Dear Trail Friends,
The numbers that prove so satisfying to the task-oriented me, who wants life quantifiable and predictable, something I can "count" on, are becoming a little meaningless now. Rather than try to find my way back to the trail in the dark (starting as usual a little before 5) I chose to walk on Hway 64, the main road through Tusayan, knowing the trail crossed it in about a mile. I was walking merrily along when I checked my gps and discovered I walked past the crossing. So I walked back. Ah ha. It was an underpass. No wonder I didn't see it. The trail went through a tunnel under the highway. So, I'll just hike down this steep embankment to the trail...uh oh. There is barbed wire fence on both sides of the tunnel. Hmmm. What do I do now? Isn't there supposed to be Trailhead parking near here somewhere? So I hike back a ways. Quite a ways. Well, that didn't work. Now what? Maybe the other side of the highway? Barbed wire fence there too. Both sides. No gate. But. Doesn't the fence look just a little bit low on that side? So I step over crotch-high barbed wire fence, wearing a backpack (me, not the fence), in the dark, on a steep incline (they don't call us lunatics for nothing), for the very first time in my life. And come away without a scratch.
It would be an auspicious way to start the day if the day hadn't got started earlier when I woke up in the wee hours (even wee-er than the ones I get up for, so we are talking 1 or 2 an) to discover my watch had stopped. Too late to order a new watch from Amazon before hiking the canyon. It feels a little uncanny to be doing this hike through time, through geological layers that chronicle the epochs of our earth (long before humans, or mammalian or even cellular life) and suddenly to be separated from the watch that tells me what time it is. Am I stepping out of time as I know it?
I have been thinking about time because IFPE (international forum for psychoanalytic education) chose time as its theme for the fall 2017 conference. And I haven't had time to write a proposal for a presentation. But also because when I reached Tusayan and wifi I had a bunch of text messages from brother Scott (trying to clear some of the family memorabilia out of his garage) that included a photo of my father (mentioned in yesterday's post) and a photo of one of my grandfather's columns. I was struck by time - Dad was roughly my same age (one year younger) in the photo, taken about 30 years ago. And grandpa Malcolm must have been about the same age too and that was also about 30 years earlier. Grandpa was writing about caring for his young grandchildren (4 to 10) for a fortnight and reflecting in the column he'd been writing for 30 years - how when he began it, his own boys had been the age of these grandchildren. I thought of my brother (the former 4 year old) now so actively engaged as a grandfather of his own grandchildren. I felt as if I was looking into a "canyon" of time as awesome and Grand as the one I will hike tomorrow, that of the Grand children, of the cycles of generations.
I imagined my father walking beside me today. He said he loved the Grand Canyon because it put everything in perspective. It was so vast spatially, it exposed layers of time so vast, that it put his small lifetime into perspective. It was like looking up into the night sky. He saw in it a beauty and order on a whole different scale from the human and it helped him put both his achievements and his failures into perspective. He spoke to me about his regrets that he had been vindictive toward our mother and damaged our relationships with her. He knew I had always wanted him to acknowledge his mistake, he said, but it was too painful. He could not bear the thought of the suffering he might have caused not only to her but to the children he cared for most in all the world. He wondered if our lives would have turned out differently if he had been capable of better decisions. I affirmed our lives as what they are. (The "it is what it is" philosophy. ) and I thought about my need to accept my niece's life too.
Time. Part of the mystery of time is this thing about mortality and generations. What would it be like to talk with my father and with my grandfather now that I've lived through these various changes of life?
The one time I've been in this canyon before - a few years after my father hiked it - we joined him on a raft trip. We celebrated my Uncle Ian's (my dad's younger brother) 70th birthday that year. I remember Chris and me composing a very long and silly series of limericks to celebrate him. This fall I will turn 70.
So somehow the canyon is about time and the mystery of the generations for me. And also about time on another and vaster and more impersonal scale that makes all the stories - the redemption and transformation stories, the tragedies, the epic journeys all seem like fireflies in the night.
I didn't really take photos today. There's one of me nude in the mirror to show Chris how skinny I've gotten. I'd actually like to post it though it's probably even more indiscreet than posting my poop. Aren't I the one who got myself in all kinds of trouble at 21 when I participated in and later became a spokeswoman for a nude protest against Playboy magazine for commercializing and depersonalizing and objectifying women's bodies? My scrapbook of that era is full of a single quote from Walt Whitman: "If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred." What does this particular free association have to do with the Grand Canyon I wonder? Perhaps that tangle with the legal system (just as I came of age and became a citizen) - which left us convicted of indecent exposure despite our appealing all the way to the Supreme Court (funded by ACLU; they saw it as a freedom of speech issue) and despite the fact that any rational person could see we were not in violation of state law which required lewd and obscene intent. Which seemed incidentally to be in plentiful supply among the prosecuting attorneys.
