Canyon Walls Quotes

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

We have all been carved out by our sorrow. Cut deep like canyon walls.

She cried before she slept. I reached out to touch the ends of her hair. She didn't notice. I didn't know what to do. Listening to her made me ache. I felt tears stream down my face too. And when I accidentally brushed Eli with my arm his face was wet where his tears ran down. We have all been carved out by our sorrow. Cut deep like canyon walls.

If flying-saucer creatures or angels or whatever were to come here in a hundred years, say, and find us gone like the dinosaurs, what might be a good message for humanity to leave for them, maybe carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall? Here is this old poop's suggestion: WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES, BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD...

bergeron's epitaph for the planet, i remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the grand canyon for the flying-saucer people to find was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT, BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP. only he didn't say "doggone.

Woman, where are they? Has no one judged you guilty?" She answers "No one, sir." Then Jesus says, "I also don't judge you guilty. You may go now, but don't sin anymore." If you have ever wondered how God reacts when you fail, frame these words and hang them on the wall.Read them. Ponder them.Drink from them. Stand below them and let them wash over your soul. Or better still, take him with you to to your canyon of shame. Invite Christ to journey with you back to the Fremont Bridge of your world. Let Him stand beside you as you retell the events of the darkest nights of your soul. And then listen. Listen carefully. He's speaking. "I don't judge you guilty." And watch. Watch carefully. He's writing. He's leaving a message. Not in the sand, but on a cross. Not with his hand, but with his blood. His message has two words: not guilty.

They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of that landscape. Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid shielded his eyes. The scalloped canyon walls rippled in the heat like drapery folds.

To be inside those canyon walls was to be cradled in the arms of the earth itself. I felt hidden out there. Safe. As if I could just slip away and be carried off to rest among Indian paintbrush and coyote willow. Left there undisturbed, untouched. Buried somewhere in the sand like pottery.

It's as though she holds to the walls of a canyon. If I move wrong she will look over her shoulder, let go, and take her chances with the fall.

If you have not touched the rocky wall of a canyon. If you have not heard a rushing river pound over cobblestones. If you have not seen a native trout rise in a crystalline pool beneath a shattering riffle, or a golden eagle spread its wings and cover you in shadow. If you have not seen the tree line recede to the top of a bare crested mountain. If you have not looked into a pair of wild eyes and seen your own reflection. Please, for the good of your soul, travel west.

My disbelief paralyzes me temporarily as I stare at the sight of my arm vanishing into an implausibly small gap between the fallen boulder and the canyon wall. Within moments, my nervous system’s pain response overcomes the initial shock. Good Christ, my hand. The flaring agony throws me into a panic, I grimace and growl a sharp “Fuck!” My mind commands my body, “Get your hand out of there!” I yank my arm three times in a naive attempt to pull it out. But I’m stuck.

A crystalline moment shatters, and the world is a different place. Where there was confinement, now there is release. Recoiling from my sudden liberation, my left arm flings downcanyon, opening my shoulders to the south, and I fall back against the northern wall of the canyon, my mind is surfing on euphoria. As I stare at the wall where not twelve hours ago I etched “RIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03,” a voice shouts in my head: I AM FREE!

The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.

We have all been carved out by our sorrow. Cut deep like canyon walls.

The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon's walls, she owned them not at all; her floor, the river beach. Her view, the heavens. It was, this freedom she was in, the longed-for cathedral of her dreams.

Pico Iyer: “And at some point, I thought, well, I’ve been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I’ve spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there’s this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps.

. . . They had skies of pure azure and walls of fog moving in and out of the canyons with invisible feet, hills in winter of emerald green and in summer mountain upon mountain of pure gold. They had even more, for there was ever the unfathomable silence of the forest, the blazing immensity of the Pacific, days drenched with sun and nights spangled with stars. . .

I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, “I must do this.” I can’t tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon’s rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view… where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you… beyond the next turning of the canyon walls. —Edward Abbey, “Benediction

May my heart hold the earth all the days of my life. And when I am gone to the farther camps, may my name sound on the green hills, and may the cedar smoke that I have breathed drift on the canyon walls and among the branches of living trees. May birds of many colors encircle the soil where my steps have been placed, and may the deer, the lion, and the bear of the mountains be touched by the blessings that have touched me. May I chant the praises of the wild land, and may my spirit range on the wind forever.

I'm so tired. Once, I wanted to watch the floods coming into a canyon, to stand on the edge and see it happen, on ground that was safe but shaking. I'd like to hear the trees snapy away and see the water come higher, I thought, but only from a place where it couldn't reach me. Now I think it might be a terrifying, bright relief to stand on the canyon floor and see the wall of water coming down, and to know this is it, I am finished, and before you could even complete the thought, you would be swallowed, and whole.

What's happening outside church walls is happening inside church walls. It is all part of the human experience. Ignorance and lack of education about sex, sexual orientation, gender identities, and human sexuality in general have led to harmful assumptions and poor pastoral counsel.

Firmly planted. Not fallen from on high: sprung up from below. Ochre, the color of burnt honey. The color of a sun buried a thousand years ago and dug up only yesterday. Fresh green and orange stripes running across its still-warm body. Circles, Greek frets: scattered traces of a lost alphabet? The belly of a woman heavy with child, the neck of a bird. If you cover and uncover its mouth with the palm of your hand, it answers you with a deep murmur, the sound of bubbling water welling up from its depths; if you tap its sides with your knuckles, it gives a tinkling laugh of little silver coins falling on stones. It has many tongues: it speaks of the language of clay and minerals, of air currents flowing between canyon walls, of washerwomen as they scrub, of angry skies, of rain. A vessel of baked clay: do not put it in a glass case alongside rare precious objects. It would look quite out of place. Its beauty is related to the liquid that it contains and to the thirst that it quenches. Its beauty is corporal: I see it, I touch it, I smell it, I hear it. If it is empty, It must be filled; if it is full, it must be emptied. I take it by the shaped handle as I would take a woman by the arm, I lift it up, I tip over a pitcher into which I pour milk or pulque - lunar liquids that open and close the doors of dawn and dark, waking a sleeping.

