My sister and I have not gotten on well for a long time. When we were younger it was a matter of politics, her abandonment of her religion, her choice of male companions—on two occasions choices that left her destitute. She is older by two years but somehow in our twenties I began thinking of her as younger. Now, as I turn thirty-seven, I have to remind myself that I’m younger.
A difficult thing I’m having to face is that after many years of condescension I’ve begun to feel admiration for her. It’s even harder for me to admit after all these years of criticism that what’s driving me to maintain contact with her is a desire to know her. I want to try to fill a gaping hole, full of anger and regret, that’s just visible to me now.
You can picture, perhaps, the unremarkable issues that separated us. I’m embarrassed at how predictable I’ve been, understanding how little she’s changed during these years. I left behind a politics founded in naïveté, on impractical solutions to intractable problems, while she continued to embrace a politics of ideals. She believed—despite the evidence of history, which shows humans are selfish and aggrandizing. As for marriage, which she quickly came to see as not an arrangement for her, I’ll not lie and claim I was honorable, if love and honor are interchangeable in a marriage. I married someone I loved, but I would not have loved her had she not been practical and devoted, had she not wanted to have children and help me finish law school. We’re divorced now. When I look back on our history together, it seems inevitable. Perhaps one day this rapprochement I want with Mirara will seem the same.
An area of difficulty I suspect Mirara and I won’t easily work out is religion. We were raised Catholic. I’m still a practicing Catholic, as they say, but the divorce and certain issues like the Church’s opposition to social reform in Latin America have made me less enthusiastic. Still, I believe the Church is brave, and correct, on other matters—abortion, for example, and in its reluctance to embrace homosexuality (despite Christ’s example of Love). I don’t think Mirara’s ever had an abortion, but nothing puts us off each other like this does. She has no religion, just her friends and her solitary hiking and running, a life that has its attraction but in which all moral issues are murky, undefined by any laws.
Here, perhaps, is our crucial difference. I have always believed in abiding by the law (whether or not I actually did), where Mirara has been indifferent to most law. She’s not been lawless, of course, not criminal; but she has a way of carrying herself above the law I find not only tiresome but anarchic, a destructive seed. I believe this.
The door that’s opened between Mirara and me was opened by an unlikely person, a client, a man with substantial real estate holdings in Phoenix but an entertaining investor in many odder things as well. At our regular breakfast meeting he handed me a clipping from the Flagstaff paper, a story about a woman who’d found three large Anasazi storage jars at an undisclosed location in Grand Canyon National Park. According to the story, the polychrome jars, in perfect condition and nearly three feet tall, had become part of a new visitor display at the canyon. The woman, the story went on, had found them while climbing below the North Rim several years before.
I knew the woman was my sister as I read the piece, as surely as I intuited why Hamilton had given it to me.
“What do you think?” he asked. “We get some of those gung ho kids up at Northern Arizona or Prescott to do this for us. Pay them a salary, underwrite the cost of the trips—I’m talking outside the park, of course—in exchange for whatever they come up with. With adequate compensation. Here’s my thought. Most of the Southwest has been scoured by pothunters. The easy places are done. The last stuff is in places like this, places nobody can get to, except these athletic kids with their high-tech rock-climbing gear. We send them around to these canyons on the Colorado Plateau, tell them to climb up to every cave opening they see—do you see this? What we acquire we sell or hold or even donate—whatever seems good.”
“If you were the Park Service, Ham, or maybe the Heard Museum, you might get kids like them to do this. But for you, no way. They’re too antibusiness, too idealistic.”
“So we set up a foundation. What about the law on this? Can you keep what you find on public land, as long as it’s not a national park or something? What if we just worked with private landholders, we’d be legitimate all the way. These kids would get into it, Steve. Preservation, Indians. They live for this kind of stuff. I can identify with it—great adventure, physical risk, financial reward. Look at pro athletes, for Chrissakes.”
“I’ll research the applicable law. There’s federal law, Arizona’s got laws. I don’t think this is for you.”
“Fair enough. We’ll talk later. Here’s another one,” he said. He handed me a clipping from the Bisbee paper, about antique tinware.
When I got back to the office I Xeroxed the story about the Anasazi jars, wrote “Is this you?” across the top and sent it to Mirara in Winslow. Three days later I got it back with an exclamation mark after my question. The same evening I phoned her. We talked about the jars, we tried to talk about other things—her job with the city manager; our parents, retired but still living in Michigan; even our rival alma maters’ football game that year (Notre Dame 38, Michigan 17)—but none of this went anywhere.
