Window on the River of Time

Teddy Roosevelt said that all Americans should try to see it. He visited it to hunt and enjoy the scenery. He also declared: “We have gotten past the stage, my fellow citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned.” He was referring to the steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona known as the Grand Canyon.


When I visited it, we managed to park, and walked to the rim, the scale of the sight off the edge was so great it was hard to muster a response. It was so vast, and so familiar from pictures, it might just as well have been a picture. What impressed me most was the Babel of languages audible among the visitors pouring off the tour buses. It sounded like Times Square on a Saturday night, with every continent represented in the hubbub.


Although the canyon is a desert, it was spring and it was an oasis – a place of peace, sequestered from the rest of the world.


To experience the canyon, you have to leave the rim. The frustration aroused by the bigness, the grandness, on a rim-only visit becomes a liberation once you drop down. The modern world falls away. It’s a trip out of the human realm, deep into the geology of the earth. Layer upon layer of the earth's crust is revealed, stratum by stratum: the Toroweap limestone, the Coconino sandstone, the Red-wall limestone, the Tonto Group; the Vishnu schist deep down, close to two billion years old, nearly half the total age of the planet – the stuff that is under our very feet as we go about our lives is laid bare here. And in the silence and stillness, in the solitude of the canyon, it’s all the more impressive.


I have always found geology astonishing, beyond human comprehension pointing directly to our Creator. Standing before geological history makes me ask these questions silently- were these hundreds of square miles of limestone hundreds of feet deep truly formed by trillions of marine creatures dying? Could a river really carve out a gash this deep? How could the Colorado River in a single day before the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, carry away 380,000 tonnes or more of silt?


It was such a vast landscape it seemed it might go on in pinnacles and gulfs for hundreds of miles. With endless new levels, new shears, shelves and tables to descend, then all of a sudden, there was the bridge again. I could see its individual railings, and as we approached, through a tunnel hewn straight through the rock, the thick, deep air beside the rushing river was like a balm. Whether it was the late afternoon light, the fatigue, or the relief of getting down, I found myself wallowing in a wonderful endorphin bath. The world went glassy. The canyon cliffs and trapezoids and pinnacles of rock all became resonant. I watched myself walk, as if the real me were a deep witness to my life, rather than the one who apparently lives it.


Once you’ve been down into it, you understand, at least a little and are humbled by its beauty, both haunting and magnificent.