The ancient canyon art of Utah belongs in that same international museum without walls which makes African sculpture, Melanesian masks, and the junkyards of New Jersey equally interesting—those voices of silence which speak to us in the first world language. As for the technical competence of the artists, its measure is apparent in the fact that these pictographs and petroglyphs though exposed to the attack of wind, sand, rain, heat, cold and sunlight for centuries still survive vivid and clear. How much of the painting and sculpture being done in America today will last—in the merely physical sense—for even a half-century?

Sometimes money finds its own expression,” Jake said. “Like water flowing through a canyon, only the walls are laws and regulations. It follows the path of least resistance and leaves the landscape altered behind it.

The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels With her meagre pale demoralized daughter. Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun And saying that when she was first married She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon. (It is empty now, the roof has fallen But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing; The place is now more solitary than ever before.) "When I was nursing my second baby My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies. Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler, Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach. I had more joy from that than from the others." Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road With market-wagons, mean cares and decay. She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows, I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries, The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.

Technically, I entered Mawrth Vallis yesterday. But I only knew that by looking at a map. The entrance to the valley is wide enough that I couldn’t see the canyon walls in either direction. But now I’m definitely in a canyon. And the bottom is nice and flat. Exactly what I was hoping for. It’s amazing; this valley wasn’t made by a river slowly carving it away. It was made by a mega-flood in a single day. It would have been a hell of a thing to see.

Sara understood this passion that beset geologists. Their minds were heavy with theories shaped by fire and water, their pockets weighted with residual bits of evidence chipped from road cuts and canyon walls, identifiable, able to be pigeonholed in time that stretched back five hundred million years. She understood that the rock in the Canadian's hand was likely to endure intact long after the bones of the four people in this room would be discovered set in sandstone among snail shells and ferns.

He’d found her, one rainy night, in an arcade. Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard’s Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline . . . And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard’s Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon.

La tierra del Encanto Clouds build on the northern ridge Where the shades of night grow pale And there comes a rain like smoke. The mountains loom and recede. And Below, the umber plain is a pitted hide. There the distance of time runs out. And the mind extends beyond itself. I have seen in the twist of wind The landscape severed and heard The edged cries of streaming hawks First light is a tapestry on canyon walls, And shadows are pools of illusions. I am a man of the ancient earth For I have know the desert at dawn

Moths fly toward burning bulbs not because they’re drunk with love or exhausted from flight, wanting to wait out the pain in their wings, as if waiting was something warm they could wrap themselves around. They fly and die simply because they cannot see what we see. Instead they see stars off in the distance, the same stars we long ago used to navigate the darkness we still know nothing about. It’s hard to imagine what we once needed to know to know where we were. Without depth, with color, the moths look to the light until it calls to them. We are good at thinking we can stay. We are good at finding hurt. I live in a mapped city that keeps expanding like regret. When I look out the window I see a house so close I can hear a toilet flush. At night we take black lights and hunt scorpions stuck to our stucco walls. I walk around darkening rooms not in use, but I cannot stop the sun or streetlights from shining in. We are all aglow. I don’t want to think about the sun burning out or the billion small deaths I continue to cause. Even in the desert, a place whose name I learned to spell by the sweet treat of its opposite, the extra s demanding more, even after all these years of genetics, of rock slides, of canyons cut deep and persistent as a heart, moths spin in circles toward their stars.

Trapping the river between the canyon’s serpentine walls, the dam would create a slackwater reservoir 186 miles in length, the longest in the world, covering Creeping Dune to a depth of 350 feet, reaching up Lake Canyon as far as that dune which itself was once a dam.

Tonight I am going to sleep alone on the bedclothes of purity. Aloneness is the first hygienic measure. Aloneness will enlarge the walls of the room, I will open the window and the large, frosty air will enter, healthy as tragedy. Human thoughts will enter and human concerns, misfortune of others, saintliness of others. They will converse softly and sternly. Do not come anymore. I am an animal very rarely. — Anna Świrszczyńska, from “I’ll Open the Window,” Talking to My Body, trans. by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan. Copper Canyon Press, (1996)

Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and his chief construction engineer on the site, an Arkansas-born bulldog named L. F. “Lem” Wylie, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy had sanctioned January 21 as the day the diversion tunnel in the west wall of the canyon would be sealed.

Men may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.' His smile thinned. 'Would you like to know how?' 'No.' 'Animals will swell to fill the void left by men," he told her. 'And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. Those ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this-' He waved at the walls. '-and this-' He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. '-forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by this fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under and uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the worlds will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.' His mouth curved into a bitter line. 'But I'll live.' 'Stop it,' Lan whispered through numb lips. 'I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I' will continue to endure... my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream... still alive.

Beyond the river and ten miles east of the city the Sangre Mountains began to reveal themselves in more detail as the sun rose higher, the rampart of blue shadow dissolving in the light, exposing the fissured red cliffs, the canyons and gorges a thousand feet deep, the towers leaning out from the main wall, the foothills dry and barren as old bones, and above and behind these tumbled ruins the final barrier of granite, the great horizontal crest tilted up a mile high into the frosty blue sky, sparkling with a new fall of snow. The mountains loomed over the valley like a psychical presence, a source and mirror of nervous influences, emotions, subtle and unlabeled aspirations; no man could ignore that presence; in an underground poker game, in the vaults of the First National Bank, in the realtor's office during the composition of and intricate swindle, in the heart of a sexual embrace, the emanations of mountain and sky imprinted some analogue of their nature on the evolution and shape of every soul.

Everything grew silent around them, even the birds had stopped their morning chitter-chatter. But suddenly Harper fell forward, her sob shattering the air. She grabbed at him, and Lucas caught her. He startled and then stilled, taking her in his arms and pulling her against his chest as she cried, her sadness bouncing off the walls of the canyon and disappearing into the forest high above.

...I looked out the window at walls of moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we we were at the bottom of some, gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea... But, with whatever hindsight, I suppose the reason that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid progress through high, drifting cumulus is — read them again — at the very opposite of what we perceive on a liquid's tilting and untilting top, and so becomes the other privileged pole among the images of this study, this essay, this memoir. Or perhaps, as it is only a clause whose syntactic place has been questioned by my own unscholarly researches, I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light, like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word motion.

