Grand Canyon Journal

Dana's Grand Canyon Journal
Home Page Biography Articles Back to Abnormal One Good Hand Jimmie Wayne Calendar Links Contact Dana	From April 1st through April 23rd, 2010, Dana was Artist -in -Residence at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon National Park. During her Residency, she kept a journal with her comments, notes, observation and such posted on this page. Enjoy. ♦ Saturday, April 3: It’s the crowds I notice first. Not in the way I normally would, which involves wishing everyone but me would quietly and non-lethally fall over the side of the canyon. I don’t wish people ill; I just wish them gone. One of the reasons I’ve been looking forward to this time as Artist-in-Residence for the Grand Canyon National Park is because right now I need time alone like a bluesman needs love gone wrong. Lately I’ve found myself lusting after solitude to the exclusion of all other lusts, which I consider to be not a good thing, priority-wise. So when from my first morning here I found myself watching the crowds in an accepting, approving way, this sort of noticing seemed significant enough to make me think about what might be causing such an out-of-character response to being constantly jostled by other walkers on the South Rim Trail. Well, sure, it came to me yesterday: it’s the fact that they are walking, too. This is America, after all, home of the 30 per cent obesity statistic. Americans don’t walk; they cyber-surf. I once hiked out to a state highway trailhead of the Appalachian trail where I overheard another hiker telling a man who’d driven to the parking area about a wondrous waterfall a hundred yards down the trail. The driver’s response? “I wouldn’t walk ten feet to see a waterfall.” But here on the South Rim this Easter weekend people are out walking by the hundreds, and their little dogs, too. And what heartens me most is that these folks aren’t just outdoorsy types like me. Over the past three days I have seen dozens of overweight teenaged boys pasty-white from their FaceBook existence. I’ve seen more wide female bottoms than I cared to count, but I mean no disrespect because these thirty-ish mothers aren’t complaining at all as they huff to keep up with their children dancing from rock to rock along the gorge. In fact, this obvious good-naturedness is what has struck me most profoundly about this place. Every spring-breaking American family unit, every photo-posing Japanese (and thank you to the nice Japanese man who not only took a photo of solo me, but gently instructed me to a better photographic stance), each young European woman looking effortlessly stylish in trail clothing, and each and every frat boy- nope, these guys deserve to be called fraternity men- who isn’t talking on his phone but to the friend walking beside him: all my companion walkers seem happy and at home. There is something about the Grand Canyon that brings out a feeling of happy ownership in its visitors. Maybe it is the unfathomable vastness of that beauteous hole that tends the human soul toward a remembrance of its own potential. And all of us, after all, thrive on being assured of our own limitlessness. ♦ Monday, April 5: Healthy. Strong. That’s how people often describe me. Tough, even. I surely don’t object to any of these designations, but now that I’ve been here for four days and have had a chance to read much of the history of the South Rim and its early settlers, I’ve come to reassess my right to claim at least the last two of those descriptors. All I need do is look at a photo of Blanche Kolb and I start to seriously question my right to even be called “healthy”. Blanche came here with her husband Emery in 1901 to build and operate a photography studio clinging on the craggy edge of the South Rim. She gave birth here, raised her daughter here. Just yesterday I watched one small child after another mountain-goating from rock to rock while his parents vacillated between an urge to strap their beloved child to mom’s leg with duck tape to keep him from bouncing bloodily to his young death, and watching with deep parental joy as their eight-year-old discovered his place in the world of nature. Mind you, these folks are on vacation; they have the luxury of paying full attention to their child’s new-found freedom as well as to his safety. Blanche had to help her husband in his work, raise food (and where, tell me please, did she manage this?) and cook it, sew, and generally keep her family alive and well in a spot not inherently friendly to humans. And all this in long skirts and long-sleeved shirtwaists, for pity’s sake! I don’t pity her, though. I admire her, and maybe envy her a little. If any of her acquaintances had referred to her as tough, she would have demurred, I imagine, but thought to herself, “You don’t know the half of it.” And she would have been exactly right. I wish I could talk with her. I wish I could know the whole of her story. ♦ Tuesday, April 6: One of my outreach programs while I’m here will be to teach two eighth-grade language arts classes at the Grand Canyon School. I imagine I will ask them to do a writing exercise I often use to illustrate the difference between Image and Concept. I’ll tell them, “I’m going to say five words and you write down a description of the first picture that comes into your head when you hear that word. Don’t define the word; don’t give me a synonym. Tell me about the picture.” When I ask for sharing of what they’ve written, many of them will have written down good, usable images, like the girl in one school who in response to the concept “jealousy” wrote, “Brittany walking by while Shawn’s talking to me at lunch.” That’s perfect. This girl has taken a giant step toward understanding how to approach writing a poem, and this is no small step, either, because eighth-graders are all about thinking large, thinking conceptually. So I have to admit to having failed my own poetic-thinking challenge yesterday out on Hermit Trail. I’d ridden the bus up from The Village, thinking I’d walk the Rim Trail back, but yesterday was a day of fifty-mile-per- hour icy winds; my hair had been whipped into auburn dreads just waiting for the bus and I was slightly cold even under three layers of fleece. A stroll down that stretch of the Rim trail would not have been pleasant; as strolls should by definition always be pleasant. “Where’s a good hike?” I asked the bus driver. He recommended the Hermit Trail, a piece of it, “if you’re up for a challenge.” I guess I just look like the sort of person who’s always up for a challenge. The moment I stepped foot off the paved parking lot and onto that white-sanded trail, I was ecstatic. (First concept) My soul (Second concept) settled in as contentedly (Third concept) as my hound dog Fred let off his leash into woods thick with deer. I rounded the first bend and saw just far enough below for me to have to look down and her to have to look up, a teenaged girl, maybe fourteen or so, lean and sleek-muscled in the way of a lifetime of tennis lessons, who raised her eyes to me, already grinning, and said, “The views get better and better the further down you go!”. Radiance: that’s what I saw on her face. Radiance: that’s concept four. And my image/definition of radiance? A carefully and expensively raised young girl , smooth brown hair, Northface parka and Keen hiking sandals, thrilled to see me, another human, so she could pass along her image of wilderness. She had been taken out of her careful urban world, view by view, into a place of alluring boundlessness, a seductive place where the seduction is due in part to the lack of safety net, and she wanted – she needed- to walk me to her new understanding, view by view. I get it. I’m a teacher. This is what teachers do. ♦ Wednesday, April 7: I wanted to hike to Pipe Creek Vista; that was my intended long hike of the day. In the five days I’ve been living above Verkamps’ Store as Artist-in-Residence, I’ve stuck to a routine. Nothing new here- I love routine the way Methodists love altar call. My order of service has evolved to: breakfast and shower at 5:30, postcards and letters, write until 9:30 or 10, short walk to get the blood flowing in my legs again, lunch, read a chapter of Eat, Pray, Love, then a long hike, four or five miles at least. This tires me out enough that I’m ready to work at the computer again until my eyes start to droop or cross or both. It’s a good thing I’m alone here because believe you me, drooping crossed eyes would not inspire desire in a bedroom companion, especially when combined with the aroma of the same Grand Canyon sweater I’ve worn for snuggle value every night I’ve been here. Pipe Creek Vista would have meant a walk of three miles or so one way, the mile and half after Mather Point likely being slim on casual walkers, which was a huge part of my reason for wanting to go that far. But I couldn’t. Construction crews diverting the roadway in order to allow native flora to re-establish had blocked my access to that last section. I walked the backhoe- noisy detour path to the visitor center to ask if there might be some other way to re-enter the trail. “Not that I know of” the ranger shook his head, “but if you’re up for an adventure, you could just strike out through the woods until you find the trail again.” That’s twice in less than a week that a person in authority, a person in uniform, has urged me to think outside the lines, to use my common sense combined with a sense of adventure to find my own path to where I want to be. This may be the most valuable souvenir the Grand Canyon National Park offers its visitors: a gentle encouragement to take a few steps into the wilderness of their personal unknown. ♦ Thursday, April 8: A little bit homesick- that’s how I started the day. Maybe it was just the cold, or the fact that I’ve seen very few spring flowers yet and everyone at home keeps telling me about pulling last summer’s shorts from the back of the closet so they can weed their flower beds without courting heat stroke. “It’s glorious!” they all taunt me, “Like Spring on steroids!” It’s been a long cold winter even in Georgia and I am so over days like Monday when the high here zoomed to a steamy 41 degrees. Or maybe it was that I’m tired of hearing the voices of people I love, without any skin covering those voices. I wanted to not just hear my family and friends, but see them with their skin on. I wanted my community, that’s what the problem was. I figured since I was feeling grumpy, anyway, I might as well go do laundry. A Laundromat isn’t the most likely place to start building community, but at least there are people around, which is a start. I love that there’s a sign on the Camper Services Laundromat door admonishing users: “Do not wash hiking boots in the washers”, and that three or four of the guys using the laundry yesterday looked like that sign had been placed there for them, specifically. These were guys whose hair has been permanently kinked and fuzzed from years of mountaintop winds. These are guys who own no item of clothing not faded and soft from use. I’m saying “guys” because that was the case yesterday, but I must look like I’m one of a kind with them, based on what happened later that day. After lunch I strolled the gloriously serene Greenways path to Canyon View Information Plaza where I planned to catch the Green Route bus to Pipe Creek Vista and back-hike my trek along the South Rim that had a day earlier been cut short by construction detours. As soon as I got on the bus, the driver zipped back to my seat and said, “You were washing clothes this morning, I was going to speak, but didn’t want to interrupt your reading,” I told him who I was and why I was there, he grinned a welcome and I settled back to enjoy the short ride. As the afternoon progressed, an elegant young Indian woman took my photo by a stunning tree over Pipe Creek Vista, two herds of mule deer graciously paused for a photo op moment, and a blond six-or-so-year-old ran up to Stranger me to tell me to “Get your camera ready- there are elk ahead!”