Message from a Boulder in Havasu Canyon

Here is a translation of utterances made by a boulder resting in the bottom of Havasu Canyon, Arizona, not far from Havasu Falls:

You look at me now. Look at you. I know what you're thinking. It makes no difference whether you write this down or not. No difference to me. Well, that's not quite true. It's just that I've been hurt before. Though the passive voice is misleading. The wound turned out to be self-inflicted. I'll spare you that story. For now. I know how to ease into a conversation.

I broke loose and toppled from the headwall of sandstone above. It must have been 3,500 years ago or so, as you count the laps Earth makes around the sun. How little you human beings understand of time – inured as you are to the rounds of day and night that so occupy the making of a life.

Listen, I can show you time: my disparate, constituent particles blowing around forever and a day, or so it seemed at the time, amidst an ocean of dunes. My gradual subsidence, spanning millennia, beneath a shallow sea. My slow burial beneath thousands of feet of sand and clay. My rise into wind and weather over the course of millions of years. Eons of deep time, passing mostly in silence, with no apparent movement whatsoever. And then, deja vu: the earth shook. Suddenly, borne away from the stone strata where I'd been hidden from myself for so long, I fell thousands of feet and came to rest where you see me now: here, now, the solitary stone you find before you. I could show you more, but I don't want to bore you. Not that I think I have. It's just that a lot of people don't seem to notice. As if they think I'm dumb.

What, you think there's a law that says a boulder can't have a sense of humor? Or any creature feeling? You, standing there, in alarming contrast to the land around you, with your bright colors, your notebook and pen, acting as if you've never been and are not now hidden from yourself, trying not to miss or misconstrue what I’m saying, acting as if the words of a stone might carry some sort of gravitas. More likely they carry evidence of your lunacy. At least you get some credit, among those of your kind with a romantic bent, for listening to the moon. But surely you know what people will say when you try to pass this off as words you got from a stone, don't you?

If they only knew. And if they did, would it make any difference? What are they making of their biblical allotment of three score and ten, anyway? You can smell the burning and the blood from here.

And, more to the point, what are you making of yours? These are not rhetorical questions. It's ok, take your time. You have all the life remaining to you to ponder answers. Which only lead to more questions. On and on it goes. With hours that number so few, compared to mine, do you ever for an instant take your life for granted? Nothing personal, but it's not much, your life. I know, it's all you got. You could do worse. And surely will, some day. Not meaning to be harsh. I may be a stone, but I'm not devoid of irony. Or of art or empathy, for that matter, which, to my way of thinking, are all one and the same.

Pardon the redundancy, but this bears emphasis: I've been hurt. And the irony of the passive voice is that it veils the fact that I was more than an accomplice: I was principal agent. Though it's true I wasn't acting alone. Just unconscious of the fact. From the wound, I brought forth the conscious will to change what is, as if I could undo what had already been done, and with that, the will to cry out, to speak from the IS in me to the IS of the invisible realms, to be heard and understood. Perhaps that's the closest a boulder can get to time on a human scale. That's where you come in. A voice seeks an audience. It seeks to enter into conversation.

I understand why you would project the logic of your own small making onto the world at large, then endow that projection with sovereignty over all else, including yourself. It's a sort of spell you cast in the vain hope of avoiding pain, a spell that works only as long as you believe it will. But that belief, as infinitesimal and evanescent as the life given to you, cannot outlast the pain. Of course it takes more than the words of a boulder to break the spell. That's up to you, entirely. But I got news: you don't have to wait till you're dead, though death's a sure-fire way. Do you understand now what’s at stake? No time to lose. I say this not to make you cry but as your friend.

I nearly forgot who I was talking to, and a rock forgets nothing. That I know of. Somehow along the way you must have learned to take others’ lives lightly, while conceiving of your own flesh, nerves, blood, and bones as substantial and inviolate, a solid-seeming wager against impermanence and loss. Let me tell you, that's a wager you're sure to lose. Not to lay it on thick with the cliches. I do what I have to, to get my point across. Circumstances being what they are. Less than ideal, if you don't mind my saying so . . .

