Headtrip Hollow, Panic Gulch
Rick Kempa
Photo by Christina Schmidt
My brother and I are in day five of a hike that traverses the long western stretch of the Tonto Plateau from Hermit Creek to Bass Canyon, 46 miles if the trail guides are to be believed, in and around the Gem Canyons—Travertine, Topaz, Slate, Agate, Sapphire, Turquoise, Ruby—each with its own lovely labyrinth of unnamed drainages; out and around the massive, many-sided bodies of rock, those highest ones, set back toward the rim, bearing the proud name of temple—Vesta, Diana, Pollux, Castor—these others jutting into the main channel of the Grand Canyon, where the great land masses finally and reluctantly surrender to open space, bestowed with earthly labels, buttes and plateaus, and human names—White, Marsh, Gelkie, Shaler, LeComte.
I hate to say it, but we’re behind schedule. We haven’t exactly been dawdling; let’s just say we’ve been fully embracing the idea of a break-in phase. In four days, we’ve managed less than half the total distance. The first afternoon, staggered by the great weights on our backs, we moved a mere three miles from Hermit’s Rest to a camp in Hermit Basin. On the second day, we inched around Yuma Point and White’s Butte on a breathtakingly narrow trail that arrived at Boucher Creek, which we liked so well that we decided to lay over. We soaked our feet in the old hermit’s stream, running cold and strong with snowmelt waters, and imagined him pulling off his own gnarly boots a century ago after a day of chipping and blasting away at the granite. We ventured into one of his mineshafts, ears perked for rattlers, and day hiked down to where the creek meets the Colorado River in a fury of whitewater. On day four, when we ought to have laced our boots tighter and raised a full day of trail dust, we moved a mere two side canyons farther west, to Slate Creek.
The fact is, we should be averaging three side canyons a day if we are to arrive at Bass Canyon trail in time to climb out, hike 22 miles back through the forest to the paved road, and find our way by thumb and bus to Tucson, so Jim can appear at work as expected at a hospital down there. He is older than I by three years, but more advanced in his career by light years. He’s a medical intern, one year shy of finishing his training; I, a college graduate, have been holding down the nightshift at a gas station, writing poetry, and, most recently, falling all-consumingly in love. A life-long Chicagoan, this is Jim’s first full season in the West and his first backpacking trip. For me, the canyon has been home and hideaway the last few years—I’ve logged over 50 days of tramping below the rim. This makes me the acknowledged leader of the hike, a position I am proud to assume. Normally I’d plan a less strenuous hike for a first-timer, but Jim is game and he is certainly fit, and this is country I am eager to revisit. It’s mid-March, a tenuous time of year, when winter can get its last licks in or when spring can come on in full glory. For us so far it has been the latter, peerless days of full sun—warm, not fierce—cool nights inviting us to lie on our backs and watch the stars swing through their arcs against the looming cliffs.
The most fertile territory of our wandering, we have found, is that of our siblinghood. It has been largely unexplored. Jim’s the brother with whom I have never done anything outside the city realm. Even when we shared our parents’ roof, we each bonded with a different brother and knew one another mainly from a distance. In recent years, while I obsessively hitchhiked back and forth across the continent, subsisting on odd jobs, plasma centers, and the largess of others, he’d stayed on in Chicago—the last of the family to do so—progressing in his career, finding himself in a disastrous marriage, reeling in its aftermath. I’d dropped in a couple of times, for shelter and food as much as for company, spent a few restless days with him in his sterile high rise apartment downtown and a few nights at a local pub. If the chemistry of smoke and beer and pizza ever coalesced and we managed to shovel past the topsoil of our lives, we certainly couldn’t remember it afterwards.
Our discoveries on this journey, by contrast, have been momentous. Watching him huff around camp in Boucher Creek the second night out, dark and dirty, wispy-bearded, cracked, scraped, chafed, laughing, singing, hooting, enjoying the echo, I think, this is the real Jim, not that public self, the doctor, by which I have been labeling and describing him all these years; that’s just his work, what he does. His boyish delight amazes me. “I heard a big animal splashing around last night,” he announces in the morning, “shortly before I heard drums.” He wants to hang his sign down here: “Dr. Jim’s Topaz Canyon Clinic. Payment collected in food-stuff.” Excitedly, he shares his first backpacker’s insights: “Out here, you never ask ‘you hungry?’ Whenever you stop, you eat.” And yet he tells me, very seriously and sadly, “No offense, but I’m gonna steer clear of your bread” (my special concoction, heavy with whole wheat, sage and rosemary). Too intense for him. “That’s OK, Jim,” I tell him. “I know you’ll be begging me for it a few days from now.” We have hidden exotic treats for each other deep in our packs.
