3 months ago, I returned home to Oakland, California from a 21 day trip rafting the Grand Canyon.
During the trip and since I left the canyon, I’ve often thought to attempt to write a post describing the experience, but the words just always seemed so elusive, so insufficient and too confined to fit the enormity of the experience – it is the fullest I have ever understood the idea of the ineffable; both in its definition and also in its existence: a word to describe that which words can do no justice.
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too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.
I suppose this post then, is more a kind of catharsis or processing or just trying to fully fit a morsel of the experience into my brain.
I’d never been in the Grand Canyon, the closest I’d come was a quick look over the rim during a cross country drive by. I was struck by its depth and mystery but it never occurred to me that I could visit the bottom of the earth and play in its gorges.
When my good friend, colleague, and trusted swashbuckler asked if I wanted to raft the Grand Canyon for 21 days, that it would be ‘the trip of a lifetime,’ how could I say no?
Admittedly – I didn’t do any research. I didn’t read any books or watch any movies (other than the orientation videos). I had zero idea what to expect and preferred it that way. It was the incredible planning and logistizing of the team leaders that allowed for this ignorance on my part – I showed up the first day knowing only that me and a lot of strangers would be spending the next 21 days together with the only contact to the rest of world being our Satellite phone.
Even as we were coached through the preparation, it was hard for me to wrap my head around what I was about to experience. I’d been white water rafting, but never for more than a day. There was lots to do, transferring all our personal gear into the appropriate water tight bags and boxes, determining what we would need most often and least – not wanting to overpack or underpack. 2 of the team sat at the kitchen table at the raft house transferring all the alcohol from glass bottles to plastic, labeling and taping the lids, another thing I didn’t understand at the time – but would be very grateful for.
We arrived at Lee’s Ferry boat launch – where our journey would officially begin. The boats were nearly finished being rigged when I arrived and a mountain of beer cases was forming in the middle of our packing area. The boats: approximately 18′ with inflatable tubes and aluminum framing, a foot pump for inflation and a repair kit for the PVC and the framing. Simple. Amazingly simple. We packed each to the brim – with enough provisions and equipment for 21 days – We were assigned our boats, and floated a short ways down the river to camp for the night. Everything would be explained in the morning.
I’m a sailor. My home is the sea. I knew huge waves and rocking ships and rust and diesel engines. I knew the deep power of being far away at sea, where land life becomes a memory and you fade into the wonders of Neptune: empty, vast horizons atop the bottomless depths – forced into sublime humility – endless hours mesmerized by the water…
I knew nothing of the magic of rivers and canyons, eddies or rapids, rafts or ores. It was humbling to realize that my commercial 100 ton captain’s license would do no service here. The first time a saw a wave standing still with the water moving around it – I watched for as long as the current allowed. It didn’t take very long to see how profoundly different this water was to the ocean or to see the relationship my boat captain had with the river, how he understood its moves and meaning, how deeply he respected it and from that respect would navigate its flows. Humility rather than domination. It was beautiful to see a relationship with water that I know so intimately be embodied in another person, another way, in another ecosystem, governed by different principles – but steeped in the same profound understanding.
Many nights since returning from the canyon, I’ve found myself unable to sleep and rather than counting down from 100 in Spanish (which is my usual solution to restlessness), I try to replay each day down the river, each moment where I was struck nearly breathless by such awe – someness, recall into my mind’s eye each camp, each night drowned in fantastical moonlight, each morning… the soft rose colored light, the clean air, the running river, the morning star still strong in the sky, the remnant fragrance of paulo santo mixing with the first wafts of brewing coffee…
It’s impossible of course to isolate the magic of the experience, to break apart the roots of emotionalism. It would mean to separate out into their respective part the sweetest combination: being fully unplugged, in the company of wonderful people, and perpetually surrounded by majestic beauty.
