by Leath Tonino
Two white-throated swifts arc and loop on sharp wings, flying in close, circling us, disappearing beyond the rim. A lone cloud sponges up the day’s last color. All is quiet without being silent, still without being static. Mike pops his beer and I reach for a chunk of rock weathered from the surface of the prow. Mike takes a sip. In my hand the rock is heavy and warm.
Ah, I could sit this way for eons.
Or could I? The rock is pocked, fist-sized, limestone. Two hundred seventy million years ago, corals and shellfish lived and died in a warm, shallow sea, their bodies sinking and piling up to become new floor. Now, that ancient ground is in my hand, and call me crazy or an animist or whatever you like, but it’s speaking—not magically, but concretely, as one might expect a rock to speak. A voice tingles through my fingers, pours through my wrist, races through my elbow, my shoulder, my chest and neck and mind. I extend my arm out over the abyss, listening, obeying the command as I imagine countless humans have before.
Drop, the rock chants. Drop-drop-drop-drop-drop.
The swifts swing into view again with a whine, wings almost brushing my face, and my arm retracts, the rock’s voice lost. Watching the birds carve elaborate designs upon the sky, I feel as though I have taken flight, as though attention alone—pure, basic, staring, blinking, breathing attention—has dissolved the boundary between inner and outer, observer and observed. I want to grab Mike and shake him and share the good news: the universal human fantasy, to fly like a bird, it’s possible! But I can’t seem to turn away or conjure language or make a gesture. For long seconds, or perhaps minutes, I wheel and swerve and sit and stare, all together and at once.
When the swifts dive from sight a thick calm settles in, and the rock in my hand pipes back up. Mike shoots me a blank, dopey look—it’s clear he’s also been flying—and I extend my arm.
“Focus,” I say. “Become this rock.” Mike’s legs are crossed, hands cradling the beer in his lap. “Put yourself in side of here. Tie yourself to it.” He inhales deeply and I do the same, both of us gazing at the rock, at the immeasurable space surrounding it, at the place where the two meet.
Sun presses the earth, a shining golden puddle forming in a trough on the western horizon. Overhead, the sky’s lone cloud stretches and separates to reveal the night’s first stars. I let go—rather, something lets me go—and the great absence humankind has come to cherish as a symbol of beauty, wildness, and mystery rushes to fill my hand. My fingers cup a cobble of humming air, the air as light and cool as the rock was heavy and warm.
Red, russet, red, gray, rust, mauve, black: The strata blur and blend. I’m plummeting, whizzing by a cave of nesting condors, a boulder perched on a ledge, a crumbling prehistoric granary, a blooming prickly pear, a bumblebee buoyant in flight. Toward and through it all, into the canyon’s stifling inner chambers, its ageless heat and solitude, I fall. Whump. The damp sand. Dark walls framing faint constellations. A massive noise washing my ears.
“How’d that feel?”
Mike nods, raising his beer.
The river runs brown with sediment.
Grandma’s Deep Winter Kaibab Adventure
On our way to the Kaibab Plateau we stopped at the Desert Rat so Mike could buy a synthetic top to replace the Banana Republic waffle-print shirts I’d forbidden him to bring into the backcountry. Normally I leave my friends to dress themselves, but Mike had never been winter camping or cross-country skiing and didn’t grasp how speedily a sweaty cotton garment can morph into an icy straitjacket. “But I look so damn good in those shirts,” he said as we entered the store, aware that the comment would freak me out.
The joint was empty save for the manager, Bo Beck, a middle-aged guy with a buzzed head who’d been adventuring in the Southwest for decades and was the author of a guidebook to local trails. Bingo. Mike went about his shopping and I outlined our plan to Mr. Beck: We’d ski the length of the Kaibab, drop into the Grand Canyon on foot for a four-day hike, then retrace our steps and ski back out. Two weeks, wilderness immersion. The cold white and the hot red all in a single tremendous trip.
Beck was the jittery sort, not really one for making eye contact, so I knew something was up when he turned and locked onto me for a beat. “Years ago I got caught on the Kaibab in a blizzard,” he said. “Temperature dropped to twenty below. Drifts rose to my bellybutton.” His eyes twitched at the ceiling. “It got dark and I broke into a Park Service shack and shivered till dawn.”
