Whenever I had seen pictures of the Grand Canyon with descriptions of its grandeur clogged in superlatives, I have discounted it as a large overrated pit. I had learnt, with amusement reserved only for fiction that the Native Americans believed that the spirits of their ancestors came to their final rest in the ravines of the canyon. One day a few fellow grad students decided to rent a car and drive up to the rim of the pit and I joined in. We drove up north to Flagstaff, AZ a town with a constant cool alpine breeze owing to its altitude, and from there further north up to the south rim of the canyon. We planned to camp in the woods around the rim and hike a modest distance inside the rim the next day. Those days, being a sucker for hiking I was quite happy with the plan.
As we neared the rim, the ambiance began to change. The shapes of the trees were now more twisted and the branches more spiraled. The smell and the sound of the breeze indicated a definite change in the geography. The car was still going up the hill when we began to notice the parked tour buses and people gazing around with cameras. We parked our car and I began walking toward the rim. The edge of the rim was marked by a two feet stone wall over which some children were playing with the rather giant squirrels. People pointed their cameras to various points on the horizon before them. The sign near the bushes read do not feed the squirrels but that didn’t seem to deter some kids who were chasing the squirrels with huge bags of potato chips trying to feed them. I walked up to the wall and took my first look at the “pit”. The moment jolted me in surprise for clearly I did not expect to see what lay before me. Looking up at the skyscrapers in Manhattan or Chicago I had always felt an awe that triggered a minor rush of adrenaline as I would begin to imagine being up on the top and looking down from the roof. Here I was physically on top of a height way beyond what I could have imagined looking down from any skyscrapers. Beneath my foot lay the depths of many skyscrapers, the combined height of the Empire State building and the Seers towers and many more - and I was standing on the roof of that height. The grand depth pointed downwards to a slither of windy twine of the blue almost green Colorado River. Along the walls I could see the hikers moving down or up like ants - disappearing into or emerging from the deep brown dust that glowed in the evening sun.
My preconception of the canyon had now been completely erased.
I looked down at the enormous grandeur that was spread under my feet and my mind left me fixated on to the rim to wander. The draw of the site let my mind go beyond its routine of placing me on the roof of the heights for a simulated excitement. With my eyes lost on the unending layers of the ravine each depicting a time my mind began flashing before me with instincts I had not known since my childhood and as if they had been waiting all these years beneath my own layers to spring. This experience had nothing to do with my stated purpose of the trip. The vastness of the canyon space and walls seemed to re-define the fading profile of my late father’s life through war and peace well before I knew to perceive. Like a breeze the feel of him standing by my side brushed over me. I watched the darkening red walls of the ravine silently encapsulating the vast depths of the canyon. In its gravity, I could touch the senses that never before landed it self to me. The depth below felt as if it is related to the unfed depths of my own. It cradled me as if I had no mass. I felt secure as a child as if my fathers arm was around my shoulders.
I was being handed back my childhood.
The grains of passage of time are carved out on the walls of the canyon with unrelenting clarity. Perhaps all that I have known and felt in my time will too be preserved on the canyon wall as a speck some day. The sun was just setting on the west rim and the edges of the east rim glowed as if it were conversing with the sun. My eyes glazed in the spectacle of its final glow and even after the sun was gone I was left with the remnant of that glow in my pupils for many minutes. A cool breeze hissed in from the alpine woods, touched my shoulders and disappeared somewhere into the darkening ravine beneath my feet – perhaps to trigger waves in the deepest rivulets of the ravine.
I had never felt as fabulously insignificant as I did when walking back to the car.