A Luddite at heart, I lead a relatively tech free life. I’m not excited about robots or holograms. I’ve read too much Ray Bradbury to ever own a device that does too much of the work for me. That said, my laptop is my most used work tool and emails and texts are sadly the most common way I communicate. While I’ve traveled extensively, I have never quite unplugged to the degree and length I did in the Grand Canyon. I hadn’t realized the weight of certain aspects of my life until they were lifted. Suddenly unplugged from a life of work and technology, a life where time is always just outside my grasp, where there are always things to do and places to be, where the stars are so often hidden by the glow of civilization – to a place where I moved at the speed of the universe, where my thoughts floated and wandered, meandering through the side canyons and waterfalls, getting lost in the embers of the fire and in the expanse of the stars. I tried to read and journal but even those things required constraints and focus that I was so happy to give up. To just sit in the silence – oh such beautiful silence – to absorb it and know it. I felt like I was in a kind of canyon fairy land, skipping across rocks down teaming creaks, discovering newness in oldness, dancing in the rain and waterfalls, bathing in the bursts of sunlight, and letting song and music freely mix with the atmosphere, sharing in its creativity…
One hot morning on a layover day, we hiked straight up for hours. Longer and higher than any of us had anticipated. Without any agreement or conversation when we reached the top and each tried to take in the view from every direction – we spread out and sat alone, in silent perfection. Words are not enough. To share silence – to somehow share the most individualistic moments with others who are in a similar state of mind, who also know the moment for what it is – is, for me, one of the most profound ways we can connect.
It is interesting trying to break down the definition of beautiful. It can mean so much. I think words like sublime are perhaps more apropos – that which is equally divine and terrifying. There were so many moments where I felt a complete sensory overload, where I couldn’t make it fit, where I didn’t understand how I could ‘feel’ so much toward something that does not, can not, and must not know that I exist. Between silhouetted rams, and cascading waterfalls, and filtered sunlight, and rocks smoothed by billions of years of flowing water, waterfalls dissipating into mist, rainbows, timeless rocks, sleeping under the stars, cliffs awash with mesmerizing, magical moonlight… There were moments where I was struck so hard that I could only weep. Not out of sadness, but out of the full rawness of my emotional self. Pulled entirely away from any of our trite attempts to box emotions into neat categories. Weep for whatever that thing is that we have lost, the immortalized story of our fall from grace – that which gives us self awareness and thus the awareness that we are somehow less apart of the beauty because we recognize it as such. This is the despair of humanity. Stripped fully down to whatever my essential self is, in all its smallness and insignificance and humility – and simultaneously feeling that I could, at any moment, burst into a million rays of light. Filled then with the power of remembering that heaven in on earth – that there is no need for gods.
I wanted desperately to stay, to etch the magic onto my brain, to stay inside of it for as long as I could. On returning home, I spent days crying on my living room floor. Days before I realized that I’d felt this kind of unnameable loss once before. After I returned from the first time I went to the arctic, to the ice edge, to the top of the world. The vast, silent, and pure ice – with no knowledge or need of humans – too harsh for us but filled with life and color that I could not have imagined. A knowledge that the world’s majesty is not ours to hold but only to see. It’s a despair that has haunted many throughout time. Nansen of Norway, the arctic explorer, returned from the ice feeling that “with this knowledge comes a terrible loneliness as humans realize they are alone in the world, alone with their laws and cracked civilization”
I don’t know what it means to touch freedom. But on the grand canyon and in the ice – I felt like I came close to touching it – only to see that it is impossible to grasp. That the quest for freedom is in fact the quest to return to something we have invariably lost. As so is our torment – that our thirst can never be fully quenched. It’s like a drug that gets you higher and higher, closer and closer, but just not quite…- then comes the pain of withdrawal. Heartbreaking.
I suppose that heartbreak serves as motivation, a reminder – to keep returning, to keep searching for those places, those moments – to find ways to bring that magic into each day – piece by piece. To let magic just be magic. To hold close and strong those deep connections to each other. To unplug, to frolic, to embrace the pain of existence and rejoice in its incomprehensible beauty.
Journey Hard Speak Easy 
Loved the way you have expressed your 21 days journey. Definitely a life time and life changing experience, if I may add. There are moments, where we really fall short of words to express what we feel at that moment. Hats off. Indeed it W’s one heck of a trip. Would like to do something like that 🙂
Wow, so beautiful!
Crushed it G! Loved reading , reminiscing and re-living the emotions and energies you so respectfully captured. Let’s go back!!!
Beautifully written! Definitely a trip of a lifetime that will always be remembered.