The story rhymed with others I’d heard: mountain lions emboldened by hunger, claustrophobia-inducing white-outs, twenty feet of snow in a season. Feeling my anxiety rising, and not liking the feeling, I excused myself to find Mike. He was on the other side of the store, a plain black shirt in either hand. “I think the Small is going to be too tight, but I’m concerned that the Medium will be loose in the sleeves,” he said. “And correct me if I’m wrong, because I don’t know jack about any of this, but it strikes me that baggy sleeves could really cramp our style, by which I mean the glory of the expedition.”
Mike. He’s a wiry blueberry farmer from New Jersey, a man of refined pleasures, most notably hot tubs, sleeping past noon, fruit smoothies, and sharing with me the nagging fear that at any moment his knees will “explode” (basketball injury, lingering paranoia). By a certain line of reasoning, he’s the World’s Most Unlikely Hardcore Winter Trekker, but that line fails to recognize his greatest attribute: gameness. Mike is always game, always down for whatever, especially when he’s got no clue what “whatever” might entail.
“I guess I’m leaning toward the Small,” he said. “What do you think?”
The image of Mr. Beck mired in heavy powder, bellybutton-deep, flashed in my mind.
“Yeah, best to play it safe,” I replied. “Those baggy sleeves have trouble written all over them.”
A few words about the Kaibab. It’s an island. No, strike that—it’s a boat, a forested barge seventy miles long and thirty miles wide floating atop northern Arizona’s vast desert ocean, the Grand Canyon plunging from its southern edge like some undersea abyss. Nine thousand feet high. Rugged and remote. Millions of tourists tag the South Rim each year, but only a fraction of them cross the Kaibab on its sole paved road to dead-end at the North Rim’s Grand Lodge for beers and fat views.
Of course, the beers are a seasonal phenomenon. From November through May, the rim is all but abandoned, the road unplowed. Maintenance workers buzz around on snowmobiles, fixing generators and shoveling roofs, but they’re a skeleton crew, and they’re it. Come winter, even the mule deer head to lower ground.
In terms of history, Teddy Roosevelt loved hunting on the Kaibab, and in 1906 he designated it a national game preserve. (In 1919, when Grand Canyon National Park was formed, the preserve was split between the National Park Service and the US Forest Service.) The ecologist-cum-ethicist Aldo Leopold also spent time on the Kaibab. As did the cowboy novelist Zane Gray. As did the monkeywrenching novelist Edward Abbey. As did Everett Ruess, the West’s most famous missing person, a vagabond printmaker who roamed the Four Corners region as a teenager prior to mysteriously disappearing in 1934.
And then—please, no drumroll necessary—there’s Mike and me. For four summers we shared a one-room cabin on the Kaibab, rattlesnakes and bobcats our neighbors. We were biological wildlife technicians, professional bushwhackers tasked with searching ponderosa pine stands, aspen groves, and spruce-fir thickets for streaks of chalky poop and the hawks that pooped them. It was a dreamy gig, the type of job where you get so deep in the land that the land gets in you. Perfect, except for the heat.
“We should really visit in February,” Mike said one particularly blistering August afternoon during our fourth and final summer of poop-searching. He was snagged by a thorny shrub, all scratched up and dehydrated and desperate for a smoothie. “Bring some sled dogs, a team of eight or so Siberian huskies? Build snowmen at the rim and kick them into oblivion?” I wasn’t sure if I could handle a team of dogs, but I liked the snowman
idea.
Thus was born our fantasy of exploring the plateau during the frigid brrrrr of its hardest season.
“I thought skiing was all about ‘shredding gnarly pow’ and other dumb-sounding stuff,” Mike said, his voice a rent in the forest’s silky quiet. He was crumpled in the snow, his sixty-pound pack (primarily tuna fish, cheddar cheese blocks, and instant coffee) having toppled him for the third time in as many hours. “Whatever we’re doing is not skiing.”
It was our first day on the crusty white road and already we were knackered. That said, we were also buzzing, or at least I was, each pull of crisp, fresh, piney air lighting me up with a crisp, fresh, piney exuberance. We were doing it! We were back! And best of all, the weather was fine: sunny, blue skies, 45 degrees. It appeared as though Bo Beck was a bit of a mythmaker, the polar ferocity I’d been dreading a bit of a myth.