. Back in the Resident Artist apartment that evening, a Park official knocked softly on the door to ask if he could show a Park guest around the apartment. By the time they left, I felt replete with community, as happily stuffed with a sense of belonging as if I’d been back in Georgia weeding my flowers, waving to walkers on my dirt road. Different dirt roads here, different walkers, but I am engaged the same sort of job I do best: using native soil to try to grow something of beauty and worth, which is what community is all about. ♦ Friday, April 9: I might as well own up to the idea that I am never more myself than when I’m teaching. Last night I was scheduled to give a reading from my new book for the nightly 7:30 program at The Shrine of the Ages; I had planned to read a couple of these Grand Canyon Journal pieces and then a short selection from Back to Abnormal. I geared up my body mic and sat down to wait as people found their seats. “Where are you from?” I asked the grandparents and young boy seated behind me. Turns out they are practically neighbors of mine back home, from Asheville, North Carolina, one of my favorite towns in the world. I love its pride in eccentricity; I can relate. I told the family about my work here and where I’m staying and how I can hear all conversation from below me when I’m working in my studio. “Did you hear the Junior Ranger swearing-in ceremony this afternoon, the one where she made us swear to eat broccoli and clean our rooms?” the grandson asked me. “That was my swearing-in.” I did, I told him. I stopped to listen, and I laughed. I’ve become more and more impressed with the Junior Ranger program as I have settled in to life here on the South Rim. Everywhere I go I see children with Junior Ranger books sitting on an outcropping sketching the view across the canyon, or running their hands over history-in-a-rock-slab mounted along the Walk Through Time, and last night, hearing my host ranger announce, “Tonight’s program counts toward your Junior Ranger certification.” I sat up and thought, “Huh?” I was to be part of these children’s education about the Grand Canyon, the original Shrine of the Ages? The ranger introduced me, I stepped to the podium and began speaking from my teacher’s heart, not my writer’s mind. I hadn’t known I would say, “How many of you have bought a t-shirt since you’ve been here? How many of you have bought postcards or taken photos? You might think you’re buying souvenirs, but what you are doing is making a tangible checkmark in your mind, just as you would mark a Junior Ranger book, showing how you have grown in this place, that you are not the same as you were before you came. Whenever we interact with nature we come away larger than we were before, and something inside us is telling us to find a way to bookmark where we were before and where we are now.” I could have talked all night. I was back in my comfort zone, deep in the sweet depths of shared new knowledge, talking and listening our way toward understanding. ♦ Saturday, April 10: I had been walking for three hours- mailing a package at Market Plaza, buying shampoo, continuing on the Greenway toward Canyon View Plaza just for the pleasure of walking that pretty path with seldom another walker passing me- and now my feet were tired, boot-tired. Back at the apartment I thought I’d take a quick nap on the apartment’s luxuriously deep and square milk–chocolate sofa with its wealth of pillows. I’m a veteran power-napper. On the days I teach all day back home in Georgia, I rush home at noon to walk the dogs and then I stretch out on the bed with Max, my peevish old border collie. Fifteen minutes and I’m good to go, though Max isn’t. I leave him there flat as a twelve-year-old pillow and tiptoe downstairs. Yesterday, though, I had no more laid my weary head on one of those fat brown throw pillows when I heard someone tiptoeing up my stairs. “Dana?” Nah, can’t be hearing my name. No one comes to my door here. “Dana? You have a visitor.” The voice belonged to one of the nice ladies from the visitor’s center under me, one of the women who refer to me as their mouse. I followed her through the employee back entrance, expecting alarms to sound any minute, so thoroughly has Rene admonished me not to enter the alarm area after closing hours. And there by the desk I saw: Inna. My student from home, Inna. Inna had told me she was planning to visit the Grand Canyon as a side trip from a work conference in Las Vegas during my time here, but having become as self-absorbed in my work as Resident Artists as supposed to be, I’d forgotten she might stop by. I looked horrendous, of course, like one of those photos the rangers use as warning: This woman was rescued from Three-mile Rest House after she foolishly disregarded warning signs not to attempt to hike to Phantom Ranch and back on the same day… Inna looked classically chic, all in simple black with strappy sandals. Anyone watching as we walked out on to the South Rim Trail so I could give Inna and her husband and daughter a nickel tour would have thought she was the teacher and I, the recently arrived refuge. But for one thing- the regard with which this Ukrainian lady who holds a doctorate in mathematics was treating me. Every carefully phrased comment (“Am I saying this right, Teacher?), every deferential request for suggestions as to the best use of their short time here, every photo posed with me, the Teacher, being given pride of place, spoke to my status in her eyes. Respect of this sort, like the love of a good man, is an honor I can never be entirely equal to, but Inna’s visit yesterday reminded me of my daily obligation to try. ♦ Sunday, April 11: Okay, so maybe the night before hiking into the Grand Canyon most of you would not have chosen to read the book I went to sleep by last night: Over The Edge: Death in Grand Canyon. It’s a book that pulls you in, though (that probably isn’t best way to describe this book’s readability), with its tale after tale of sheer human stupidity and the consequences of being so haplessly arrogant. Like the young father who clowned around on a rock edge for his watching daughter, “oh, oh, oh, I’m falling…” And then he did. Or Dee Dee Johnson, the 1940’s fashion model who posed a bit too provocatively on a precipice and when rangers managed to haul her back from the ledge she’d miraculously landed on, was outraged that their ropes shoved up her halter and caused her rim-side reentry to be a topless one. After I put the book down and turned off my bedside lamp, I drifted serenely to sleep in the knowledge that I have no intentions of clowning around on rock edges or flat sandy path, nor will I be hiking in any sort of wardrobe-malfunctioning clothing, so I have on at least two counts greatly increased my odds of maintaining an incident-free hike today. The only wardrobe issues I might have will be of a stinky nature, as I am hiking with a day pack, not a roomier backpacker pack, so my clothing choices will be more along the lines of which layers to put on or take off, rather than what I might be in the mood to wear. I’d better plan to be in the mood to wear the three tops and 2 pairs of pants I’ll have with me, and if I smell, I smell. Am I nervous about the hike in and the long uphill hike out? No, not really. I inherited Daddy’s tireless legs and strong back. It doesn’t damage my jock pride at all to be as slow as a tax refund if I feel like that’s what I need to do. And as my hometown friend Jon Greeson has been known to fuss during the day hikes a group of us takes from time to time, “This isn’t a race, you know.” And it isn’t. It’s most likely a once-in-my-lifetime chance to trek across the bottom of our nation’s western geology, and I intend to savor every minute of it. And come home to tell about it. No one’s going to add me as a chapter to last night’s bedtime reading. ♦ Sunday, April 11 - 8 PM: The phone rang at the Phantom Ranch Trail Crew Bunkhouse right after I’d come back from supper, bone-weary but nourished, at least. “Hey, I’m calling from the Ranger Headquarters. Say, we had a group in the bunkhouse over the weekend who kept so many lights blazing at night that the folks in the campground complained. Could you make certain the shades are down and you don’t use more light than you have to?” Sure, glad to. I’m a huge fan of keeping night skies dark; I’ve written poems and articles about light pollution. I was so eager to comply that I turned off every single light and crawled into my sleeping bag. All right, so maybe my quick and total compliance had just a teensy bit to do with today’s hike down into the canyon. I had known this mercilessly downhill trek would involve hours of thudding over waterbreaks and along switchbacks, but I had greatly underestimated the degree (literally) of heat and exposure I’d have to deal with. Around four miles into the hike the trail became relentlessly hot and as exposed as Tiger Woods. I found myself taking more and more rest breaks under scrub trees so tiny I had to curl up like a canyon squirrel to fit into the bit of shade they offered. I drank, and ate every salty snack I had, and tried to give my back a brief respite from the weighty pull of my pack. So worn down was I that it stands as a great testament to love I hold for my son-in-law and step-dad, both engineers, that I paused in the shoulder-frying sun to photograph for them the mechanisms holding up the suspension bridge spanning the Colorado River which hikers and mules cross before entering Phantom Ranch. I stumbled (believe the accuracy of this word choice) into Phantom ranch around three p.m., some eight hours after Rene had dropped me off rim-side with a hug. History lover though I am, I ignored every marker and vista, even passed right by – I discovered the next day- some pueblo ruins without even seeing them. My eye was on the prize: the building marked “Trail Crew Bunkhouse. Three jelly-jar glasses of ice water spiked with electrolyte powder later, followed by two cups of hot tea similarly spiked, I began to believe I might possibly some time in the next decade feel a slight need to pee. Actually, it