On the beach at Boucher Rapids on our third day, we lie like driftwood, sand plugging our orifices and caked in our hair, the sun drifting in and out, roasting us. I’m daydreaming about Fern, the woman I’ve just met, thinking What am I doing here? Shouldn’t I be there, building something with her? Jim, meanwhile, is all open-ears. “Funny how you hear voices in the water,” he announces. “I just wish I could understand the language.” Later, on the trail, he stoops to place his fingers in the deep cloven tracks of deer; he picks up some droppings, sniffs them—an amazing act for a guy with a doctor’s fetish for sterility—and exclaims, “It smells like Illinois!” He finds a deer skull, holds it up to the sun and squints at it, probing the sockets, the gaping mouth, then breaks into magnificent verse: “Imagine the force that lived once inside this crumbling lifeless thing!” I teach him the ancient Greek term for wonder, thaumizdo, “my favorite word,” I say, and he makes a mantra of it as we walk. At night, while I huddle close to the candle with my notebook, he heads out with his flashlight and star chart to name the heavens. I hear him clucking to himself: “Good, good, there’s Pegasus…”
How I seem to him is another matter, and a mystery. While he gives me the best of his energy, I give him half, at best. I both want it and don’t want it to be this way. I carry a totem from Fern in my pocket, a small purple pentangle that she gave me as I was leaving, and I go frantic on the second day when I lose it. For mile upon mile on the trail, I try to work it out: Is this loss symbolic?…Of course not, you idiot; it’s just a little scrap of cloth….No, it was more than that. Once a day at least, I dart away from camp when Jim’s back is turned and take my heavy head up the nearest slope, the steeper the better. I climb until I can’t breathe, collapse on a ledge and tell myself between gasps, “Be in place. Be here now.” There’s more light up there, and a wider horizon, but I am peering inwards, not out. I fill page after page of my journal, talking to her as if she’s there beside me.
When I am spent, I watch Jim, not much bigger than a bug, busying himself around camp, rummaging in his pack, crouching by the camp-stove, wandering around the fringes with his field guide. His voice arrives on a breeze, small and indistinct and, suddenly, too alone. My sibling sympathy wells up, so I go leaping and skidding down the slope, saying, “I’m coming, Jim!” He never asks where I’ve been when I reappear; he just welcomes me.
There will be no time for such headtrips today. We have decided that we will be machines of motion; we will traverse, by god, four inches east to west on our topo map before the day is done. We are breakfasted, packed and in full stride when the sun strikes the white-capped temples to the north, have already snaked our way around a couple of canyons when it finds us on a spit of land between Sapphire and Turquoise—the rim country behind us taking its final plunge, then leveling off briefly here before falling away again on three sides. “The perfect stopping place!” I declare, throwing down my pack and extending my arms. Jim drops his pack alongside and turns toward the vista opening out before us. His fingers absently probe through the rubble of sunflower seeds and broken peanuts in his diminishing bag of GORP. “Let’s look at that map,” he says.
We measure where we’ve been to where we’re going, affirm that today indeed is the dawn of the Age of Progress. Then a label on the map, Scorpion Ridge, raises my eyes to a great hemispheric sweep of Redwall across the river that narrows on either side to pincer points. A memory arises from my winter passage a few years back with my buddy John. This is the place where I first broke the code of the map, where that single stretch of cliff, one among thousands, became a formation, something with a name. “Once I saw the scorpion, I began to see the shapes of everything,” I tell Jim, “and all the names fell into place. Now I can’t get them out of my head.”
He’s peering over my shoulder at the stacked contour lines of the map, the exact shape and nearly the same size as a real scorpion. He too sees. Then he pulls the map onto his lap and takes a turn at the Name Game, touching the words on paper with one forefinger, pointing with his other at the things themselves: “That there must be Confucius Temple. Greetings, Wise One! And there’s Shiva. Oh great god, protect us!”
“My God, Jim, you’re a natural!”
“It’s about time you noticed, man.”
“A natural born idiot, I mean.”
