Splitting Sides Below Laughing Walls, Another Grand Humbling

Havasu Canyon took my breath away.

Literally, I was left gasping, searching for what to do with my chest or diaphragm or trachea to get any air in at all.

For I took an instantaneous re-orientation through space from vertical to horizontal, introducing with a crunch my right side to the water-sculpted edge of the river rock that, but a moment prior, had been underneath my feet.

Profile, meet landscape.

Which is precisely the maneuver I was orchestrating with my camera, trying to capture the laughing effigy in the rocks, one of the assortment of faces to be found in the depths of the Grand Canyon. I’m sure he found humor in me finding my place, of looking at the world for my visual consumption and discovering not everything is to be captured with a trigger-happy shutter finger. It may be trite to say, but before my lungs found oxygen once more, I thought, “Of course.” And the cage around my heart cracked its own smile, showcased in a newly broken rib.

“Of course.”

After all, think of a couple of the main ways we describe photography—to shoot, to capture.

And in my quest to try and preserve an element of the immensity, to shape and present so as to make it my own, I was rendered very much in the moment for the next ten days.

With each inhale.

In every twist.

With each lift of the arm.

Lying down.

Sitting up.

While wiping on the backcountry toilet, affectionately termed “the groover.”

Scrubbing the grunge from the innumerable dishes Jaysen finds a way to make dirty while cooking.

And in so many of those interstitial moments that pass by in the periphery,
I heard the message,

“Here you are.”

The thing about pain—it can consume but it also clarifies. You want time to slow down? Here’s your path. We seek presence but then so often say, “Wait, not like that!” Pain shapes how we move through the world, what we can give, and how we receive. Lifting, tying, paddling? Out of the question. My personal sense of self-worth dropped as I did, though I (at times, slightly begrudgingly) was only met with kindness and empathy, from each member of our ragtag crew. How could I deserve this compassion without reciprocation?

For if I had to distill nearly 200 miles through unimaginable grandeur into what I had no choice but to learn, it was this:

Humility.

The best I can describe an experience in the Grand Canyon, passing through rock a third the age of this planet, is of course, only by a metaphor.

It is as though you are tasked with cataloguing a dark room filled with wonder and intrigue, brimming with art and knickknacks, a collection of splendor and minutiae, and you have but one minute and a small personal flashlight to do so. Being in the Grand felt as though for one glorious second of that time, the house lights came on and illuminated it all.

And in doing so, highlighting any attempt to capture more than an incomplete bite as a fool’s errand.

We’ve all heard that we can’t take it with us, of course predominantly about the materialistic trappings of the physical world. It certainly holds true for each moment too though, regardless of our memories, our fancy cameras, or ironically here, our written words.

But for now, I still have my flashlight, and I know what it illuminates will perhaps never be seen by these two eyes again. So I’ll look at what I can, and I’ll hope to see the beauty in the opulent and the mundane.

In the fresh morning coffee brewed daily to sip under fiery walls, and the invariable squabbles to be had over dinner ingredients.

In the missteps of finding our places, and in where those feet take us when we find the rhythm in constructing a perfect camp to call home for the night.

In the sand blown into, well, everything, from everywhere, during a three-day onslaught, and the relieved exhale at opening your eyes to enjoy reverent peace when those winds take a rest. (You’re still feeling that exhale though, the rib makes sure of that).

And like those layers of surrounding walls, unfathomably stacked for more than a billion years, we get but a slice of a slice to define our days.

So instead of trying to meticulously catalog it all with so brief a time and but one lantern, let me instead use the light in projecting shadow puppets on the wall, telling ghost stories, or setting the stage for a “passion show” of shared performances with the varied and beautiful souls the river has delivered to share that evening.

Because one day, the moment will come when the laughs end. The joy and awe will be felt for the final time. The sights and sounds and smells and senses all around, no more. Even the pain will come to a close.