was the next day, twelve hours and many, many Gatoraide cocktails later. Supper helped. Meals are served family style here at Phantom. You sit at a long table and pass around big bowls of stew and salad and plates of cornbread. I ate enough to make me worthy- almost- of my resident status at the bunkhouse the trail crew uses. I’m the only one here tonight and tomorrow, but I don’t feel alone. The place reeks guy-ness. The cabin is so obviously home to mostly men (and some women- the women who work on the crew have my unbounded admiration and respect) who work through long days using the trail I’d nearly swooned on as their commute. Then they get down to the hard work, maintaining trails and repairing water breaks and shoring up rock support walls. And when they’re done for the day, do they come back here and collapse on their bunks at 8 p.m.? Nooo… they play volleyball. I know because I can sit right here and see a photo on the far wall. That bunch of healthy guys in the photo look like they’re tickled to have a chance to get a little fresh air and exercise. When they do finally sleep, it is in the same deep darkness I went to sleep in, a darkness so profound I could see nothing at all the times I woke during the night. I lay there enjoying the novelty of having no sensory proof the hand I waved in front of me was actually there. No wonder the campers were testy about having bunkhouse visitors ruin for them what they may not otherwise have a chance to experience: absolute darkness. The day before I hiked down here I overheard a child walking along the South Rim ask his mother, “What are we going to so after the Grand Canyon?” as if the Grand Canyon was a Saturday afternoon movie or a pizza at Chuckie Cheese. Bring that child down here, I’d like to tell his mother. Let him sleep along Bright Angel Creek with only the rushing whoosh of the water to assure him a touchable world exists out in that borderless darkness, and then see if he asks what’s going to be next. One night at Phantom Ranch is all it would take to introduce him to the limitlessness of now. ♦ Monday, April 12 - Evening: There are people who book a day at a spa when they need to recover their glow and vitality; I spent the day today at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Compared to my just-crawled-in-from-being-lost-in-the-Sahara look of yesterday, I am fairly sparkly-eyed and perky. If, of course, you ignore the huge purple blood blister where a pack strap pinched my inner arm one of the hundred times I desperately flung off or resignedly dragged on my pack during yesterday’s downward slog. And also that yellowish/green bruise on my right knee where I unwittingly knelt on a pointed rock to take a close-up of a flowering cactus for Mama (think nothing of it, Mama. After all, you did go through that whole labor and delivery thing for me). And, as well, two sunburned shoulders and kidneys that are only now, at five in the evening and after a day of marathon chugging of electrolyte-replenishing drinks, grudgingly beginning to think about maybe perhaps possibly taking back up their output duties. But, really, other than these few battle scars I do look as rested and whole as if I’d spent the day at a spa. The truth is, I feel much more rested than if I’d been spa-centered today, because I have rested my spirit just by being here amidst such a ruggedly lovely environment. Each tree, each scrub bush, each teeny deer and emerald lizard here seems delicate, belying the toughness of life at the bottom of the canyon. It’s as if Nature has decided if any creature or plant can survive here, if any hiker can make it here, the ardure of the journey will be rewarded with this visual delicacy. It’s all about balance. My physical duress of yesterday has been rewarded today with rest and a glimpse into the nearly surreal beauty of the inner canyon. An entry in the bunkhouse log tells me of a blizzard here less than a month ago, which will be balanced a month from now with temperatures soaring to 120 degrees. The barren red rocks I clung to yesterday for support are balanced today by the wildflowers of deepest heart red and urine yellow (and I mean that in a good way). A wind is right now howling outside, but tomorrow will dawn calm and cooler, a perfect hiking morning for my trek back up to the rim. ♦ Tuesday, April 13: Four a.m., and wide awake in the bunkhouse, snug as it is possible to be only inside a really fine sleeping bag, but I unzipped myself from that cozy comfort and hit the wood floor scurrying with purpose. Today I was hiking Bright Angel Trail, all 9.6 miles, and my flinging-off of comfort was to prove a portent for the day. But first: breakfast with the cheeriest group of semi-strangers I may ever encounter at that early hour. Everyone ate eggs, and pancakes with butter, and bacon (well, I offered mine away to the non-vegetarians) and orange juice and not one person turned away a morsel on account of diet worries. Our duty was to eat, to fuel, to stoke our bodies for the walk ahead. And people think there are no up sides to hiking! The day could not have dawned more gloriously. Yesterday’s blustery storm had cleared and cooled the air. I dropped my sleeping bag off for a mule to haul up (along with a bag of dirty underwear and socks, a flashlight, two t-shirts and a book I’d stuffed in the stuff sack to cut down my pack’s weight), and I bounced on down the path cheery with the lightness of my load and the lightening of the sky. I took a step onto the Silver Bridge- the other suspension bridge linking Phantom Ranch to the world above- and OMG! there was no wooden plank lining the steel mesh floor of this bridge. Just mesh. Open weave mesh. Frighteningly, dizzyingly open mesh. Vertigo-inducingly open mesh, for, oh an eighth of a mile or so across the raging Colorado River. I set my sights on the canyon wall ahead and thought magnetic thoughts of stone pulling me safely over. Never once did I, could I look down. Two miles or more along the river’s edge the trail wanders prettily and easily through sand. So pretty and easy and level was the trail that I began to think as I often have while interstate driving, of the writer Erma Bombeck who wished the DOT would post frequent signs stating, “Yes, Erma, you are still on the right road.” I was still on the right trail, but I had to stop and pull out my trail guide to convince myself of that. After the hike down (no offense, Kaibab), this easy stroll through increasingly lush and almost tropical terrain seemed too good to believe. For the next couple of miles, Columbine Spring flows out of a cliff to nourish a narrow Eden of riparian vegetation. (Warning to anyone I call by the name “Mama”- don’t read the next three words.) I was alone for the first four miles of the hike, so I wasn’t the least bit worried about talking out loud to myself, exclaiming over and over with the masterful employ of words one would expect of a writer, “Oh, wow!” This trail section was so greenly generous to my eyes that it fed my soul as well as the breakfast eggs had fed my stomach so I fairly raced along, even up Devil’s Corkscrew, a malicious set of upward switchbacks. Not that I’ve never known any switchbacks anywhere to be other than malicious. At Indian Garden, the slightly-over-halfway mark, I called home (yep, had cell service again) to smugly report that it was eight-thirty and I was more than halfway up. Piece of cake, I assured Mama, I’ll be up and out by noon. Oh, but all the gods that be purely love it when we make comments like that. Another mile or two and a little thing called altitude starting having its way with me. And my legs and back were tiring down a bit. And the rain we’d had at Phantom Ranch had reached the upper elevations as snow, snow which was now slushing and icing on the trail, and mixing colorfully with green mule dung. At one and the same time this smelly bright muck both sucked my boots into its depths with each step, and also tried to fling me over the canyon wall with its surface slickness. This simply bewitching trail condition reached its peak just as I started up Jacob’s Ladder, a biblically-ever-skyward series of switchbacks. And as I climbed my evil brain inwardly sang on endless repeat, “We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder, we are climbing…” As if I needed to be reminded that every round went higher, higher! Lordy, but I was tired. I began to stop every half hour, then every fifteen minutes, then every ten, to steady the pounding in my chest. Sue, the delightful lady I’d met at Phantom Ranch, gave me pep talks, telling me landmarks to watch for and how close each one would indicate I was to reaching the Rim. And Brian, a quietly gentle chiropractor, walked with me a long ways, claiming he’d never had a chance to “walk with a published author”, but really he wanted to give me heart through companionship. I loved them both for their company and their faith, almost as much as I increasingly despised the day hikers now filling the trail with their clean, perky selves. Yeah, you start where I started and see how spiffy your white Nike hiking tights look then, honey. A few minutes later, and I no longer cared how clean the day hikers looked or how mud- and dung-spattered I looked. I was there, on the Rim, easing myself to the low stone wall by Kolb Studio and waiting for Sue, ten or so minutes behind, to join me. And amazingly, there were people staring at me not with disgust but with delight. They wanted to hear that I’d made it from the bottom, that I’d hiked the whole way up. I had, I told the nice couple hanging over me where I sat. Will you take my photo? Will you take one of Sue and me together? And then I called Mama. ♦ Wednesday, April 14: I’m not a person who ever feels proud of herself. I often feel pleased when I’ve done something well, but that’s more a sense of satisfaction in having lived up to my own expectations than it is pride. Yesterday, though, I felt pride more than once. I would perch on a rock to let my breathing slow and my heart steady itself (all my fellow backpackers know there are two sorts of breaks: the ones like this where you don’t take off your pack as a signal of committing to a true stop but just lean back against something to ease its pull, versus a real rest stop where the pack comes off and you feel for a brief moment as if you might levitate), and as I looked down at where I had been and how far I had walked- I was proud. All pride can be tempered by comparison, though. Take Pam Cox, for example. Pam is the Ranger who keeps things running smoothly down at Phantom Ranch. She hiked in a number of years ago same as I did, just to experience the place, and it “changed my life”. She set out to become a ranger purely so she could work and live at the Ranch, which she has, for well over a decade. She has lived there through several foot surgeries and some back issues and now is facing a complete knee replacement, her knee having broken down while taking the strain off her recovering foot. So what was she planning to do the day I hiked out? Hike out, that’s what. Might