No end of blessings from heaven and earth. As we climb up out of the Moab valley and reach the high tableland stretching northward, traces of snow flying across the road, the sun emerges clear of the overcast, burning free on the very edge of the horizon. For a few minutes the whole region from the canyon of the Colorado to the Book Cliffs—crag, mesa, turret, dome, canyon wall, plain, swale and dune—glows with a vivid amber light against the darkness on the east. At the same time I see a mountain peak rising clear of the clouds, old Tukuhnikivats fierce as the Matterhorn, snowy as Everest, invincible. “Ferris, stop this car. Let’s go back.” But he only steps harder on the gas. “No,” he says, “you’ve got a train to catch.” He sees me craning my neck to stare backward. “Don’t worry,” he adds, “it’ll all still be here next spring.” The

Thanksgiving My guy buys brie, a baguette, and cherry tomatoes with his food stamps. I buy firewood and wine. We go up the canyon and light a fire in a stone fire pit and sit in soft folding chairs and talk for hours, let the penny-colored pit bull walk against the river current. And as we sit, the tall granite walls of the canyon slowly purple to black, and the sky goes out, and the flames we're sitting by get brighter and warmer, until we begin to dwindle, and we douse them, and we go.

With the flashlight to illuminate my way, I climbed the steep walls of the south canyon, got up on the highway streaming with cars Frisco-bound in the night, scrambled down the other side, almost falling, and came to the bottom of a ravine where a little farmhouse stood near a creek and where every blessed night the same dog barked at me. Then it was a fast walk along a silvery, dusty road beneath inky trees of California—a road like in The Mark of Zorro and a road like all the roads you see in Western B movies. I used to take out my gun and play cowboys in the dark.

Jim climbed a short ladder to the palisade. He perched his elbows on the top of the wall, gazing toward the Big Horn Mountains. With his eyes he traced again a deep canyon that seemed to penetrate the mountain’s very core. Did it? He smiled at the infinite prospect of what might lay up the canyon, of what might lay on the mountaintops, of what might lay beyond. He raised his eyes to a horizon carved from snowy mountain peaks, virgin white against the frigid blue sky. He could climb up there if he wanted. Climb up there and touch the horizon, jump across and find the next.

Nancy grabbed Plum's hand and together they ran around the last curve and then they were leaning against the old stone wall that marked Lookout Hill. Far, far down below them, a river was trying to wriggle its way out of a steep canyon. Over to the right, thick green hills crowded close to each other to share one filmy white cloud. To the left, as far as they could see the land flowed into valleys that shaded from a pale watery green, through lime, emerald, jade, leaf, forest to a dark, dark, bluish-green, almost black. The rivers were like inky lines, the ponds like ink blots.

The waters tell of time. Always rivers run upon the earth and quench its thirst. Bright water carries our burdens across long distances. Without water we, and all that we know, would wither and die. We measure time by the flow of water as it passes us by. But in truth it is we who pass through time. Once I traveled on a great river though a canyon. The walls of the canyon were so old as to be timeless. There came a sunlit rain, and a double rainbow arched the river. There was mystery and meaning in my passage. I beheld things that others had beheld thousands of years ago. The earth is a place of wonder and beauty.

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.

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie… Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics…

With Tommy by his side but Anthony Jr. nowhere to be seen, Anthony cranks out an old 8mm projector, and soon choppy black- and-white images appear on the cream wall capturing a few snapshots from the canyon of their life—that tell nothing, and yet somehow everything. They watch old movies, from 1963, 1952, 1948, 1947—the older, the more raucous the children and parents becoming. This year, because Ingrid isn’t here, Anthony shows them something new. It’s from 1963. A birthday party, this one with happy sound, cake, unlit candles. Anthony is turning twenty. Tatiana is very pregnant with Janie. (“Mommy, look, that’s you in Grammy’s belly!” exclaims Vicky.) Harry toddling around, pursued loudly and relentlessly by Pasha—oh, how in 1999 six children love to see their fathers wild like them, how Mary and Amy love to see their precious husbands small. The delight in the den is abundant. Anthony sits on the patio, bare chested, in swimshorts, one leg draped over the other, playing his guitar, “playing Happy Birthday to myself,” he says now, except it’s not “Happy Birthday.” The joy dims slightly at the sight of their brother, their father so beautiful and whole he hurts their united hearts—and suddenly into the frame, in a mini-dress, walks a tall dark striking woman with endless legs and comes to stand close to Anthony. The camera remains on him because Anthony is singing, while she flicks on her lighter and ignites the candles on his cake; one by one she lights them as he strums his guitar and sings the number one hit of the day, falling into a burning “Ring of Fire ... ” The woman doesn’t look at Anthony, he doesn’t look at her, but in the frame you can see her bare thigh flush against the sole of his bare foot the whole time she lights his twenty candles plus one to grow on. And it burns, burns, burns . . . And when she is done, the camera—which never lies—catches just one microsecond of an exchanged glance before she walks away, just one gram of neutral matter exploding into an equivalent of 20,000 pounds of TNT. The reel ends. Next. The budding novelist Rebecca says, “Dad, who was that? Was that Grammy’s friend Vikki?” “Yes,” says Anthony. “That was Grammy’s friend Vikki.” Tak zhivya, bez radosti/bez muki/pomniu ya ushedshiye goda/i tvoi serebryannyiye ruki/v troike yeletevshey navsegda . . . So I live—remembering with sadness all the happy years now gone by, remembering your long and silver arms, forever in the troika that flew by . . . Back

and we knew that long after we should have forgotten the simple rivulet it would still be plodding its patient way down the mountain sides, and canyon-beds, and between the banks of the Yellowstone; and by and by would join the broad Missouri and flow through unknown plains and deserts and unvisited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among snags and wrecks and sandbars; and enter the Mississippi, touch the wharves of St. Louis and still drift on, traversing shoals and rocky channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends, walled with unbroken forests, then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody islands, then the chained bends again, bordered with wide levels of shining sugar-cane in place of the sombre forests; then by New Orleans and still other chains of bends—and finally, after two long months of daily and nightly harassment, excitement, enjoyment, adventure, and awful peril of parched throats, pumps and evaporation, pass the Gulf and enter into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea, never to look upon its snow-peaks again or regret them.

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

In scale and audacity, the dam was astonishing; engineers were going to anchor a mile-long wall of concrete in bedrock at the bottom of a steep canyon in the Columbia. They would excavate 45 million cubic yards of dirt and rock, and pour 24 million tons of concrete. Among the few dams in the Northwest not built by the Corps of Engineers, the Grand Coulee was the work of the Bureau of Reclamation. When completed, it was a mile across at the top, forty-six stories high, and heralded as the biggest thing ever built by man. The dam backed up the river for 151 miles, creating a lake with 600 miles of shoreline. At the dam’s dedication in 1941, Roosevelt said Grand Coulee would open the world to people who had been beat up by the elements, abused by the rich and plagued by poor luck. But a few months after it opened, Grand Coulee became the instrument of war. Suddenly, the country needed to build sixty thousand planes a year, made of aluminum, smelted by power from Columbia River water, and it needed to build ships—big ones—from the same power source. Near the end of the war, America needed to build an atomic bomb, whose plutonium was manufactured on the banks of the Columbia. Power from the Grand Coulee was used to break uranium into radioactive subelements to produce that plutonium. By war’s end, only a handful of farms were drawing water from the Columbia’s greatest dam. True, toasters in desert homes were warming bread with Grand Coulee juice, and Washington had the cheapest electrical rates of any state in the country, but most of that power for the people was being used by Reynolds Aluminum in Longview and Alcoa in Vancouver and Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane and Tacoma.

listening to Joe and after the game warden had dispatched the suffering animal. “I could see them sending someone out here to shut up The Earl once and for all. They came, shot him, and hung him from the windmill, and they were on a plane back to O’Hare by the time you found him.” “It may be what happened,” Joe said, “but it’s speculation at best. Marcus Hand sent two of his investigators east, and they may come back with something before the trial is over. But they may not. What I have trouble with in that scenario is how this Chicago hit man would know to frame Missy.” Nate said, “They had an insider.” “And who would that be?” “The same guy who told Laurie Talich where she could find me.” “Bud?” “Bingo,” Nate said. “It took a while for me to figure it out and there are still some loose ends I’d like closed, but it makes sense. Missy knew vaguely where I was living because she talks to her daughter, and last year she tried to hire me to put the fear of God into Bud, remember? She might have let it slip to her ex-husband that if he didn’t stop pining over her, she’d drive to Hole in the Wall Canyon and pick me up. Somehow, Bud found out where I was. And by happenstance, he meets a woman in the bar who has come west for the single purpose of avenging her husband. Bud has contacts with the National Guard who just returned from Afghanistan, and he was able to help her get a rocket launcher. Then he drew her a map. He must have been pretty smug about how it all worked out. He thought he was able to take me out of the picture without getting his own hands dirty.” “Bud—what’s happened to him?” Joe asked, not sure he was convinced of Nate’s theory. “Why has he gone so crazy on us?” “A man can only take so

He looked at her face and hesitated. He looked up at the canyon walls. Here on the sandbar, it was eerily quiet except for the tinkle of water over the rocks. A large bird made lazy soaring circles way up in the sky, almost invisible due to the angle of the sun. God forgive me, he thought. Then he touched Ranjit’s lighter to the small sheaf of dried grass and threw it on the pyre. He was surprised at the flash when it caught fire. It wouldn’t be long, he thought. I will move on, but I will never forget this place. (from The Sacrament of the Goddess)

Don't do anything quickly, Tag had told him. And whatever you do, don't hit your brakes. You'll end up in the ditch. He caught something in his headlights. It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing before his heart took off at a gallop. A car was upside down in the middle of the highway, its headlights shooting out through the falling snow toward the river, the taillights a dim red against the steep canyon wall. The overturned car had the highway completely blocked.

It is hardly surprising that the initial stage of most mountain journeys involves laborious uphill hiking. Coming at a time when the typical hiker is out of shape, unacclimated, and transporting the heaviest load of the entire trip, the seemingly endless hillsides can elicit rumblings from even the hardiest backpackers. The first section of the High Route qualifies as a splendid example of such unremitting travel, for the hiker must toil up 6,000 feet to the first major pass, a disheartening prospect. Weathered dead pine at timberline Optimistic hikers who seek the brighter side of unpleasant situations, however, will quickly discover mitigating factors on this interminable slope. The well-manicured trail zigzags up the north wall of Kings Canyon with such a gentle gradient that the traveler can slip into a rhythmic pace where the miles pass far more quickly than would be possible on a steeper, rockier path. Thus freed from scrutinizing the terrain immediately ahead, the hiker can better appreciate the two striking formations on the opposite side of the canyon. Directly across the way towers the enormous facade of Grand Sentinel, rising 3,500 feet above the meadows lining the valley floor. Several miles to the east lies the sculpted oddity known as the Sphinx, a delicate pinnacle capping a sweeping apron of granite. These two landmarks, visible for much of the ascent to the Monarch Divide, offer travelers a convenient means of gauging their progress; for instance, when one is finally level with the top of the Sphinx, the upward journey is two-thirds complete. Hikers able to identify common Sierra trees

This is how I healed. Or didn't. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly and with wind.

For a few moments he indulged his old joy in range and mountain, stretching, rising on his right, away into the purple distance. Something had heightened its beauty. How softly gray the rolling range land—how black the timbered slopes! The town before him sat like a hideous blotch on a fair landscape. It forced his gaze over and beyond toward the west, where the late afternoon sun had begun to mellow and redden, edging the clouds with exquisite light. To the southward lay Arizona, land of painted mesas and storied canyon walls, of thundering streams and wild pine forests, of purple-saged valleys and grassy parks, set like mosaics between the stark desert mountains.

Jack, you want to know what’s going to happen to you? I’m going to torture the living crap out of you, until there is barely any life left in you. I might nurse you back to health, give you whatever false sense of hope you need, then I’m going to kill the crap out of you, over and over and over again until I feel better.

she admitted, then blew on a spoonful of hot broth. “No. I mean, I really like it. When I’m near you, it’s easier for me. It’s not such a fight with Bear. He settles around you.” If this was settled for Bear, he really did have less control than she could even imagine. What had happened to Ethan to break the bond between him and his animal? It wasn’t supposed to be a war. They were supposed to work together. She draped her legs over his lap as he lifted his bowl of soup and leaned against the wall behind the cot. “Better?” she asked with a coy smile. He gifted her a hungry glance and relaxed under her. “Much.” His voice was still too low and growly, but his eyes were the color of dark chocolate, and that was good enough for her. Dinner was a comfortable affair, highlighted with a few phone calls from campers who’d been locked out of the gates past closing time and needed the code to get back in to their campsites. Ethan insisted on rinsing the dishes, but it didn’t sit well with her to just sit around while he worked, so she helped. She stood so close to him, their arms touched. If he liked feeling her, she didn’t mind soothing Bear. “What are you thinking now?

A flash flood had come into Helen’s life, careening down canyon walls. All that love couldn’t be trapped anymore—it had to find a path or it would destroy her. She knew now that the path didn’t lead to Stuart, but water, like love, is good at finding where it’s meant to be.

We reached a section where the canyon walls closed in until it was almost claustrophobic. There was little room left on the bank alongside the stream, occasionally forcing us onto rocks that poked through the water. My heels were starting to blister in my ski boots. And to make matters worse,

Where was he staying?” Rice said, “We checked at El Tovar, Bright Angel, Thunderbird, and the rest of the possible places. He wasn’t booked at any of them.” “He had to stay somewhere.” “It could have been at one of the campgrounds, either inside the park or nearby,” noted Lambert. “Okay, he took the train up here. But if he came from DC he probably first flew into Sky Harbor. He might have stayed somewhere there until he went to Williams, Arizona. That’s where the train leaves from, right?” Lambert nodded. “There’s a hotel at the train depot. He might have stayed there.” “Have you made a search down here?” “We covered as much ground as we could. No trace so far. And we’re losing the light.” Pine took all this in. In the distance came the sharp bark of a coyote followed by the echoing rattle of a snake. There might be a standoff going on out there between predators as the lights of nature grew dim, thought Pine. The muscular walls of the canyon held a complex series of fragile ecosystems. It was the human factor that had intruded here. Nature always seemed to get on all right until people showed up. She turned her head to the left, where a long way away

Unlike forest or seashore, mountain or city, plain or swamp, the desert, any desert, suggests always the promise of something unforeseeable, unknown but desirable, waiting around the next turn in the canyon wall, over the next ridge or mesa, somewhere within the wrinkled hills.

his eyelids lower so that he’s either giving the path to the kiln house some serious bedroom eyes, or he’s irked and he’s going to dash my body against the canyon wall here in about two-point-five seconds.

Water in flood means exactly what it says. It has no hypocrisy. Even as it murders, it leaves life behind and carves elegant, intricate passages into raw stone, all the while having no debate about its intention. It is the same water that will sit complacently in a hole for months or years, the same arrangement of atoms that flows gently, singing lullabies, the same that fiercely consumes children and tears the walls from titanic canyons.

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…

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.

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.

Eli returned to the river and paused for a moment midstream. His feet were balanced upon uneven stones. The current tumbled around him. The canyon walls were steep and jagged and solid. The colors beneath the surface stirred and glittered. He wanted to hold his face under water and breathe in their beauty. He dipped his fingers into the snow-cold transient texture and felt a tingle. He closed his eyes to see this sensation clearly. He breathed. He put his hand up to his face and felt the freshness enter his soul. Water droplets dripped from his skin and returned to the river. He opened his eyes as if they were separate from his body, separate from the tension of life, distant from any distraction. He breathed.

Wreckage' Had my bones, like the sun, been splintered on this canyon wall and burned among these buckled plates, this bright debris; had it been so, I should not have lingered so long among my losses. I should have come loudly, like a warrior, to my time.

Out there in the millrace, the rush of water was broad and powerful, and as the current pushed past, it did so with an eerie silence. But if you cocked your body at just the right angle, you could detect a faint thrum, a kind of basal tremor. The frequency of that vibration was impossible for the ear to pick up, but it registered unmistakably on the hairs of the forearms, the wall of the chest, and deep in the belly. This was the muffled resonance of a runaway river, the sub-audible bell-tone of water surging with ungovernable force into the throat of the canyon. Just

Three generations later, viewed from the standpoint of the digital age, a structure such as Hoover can appear to suffer from a kind of vulgarity of size—a thing so enormous and monolithic as to seem preindustrial, almost primitive. Like fascist architecture, that soaring wall of concrete, for all its Art Deco adornments, can strike the postmodern eye as embarrassingly elephantine and childishly simplistic. Yet one only need page through the dam’s elegant blueprints to realize that this is a machine that, in its own way, is as sophisticated as a Boeing 747—a marvel of engineering, of mathematics, of human thinking, of vision, and, yes, of art. For all these reasons, Hoover is regarded by many civil engineers as one of America’s most impressive achievements. It may not be much of an overstatement to say that, along with splitting the atom and sending the Voyager spacecraft beyond the solar system, Hoover is the most remarkable thing this country has ever pulled off. Unlike

We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Powell wasn’t overstating their ignorance. At this point, they had no clear idea how far they had come or how much canyon lay ahead of them. They did not know how many turns the river would make, how many rapids there might be, or whether their supplies would sustain them through the time it would take to negotiate these obstacles. And they had no way of knowing that their most serious challenges lay ahead. Just

The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has entries that tend to change rather often and is biased toward the religion of secularism. Even so, they write: Typically a steep-walled, narrow gorge is inferred to represent slow persistent erosion. But because many of the geological formations of Canyon Lake Gorge are virtually indistinguishable from other formations which have been attributed to long term (slower) processes, the data collected from Canyon Lake Gorge lends further credence to the hypothesis that some of the most spectacular canyons on Earth may have been carved rapidly during ancient megaflood events.7 Notice that the religion of secular humanism still reigns supreme in this quote. The encyclopedia refuses to give the possibility of a global Flood (Noah’s Flood) being the triggering factor (as well as subsequent factors resulting from the Flood) for many of the great canyon’s formations. Instead they appeal to “megafloods.” But regardless, major floods and other catastrophes destroy the idea of millions of years and long ages.

Dylan Caine came over last night and worked with me to strip the walls.” Her stomach tingled again as she remembered that kiss that had happened right about where her mother stood. Laura frowned. “Which Caine brother is that? There are dozens of them.” “Only six, Mother. He’s the youngest son.” Laura looked baffled for a moment, trying to put the pieces together, and then her eyes widened. “Dylan. He’s the one who lives up in Snowflake Canyon. The one who lost his arm.” “Yes,” she said calmly. “That’s the one.” Laura stared at her. “Why would you have him help you? What can he even do without an arm?” Kiss her until she couldn’t remember her name, for one thing. He had amazing skills in that direction, but she was quite certain her mother wouldn’t appreciate that particular insight.

The train was moving too fast to see much beyond the pines stepping up rock walls, but she knew from memory the bird species that would be endemic. She could picture the colored plates in her textbooks- the greater roadrunner, with its shaggy pompadour crest; the yellow eyes of burrowing owls; the shiny, jet-black plumage of the phainopepla, which gobbled up hundreds of mistletoe berries a day. She'd missed the Festival of the Cranes by only a few weeks. How tempting, to find herself just hours from Bosque del Apache, and the Rio Grande. She imagined lying on her stomach, binoculars trained on the sandhill cranes and snow geese in their winter quarters, watching in wonder the mass morning liftoffs and evening fly-ins. It was an old desire, but even now, though she knew the impossibility of it, it persisted; the world as one giant aviary she ached to see, all of its feathered inhabitants in their natural environment, a thousand times better to hear their cries dampened by verdant jungle foliage or echoed across the wells of canyons than to listen to abbreviated bits of captured songs emanating from a machine.

We reached a section where the canyon walls closed in until it was almost claustrophobic. There was little room left on the bank alongside the stream, occasionally forcing us onto rocks that poked through the water. My heels were starting to blister in my ski boots. And to make matters worse, Warren insisted on singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

As the late sun descended into the ocean, it seemed to trail ragged strips of black cloud with it, like a burning red planet settling into the Pacific’s watery green rim. When the entire coastline was awash in a pink light you could see almost every geological and floral characteristic of the American continent tumbling from the purple crests of the Santa Monica Mountains into the curling line of foam that slid up onto the beaches: dry hills of chaparral, mesquite, and scrub oak, clumps of eucalyptus and bottlebrush trees, torrey and ponderosa pine growing between blue-tiled stucco houses, coral walls overgrown with bougainvillea, terraced hillside gardens filled with oleander, yucca plants, and trellises dripping with passion vine, and orange groves whose irrigation ditches looked like quicksilver in the sun’s afterglow. Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.

Eli returned to the river and paused for a moment midstream. His feet were balanced upon uneven stones. The current tumbled around him. The canyon walls were steep and jagged and solid. The colors beneath the surface stirred and glittered. He wanted to hold his face under water and breathe in their beauty. He dipped his fingers into the snow-cold transient texture and felt a tingle. He closed his eyes to see this sensation clearly. He breathed. He put his river-wet hand up to his face and felt the freshness permeate his skin. Water droplets dripped from his face and returned to the river. He opened his eyes as if they were separate from his body, separate from the tension of life, distant from any distraction. He breathed.

When my dog picked up scent he immediately left the main wash and took off up one of the 40’ ravine walls to head cross country. He had been working just ahead of us as we went northerly up the wash. He was not ranging any distance at all before he got scent. When my partner and I followed him and got to the top of the ridge, my dog was already at the bottom of the ravine and starting to climb up the next ridge. He paused to look back and see we were coming and then disappeared out of sight over the next ridge as we were working our way down. He repeated his behavior as we negotiated at least three ravines and ridges in this fashion. When he came again to the main wash he waited only long enough to make eye contact again before entering the narrow slot canyon where the subject was found.” – Susan Williams

But this gargantuan dam in Glen Canyon, authorized in April 1956, and begun just five months later with appropriate presidential fanfare and a pig-tailed string of blasting sticks, wasn’t the first audacious impoundment of the Colorado. Twenty-five years before, in 1931, work had gotten under way in Black Canyon, 400 miles downstream, on an enormous dam that would ultimately be named for Herbert Hoover—the largest dam in the world at that time, and the first time engineers had been able to test their convictions that a high concave wedge of concrete could successfully stop a river. Often called Boulder Dam during the desperate Depression years of its construction, Hoover Dam claimed the lives of 110 men before a swarm of workers topped it out, but it also captured the wonder and pride of the nation at a time when there were few palpable symbols of America’s continuing might. It was a public work on the grandest scale imaginable, and its sweeping walls of concrete crowned by fluted, Deco-inspired intake towers attested to the fact that we as a nation knew we would be great again, signaled the certainty that our natural resources remained our secure and fundamental wealth.

although each was physically separated from the other by the great, wondrous gash of the Grand Canyon, Hoover and Glen Canyon dams had much in common: each dam and its companion power plant ultimately would generate 1.3 million kilowatts of hydropower, enough electricity to supply a city of a million people; measured at its crest, each dam rose precisely 587 feet above the Colorado’s mucky, boulder-strewn bed. But there were subtle differences between them: Hoover was taller by 16 feet when the measuring began at bedrock; Glen Canyon contained 1.5 million cubic feet of additional concrete. The reservoir behind Hoover Dam held more water, but Glen Canyon’s reservoir encompassed double the miles of shoreline and its length extended 76 miles farther upstream. Hoover Dam was wedged between hard, black walls of igneous andesite; Glen Canyon Dam abutted stained, striped, orange cliffs of spalling Navajo sandstone.

Rays of sunshine beamed through the narrow slit at the top of the canyon walls and straight down into the deep shadows of the caverns. It pierced the darkness and, in some strange, fantastical way, the two seemed to make one another more beautiful. The dark and light complemented each other, not in the way that the right shoes complement an appropriately suited outfit, but in the way that life complements death. Without one, you simply can’t have the other. Maybe God was doing something like that in my life, too?

We went as far as we could until finally the canyon ended at a soft, smooth wall of sandstone that shot abruptly skyward. I immediately took my shoes off, gripped my hands and toes like a chameleon into the porous sandstone wall and began scaling the slippery surface. As I climbed, I turned my gaze upward and fixed it where I wanted to go. At that moment, and from that particular vantage point, I could see the hole in the ceiling through which the light entered the canyon. I smiled as I realized that the walls of the shaft curved up into the shape of a heart around me. As the sun glistened down the column, it beamed like a heart made of sunshine. It was God’s heart, and it was enveloping me.

He’d never been on a train before, although he’d flown many times. It was one thing to be admired by the tourists at the show, those families wearing the straw cowboy hats with colored bands reading Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, or Montana, but it was another thing to be stared at by people on the train. When one well-dressed man came up to Lyle and handed him a five-euro note and said something in French about “exploitation by the Americans” and “cultural imperialism” and something nasty about the past president, Lyle nodded solemnly and took the money. After the man left, Lyle winked at Jimmy and grinned. “George Booosh,” Lyle mocked. “He’s still money.” They emerged from the train at the station on Rue de Rivoli, the Tuileries Garden on their left and beyond them the Seine, behind them the Louvre. Ornate canyon walls of magnificent

The sounds of the canyon are different now. Settlers have crowded in. Fences and longhorns dot the land as far as the eye can see. Nowadays, I wake to the rumble of engines, do chores to the whoop and holler of a hundred cowhands, and go to sleep to the blast of the train whistles. But some days when I ride north beyond the last stand of salt cedar, I can once again hear the faint chords of the old songs. I hear the clatter of clashing horns. I hear the bellowing of the bulls. I hear the muffled thud of hooves as they hurl up dust. And I live on the keen edge of hope that one day the strains of that sweet, wild music will echo far beyond these canyon walls.

People said that if you traveled too deep into the chasm, you could look up at midday and see the stars. It was rumored that whole plateaus inside of the canyon had been cut off from the outside world for so long that primordial monsters still roamed there, relicts of a ferocious past. The few scientific expeditions that had ventured inside—a few by river, the others on foot—came out with more fancy than fact. They spoke of a fabulously rich silver mine that nobody could find, and herds of feral horses no bigger than coyotes. They told campfire stories of a Petrified Man whose form shone out clearly from the canyon wall—and why not? The sculpted stone, sometimes, did look like it was trying to form living shapes, fluted into scales or fur by the constant wear of water.

She stood spellbound by the moonlight drifting down the cliffs, a play of silver light and deep shadow. Bell woke, too, and came to join her at the river’s edge. They stood silent beneath the cold glow of the stars, watching the nearest rapid curl and froth, playful as an otter. Finally Clover crawled back into her bedroll, feeling her air mattress deflate by slow inches (she’d lost the plug some time before). “The night was so beautiful that I couldn’t sleep,” she wrote in her journal. She had been warned about the Grand Canyon: its oppressive walls and gloomy crags, and how the sound of water striking rock preyed on travelers’ minds. She found, instead, a nameless beauty.

We go on,” wrote Clover, “thru restless water between sheer walls of black to reddish basalt streaked with white marble.” It wasn’t truly marble, but thick ropes of Zoroaster Granite interlaced with dark schist formed 1.75 billion years ago when life on Earth had not progressed beyond a single cell. The ribbons of pale pinkish stone were once living magma in the veins of the earth, now hardened, folded, and warped by tectonic convulsions, brought into the sunlight by the thin knife of the Colorado River. These rocks were the roots of mountains that had long since eroded away.

While she waited there she forgot the prospect of untoward change. The bray of a lazy burro broke the afternoon quiet, and it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the open corrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely cedar trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of canyons from which rose an up-flinging of the earth, not mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments. Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.

As I approach the canyon wall, I see darkness stretch below the bridge. The sun is descending but is not yet set. That darkness is not shadow but stone.

found that by copying the distinctive prints and scratches made by other animals we could gain a new power; here was a method of identifying with the other animal, taking on its expressive magic in order to learn of its whereabouts, to draw it near, to make it appear. Tracing the impression left by a deer’s body in the snow, or transferring that outline onto the wall of the cave: these are ways of placing oneself in distant contact with the Other, whether to invoke its influence or to exert one’s own. Perhaps by multiplying its images on the cavern wall we sought to ensure that the deer itself would multiply, be bountiful in the coming season…. All of the early writing systems of our species remain tied to the mysteries of a more-than-human world. The petroglyphs of pre-Columbian North America abound with images of prey animals, of rain clouds and lightning, of eagle and snake, of the paw prints of bear. On rocks, canyon walls, and caves these figures mingle with human shapes, or shapes part human and part Other (part insect, or owl, or elk.) Some researchers assert that the picture writing of native North America is not yet “true” writing, even where the pictures are strung together sequentially—as they are, obviously, in many of the rock inscriptions (as well as in the calendrical “winter counts” of the Plains tribes). For there seems, as yet, no strict relation between image and utterance. In a much more conventionalized pictographic system, like the Egyptian hieroglyphics (which first appeared during the First Dynasty, around 3000 B.C.E. and remained in use until the second century C.E.),4 stylized images of humans and human implements are still interspersed with those of plants, of various kinds of birds, as well as of serpents, felines, and other animals. Such pictographic systems, which were to be found as well in China as early as the fifteenth century B.C.E., and in Mesoamerica by the middle of the sixth century B.C.E., typically include characters that scholars have

High on the rosy canyon wall a wren sang out, flute notes falling in a bright cascade of quicksilver semiquavers.

Wall pink like sliced watermelon, right-angled verticality, rising one hundred feet above the graygreen talus of broken rock, scrub juniper, blackbrush, scarlet gilia, purple penstemon, golden prince’s plume. It is the season of spring in the mile-high tablelands of the canyon country. In America the still Beautiful.

Steep black-cindered slope, with its soft gray patches of grass, sheered down and down, and out in rolling slope to merge upon a cedar-dotted level. Nothing moved below, but a red-tailed hawk sailed across her vision. How still-how gray the desert floor as it reached away, losing its black dots, and gaining bronze spots of stone! By plain and prairie it fell away, each inch of gray in her sight magnifying into its league-long roll, On and on, and down across dark lines that were steppes, and at last blocked and changed by the meandering green thread which was the verdure of a desert river. Beyond stretched the white sand, where whirlwinds of dust sent aloft their funnel-shaped spouts; and it led up to the horizon-wide ribs and ridges of red and walls of yellow and mountains of black, to the dim mound of purple so ethereal and mystic against the deep-blue cloud-curtained band of sky.

So laced and lush is this ecosystem that we walk our several miles through it today without making a footfall, only scuffs. Carol tells me that these Olympic rain forests and the rough coast to their west provide her the greatest calm of any place she has been. That she can walk in this rain forest and only be walking in this rain forest, moving in simple existence. Surprising, that, because neither of us thinks we are at all mystic. Perhaps, efficient dwellers we try to be, we simply admire the deft fit of life systems in the rain forest. The flow of growth out of growth, out of death . . . I do not quite ease off into beingness as she can. Memories and ideas leap to mind. I remember that Callenbach’s young foresters of Ecotopia would stop in the forest to hug a fir and murmur into its bark, brother tree. . . . This Hoh forest is not a gathering of brothers to humankind, but of elders. The dampness in the air, patches of fog snagged in the tree tops above, tells me another story out of memory, of having read of a visitor who rode through the California redwood forest in the first years of this century. He noted to his guide that the sun was dissipating the chilly fog from around them. No, said the guide looking to canyon walls of wood like these, no, “The trees is drinkin’ it. That’s what they live on mostly. When they git done breakfast you’ll git warm enough.” For a time, the river seduces me from the forest. This season, before the glacier melt begins to pour from the Olympic peaks, the water of the Hoh is a painfully lovely slate blue, a moving blade of delicate gloss. The boulder-stropped, the fog-polished Hoh. Question: why must rivers have names? Tentative answer: for the same reason gods do. These Peninsula rivers, their names a tumbled poem of several tongues—Quinault, Quillayute, Hoh, Bogashiel, Soleduck, Elwha, Dungeness, Gray Wolf—are as holy to me as anything I know. Forest again. For comparison’s sake I veer from the trail to take a look at the largest Sitka spruce along this valley bottom. The Park Service has honored it with a sign, giving the tree’s dimensions as sixteen feet four inches in diameter, one hundred eighty feet in height, but now the sign is propped against the prone body of the giant. Toppled, it lies like a huge extracted tunnel bore. Clambering onto its upper surface I find that the Sitka has burls, warts on the wood, bigger around than my body. For all that, I calculate that it is barely larger, if any, than the standard nineteenth-century target that Highpockets and his calendar crew are offhandedly devastating in my writing room. Evening, and west to Kalaloch through portals of sawed-through windfalls, to the campground next to the ocean. In fewer than fifty miles, mountain and ocean, arteried by this pulsing valley.

Hurry-Up Crowe. Yet there was something more, something intangible, that endowed Crowe with the ability to drive his crews at a clip that bowed to almost no obstacle, not a killing cold spell nor suffocating desert heat nor the boundaries of human endurance. Perhaps the secret was his ability to communicate a shared goal. Men choking on gasoline fumes in an underground tunnel nearly a mile long, or suspended on ropes two thousand feet in the air from the rim of a gorge, drills in hand, or sunk to their ankles in wet concrete under a remorseless desert sun might well question from time to time whether the work was worth the four or five dollars they earned for a punishing eight-hour shift. Frank Crowe made them understand the honor of participating in the creation of something eternal. “I’m proud that I had a hand in it,” said Tex Nunley, whose myriad jobs in Boulder Canyon included painting white crosses on solid rock walls to mark the center line of the tunnels the drillers were to drive through them. “Yes I am. I think it was a marvelous piece of work.

Relatively late in life, Brower had discovered the sublime emptiness of the plateau and red canyon country of the Colorado River Basin. It was the same terrain that had enchanted John Wesley Powell eighty years before, and it was almost as unpeopled and unspoiled as it had been then. Brower loved everything about it: the bottomless dry wind-sculpted canyons, beginning suddenly and leading nowhere; the rainbow arches, overhangs, and huge stately monoliths (an expert rock climber, Brower had pioneered the route up the most impressive of them, Shiprock in New Mexico); the amphitheater basins ringed by great hanging rock walls; the

I was born to walk the Earth, experience the amazing beauty of this planet, and witness the splendor and magic of all things—to be overwhelmed by a ray of sunlight, touched by an encounter with a frog, and mystified by the texture of a rock wall. I was born to splash through the creeks, sing through the canyons, laugh with the squirrels, just as I did as a small child in the woods behind our family’s home. I was born to be a kid, and not take life too seriously, or get sidetracked by a career, a project, or anything that ties me down to the life of bills, shiny new toys, status, and pavement.

Obstacles in life consume energy. Because Tom and I were able to overcome the obstacles in our way, we experienced a new type of energy. We felt powerful and full of vigor as we continued on. As we approached the final part of the canyon, moonlight began to peak through the rocky walls. It was a beautiful sight as we began to regain our vision and realize what we had just accomplished.

A writer uses a blend of signs to convey an admixture of thoughts, legendary, mythical, and complex, which enigmatic merger represents ideas launched from a variable consanguinity. Modern essay writing, resembling the prehistoric pictographs painted onto canyon walls by ancient tribal shamans and initiates, plays a medicinal role in the life of the writer and persons whom come along later and see a reflective image that speaks to them swimming amongst the streaked and discolored brush strokes on the benevolent face of Grandfather Rock. The healing powers of writing, painting, and other physical crafts represents the artist’s creative fusion of the physical, intellectual, and the spiritual challenges that characterize living an engaged life.