Beaded Buffalo

“With some eagerness, and some anxiety, and some misgiving, we enter the canyon below….” John Wesley Powell, Aug. 13, 1869

Powell had solid cause for a few goose bumps. He was about to venture into what he called “the Great Unknown,” and paddle a river—the Colorado—that could chew his wooden boat to splinters. I was simply hiking into the Grand Canyon on the tough but well-traveled Tanner Trail. Still, I shared Powell’s emotions: “eagerness” because I’d dreamt for years of lying beside the mighty Colorado River as the Milky Way coursed overhead and moon shadows danced across sheer canyon walls rising 4,000 feet into the night; “anxiety” because a shattered wrist suffered two months earlier left me with the stamina of a three-legged tortoise; and “misgiving” because my 16-year-old son was 2,000 miles away taking the skills test for his driver’s license. 

As I stood at the trailhead, straining to see the canyon bottom and wracked with angst (can I do this?), my thoughts drifted back home to the boy who would soon be driving. He’d trained and studied and said he was ready, but I wasn’t. Images of him behind the wheel didn’t mesh with memories of the frightened child who bravely held my hand one September morning as we waited for his first school bus; or the time his hit sent his Little League team into the playoffs; or the countless nights I rocked him to sleep in my lap. My precious little guy was suddenly 16, and soon to be able to legally operate a vehicle on roadways choked with the bad, the drunk, and the just plain idiotic (like the fool who had almost killed me in an incomprehensibly senseless accident a year earlier). I didn’t want him on the roads.

“Gaze not too long into the abyss/Lest the abyss gaze into thee.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher

The Colorado River, with its world-famous rapids, gets the lion’s share of Grand Canyon visitor traffic. But slow, self-absorbed foot travel is a better way to become intimate with such powerful places. On the trail, you quickly fall into a rhythm—some call it “canyon magic”—and lose yourself in the awe, the reverence, and the switchback-induced exhaustion. The physical strain is rewarded each night with soft, beach-sand campsites and river lullabies. Then the next morning, you make the hard hike up again, climbing thousands of feet, then carefully picking your way along thread-thin paths that barely cling to canyon walls.

High up in the clear canyon air, your mind is alert, your senses sharp and keen. The Colorado to move as slow as molasses in winter a mile beneath you, and you notice that this is a land of layers. The river has scoured through the Colorado Plateau, exposing multi-colored segments of rock as young as the 250-million-year-old Kaibab limestone near the canyon rim, and as old as the 1.7-billion-year-old Vishnu schist on its floor.

But more importantly, you realize that the canyon isn’t just the result of nature’s destructive forces wearing away at the land. Time created this place and serves us all lessons, if we’re willing to listen and learn. If you spend enough time in such a place, an ancient and subtle reverence is called forth, as is respect. Heed this signal, rest with it patiently, let the land steady you, and eventually you’ll be rewarded with a gift of knowing.

Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee.
—Job 12:8

About midway through the week of hiking I received my gift, the answer to the question that had weighed on me since the first day’s exhausting, rubber-legged, 4,500-foot descent to the river: How do I protect my son? While staring into the canyon during a lunch break high on a sun-warmed, golden, sandstone plateau, I heard a raven cry and realized there’s an order to it all. The river flows, the waters carve, and over time the land is shaped. It’s clean, precise, simple and based on a relationship of natural elements—not logic, or systems, or emotion, but a natural order as strong as anything in nature. It must be adhered to, as must the natural, irrefutable order in which the passage of time turns young fathers into graybeards and babies into young men.

It was time to give my son wings and let him soar like the raven circling overhead, just as my father had done for me. He’d observed from a carefully measured distance, wrestling with the pleasure and pain that accompanied my coming of age. And just as my father knew, I too realize my son will drift away, then return to the nest when the updrafts fail him.

After that lunch break, the canyon’s muscle-burning trails no longer seemed difficult, and I felt like I’d found my second wind. It’s a fairly common phenomenon unique to this grand place. The immensity of the landscape alters your perspective and all else seems small by comparison, even life’s dilemmas and turning points. Such land-inspired revelations make some canyon travelers break out in tears, while others have been know to go home and quit their jobs. This place does change you.

With surprising ease and no hesitation or emotional jousting, I accepted the fact that it was time to set my son free, to trust him to take care of himself. I wouldn’t be there to guide and protect him every step of the way, as I had for 16 years, but I knew he was ready.

One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever.
—Ecclesiastes 1:4

The Grand Canyon was formed by a series of cataclysmic events and erosion—forces that can devastate the land, or result in magnificence and splendor. It’s a pity that so many of us are afraid of similarly dramatic change in our lives, when what we should fear is the slow erosion of insight, wonder and courage. What a grand world it would be if we spent more time recasting what we perceive as negative into things that make life more beautiful.

When I returned home, the boy I’d left there a week earlier was gone. A fine young man was waiting for me, and never in my life have I been happier to see anyone.

A version of this article appeared in Backpacker Magazine.