as well hike; her doctor told her, you can’t damage what’s already destroyed. What’s not destroyed is her strength of will. Before I gave the 7:30 evening program Monday night she told me her knee was aching a good bit. Then she laughed, “ Whine, whine. The Ranger’s whining.” No, Pam, that’s not whining. Whining is when you refuse to attempt more than you think you can achieve and then fuss at others or at your body or at fate for supposedly keeping you from it. Pam’s not a whiner; she’s a realist. She knows her knee has to be worked on. She knows she’ll ultimately have to leave this place she loves so passionately because there are no mechanized means of transport here. She plans to keep hiking here and working here as long as her strength of will will pull her up and down those canyon walls without endangering someone else. I hope she feels proud of herself, because she’s earned the right. Come to think of it, maybe I have, too. ♦ Thursday, April 15: I had lunch today with Bob Sutton, a long-time Park resident. He came here in 1969 or ’70, like a lot of young guys of that time wanting to start a life that wasn’t his parents’ life. He never left. He started out washing dishes at the Bright Angel Lodge Restaurant and when he was offered a job driving one of the tour buses, “I thought I’d made it!” He drove those buses for many years, as well as providing the trash collection for the whole Park. On his off-hours he and his friends hiked the many trails and non-trails through the canyon. Bob knows the Grand Canyon. So when he mentioned the current controversy involving the propriety of using mules to haul goods and visitors into the canyon and back out, I asked him what the varying local opinions were, but I didn’t offer my own. I am here for less than a month; I don’t have the right to say what I think based on what I can observe in this short time. After Bob dropped me off at my Verkamp’s apartment, though, and the afternoon passed by, I thought more and more about what I’ve seen since I’ve been here. I started to think maybe the opinion of someone from away, a possibly more objective observer, might not be a bad element to add to the discussion. So here’s what I’ve noticed, here at the Rim, down the canyon and along the trail: First, those mules are some big healthy animals. Believe me, I’ve witnessed them about as up-close and personal as possible: flattening myself against the canyon wall while their muscled legs and huge, well-groomed feet stomped through the mud an inch or so from my booted feet. Their eyes are clear and patient-looking (trying not to lapse into anthropomorphism here). Their coats are as clean as possible on a trail, the days I’ve been on it, deep in mud from spring snow-melt. I can tell you for certain those guys are a lot cleaner than I was when they passed me. Then there’s the attention paid to their care. I’ve stood talking with them in their corral down at Phantom while they munched their dinner. They seemed to me, a casual passerby but a passerby with some knowledge of equine care, to be relaxed and intent on eating in the same way I would be later at the canteen: glad of good food after a day of trekking, confident in a way born of long security that food and a rest time afterward would be their just compensation. They rest on the trail, too. More than several times during my hike back up Bright Angel I had to wait (and was wildly grateful of the excuse) while the mule drivers stopped the team right on the trail so the ones doing the hardest work could have a break. Lastly, I need to mention my take on the drivers, those cowboy-hatted guys with the big coats and the serious demeanor. Each time I said hi to them they answered back, but briefly, unwilling to take their attention away from their charges. They love these brown furred fellas, I realized. They are as protective of the mules as any mother of her children. Now remember, I am a visitor here. I can only say what I saw or what I believe I saw. But sometimes the outsider’s observations can add a needed element to a controversy which is most likely valid to some extent on both poles, but held captive by emotions born of history and circumstance and need. ♦ Tuesday, April 20: I’m back from a weekend trip to Tucson spent researching some data for my new book, a book so new I should not yet burden it with the name “book”. Let’s call it a project, instead. So while I was working on my Project I stayed with an old friend who had conveniently moved to Tucson last year. In what turned out to be a delightfully social weekend with a number of my friend’s friends, the discussion at some point shifted in the direction of my residency here at Grand Canyon. People are curious about what comprises an artist’s residency: “Do you have any responsibilities while you’re there?” I tell them, yes, I am obligated to at least three outreach programs. I’ve completed two of mine, already- evening programs at the Shrine of the Ages and at Phantom Ranch. “What do you think about the parks providing so much entertainment for the public”, one new acquaintance asked me, “even educational entertainment? Shouldn’t natural surroundings be enough? Don’t evening ranger talks and interpretive centers and Junior Ranger programs and Imax movies interfere with a first-time visitor’s ability to absorb the wonders of the canyon itself?” I thought about her questions during my long drive back up I-10 and I-17 to Phoenix and then north to Flagstaff and Grand Canyon. I see her point, absolutely; after all, I’m a person who believes you never really see a place until you walk through it, and walking through a place for me ideally involves a greater degree of silence than chatter, the better to focus all my senses on what I am seeing and hearing and feeling. I am also an artist, though, and an artist is intrinsically an interpreter. Each time I see something that in some way stops my hurrying on toward my next to-do item, I want to figure out what it was that caused me to be stopped for that moment. What moved me, if you will. I try to figure out why I was moved to observation and that why becomes the poem or the essay I write. There must be within the human infrastructure a switch or a mode or an App- to think in Smart Phone terminology- that creates in our conscious mind a deep need to know not just the what, but the why. This need could have its groundings in ancient survival mechanisms within our prehistoric selves. Had my great-grandfather-to-the-thousandth-power been satisfied with thinking to himself, “Huh. There’s another saber tooth tiger in front of me”, but not thought through the Why of that carnivore’s ever-increasing proximity to where great-granddad was standing pleased with himself for remembering the creature’s name, I would not be writing this on a splendidly sunny Grand Canyon morning . Just outside my apartment window several dozen park visitors are standing motionless facing the south rim which is once again rippled in layers of early morning light. They will stand there as still as deer for long minutes before they turn to enter Verkamp’s Store just behind them where a ranger will tell them more about what they were seeing. If these visitors never turned to walk into Verkamp’s for that ranger talk, it would be enough for them to have seen the canyon, but to hear the why of what they saw gives their intellect more to chew on. That is the sort all-you-can–eat I heartily endorse. ♦ Wednesday, April 21: I was getting ready to go teach a poetry session in Lori’s eighth-grade class at Grand Canyon School yesterday when I glanced out my apartment’s road-side window to see what movement had caught my eye. It was a ringtail, that small-dog-size cousin of the raccoon that roams these canyon environs. I was tickled I didn’t have to go home to Georgia on Friday not having seen one, especially after hearing about a particular habit of this exotic-looking mammal. The ringtail doesn’t have any great affinity towards humans as a whole (nor do, I, for that matter) but is drawn toward human warmth (preaching to the choir here). Canyon campers have spread their sleeping bags under the stars and waked later in the night to a snuggly bump of ringtail curled in the hollow of their knees, spooning to available warmth. Then yesterday evening while Rene was driving me to Pat Gamman’s house so I could record a pod cast with him, an elk sauntered across the road, if any animal that huge can be said to “saunter”. It was much like watching another sort of pod, one of those moveable temporary storage units, saunter from one side of the road to the other. These guys are way big. Rene stopped to offer a ride home to a park employee walking fast to beat last night’s storm clouds and yelled to her, “There’s an elk nearby.” “How close?” the woman asked, scanning a nervous circle around herself. It was obvious to me, a person who does not live with elk nearby, that elk are neighbors folks here treat with deferential respect, sort of like living next door to a Secret Service agent: park residents are relieved when they don’t have to meet him up close, and try their best to present an absolutely guileless demeanor, when they do. Small wonder Lori’s eighth-graders gave as their number two answer to my question, “What is unique about where you live?”: “the elk”. Number One answer being of course, the canyon. If “the Grand Canyon” hadn’t been their first response, I would have held serious doubts about my chances of teaching these students to practice close observation in the way writers observe their world. Heck, I would have held serious doubts about their eyesight, maybe even their intellect. But the kids were great. We talked about elk; we talked about dogs; we progressed our way toward writing a poem in someone else’s voice as a way of illustrating the sort of translation work which lies at the heart of writing poetry. I returned to this idea of artist as observer and translator when I got to Ranger Pat Gamman’s house yesterday evening. “What do you see as the purpose of a National Park Artist-in-residence?’ he asked me. While his flop-eared hound Moki snored gently between us, a warm lump shedding silently all down the length of my black top and jeans, I talked about artists of all genre being people who look at a place and pluck out some facet of that place’s essence-for lack of a better word- which they then make visible through words or paint. We work as mediators between the unseen and people who are trying their best to see. We lie down in a warm place of possibility and sometimes, when the work is at its best, a softly breathing lump of insight curls up next to us in the dark.
To see & Hear Ranger Pat Gamman’s Pod Cast interview with Dana Click here
Dana at Mather Point Verkamp's Visitor Center Dana's apartment above The View from Dana's Apartment The Grand Canyon - with snow Mule Deer Patriarch Dana at Pipe Creek Vista Dana at the Kaibab Trailhead Yep, that's the trail down Cactus Blooms Desert Wildflowers Dawn at Phantom Ranch Phantom Ranch End of the trail - Dana & Sue Lori's 8^th Grade Class at Grand Canyon School

