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The Grand Canyon If we want to feel huge, significant, exalted, we go to the last of the few remaining wild mountaintops in this country and let the high winds press against us. But if we dare to realize who and what we are, the tininess of our myths, we can descend into the lower places. We can pass beneath cathedrals of sun-shafted old-growth forests or descend even deeper, into temples of geology and time, the greatest of which in this country is the Grand Canyon. Looking upon that rent in the Colorado Plateau, you know that you are looking at a living force, one of the greatest ever, a force that is not the speed and endurance of the river, nor the great fractured respirations of the Earth—the millennia of banded, multicolored strata—but time itself. The first white visitors to this land of the Hualapai, Havasupai, and Paiute knew nothing of the Colorado River's thunderous nature beyond what they could see or hear around the next bend. The one-armed Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell brought three boats and five men completely through the canyon in 1869. They had bucketloads of courage, but fear, too, describing the canyon's sheer walls (with the river just 80 feet wide in places) as "portals of the infernal region." Now that the safe passages have been shown for you—and perhaps, as well, now that so many of our truly wild, truly reckless landscapes have been boxed in, leveled, cut up, or erased—you are less likely to consider the canyon the portals of the netherworld than the opposite. Walls of schist and granite glitter sun-heated in midday columns of light, and ancient fine-grained sandstones glint gold-flecked, as bright as any biblical images of heaven. The rock walls cool fast in dusk's long shadows. At night, you sleep on a sandbar deep in the canyon—on sand perhaps two billion years old—with only a ribbon of stars visible above. The ancient roaring of the river fills your dreams, and you imagine that you are in the belly of time, moving, and that even the canyon is moving, and that time is not an abstraction, a measurement, but a physical thing—real like stone or water, deer or eagle; as alive as you are, even if on a scale too great to grasp. On the vertical hike out, into the quick-brief world of man, you begin to miss already that sense of real time. You want, fiercely, to protect all such grand and wild places from our tiny erasures and alterations. You want again to float on the river and touch with your bare hands those rock walls, again to feel those water-smoothed flanks of time, a mile down, bright in the underworld's sun. The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.
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