When this foolishness plays out, we leave our packs and follow the tilt of the plateau downwards fifty or so yards to where it falls away into Granite Gorge. Keeping close to each other for balance, we peer cautiously over. A thousand feet below, in a world as yet untouched by sun, the river gives back the sky’s light in subtle green hues. The inner canyon walls are dark and darker, devoid of color. There’s nothing moving down there; it’s as if we’re in a photograph. Listening hard, we discern the mumble of rapids upstream and down, each one distinct, at the heads of the two canyons we are straddling. A calmness rises up to meet us, something tangible that for a rare moment takes the edge off of our motion mindset.
Jim is the first to step away from the edge.
“Well, I’d like to stay here forever, but…” Back at our packs, we take one last swig, gear up, and with a quick exchange of glances—the private language that two people in close contact devise and delight in—he assumes the lead. I fall back a ways to give him a little private space, to claim some of my own. Yes, I’m thinking, progress on all fronts.
I come around a bend and there’s Jim, lying in the middle of the trail, his pack askew in the dirt beside him. Eyes shut tight, face all scrunched up, he’s gripping the back of his head with one hand. He is utterly quiet. I shed my own pack, drop down beside him. “Jim, bro, what happened?”
He emits a small moan in reply. I look him over head to foot. No grotesquely twisted limbs, no pools of blood. There are some impact areas on his elbows where they hit ground, dirty now, that may soon show red. Nothing on his knees or thighs. He must have gone over backwards.
Again I ask what happened. “Tripped…on a… rock…hit my head,” he manages to say.
I try to think what he, a physician, would do if I were laid out there. I lean in and stare at where he is holding his head—no oozing between the fingers, that’s good. I move my palm back and forth above his face, so that its shadow crosses his eyes. No response. Gently, I place my thumb on the skin over his right eye, so I can draw it back and peer inside. He slaps at my hand. “Knock it off, will you?” That’s good too.
“Well, a least we have a doctor in the house,” I say. He just snorts.
A rock the size of a small melon is sitting smugly in the middle of the trail. I walk over to it, prod it with my toe. “Is this the one that did it to you?” Only his eyeballs are moving.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Well then, we’ll just see about this.” I pick the rock up, carry it fifteen or so feet away from Jim but within his line of sight, hold it over my head with both hands and heave it against a larger, more deeply rooted rock. “Take that!” I shout. “I’ll teach you to mess with us!” It cracks neatly into two halves, each of which is given the same treatment. I’m still not through. I pick up the four biggest chunks and, yelling, “You shall be scattered to the four winds, you will never know your kind again!” I fling one in each direction. Wiping my hands on my pants, I turn back toward Jim.
He’s sitting up now, watching me with wide eyes. He’s still holding his head, but there’s nothing to be done about that. The real damage, we soon discover, is to his pack, an old Army Surplus affair that we borrowed from a friend’s friend, which, when he hit the ground, went to pieces. The buckle on the waist strap is broken, and the cotter pins connecting both shoulder straps to the frame are neatly sheared off. Jim hardly reacts to this bad news, staring out instead toward the gorge with resignation. I’m surprised at his docility. Out comes the repair kit from my pack’s lower left pocket: a weird collection of paper clips, string, wire, rubber bands, safety pins, nylon patch and thread, and even—what luck!—two cotter pins I salvaged years ago from my first backpack, the K-Mart Special, before I threw it out. We replace the pins on the shoulder straps, holding them in place with paper clips, and use rope to make the waist strap functional, if not comfortable. This takes a good while, and for the first time that day, I feel the heat on my neck, the sweat pooling behind my ears and on my cheeks, droplets working their way down to my chin.
Repairs made, elbow scrapes inspected and cleaned, boots tightened, water bottle passed between us, we have nothing left to do but get a move on. Standing with our packs propped alongside, we each wait for the other to give the signal. Neither of us gives it. All that trauma, all that activity, it takes something out of you.
“Maybe we should eat lunch here,” Jim says. I’ve been thinking the same thing. It’s not a place one would choose to stop in–nameless, unrecognized until now, when something actually happened here. There’s no shade, no breeze even; it must be torture here in high summer. But it’s full-blown spring instead and not quite noon. Besides, we didn’t choose this place; it chose us.
We sit right back down in the trail. I pull the bread and cheese from the food sack, break off generous chunks of each, pass some Jim’s way, take my own share. We’re absorbed in our small bites, the effort of chewing. I for one am not even pensive; like everybody else down here, wherever they’re hiding—lizards, deer, bighorn sheep, hermits—I’m feeling my brain simmer slowly in its skullcap. I’m waiting, not even sure what for.