Dana's Grand Canyon Journal

From April 1st through April 23rd, 2010, Dana was Artist -in -Residence at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon National Park. During her Residency,

she kept a journal with her comments, notes, observation and such posted on this page.

Enjoy.

♦ Saturday, April 3: It’s the crowds I notice first. Not in the way I normally would, which involves wishing everyone but me would quietly and non-lethally fall over the side of the canyon. I don’t wish people ill; I just wish them gone. One of the reasons I’ve been looking forward to this time as Artist-in-Residence for the Grand Canyon National Park is because right now I need time alone like a bluesman needs love gone wrong. Lately I’ve found myself lusting after solitude to the exclusion of all other lusts, which I consider to be not a good thing, priority-wise. So when from my first morning here I found myself watching the crowds in an accepting, approving way, this sort of noticing seemed significant enough to make me think about what might be causing such an out-of-character response to being constantly jostled by other walkers on the South Rim Trail.

Well, sure, it came to me yesterday: it’s the fact that they are walking, too. This is America, after all, home of the 30 per cent obesity statistic. Americans don’t walk; they cyber-surf. I once hiked out to a state highway trailhead of the Appalachian trail where I overheard another hiker telling a man who’d driven to the parking area about a wondrous waterfall a hundred yards down the trail. The driver’s response? “I wouldn’t walk ten feet to see a waterfall.” But here on the South Rim this Easter weekend people are out walking by the hundreds, and their little dogs, too.

And what heartens me most is that these folks aren’t just outdoorsy types like me. Over the past three days I have seen dozens of overweight teenaged boys pasty-white from their FaceBook existence. I’ve seen more wide female bottoms than I cared to count, but I mean no disrespect because these thirty-ish mothers aren’t complaining at all as they huff to keep up with their children dancing from rock to rock along the gorge. In fact, this obvious good-naturedness is what has struck me most profoundly about this place. Every spring-breaking American family unit, every photo-posing Japanese (and thank you to the nice Japanese man who not only took a photo of solo me, but gently instructed me to a better photographic stance), each young European woman looking effortlessly stylish in trail clothing, and each and every frat boy- nope, these guys deserve to be called fraternity men- who isn’t talking on his phone but to the friend walking beside him: all my companion walkers seem happy and at home.

There is something about the Grand Canyon that brings out a feeling of happy ownership in its visitors. Maybe it is the unfathomable vastness of that beauteous hole that tends the human soul toward a remembrance of its own potential. And all of us, after all, thrive on being assured of our own limitlessness.

♦ Monday, April 5: Healthy. Strong. That’s how people often describe me. Tough, even. I surely don’t object to any of these designations, but now that I’ve been here for four days and have had a chance to read much of the history of the South Rim and its early settlers, I’ve come to reassess my right to claim at least the last two of those descriptors. All I need do is look at a photo of Blanche Kolb and I start to seriously question my right to even be called “healthy”.

Blanche came here with her husband Emery in 1901 to build and operate a photography studio clinging on the craggy edge of the South Rim. She gave birth here, raised her daughter here. Just yesterday I watched one small child after another mountain-goating from rock to rock while his parents vacillated between an urge to strap their beloved child to mom’s leg with duck tape to keep him from bouncing bloodily to his young death, and watching with deep parental joy as their eight-year-old discovered his place in the world of nature. Mind you, these folks are on vacation; they have the luxury of paying full attention to their child’s new-found freedom as well as to his safety. Blanche had to help her husband in his work, raise food (and where, tell me please, did she manage this?) and cook it, sew, and generally keep her family alive and well in a spot not inherently friendly to humans. And all this in long skirts and long-sleeved shirtwaists, for pity’s sake!

I don’t pity her, though. I admire her, and maybe envy her a little. If any of her acquaintances had referred to her as tough, she would have demurred, I imagine, but thought to herself, “You don’t know the half of it.” And she would have been exactly right. I wish I could talk with her. I wish I could know the whole of her story.

♦ Tuesday, April 6: One of my outreach programs while I’m here will be to teach two eighth-grade language arts classes at the Grand Canyon School. I imagine I will ask them to do a writing exercise I often use to illustrate the difference between Image and Concept. I’ll tell them, “I’m going to say five words and you write down a description of the first picture that comes into your head when you hear that word. Don’t define the word; don’t give me a synonym. Tell me about the picture.” When I ask for sharing of what they’ve written, many of them will have written down good, usable images, like the girl in one school who in response to the concept “jealousy” wrote, “Brittany walking by while Shawn’s talking to me at lunch.” That’s perfect. This girl has taken a giant step toward understanding how to approach writing a poem, and this is no small step, either, because eighth-graders are all about thinking large, thinking conceptually.

So I have to admit to having failed my own poetic-thinking challenge yesterday out on Hermit Trail. I’d ridden the bus up from The Village, thinking I’d walk the Rim Trail back, but yesterday was a day of fifty-mile-per- hour icy winds; my hair had been whipped into auburn dreads just waiting for the bus and I was slightly cold even under three layers of fleece. A stroll down that stretch of the Rim trail would not have been pleasant; as strolls should by definition always be pleasant. “Where’s a good hike?” I asked the bus driver. He recommended the Hermit Trail, a piece of it, “if you’re up for a challenge.” I guess I just look like the sort of person who’s always up for a challenge.

The moment I stepped foot off the paved parking lot and onto that white-sanded trail, I was ecstatic. (First concept) My soul (Second concept) settled in as contentedly (Third concept) as my hound dog Fred let off his leash into woods thick with deer.

I rounded the first bend and saw just far enough below for me to have to look down and her to have to look up, a teenaged girl, maybe fourteen or so, lean and sleek-muscled in the way of a lifetime of tennis lessons, who raised her eyes to me, already grinning, and said, “The views get better and better the further down you go!”. Radiance: that’s what I saw on her face. Radiance: that’s concept four. And my image/definition of radiance? A carefully and expensively raised young girl , smooth brown hair, Northface parka and Keen hiking sandals, thrilled to see me, another human, so she could pass along her image of wilderness. She had been taken out of her careful urban world, view by view, into a place of alluring boundlessness, a seductive place where the seduction is due in part to the lack of safety net, and she wanted – she needed- to walk me to her new understanding, view by view.

I get it. I’m a teacher. This is what teachers do.

♦ Wednesday, April 7: I wanted to hike to Pipe Creek Vista; that was my intended long hike of the day. In the five days I’ve been living above Verkamps’ Store as Artist-in-Residence, I’ve stuck to a routine. Nothing new here- I love routine the way Methodists love altar call. My order of service has evolved to: breakfast and shower at 5:30, postcards and letters, write until 9:30 or 10, short walk to get the blood flowing in my legs again, lunch, read a chapter of Eat, Pray, Love, then a long hike, four or five miles at least. This tires me out enough that I’m ready to work at the computer again until my eyes start to droop or cross or both. It’s a good thing I’m alone here because believe you me, drooping crossed eyes would not inspire desire in a bedroom companion, especially when combined with the aroma of the same Grand Canyon sweater I’ve worn for snuggle value every night I’ve been here.

Pipe Creek Vista would have meant a walk of three miles or so one way, the mile and half after Mather Point likely being slim on casual walkers, which was a huge part of my reason for wanting to go that far. But I couldn’t. Construction crews diverting the roadway in order to allow native flora to re-establish had blocked my access to that last section. I walked the backhoe- noisy detour path to the visitor center to ask if there might be some other way to re-enter the trail. “Not that I know of” the ranger shook his head, “but if you’re up for an adventure, you could just strike out through the woods until you find the trail again.”

That’s twice in less than a week that a person in authority, a person in uniform, has urged me to think outside the lines, to use my common sense combined with a sense of adventure to find my own path to where I want to be. This may be the most valuable souvenir the Grand Canyon National Park offers its visitors: a gentle encouragement to take a few steps into the wilderness of their personal unknown.

♦ Thursday, April 8: A little bit homesick- that’s how I started the day. Maybe it was just the cold, or the fact that I’ve seen very few spring flowers yet and everyone at home keeps telling me about pulling last summer’s shorts from the back of the closet so they can weed their flower beds without courting heat stroke. “It’s glorious!” they all taunt me, “Like Spring on steroids!” It’s been a long cold winter even in Georgia and I am so over days like Monday when the high here zoomed to a steamy 41 degrees. Or maybe it was that I’m tired of hearing the voices of people I love, without any skin covering those voices. I wanted to not just hear my family and friends, but see them with their skin on.

I wanted my community, that’s what the problem was. I figured since I was feeling grumpy, anyway, I might as well go do laundry. A Laundromat isn’t the most likely place to start building community, but at least there are people around, which is a start. I love that there’s a sign on the Camper Services Laundromat door admonishing users: “Do not wash hiking boots in the washers”, and that three or four of the guys using the laundry yesterday looked like that sign had been placed there for them, specifically. These were guys whose hair has been permanently kinked and fuzzed from years of mountaintop winds. These are guys who own no item of clothing not faded and soft from use. I’m saying “guys” because that was the case yesterday, but I must look like I’m one of a kind with them, based on what happened later that day.