For a reason I can’t explain—and at the time thought might be an overreaction—I drove up to Grand Canyon that weekend to look at the jars. They were lovely. I read the typescript handout, reporting what Mirara had already told me—the pots had been found in a small cave in a sheer wall, 150 feet above the canyon floor. But what was Mirara’s arrangement with the Park Service? A ranger at the exhibit, a woman, was adamant—no answers, even when I told her I was Mirara’s brother. She told me to speak with the park archeologist. After an awkward moment when I had to admit I knew very little about what my sister did, this fellow told me Mirara was “just a friend to the park,” and that she’d found other things in the canyon over the years—twisted willow-twig figures, clay jars, even pieces of bark clothing.
“Mirara’s more knowledgeable than anyone, I think,” he offered, “about trails in the canyon. She was the first to find routes down to the river through Specter and Matkatamiba, on the South Rim. I know she’s pioneered two or three routes off the North Rim. You should talk to her about it.”
I ignored his jibe. Specter and Matkatamiba were side canyons, I supposed.
“Do you have her address?” he said. “I’m afraid her phone’s not listed.”
Jesus, I thought. “Yes, I’ve got her address. We’re in touch regularly, it’s just that I don’t know much about this part of her life.”
“Well, it’s a hell of a lot more important to her than her job, I can tell you that.”
“Well thank you. I’m glad to know that. I think I’ll give her a call and take her out to dinner in Flagstaff. You’ve been very helpful. Thank you.”
I did call. She said she’d be happy to fix a late dinner if I’d make the drive out from Flagstaff.
On the way there I thought more about the canyon than I did about Mirara. Our parents had brought us there when we were kids, in 1968. Mirara went back every year after that. I made one trip with the Boy Scouts. We hiked down Bright Angel Trail to Phantom Ranch and then rode rafts down the Colorado River through Unkar and Hance and Sockdolager rapids. Thinking about it made me remorseful. For all I gained on that trip, I never went back. Carol and I went up two or three times with the kids. Carol wanted to buy a house up there and Geoffrey and Lisa loved going but I just couldn’t get interested in it. It seemed like a place you went when you were a kid, then you took your kids to it.
Maybe I could do it again, hike down the trail, raft the river through the big rapids. When I looked out over the canyon that day, after I called Mirara, it seemed welcoming.
Mirara, it turned out, had two broken ribs, which is why she didn’t want to drive over to meet me in Flagstaff. And she had a guest, a young man named Ned Wearny, a student at Prescott. I resented his being there. He was far too young for my sister—what now? I thought as we shook hands—and he made it impossible for me to speak openly. As dinner proceeded, however, Ned grew on me, with his earnestness and his stories about climbing in Nepal and studying drumming somewhere in Africa. He was a very serious and determined young man. I couldn’t get the reason he was with my sister, but Mirara had not had good luck with men, so maybe this was a new direction. I asked her once when she was going to get married. “I’m very happy,” she told me. “That doesn’t mean I’ll never get married. But I’m not staring at the horizon.”
She’d broken her ribs in a fall in the canyon the week before. I wanted to learn more about her hiking and climbing, but I didn’t feel comfortable exposing the rift between us in front of young Ned, so I pretended to know more than I did, which meant I learned more about Ned than I did about what my sister was doing.
After dinner I had to leave. I wanted to get back to Phoenix even if it was very late, so I could get a fresh start in the office in the morning. Ned wanted to know if I’d give him a lift to Flagstaff. He had friends there. By all means, I said. I told Mirara I’d call her the next night. I’d been charmed, actually, by the way she carried herself. She had mannerisms, ways of moving her hands, a slang diction that she’d acquired over the years, that irked me; but she guided the conversation so Ned could talk about himself and she didn’t insist that I listen to any music, which she used to do.
“So where did you meet Mirara,” I asked Ned when we got out on the Interstate.
“Well, I heard about her, like everybody else, you know, but, actually, I met her first when I was hiking in the canyon, going solo over the Nankoweap.”
“Nankoweap Trail?”
“Yeah, over on the North Rim. There’s a lot of exposure on that trail. It’s only about four inches wide in some places, really dangerous scree. No water. I met her in a place where it was pretty easy to get by. We said hello. The thing was, she was running, you know, so I didn’t want to stop her to talk. But I knew right away it was Mirara Graham.”
“She was running down the trail?”
“No. Up. It was September, you know, overcast day. Cool. She ran with these two water bottles in her fists. As far as I know she’d already been to the end of the trail and was coming out, which meant she must have started in the dark, way before sunrise, which is pretty scary.”
“Yeah.”
“But, that’s your sister, man.”
“Tell me something—I don’t want to pry—but, are you and Mirara … ah …”
He looked at me blankly. No help.
“Are you together?”
“You mean, like, are we seeing each other?”
“Yes.”
“No, no. I go over there to talk to her once in a while, talk about the trails you know. Mirara has spent maybe eight hundred days below the rim. She’s covered every trail known in the canyon and discovered about ten. Plus, she’s climbed all over down there. That’s how she found those jars. She’s done that about ten times, too, I guess. She spots a place, just goes to it. Over the years, you know, the canyon’s changed. Some of the miners’ trails from the eighties and nineties, big enough to move ore across, they’re gone now. Collapsed. Most of the really old trails, the Anasazi trails, are gone, too. Rock slides, erosion. So you see these isolated caves with no trails to them, just sheer cliff faces. So she’s found a bunch of those and climbed up to them.”
