Scout troop, and other folks who were walking down to stay at the Phantom Ranch accommodations, and whose gear was being carried down by mule train.

When I arrived at the South Kaibab Trailhead, I shouldered my 24.6 lb pack, picked up my trekking poles, and started down; seven miles almost straight down. It was a bone-jarring descent but worth it. To see the Grand Canyon from down inside it is perhaps the single most spectacularly beautiful geological formation in the world. I couldn’t stop craning my neck at the color and form all around me. And the Colorado River below is purely emerald green and looks awfully inviting when you are hot.

Three and a half hours later I arrived at Bright Angel Campground, beside Bright Angel Creek. I made camp, read, napped, washed up, made dinner, meditated, read some more, went to an evening program given by the ranger girl Maddie, “Geology of the Grand Canyon.” By then it was 8:30 at night and I was dead tired. I slept under no canopy but the stars, which were luminous and innumerable for as long as I could keep my eyes open. The rushing of the creek drowned out any potential sleep disturbances. I slept happily.

At 5:00 a.m. my alarm went off as I intended. I propped myself up using my backpack as a pillow, set a titanium cup of water on the burner next to me, made my coffee in bed and watched the canyon wake up. Saving breakfast for later, I packed up and was walking the River Trail on the way to Bright Angel Trail by 6:00. It is good to get far up the canyon before the sun heats it up. There can be a 20-30 degree temperature difference from the rim to the floor during the late spring and summer months, and the day I walked in, Sunday April 19th, was the first hot day of the 2009 season on the canyon floor—85 degrees. Monday the 20th, as I was walking out, the expected temperature on the floor was to be 95. I wanted to be on the rim by noon. Nine and a half miles and 6 hours later, I was. See pictures.

When I travel alone I often delight in splendid, thought-provoking solitude. Yet I also suffer loneliness from time to time and am tormented by feelings of being cut off or unmoored from people and familiar places and activities I love.

These negative feelings occur most powerfully at the time of day we once knew in this country as Cocktail Hour. It is coincidentally the very time of day that Tommie and I have kept set aside for meeting and reconnecting at the end of the work day. Every day, for over twenty years now, we sit and have a drink and I delight in hearing about her day and telling her a about mine. I embellish my stories and she laughs at my jokes and I delight in her company; I miss it and there is an empty feeling that wells up near to the point of panic. “What am I doing?! Everything I love and treasure (well, except for high mountains and deep canyons) is back in Austin, Texas! And I am here surrounded by Freds at what is basically a small tourist town on the lip of the country’s most visited national park in frigging Arizona!

I cope with these feelings by paying them bare attention; just acknowledging them and watching my reactions as much as possible without judgment or being freaked out by them. And I remember that I haven’t really been gone that long; I speak to Tommie nearly every day by cell phone. When I remember to pay bare attention to the negative energy And, I remember that it is basically a long two-day drive back to her from just about anywhere in the country. , and I recall the principles the panicked feelings of being unmoored recede.

And yet while thinking about my next destination—heading further north to Zion National Park; whether or not to end my long-standing, boycott of Lake Powell (or anything having to do with Glen Canyon Dam), and so on, I realize that I am actively fighting the urge to declare an unscheduled “trip break,” jump onto I-40 East from Flagstaff, and beat a line back to my baby’s door. After two weeks of my own private meditation retreat, maybe it’s time to go home, for just a week or so, and reconnect.

“Up on Cripple Creek she sends me
When I spring a leak, she mends me
I don’t have to speak cause she defends me
A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one”

bap