I planted my poles and sidestepped over, extending a hand. “Not so fast,” Mike said. “This has just become an official rest break—a long rest break. And while I’m on the subject, from now on call me Grandma. But don’t go picturing some sweet little lady, molasses cookies, that kind of bull.” He spit into the snow for grandmotherly emphasis. “No sir. I’m slow, I’m bitter, and I’m positive that if we keep this up one of my knees is going to explode.”
I asked which knee.
He smiled. “Both.”
After lounging for a half-hour, guzzling gorp and screeching greetings at the occasional acrobatic raven, we got to it, me in the lead, Grandma—ever agonized—lagging behind. Our path went through mature forest and zones where wildfires had blackened the trees. It went through memories too, old dusty memories of those old dusty summers we’d spent schwacking the plateau. Porcupine quills, fossils, lichen, lupine, fawns gamboling, a hummingbird’s iridescent throat, a mouse’s bleached bones knit into auburn duff—the images rose before me, linking one to another. But they didn’t belong: wrong season, wrong mood. Like the miles, they slipped away beneath my skis.
Wilderness therapy? Something like that. A week without people, without money, without internet or cars or clutter. A week for the mind’s usual chirps, mutterings, and sirens to lose themselves in exertion.
That first evening looked, sounded, and tasted the same as the five that followed. Pitch the tent in pink sunset glow. Gather a pile of branches. Make a ripping fire. These were the best times, these spacey, lazy hours, hands and feet and faces too hot, backs frozen. Dinners were delicious: beans and rice from a sooty aluminum pot, melted smoky snow-water, cheap whiskey straight out of the plastic bottle. I’d take a nip and mention my steaming socks. Grandma would take a nip and describe his plans for establishing a smoothie company in Philadelphia (“maybe Manhattan if it does well”). Coyotes yowled in the distance. Flecks of ash drifted mothlike and mute above the flames. In the darkness the huge land became snug, a cozy chamber roofed with stars.
As anticipated, the huge land soon became huge again, very huge. It’s one thing to experience the Grand Canyon, another thing to experience it in winter, a third thing—a thing best expressed by a sequence of joyous, meticulously arranged swear words—to gulp consecutive pots of Taster’s Choice while perched all dangle-legged and agog out front of the shuttered, half-buried Grand Lodge. For two days we toured the desolate rim, sharing the world’s most famous vistas with a friendly squirrel and an electrician named Jude (pale, wispy) who may or may not have been a ghost. We climbed rock outcrops. We peed off the edge. We built a mini-snowman but didn’t have the heart to kick him.
A part of me would have liked to stay there, gazing and tossing snowballs into the abyss, but another part felt tugged by gravity: The depths were calling. So on the ninth morning of sun, having imbibed enough caffeine to permanently damage our brains, we stashed the skis beneath a ledge and started down. “The time has come to regain our sacred pedestrian heritage,” Grandma proclaimed, triumphant.
The descent was a shedding of layers, both clothing and rock strata—the Coconino Sandstone and our jackets, then the Hermit Shale and our gloves, then the Supai Group and our hats. Icicles dripped. Junipers sloughed snow. By the time we hit the Redwall Limestone, winter was gone, melted and forgotten, and I was hiking in my boxers.
Fourteen miles to the river. A night in the dirt. Black-throated sparrows. Fragrant sagebrush. Another ten miles to a twisty tributary canyon where a creek flickered through bare gray cottonwoods. We camped there, at the foot of soaring cliffs, at the hot hidden middle of immensity, and steeped ourselves in a stillness stiller than any I’d ever encountered. It was a geologic stillness, primordial and dense. Shouting, singing, clacking stones together—these somehow added to its power. It was all-encompassing, all-swallowing. Clouds scudded in. They were gorgeous. They were part of it. We thought nothing of them, nothing of anything, and the afternoon passed in reverie.