After lunch I strolled the gloriously serene Greenways path to Canyon View Information Plaza where I planned to catch the Green Route bus to Pipe Creek Vista and back-hike my trek along the South Rim that had a day earlier been cut short by construction detours. As soon as I got on the bus, the driver zipped back to my seat and said, “You were washing clothes this morning, I was going to speak, but didn’t want to interrupt your reading,” I told him who I was and why I was there, he grinned a welcome and I settled back to enjoy the short ride. As the afternoon progressed, an elegant young Indian woman took my photo by a stunning tree over Pipe Creek Vista, two herds of mule deer graciously paused for a photo op moment, and a blond six-or-so-year-old ran up to Stranger me to tell me to “Get your camera ready- there are elk ahead!”.

Back in the Resident Artist apartment that evening, a Park official knocked softly on the door to ask if he could show a Park guest around the apartment. By the time they left, I felt replete with community, as happily stuffed with a sense of belonging as if I’d been back in Georgia weeding my flowers, waving to walkers on my dirt road. Different dirt roads here, different walkers, but I am engaged the same sort of job I do best: using native soil to try to grow something of beauty and worth, which is what community is all about.

♦ Friday, April 9: I might as well own up to the idea that I am never more myself than when I’m teaching. Last night I was scheduled to give a reading from my new book for the nightly 7:30 program at The Shrine of the Ages; I had planned to read a couple of these Grand Canyon Journal pieces and then a short selection from Back to Abnormal. I geared up my body mic and sat down to wait as people found their seats. “Where are you from?” I asked the grandparents and young boy seated behind me. Turns out they are practically neighbors of mine back home, from Asheville, North Carolina, one of my favorite towns in the world. I love its pride in eccentricity; I can relate. I told the family about my work here and where I’m staying and how I can hear all conversation from below me when I’m working in my studio. “Did you hear the Junior Ranger swearing-in ceremony this afternoon, the one where she made us swear to eat broccoli and clean our rooms?” the grandson asked me. “That was my swearing-in.” I did, I told him. I stopped to listen, and I laughed.

I’ve become more and more impressed with the Junior Ranger program as I have settled in to life here on the South Rim. Everywhere I go I see children with Junior Ranger books sitting on an outcropping sketching the view across the canyon, or running their hands over history-in-a-rock-slab mounted along the Walk Through Time, and last night, hearing my host ranger announce, “Tonight’s program counts toward your Junior Ranger certification.” I sat up and thought, “Huh?” I was to be part of these children’s education about the Grand Canyon, the original Shrine of the Ages?

The ranger introduced me, I stepped to the podium and began speaking from my teacher’s heart, not my writer’s mind. I hadn’t known I would say, “How many of you have bought a t-shirt since you’ve been here? How many of you have bought postcards or taken photos? You might think you’re buying souvenirs, but what you are doing is making a tangible checkmark in your mind, just as you would mark a Junior Ranger book, showing how you have grown in this place, that you are not the same as you were before you came. Whenever we interact with nature we come away larger than we were before, and something inside us is telling us to find a way to bookmark where we were before and where we are now.”

I could have talked all night. I was back in my comfort zone, deep in the sweet depths of shared new knowledge, talking and listening our way toward understanding.

♦ Saturday, April 10: I had been walking for three hours- mailing a package at Market Plaza, buying shampoo, continuing on the Greenway toward Canyon View Plaza just for the pleasure of walking that pretty path with seldom another walker passing me- and now my feet were tired, boot-tired. Back at the apartment I thought I’d take a quick nap on the apartment’s luxuriously deep and square milk–chocolate sofa with its wealth of pillows. I’m a veteran power-napper. On the days I teach all day back home in Georgia, I rush home at noon to walk the dogs and then I stretch out on the bed with Max, my peevish old border collie. Fifteen minutes and I’m good to go, though Max isn’t. I leave him there flat as a twelve-year-old pillow and tiptoe downstairs.

Yesterday, though, I had no more laid my weary head on one of those fat brown throw pillows when I heard someone tiptoeing up my stairs. “Dana?” Nah, can’t be hearing my name. No one comes to my door here. “Dana? You have a visitor.” The voice belonged to one of the nice ladies from the visitor’s center under me, one of the women who refer to me as their mouse. I followed her through the employee back entrance, expecting alarms to sound any minute, so thoroughly has Rene admonished me not to enter the alarm area after closing hours. And there by the desk I saw: Inna. My student from home, Inna. Inna had told me she was planning to visit the Grand Canyon as a side trip from a work conference in Las Vegas during my time here, but having become as self-absorbed in my work as Resident Artists as supposed to be, I’d forgotten she might stop by.

I looked horrendous, of course, like one of those photos the rangers use as warning: This woman was rescued from Three-mile Rest House after she foolishly disregarded warning signs not to attempt to hike to Phantom Ranch and back on the same day… Inna looked classically chic, all in simple black with strappy sandals. Anyone watching as we walked out on to the South Rim Trail so I could give Inna and her husband and daughter a nickel tour would have thought she was the teacher and I, the recently arrived refuge. But for one thing- the regard with which this Ukrainian lady who holds a doctorate in mathematics was treating me. Every carefully phrased comment (“Am I saying this right, Teacher?), every deferential request for suggestions as to the best use of their short time here, every photo posed with me, the Teacher, being given pride of place, spoke to my status in her eyes.

Respect of this sort, like the love of a good man, is an honor I can never be entirely equal to, but Inna’s visit yesterday reminded me of my daily obligation to try.

♦ Sunday, April 11: Okay, so maybe the night before hiking into the Grand Canyon most of you would not have chosen to read the book I went to sleep by last night: Over The Edge: Death in Grand Canyon. It’s a book that pulls you in, though (that probably isn’t best way to describe this book’s readability), with its tale after tale of sheer human stupidity and the consequences of being so haplessly arrogant. Like the young father who clowned around on a rock edge for his watching daughter, “oh, oh, oh, I’m falling…” And then he did. Or Dee Dee Johnson, the 1940’s fashion model who posed a bit too provocatively on a precipice and when rangers managed to haul her back from the ledge she’d miraculously landed on, was outraged that their ropes shoved up her halter and caused her rim-side reentry to be a topless one.

After I put the book down and turned off my bedside lamp, I drifted serenely to sleep in the knowledge that I have no intentions of clowning around on rock edges or flat sandy path, nor will I be hiking in any sort of wardrobe-malfunctioning clothing, so I have on at least two counts greatly increased my odds of maintaining an incident-free hike today. The only wardrobe issues I might have will be of a stinky nature, as I am hiking with a day pack, not a roomier backpacker pack, so my clothing choices will be more along the lines of which layers to put on or take off, rather than what I might be in the mood to wear. I’d better plan to be in the mood to wear the three tops and 2 pairs of pants I’ll have with me, and if I smell, I smell.

Am I nervous about the hike in and the long uphill hike out? No, not really. I inherited Daddy’s tireless legs and strong back. It doesn’t damage my jock pride at all to be as slow as a tax refund if I feel like that’s what I need to do. And as my hometown friend Jon Greeson has been known to fuss during the day hikes a group of us takes from time to time, “This isn’t a race, you know.” And it isn’t. It’s most likely a once-in-my-lifetime chance to trek across the bottom of our nation’s western geology, and I intend to savor every minute of it. And come home to tell about it. No one’s going to add me as a chapter to last night’s bedtime reading.

♦ Sunday, April 11 - 8 PM: The phone rang at the Phantom Ranch Trail Crew Bunkhouse right after I’d come back from supper, bone-weary but nourished, at least. “Hey, I’m calling from the Ranger Headquarters. Say, we had a group in the bunkhouse over the weekend who kept so many lights blazing at night that the folks in the campground complained. Could you make certain the shades are down and you don’t use more light than you have to?” Sure, glad to. I’m a huge fan of keeping night skies dark; I’ve written poems and articles about light pollution. I was so eager to comply that I turned off every single light and crawled into my sleeping bag.

All right, so maybe my quick and total compliance had just a teensy bit to do with today’s hike down into the canyon. I had known this mercilessly downhill trek would involve hours of thudding over waterbreaks and along switchbacks, but I had greatly underestimated the degree (literally) of heat and exposure I’d have to deal with. Around four miles into the hike the trail became relentlessly hot and as exposed as Tiger Woods. I found myself taking more and more rest breaks under scrub trees so tiny I had to curl up like a canyon squirrel to fit into the bit of shade they offered. I drank, and ate every salty snack I had, and tried to give my back a brief respite from the weighty pull of my pack. So worn down was I that it stands as a great testament to love I hold for my son-in-law and step-dad, both engineers, that I paused in the shoulder-frying sun to photograph for them the mechanisms holding up the suspension bridge spanning the Colorado River which hikers and mules cross before entering Phantom Ranch.