Havasupai Country

For nine days in February, along with fifteen students, three fellow teachers, and one alumnus from my school, I journeyed over a thousand miles, by van and on foot, from Las Vegas to Havasu Canyon to the Grand Canyon to Bryce Canyon to Zion Canyon and back to Las Vegas. It was our school's Winterim, during which time teachers lead students on various excursions -- from France to Guatemala to community service projects in the Tacoma region to college trips to backpacking and camping trips such as ours. My group gathered backpacking gear and flew from Seatac Airport to Las Vegas, where we rented a caravan of passenger vans and drove across the Hoover Dam toward our first night's lodging in a motel in Kingman, Arizona, which served as a staging area for our journey to the rim of Havasu Canyon the following day.

Havasu Canyon is a tributary of the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon's western part. The trail head, Hualapai Hilltop, overlooks the canyon from a vantage point more than 6,000 feet above sea level. As we closed our packs and hefted them to our shoulders, we could see snow from a recent storm brightening the shadows and setting off the lineaments of the north-facing buttes and sandstone cliffs, tawny and rust-colored landforms jutting into the clear sky, the bluest of blue. After descending two or three miles of relatively steep switchbacks, the trail eased into an open canyon that narrowed with each step along the six or seven mile walk into the village of the Havasupai Indians, who have lived and farmed in the canyon for thousands and thousands of years. Here, where the trail enters the village, the luminescent blue water of Havasu Creek flows into the canyon. We were greeted with views of old and new homes, yards with ramshackle fences surrounding horses and donkeys and mules and cows and the occasional goat, quite a few friendly dogs moving untethered and free, and gentle smiles on the faces of the Havasupai people.

The contrasts between the suburbs of Tacoma, where most of the students on our trip live, and the Havasupai Reservation, which depends largely on horse, donkey, and mule trains to bring in supplies and carry out mail and refuse, tells of two Americas: the America of egregious consumption, running on gasoline, credit, and greed; and the America of its indigenous, sovereign peoples, who live distinctly on the margins. The Havasupai people, for the most part, still inhabit their ancestral homeland: Havasu Canyon is remote and difficult to access, on land that happens to have no minerals to mine or forests to clear cut.

On our third day there, we hiked down to the Colorado River, following a route that meandered around and through pool after pool of turquoise blue water. We camped in the cottonwoods between two grand waterfalls, where we had a great view of the lunar eclipse during the night of February 20th -- the darkened full moon, filtered down to the color of blood by the earth's umbra, heightened the brilliance of the stars. And in the light of the preceding day, you could see cottonwood trees crowned with green buds, the grasses and early flowers breaking thick and lush through the soil’s winter crust.

After leaving Havasupai land, we drove through a full-on blizzard as we passed by the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, so our views were limited to a frenzy of snowflakes veiling ghostly shapes. We drove on through the storm across the Navajo Reservation toward Ruby's Inn and Bryce Canyon N.P. in southern Utah that afternoon, then hiked a loop in Bryce the following morning as the storm cleared -- it was magical swishing through crystals from one of those fabled desert snowfalls, amid almost unearthly colors and weird shapes called "hoodoos" -- like the lumpy towers of sand castles, pink and orange and red and hundreds of feet tall, drizzled through the fingers of giants, pointing toward clouds breaking to a deep blue sky.

We then drove to Zion N.P. -- all but two of our fifteen students ventured with two co-leaders and me toward Angel's Landing, a grand sandstone fin jutting about 1700 feet above the Virgin River below. We broke trail through the snow to within 100 meters or so of the top, but it became too treacherous to proceed, clutching as we were to chains and handrails the park service installed back in the 30s to aid climbing. Zion was absolutely amazing - I'd never seen so much snow there; the cliffs were heaped with white quilts, festooned with mighty icicles and silver strands of waterfalls; several of the waterfalls disintegrated into mist as they dropped a thousand vertical feet in free fall!