But the reverie refused to hold. Stillness? What’s this stillness of which you speak? The next morning, roused by the tent’s crazy flapping, I stuck my head out into whirling chaos: snowflakes swooping and swerving over cactus and yucca, rusty red towers vanishing and materializing and vanishing again. There was no sky, just storm, just frenzy. Winter was back, pressing in from every side. Apparently the Kaibab’s sneaky white hand had reached low during the night to grab us from our sanctuary. And now that we were grabbed, it was squeezing.
“Rough out there, though beautiful too,” I said, wiggling into the tent and zipping the door closed. Grandma emitted a high-pitched whining noise and burrowed into his sleeping bag, only emerging for a quadruple-dose of instant Taster’s. We drank without speaking, the tent sucking and snapping against our ears. I thought of Bo Beck’s story, thought of his mired bellybutton, and my anxiety surged. If the storm was this bad inside the canyon, what was going on atop the plateau, six thousand feet higher?
The tent shuddered, jerked, heaved like a punctured lung. Our trail back to the rim was twenty miles, narrow as a sidewalk, carved into vertical walls—a daunting prospect even in stable weather.
“I’m paranoid about my knees,” Grandma said. That was all.
An accomplished travel writer once told me the problem with building suspense in a first-person adventure story is that the reader knows, from the outset, the narrator is going to make it out alive. He put it quite logically: “If the author croaked in the wilderness, then who the hell is sitting at the computer typing it all up?”
This by way of saying that—surprise, surprise—we didn’t croak. Grandma made it to New Jersey and indulged in the most decadent jumbo smoothie of his life. I treated myself to a post-trip trip to Palm Springs, California, where I lounged poolside with real grandmas (the nice molasses cookie kind).
Nevertheless, things did get weird, get bad, get miserable to the point of scary. The storm unloaded its screaming Arctic-style violence onto us for a full seventy-two straight hours. Ice froze in our beards and to our eyebrows. Curses mixed with prayers and confusion. The climb out of the canyon nearly killed us, the next day did kill us, and the day after that we rose to Heaven, where, incredibly enough, we were killed again.
Whew—it was over.
But obviously it wasn’t over.
Day fourteen. An open meadow at the geographic center of the plateau, a wondrous place all glittery under sun. Not that I had energy left for wonder. The blizzard was spent, but the road—a direct shot to our car, still forty miles north—was buried by three feet of powder. As in gone. As in oh-mercy-my-measly-muscles-can’t-press-on-like-this-oh-mercy.
We’d been trudging since five a.m. and Grandma was coming apart, falling farther and farther behind. I paused to check his progress but couldn’t make him out—the snow was too bright, the distance between us too great. Fearing that this time his knees really had exploded, I sat on my pack to wait. A plane cut a line through the blue at thirty-five thousand feet. I tried to picture myself up there, tried to picture the tray tables and peanuts and sodas, the speed and ease of it all. Nope. That reality wasn’t real to m
e.
I was cold.
I began to shiver.
I was where I was: here.
When Grandma arrived he didn’t speak, only grimaced. “We’re going to be okay,” I said, offering him half of our last granola bar. “If I keep breaking trail at the rate of a mile an hour, and if you keep limping, and if we ration our food ever so slightly, I swear, we’ll be out of here in four days, maybe even three, I swear.”
Silence. Grandma pondered the fragment of granola in the palm of his mitten, scrutinized it with a strange and disturbing intensity of focus, and after a horribly prolonged minute, raised it to his mouth. As he did so, two crumbs fell to the snow. They were just crumbs—puny, insignificant, hardly worth a calorie combined—yet they were also more than crumbs. I saw us in them: so tiny, so trapped, so deep. You might say it was a spiritual revelation, a sudden glimpse of eternal truth, a burst of holy perspective. You might say it was the simultaneous high and low point of the entire trip, the gift we’d traveled so long and hard to receive. You might say it was the essence of the Kaibab—our special summery Kaibab transmogrified by winter.
I felt shaky.
The crumbs seemed almost to pulse against the blinding white.
And then, in the corner of my eye, I noticed another crumb, a dark crumb-speck on the horizon. Grandma let out a whoop and threw his hat in the air, took off his skis and threw them nearly as high. Impossible, a hallucination: metal and fire and power, the strength of a thousand horses, the determination of ten thousand men. The crumb-speck was our salvation, our freedom—a beast of a John Deere tractor ramming through the drifts, blasting them out of existence.