I stumbled (believe the accuracy of this word choice) into Phantom ranch around three p.m., some eight hours after Rene had dropped me off rim-side with a hug. History lover though I am, I ignored every marker and vista, even passed right by – I discovered the next day- some pueblo ruins without even seeing them. My eye was on the prize: the building marked “Trail Crew Bunkhouse. Three jelly-jar glasses of ice water spiked with electrolyte powder later, followed by two cups of hot tea similarly spiked, I began to believe I might possibly some time in the next decade feel a slight need to pee. Actually, it was the next day, twelve hours and many, many Gatoraide cocktails later.

Supper helped. Meals are served family style here at Phantom. You sit at a long table and pass around big bowls of stew and salad and plates of cornbread. I ate enough to make me worthy- almost- of my resident status at the bunkhouse the trail crew uses. I’m the only one here tonight and tomorrow, but I don’t feel alone. The place reeks guy-ness. The cabin is so obviously home to mostly men (and some women- the women who work on the crew have my unbounded admiration and respect) who work through long days using the trail I’d nearly swooned on as their commute. Then they get down to the hard work, maintaining trails and repairing water breaks and shoring up rock support walls. And when they’re done for the day, do they come back here and collapse on their bunks at 8 p.m.? Nooo… they play volleyball. I know because I can sit right here and see a photo on the far wall. That bunch of healthy guys in the photo look like they’re tickled to have a chance to get a little fresh air and exercise.

When they do finally sleep, it is in the same deep darkness I went to sleep in, a darkness so profound I could see nothing at all the times I woke during the night. I lay there enjoying the novelty of having no sensory proof the hand I waved in front of me was actually there. No wonder the campers were testy about having bunkhouse visitors ruin for them what they may not otherwise have a chance to experience: absolute darkness.

The day before I hiked down here I overheard a child walking along the South Rim ask his mother, “What are we going to so after the Grand Canyon?” as if the Grand Canyon was a Saturday afternoon movie or a pizza at Chuckie Cheese. Bring that child down here, I’d like to tell his mother. Let him sleep along Bright Angel Creek with only the rushing whoosh of the water to assure him a touchable world exists out in that borderless darkness, and then see if he asks what’s going to be next. One night at Phantom Ranch is all it would take to introduce him to the limitlessness of now.

♦ Monday, April 12 - Evening: There are people who book a day at a spa when they need to recover their glow and vitality; I spent the day today at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Compared to my just-crawled-in-from-being-lost-in-the-Sahara look of yesterday, I am fairly sparkly-eyed and perky. If, of course, you ignore the huge purple blood blister where a pack strap pinched my inner arm one of the hundred times I desperately flung off or resignedly dragged on my pack during yesterday’s downward slog. And also that yellowish/green bruise on my right knee where I unwittingly knelt on a pointed rock to take a close-up of a flowering cactus for Mama (think nothing of it, Mama. After all, you did go through that whole labor and delivery thing for me). And, as well, two sunburned shoulders and kidneys that are only now, at five in the evening and after a day of marathon chugging of electrolyte-replenishing drinks, grudgingly beginning to think about maybe perhaps possibly taking back up their output duties. But, really, other than these few battle scars I do look as rested and whole as if I’d spent the day at a spa.

The truth is, I feel much more rested than if I’d been spa-centered today, because I have rested my spirit just by being here amidst such a ruggedly lovely environment. Each tree, each scrub bush, each teeny deer and emerald lizard here seems delicate, belying the toughness of life at the bottom of the canyon. It’s as if Nature has decided if any creature or plant can survive here, if any hiker can make it here, the ardure of the journey will be rewarded with this visual delicacy.

It’s all about balance. My physical duress of yesterday has been rewarded today with rest and a glimpse into the nearly surreal beauty of the inner canyon. An entry in the bunkhouse log tells me of a blizzard here less than a month ago, which will be balanced a month from now with temperatures soaring to 120 degrees. The barren red rocks I clung to yesterday for support are balanced today by the wildflowers of deepest heart red and urine yellow (and I mean that in a good way).

A wind is right now howling outside, but tomorrow will dawn calm and cooler, a perfect hiking morning for my trek back up to the rim.

♦ Tuesday, April 13: Four a.m., and wide awake in the bunkhouse, snug as it is possible to be only inside a really fine sleeping bag, but I unzipped myself from that cozy comfort and hit the wood floor scurrying with purpose. Today I was hiking Bright Angel Trail, all 9.6 miles, and my flinging-off of comfort was to prove a portent for the day. But first: breakfast with the cheeriest group of semi-strangers I may ever encounter at that early hour. Everyone ate eggs, and pancakes with butter, and bacon (well, I offered mine away to the non-vegetarians) and orange juice and not one person turned away a morsel on account of diet worries. Our duty was to eat, to fuel, to stoke our bodies for the walk ahead. And people think there are no up sides to hiking!

The day could not have dawned more gloriously. Yesterday’s blustery storm had cleared and cooled the air. I dropped my sleeping bag off for a mule to haul up (along with a bag of dirty underwear and socks, a flashlight, two t-shirts and a book I’d stuffed in the stuff sack to cut down my pack’s weight), and I bounced on down the path cheery with the lightness of my load and the lightening of the sky. I took a step onto the Silver Bridge- the other suspension bridge linking Phantom Ranch to the world above- and OMG! there was no wooden plank lining the steel mesh floor of this bridge. Just mesh. Open weave mesh. Frighteningly, dizzyingly open mesh. Vertigo-inducingly open mesh, for, oh an eighth of a mile or so across the raging Colorado River. I set my sights on the canyon wall ahead and thought magnetic thoughts of stone pulling me safely over. Never once did I, could I look down.

Two miles or more along the river’s edge the trail wanders prettily and easily through sand. So pretty and easy and level was the trail that I began to think as I often have while interstate driving, of the writer Erma Bombeck who wished the DOT would post frequent signs stating, “Yes, Erma, you are still on the right road.” I was still on the right trail, but I had to stop and pull out my trail guide to convince myself of that. After the hike down (no offense, Kaibab), this easy stroll through increasingly lush and almost tropical terrain seemed too good to believe. For the next couple of miles, Columbine Spring flows out of a cliff to nourish a narrow Eden of riparian vegetation. (Warning to anyone I call by the name “Mama”- don’t read the next three words.) I was alone for the first four miles of the hike, so I wasn’t the least bit worried about talking out loud to myself, exclaiming over and over with the masterful employ of words one would expect of a writer, “Oh, wow!” This trail section was so greenly generous to my eyes that it fed my soul as well as the breakfast eggs had fed my stomach so I fairly raced along, even up Devil’s Corkscrew, a malicious set of upward switchbacks. Not that I’ve never known any switchbacks anywhere to be other than malicious.

At Indian Garden, the slightly-over-halfway mark, I called home (yep, had cell service again) to smugly report that it was eight-thirty and I was more than halfway up. Piece of cake, I assured Mama, I’ll be up and out by noon. Oh, but all the gods that be purely love it when we make comments like that. Another mile or two and a little thing called altitude starting having its way with me. And my legs and back were tiring down a bit. And the rain we’d had at Phantom Ranch had reached the upper elevations as snow, snow which was now slushing and icing on the trail, and mixing colorfully with green mule dung. At one and the same time this smelly bright muck both sucked my boots into its depths with each step, and also tried to fling me over the canyon wall with its surface slickness.

This simply bewitching trail condition reached its peak just as I started up Jacob’s Ladder, a biblically-ever-skyward series of switchbacks. And as I climbed my evil brain inwardly sang on endless repeat, “We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder, we are climbing…” As if I needed to be reminded that every round went higher, higher!

Lordy, but I was tired. I began to stop every half hour, then every fifteen minutes, then every ten, to steady the pounding in my chest. Sue, the delightful lady I’d met at Phantom Ranch, gave me pep talks, telling me landmarks to watch for and how close each one would indicate I was to reaching the Rim. And Brian, a quietly gentle chiropractor, walked with me a long ways, claiming he’d never had a chance to “walk with a published author”, but really he wanted to give me heart through companionship. I loved them both for their company and their faith, almost as much as I increasingly despised the day hikers now filling the trail with their clean, perky selves. Yeah, you start where I started and see how spiffy your white Nike hiking tights look then, honey.

A few minutes later, and I no longer cared how clean the day hikers looked or how mud- and dung-spattered I looked. I was there, on the Rim, easing myself to the low stone wall by Kolb Studio and waiting for Sue, ten or so minutes behind, to join me. And amazingly, there were people staring at me not with disgust but with delight. They wanted to hear that I’d made it from the bottom, that I’d hiked the whole way up. I had, I told the nice couple hanging over me where I sat. Will you take my photo? Will you take one of Sue and me together?

And then I called Mama.

♦ Wednesday, April 14: I’m not a person who ever feels proud of herself. I often feel pleased when I’ve done something well, but that’s more a sense of satisfaction in having lived up to my own expectations than it is pride. Yesterday, though, I felt pride more than once. I would perch on a rock to let my breathing slow and my heart steady itself (all my fellow backpackers know there are two sorts of breaks: the ones like this where you don’t take off your pack as a signal of committing to a true stop but just lean back against something to ease its pull, versus a real rest stop where the pack comes off and you feel for a brief moment as if you might levitate), and as I looked down at where I had been and how far I had walked- I was proud.