“Is there very often Anasazi pottery in them?”
“Sometimes. What you need to understand, though, is that, for her, it’s not like she’s looking for anything. She just walks and climbs and runs. And sometimes she finds things.”
“So you talk to her about the trails?”
“Sure. But—well, a lot of us, five or six people I know, just like to talk with her. She’s very satisfying to be around. She set out to do something, she’s still doing it, and she doesn’t want to do anything else. For somebody like me—I’m twenty and still don’t know what I want to do—she’s good to be with. She’s more gentle, more focused, than anyone I know.”
“Do you hike or run with her?”
“See, that’s the thing. You’d like to. But she asks you only once in a great while. And, brother, if you’re called, you better be ready.”
“Have you gone with her?”
“Twice. Once down the Atwater, off the North Rim in the west canyon, another time down the Enfilade Point Trail, also off the North Rim. Harvey Butchart pioneered the Enfilade around 1961 or so, but Mirara discovered the Atwater. The Park Service calls it the Atwater after some miner. She calls it something else. It was an Anasazi trail first.”
“These were good trips?”
“They were scary, is what they were. I mean, you have to be at a certain level to keep up with her. I don’t mean just to keep up physically. It’s psychological and spiritual. That Atwater trail, there’s some radical exposure there—five hundred feet of Redwall below you, two hundred feet above you and you’re on a trail that’s no wider than your shoes. You have to take hold of yourself. That’s the psychological part. The spiritual part—she makes you think about what you believe in when you’re with her, because what she believes in you can see. It’s in the way she moves. She runs all those long trails, you know, on the rim, the Widforss and the rest. You watch her, you’ll see her stride, her hand balance, is perfectly matched to the ground. I mean perfect. It’s beautiful.”
“Do you—excuse me, this is all new—do people run for records on these trails, like quickest down and back?”
“Some people do that. I think Mirara is probably pretty quick, but quickness is not her thing. What she would do, for example, what I did with her on the Enfilade, was we would go along a ways and then go up a ravine, climb five hundred feet and maybe find some pictographs or petroglyphs. Or watch deer or bighorn sheep moving up the side of a bay. She’d study that so hard, you didn’t have a prayer, right then, of getting a question answered. And I know, other times, she has gone to the bottom, drifted and swum across the river and come up another trail. In one day. Start in the dark, finish in the dark.
“You learn a lot when you’re with her. She sees a lot of things you miss, but she never makes you feel stupid because you missed them. And you know when you’re with her you’re going to see something incredible, because she’s given herself away to the place, and it’s how it responds to her.”
I wanted to tell Ned how we’d first come to the canyon in 1968, but couldn’t find words that didn’t sound like I was laying partial claim to something I knew nothing about.
“I heard a story about her one time—you hear lots of stories about Mirara, and she likes to hear them, too, because a lot of them aren’t true, but this one is—about a time some people on a raft trip saw her running along the edge of the river. They passed her first just above Grapevine. Now, as far as I know, there’s no trail around Grapevine, nothing, but when these people pulled over for lunch below the rapid they saw her again and she wasn’t wet so they knew, the guides knew, she’d some way gotten around that. There she was, on the far bank, just running on down the river. They passed her again about an hour later. She runs like a deer sometimes, way up on her toes with those long legs, you know, so you almost hold your breath watching her. The reason I think she goes into the canyon alone so often is that very few people, even really good free climbers, have that kind of balance. She has a hunger that’s fed by moving through the canyon with that kind of balance.”
I dropped Ned off at a bar in Flagstaff.
“Listen,” he said after he got out, speaking through the passenger window, “if you want to read about this stuff, get hold of three books by Harvey Butchart. They’re called Grand Canyon Treks One, Two and Three. They’ll get you started. Butchart’s from another time, but he’s a trailblazer, you know. Get a feeling for it, then give Mirara a call. I bet you that’d make her happy.”
“You know,” I said, “I run in Phoenix. I did a 2:31 marathon this spring. I should get out on those trails. Maybe I’d meet Mirara, right?”
“Well, like I was saying, it’s not so much that kind of running, for her.”
“I know, I know. What I mean is, if I have the stamina, the physical stamina, then I might—then at least I might be ready for the rest. To try.”
“That sure could happen.” He tapped the door frame lightly and nodded. “You take care, Mr. Graham,” he said and walked away into the bar.
Ned’s goodwill had a note of disbelief in it, which I carried all the way to Phoenix. By the time I got there, I wondered if it would ever be possible to reach my sister, if I could ever make up the ground.