Jim finishes first and stands, brushing the crumbs from his lap. “Something for the little critters,” he says. He steps past me off-trail, to pee, I figure. Soon he’s calling, “Hey, check this out!” He’s standing alongside a giant Utah agave, gaping up at its crest. “This baby’s three times my height and then some!” I call his attention to the dagger-sharp leaves jutting out from the ground, some of them an inch or so from his legs. He doesn’t even look down, grips the brown stalk with one hand and gives it a shake. It hisses like an aboriginal rainstick. I tell him how the agave blooms only once every 30 years or so, then bites the dust. “This baby’s done for, in fact.”
“Oooh, too bad, too bad,” he croons in a falsetto voice, rattling the stalk some more.
He lets go and angles over to the boulder where I broke the evil rock. He’s been lured by the scarlet blooms of a cluster of hedgehog cacti, big, fragile flowers perched atop the skinny, bristling barrels. Leaning in, hands on knees, he shouts, “Holy cow! Come over here!” I squat down beside him. The inside of each flower is alive with a swarm of tiny little worms, gorging themselves on nectar!
The more he looks, the more he sees. He moves from the plants to the rocks that have tumbled down here from above, each with its hue and texture, each having its own story to report. “You know anything about rocks? Can you name these?” he asks. Next, he inspects the earth in which the rocks are rooted, claws up a little handful. “You wouldn’t call it soil,” he muses, as he trickles it through his fingers. “They’re little rocks and boulders in their own right. I wish I had my magnifying glass!”
Eventually he ends up at his backpack, rooting around. I watch him absently. Maybe he does have a magnifying glass, who knows? But what comes out instead rivets my attention: the electric silver foil of a mint carob candy bar! He takes it over to the flat rock that has been our table, carefully wipes the surface with his bandanna, and lays it there.
He’s not talking now, but I’m taking care of that for us: “Wow, Jim! Where did that come from? What are we waiting for? Let’s dig in!” He opens the pocket knife, cleans the blade, seeks out the midpoint of the bar, and with a surgeon’s deftness, surely and steadily cuts through it, paper and all. The moment is sacramental.
We will certainly never be able to find this place again—it is just one bend of thousands on this plateau trail—but we name it anyway: Headtrip Hollow. There’s a rock no longer in place here—the one which became the many. But even Jim, who sports a bump the size of half a golf ball, holds no grudge, says it was our good fortune to have stopped here. We leave as one should leave all places where, for a moment, full consciousness reigned: reluctantly, and with gratitude.
Had this moment been the apogee of our trip, the point from which we turned in full camaraderie in the generous warmth of spring to our outbound trail, our journey would have shimmered in memory for Jim, just as my first canyon trip with our brother Steve six years earlier will always shimmer for me. But the journey I’d planned was designed to test us, as if I needed to show my older and more accomplished brother what I was made of. I had foreseen at best a rigid Spartan affair from which we would emerge lean and hard, or at worst a sort of shock therapy, a full-immersion measure of the man. And the canyon, as if exacting tribute for my earlier inattention, would soon unleash the worst.
Change is afoot. Instead of random this-way-and-that breezes to tease us or the predictable rush of air downcanyon every night, a definite wind arises from the northwest, stiffens. The temperature tops out at midday, then inches down a notch. A low-lying muddle of clouds above the North Rim thickens and grows. There’s a crispness to the air that hones our senses.
That evening, we scramble through the cliffs above our camp in Ruby Canyon until we catch up with the sun. The air is suffused with yellow light, each speck of dust, set adrift by the day’s winds, announcing itself—here I am; I exist too. Abruptly, the light slides away from us, migrates up the cliffs. One by one, the bands of strata assume their colors. Soon, the piled clouds come alive as the light strikes their bellies—a tinge, a thread, and then at last an explosion of the most vivid colors of the spectrum. We are drawn in, stunned beyond words, and because one cannot look for long upon such beauty, turned back. Long before the final curtain falls, we have retreated to our camp.
We pitch our tent for the first time, more against the growing cold than the threat of rain. A couple of raindrops splat against the fly during the night. Once, when I go outside to pee, the stars, refracted by moisture, are blinking and pulsing madly. Day six dawns wild, cold air blasts whooshing through our camp, messengers from the windstorm out on the Tonto Plateau. Sand in the coffee, grit in the eye. White sky streaming west to east. All this action makes us edgy, and we are quick to take to the trail. Once in motion ourselves, however, we are exhilarated. We may be moving against the flow of air, but we are every bit as directed, heading for a last river-camp at Bass Rapids.