All pride can be tempered by comparison, though. Take Pam Cox, for example. Pam is the Ranger who keeps things running smoothly down at Phantom Ranch. She hiked in a number of years ago same as I did, just to experience the place, and it “changed my life”. She set out to become a ranger purely so she could work and live at the Ranch, which she has, for well over a decade. She has lived there through several foot surgeries and some back issues and now is facing a complete knee replacement, her knee having broken down while taking the strain off her recovering foot. So what was she planning to do the day I hiked out? Hike out, that’s what. Might as well hike; her doctor told her, you can’t damage what’s already destroyed.

What’s not destroyed is her strength of will. Before I gave the 7:30 evening program Monday night she told me her knee was aching a good bit. Then she laughed, “ Whine, whine. The Ranger’s whining.” No, Pam, that’s not whining. Whining is when you refuse to attempt more than you think you can achieve and then fuss at others or at your body or at fate for supposedly keeping you from it. Pam’s not a whiner; she’s a realist. She knows her knee has to be worked on. She knows she’ll ultimately have to leave this place she loves so passionately because there are no mechanized means of transport here. She plans to keep hiking here and working here as long as her strength of will will pull her up and down those canyon walls without endangering someone else. I hope she feels proud of herself, because she’s earned the right.

Come to think of it, maybe I have, too.

♦ Thursday, April 15: I had lunch today with Bob Sutton, a long-time Park resident. He came here in 1969 or ’70, like a lot of young guys of that time wanting to start a life that wasn’t his parents’ life. He never left. He started out washing dishes at the Bright Angel Lodge Restaurant and when he was offered a job driving one of the tour buses, “I thought I’d made it!” He drove those buses for many years, as well as providing the trash collection for the whole Park. On his off-hours he and his friends hiked the many trails and non-trails through the canyon. Bob knows the Grand Canyon. So when he mentioned the current controversy involving the propriety of using mules to haul goods and visitors into the canyon and back out, I asked him what the varying local opinions were, but I didn’t offer my own. I am here for less than a month; I don’t have the right to say what I think based on what I can observe in this short time.

After Bob dropped me off at my Verkamp’s apartment, though, and the afternoon passed by, I thought more and more about what I’ve seen since I’ve been here. I started to think maybe the opinion of someone from away, a possibly more objective observer, might not be a bad element to add to the discussion. So here’s what I’ve noticed, here at the Rim, down the canyon and along the trail:

First, those mules are some big healthy animals. Believe me, I’ve witnessed them about as up-close and personal as possible: flattening myself against the canyon wall while their muscled legs and huge, well-groomed feet stomped through the mud an inch or so from my booted feet. Their eyes are clear and patient-looking (trying not to lapse into anthropomorphism here). Their coats are as clean as possible on a trail, the days I’ve been on it, deep in mud from spring snow-melt. I can tell you for certain those guys are a lot cleaner than I was when they passed me.

Then there’s the attention paid to their care. I’ve stood talking with them in their corral down at Phantom while they munched their dinner. They seemed to me, a casual passerby but a passerby with some knowledge of equine care, to be relaxed and intent on eating in the same way I would be later at the canteen: glad of good food after a day of trekking, confident in a way born of long security that food and a rest time afterward would be their just compensation.

They rest on the trail, too. More than several times during my hike back up Bright Angel I had to wait (and was wildly grateful of the excuse) while the mule drivers stopped the team right on the trail so the ones doing the hardest work could have a break. Lastly, I need to mention my take on the drivers, those cowboy-hatted guys with the big coats and the serious demeanor. Each time I said hi to them they answered back, but briefly, unwilling to take their attention away from their charges. They love these brown furred fellas, I realized. They are as protective of the mules as any mother of her children.

Now remember, I am a visitor here. I can only say what I saw or what I believe I saw. But sometimes the outsider’s observations can add a needed element to a controversy which is most likely valid to some extent on both poles, but held captive by emotions born of history and circumstance and need.

♦ Tuesday, April 20: I’m back from a weekend trip to Tucson spent researching some data for my new book, a book so new I should not yet burden it with the name “book”. Let’s call it a project, instead. So while I was working on my Project I stayed with an old friend who had conveniently moved to Tucson last year. In what turned out to be a delightfully social weekend with a number of my friend’s friends, the discussion at some point shifted in the direction of my residency here at Grand Canyon. People are curious about what comprises an artist’s residency: “Do you have any responsibilities while you’re there?” I tell them, yes, I am obligated to at least three outreach programs. I’ve completed two of mine, already- evening programs at the Shrine of the Ages and at Phantom Ranch.

“What do you think about the parks providing so much entertainment for the public”, one new acquaintance asked me, “even educational entertainment? Shouldn’t natural surroundings be enough? Don’t evening ranger talks and interpretive centers and Junior Ranger programs and Imax movies interfere with a first-time visitor’s ability to absorb the wonders of the canyon itself?”

I thought about her questions during my long drive back up I-10 and I-17 to Phoenix and then north to Flagstaff and Grand Canyon. I see her point, absolutely; after all, I’m a person who believes you never really see a place until you walk through it, and walking through a place for me ideally involves a greater degree of silence than chatter, the better to focus all my senses on what I am seeing and hearing and feeling. I am also an artist, though, and an artist is intrinsically an interpreter. Each time I see something that in some way stops my hurrying on toward my next to-do item, I want to figure out what it was that caused me to be stopped for that moment. What moved me, if you will. I try to figure out why I was moved to observation and that why becomes the poem or the essay I write.

There must be within the human infrastructure a switch or a mode or an App- to think in Smart Phone terminology- that creates in our conscious mind a deep need to know not just the what, but the why. This need could have its groundings in ancient survival mechanisms within our prehistoric selves. Had my great-grandfather-to-the-thousandth-power been satisfied with thinking to himself, “Huh. There’s another saber tooth tiger in front of me”, but not thought through the Why of that carnivore’s ever-increasing proximity to where great-granddad was standing pleased with himself for remembering the creature’s name, I would not be writing this on a splendidly sunny Grand Canyon morning .

Just outside my apartment window several dozen park visitors are standing motionless facing the south rim which is once again rippled in layers of early morning light. They will stand there as still as deer for long minutes before they turn to enter Verkamp’s Store just behind them where a ranger will tell them more about what they were seeing. If these visitors never turned to walk into Verkamp’s for that ranger talk, it would be enough for them to have seen the canyon, but to hear the why of what they saw gives their intellect more to chew on. That is the sort all-you-can–eat I heartily endorse.

♦ Wednesday, April 21: I was getting ready to go teach a poetry session in Lori’s eighth-grade class at Grand Canyon School yesterday when I glanced out my apartment’s road-side window to see what movement had caught my eye. It was a ringtail, that small-dog-size cousin of the raccoon that roams these canyon environs. I was tickled I didn’t have to go home to Georgia on Friday not having seen one, especially after hearing about a particular habit of this exotic-looking mammal. The ringtail doesn’t have any great affinity towards humans as a whole (nor do, I, for that matter) but is drawn toward human warmth (preaching to the choir here). Canyon campers have spread their sleeping bags under the stars and waked later in the night to a snuggly bump of ringtail curled in the hollow of their knees, spooning to available warmth.

Then yesterday evening while Rene was driving me to Pat Gamman’s house so I could record a pod cast with him, an elk sauntered across the road, if any animal that huge can be said to “saunter”. It was much like watching another sort of pod, one of those moveable temporary storage units, saunter from one side of the road to the other. These guys are way big. Rene stopped to offer a ride home to a park employee walking fast to beat last night’s storm clouds and yelled to her, “There’s an elk nearby.” “How close?” the woman asked, scanning a nervous circle around herself. It was obvious to me, a person who does not live with elk nearby, that elk are neighbors folks here treat with deferential respect, sort of like living next door to a Secret Service agent: park residents are relieved when they don’t have to meet him up close, and try their best to present an absolutely guileless demeanor, when they do.

Small wonder Lori’s eighth-graders gave as their number two answer to my question, “What is unique about where you live?”: “the elk”. Number One answer being of course, the canyon. If “the Grand Canyon” hadn’t been their first response, I would have held serious doubts about my chances of teaching these students to practice close observation in the way writers observe their world. Heck, I would have held serious doubts about their eyesight, maybe even their intellect. But the kids were great. We talked about elk; we talked about dogs; we progressed our way toward writing a poem in someone else’s voice as a way of illustrating the sort of translation work which lies at the heart of writing poetry.

I returned to this idea of artist as observer and translator when I got to Ranger Pat Gamman’s house yesterday evening. “What do you see as the purpose of a National Park Artist-in-residence?’ he asked me. While his flop-eared hound Moki snored gently between us, a warm lump shedding silently all down the length of my black top and jeans, I talked about artists of all genre being people who look at a place and pluck out some facet of that place’s essence-for lack of a better word- which they then make visible through words or paint. We work as mediators between the unseen and people who are trying their best to see. We lie down in a warm place of possibility and sometimes, when the work is at its best, a softly breathing lump of insight curls up next to us in the dark.