Ann Zwinger Quotes

The sky is a meadow of wildstar flowers.

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash, flipped through in succession, leaving a richness of images imprinted on a sunburned retina.

I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil I’d like to be. I guess I’d like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserved as the track of some lug-soled creature locked in the sandstone- how did it walk, what did it eat, and did it love sunshine?

Dryness promotes the formation of flower buds...flowering is, after all, not an aesthetic contribution, but a survival mechanism.

I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity.

The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper’s seven stars speed in different directions.

This stretching of self beyond stretchable boundaries, this glory of being where few have stood, of listening and seeing, of feeling the sun and the rock, somehow matters very much. The exhilaration is worth every bit of the discomfort and duress. I have pushed through discomfort to another level of being. I love being here, shot through with sunlight, incandescing it outward as I receive it inward. I feel an outer glory like an aura or a nimbus

For most of the time, one disciplines oneself to ignore the discomfort of being hot or tired or having sore hip bones or being hungry, thirsty. Someone once characterized backpacking as the most miserable way of getting from Point A to Point B. But when salt restores the electrolyte balance, when water cools the insides as well as the brow, when food refurbishes the body’s cells, when time has been spent off one’s feet and a heavy pack is a mile downcanyon, then there follows a tremendous rush of well-being, a physical sense of buoyancy, all out of proportion to the time and place.

Unkar Delta at Mile 73 The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke’s description of “raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet.” Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified.

The question haunted me, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet on my way to be a grandmother. My mind on other things, intending only to glance out, the exquisite smallness and delicacy of the river took me completely by surprise. In the hazy light of early morning, the canyon lay shrouded, the river flecked with glints of silver, reduced to a thin line of memory, blurred by a sudden realization that clouded my vision. The astonishing sense of connection with that river and canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a breath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn.

My curiosity about this country intensified…and so I went. I discovered that, like all canyons, they have a powerful sense of direction and this becomes imprinted upon one’s way of thinking: there are upcanyon and downcanyon, and one adjusts to that simple fact. More than anywhere else I sensed that here one must fit into the landscape, must know what is there and where, in order to survive. These canyons, like the ocean and the air, are unforgiving.

The canyon walls are, for the most part, formidable barriers. The sandstone, limestone, and shale walls are carved either into overhangs or are sheer drops of hundreds of feet or treacherous talus. In most places they are simply impassable. Once down in the canyon, you’re locked in. With plants that are thorny, spiny, hostile. Locked with rattlesnakes—the ubiquitous buzztail, sunning on the rock ledge you’re about to haul yourself up onto. In spite of this, after walking there for days, coming home bug bitten, shins bruised, nose peeling, feet and hands swollen, I feel ablaze with life. I suspect that the canyons give me an intensified sense of living partly because I not only face the basics of living and survival, but carry them on my back. And in my head. And this intense personal responsibility gives me an overwhelming sense of freedom I know nowhere else.

One begins to have a feel for each canyon itself- its way of going, its way of defining the sky, its way of turning, that belongs to it alone. That kind of aware walking brings rewards. There is nothing vicarious or secondhand about walking there; instead, I have an exhilarating sense of immediacy. To me there is an enchantment in these dry canyons that once roared with water and still sometimes do, that absorbed the voices of those who came before, something of massive dignity about sandstone beds that tell of a past long before human breathing, that bear the patterns of ancient winds and water in their crossbeddings. Here I find something of necessity.

I wish I could sit here for eons and watch as these sandstone walls crumble, grain by grain and fall to floor this dry wash, become rearranged by water and wind, compressed to other cliffs, excavated into other canyons, and feel the wind all the same. The rock changes, the channel changes, the wind just carries air from one place to another, more constant than the rock. The rock is ephemeral, the wind, eternal.

I stand at the top of Collins Canyon and look back and down. The canyon turns, twisting out of sight, screening the gulch itself, as if the only way one is allowed knowledge of what went before is to go down and find out. A thin corner of blue sky catches on a sandstone pinnacle, so different up here, slickrock rolling away for miles, so open, windswept, windtorn. The canyon, sheltered by its cocoon of sun-warmed walls, is to a halcyon place. Down in the canyon, I grew a little, understood a little more, perceived even more, and in so doing split the carapace of time and place I commonly wear. Split it, wriggled out of it, left it there…the new skin was extra-sensitive so I perceived the canyon about me with new eyes, more sensitive touch, emotions closer to the surface…

Did an Anasazi once stand here, pulling strength out of the earth as I do, making obeisance to the gods of the winds? …Perhaps when one scratches the underside of heaven one is granted a special grace. The euphoria remains, and I can still call back that feeling of being astride the world and what it was like to be charged with the energy of the universe…the particular charge of serene energy to bring out whenever needed.

After seeing ruins all day, I am extremely conscious of those who came here before me. So too, on a warm spring evening, a thousand years ago, someone must have stood like this, soothing calloused feet, cactus scratched legs. I feel no time interval, no difference in flesh between who stood here then and who stands here now….As long as I can stand, ankle deep, without civilization, without defense, going back to self…so long as possible I stand here, submerged physically only to the ankles, psychologically to the base of being. Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson