SUMMER

When the sun first crested or filled a notch in an eastern ridge, a perfectly straight shaft of light would slant across the sky, then immediately hinge downward into the Canyon. If we were lucky enough to be working on the western side of a ridge, or deep in Bright Angel or Garden Creek Canyon, we could have an hour or so in which to actually enjoy the diaphanous cast of light on the world. The incrementally shortening not-yet-lighted spaces would saturate with a wash of indirect light. Within that wash of light the world became luminous: the cactus spines would glow, the dried grass heads would glow, the redbud or cottonwood leaves would glow, and the iridescent filaments of spiderwebs that streamed from every bush would flicker, and sway, and glow. The gnat motes that hung above the creekbeds would flare like floating stars. As the sun breached that last, blessed rock barrier and finally lay across us, there would be—at least early in the season, and certainly come autumn and early winter, when the high desert air opened itself to the absolute zero of deep space—a few moments when the sun on the skin actually felt good. But as the days approached then slowly passed the summer solstice, these gentle moments became briefer and briefer, the flood of molten light no longer magical but scalding, suffocating, oppressive. Standing in the last of the shade, you could hold your hand inches from the encroaching light and feel its heat as tangibly as open flame. By mid-June on the South Kaibab Trail the sun broke over the distant ridge like the opening of a smelter door. I’d avert myself from it with clothing and hat and sunglasses and sunscreen as if it were some incandescent god, too terrible to behold.

The sun slid across me. I sighed, stretched, put down my pick, walked over to my pack, grabbed my shirt, and pulled it over my head. The dirty cotton prickled my sweaty torso. I rummaged around for my sunscreen and slathered it across any and all exposed skin.

We’d been starting work at five in the morning to try and beat the heat. Waking at four was rough, but dawn came quick, and as we had a steep morning commute—1,500 feet in a few miles, from our Phantom Ranch bunkhouse to a stretch of trail below the slumped outcrop of Tapeats sandstone known as Trainwreck—it was good to hike in the cool of dawn. Even so, I’d be wet with sweat long before I grabbed a pick and shovel.

I looked downtrail at Blake, wrestling a liner rock. He was still shirtless, would remain so for much of the day. I noticed he wasn’t wearing his heart-rate monitor.

“You’re not wearing your monitor,” I called out.

He looked up.

“My ‘bro’? Fuck that thing. It’s chafing my boobs.”

“Chafage? Is that what happened to your chest hair? And whatever: you just don’t want anybody to know that you don’t work very hard.”

“Pshhhh. I’m just acclimated.”

I grinned, looked around for the NIOSH guy. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the federal government agency that researches and makes recommendations for preventing work injury, was conducting a study on occupational exposure to hot environments. As part of the study we’d been asked to strap heart-rate monitors across our chests. We’d also been asked to swallow a pill-sized thermometer that would beam out our core body temperatures. Blake had immediately dubbed them “government cyborg fetuses.”

Blake’s instinctual flair for the dramatic was matched by a wit born from a piercing eye and an intrinsic understanding of irony, pop culture, and human nature. He had a comic’s masterly sense of timing, tossing off the instant, cutting quips that for most of us come hours too late. He had a knack for non sequiturs, for improvisation and imitations, for creating hysterical lyrics to silly songs or inventing ridiculous strings of words for everyday objects. I’d look up from my work to see him standing above me, one hand resting on a pionjar (pronounced “poon-jar”; Swedish for “pioneer”) and the other holding out a bottle cloudy with citrus-flavored water. “Poon”—he’d say, looking down at the drill, then, switching his carefully neutral gaze to the water bottle—“Tang.”

Blake was one of those people it was good to be around, a guy who could lift the people around him. But like all of us he was a gnarl of complexities and contradictions. For all his wit and wonderfulness, he’d lapse into grim moods and dour views wherein he felt persecuted, a pariah. For a while he took to claiming that he was “the guy they don’t know what to do with.” In a way this was true: the bosses moved him around from laborer to packer to mason. He claimed it was because he didn’t “kiss enough ass,” but I always suspected it had more to do with self-fulfilling prophecy, the positive feedback loop within his persecution complexes. It was thus completely in character for him not only immediately to refuse to let the government impregnate him with a cyborg fetus, but also to declare ominously that the studies would be used to “shut down Trails.”

Of course, swallowing a strange government radio device that we’d eventually “pass” exceeded most of the crew’s notions of civic duty, not to mention a good time. Sara expressed squeamishness about having radio waves so close to her ovaries. Johnny—who, it turns out, had survived that first hike after all, though he’d only work a season before defecting over to a wildland fire crew—mentioned the scene in The Matrix when the robot-worm tracker crawled into Keanu Reeves’s belly button. I mentioned the Tuskegee Airmen. Evin just glared at the guy. I felt a little bad for him, because in the end only Devin and Patrick volunteered for impregnation.

So for three days the NIOSH man sat at our work site monitoring signals and taking notes on our work. He’d certainly picked a good time and place for heat-work studies: premonsoon June in the Inner Canyon. At least 104 degrees in the shade. The sun nearly vertical in the noon sky. Its light, supposedly already eight minutes old, seeming only seconds removed from its thermonuclear womb. We were working on a section of trail that ran through a long and barren stretch of Hakatai Shale. The brilliant-orange, billion-year-old Hakatai—formed hundreds of millions of years before the first multicellular organisms evolved—seemed a thin membrane under which roiled a magma sea. With its dust hot in my mouth I’d stand upright and take long drinks of water, watching the shadows of refracted heat writhe around my shadow.

The heat would send the antelope ground squirrels into prolonged torpors known as aestivation. Aestus is Latin for summer. An obsolete definition is “the taking of a summer holiday.” That’s one way of putting it. Generally aestivation involves some sort of burrowing into the ground. A slowed breath and heart rate. Lungfish aestivate by burrowing into mud at the top of a dried lake and secreting a coating of mucus that eventually dries into a moisture-retaining cocoon. I may have been coated in a pasty amalgamation of sweat, Hakatai dust, and titanium dioxide sunscreen, but it didn’t exactly retain moisture. During lunch I’d wedge myself into the diminishing shade of an overhanging rock and think how incredible it was that I’d once enjoyed the weight of the sun on the skin, once relaxed in the kind of sunlight to which my cats offered the whiteness of their bellies.

And Blake? He’d sit bare to the waist in the conflagration of light, occasionally craning his neck to check the progression of his shoulder tan. He strove, in his own inimitable words, for a “mocha latte” tan. I’d tell him he’d be a wrinkled piece of leather by the time he hit thirty, but he’d shrug it off, saying, “Well, I figure you’re either gonna be old and doughy or old and leathery, and I’d rather the latter.” We let him get away with these things because really, what were we going to do, it was his body, and he was incredibly stubborn. But also because he was hilarious. Mocha latte? Who says that?

And he was acclimated. He grew up in the Canyon. His dad was Trails foreman for fifteen years. Blake joked about having been conceived at YACC camp, Trails’ cloister of trailers in the South Rim woods. He’d lived other lives in other places—East Bay, Mount Rainier, Tucson—but those years of his life were not unlike rumspringa, when Amish teenagers leave the community for a few years to encounter the outside world. Most of the Amish kids find the outside world not to their liking and return to the fold, and Blake returned to the Canyon, likely never to leave. In a way it’s too bad neither of us volunteered to host the internal thermometers: I have no doubt that at rest his core body temperature was higher than mine, the salt content of his sweat was lower, and his blood volume may have been greater.

“Acclimated” doesn’t capture the whole of it. Like no other person on the crew, or other person I knew of enthralled by the Canyon, Blake formed himself to his Canyon. An impressive number of the crew—especially considering Trails’ dearth of “permanent” positions—have made the Canyon their permanent home, have given their lives to the place. But none as thoroughly as Blake: he’d wholly crafted himself around the idea of his presence in the Canyon: doing backflips off cliffs into the river, rallying dune buggies along the forest roads, making love to lonely international girls at the concessionaire. At times I suspected that his passion for the sequestered world of the Canyon—not to mention a lifetime dealing with the stultifying bureaucracy of the federal government—narrowed or encaged his sense of the greater world. But what did the greater world matter?

What fascinated me about Blake’s epistemological approach to the Canyon was how much it differed from my own. Very few people I know have spent as much time as he has within the Canyon. He hiked hundreds of miles every year working Trails, and later, when he became a river ranger, he was able to explore those sections of the Canyon to which the river provided easy access. But river work and trail work consistently revisited the same places. He didn’t backpack, or climb, or pore over maps in order to explore new areas. He rarely, if ever, struck out on his own, or with a chosen crew. He was content with where he was, what he had, what came to him through the work, what came to him through his particular sense of belonging.

I was not so content.

At times the gravity of vertical exposure seems to have a greater attraction than that attaching one to terra firma, and sure enough the siren pull of the vast expanses spread beneath Mount Huwethawali arced up and anchored in an expanding hollow between my stomach and sphincter. But I sat comfortably, knees hinged over the edge, feet dangling in open air, having no desire to succumb to the pull, and figuring that it’d require more than my 190 pounds for the deeply weathered summit sandstone to sunder and the rock collapse into the depths.

I’d dedicated my breaks that summer to solo day hikes and climbs off the South Rim. No major backpack trips into the Canyon, just planning the hike the night before on my map, maybe a look in the Summits Select guidebook, a morning drive to a trailhead or pull-off, then down off the rim, out to the base of the isolated mountain or temple or castle or butte or plateau, then up, a snack or lunch or howl at the top, a few minutes or hours of silent contemplation, a note and name scribbled in the summit log, then down and back up to the rim, four- to nine-hour days.

Mount Huwethawali was appealing because it was right off the South Bass Trail, there was a clear route up its heavily eroded southern flank, and of the Esplanade’s enormous monadnocks it was really the only one that could be easily climbed. The Dome required a technical ascent up decomposing rock, and I considered Mount Sinyella, perhaps the most visually pleasing of all the peaks in the Canyon, a solid, uniform butte with nearly symmetrical alluvial shale skirts rising out of a flat, slickrock mesa, off-limits out of respect for the Havasupai’s regard for it as the Center of the Universe.

So I set off one evening and arrived at the South Bass trailhead at sunset. I was the only person there. As individuals, we form our sense of ourselves largely by the way we are reflected by others or our surroundings, and alone in the desert I stretched into the emptiness and came circling back with nothing, or with the sparest of responses, and was thus left, in time, to accept that nothing and weave my sense of myself as a solitary soul more tightly. Yet the high-elevation desert, with the wind ever in the pines, throbs with loneliness, and though much of its beauty and power arises from this severity, the loneliness expands after a while, echoes within itself, reminding us that we are, incurably, social animals. Good company lessens the distance, makes more accessible the ineffable qualities of dimming light on bare rock. Besides, I rarely if ever laughed when I was alone. Sure, I wasn’t climbing mountains for comic relief, but nor was I engaged in solemn druidic ritual: I liked to laugh out loud. But my two Canyon climbing partners were otherwise occupied: Kirk off climbing aid routes in Zion and Erika off climbing trees in British Columbia. So in silence I ate my beans and watched the sun slip behind a distant mesa. I unrolled my sleeping pad on the rimrock and slept under the stars. When I started hiking the next morning, I was glad to be alone.

Any attempt to describe the appeal of venturing deep into the Canyon—bushwhacking through hellish thickets of manzanita and locust, scrambling up loose scree slopes, carefully picking your way up rotten rock, stressing about diminishing water supplies—to attain a distant summit is almost inevitably inadequate. When asked why they climbed, the English climber George Mallory famously replied, “Because it’s there”; the American climber Warren Harding replied, “Because we are insane,” and my own reasons swung wildly between these two responses. I like what the climber David Roberts wrote in The Mountain of My Fear: “At best [I] can hint at what the mountain meant to me; yet if I understood that at all well I would explain it better…. The mountain was beautiful; perhaps that is all that need be said. That, and that it would be very hard to climb.”

It’s not entirely reductive to say that I climbed for the view. For the access to beauty and solitude. Nor can I avoid the old clichés of escape, exercise, fresh air. But beneath the clichés is this: hiking and climbing were the best ways I knew of engaging the sublime. I’ll never truly understand the Canyon, nor will I ever truly understand what it meant to me, but by immersing myself in it in as physical a manner as I could, I could attain a peace with the tumult of awe, mystery, knowledge, and ultimate ignorance it inspired. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams proclaimed, and I understand that, then, there; that sublimity, chaos, time, love, loyalty, passion, and fear are aspects of the Canyon I’d only and ever understand if they burned through me as physically lived experiences: as sweat stinging the eyes, lungs gulping the air, a stone tossed as far as I could into the void, a hand extended to offer help. It wasn’t enough to drive to the rim, dangle my legs off the edge, and think long thoughts about my interrelations to the world. Nor was it enough to engage the Canyon through the work, even with all the physical ways of knowing and being that opened for me. I needed the palpatory immediacy of hiking and climbing.

All summer we’d work on one of the same Corridor trails—the South Kaibab, the North Kaibab, and the Bright Angel—often on no more than two or three different sections of a single trail. Hiking those trails I knew where each foot should fall with every step. I’d focus my footfalls on the resistance of familiar solid objects—check steps, rocks, or roots embedded in the trail—rather than the slight but still significant give of the softer trail tread. Over and over, day after day, for tours on end we’d hike down to our work sites then back up, the months of retreading the same miles like the numbingly repetitive chanting of a Buddhist dharani, the liturgical repetition designed to dissolve the sense of self and move one to Enlightenment.

And as familiar as I became with the trail, as much as I developed peripatetic relationships with its rocks and roots, as much as I knew which trees or boulders provided the best shade or which switchback corner offered the best view, something new always came into focus, and not just a blooming flower or a curious Steller’s jay, but, depending on the angle of light or my mood or attention, freshly revealed aspects within stationary objects: a juniper having encased a rock within its stretching trunk; a section of cliff with a weathering scar shaped like the Eye of Horus; a set of reptile tracks adorning an everyday piece of liner rock.

Though I may not have consciously acknowledged it at the time, this recognition of an endless new in the old familiar was an argument for sedentism and the rooted life. The opening lines of William Debuys’s book The Walk, in which he reflects on the same walk he took on his property every day for twenty-seven years, reads: “A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing one thing, one phenomenon or essence, so cleanly and fully that the light of its understanding illuminates the rest of life.” That’s how I felt walking the Corridor trails: that my movements were not simply monotonous repetitions of everyday experiences, but an engraining, an invariable and cumulative deepening of my relationship with the desert.

At least that’s what I told myself, consigned to working a single trail for an entire summer. And on a greater scale, the Canyon itself was a confinement. The Canyon is, on average, only ten miles wide, and though I could never come close to exhausting that inexhaustible terrain—one would need an obsession spanning multiple lifetimes to do so—over the years I felt that my overlapping hikes were like sutures slowly cinching the place tighter and tighter. As much as I enjoyed coming to know a place; as much as repeating my path was never a true repetition, and as much as I enjoyed exploiting a new break in the Redwall or walking out along a knife-thin ridge to a new viewpoint, each of these acts shrank the Canyon world. I hated the shrinking of the world. So I found myself always in front of my map, seeking out the peaks I hadn’t yet summited, the trails and routes and areas I hadn’t yet explored.

Like most Canyon neophytes, I’d started hiking in the Canyon along the Corridor trails. But since I hiked them every day for work, and since they were crowded, and since they were redundant in terms of the Canyon regions to which they provided access, I started hiking the “Backcountry Trails”—the Boucher, the Tanner, the Nankoweap—trails far less traveled than the Corridor trails, but still clearly delineated on maps, occasionally maintained, and still hosting thousands of people a year. When I had hiked most of those, I began looking for routes.

A route was essentially any single way of entering, exiting, or moving within large contiguous areas of the Canyon. A route could be anything from an unmaintained but easy path paralleling the river, to a series of Class 4 scrambles up cliffs, to a technical ascent of a remote summit such as Excalibur (5.10+). Some routes were well traveled and marked by cairns and the tread of the sizable community of Canyon hikers; others would peter out into sheep trails or necessitate hideous bushwhacking through brush-choked slopes. Some required vertiginous rappels down cliffs and slot canyon pour-offs, wading through waist-high creeks, or hauling a small inflatable packraft so as to repeatedly cross the river. Many routes were so infrequently traveled or referred to they weren’t actually named, but simply referred to as “the route up Fossil Canyon” or “up Outlet.” Some routes were once trails strong enough to support stock—like the Old Tanner Trail or the Harry McDonald Route—but a century of vegetation growth and erosion had reduced them to essentially long, painful, and often dangerous ways in or out of the Canyon. There are hundreds of such routes, and thousands of variations one can take depending on where one wants to go, how much time one has, and how well versed one is in Canyon hiking.

These routes did not afford the backcountry ramblings one can enjoy in a place like the High Sierra, where one can see for miles upon miles across the open granite and choose dozens of ways to traverse that distance. The Canyon’s enclosed topography offers a bewildering array of ridges and slots, cliffs and terraces. Water was scarce. The sheer cliffs and paucity of water sources funneled hikers toward certain routes—there may be only one break in the massive Redwall cliffs for a span of ten arduous miles. Reaching that break, descending it, and then winding your slow, thorny way through the immense, tortuous, and torturous rock labyrinth to the next water source: that is a route.

There’ll be times when the route edges along a two-foot-wide bedrock ledge, a vertical cliff to the right and a precipice to the left, with no other way down, and since you’ve drunk much of your water there’s no retreat, you have to cross the ledge to scramble to the creek below, but no problem, it’s a mere twenty-foot-long ledge, scary, sure, but all you have to do is go slow, stand upright, and with every step kick away the rock marbles underfoot to ensure solid footing—totally doable, except for the unfortunate fact that a “Spanish Bayonet” yucca is sprouting out of the middle of the ledge, its three-foot spears occupying the entirety of the space you were hoping to cross. More commonly, when traversing such a ledge, would be a bulge in the cliff wall, so that you’d have to inch along the ledge sideways, hugging the bulge, your backpack out over the abyss, pulling you downward.

Or the way the normally broad Tonto Platform thins to a narrow shelf between the Palisades of the Desert and the Inner Gorge, and, lacking space, has gotten so piled with the accumulated alluvium of the upper cliffs that, even by Grand Canyon standards, it’s achieved maximum rubble. Traversing across it, you’ll come to the places where the rim lands’ drainages spew floods into almost four thousand feet of freefall, and the impact of these cascades shreds the loose conglomerate into dramatic gullies. You must delicately maneuver down the rubble, with car-sized boulders haphazardly held in place by sedimental glue. Picking your way out of that drainage, you top the bank to realize there’s a drainage immediately on the other side, the bank you’re perched on just a thin fin standing by force of habit alone.

There’s the seemingly simple act of navigating the scalloped bays that dominate the western region of the Canyon. From one point of a bay’s crescent to another may be three miles to a raven, but we lumbering primates need twelve miles to skirt the deeply incised side canyons that have eaten through the slickrock, some visible only meters from their lip, some stretching only fifty feet across but requiring forty minutes to detour. Once you finally arc around the long rock point that forms the crescent cusp, you immediately enter a new bay, to repeat the process, bay after bay after bay.

There’ll be times when there is no trail, no route. The occasional footprint, the occasional cairn, the rare moments when the multiple bighorn sheep paths hatching the red earth converge into one, but then that too dissipates into brush, and again you’ll trudge across the sand, breaking through the cryptobiotic crust, weaving through the bushes and cactus. There’ll be times you’re lost. Dehydrated. Irritable. Wretched. Your vision marred by flashing bars and psychedelic motes. When you’re happy to see animal sign, especially sheep shit—where desert bighorn can go, you can go. When you brim with happiness at the sight of a rock stacked on another rock, that little kindness of a stranger letting you know you are on the right path. That you won’t die.

Not that I expected disorientation or death while climbing Huwethawali. For one, it’s impossible to miss, rising like a stone plug out of the dead center of Darwin Plateau. And since it’s so close to the rim, I was able to scout the route the night before with binoculars. The route up was evident, easy: the whole southern portion of the monadnock blown out, its cliffs slumped and ramplike. Still, I’d left Abel—my trailer mate that summer—a note detailing where I was going and when I should return. I’d brought a flashlight, sufficient water, extra food, a warm layer, and a watch to time my “turn back” window, so that I wouldn’t be caught out in the dark.

Within two hours of relatively painless hiking and scrambling I was sitting on the summit, admiring the view. To the north, across the hidden river, were the towering flanks of the Powell Plateau, topped with dark forest; to the west the highly dissected sandstone terraces of “Conquistador Aisle”; to the southwest the snarled geography of the Aztec Amphitheater; and to the far west the dominant horizon of Great Thumb Mesa.

I wasn’t alone. The flies had found me, as eager for companionship as always. A pair of ravens coasted past at eye level. A flock of swallows whirled and shrieked. The wind ripped out of the west. My map trembled under the five stones with which I’d weighed it down. Earlier in the season, on the summit of Coronado Butte, a wind gust had punched the map from my hands and lofted it over the abyss. It hovered for a few seconds as perfectly as a kettling buzzard, its edges flapping calmly, five feet out of reach and sixty feet off the ground, then dipped like a falling leaf back into my outstretched palm.

The Canyon winds are a wild and fickle bunch, but subject to certain habits. They’ll slosh from rim to river like water in a bathtub: at dawn the katabatic winds surge down the side canyons, knifing into the warm night air pooled in the Inner Gorge, plunging the temperature on the beaches five, ten degrees in minutes. At sunset the wind flips like a switch and rushes frantically up the side canyons, beating the willows, setting the cottonwoods ashimmer. In the heat of the day the thermals shaft out of the depths of the Canyon—I read once that airplanes flying twenty thousand feet above the summer Canyon will rise an additional few hundred feet, just like that, elevated by the great pillows of warm air welling out of the depths.

Watching my map twitch, I wondered if the winds were stronger west of the Grand Scenic Divide; if, less impeded by the eastern Canyon’s long fins of rock, they were free to rip and roam across the broad, scoured shelves of slickrock eponymously known as the Esplanade. The amount of material transported by the winds was almost as impressive as the amount conveyed by the river. I’ve seen dust storms on the rim lands tower hundreds of feet into the air, blotting the blue sky, scudding for miles across the range, dust devils fractaling off their edges. I’ve watched individual grains whisk off of the relict, riverside sand dunes into the river. The winds had whittled the juniper on Huwethawali’s summit into warped and gnarled shapes: their trunks particularly whorled, the few cords of live cambium braided with dead wood. Their exposed roots clawed across the bare rock, anchoring into available cracks like snakes panicking for holes.

Both the bonsaied junipers and the Canyon’s innumerable peaks struck me as resilient individuals, their unique characteristics borne of the vagaries of wind, water, time, and shifting earth. Like tree and rock, I had been shaped by the desert. As I worked to craft it, so too it crafted me. Every spring I returned to the Canyon after a winter away and, mirroring the seasons, my body shifted. My muscles fatigued in spring, tightened in summer, and diminished back toward bone in winter. My neck, forearms, even the webbing between my fingers shifted from white to beige to brown then back to white. My hands and heels blistered, callused, and cracked; my knee skin burned and roughened; my hands grew to the sledge, my feet to the tread, my lungs to the heights. A winter’s worth of nostril detritus would clot up and bleed out that first week, but my nosebleeds would stop, my eyes would stop rasping in their sockets, and I’d need to drink less and less water. I’d maneuver rocks onto my tabled thigh before straightening up to carry them; where the rocks had rested, bruises would blossom and fade like mariposa lilies. The fronts of my thighs would be chapped hairless by hiking in denim pants.

Not all the physical effects were so ephemeral. The meniscus in my left knee has worn thin from hauling heavy packs or pionjars or juniper logs. My back has weakened with the bending and lifting and compression. The skin beside my eyes prematurely crinkles into wings. So too the desert had begun to shape my actions, my habits, my modes of thought, so that perhaps it wasn’t only the practicality of weight and survival that had me pick and choose what I put in my pack that morning, but a reflection of the desert’s own frugality, what the Saharan explorer Wilfred Thesiger described as “everything not a necessity an encumbrance.”

This, too, was part of the appeal about hiking: it laid bare the hubris at the heart of so many of our interactions with the world. Picking my way back down Huwethawali, I couldn’t help but feel cast in the traditional Western dualism of a hard individual in a hard land: a lone human pausing in his journey to look toward the distant frontier and setting sun. I could almost hear the Ennio Morricone theme music. Yet the intimacies of interdependence were everywhere around me: the wind ripping my desiccated flesh and whirling it into the world, the sun chemically affecting my skin, my skin refracting the light back into sky and onto earth. The water in the barrel cactus was the water within me. My individual feet fell on sand and decomposed rock stitched together by a rich skein of fungus, lichen, and cyanobacteria. I’m an amalgamation of common molecules arranged in a certain way, and, as far as the desert is concerned, no different than a deer, sheep, fish, or fly. If I were to have fallen into a crack and died, never to be found, my body would have decayed so excruciatingly slowly it would have seemed as though the earth was reluctant to accept me. But I’d have dried into dust all the same.

Climbing, hiking, and working weren’t the only ways of knowing the Canyon. I’d get off work and shuck my clothes in a cloud of dust and enter the shower and the red earth would stream off my arms and legs and swirl around my feet, the melting carapace of sunscreen and sweat and Supai dirt revealing skin, human skin. I’d step out, a new man, and as a new man I’d crack a cold beer and stare at my five-foot-by-three-foot USGS topographical map of the Grand Canyon.

Erika had given me the map my first season in the Canyon. She knew I was becoming attached to the place; that map helped turn attachment into obsession. In time it’d grace the walls of all my Canyon dwellings. That map helped me know the Canyon almost as much as exploring its depths did. Obviously, a cartographical, two-dimensional representation of the Canyon’s intricate three-dimensional topography couldn’t capture the endless variegations of rock or the contorted realities of physically traveling within the living earth. Eighty-foot contour intervals couldn’t truly impart the precipitousness, or magnitude, of those cliffs. That said, though, within the Canyon the endless corrugation of the long, thin ridges that run perpendicular to the river often limit visibility, and the only ways I knew of unfolding that tightness into knowledge was through summit views and maps.

And this map captured, better than any other map I’ve ever seen, the absolute erosional abandon that conformed the Grand Canyon: its rumpled, ragged-edged rock, the crenulated plateaus and scalloped bays, the chaos of drainages and ridges, the canyons within canyons within canyons. Here, in exacting cartographic detail, was Joseph Wood Krutch’s “spectacle too strange to be real … an unbelievable fact.” Here was Powell’s “wilderness of rocks,” Dutton’s “sublimest thing on earth,” Ellen Meloy’s “seemingly irrational geography of space and rock.” Here was the stark reality that “Grand Canyon” is a misnomer, or simply an insufficient term, that this canyon, however grand, contains multitudes: rivers, creeks, springs, caves, arches, bridges, peaks, valleys, mountains, capes, plateaus, buttes, mesas, pyramids, castles, towers, temples, shrines, ridges, points, walls, basins, flats, and gorges.

The map helped me grasp the Canyon spatially, objectively. It also revealed something else: stare at it long enough and out of the convoluted madness emerged certain patterns. The fundamental pattern is the bonding between two hydrogen and an oxygen atom, and the resultant molecules’ need for rest; a secondary and more personally intriguing pattern is the slashed geometries of faults: how water had exploited the weakened rock so that drainages bared the fault, brought it to the surface. The Canyon’s rock is shattered by surface faults—gravity faults, growth faults, reverse faults, thrust faults, anticlines, monoclines; faults that strain, shear, slip, heave, throw; faults that on the map looked like the crazed glass of a broken windshield. The Canyon’s faults were formed long before water exposed them to the open sky. Many of the major faults originated in the Precambrian, meaning that the almost vertical mile of rock that makes up the Grand Canyon rests on broken and shaky foundations. Most of the other faults resulted from, or were “reactivated” by, the strain of orogenic uplift—when the Colorado Plateau heaved up out of the surrounding deserts during a massive uplift of the continent some 70 million years ago.

Late at night or in the early morning, back from the bar or a friend’s house, slightly or considerably drunk in front of that map, with a fingernail ground down by rock and blackened with grit, I’d trace the faults: Sinyella Fault, Big Springs Fault, Butte Fault, Crazy Jug Fault, Fence Fault, Hance Fault, Mohawk Fault, Hurricane Fault, Bright Angel Fault, Cremation Fault, Hermit Fault. Or the monoclines, where the earth flexed but didn’t break as fault: the Grandview, the Crazy Jug, the Monument, or the mighty East Kaibab Monocline, which within some thirty miles upwarps the Kaibab limestone from a height of 3,100 feet at Lees Ferry to 8,800 feet at Point Imperial.

One of the reasons I searched out the surface faults is that these rifts enabled the Canyon’s trails and routes. The Canyon’s cliff bands afford few opportunities to descend into the Inner Canyon; generally one can pass through the layered rock only where these cliffs are broken by a fault or covered by an apron of erosional debris. For hundreds of thousands of years these cliff breaks were used by cougars, mule deer, Shasta ground sloth, Harrington mountain goat, and dire wolf. At least fifteen thousand years ago Native Americans began using these same routes to pass through the Canyon and, within the last seven hundred years, seasonally migrate between their dwellings on river and rim. These animal and Native American routes didn’t become what most now consider a “trail” until the arrival of Anglo miners in the 1850s. As ease of access was imperative for mineral extraction, the miners reinforced some of the aged routes with structures—riprap, walls, water bars—that would support ore-laden pack mules. In time, the miners realized they could earn far more money for far less toil by leading mule strings of tourists down their narrow trails. The major trails of the time—the Grandview, the Bright Angel, the North Kaibab—were thus bolstered for tourists’ ease of access, and more closely resembled today’s Corridor trails: four feet wide, groomed, and supported by innumerable structures.

Not that my map contained such information. But it did contextualize the place. It aided historical abstractions. For despite our frequent use of pionjar and chainsaw, and our infrequent use of skid steer, mechanized wheelbarrow, and helicopter, our work on those Corridor trails was a continuation of the miner-cum-developers’ work: we built trail to allow tourists easier entry into the cracked earth. But on a deeper level we were still enacting the deer’s choice of one route across a boulder field as opposed to another, or the ancient Native American nudging a rock off the path to his field. And on an even deeper level we were simply following the strains of our restless earth, following the strains of our restless hearts.

We talked about girls. We talked about girls and we talked about Brighty the Burro’s untimely demise at the hands of hungry miners, about the man who attempted to float the Colorado River in a giant plastic gerbil ball. We talked about different styles of bushwhacking, Henry Butchart, the Great Mule Escape, our daily bowel movements, John Wesley Powell, breasts, beards, beer, bourbon, the official National Park Service expedition to get to the bottom of the Legend of the Canyon’s Tiny Horses, South Park episodes, mules versus donkeys versus horses, the Anasazi, plate tectonics, whether the Havasupai made fun of the Hualapai for eating chuckwallas or vice versa, ringtail cats, how many people were going to perish in the Canyon that year, mixed martial arts, condors as descended from reptiles, whether all life, even gonorrhea and chlamydia, has a soul, why the overwhelming majority of backpackers are white, ravens, why one should or should not try to smoke prickle poppy seeds, the Bat Cave guano mine, aging, shaving, balding, whether or not to eradicate the bison roaming the North Rim, the generally well-known secret campaign to eradicate the tame ground squirrel population dominating Bright Angel campground, the rez, preferable ways to die, the 1956 midair jetliner collision over the Canyon that killed 128 people, Redwall breaks, the reintroduction of the Mexican wolf, accents, ascents, the Kaibab deer irruption and the subsequent Great Kaibab Deer Dive, how much tougher people used to be, the Pleistocene overkill, where the Grand Canyon actually begins, our favorite rock layers, scars, knives, marriage, kachinas, our fathers, our mothers, the “Lost World” expedition to Shiva Temple, movies about revenge, tamarisk beetles, fetishes, what happened to the apostrophe in Lees Ferry, having children, childhood, river rapids, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the old-timers—including Zane Grey—who lassoed cougars on the North Rim.

But mostly we told stories. At times our friendships seemed constructed of nothing but stories, our individual identities, even, inextricably attached to the often-embellished memories that bolstered our opinions of ourselves as proud, passionate, rugged, boisterous, obsessive, carefree, jealous, reckless. The Canyon, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, was a story we told ourselves about ourselves.

There were the stories of the times we were called on to do something that had nothing to do with trail work but everything to do with the nature of those who worked Trails: when the National Park Service mountain lion biologist died of the pneumonic plague after performing a necropsy on a dead lion in his garage and, days later, with an eight-hundred-pound elk caught in one of his mountain lion snares, three Trail boys were called in to help tackle and free the beast. Or how, when the poor mules that hauled tourists in and out of the Canyon, day after day, year after year, keeled over and died, right in the middle of the trail, Trails would be called in to drag them over a cliff for the condors and coyotes or, if there was no convenient cliff, to bundle them up in a net for the helicopter to haul. Or when Dee was flown in with rigging gear to extricate a dory that the weight of the river was pinning against a rock in Dubendorff rapids, or Wayne called in to winch out cars that had gone over the rim, or Duke sent down backroads with the backhoe to dig graves for the Havasupai.

There were the endlessly rehashed stories of pranks and shenanigans. The time when, to his everlasting regret and the crew’s everlasting delight, the mule packers convinced one poor fool on their crew that the best way to calm a spooked mule was by gently stroking its penis. When Wayne set an alarm clock for two in the morning and hid it under Devin’s mattress in the Phantom Ranch bunkhouse. When Blake called me over to the river-camp toilet to catch a chuckwalla and it wasn’t until I’d donned a glove and was leaning over it, about to grab it by the neck, that I realized it was made of plastic. (We named the lizard Salvador, and Blake mounted it as a figurehead to the front of his inflatable kayak; years later I’d see it in his backyard in various states of indecency with naked Barbie dolls.)

And there were the stories of John Hiller. John Hiller, an Iowa farm boy with white skin and blue eyes and red hair, was our Pecos Bill, our Paul Bunyan—everything he did was of mythological proportions. John Hiller could devour nine hundred Chips Ahoy cookies and fifteen bags of beef jerky in one sitting. John Hiller could put his head down and dig sixty-two miles of trailside ditch in a single day. When John Hiller was amused he laughed a huhh-huhh-huhh chuckle that never fully emerged but burbled within his throat until he found something really funny and it burst out at once and birds flew low for cover thinking, Thunder. When John Hiller got tired he got tired all at once: the impressive animating power would drain from his hulking frame and he’d collapse into coma, broken only by violent night fits: thrashings and cursings and punchings of pillow. John Hiller was gigantic—Devin boasted of a bar the crew had built at our bunkhouse at Phantom Ranch by claiming it could withstand Michael body-slamming John Hiller on it, but we all knew that nothing on earth could withstand such an act—that it would rival the bolide that punched the Chicxulub crater and wiped out the dinosaurs.

LTB was grunting. He always grunted as he moved stone, just as he muttered as he shaped it, but this was ridiculous. I looked up, annoyed, then awed—he was heaving an oven-sized block of limestone end over end, grunting with every push.

“Jesus, LTB.”

“What?”

“That thing’s gotta weigh three hundred pounds.”

“Yeah,” he said happily, looking down at it.

LTB stood for Little Tommy Boyle, though he was little only in a squat, muscular, troglodytic sort of way. Even among all the characters that composed Grand Canyon National Park Service Trail Crew, LTB stood out. He wore a black bandanna headband to keep his stringy-long, sun-blond hair out of his eyes; he braided the rest behind him. He never wore a hat because he feared it would bald him; his hair receded all the same. His moustache overhung much of his upper lip; he trimmed it with his teeth. He wore short shorts that showcased his tanned, trunk-like thighs. He didn’t wear underwear. He rarely wore work gloves, begrudgingly pulling them on when a higher-up neared. He preferred his bare hands, his stubby paws, good for grasping a single-jack sledgehammer or breaking apart a mastodon femur to best suck out the marrow. Marie, one of the few long-tenured women on the crew, and an impish raconteur, loved to tell her favorite LTB story: she was walking downtrail for work to find LTB, bare-chested and long hair hanging down, working on a retaining wall. She turned to the hikers behind her and said, in pseudo-ranger voice, “And here we have ‘Uugah,’ the Grand Canyon’s last Neanderthal,” and LTB, not catching what she said, rose out of his crouch and half-moaned, half-grunted, “Huhhhhhhhh?” and everybody cracked up laughing.

“Uugah’s” block of limestone was to be a foundation stone in the reparation of an old dry-laid retaining wall that supported a section of trail that wound along the lip of the South Rim. Some twenty linear feet of the six-foot-tall wall had sloughed into the abyss of Garden Creek Canyon, taking with it most of the trail. Piñon and juniper roots dangled into the open space once occupied by stone; roots that had wormed between the wall stones and wedged them apart as they fattened with age. Soil spilled from the breach. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) workers who’d built this wall sometime between 1933 and 1942 had used dirt instead of rock as backfill, and that soil, year after year, had been inundated by snowmelt, had frozen, then thawed, then frozen again—the pulsing, sodden earth working against the wall’s weakest connections. The wall rose out of a steep declivity of decayed rock; we could see, where the wall still stood, how the slope had slipped from beneath the foundation, undermining the entire structure.

The CCC were generally phenomenal craftsman, but this particular wall was a barely coherent aggregation of unevenly stacked plates and chunks of weathered Kaibab limestone. LTB and I referred to it as a “cowboy wall,” as though some cowpoke-turned-miner had thrown it together over a century earlier, as they had on many of the trails that plunged from rim to river. But we also knew that it didn’t matter who had built the wall, or even how well it had been built—we’d both looked long enough across the Canyon’s expanse of exposed rock to accept the essential futility of our attempts to staunch the greatest active example of erosion in the world.

As to rebuilding the wall, we’d replace the blown-out section of the old wall with a better, burlier wall. We’d replace the flakes and chunks with solid stone blocks. We’d dry-lay the stone so that the wall would weep water, so that it could shift and settle against the slumping earth. We’d use the rock from the not-yet-sundered sections of the old wall as backfill for the new. We’d make sure that each course had at least one “deadman”—a wall stone extending deep into the retained earth, riveting the wall to the slope. We’d position each stone’s “batter,” or the intrinsic cant of the rock, its unique center of gravity, so that the wall as a whole reclined at an even angle. In this we were unwittingly heeding the Sakuteiki, the antique Japanese gardening text, which refers to a stone’s “requesting mood”: its face, stature, and eventual alignment within the wall and garden. We’d make sure that each stone broke the joint in the two stones it rested on; that the stones of the new wall intertongued with those of the old wall like fingers fitted together in prayer. We’d bless the wall with blood and sweat and curses and laughter.

All of this was routine. Our method of procuring stone for this wall was not. Within the Canyon, where we usually worked, we’d look for loose rocks on slopes above the work site, or split boulders into usable blocks with a rock drill. We’d roll these rocks by hand; occasionally we’d convey them with a rigging system of block and cables, straps and manual winches. Once we had a stone we’d winch it down to those doing the masonry. Or we’d pull up the stone from the wall’s previous incarnation to reuse in constructing the latest. Winching rock inch by inch upslope was a pain in the ass, but fitting, too, in that headstrong human way: not for nothing did Robinson Jeffers refer to stonemasons as “fore-defeated challengers of oblivion.”

But the cowboy wall was perched on the rim itself, right above the South Rim Village. All we had to do to get stone was drive a stake-bed truck eight miles to the quarry, select good building stone, load it onto the truck with a front-end loader, drive back, roll the stone out of the truck into a pile by the side of the road, then use a rock dolly to roll them the few hundred mostly paved yards to our work site. It was a carbon-intensive process, and almost embarrassingly easy, but we got great stone, and great stone was not easy to come by even in the world-of-stone Canyon.

The majority of the Canyon’s rock is choss—friable and rotten, wasted by up to 1.5 billion years of geomorphic activity: supercontinents formed, melded with others, ripped apart; thousands of millions of years’ worth of strata laid down and scoured off even before the Canyon’s current sedimentary layers were deposited; hundreds of millions of years of strata laid down and scoured off the top of the Canyon’s current strata. This ancient, fault-fractured rock has been exposed to the elements for 5 million years; for the past, oh, seven thousand years this rock has suffered the same elements as it does now—intense heats and bitter colds, heavy winter snowfalls and heavy summer rainstorms. The weathering of the rock is as varied in name as in process. There is thermal expansion, also known as thermal shock, onion-skin weathering, insulation weathering, exfoliation, spalling. There is chemical weathering—oxidation, hydrolysis, haloclasty, carbonation. There’s slope slump and creep. Frost wedging and heaving. Spring-sapping and scarp retreat, which can lead to pressure release, which is also known as unloading or sheeting. All of this weakening and weathering, this priming, results in erosion: karst, rockfall, landslide, debris flow, everything that made—is still making—the Canyon Grand.

The Canyon’s rock may have been choss, but the spectacular diversity of that shitty rock was one of the things I loved most about working Trails in the Canyon. I loved how the material of the stone structures supporting the trail corresponded to the strata through which the trail thread—Coconino riprap as I moved through the Coconino, stacked shale retaining walls as I passed through the Hermit shale. So when Will, the trail boss, decided to helicopter some 240,000 pounds of quarried Kaibab limestone into the “Red and Whites,” a steep section of trail ascending a cliff of Redwall limestone, I shook my head in disgust. I understood the reasoning—there wasn’t enough available loose rock along the trail to riprap an entire series of switchbacks—but I disliked the act of flying fifty pallets of rock into the Grand Canyon, not only because of the astronomical cost, or because it vindicated what I had always thought was one of the stupider tourist questions (Where’d you get the rock?), but because, aesthetically, it seemed a shame to have yellow Kaibab limestone inlaying a section of ruddy Redwall cliff.

Further, the helicopter delivery betrayed the artistic pride I drew out of our work. Though on occasion I’d envy trail crews in the Sierra Nevada, working that glorious, sectile granite, I agreed with David James Duncan’s paraphrasing of the Mahabharata: that one sign of a true artist is a willingness to work patiently and lovingly with even the most inferior materials. Duncan was referring to fly-fishing with a beater pole, but that’s how I felt about working the Canyon’s stone, the limestone in particular.

LTB, no longer grunting, was standing next to his block of limestone and looking about, trying to figure out how he was going to roll his stone around the pile of the old wall’s rock that we’d crush and use as backfill for our wall. I was standing at the foundation level of the wall; I tossed up a flake, then scrambled after it to help Tom maneuver his stone. He was staring vacantly at the pile of white rock, some pieces speckled with lichen and black moss, some still bearing the marks of a chisel.

“Yeah, too bad we don’t have the rockcrusher down here, huh?” I asked.

LTB looked at me, snorted, reached behind his head to adjust his bandanna.

“That thing is dumb.”

The rockcrusher was our bosses’ latest investment: a 2,200-pound, six-foot-wide, caboose-shaped rockcrushing machine. It could digest bowling-ball-sized rocks and spit them out as chunks and chips. The thing was a monster, so much so that it seemed as though they’d bought it as an intentionally over-the-top response to the barely veiled insults we’d receive on a daily basis: the tourists who’d watched LTB and me roll rocks off the truck by hand and shouted, “Surely there’s a better way”; the ubiquitous “Isn’t there a machine for that?” questions; the snide or incredulous comments implying that a young man in his prime spinning a sledge in circles against a rock was not a beautiful act but a crude throwback, a primitive means of production yet to be replaced by progress.

Even if that was their intention in buying the beast, which it certainly wasn’t, having more to do with end of the fiscal year budget depletion, LTB was right, it was dumb: too wide to drive down trails and too heavy to be flown into the Canyon by the Park Service’s helicopters—we’d have to wait until a skycrane flew into the park for one reason or another. The rockcrusher was incredibly loud and incredibly dusty, necessitating a half-face respirator, which in turn necessitated a clean-shaven face, which few of us were in the habit of maintaining.

“Besides,” Tommy said, squatting beside his boulder, “I like crushing rock.”

I grinned. Of course he did.

I considered many of us craftsmen: we regarded crappy rockwork with the same disdain we reserved for an opponent who wished to play “slop” pool—where any ball hit haphazardly into any pocket counts, rather than the precise, intended shot of a devotee of the game. Trail work mirrored the desert it crafted; it stripped you bare as its own rocks: you couldn’t hide shitty work any more than you could hide from the sun, the cold, the wind in the pines. You embraced the work as you dedicated yourself to the Canyon. And after a while the work defined you. This was not limited to my personal physical phenology of muscles waxing and waning and my skin darkening and paling with the seasons. Working trails became the lens through which I viewed the Canyon—came a time I couldn’t see a rock without immediately evaluating its batter, couldn’t see a reiterating juniper tree without counting how many check steps I could cut from its candelabra trunk, couldn’t see a balanced boulder without calculating where the best spot would be to place the rock bar that would tip it over. At times, deep in the backcountry, I’d pass the snout of a rockslide and assume, in the instant before logic set in, that the randomly stacked stones were an old rubble wall.

This last wasn’t entirely illogical—again, humanity’s spoor, its profound permeations, were everywhere evident and inescapable. Always a mark—the chisel marks in the old wall’s stones, the sun creases inscribed on my face. Canyon and crew scathed alike. And we liked that, liked our unique and exclusive relationship, how our work was one of the last ways we could know the Canyon by working the Canyon.

Of course, the reason LTB liked crushing rock had little to do with it being part and process of high craftsmanship or a life-defining activity: he liked it because shattering a rock into separate pieces with a single blow was immensely satisfying to cavemen like Little Tommy Boyle. It was immensely satisfying to us all, for the same reasons, but also because, like most of trail work, even the brute act of crushing rock contained a deliberate rhythm, an intentional calm, an edaphic joy, as Robert Frost put it, in the “grip on earth of outspread feet.”

Take carving stone, hewing it to shape so that it fit against another rock like pressing together one’s fisted knuckles. Chisel in my left hand, hammer in my right, I exploit the stone’s existing seams; shave its ridges and flakes. I angle the chisel in various degrees; at certain angles the grit and fry of the spalling rock peppers my face. I pop off knobs and nubs with single blows or I scour a groove then rain hard, rhythmic blows along the line, the inert rock absorbing blow after blow until cleaving along the intended line.

After a while I’m lost in the work, lulled by the percussive beat. The periphery of my consciousness flickers with the progress of the rock, but mostly I drift into suspension, islanding occasionally on a stray thought or memory, but then drifting again into the widening stillness. Everything funnels into the particular and specific—a point off here, a nub there, the smell of hammered rock and the ring of hammer in air—and at the same time expands into a greater engagement: I can identify the birds overhead by the way their shadows flit across the ground in front of me: the quick-dart raven, the bent-wing turkey vulture, the darkening of the sun condor. Their sounds too: wind ripping through condor’s braced wing feathers; the dull whup whup whup of a raven’s wingbeats.

The rockcrusher—gigantic, loud, industrial—offered no such moment. It violated such moments. It was a needy machine, and demoted us to the assembly-line auxiliaries we’d always set ourselves against. It reminded me of Thoreau’s response to a woman who offered him a mat—“I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.” This was stretching it: we were well versed in mechanical evils.

We didn’t mind the helicopter long-lining logs to our work sites. We scoffed at the suggestion to use crosscut saws rather than chainsaws in clearing the North Rim’s forest trails. As long as they were running smoothly, we adored our rock drills. Some of the same meditative characteristics that flowed from the heft of hammer and dig of chisel also arose out of rock drills and chainsaws. Take felling junipers and limbing them into logs we’d use as check steps: whether it was the earplugs that deadened the world or the risk posed by both saw and tree, I’d enter an almost hypnotic state. The sight of sawdust spitting out the chain, the cloying smell of the exposed pitch, the incrementally widening kerf as the whorled trunk began to hinge, the dusty whump of the anticlimactic crash, all seemed accentuated, distilled. These crystallized moments were not daydreamy epiphanies or catch-the-eye flashes of the unexpected in the otherwise mundane. They didn’t arise out of the good work: they were the good work. The slivers of shaved metal flashing in the morning sun as I sharpened my chain and the needles shuddered loose from the tree’s uppermost branches as it began to fall were aspects as intertwined in our work and life as were the ring, piston, and clip components of the saw.

So perhaps there could have been similar such attunements while manning the rockcrusher. But I doubted it. It was too much. Offensive, even—from no aspect of its use could we derive pride. And, in the end, this pride was all we had.

I know where lies or stands every wall, water bar, switchback corner, section of liner or riprap I’ve ever lain. If time has passed since I last hiked past, I’ll stop and study the structures, how they’ve shifted and settled, how the Canyon has worn around them. I’ll search out individual rocks, and if the anthropomorphic attributes I assigned to the rock as I worked it—the obstinate bastard, the easy beauty—have faded, the pride or shame of the fitting and placement remains.

We couldn’t sell what we crafted. We owned only the hours we put into the construction. No, we didn’t even own those—we sold them for a bimonthly paycheck. No one profited from the placed stones but in the profits of hiking and experience. These profits—benefits, really—are not to be dismissed. Still, I can’t help but feel it’s a stretch to think: I helped people see and experience something greater than themselves, and maybe they will, in some way, come to know it or love it as I have come to know it and love it.

No, our work was our own, and our most important, reward.

For though we let go of the hours and the product, we were not alienated as Karl Marx may have feared: the loss of our product did not mean a loss of our selves. The work could be monotonous and labor intensive, but Trails was no assembly line. Our work wasn’t stretched out across thousands of miles, strangers, machines, and meetings. In working these rocks I was invested in every step of the process. I knew what needed to be done and I did it. I knew what type of rocks I needed, I searched for them, I found them, I rolled them into place, I shaped them to fit one another, I dug them a berth and I placed them, all by hand. When I used a machine—a rock drill or chainsaw—I used the machine, not vice versa. If it broke, I knew enough about it to fix it in the field. So rather than causing loss of the self, the work empowered.

LTB and I grappled his stone to the edge of the trail, then carefully flipped it into its berth. The earth shook as it thudded into place. Marx was right: to be human is to shape the world around us. To be happy as a human is to appreciate that process, to be invested in it as work and art, to embed bits of ourselves in the earth with every rock. Though we knew that in time even the bestbuilt wall will slide into the Canyon, I’d come to see our work in mythological terms, the loss of the wall as sacrifice, an offering celebrating our place in a system, not of the capitalist market or of national parks or even of human endeavors, but one of even greater continuity: order and entropy.

The door to the Ranchers’ bunkhouse slammed open and out spilled music, laughter, and the flash of colored lights. I slipped in before it closed; it was like stepping into a sauna: hot, humid, and thick with sweat, skin, whiskey, dust, beer, and hormones. A sauna with a flashing disco ball and Prince blaring from the speakers. There must have been twenty people crammed in the small living room, with more in the loft: Ranchers, Trails, mule packers, trail guides, European volunteers, random peeps, everybody shouting over the music and dancing to the music and carrying on in Independence Day revelry.

Phantom Ranchers are a special breed, not unlike Trails in their love for the Canyon, in the twisted paths that had brought them to live, some for decades, in the reclaimed desert oasis known as Phantom Ranch. Like Trails, they’re a wild bunch of hikers and drinkers, though during my years in the Canyon the Ranchers were an artier, more musical, more flamboyant bunch. They reminded me of that famous Jack Kerouac line: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” The room was burning, all right. Barring Burning Man, I’ve never seen as many bared breasts or casually exposed cocks as I did in that Phantom Ranch bunkhouse. Both were in ample and evident supply that night. As was the bourbon—multiple bottles circled the room, their caps long since discarded.

Squeezing through the crowd, I bumped into Willow. She was wearing a Vegas linedancer-style turkey feather headdress and a small skirt and had coated her bare breasts and belly with some sort of shiny substance, onto which she’d flung indiscriminate handfuls of glitter. Her pupils were as round as new moons and her sense of personal space, always a bit more intimate than mine, had gone the way of her clothing. She was striking, and scary, and after a greasy hug I was eager to escape her gravity. I gravitated instead toward the stack of Tecate twelve-packs towering on the counter. Aaron was using the same counter to prop himself upright. He’d been that year’s Queen of the Parade—was still wearing a slinky cocktail dress—and, considering that he’d been plied with booze to the point of belligerence for the parade at noon, I was impressed he was still standing, nine hours later. I told him so.

“I’m the fucking queen,” he slurred, “of ’murica.” He released his high-pitched giggle.

“How was the parade?”

“It was … magical,” he said, and pretended to break down crying like a teenage pageant winner. “Everything I ever could have wanted.” He belched. I’d missed the parade, but it wasn’t hard to envision Aaron, slathering drunk, wrapped in Ol’ Glory, standing in a gussied-up wheelbarrow “float,” waving, calling out to, and occasionally outright insulting the wide-eyed and cheering tourists. He’d have been surrounded by a carousing band of costumed or nearly naked Ranchers singing and playing music and generally prancing along like oreads—grotto nymphs—the whole scene some sort of carnal Gonzo bacchanalia.

A scene I was happy to join, however belatedly. I cracked a Tecate, took off my shirt, grabbed an oversized Huck Finn hat, was gifted a purple feather boa by a flamboyantly gay friend, took a shot of bourbon from a bottle, and commenced celebrating the birth of our nation.

At best I am a deeply ambivalent patriot.

I love America for producing Louis Armstrong, Walt Whitman, Hank Williams, Martin Luther King Jr., Mark Twain, and John Lee Hooker. I like how, in general, Americans are open, independent, affable, honest, direct. I appreciate our easy sense of humor. The thought has occurred to me that the freedom inherent in the life I have chosen to live—like, say, being able to live over three decades without having held a single continuous full-time job for more than a year, and yet having lived in, worked in, enjoyed, and explored some of the most beautiful places in the world without falling into crippling poverty or bottomless debt—may in large part owe to this freedom being inscribed or at least implied in our cultural DNA. And I do appreciate clean water, decent infrastructure, extended life expectancy, nonviolent elections for a constitutional government, passable public education, freedom from religion, and being able to openly air my abundant criticisms without being silenced through censure, prison, or summary execution. But these are the benefits of first-world economies and the civil rights and liberties of liberal democracies—none of which are exclusive to America. No, in my darkest days, I saw America as most exceptional in terms of incarceration rates, per capita energy use, health expenditures, obesity, anxiety disorders, and the obscene amounts of national treasure poured into ingenious ways of simultaneously killing people. I’ve had citizens with more traditional conceptions of patriotism point to Sudan, North Korea, China, or Russia as examples of places I could live if I didn’t like America well enough, but they always failed to point to those objectively happy, healthy, and equitable Scandinavian counties, as if it was either God Bless America or the gulag.

But they’re right—I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Because, despite my abundant criticisms, I have a profound and abiding patriotism, one anchored in the diverse beauties of the American landscape: the forests and rivers and canyons and mountains and deserts. Of these places I am fiercely proud, fiercely protective. The problem with a patriotism so deeply embedded in a love of this unique, rich land is that for the most part we Americans have done and continue to do a fine job at irreparably altering and flat out destroying this unique, rich land. Clear-cuts, tree plantations, dams, GMO monocultures, mountaintop removal, suburban sprawl, dead zones, strip mines, landfills, Superfund sites; the ongoing extinction rate maybe ten thousand times the natural background rate: America is as much this impressive and ongoing litany of degradation and destruction as it is national parks and “purple mountains majesty.”

Essentially, I’m patriotic about the last vestiges of the America that existed before European Americans arrived to ruin it.

But we try, here and there, and here and there I have my patriotic moments. One of them welled up a few days before the Phantom Ranch Independence Day bacchanal. Hiking through The Box, the section of narrow canyon upcreek of Phantom, I rounded a corner to find a condor sunning her wings in a shaft of light on a trailside liner rock. Spooked by my approach, she beat heavily upstream—condors are consummate gliders, and watching her work her enormous wings in the narrow confines of the canyon, the deep thwocking reverberating against the cliffs, was a rare treat. She didn’t fly far, just swooped up to perch amid a thousand-foot-high cliff slab of polished black Vishnu Schist.

The rock generally referred to as Vishnu Schist is really a complex of rocks consisting of all the Canyon’s Early Proterozoic crystalline “basement” rocks. Geologists refer to it as the “Vishnu Complex,” or even the “Granite Gorge Metamorphic Suite.” Regardless, it’s the bottommost rock in the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon, formed some 1,700 million years ago, when forty thousand feet of ash, lava, mudstone, and siltstone fused together under tremendous heat and pressure. At various times during this metamorphism, the lithic brew of what would become the Vishnu Complex was shot through and through by sills and dikes of plutonic rock we now call Zoroaster Granite. Like the epigenetic deposits that now layer thousands of feet on its foundation, the Vishnu Complex’s grains, platey minerals, and quartz and mica crystals are repetitively layered along a plane. Unlike these overlying sedimentary deposits, which are horizontally bedded, the schist’s foliation is vertically inclined—the rock stretches toward the sky like interlocking tongues of black flame. Most of the ribbonlike intrusions of Zoroaster Granite parallel this verticality, though others swarm across the thousand-foot-tall cliffs as contorted and discordant veins, their pink and white a marked contrast to the onyx and silver cliffs. There was an apocalyptic glint to this earth marrow rock, like something out of Ragnarök, or akin to the book of Revelation’s “sea of glass mingled with fire,” and against this fantastical, phantasmal, primordial backdrop the condor had again spread the full glory of her nine-foot wings. She stood into the sun as though crucified. And that, too, was why I was so happy in that moment—it wasn’t solely the ecstatic aesthetics, it was that, like some Gymnogyps Jesus, she and her kind had come back from the dead.

In 1987 all twenty-two of the world’s last remaining wild California condors were captured and shipped off to breeding centers. Once widespread during the Pleistocene, the genus Gymnogyps had a rough time in the Holocene, contracting until only Gymnogyps californianus—California condors—remained. With the end of the ice ages, the relatively sudden lack of mastodon carcasses on which to feed, the introduction of bored, rifle-toting humans, the introduction of these humans’ poisonous bullet fragments into otherwise tasty hunting waste, and with their habitat converted into power lines, farmland, and concrete, by 1987 the California condor teetered on the brink of extinction. Perhaps haunted by the memory of poor “Martha,” the endling passenger pigeon who died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, the US government captured the last condors and began breeding them in zoos. In 1991 and 1992 young condors were released in California, then again in 1996 in House Rock Valley above Marble Canyon. By June 2014 the California condor population reached 439, with 225 in the wild.

So a few days after my Gymnogyps Jesus experience, Independence Day, I felt good. Downright patriotic. Since the feeling was rare I remember it well, remember the little American flag I found on a picnic table and stuck in my backpack, remember driving out to the trailhead, arm out the window, listening to NPR, and hearing the host discuss with a Pentagon correspondent for the Los Angeles Times how American soldiers in Iraq had broken into a civilian family’s house, gunned down the parents and their six-year-old daughter, then repeatedly raped the fourteen-year-old daughter before killing her as well.

I left the flag in the van.

Any other day of the year I’d have attempted to absolve my complicity in the war crimes through equal parts open invectives and private grumblings. I’d have spent some time loathing my role as an American. But by my own tradition the Fourth of July was the one damn day of the year I said to myself: I am American, and I will try to own this with as much joy as I have guilt. It was the one day I tried to forgive previous Americans for the spoiled heritage they’d left me—after all, I told myself, these past generations didn’t really know what they were doing: it wasn’t really until the time of Darwin that we even realized that species could become extinct; we were so ignorant about how the world worked that the first director of the US Geological Survey, in the 1890s, believed that a canyon such as the Grand was formed before a river like the Colorado by happenstance began to flow through it. Hell, we didn’t even figure out plate tectonics until the 1960s. Independence Day was the one day I could try to forgive myself for the even worse heritage I am leaving my descendants. If I could not quite achieve that, then I could at least attempt to expiate some of the taint by celebrating my idea of America, my American values and ethos, not of unrelenting self-interest, competition, and violence, but of community, solidarity, and profound love of place.

The sweltering heart of the Canyon may have been the best place to celebrate America, and not because the national park was an atonement, but because it provided critical and revelatory context: if the age of our 4.5-billion-year-old earth was compressed into a twenty-four-hour clock, the planet born on midnight, the schist ensconcing us at Phantom Ranch would have come into existence at 2 p.m., the Kaibab limestone that formed the dark rim a mile above us would have chimed in at 10 p.m., and the existence of our human species would have blipped into being only two seconds before midnight. Juxtaposed against that incomprehensible time frame we had our great idea of a country on its 230-year birthday. We had our community of individuals only two, three, four decades old, celebrating not only the blessings of our spark-like, impossibly brief moments amid the ancient rock, but the very idea of belonging: to a tribe, a place, a country, a planet. As an act of resistance, it may ultimately have been shallow and futile, but it was something. It was good, in the moment.

So, having consumed Tecate at the rate of cubic feet per second, and flushed with dancing, hormones, and our individual interpretations of patriotism, a gang of us would stream outside to swim naked in the pool the Ranchers had built in the creek, or down to the boat beach to hurl ourselves in the river, or out to the middle of the Silver Bridge to grab the rails and spread our feet and in unison rock from side to side until the whole 530-foot span of the bridge swayed and rippled like rope. And later, absolutely soused, the planet already having spun the sun back up in the east, the Canyon walls swayed and rippled, and at first the surge of vomit felt good, a purging, and then, surge after surge, it did not feel so good, though this, too, was an atonement.

There are hangovers that you can sense the instant that the long, slow, and disassociated ascension toward consciousness begins. You do not yet actually feel the hangover, and can lie there, still mostly asleep, indeed, to all outwardly appearances in a coma, but you’re awake just enough and, unfortunately enough, experienced enough to recognize the situation and dread the actual awakening. Because while asleep, even a sleep disturbed by the first shudders of consciousness, even if that consciousness is capable only of sensing the impending misery and horror, that misery and horror is still a disembodied pain hovering out there like a hawk high in the distant light of day. At this point you may even allow yourself a minor note of congratulation on having made it to your bed, a place you will need to remain for another four or twelve hours, until the shudders subside. But that morning, the fifth of July, I could not sleep another minute for it was midmorning and Blake was shaking me awake because we had to hike out of the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

The hangover descended like a hawk stooping to its prey.

My tongue lay like a dry streambed in the parched gorge of my mouth. My eyes could open, but they struggled to focus. My legs could support the weight of my body, but not strongly. My consciousness seemed to be operating from a distance of about four feet above and behind my body. The Ranchers make the best bacon I’ve ever eaten, and the cook that morning fixed me eggs to order, but neither the bacon nor the eggs nor the toast nor the pitcher of water nor the coffee nor a plunge in the creek helped staunch the horror. I lay on a rock by the edge of the creek, still drunk, still reeling with the remnants of the night, and looked dumbly at the cicada husks that clung to the willow branches above me. If my brain had been functioning with anything other than the mental capacity of a chuckwalla I might have made some connection with those eclosions, something between those cracked-open cocoons and my condition, something about new beginnings and redemption, something, anything, but my brain was not functioning, and all I could do was watch the husks rattle soundlessly in the down-creek wind.

It was 106 degrees when we began to hike. More accurately, when I began to put one foot in front of the other in hopes that through some miracle these familiar mechanics would convey me out of that great rent in the earth. As my heart began to pump harder, the bourbon, bedded down for the night in my bloodstream, roused up in irritation and anger, and I had to place both hands against the trailside cliff wall to keep from fainting. I was a switchback or two off the bridge, seven miles and 4,700 feet below that insuperable rim, and for the only time in my Canyon life I thought to myself, “I’m not going to make it.” Even that first hike I knew I was going to make it because I had pride, something to prove, blisters be damned. That fifth of July I had nothing left to prove. My pride had been burned by the night, retched behind brittlebrush. Still I put one foot in front of the other. Monsoon thunderheads had massed early that morning, cutting the heat but spiking the humidity. I’d replaced my body’s liquids with Tecate and Maker’s Mark, and then I’d vomited most of those out, replacing them with coffee and a belated few liters of water, and the humidity wrung this out of me as one twists the last moisture from a damp rag.

I could not go on.

Thunder cracked from the clouds. The first spattering of drops vanished on the sunbaked boulders the way breath fades from glass. More thunder, more raindrops, and then the rain fell hard and steady. The aromatic resins of Mormon tea, blackbrush, and sage exhaled from the earth. I stood with my face turned to the sky. The rain began to sheet. The lightning stuttered and flared, staccato; the thunder slurred and pealed, legato. I could hear Blake yelling at me, something about taking shelter beneath the rock formation known as Trainwreck, and I watched him run uptrail, stopping occasionally to kick at clogged water bars—even this he did with theatrical gesture. But still I stood there, my face up, my nausea subsiding, my questionable patriotism something to reexamine next year.

The monsoons had come.

Everything about the thunderheads signified rain—their reflective intensity indicating a particular denseness of water molecules; their flat black bellies pressing close to the ground; the updrafting thermals pushing the cloud tops ten, twenty, then thirty thousand feet above their bases.

So when a young family of Belgians hiking through our work site on the Grandview Trail asked us whether the thunder, increasing in frequency and volume, signified an imminent storm, I hesitated.

The clouds that day after day had trundled over our work site were clouds without rain. Or the rain would ease out of them as ten-mile bridal trains of virga, never to grace the parched earth. Or they’d break into rain a hundred miles to the west. The next day nothing. The following day a storm would blot out a plateau five miles to the east, and a side canyon would flash in flood. But nothing overhead but sterile thunder.

It was my first season. I knew nothing about the Southwest’s monsoons. I didn’t yet understand that the incremental shifting in the weight of the air on the skin signified the arrival of the monsoon season, or what that season entailed. The word “monsoon” is derived from the Arabic mausim, meaning “season,” a term intimately connected to a shift in the wind. According to author and Arizona monsoon aficionado Craig Childs, the term was brought to Phoenix and Tucson by pilots who had become familiar with the phenomenon in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and ’60s. In his exquisite book The Secret Knowledge of Water, Childs makes a compelling case that the Southwest monsoons should be called chubascos—an unrelenting stream of convective thunderheads, as opposed to a significant weather front. “Chubasco” is a good word, and may well be more regionally specific, but it doesn’t provide quite the same onomatopoeic boom as “monsoon” does when we howled it out across the rain-wet rock as invocations for more. (For even more semantic quibbling, apparently saying “monsoons” as opposed to “monsoon season” or “monsoon thunderclouds” is a meteorological gaffe. But that’s what we said, and I liked how a single word—like “Canyon”—could contain the distinctions and complexities of the entire phenomenon.)

Besides, I figured that monsoon is an appropriate enough appropriation for the Four Corners region, whose summer thunderstorms are formed by a seasonal reversal of the wind patterns: in winter the winds flow from the west and northwest, out of the desert; in the summer months the wind blows from the south and southwest, off the ocean. The summer sun radiates off the southwestern deserts like heat off a griddle. Rising hot air is a low front. Air tends to move from high fronts to low fronts, and so the cooler and moister air rising off the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico is sucked inland. The meeting of the colder, moist oceanic air with the hot, arid desert air creates an unstable atmosphere in which spawn monstrous conglomerations of cumulonimbus thunderclouds. The clouds pass over the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico, unload on Tucson, load on Phoenix, then barely crest the Mogollon Rim, where the earth between Phoenix and Flagstaff rises 5,700 feet. Around eleven every morning the chubasco thunderclouds in their thousands breached the South Rim and streamed across the whole dome of sky, dwarfing the Canyon below them.

The juxtaposition between stone and cloud was entrancing, the rock solid and to all appearances static, its motion measured in millennia; the clouds mercurial and essentially ephemeral, their motion measured in seconds. I could cloud watch for hours: their continental shadows slipped across the slashed earth like liquid, or the shadows of shoals of fish. In contrast to the earthly grounding of trail work the clouds offered unfettered floatings; in contrast to the preceding sun-blanched weeks the shadows accentuated the Canyon’s relief.

But really, at that early point in my Canyon life, the clouds signified little more than a welcome respite from what had been an indomitable sun. After weeks of bleeding noses and cracking skin and impossibly arid days, the desert air had grown heavy, sullen. Yet this meant little to me beyond that it dredged an easier, stickier, muskier sweat. And so, because I was ignorant and young and cocky, I assured the Belgian family that the approaching storm was all bark and no bite.

Hopefully they didn’t understand the idiom.

An hour later, just as we’d begun our end-of-day hike up to the rim, a supercell-sized cloud, laden with hundreds of millions of pounds of water, buoyed only by the miracle of atmospheric thermodynamics, suddenly, well, lost its buoyancy.

I’ve been in storms. A tropical deluge in the upper reaches of the Amazon that caused a flash flood that nearly killed my parents’ only two sons; an unworldly purple and green thunderstorm that smothered the empty stretches of the Kalahari Desert; a true monsoon torrent that flooded the streets of Bangkok knee-deep in foul urban runoff. I’ve been caught in storms in the Canyon since that day: thunderstorm downpours that had me scurrying for shelter under overhangs or hunched miserably under tamarisk, shivering uncontrollably mere hours after sweating profusely. I’ve been engulfed by snowstorms that boiled down side canyons like avalanches. I’ve buried my face in my arm as a microburst windstorm snapped a half-dozen dead aspens across our work site.

But I’ve never been in a storm with the thermodynamic violence of that storm that day on the Grandview Trail. All the instability and pyrotechnic turbulence and gigaton nuclear bomb energy of the mature thunderhead funneled through the conduits of rain and air and exploded onto rock. Most of the Canyon is steeply sloped rock, and what little soil there is had been baked by the sterile heat of early summer into an impermeable crust. So the oceans of rain pouring out of the sky poured off of the earth. Sediment-tinged water slid in sheets down rock then ripped in hundreds of rills through slopes. The rills gathered into streams, the streams slopped into drainages, the drainages spewed off cliffs into bigger drainages farther below. Through the veil of rain I could see dozens of brown waterfalls sprouting from the Redwall and distant Tapeats cliffs. A surprising number of people believe the Canyon was gutted from the earth as a result of the cataclysmic draining of the waters of Noah’s flood; for the first time I sympathized with such nonsense: all the waters of the world were pouring into the depths. I put my head down and began running up the trail.

The rain turned to hail. Some of the hail dwarfed marbles. The ice balls bounced off the rock as high as my knees then bounced frantically downslope. I slipped; the sloppy red earth plastered my hands, calves. A few hundred feet above me lightning stabbed the rim as one stabs a block of ice with an icepick. I could hear the sharp vitttt sound of the bolts; I could taste the sour copper of ozone. If some thunder tears slowly across the sky like a metal roof rent by wind, and some thunder booms into the bones, this thunder cracked quick, barely a distinction between lightning strike and thunderclap. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods unleash on the world a flood that so frightens them that they “cowered like dogs lying by the outer wall. Ishtar shrieked like a woman in childbirth.” I realized that archetypal fear: after a particularly close flash-boom I ducked, stopped running, and looked around wildly for cover. There was no cover. But for a moment I stood and took it all in.

In the seven more seasons I would spend in the Canyon, I would glean some understanding of how the gorge came into being. Dee and I worked an afternoon building a stone staircase up and over a ten-foot-high by twenty-foot-long rubble pile that blocked a popular trail in the Deer Creek narrows. Two summers later I returned to the spot and neither the stairs nor the mound remained, only the clean sandstone floor, and I doubled back, confused in the strange way that one’s assured universe abruptly shifts, but nothing remained, only the creek, the cottonwoods, the corrugated walls—a flood had swept the terrace clean, removed every last trace of rock, rasping away even the scar of impact.

Still, it was rare to witness the actual erosive action, the geologic processes at play. Because of this, most people, trail crew included, tend to view the Canyon as though it were static, as though the processes that sculpted it have stilled. Because our culture tends to regard “nature” as though it were a Sierra Club calendar, it’s understandable that we’d see the Canyon as fixed in time, just as it is fixed in those photographs—surely something that so defies our sense of time cannot be subject to change. We tend to see ourselves, or the cicadas, the willows, as the living, dynamic forces; geologic processes seem as stilled in place as raindrops illuminated by a lightning bolt. Every time I discovered a recent rockfall or slide—a microwave-sized rock sitting in the trail or a slide of small rocks and splintered yucca, none of which had been there hours or days previous—I stopped and quizzically stared, as though they had always been there and I had simply failed to notice, as though the frequent clatter of small rocks and the infrequent crack of boulders calving of cliffs were abnormal, freakish occurrences. I’d search the upper slopes and cliffs for the telltale signs: recently exposed roots, lighter patches of unweathered cliff, darker patches of moisture, fresh dirt still clinging to the cliffs.

In Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains, geologist Keith Heyer Meldahl writes of the “lens of human time” as a “perspective that gives the illusion of stability to a world that, over geologic time, is radically mobile.” “In human time,” he continues, “the continents and ocean basins appear fixed and permanent. To know that the Atlantic Ocean is forty-three feet wider today than when Columbus crossed it lifts, just a little, the veil of our illusion.” This storm lifted that veil. It shattered the notion of a static Canyon. The solid earth was melting. The elements were in flux: water in air, water on earth, earth in water, earth in air, earth moving like water. Everything in motion, slipping, sliding, tumbling downward. The Canyon widening around me.

Later, after we’d all safely if soakingly piled in the van and started driving back to headquarters, we saw a debris flow. I’d always wished to see such a thing: part water but mostly soil and sticks and rocks and dead dogs and old tires or whatever else had been flushed into a drainage. The flow, crusted with hailstones and fattening off thousands of rivulets, moved rapidly through the roadside drainage ditch. Eventually we reached the snout of the beast, which pushed before it a bore of duff, pinecones, and sticks. The bore slowed the flood, and the glutted muck behind the bore would build until it was big enough to roll over and absorb the debris. The flow would then pulse faster down the drainage, devouring the earth, the bore again building before it. Eventually, after we had stopped ogling and had driven past, the debris flow swamped the road, fed into a larger drainage, overtopped a four-foot-high pedestrian bridge, and shot off the rim. When it hit Garden Creek, some 2,500 feet below, the flood obliterated a small jungle of vegetation that had grown at the base of the Redwall cliffs. It punched truck-sized boulders aside as though they were toys. The flood roared down Garden Creek, quickly overstuffing the main channel, and then went thrashing about the creek valley like a loose firehose, cutting eight-foot-deep channels twenty feet off the breached main.

If, as I ran uptrail, all the rocks tumbling past me was the active widening of the Canyon, this debris flow was the deepening. Not of the main stem, the Colorado River corridor: that process has been stilled by the Glen Canyon Dam. More on that later. This was the deepening of the venous network of side canyons. The Grand Canyon is not a clean rent, a neat incision in the rim lands, as is Marble Canyon, directly upstream. The massive plateaus that make up the Grand Canyon region—the Kaibab, the Kanab, the Uinkaret, the Coconino, the Shivwits—are lacerated, absolutely ravaged by side canyons. Some 530 tributary drainages merge into the main stem of the Colorado, and every one of the tributaries has its own dendritic network of headwaters. The gutting that these tributary canyons inflict on the rim lands, their incessant removal of incomprehensible quantities of earth, are what have made the Canyon distinct, unique, grand. And so they were doing that day: soon that thrashing flood reentered the course laid before it by previous floods: it compressed itself into the Tapeats Narrows, launched off a three-hundred-foot-tall schist cliff, and then went blasting down the last of Pipe Creek into the Colorado.

Floods like these are why Pipe Creek, like the majority of tributary creeks in the Canyon, enters the Colorado at river level. This is a remarkable thing. Though Pipe has a small perennial water-flow, most of the Canyon’s tributary canyons do not. Some do not flow for decades. And yet almost all of them have carved through the rock as deeply as the main stem of the ever-flowing Colorado. It’s simple mathematics: one inch of rain over one square mile amounts to 17.38 million gallons of water. Nankoweap Creek, to take one of the Canyon’s larger drainages, drains thirty-three square miles. The rainstorm I experienced that day could have dumped two inches of rain. This means 1,147 million gallons of water could have been ripping through Nankoweap Creek with that single storm.

Because our Pipe Creek flood had just plunged down the nearly vertical mile from rim to river, it was flowing very quickly, easily ten miles an hour. For every mile per hour a flow increases, its carrying capacity is increased to the sixth power, which is to say, as Wallace Stegner did, “a stream moving two miles an hour will carry particles sixty-four times as large as the same stream moving one mile an hour, and that one moving ten miles an hour will carry particles a million times as great.” The flood that ripped down Garden Creek, into Pipe Creek, and into the Colorado that afternoon was large, flowing fast, and scouring a creekbed that, owing to the fracturing and weathering the Bright Angel Fault had inflicted on the bedrock walls of the Canyon, provided no small amount of sediment. By the time the flow finally disgorged into the Colorado it easily could have contained, by volume, 90 percent sediment.

Up and down the length of the Canyon the tributaries discharged their sputum earth into the thickening, darkening river.

My settling bag hit the eddy current and inflated like a parachute. I had to use both hands to heave it out of the river and stagger it onto the small beach. The water inside the bag was turbid with suspended sediment. The silt would need a couple of hours to drift to the bottom of the bag, but I’d take what the last hour of daylight gave me—at least the larger grains would subside, and my water filter would last that much longer.

Scrambling up a series of sandstone ledges, I found a nice spot to sit: a bedrock backrest with a view of the wavering line where the waters of the Little Colorado River joined those of the Colorado River. The Little Colorado is usually an opalescent turquoise blue, milk-bright with dissolved travertine and limestone. But the rains from a few days earlier had rusted the color to that of an old ceramic pot, a few shades browner than the gray-green Colorado. The smaller river eased into the Colorado’s corridor, but the two rivers didn’t immediately merge, they simply ran, side by side, down the course of the Canyon. They’d maintain their distinct flows for a good half-mile before rapids disrupted them into unity. The meeting of any waters is mesmerizing to watch; especially so here, with the Little Colorado’s suspended silt mushrooming into the silt-strained Colorado.

Silt-strained. From where I sat at the confluence, I was only sixty-one miles downstream of Glen Canyon Dam. Behind Glen Canyon Dam, the silt-laden, rusted-red Colorado River becomes Lake Powell. At the exact-if-ever-fluctuating spot where river slacks into reservoir the river drops its sediment load, just as the particles of suspended earth were drifting to the bottom of my settling bag. This is a load that wind, water, and humanity has scraped from 108,000 square miles of mostly arid, barren, and highly erodible land. Estimates on the exact annual size of this load range from 45 million tons to nearly 200 million tons, but even the lowest of these estimates is an enormous amount of sediment being deposited into the head of the impounded river. Some 180 miles later, when the dam releases the river from the bottom of the three-hundred-foot deep reservoir, a different river emerges: a green, bitterly cold, enslaved river, its soul having settled down with the silty coagulum burying the drowned contours of Glen Canyon.

The Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1963, has wreaked havoc on downstream ecology. The seasonal flux of spring flood and winter ebb was replaced by a mechanical, anthropogenic rhythm: the dam now doles out the river in accordance with major metropolitan area’s electrical needs. Before the dam, the rise and ebb of floods would deposit and rearrange the river’s sediment into ecologically important fluvial formations: sandbars, islands, beaches, backwaters. With the replenishing floods stifled by the dam and the sediment dropped at the top of the reservoir, the beaches and eddy sandbars are slipping away, grain by grain. No longer scoured by floods, the remaining beaches are increasingly impenetrable with tamarisk, Russian olive, and willow. No longer swept aside or rearranged by floods, the debris fans that form at the mouths of tributary canyons constrict the river, forming narrower, bonier rapids. Before the dam, the river could reach a high of eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit; the river is a now a consistently frigid forty-seven degrees—for this alone I hated the dam, how it spoiled one of life’s greater pleasures: swimming in a summer-warmed river.

The dam’s effects are geological as well as ecological. Before the dam, the melting of the Rocky Mountains’ snowpacks sent spring floods raging through the Canyon. The highest recorded flood (in 1884) peaked at 300,000 cubic feet per second, or cfs (the dammed river now fluctuates between 7,000 to 30,000 cfs). And yet even that deluge is dwarfed by floods that ripped through the Canyon within the last 2 million years: the cyclic melting of the Quaternary Ice Ages produced flood after flood—some as large as 1 million cfs. These floods significantly contributed to the downcut topography of the Colorado Plateau; the geologist Wayne Ranney estimates that as much as half of the Grand Canyon’s current depth—so, some 2,500 feet—occurred within this time. After all, the Colorado River did not carve the Grand Canyon by the steady rasp of sediment-laden waters abrading bedrock. A thick—in some cases seventy-five-foot-thick—layer of silt, mud, and sediment protects the bedrock from the river’s scour. Only when the river swelled in floods big enough to sweep away the sediment, and the giant boulders suspended within the flood hammered the bared bedrock into clasts the flood then whisked away, only then did the Canyon deepen.

No more. The once diluvial Colorado River system is now constrained by more than a hundred dams between headwaters and delta. The once volatile river has been reduced, as the river guide and author Kevin Fedarko has written, to “little more than a giant plumbing system” consigned to slake the thirst of some 30 million people. The river that carved the Grand Canyon in a scant 6 million years has been fettered; the canyon this river carved no longer deepens.

I had crossed the Little Colorado River and walked upstream of the confluence to pump my drinking water, and not just because the river was running thick. The Little Colorado’s water is some of the foulest in the Canyon: heavily mineralized, slimy, brackish, stank. Jack Sumner, one of Powell’s crewmates on his first trip down the Canyon in 1869, found it “a lothesome little stream, so filthy and muddy that it fairly stinks … as disgusting a stream as there is on the continent … half of its volume and ⅔ of its weight is mud and silt. [It was little but] slime and salt.” A hundred years’ worth of human effluvia: battery acid, car oil, tires, trash, as well as traces of one of the worst radioactive spills in US history, when 100 million gallons of radioactive water were accidently released into a major tributary in 1979, has done little to improve its flavor.

But honestly, even though it begins as Rocky Mountain snowmelt, by the time it reaches the Canyon, the Colorado River’s water isn’t all that much more palatable. I pumped a liter and took a sip. Alkaline, almost curdled. The rim of my bottle was gritty; I could feel the grains of rock rasp my tongue, the sand grind my teeth. Despite the dam, the Colorado through the Canyon is by no means devoid of silt. According to Gwendolyn L. Waring, author of A Natural History of the Intermountain West: Its Ecological and Evolutionary Story, the river below the dam still conveys some 12 million tons of silt a year. Twelve million tons of silt still makes for a raspy river. Much of the silt comes from the Pariah River, which enters the Colorado hypersaturated with the pink, hematite-rich soils of Bryce Canyon. Waring claims that the Pariah, a Paiute word meaning “muddy” or “elk water,” has “carried greater concentrations of suspended sediment than any other river in North America; concentrations of up to 2 pounds of sediment per quart.” The Little Colorado supplies a significant amount of sediment; the rest comes from the park’s hundreds of tributary canyons. And thus a drink of the river, despite the twist of the mouth at the taste, is a desert communion: the dolomites and mudrocks of Nankoweap or Kwagunt basins, having clouding into the Colorado, now billow into my bloodstream.

The Southwest’s intense monsoon thunderstorms play an integral role in the conveyance of tributary silt. For those few wet months, floods and debris flows—ranging from 3,500 to 10,600 cfs and, at least once this century as high as 35,314 cfs—race down the tributaries, scorching the river its namesake red. Flush with runoff, again the river moves the wasted continent to the sea. You open your eyes underwater and it’s black as a cave. Like being buried alive.

Yet because of repressed river flow, most of this tributary sediment settles to the riverbed shortly downstream of the tributary canyons. Since 1996 the various federal agencies managing the dam and river—mainly the Bureau of Reclamation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service—have been experimenting with short-duration, high-volume dam releases (aka “high-flow experiments,” or HFEs) designed to mobilize these thick mantles of sand and sediment in hopes that when the flood subsides, the mobilized sand will have replenished downstream beaches and riparian areas. As of 2017 they’d conducted six such experiments, with no flood larger than 45,000 cfs. The latest tactic, now part of the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program, is to strategically time the high flows with the episodic flooding of tributaries, as when, in a three-month, end-of-monsoon-season span in 2012, the Paria River debouched at least 538,000 metric tons of sand into the Colorado River.

However, according to a 2011 USGS report, the relation “among sand supplied from tributaries, short-term sand enrichment in the Colorado River, sand transport during HFEs, sand transport between HFEs during normal operations, and the resultant sand mass balance” is complex, and delicate, and “uncertainties still remain about downstream impacts of water releases from Glen Canyon Dam.” For example, the experimental floods may have had a role in the 800 percent increase in the catch rates of rainbow trout—the endangered humpback chub’s main predator—at the confluence between 2007 and 2009. On a wider scale, the question remains whether tributaries even supply enough sand “to provide the elevated suspended-sediment concentrations needed to build and also maintain sandbars.” Because of this, environmentalists have urged the Bureau of Reclamation to install a slurry pipe that would inject reservoir sediment back into the river, though the bureau has indicated no more willingness to do this than to install a native-fish-friendly device that pulls warm water from the surface of the reservoir though the penstocks. They have valid reasons: sediment released from Lake Powell will only further reduce the already diminished capacity of Lake Mead, a far more strategic reservoir, and warmer water, while bad for trout, might increase the populations of other voracious warm-water nonnative fishes. Still, the bureau has been historically, notoriously recalcitrant concerning anything other than the Glen Canyon Dam’s main purpose as a “cash register” dam, and even getting them to conduct some of the high-flow experiments required litigation.

So it goes with the Colorado River these days; as Marc Reisner put it in his classic book Cadillac Desert, “The Colorado’s modern notoriety … stems not from its wild rapids and plunging canyons but from the fact that it is the most legislated, most debated, and most litigated river in the entire world.” Though there is a great and necessary deal of cooperation over this miracle of a desert river “resource,” scarcity and complexity breed conflict, and often enough it’s the Bureau of Reclamation versus the National Park Service versus the Fish and Wildlife Service versus the Navajo Nation versus conservation organizations; urban Phoenicians versus pima cotton farmers versus whitewater rafters; “upper-basin” states versus “lower-basin” states versus the federal government; on and on, all the parties with their own vested interests, competing values, institutional ideologies, and narrative blinders.

And beyond all the tangle of acronyms, abstractions, and differing philosophies is the squat, concrete reality of the dam. So, too, for all the ways our individual and cultural conceptions allow us to see or not see the Grand Canyon, and as much as it may be the most staggering, unknowable, sublime phenomenon that I have ever experienced, the Canyon is still rock, and wind, and river. I was born sixteen years too late to have experienced the Canyon before the dam. I couldn’t—can’t—see the native fish slipping toward extinction. I haven’t yet spent enough years on the river to witness the beaches waning to nothing, the rapids choking with boulders. There is only so much my mind can bear to read about acre-feet allocations, fluvial geomorphology, and adaptive management programs. But every year, as the monsoons waned, I watched brown-green veins more frequently marble the firebrand red until, in time, the entire river flowed that sullen, incarcerated green.

Conversely, during those months when the tributaries are flashing, turning the river brown, or during those rare, brief days of high-flow experiments, one understands that the central miracle of the Grand Canyon is the staggering amount of material that the river is capable of conveying. It’s so obvious that it’s commonly disregarded, or slips past without notice, but the exposed and spreading rock is not the Grand Canyon: the Canyon is the absence of that rock. The Canyon is a lacuna—a gap, a segment of earth torn from its surroundings, the thousand cubic miles of rock that the river has excavated. And not merely the iconic gorge itself—in what the geologist Clarence Dutton dubbed “the great denudation,” strata a mile thick was removed from the top of the Grand Canyon region. An entire landscape, gone. The Moenkopi layer, gone. Chinle layer, gone. The Moenave, Kayenta, Navajo, Templecap, Carmel, Dakota, Tropic, Wahweap, Kaiparowits, Wasatch, Brian Head—almost 200 million years’ worth of sedimentary deposition—gone. The arterial river flume sluiced the broken landscapes to the Sea of Cortez. Wells sunk along the river’s delta have penetrated eighteen thousand feet of alluvial fill without hitting bedrock. Fifty thousand cubic miles of sediment may lie buried under the Gulf of California. In time that material will be subducted and reabsorbed into the hot crust of the earth, and, in even greater scales of time, again rise to the surface as new earth.

And yet, for a geologic gasp, no more sediment disgorges into the gulf. None.

In the fathomless reaches of geologic time, a few centuries’ or millennias’ lack of silt won’t affect the tectonic cycle in the slightest. And that’s part of the magic of the Grand Canyon: all I had to do to feel, if not hope, then at least a comforting sense of context, was to look around me, press my bare palms against that unbearably ancient rock, slide my bare feet in that cold, indifferent water. I may mourn that I’ll never get to see a 200,000 cfs flood deepening the Canyon, or that I’ll never get to sit at the confluence of the free-flowing San Juan River and the free-flowing Colorado River and watch the sediment of one curl like spiral galaxies into the deep space of the other, but I find some small, fatalistic comfort in the fact that the dam is a temporary barrier, that the river, as Robinson Jeffers put it, is a “heart-breaking beauty [that] will remain when there is no heart to break for it.”

My water bottles full, I poured the remaining water in my settling bag into the shallows. The force of the water plumed sand into suspension, some of which settled back to the bottom, some of which was whisked away by the eddy. I watched the gauzy ribbons of sediment flow past, allowed myself to fancy that they made the main current to be carried down the river’s length to the waters of Lake Mead, where the individual grains will again succumb to their minuscule gravities and fall, slowly, to the bottom.

Abel placed the old sledge head over the new handle to see how much more wood he needed to rasp off for the head to fit true. A lot more, apparently: the head barely slid down an inch. He looked closely at where head met handle, then into the eyehole of the head, trying to see the contact that impeded the fit. Without taking his eyes off the handle he popped the head off, placed it on the workbench, and with the same hand reached for his rasp. He began scouring vigorously, his brow furrowed in concentration.

I smiled, reminded of the time he was pleading his case to a Navajo Tribal Policeman. Well, not so much pleading as defending his honor, which had been called into question, and in a sequence of flustered, earnest statements, without a hint of braggadocio, he said, “I’m a hardworkin’ man!”

Abel was a good ol’ boy from the hills of North Carolina. His slow drawl and southern colloquialisms made him a gem to listen to on the Park Service radio. Most of us adopted curt, professional voices, all “Clear!” and “Copy,” and Abel did too, but every once in a while he’d get excited and squawk things like: “I just got hit by the squall! It’s lightninin’ perdy bad!” (Afterward, as the storm would be clearing and the sun would shine through the rain, he’d turn his blue eyes, strong jaw, and hawk nose to the sky and say, happily, “Yup. Devil’s beatin’ his wife.”) He loved to talk politics, read Newsweek with his coffee in the morning. A great “geetar” player, though he was shy and didn’t know actual songs, just put his head down and jammed blues riffs. Blake called them “songs from the heartland,” and Abel thought that Blake was just about the funniest guy he’d ever met in his life. When Blake told stories Abel would slap his knee and let loose a series of short Rebel Yell barks or a single bluegrass falsetto “Ha!” Often he’d be talking and then trail off into muttering, as though accustomed to nobody listening to him, as though so used to talking to himself he would continue doing so among friends. When he was telling a story or had an unexpected audience, he’d spread his legs wider, clasp his hips with his hands, cock his head to the side, stare out into the distance, and talk in measured, almost mock proclamations. At times this pose was clearly a joke, but he adopted it so habitually, in irrelevant or inappropriate situations, that it slipped from joke to refuge. I always suspected these strange mannerisms arose from being raised dirt poor with a strict father. When he’d berate himself for messing up some minor thing I’d have hardly bothered to notice, he’d look as though his father were about to whip him. And he was a hardworking man: dedicated, strong as the noonday sun, handled his tools and worked his stone with ease and familiarity.

He knew what he was doing with the sledge shaft. We didn’t protect our wood handles with rubber guards, so if I was hammering rebar through a juniper log check and missed by a half-inch, the rebar would shred the handle. Too many missed blows and the handle either splintered outright or become severely compromised. You could feel it, swinging a solid sledge versus one on the verge of cracking. A good helve would shiver and spasm with the blows, tight and muscular. A weakened helve would ring hollow as it hit rock, wouldn’t bounce back as smartly. Eventually the handle would break, the wood ligaments still connected but flimsy, folding. On rainy days we’d take off work an hour early and do maintenance on our tools in the barn. Someone would spill a bucket of old sledge heads onto the dirt floor, crack a box of brand new, clean-as-dawn thirty-six-inch hickory wood handles, and we’d get to work.

The new handles were always much fatter than the oval hole in our sledge heads, so we’d have to rasp wood off the top of the handle until the sledge head slid on snug. But you had to be careful not to rasp too much off or the head wouldn’t fit faithfully, no matter how the handle widened once you’d corked it with wood and metal wedges. As we rasped, someone on the crew would be sure to point out how much more efficient it’d be to use mechanized wood sanders, but I liked rasping away by hand. So, it seemed, did Abel. He pushed the rasp against the handle with long, powerful strokes; fat-grained sawdust shot onto the floor. He’d rotate the handle rotisserie-style as he worked, he’d check to see how the head fit, then rasp again, then check again.

Abel and I came from different backgrounds and from opposite ends of the country. We had very different ways of being in the world. But we were good buddies. And in a way we were similar. We were both good at trail work because we were strong and had good balance and coordination, and because much of the work came naturally. We also both came to the craft as adults. It is something we learned. Neither of us was like John Hiller or the Luck brothers, who grew up on farms in Iowa, or Jim Bryers, raised by a Mennonite family, also on a farm, or Francis, the Navajo jack-of-all-trades who came up hard on the rez—those guys who knew how to weld, repair tack, mend broken chainsaw links, tie diamond hitches, frame a house, fix a carburetor, all those tricks and tools of the trades that one seems to pick up as a matter of course when growing up on a farm, ranch, or rez.

Me, I grew up in an affluent neighborhood in one of the most urban metropolitan areas in the world. I had to lie to get my first job in the trades: as a carpenter working for Alaska State Parks. I had driven up to Alaska my first summer in college. I didn’t have a job lined up and knew only one person in the whole of Alaska—my aunt—but I was wholly taken with the idea of the place, owing to childhood Jack London stories and to a girl I had a crush on in high school telling me of a guy she was probably sleeping with having come back from a summer on a fish boat in Alaska all tan and muscular and bearded. I wanted to be all tan and muscular and bearded and get the girls. When I arrived in Homer, I went down to the docks and asked around for work. A guy asked if I was good at cleaning fish. “Pretty good,” I told him, having never cleaned a fish in my life. Later that summer, watching people clean fish on those same docks, I thanked the gods I don’t believe in that I hadn’t been stupid enough to try and bluff my way into that job—these guys were cleaning four-foot-long king salmon and two-hundred-pound halibut as quickly and efficiently as coring apples. My dumb bluff would have been called quickly, horribly.

Anyway, after a few days of failed searching, my aunt called the local district ranger, and he called a guy and that guy, not all that much older than me but in charge of rebuilding a ranger station in Kachemak Bay State Park, bought my fabrications about my experience on a construction site. I can’t remember what specifically my bullshit consisted of, but I justified it to myself as a necessary surmounting of the classic catch-22: so often to get a job you need relevant experience, but usually you can’t get this experience without first having had a similar job. Generally this is overcome by a fair amount of exaggeration on the one hand and a kind person opening the door for you on the other. I provided the exaggeration; this kind person opened the door. And what a door: ten-hour days of honest work and deep camaraderie under the Alaskan summer sun, with loons crying the sun down and schools of salmon stirring the surface of the lagoon.

I used this experience, along with that from my job on my college’s farm, to get my first job working Trails at Point Reyes National Seashore. Though to get this job I also lied, this time about my experience using chainsaws. On the first day of the job, when the foreman showed us a shed containing about thirty different chainsaws, I asked, “Do you ever use electric saws?” because back in LA that’s what we’d use in the rare instance a eucalyptus limb would fall across the driveway. And he looked at me like, “Electric fucking saws? What, we have a ten-mile-long extension cord, too?” Luckily, before he could dig deeper into what exactly my experiences with saws had been, the other new guy, a pale, bespectacled, skinny kid, was overcome by the oil and gas fumes in the cramped quarters of the saw shed and fainted. The next day, continuing my bluff, I simply grabbed a Stihl 440 saw, surreptitiously watched how the others were starting theirs, fired it up, and went at a downed redwood. My confidence knew no bounds; nor, apparently, did my idiocy.

Luckily we spent most of the autumn cutting brush and smaller deadfalls. My best friend on the crew, a beak-nosed bodybuilder covered head to toe in tattoos, including one of crucified Jesus that covered the entirety of his very muscular back, happened to be a wildland fire hotshot during the summers. He babied his saw as if it were his newborn child. He taught me a great deal about cleaning, sharpening, and repairing a saw, the intricacies and physics involved in felling and bucking trees, as Devin was to do about rockwork in the Canyon.

And so, despite having entered the trades through no small amount of bluffing, bullshit, and irrational self-confidence, I became competent, then skilled, at my chosen craft. As had Abel, though surely on more honorable paths. We both felt like we belonged to the work, to the crew, and to the place. Even so, I had my doubts. I didn’t know if Trails was something that I could or would want to do indefinitely. I didn’t know if I should.

During my brief stint as a farmhand in the Pacific Northwest, I worked as a beekeeper for a small honey farm. One of the men on my crew had been born in Mexico—indeed, he had been smuggled through a tunnel under the border when he was a scared-stiff sixteen-year-old—and told me in his broken English about his younger cousin, raised in the States, whose parents had helped pay for him to go to college, but who, with degree in hand, had gone back to work in the fields with his family. My friend said this with scorn; he said this as though I was supposed to laugh in disbelief and shake my head at the idiocy and waste of certain people. Certain people like me. Essentially he was telling me that I had a place and that laboring in the radish seed fields was not that place. That no matter how much I worked to shape myself, no amount of rasping would hone me true to that head.

He had a point: I had graduated from college, perhaps I shouldn’t be harvesting honey in a bee suit in the hundred-degree sun for ten hours a day earning ten dollars an hour. A similar thought occurred to me once or twice in the Canyon—that I’d be squandering the incredible good fortune of my birthplace and the rigors and expenses of my education by grubbing ditch in a desert for the rest of my days. After all, I may have been good at swinging a sledge and stacking stone into walls, but what I was really good at? Reading comprehension. What I really liked to do, more than shaping stone and about as much as hiking, was sit in a hammock in the shade on a summer day and read a good book of poetry. I couldn’t have been much more than six when my aunt asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up and I said: “A fireman.” And even now I think of how that would have been a good job: good tools, good skills, exciting, heroic, a closeness with the elements, part of a brotherhood, an all-around honorable profession. But when she asked me why I wanted to be a fireman I said, “So I can lie in a cot and read all day.” Even now this rings true.

There was no reason I could not dedicate myself with good conscience to the good work that was Trails, to honing myself in body and mind as I honed a blade or rasped a helve. What laborer work failed to provide monetarily it made up for spiritually. But I had not dedicated myself: I was a fickle dabbler, over and over a novice, going from construction to farming to Trails. And all the while I wrote in my journals; all the while what I really wanted was to do was write.

I had always known this, and I had always buried it. I’d refused to commit to it as I had to anything else. But Trails, and the Canyon, catalyzed that want. Sitting there, that day, watching Abel rasp that helve, I realized that I was paying attention to the details of woodchip and raindrop in that distanced, attentive way a writer watches something he or she will later write about. I realized that I shouldn’t ignore the fact that I’d filled hundreds of pages of notes and anecdotes and descriptions of the Canyon. The trove signified that that’s what I was doing, anyway: writing.

Reputedly, Hemingway’s basic motivations for writing were to find out how fly-fishing and bullfighting worked; I’d been half-heartedly doing the same with Trails. And there were similarities between the crafts of writing and trail work. The quick clack of the keys in the flow of writing was not unlike the sharp ring of the hammer in the rhythm of masonry. Both blank page and gaping hole presented an empty form to fill; be they words in a sentence or stones in a wall, one had to determine the best fit. Writing, like crafting a wall, examines and invests in what is solid, what is satisfying, what matters.

This should have been my answer to the question Erika posed that day on the North Rim. Yes, I wanted the storm-wracked Canyon below us to be part of my life. But I also wanted to write about it. I wanted to create a balance between the worlds of writing and labor, between hard work and proper idleness. Working Trails in the spring, summer, and fall, with a nice winter off-season for writing, was as close to that as I had yet come in my life. I wasn’t going to abandon that to move to Florida. I decided, right then, in that barn, what I wanted, what I was going to do: I’d apply to MFA writing programs, continue to work Trails in the summers, and have faith that our relationship could survive the distance.

Abel held the sledge vertically between his legs and tapped the handle end forcibly onto the deck. The boards boomed with each blow. He held the sledge up, looked at it from the top, looked at it from the bottom, slammed it back down against the floor. Looked again. Hefted it, happily. Caught my eye. “Trued,” he said.

The herd of cow elk ran off the slope so fast I barely had time to gasp before the first, then the second gigantic creature squeaked past the hood of the car, and to duck as Erika punched us broadside into the third elk at fifty-five miles an hour. We hit her right at the knees, so that all eight hundred pounds of ungulate crashed onto the hood and then flipped over the top of the car. My car.

Erika wrenched us over to the side of the road. The car was still running, but the engine squealed and the dashboard flashed red.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She was crying, shaking, one hand fluttering in agitation, the other death-gripping the steering wheel.

She was all right.

“I’ve gotta get that elk off the road.” Adrenaline had clouded the brain, and I was out of the car and running up the road, barefoot, not bothering to consider how I’d dispatch a mortally wounded elk with my bare hands. But the elk was gone. There was an empty series of tight curves, the cold moonlight on the guardrail, and a mountainous drop into the darkness beyond. I ran back to the car.

Erika was standing there, sobbing. She looked up at my approach.

“I killed your car,” she cried.

By all appearances, she had. Fluid was pouring out of the crushed radiator. Shards of headlight lay scattered across the blacktop. The hood bore the cartoonlike impression of an elk: there was the imprint of the legs, there the ass, there the massive belly. There the elk pellets lodged in the windshield wipers.

“Jesus Christ. That thing blew right over the top of the car,” I said.

“I killed your car.”

“I don’t care about the car.”

The car was a 1996 Saab convertible, a hand-me-down from my father. It was a nice car, a reliable ride, and I wasn’t in any financial position to be turning down gifts of any sort of used vehicle, but it always embarrassed me, driving a teal-green Saab convertible in the southwestern desert. It seemed a slice of LA ostentation that didn’t transplant well to the desert, or at least the desert life I was living, or at least the desert rat ego I’d developed. (Did it have California license plates for a while? It may have. All that was missing for total AZ ostracism was a Lakers sticker.) I’d inch it over forty miles of washboard road to a remote trailhead, and in the rare instance anyone else would be out there they’d be getting in their high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle, and would stare at me with what may have been astonishment but which I always assumed was condescension.

But apparently that car was a tank. I had dubbed it Tipitina, in honor of the Professor Longhair song, because it called to my mind a tawdry lady of the night—though I was the whore, for taking it—but the day after Erika plowed it through a full-grown cow elk, after we limped it into a nothing town and it needed just two cans of Radiator Seal-All to stagger another 530 miles to a radiator mechanic, I loved that car a little more, or at least respected her enough to rename her Stagger Lee.

Later Erika visited an old junkyard and bought the same make and model and color of hood. But blowing the literal shit out of an elk had bent Stagger Lee’s front frame and the hood didn’t fit true. So back on the North Rim, Erika spent a good week putting in new headlights and a grill and jiggering the frame into alignment. The hood never did fit plumb or latch securely, but whatever, it signaled a good story, especially because if Erika had time to brake and we’d hit that elk at any slower speed that creature would either have come through our windshield or flipped atop the ragtop and crushed us to death.

After work I’d walk to my trailer to find Erika on her back beneath the car, the frame strung between ratchet straps stretched taut between fir trees. She had received my plan of attending graduate school, apart from her, calmly, sadly. We didn’t discuss it much, in part because of the possibility that neither of us would be accepted, and there was no point in shedding unnecessary tears, but also because it was sad, and there was little to say besides “We’ll make it work.” This is what we said. As for what would happen once we had received our master’s degrees, whether we’d both come back to work in the Canyon, or I would continue to work in the Canyon while Erika got her PhD, or I’d pack up and follow her to Florida, we had no idea. In all honesty, at the time I think I was less concerned with what would happen years hence than I was with overcoming my reticence about telling my crewmates that I was relinquishing a significant amount of time on Trails in order to study creative writing. Hunching over a computer in an enclosed space didn’t entail quite the same level of manly glory as swinging a sledge in the open air. If I don’t consider myself the platonic ideal of machismo, this was still an enervation. I’d still be abandoning a part of my identity: I’d come to regard my scarred arms, tanned neck, strong grip as though they were birthrights. But the boys didn’t care. They were surprised, sure, but kind of interested, even admiring of my attempt to break Trails’ own particular inertia.

Still, a strong undercurrent of machismo flowed through the trail crew. Back at the bunkhouse, tossing horseshoes, the boys on the crew would rag me about having my ol’ lady fix my car. I’d shrug, say, “She’s the one who wrecked the damn thing,” or closer to the truth, “I don’t know shit about cars.” But the real truth was that I didn’t care either way, that for days I’d been caught by another thought: why do things happen? Perhaps the Greeks were right about our threads of fate, or the New Agers right about lines of power crisscrossing the earth, and how we animals go coursing along those preordained lines right into one another to call it chance. If the intersecting currents of elk and car seemed a common enough miracle, the way Erika and I had come crashing together seemed a less common miracle. For unlike the other relationships we’d both been in, we hadn’t eventually bounced off one another, back into the proverbial darkness. We had crashed together and wrapped, melded, the imprints one left on the other deep, enduring, and hopefully ongoing.

Dee and I were walking to Cape Royal when a four-foot-long, wrist-thick, brilliant-gold and bright-black gopher snake drifted across our path. I followed it, just shy of grabbing it, parting branches to better peer into the desert mahogany in which it took shelter, chattering all the while to Dee until I looked back and realized that he was gone.

I found him at the end of the cape, leaning against the safety rail, looking across the hazy Canyon.

“What happened to you?”

“I’m not supposed to be around snakes.”

“Oh.”

We looked out at the desert.

“Why?”

“Because I’m Diné.”

Years later I sat on a chunk of sandstone amid a field of similar stones, their unblemished surfaces exposed to the elements for the first time in 275 million years. Above me rose the sheer, four-hundred-foot Coconino sandstone cliff from which the slide had originated. I sat there, looking at the cliff, at the slide, wondering how and why it happened, and thinking of Dee shunning that snake.

As to the collapse, which had razed a large section of the Tanner Trail, I considered the cliff itself, formed from an ancient aeolian sea of sand. Perhaps the extensive cross-bedding within the boulders of the slide signified an instability within the dunes that formed this particular section of cliff, and this instability eventually led to this collapse. Perhaps a rare instance of rain fell on the surface of these dunes, then the moistened sand hardened, was covered by dry sand, and this unusually ossified sediment layer proved the weak link. Or, broader still, the fall may owe to how the Tanner Fault—which the trail exploits to descend to the Colorado River—weakened the cliffs to the forces of erosion.

But all of that simply set the stage. More relevant are the processes by which the cliff was primed for the final, violent kinetics. There is scarp retreat: when groundwater percolating through porous sandstone reaches an underlying and impermeable shale layer, it is sluiced out onto the surface. The running water scours the shale; in time the cliff overhangs its undercut bed. When the sapping reaches a vertical joint in the overlying rock, the cliff collapses in landslide. There is frost wedging: when water freezes it expands by 9 percent; thus when snowmelt seeps into a fissured rock and refreezes, it wedges the cracks apart. When the frozen water melts, it penetrates deeper into the expanded cracks, removing particles that helped glue the rock together, further fracturing the rock when frozen again. There is root wedging: the slide contained remnants of an absolutely pulverized piñon; perhaps the tree had shot roots through and through a system of cracks in the cliff, roots that wedged the cracks wider as they fattened. Or perhaps the general seismic activity of the region—the five earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or bigger since 1900. Or perhaps the fact that when the moon passes especially close to the planet its gravitational pull causes the earth to bulge four to forty inches toward it. Perhaps a particularly strong pulse along an underlying telluric current. Perhaps a sheep hoof, a lizard pushup, a human voice. Perhaps, as the geographer J. B. Jackson put it, “mysteries that fit into no pattern”: the shifting of a kachina in sleep, the strict whim of Yahweh.

In the end, I’ll never know. Nor does it matter. On a broad scale, no mystery lies in the mechanical processes I sought to interpret: rock erodes and tumbles to rest. But I do believe in fey processes or fluctuations; a minuscule, improbable, powerful event, as with the quintessential chaos theory metaphor of the flapping of butterfly wings in Brazil causing a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. It could be that this force, or agent, or whatever, has simply not yet been discovered, as with all the phenomena in the world—germs, neutrinos, tectonic plates—that, before they were empirically verified, were dismissed as unlikely or impossible.

This, then, is why I thought of Dee and the snake.

There is much in this world that we recognize but don’t yet understand. Coincidences. Accurate premonitions. Déjà vu. How some animals sense earthquakes, or how the fly knows when I have her in my attention and thus evades me. How Erika, from across a crowded room, will feel the touch of my eyes and turn to meet them. How coyote willow seedlings, deposited by floods thirty feet above a creek, unerringly know the exact direction to send their roots toward water. How the light from Betelgeuse affects the cells of an aspen leaf, or a solar flare scrambles the navigational abilities of butterflies. Much of what we will never comprehend is linked to, or gives rise to, superstitions. Yet within the murky waters of superstition are suspended grains of truth.

Take, for example, Dee’s belief in not just the snake taboos that accompany his father’s Navajo bloodlines, but the animistic beliefs that accompany his mother’s Hopi bloodlines: that supernatural power inhabits everything. That not only snakes but also stones, rivers, and clouds possess their own existence. Western physics acknowledges that all these objects contain potential energy, and, in the case of a thunderhead, kinetic energy, but many Native Americans—and indigenous people the world over—go beyond that: they believe that rocks had life. Scientifically, this is false: if living can be defined by cells and the electrical synapses between cells, rocks—inert, cell-less, passive—are, as they say, stone-dead.

I’m a skeptic through and through and, in the case of the Tanner slide, believe in little besides the protean effects of water molecules. But still, I can’t wholly dismiss the belief that rocks contain within themselves power or life. For I quite easily accept the fact that water percolates through seemingly impermeable sandstone; that the stone in time saturates with liquid; that the dry air at the stone’s open faces draws the water through rock pores to the surface, where it forms a thin film; that this liquid film evaporates and leaves behind crystalloid evidence of calcite, gypsum, halite. To me, the rock’s inhalation and exhalation of water resembles breathing, and so the Hopi, if not scientifically correct, are at least poetically accurate—the insensate stone breathes, and what breathes, is, in a way, alive. Or if that stretches belief, put it this way: if one accepts that the mechanical and chemical processes working within a rock, and thus the rock itself, are inextricably threaded into the fabric of what we consider living, breathing life, then to separate the two, to draw distinctions between living and rock, is, in the end, meaningless.

During a Trails off-season, I worked for a few months on the National Park fisheries crew. As part of a native fish reintroduction project, we waded fourteen miles of Bright Angel Creek with backpack electroshockers, culling trout and tagging native fish. Fourteen miles, minus the stretches immediately upstream or downstream of the confluence of Ribbon Falls Creek. For the Zuni tribe believe that they originated from the water cascading from those falls. Out of respect for their beliefs we didn’t use our electroshocking backpacks near the confluence. Even so, during one of the meetings between the park and the tribe, the Zunis mentioned how there had been a dramatic increase in “tasing” incidents on the reservation, and hinted that they thought this increase could be attributed to the electroshocking of Bright Angel Creek, hundreds of miles away. As much as I find this hard to believe, even ridiculous, I do believe in the tenets of chaos theory, or the possibility of quantum entanglement—what Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance”—and for that reason I cannot outright dismiss the Zuni’s beliefs.

For all the knowledge I have gained through rational, linear thought, through systematic investigation and objective analysis, I also know that these same processes have limited me, distanced me from alternate ways of knowing or being. In his book One River, the anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis relates how shamans of various Amazon basin tribes combine different plants to make entheogenic potions such as ayahuasca. The potions are effective only because of a unique mixture of chemical compounds, yet the range of compounds within the pharmacopoeia of the rainforest is so great that thousands of years of trial-and-error testing cannot explain the shamans’ success in discovering the correct combinations. When questioned by Western anthropologists and pharmacologists, the shamans said simply, The plants sing to us.

In his poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman writes of becoming “tired and sick” of an astronomer’s proofs, figures, charts, and diagrams, and instead glides out into the “mystical moist night-air” to look “up in perfect silence at the stars.” (In this he was following the path laid for him by Wordsworth, among others, who claimed that “one impulse from a vernal wood” had taught him more than “all the sages can.”) In a way, that’s what Dee came to represent for me. Not so much the mystical—the two of us had drunk too much whiskey and watched too much South Park together to allow any romantic visions of a modern-day Noble Savage. Nor was he the type to be wholly content with incertitude: he’d riff on Carl Sagan or the latest nature documentary for hours. No, it was something else, his intrinsic capacity for what the poet John Keats called “negative capability”: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Twice we walked forty miles along the river paths of Buckskin Gulch and Pariah Canyon. Twice we tread the same ground but passed through different worlds. If Dee was awed by the beauty, he also accepted it, content as he was with retracing the pathways his ancestors had taken for tens of thousands of years. If I was awed, I was not necessarily content: as a writer I struggled with a lack of words for the beauty, with the way it reduced me to a prelinguistic state: making bird chirps and swooshing sounds, motions with my hand describing waves, ripples, curves. The canyons revealed language as sham, as impotent symbols and structures unable to adequately capture the shifting light on the curved walls, the brilliant green of a young cottonwood’s leaves against the red rock. My inarticulateness was no small thing: putting the right words in the right order is how I piece together the world.

Over the eight years I spent in the deserts of the Colorado Plateau, I’d cycle through the ouroboros-like gamut of ways of being and knowing. Sometimes I’d be searching for causes and effects and struggling with words and sentences; other times I’d enter into extended moments of stillness and simple being, of seeing the stars in perfect silence. Many of these more meditative moments pressed into me from my surroundings—sitting in the shade of a rock shelf, stunned into stupor by the heat, or later, at sunset, looking out from the lip of the rim, stilled by the hum of open spaces. There’s a wonderful moment in one of Powell’s journals when this consummate questioning naturalist writes, simply, “On the summit of the opposite wall of the cañon are rock forms that we do not understand” and leaves it at that.

I have difficulty leaving it at that, or in quieting what Susan Sontag has referred to as a “perennial, never consummated project of interpretation.” In her essay “Against Interpretation,” Sontag explains that “real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.” Obviously, the desert is not a work of art. The Canyon was created not by a craftsman god, but by the incremental eons. The rasp of water over rock is not trying to “say” anything. And in the case of the Tanner slide, I wasn’t trying to interpret its subtext, only its physical and historic processes. But still, Sontag is on to something, and Joseph Wood Krutch echoes the refrain in The Desert Year:

The fact that I never had stayed long in any part of the monument country may be the consequence of a certain defensive reaction. There is a kind of beauty—and it is presumably the kind prevailing throughout most of the universe—of which man gets thrilling glimpses but which is fundamentally alien to him. It is well for him to glance occasionally at the stars or to think for a moment about eternity. But it is not well to be continuously aware of such things, and we must take refuge from them with the small and the familiar.

The Canyon so transcends our accustomed cognitive capacities that we use any tool at our disposal to cage it into comprehension: analyzing the minute physical processes; using the frames of “viewfinder” telescopes on the rim; listening to an interpretative ranger provide statistics designed to subject the Canyon’s staggering phenomena into small and familiar frameworks: how many Rhode Islands can fit into the national park and neighboring national monument, how many Empire State Buildings stacked atop each other will equal the Canyon’s height or span, how many dump trucks would be filled by a day’s worth of transported river-silt.

Dee, and the rest of the trail crew in general, tended to regard such factoids—and the way of knowing the Canyon from which they arose—with a good deal of suspicion and scorn. An interpretive ranger’s knowledge of the Canyon was dismissed as gleaned from books and thus shallow—as if you could learn how to run a rapid or recognize the pressings of heat exhaustion by reading a book!—while the crew’s deeper knowledge was seen as arising from our hard work, our blood on the rocks. There is truth to this.

But I’m a voracious consumer of Grand Canyon facts and factoids. I love knowing that all the rock layers were laid down long before the North American landmass rammed into the African landmass to form Pangea, or that, as impressive of a geologic record as is the Canyon’s rock, 80 percent of the earth’s history is lost in the Canyon’s unconformities. I like how the detached, disinterested gaze of the interpretive ranger allows one to see the world as a riddle, as a problem to be solved.

Yet I also enjoyed Dee and the crew’s immersive and ebulliently subjective way of knowing the Canyon. I, too, place greater trust in the state of suspension and envelopment that arises when I lose myself in wroughting stone, or when I know exactly, easily, how to run the pool table, or when the exact words or sentences complete one another on the page: those heightened, perfect, rare instances of flow. Trusting this instinctive, tacit wisdom is far preferable to my annoyingly persistent postmodern doubts. Furthermore the bite-sized facts and factoids dispensed by the interpretive rangers carried a weight of conclusiveness that seemed suspect, untrued to our understanding of the ever-shifting world of the Canyon, a world offering a continuum of possibility and a web of interrelations, some of whose strands stretched into the fogs of mysticism. As in the case of Ray’s statement about “the real world,” to take one thing out of that strand and hold it to the light and say “This is this, period,” seemed, well, wrong. It wasn’t only that the world was mutable: it was ultimately unknowable.

Many in the crew felt that scientific knowledge detracted from their sovereign experiences, as though knowing the intricacies of the geologic record or species names for plants or animals removed the object from a general, democratic knowledge and into the realm of esoteric elitism. As though rigid scientific methods of objective analysis or the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge tarnishes the luster of awe, diminishes the great mystery of life and existence. Far better the direct, personal, sovereign, even naive experience, objectivity be damned. But I figure that knowledge gained through the fickle senses is best paired with knowledge from another, more objective or even empirically verifiable source. I’ve never found the pursuit of scientific knowledge to ever detract from wonder. On a certain level the crew is right: I could admire that gopher snake without knowing its species (Pituophis catenifer). When hiking with a botanist spouting Latin species names or a geologist speaking in terms of micritic ooids, I’ve had to suppress the urge to throw them into an Agave americana rosette or down an exposed breccia pipe. Discovering through later readings that the brilliant red shards of the lower Redwall are actually semiprecious, gem-quality jasper delivers far less a thrill than the initial discovery of the jasper by cracking open a stone with a single blow. And, perhaps in the end, loving without knowing is more important than knowing without loving. But knowing the story behind the jasper—a story of transgressions and regressions of a primeval oceanic sea over 15 million years; a sea teeming with life that died en masse and compressed into rock, in the process of which some shells morphed into jasper—does nothing but further my appreciation of the gem shining in my palm.

Not everyone on the crew distrusted the scientific worldview; those who did harbored different reasons for doing so. Dee put faith in his native traditions. Wayne distrusted that which contradicted the strict Christian beliefs of his upbringing. I always figured Blake didn’t appreciate how scientific facts impinged on the imaginative potential of the world, and preferred instead to delight in that moment when a shadow could be a lizard, or a rock spire a giant iguana dick. Some believed in the dichotomy between a cold, rational mind and a warm, intuitive heart, and put their faith in the latter. Many on the crew exhibited little curiosity or interest in the Canyon beyond its role as a place to earn their daily bread. As Anaïs Nin put it, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

What united the crew’s disparate outlooks was a need to ground any and all understanding in self-understanding, in how the perceived world worked through us in action and experience, sensation and emotion. Immersed in the Canyon, day in, day out, for months and years on end, the line between self and surroundings blurred—it was hot, we were hot; it rained, we got wet. Prickly pear glochids that embedded in my skin were eventually absorbed. Moving across the jumbled mass of the Tanner slide, the lines in my palm pressed against the sedimentary lines of ancient slip faces; the finely seamed angles of cross-bedded dunes mirrored the crow’s feet beginning to wing my eyes.

Scientific detachment wasn’t for us. As Sontag wrote about Marienbad, we fancied ourselves immersed in “the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy” of the irreducible rock, heat, wind. Even now, what I remember and how I remember the Canyon is bound to the sensuous: the shovel’s rasping scoop and snickering dig. The way mule’s shoes struck sparks against rocks in the early dawn. How a lightning strike would split a ponderosa’s bark into a ragged vulva that dripped butterscotch sap where cambium met heartwood. Raindrops plopping into the river and riverdrops rising in perfect synchronicity back up toward sky. Standing wet on a warm rock in the middle of the creek after a swim, the current causing the brilliant pink mats of coyote willow roots to sway above the dark river stones, the water beading like pebbled stars on my bare skin, and nebulae of cottonwood fluff floating slow and steady upcanyon, so that I could stretch my head and have them dissolve on my tongue, the tiny seed cracking between my front teeth.

At the time, I was surprised Dee wouldn’t want to grab the snake and note its forked tongue, its overlapping scales, its lidless eye. I was disappointed, too, figuring that someone who loved the Canyon as Dee loved the Canyon should want to know everything about the place he loved, in as fine and visceral detail as he could. But I couldn’t hold that against him any more than he could hold against me my pointed if relatively pointless musings about the genesis of the rockslide that wiped out the Tanner Trail. Dee helped me see the Canyon as a richer and more meaningful place, a place of stone and water, superstition and blood.

And then the mules escaped.

We’d bought five mules from a breeder in Oregon and locked them in the training facility in the South Rim’s woods. Abner, head packer at the time, said that the breeder, in an effort to showcase the mules’ agility, had led them through an elaborate obstacle course. If we saw that as perfect for the rigors of hauling loads on the Canyon’s steep, winding, and rocky trails, one of the mules saw it as training, and a week into her Arizona stay scrambled up the six-foot rock cliff that formed part of the pen. The mule headed north, back to Oregon, but promptly hit the rim. She stood awhile, admiring the view, then tried to board a tourist bus. The bus driver whipped off his belt and hobbled the mule to a tree.

So we laughed at that, and the packers put a fence across the section of cliff the mule had climbed, but a week later, ten at night, somehow all five of the new mules escaped. They stampeded through a nearby volunteer campsite, the volunteer’s flashlights revealing wild green eyes and then black night as the mules vanished into the woods.

The next morning a slew of Trails workers searched the South Rim’s endless piñon-juniper forest. By the end of the day they’d recovered one mule nine miles to the west. At the next day’s morning meeting, Devin covered a table with maps highlighted in different colors distinguishing boundary fences, fire roads, and water tanks. He immediately started detailing and delineating duties. Abner was there, conferring in low tones with Stan, the Hopi blacksmith. When Devin reached his full head of steam, Abner sidled over, pulling at his cigarette, looking at the maps, silent, impassive, but nodding once or twice, and once even pointing to the map, muttering something to which Devin, pausing, deliberating in that detached way of his, nodded in agreement.

A word about Abner.

Blake’s dad, former Trails foreman, told me of how one night on a spike camp, about twenty years before my time in the Canyon, Abner lit into a big bottle of vodka. Later that night, as Blake’s dad and an equally bear-sized man were stumbling back to their camp, they heard, down near the creek, a voice call, “Help me.” Their flashlights illuminated Abner crumpled up among the boulders. They made their way down the embankment and propped him between them. The whole way up Abner cursed them a blue streak, all “you motherfuckers this, you motherfuckers that,” and Blake’s dad and the other bear-sized man, struggling over an ingrate drunkard, said, “Fuck this” and dropped him and walked back to camp and went to bed. In the morning Abner hobbled into camp with a shovel as a crutch, complaining about his ankle, asking, “What happened?” Blake’s dad didn’t want to have to medevac him because of a drunken fall, and made Abner wait it out until they all rode out a few days later. Turns out his ankle was broken in three places.

Little wonder, then, how Abner had weathered: no real teeth, long goatee streaked with gray, the wrinkles on his face like the fault lines on a map, every one a story of wind, sun, rock, heat, dust, leather, cigarettes, whiskey, heartbreak, mule hair, fried chicken and biscuits, three marriages, three divorces. The man could inspire or embody any number of country songs, though Waylon’s “Lonesome, Ornery, and Mean” springs quickly to mind. He was a good man, and unfailingly charming to the younger women on the crew, but he was also bitter, bigoted, and an absolute grump. Like most of the crew, Abner mixed stereotypes and categories—he contained a spiritual and pragmatic side, could be sweet-hearted and racist. Take the way he treated the mules: he loved them, certainly, and masterfully worked them, but he’d also fly into a rage: kicking, punching, and cursing at a mule. Though generally gentle of demeanor, he was an absolute wild man behind the joysticks of a skid steer loader, lurching and bucking, spinning around like a dervish. He once spun one so wildly he knocked loose rocks he and Abel had spent the day placing, which sent Abel into a hard-hat-throwing rage, and Abner, still in the Bobcat, cigarette drooping from his mustached lip, just languidly watched him, as though Abel called to mind a rabid dog his papa had to shoot back in his Texas childhood. And the man had style: assorted silver and turquoise bracelets and necklaces, beaded and feathered juju tassels off his flat-brimmed hat. Weathered or not, he looked good. Little wonder that every camera turned from the Canyon to him as he led a mule string downtrail, spurs twinkling, aviator glasses gleaming, chapped hands rolling small cigarillos as he rode, a living, shining relict.

Another thing: he wasn’t too fond of Devin. There was a degree of old-blood-versus-new-blood NPS resentment there, and no small amount of fraught personal history between them, and on a whole they were vastly different people, their differences happening to grate harshly on one another, especially as they were differences that, owing to their senior positions on Trails, were not easily avoided. I don’t know what Abner thought that morning, watching Devin presiding over his maps like a general at war—I honestly doubt he paid him much mind at all, concerned as he was about his lost mules. The distance between them, the old tensions, was evident, as it always was, but at the same time, for the slightest of moments, came a slackening, a thin but true thread of mutual respect.

Anyway, after the map session, six of the crew went out on mules, two in a six-wheeled Polaris, one on his personal dirt bike. The rest of us went downtrail to work. All day we listened to the search party on the radio as maps in hand they combed the woods, at first sounding professional and organized but by day’s end clearly roaming the woods at random—at one point Devin asked LTB’s location, and there was a pause in which every single person listening to the Park Service radio could envision LTB looking around at the pressing woods as though seeing for the first time that the hard blue juniper “berries” were actually fused seed cones, or just then realizing that the unrelenting chatter of birdsong in the background was an especially large flock of foraging piñon jays, but then snapping to and coming back on the radio and saying “Ummmmmmm … in the woods.” If it hadn’t been so amusing the whole situation would have been deeply embarrassing.

It was deeply embarrassing.

Finally, late that afternoon, Dispatch came over the radio, reporting a mule in the woods behind Mather Apartments, only a mile from the pen. Then Dispatch again, with a report from a UPS man—oh, the laughter from those of us down on the trail at this—of two mules walking along the side of the highway.

Day three of the Great Mule Escape dawned with four out of the five mules caught. As the mules cost five thousand bucks a head, plus the hourly pay of the dozen Trails boys out looking for them (later, filling out timecards, tragically, hilariously, attributing those hours to “animal caretaking”), plus three hours of helicopter overflight, and general and specific wear and tear on the equipment, this last mule had become a rather expensive beast of burden. Day three and Devin, whose stress was pushing toward panic, was in the office printing Lost Mule posters to place around the South Rim Village. Day three, end-of-July hot, the water tanks in the forest dry.

And finally, after Dee and others slept out by the few tanks that had water, waiting for the thirsty mule, fearful of the Havasupai’s feral cows, they caught the last one. Except that Stu, our blacksmith and farrier, who had spent his youth roping calves in reservation rodeos, had “borrowed” the law enforcement ranger’s horse for the search, and, in the act of roping the last mule, this horse, more accustomed to making its way through ice cream–eating tourist crowds than to chasing after half-wild equines, bucked him off and bolted. So we had captured the final mule but lost the ranger’s horse and saddle—neither of which we had permission to use. As if we weren’t already on bad enough terms with the rangers.

This necessitated yet another extensive search, again for a number of days, again embarrassing for Trails, but too farcical to care too much, the radio chatter too classic, too pathetic. Of course, it wasn’t really funny—eventually the search was called off, consigning the horse to death by predation or heat exhaustion. We sacrificed the ranger’s horse for our mules, we told ourselves, not entirely displeased.

More than a week later the Havasupai found the poor horse: gaunt, lame, its saddle having rubbed gangrenous sores into its parched hide. A year later Abner received the blame for the Great Mule Escape, and wasn’t rehired.

A search-and-rescue ranger found the man’s discarded backpack a little ways off-trail. The following day, a half-mile south, under a large overhanging boulder, another ranger discovered a stash of food, including a can of tuna fish, which the man, as though in a frenzy to drink the juices, had crushed open with a rock. The boulder was between a series of dendritic drainages that merged into a small canyon, which in turn ran less than two miles into the Colorado River.

I figured the hiker was a fool who’d either overestimated his abilities or underestimated the Grand Canyon or both, and if he was dead—which seemed likely, as he was reported missing Tuesday and we flew in Friday—well, then, he had died a fool’s death, as had the other five or six a year in my Canyon time.

But then Kirk and I split from the others and slid down several scree slopes, down past the boulder shading the snack cache, down into the narrow canyon, and in the dry stream gravel I saw the first footprint. I followed with my eyes the wavering line of tracks downcanyon, and something settled over me, something that still settles in fits and starts of memory and meaning.

I watched the change take hold of Kirk, as well. Kirk swings between hummingbird-like exuberance and sullen lethargy. When he is down, he is way down, but on this search he was up, way up, his blue eyes sparks above the red earth, his forearms rippling in knots and cords as he scrambled up boulders. When Kirk climbs, he dances along the rock, seemingly more at ease with being alive in the world on vertical rock than on flat ground. Once in the canyon, on the tracks, away from the helicopter and the others, he calmed, became more reflective, as I have often seen him do when high on a route, working through a difficult move.

We followed the tracks. We pushed through branches broken by the man’s passage and stepped on boulders still smudged with sand once stuck to his shoes. We’d lose the trail in the boulder fields and move slowly, stopping to scan the walls, the shaded recesses … and then the prints would appear in a sand patch, always downcanyon, always toward the river. The days between our passings had slumped the track’s edges into mere pressure spots, indents, nudges.

The heat was staggering. It was easily 105 degrees in the shade, but there was little shade. The heat was not general: in pockets of purple shale or near-black mudstone, it was as though we waded through the heat. I had five liters of water and doubted it would be enough to last the length of the canyon. I tried to breathe through my nose.

I stopped once and called his name. I thought he was dead, but I called out. No echo. The heat, the pressing rock walls, absorbed the call. The natural world is a mirror of moods, reflecting one’s joy, claustrophobia, pain. But always, at the core, is indifference. I’d cut my hand on a sharp rock and wiped the blood on my pants, thinking, unforgiving, but even as I thought it, I knew the word’s little truths had nothing to impart to mute stone or acacia thorn. There is nothing to forgive, nothing to do the forgiving. Every way I turned, every indication from the sere surroundings reinforced what I already knew: life here is hard and not to be taken for granted. Perhaps especially hard for pale, mostly hairless, upright primates, no matter our brain size or will. But hard regardless—I’ve seen deer and sheep dead before their times in these canyons. I called out again. Silence. A fly would buzz then stop, and the silence hissed in the ears. Kirk called from downcanyon, and I continued following the two pairs of now-intermingled tracks.

Not two weeks before the search, Kirk and a mutual friend on the crew, Luke, attempted to climb a Canyon formation known as Newton Butte. Both Kirk and Luke are highly skilled climbers, and as Newton was not a technical climb, they hadn’t brought ropes. They scrambled up a series of natural ramps and small cliff faces but, at a certain point, deemed their chosen route unsafe and turned around. As Luke was navigating a tricky descent, the rock he was using as a handhold peeled off the wall. He plunged twenty feet, bounced off a rock ledge, fell an additional twenty feet, and finally landed on the rocky slopes, shattering one of his feet. They were a few thousand feet below the rim; at least three miles by trail. The sun was setting. Kirk climbed down to Luke, left him with his warm clothes, headlamp, and cigarettes, and set off, up the dangerously exposed, skinny-as-a-sheep-trail route known as the Shoshone Point route. He then hiked a mile and a half to the road, called Dispatch, and within three hours was leading a search-and-rescue medic back down the route in the dark. The medic later told me that, on the way down, she felt the wind rising out of the black night and realized it was coming from four hundred feet of exposed cliff. They eventually reached Luke, shot him full of morphine, and, in the morning, attached him, with the medic, to a line hanging from a helicopter. Kirk, for the fourth time in twelve hours, made his lonely way along the Shoshone Point route. Later he would tell me of the “instant and everlasting connection” that sparked between him and Luke in the seconds Luke plummeted past him, out of sight, seemingly to his death, before yelling up that he was alive.

The peculiar realities of this search were stitching such bonds between Kirk and me, hiking closely together now, just as they were between us and the man somewhere downcanyon.

Almost immediately, the dry streambed plunged off a rock shelf. It wasn’t a huge drop, maybe thirty feet, but sheer, and I scouted the steep talus bank to the right of the pour-off. There was sheep sign and sign of something else, something heavier. I knew it was his path, because I was looking and because I have traced my own faint paths back when ledges failed or turned to cliffs. I knew because Trails had familiarized me with the nature of disturbance in these desert soils: the broken crust, the scuffed rock. We avoided the pour-off as he had done.

Despite the pressing walls, the heat, the tracks, my eyes were caught by rocks and shells. In certain sections of the canyon, we crossed bedrock that had shattered into thousands of crystalline shards, all clouded reds and translucent pinks, speckled and marred by intrusive veins of dissimilar rock. I picked them up and held them to the light and pocketed the more brilliant. Dried millipede husks and flat, dime-sized snail shells glinted amid the red shale slopes. I picked them up, they powdered at my touch.

To drill holes into boulders in order to split them into workable blocks we’d use a pionjar, which rattles and chatters, hammering as it drills, necessitating double ear protection—earmuffs over earplugs. The world, suddenly muted, comes alive in unfamiliar ways. I’ll notice a single oak leaf, hung from a spider’s strand, spinning wildly, without a single other leaf moving. I’ll notice, on the flat surface of the rock I am drilling, minute sand grains popping like splattering oil to the vibrations of the drill; the muscle power of a raven’s tail feathers angled when banking; the liquid slide of clouds over the canyon’s vertical relief. All these phenomena stand out in near silence and acute visual clarity, and strike in me an almost nostalgic chord, like the detached contentment of a lucid dream. So it was then, in that canyon, following those man’s tracks, amid the stones and shells. Some ineffable light, glancing off of them, caught me, held me.

Part of the surreal nature of the day, besides the stones and shells, the burning rock walls, the heat and tracks, was that the standard geology of the Grand Canyon was warped and awry. The man had descended a canyon that ran through the heart of the Surprise Valley. Surprise Valley was formed by a series of enormous landslides, perhaps a dozen in all, the biggest landslide complex in the entire Grand Canyon. In total, a two-by-eight-kilometer section of rock and earth broke off the rim of the Esplanade and slumped a half-mile into the river corridor—an event so substantial that geologists refer to it as “bedrock land slippage.” We walked through the rubble of these slides. The canyon’s distinctive sedimentary layers were present and recognizable, but rather than layered striations, all was rubble, upturned and askew.

The evening was long, but dusk in the confines of a canyon within a canyon is brief. Kirk and I lay our sleeping pads over a stretch of sand broken by the man’s footprints and ate our freeze-dried meals in near silence. What we could see of the night sky between the narrow walls was veiled in clouds. We didn’t talk about the clouds, about how sleeping in a sandy wash in a narrow canyon in monsoon season was a way of tempting fate. But it was on my mind, and I knew it was on Kirk’s. I slept fitfully, in and out of dreams, bothered by the mosquitoes, the heat, the grit on my bare skin. I awoke in predawn to a rising nasal whistle, a toweeeep shriek, and only minutes later, hearing the hoo, hoo-hoo, did I recognize the owl screech and call. I lay on my pad and watched the bats spasm through the soft spreading light. By the time we were up and hiking, the sun was sliding down the western slope like a guillotine. It was five days after he should have emerged. The first traffic on the Park Service radio concerned flying in a cadaver-sniffing dog.

Within ten minutes of scrambling downcanyon, we came to another pour-off. The bedrock streambed funneled between two cliff walls and abruptly ended, continuing a good 120 vertical feet below. I lay my bare belly on the burnished red floor and inched my head over the drop. The pour-off was overhung—I could look straight down at the rocky streambed below and crane my neck to see the cliff wall concaving beneath me. I suddenly remembered how, the night before we flew in for this search, Luke, with his cast-encased foot propped on a pillow and his eyes alternating between musing vacancy and sparkling intoxication, had told me he’d been praying a lot those last few weeks.

I made my way along the slope to the left of the pour-off, seeing if the man could have avoided the drop and continued downcanyon. If not, there was no point in going over the edge. There was scant space on the steep slope between the sheer cliff above and the sheer cliff below—any misstep and I would have slid over the lip. The only person we knew to have ever hiked this canyon—an affable old canyon ranger—had described the rock as “manky.” We didn’t know what the word meant, but we didn’t have to ask: we well knew the Canyon’s rotten rock. I stretched out each foot and scraped the manky scree to form a foothold before stepping into it; the loosened shale skittered into freefall. I stopped every so often and scanned the slope for similar tracks but saw nothing, perhaps because I was so carefully attending to my own footing. I made the traverse—certain the man-boy could have done the same—and returned to the pour-off. Kirk, watching my slow progress, had already pulled out our gear and set up the rappel.

I was accustomed to the heat but was ripe with sweat. The littlest things—fumbling with my climbing harness, a slip of the foot—and the sweat sprang out all at once. I was happy to have it, for I knew there were only so many layers of sweat and that, in time, it would grow thicker, ranker, and eventually stop. I knew sweat was effective only if it evaporated, and I noticed the beads and sheets didn’t seem to be evaporating, just runneling down my skin. I also knew the instant irritation at the little nothings that cued some of my sweat flushes signaled the first stages of heat exhaustion.

Kirk rigged an anchor around a large rock perched on the lip of the fall. We clipped ourselves to the rope, and, one after the other, leaned back into the void and stepped off the edge. Our feet touched the vertical wall for two steps, then the wall curved away from us, and we hung, twisting in midair. Kirk zipped down, the rope whirring through his harness clip. I played the rope slowly out of mine, enjoying the vertigo that blossomed and pressed my stomach.

About one hundred yards downstream we found a single footprint in a spill of sand. We sat for a while in the last of the shade and watched the track change with the rolling sun. The shadows marking the cupped earth seeped into the sand, and the bleached track all but disappeared.

The night Luke fell, a number of us had gathered to eat dinner—indeed, Luke’s car pulled up, and we cheered, only to have Kirk rush out and tell us what had happened—and talk turned to the Canyon and how many of us believed it was, in a way, its own entity, an eminent or inspirited force with a penchant for the occasional bitch slap. Most opined that this punishment was meted out toward those lacking the requisite respect, those who underestimated or abused the Canyon, but others at the table argued it had more than a little Old Testament retributive wrath, and would lash even devotees: hence, the handhold that gave on poor Luke. But I don’t believe in a conscious or concerned force, be it the Canyon or God. Nor do I believe that one can trace an effect back to a single cause, be it a slight or a mistake.

Nobody knows the exact sequence of events that sparked the Surprise Valley landslides, or even the time frame in which they occurred—whether as a sustained and gradual (albeit geologically quick) slumping or a more typical crash-and-boom collapse. We know many probable causes: the saturation and lubrication of an underlying shale strata, the exposure of that shale by the incision of the Colorado River, the significantly wetter climate. But a more exact sequence, a more detailed geomorphic autopsy has yet to emerge, if it ever will.

Nor will we ever know the exact sequence of events that led to this man’s journey down this canyon. We know he called his dad before he left and told him when he should return. We know where he parked his car, where he left his backpack, where he ate a snack. We know his brain flooded his skin with sweat, as it flooded his capillaries with blood seeking temperatures cooler than his core. It is likely that his head hurt, a heavy clenching of the mind. Perhaps the strange veil fell across his vision—a sparking of sunspots, his sight marred by floating, psychedelic dust motes. With all his blood pressing against his skin, less blood went to his muscles and brain. His brain had already begun to malfunction—dehydration, like inebriation, allowed bad decisions: abandoning his backpack, leaving the trail, striking off down an unknown canyon. His body, unable to dissipate the heat, began to cramp, stiffen, stumble. His stomach heaved with nausea. His world spun. He tore off his pants. His body became a furnace—at 104 degrees, his life was threatened. At 106 degrees, brain death began. He slipped into a coma.

We know where he died.

After edging past the last pour-off, he hiked downstream. The canyon walls opened into spread-out hills, with an open view of the Colorado River corridor barely a quarter-mile away. The river—water, life—was right there. Perhaps, then, he had hope, though that last pour-off was surely still lodged in his mind like a thorn. And then the open canyon, almost a valley, swung to the south, and the strata shifted into the banded purple-brown Tapeats sandstone, and there, after all that, so close, so scared, alone, crazed, he scrambled down a series of bedrock ledges, hoping that what he saw wasn’t what he saw, and peered off the lip of his life.

On a boulder at the lip of the final, undescendable pour-off was the dead man in the dumb heat. He was draped across the boulder on his belly. He was naked below the waist, and his skin was burnt near black. It was as though he had fallen from a height onto the boulder. It was as though someone or something had placed him on the boulder. There were liquid stains on the boulder and bedrock ledge beneath his head. Maybe he died while bent over the boulder and vomiting; maybe he stood and fainted forward and died, and, in death, his swelling body’s liquid ran out of his mouth. What sticks with me, more than the liquid stains, the redblack skin of his bare legs, was the twist in his left knee, the way the muscles and tendons and ligaments skewed and slackened in death.

After some time regarding death, or perhaps in reaction to it, I studied the rock he died on, a water-smoothed boulder of Temple Butte limestone. I thought of how billions of ancient sea organisms died, piled up on the sea floor, were covered by silt and sediment, and, after hundreds of millions of years of pressured weight and heat and uplift and erosion, became this boulder now squatting at this cliff lip, serving as a cradle for death. I thought of how, in a millennium or two, the boulder will be pushed off toward the river, how it will crumble in time and make its way as silt to the ocean floor. As would this man-boy’s body, a body like a potsherd in the dust, a ruin, a body to be taken out of this canyon, in a bag attached to a helicopter, and buried in real soil with grass on top. I looked at the body, and I looked up at the implacable face of the distant slopes, the pockets of beauty I had become accustomed to, pockets my ancestors had to learn to find beautiful, and past them, I looked into the white sky, at the spark of the sun in cold space.

After scrambling down the Kaibab cliffs, traversing along the Toroweap, rappelling down the Coconino cliffs, sliding down the Hermit shale, chimneying through the Esplanade sandstone, zigzagging through the remaining Supai terraces, traversing atop the Redwall limestone, after four hours in the August sun, Erika, Kirk, and I arrived at the saddle, stashed our packs in the shade of a scrawny juniper, and were only then ready to begin the true climb, the colossal mass of Vishnu Temple rising another two thousand feet above us.

So back up the same strata we’d scurried down, the patterns of slope/cliff/slope the same as the way down but the threading up them different. Up and up, some tricky moves but we were making great time, which we had to, as the sun hadn’t much longer in the sky, and we didn’t want to descend in the dark. The last push to the pinnacle-like summit, and there, in the final twenty vertical feet of the entire massif, loomed the most dangerous part of the day: a four-move boulder problem with tremendous exposure on rotten rock.

We fall, we die.

This is not an uncommon occurrence in the Grand Canyon. There are times, many such times, when you do not want to fall. There are times, many such times, when it is not the fall so much as the remoteness of the tortured topography that will kill you. Danger abounded, and we’d all had our close calls. I’d almost stepped on a rattler deep in the backcountry. A lightning bolt struck insanely close to Kirk and me while we sat on the rim watching a thunderstorm. One season the concessionaires hosted an employee party to celebrate the closing of the North Rim lodge: a band played in the lodge’s foyer, a bonfire raged in the fireplace on the veranda, and I drank so much bourbon that on the bike ride home, up the hill to our FEMA trailer, I swerved back and forth, and maybe even fell asleep for a moment, because I came to, confused, lying on my back on a steep slope, my bike light shining fifteen feet below me, and a small light that it took me a moment to realize was Erika’s headlamp a good twenty feet above me, and Erika’s voice, filtering down to me, thick with worry—“Oh, my god, are you okay?”—and it only then occurred to me that I’d biked off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Trying to climb back up the scree with my bike, I kept sliding farther and farther down, and, being drunk, and figuring that I was never going to be able to get out of this Canyon, all I could do was laugh and laugh, and even later, back in our trailer, with Erika scolding me, furious, still all I could do was laugh, because, really, I was alive and unscathed and very drunk, but also because I was not just alive but living, the two, in my mind, not synonymous or mutually assured, one associated with breathing, eating, sleeping, shitting, the other associated with drinking, dancing, laughing, and, if so be it, the occasional headlong plummet into the place I’d learned to love like no other.

But I’m not, really, so much a fool. I know that getting hurt, badly hurt, is often the outcome of such endeavors, and that the denial of this inevitably is a crucial component of what I’ll readily admit can be an adolescent way of living one’s only life—a way I was, perhaps belatedly, learning to forsake. As much as a small, irrational, imbecilic part of me flirted with these touched-by-god experiences—wanted to get tapped by energy five times hotter than the sun, wanted to get recirculated in that chasmal hole in Upset Rapid, wanted to feel the burn of a rattler’s poison—the stubborn reality is that the burst of lightning above our head that day made me jump as I’ve never jumped in my life, the few times I had to swim rapids in the Grand made me never want to repeat the ordeal, and the sight of a rattler spasming in anger underfoot made me spin so quick in panic that I pushed Erika out of the way in my haste to flee.

Nor have I remained entirely unscathed. We once worked sixteen days in a row repairing the Bright Angel Trail after a particularly savage monsoon storm. On the seventeenth day I’d unearthed a huge, obelisk-like rock to use rebuilding a wall, but since it was too long to fit between the rock trail liners to roll down to my work site, I’d used all my strength to stand it on end and then let it flop over downtrail. This worked well for a good fifty feet, but then fatigue set in, or my string of luck frayed, and in the instant the boulder reached its balancing apex I slipped and fell backward and the boulder crashed back down onto my knee, which was pinned against a liner rock. The impact crushed the peroneal nerve in my knee; it was eight months or so before I could fully lift my toes off the earth.

Half an hour into our Vishnu hike, picking her way down a narrow chute in the Toroweap, Erika stepped on a loose, microwave-sized rock. The rock dislodged. She fell forward, the rock rolled over her ankle, and barreled downslope at Kirk and me, who scattered. Her ankle was scraped and bruised, but she wanted to continue the climb. Still, she was shaken, and for the rest of the hike she was cautious and slow. That incident, even the gravest possible repercussions of that incident, paled in comparison to the lethal repercussions of those final moves before us.

Kirk, the best climber I’ve ever known, had danced up the last twenty feet without a thought, the exposure nothing, the rotten rock nothing, and disappeared from view atop the summit. Whatever self-congratulatory lines I’ve written about the way the Canyon burned through me, Kirk’s burning made mine look like smoldering. When his excitement spiked, which was often, he burned like a crown fire. The Canyon may have sat closest to his heart, but the boy was always off crushing climbs in Patagonia, the Tetons, Zion, Yosemite, the Bugaboos, his phenomenal climbing abilities matched only by his utmost humbleness about them. Praised for his climbs, he had an utterly disarming response: “I just like being outside.” But that was only half of it. His slight, wiry frame simmered with the need to be physically active. We’d be at the base of a cliff, searching for a route up, and I’d look away for an instant, and when I turned back he’d be halfway up the cliff face. We’d get off work and I’d shower and collapse into a chair with a beer and a book; Kirk would go jogging. Or he’d load up his dirt bike with his camera gear and go roaring down one of the myriad fire roads scarring the Kaibab Plateau to scout routes or take pictures. He was probably already scribbling in the Vishnu summit register the end lines of the Jack London quote he’d framed above his kitchen sink: “The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

But Erika and I still stood there, discussing how to prolong our days. Erika has a catlike tendency to scramble up a cliff or tree without a care, but when time comes to descend she stiffens, her eyes deepen into pools, and she starts mewling. She hates down-climbing—hates having to look into the abyss, hates having to commit herself, however slightly, to the pull of gravity; hates it so much that I know once she summits her jubilation will be tempered by the knowledge that she’ll have to make these same four moves in reverse. So we stood there, and Erika cried a bit, and we talked it over, the obvious thing being not to fall, the less obvious thing being not to look down, except at your footholds, and the unspoken thing being: well, do we have to climb up there?

Not the first time we’d faced such a choice.

Once, in South America, Erika and I had already walked something like thirty kilometers in the pouring rain by the time we got to the river. The thing was: there shouldn’t have been a river there. At best a creek. But we crested a slight rise in the red clay road and it looked as though the road slid into a lake, and as we got closer it appeared that the middle of the lake was moving, and as we got even closer we saw the road emerging from the riverlake some hundred meters on the other side of the water. We had never before walked the road, only taken the dawn bus—the same bus that had not passed through the village that morning because the rain had disintegrated the roads and, apparently, caused creeks to overtop bridges.

“Is there even a bridge under there?” she asked.

I followed the road into the muddy swell, probing a stick in front of me. The water swifted across my belly button before I’d got a quarter of the way across the river. A log floated past me at a good clip, rolling with the current. I walked back to Erika.

“Well, we either walk back or we swim,” I said.

She looked back the way we had come, our tracks like postholes through the ankle-deep mud.

“I don’t think I can walk back,” she said.

“Yeah.”

The road’s slick clay mud had necessitated an exhausting toe-gripping gait, and we weren’t accustomed to walking so long, especially with packs, and I was barefoot, and my big toe hosted a painful pique, a parasitic chigoe flea. So we sat there, watching the water.

And then we waded in.

The river was thick with silt but warm. When the water reached her waist, Erika stopped. She looked unhappy. She muttered, “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” I tried to come up with some encouraging words, failed, and instead offered some lame assurance about how our backpacks should float. We took a few more steps and the ground was no longer beneath us and we were swept downriver. Our backpacks did float, luckily, though towing them made for awkward side swimming. We struggled across, being swept ever farther downstream. Finally we reached a straggly grove of half-submerged trees. We clung to their branches for a while, catching our breath and bobbing in the waves, then pushed off and swam to calmer water within the flooded forest. We pulled ourselves along the overwhelmed branches, getting tangled in underwater vines, until finally we staggered out onto the mud bank and collapsed, panting, happy. After a while we stood, shouldered our bags, and set off farther down the road.

Every risk was different. Every risk had to be respected, sized up as dispassionately as possible, and weighed against the repercussions and rewards. If Erika and I had committed ourselves to some risks together, we had declined many others. The declining was as powerful, perhaps more powerful, as the commitment: turning away from Lava Rapid had taught me that restraint, or resisting expectations, demands, glory, whatever, takes its own, and in some ways greater, courage.

So, no, we didn’t have to finish the climb.

But I had wanted to climb Vishnu ever since I first saw it dominating the skyline of the eastern Canyon: a titanic pyramid of rock rising out of the depths of the gorge, stunningly detached from the rim. Dutton found it “so admirably designed and so exquisitely decorated that the sight of it must call forth an expression of wonder and delight from the most apathetic beholder.” Every different perspective—from atop Coronado peak, directly south; or from Cape Final, to the east, or Duck on a Rock Viewpoint, to the west (this last one with a full inversion layer obscuring almost the entire Canyon except for the tip of Vishnu)—strengthened its pull.

We didn’t have to finish the climb.

But we had descended two thousand feet off the rim then ascended another two thousand back up this damn mountain and to turn aside at the last twenty feet would have been almost too cruel. Those last moves were why we climbed in the first place—the potential consequences of our actions cut through all the layers of inattention and distraction inherent in our twenty-first-century lives. Climbing brought about a keen and immediate involvement in the world. The entire world funneled into edges and cracks in rock. For a few vivid minutes seldom recognized minutiae—the presence of desert varnish, the tint of weathering, the texture of lichen—would have amplified, and essential, meanings in my life. Climbing dictates a wholehearted plunge that I’d intentionally avoided making in so many other aspects of my life, including, for the longest time, my relationship with Erika.

Watching Erika compose herself beneath that awful summit I realized that we’d been committed all along. The risk our recurring separations posed to our relationship was always subsumed to our confidence in ourselves, our trust in one another, our submission to the attractive force that kept pulling us back together. I realized how lucky I was that the girl to whom I would commit was as committed as I was to an outdoor life. I realized that the biggest regret in my life would be to not commit to her, to not abandon my-self to our-selves.

We didn’t have to finish the climb.

But at one particularly cuddly point in our relationship, we had decided that, were we ever to marry, we’d ask a dear friend to read Mary Oliver’s poem “Spring,” the crux of which reads: “There is only one question: / how to love this world.”

This is how we loved this world.

Erika stood, smiled, wiped her tears with the back of a dusty hand, and slowly picked her way up the last moves of Vishnu. I followed.

The technical aspects of those last moves were unremarkable; dangerous but not difficult. One of the paradoxes of the intense concentration required in such situations is that it does not, at least for me, seem to employ the same mental circuitry that results in memory: I seldom remember individual moves in a climb unless they were carried out with unusual grace or resulted in a fall. What I do remember, almost always, is the exact moment when my concentrating mind’s reduction of the world into tight, distinct moments relaxes and expands into the openness of the summit view, in this case the glory of the eastern Canyon: the burnt, rippled scarp face of the Palisades of the Desert, with Unkar Delta fanning into the main stem of the Colorado, the river muddy with monsoon runoff, and the indomitable horizon line of the Kaibab Plateau already casting a broad shadow on our camp, far below.

What I do remember is how, after having descended those four moves and then safely descended the bulk of Vishnu Temple and then eaten the calzones Erika had prepared the night before, we three spread our sleeping pads on bedrock ledges and lay on them and talked in happy exhaustion as we looked up at the night. I remember how the inky presence of Vishnu blotted the otherwise full flow of the Milky Way. I remember lying there, listening to Erika breathe in sleep beside me, and thinking that nothing mattered as much. Not writing, not Trails, not the Canyon. What were the Neruda lines? “When you surrender you stretch out like the world.” I surrendered. It was August, during the Perseids, and green meteors disintegrated across half the sky.