Nudity is no more obscene than wilderness. It is the body unclothed, freed of civilization. A long thru hike is a lot like nudity. It's amazing how frightened people are of wildness. It seems so clear to me (and other hikers) that dangers - violent criminal humans, vehicles that injure and maim when they go out of control - are concentrated in urban settings and on freeways. We have learned to fear the nakedness and wildness in ourselves, I think. We work so hard to twist ourselves into shapes that can bear the strait jacket of civilization. Fried would say we are right to fear our own wild instincts and drives. I don't disagree with him. I just think we are beautiful too.
So here's the irony. People ask me what is the most beautiful place I have seen on the trail. It isn't only my memory problem. It is an amazing trail. But do you know what the most beautiful memories are? (Forgive me if I've written this before and just attribute it to my memory problems). The most beautiful moments - besides meetings with Gila monsters and singing hallelujah to the mountains as loudly as I could - the most beautiful moments were encounters with trail angels and glimpsing their beautiful souls in their stories and faces and bodies and homes.
So here is the skinny nude River. Exhibit one for the defense. Exposure is not indecent if there is no lewd or obscene intent. If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred. The setting is my hotel room in Tusayan. I am tormenting my Scottish ancestors - who had almost reconciled themselves to my passion for fear and stopped turning in their graves - with this new wave of self-indulgent stays at what I regard as very expensive hotels.
The next photo was taken at the Backcountry office waiting for my number (10) to come up. Some people had numbers from yesterday when they came but couldn't get the campsites they wanted. The rest of us, using the honor system, got numbers according to order of arrival. I was second, arriving at 7:15 before the office opened at 8. And while I did not get what I most wanted, I do get to camp a little beyond Bright Angel camp (at the bottom) in a "use" area that is not a formal campground, called Clear Creek. That's the first night. The second night I camp in Bright Angel. So really I am pretty lucky. I don't qualify for thru-hiker privileges because I'm not hiking to the north rim. "But I've hiked all the way from Mexico" I whined. "A lot of people have come a long way" the ranger-lady said. That shut me up. We actually made a nice contact later when she asked me the most beautiful part of the trail and I told her it was the people I met.
But photo 2 is of an exhibit warning about how many people have died hiking the canyon. I found it sobering and realized all those helicopters I heard could well have been rescue, and not tours. It is not a hike to take lightly. One poster showed a beautiful athletic young woman (who had run the Boston marathon) who died of heat exposure and dehydration in the canyon. All quite sobering.
I also took a photo of the map of the shuttle system here which continues to elude me. How I long for a gps app to guide me through civilization. If the orange line, which goes to South Kaibab Trailhead (not shown in photo - to the right of Pipe Creek Vista) has its first shuttle leave at 4:30 am going in the direction of Mather Point and the Museum, at what time can I catch the earliest shuttle headed in the other direction (toward Pipe Creek Vista and South Kaibab Trailhead)? I can't tell you how many people were confused by this. And how confused I by every little thing about civilization. Where is the lodge front desk - it's got to be somewhere? Where are the ordinary candy bars in a grocery store (it's a good thing I don't try to resupply in stores - I get so overstimulated and confused by the light and aisles and stuff I go into an altered state that couldn't make a decision no matter how simple if my life depended on it).
Although I came close to having to do that today. My resupply box had not arrived. I contacted Chris for the tracking number. I was in an absolute state of panic and depression trying to imagine putting together 3 days worth of food from the store. Though resolved I would do it if I had to. Fifteen minutes of inverted pose calmed me immensely. But what really calmed me was when they found my box.
One more - the view from my room at the lodge. Why I think it's so special to have a view of trees (with by the way a parking lot just beyond then) outside my expensive window when I can camp among them for free, I cannot explain because I don't know. But the truth is that it is sweet for me to be here, a real gift to myself. Maybe trees seen through the window of civilization represent some kind of peaceful coexistence of opposites? I don't know but I'm happy to be here and happy that you are with me.
And what about this riding a shuttle to the Trailhead? You're not going to road walk back to where you got off the trail and hike every precious mile of trail? What kind of a thru hiker are you? Oh I know the backcountry office told you to hike only before 10am and after 4pm so you don't end up dying of heat and dehydration (it's April, River, for pity's sake, not August) and something about this trail has cured you of your thru-hiker purity. Purity and impurity. Civilization and wilderness.
It is what it is. And tomorrow we walk down 4800 feet into what is probably the grandest canyon in the world. (No wifi in my room so cannot google that. ) by the way I did google tank etymology (and despite the added complexity of those military vehicles known as tanks and the verb to tank, there is at least some evidence and some sources that see it originating in a word for reservoir with the notion of a man made container coming later. So let's hear it for Purple Pants, the physicist with a very fine feel for language.
And let's get some sleep now. The best guess was that the orange line shuttle will completed its loop to the west in 15 minutes and be back at the starting point to head east toward South Kaibab Trail around 4:45. So we get up around 3:30am, leave the room around, 4:20 and head for the Grand Canyon Visitor Center to catch the shuttle to the Trailhead. See you bright and early. That part of you and me that shines like the stars, that beautiful soul that had so moved me on this trek, the bright angel we all are underneath. (I'm not saying we aren't scary demons, too, just that we are also bright angelic spirits.)
Thank you.
Congratulations for achieving the most perfect body!
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