The wind is a creature from another season. It moves silently across the open spaces out between canyons, where there is nothing for it to sharpen its claws upon. If we are alert we can see it advancing: the big agave stalks bobbing, the brittlebush shivering, dust whorls spinning, birds screeching by. As often as not it arrives unseen and beats against the drums of our ears. All of our molecules are vibrating.
Both rims now are masked by sheets of snow. I review the problems we are sure to face when we scratch our way out of Bass Canyon and find ourselves in a blizzard. There’s an abandoned ranger station up there at Pasture Wash, four miles in from the rim, where John and I took shelter from another such storm two years ago, before the last day’s long, forced hike. Unbelievable, that the same scenario should be playing out again!
We come at midday to the Grand Scenic Divide, where the balustrades and bastions of the high cliffs extend nearly all the way to the Inner Gorge before giving way, and the river makes a big, sweeping loop from north to west. For days, we have been anticipating this place, and the fantastic formations that first come into view here, with names like Guinevere Castle, Holy Grail Temple, Merlin’s Abyss, and Galahad Point. I try for a minute to unfold the map, but the wind will have none of that. This is the wildest place yet: all motion and turmoil, the possibility of violence. Clouds are everywhere, piled thick and dark on both rims, wreathing the big rock bodies from the midriff upwards, and here in the Inner Canyon, skidding and rolling just overhead.
But the real show is below, where the perception is not of moving clouds but of sunlight loosed upon the world. Strange-shaped patches and shreds of light race across the landscape, adding the third dimension, depth, wherever it touches—contours and angles, body and shadow. The sacred presence of water is everywhere: the sheen of wet rock where squalls have been, the bedazzlement of newly-filled waterholes, the sinuous silver thread of a streambed. We throw down our packs and stare in amazement.
Sometimes, unexpectedly, the light sweeps up the Divide and rolls across us, and we raise our faces and grin. We are participants! Then a rain squall bursts upon us, soaking our faces, whipping the ponchos up around our waists, and we scowl. Just as suddenly it is gone, and then again, let there be light and shamelessly buoyed spirits! We don’t say much—who talks in a cathedral? But then Jim shouts, “Thaumizdo!” I laugh—yes indeed, the world is wondrous, and I join in with him; we’re the chorus, hollering the refrain: thaumizdo! thaumizdo!
At Bass Rapids a few hours later, I pitch the tent in an exposed spot on the beach, which proves to be bad judgment when the brunt of the storm arrives. The wind sweeping out of the gorge buffets the fly like a topsail, drives the rain against the fabric like a thousand arrows. It’s too late to move camp; we’re already in our sleeping bags. No final driftwood fire, no exploratory forays tonight, except (frequently) to reset the stakes and tighten the guy ropes. The sun does not set; rather, light dissolves into the cloudbank that, at last glance, has completely masked the land of Camelot. We are tense. I’ve told Jim what we can expect when we hike into those clouds. Even in clear weather, the thought of climbing a vertical mile weighs heavily on first-time hikers. Now, with visions of ledges glazed with ice and snow-choked gullies, he has plenty to frown about. And then there’s the matter of that impending 18-mile hike through a forest filling up with snow. I’m grateful he doesn’t lay into me for getting him into this mess; it sure seems foolish to me now.
All night long, bursts of rain on the nylon pierce the thin skin of sleep, and condensation drips down like Chinese water torture. Awake in the dark, I try to summon Fern for comfort and courage, but she has gone elsewhere. Smart lady! When daylight comes, we keep our eyes shut tight, pretending sleep, forestalling the beginning of our work. Finally, we wrestle out of our bags and into our wet clothes. Like soldiers on the day of a great charge, we mouth our tasteless gruel, grimly stow and heft our gear, line up on the trail.
Funny, how motion builds on itself, even in a deluge. Yesterday’s edginess is today’s urgency. Plain and simple, I want out. I’m thinking we can attain the ranger station up in the forest—a goal that would require epic action from us, considering our late start. But who is to say what we are or are not capable of? So I break out the old habit of walking faster, stopping less; this works great when I’m by myself, but with another hiker, it’s a tough-love tactic: I keep fifty or so yards in the lead; however much Jim tries to close the gap, I do that much more to sustain it. I don’t consult him; I just string him along, assuming he’ll thank me later. We don’t stop even when we should. Lunch in the rain, cracker crumbs and peanut butter—why bother? I grow light-headed and punchy, but keep moving, thinking, I—I mean we—will break through this, find that second wind just over the next rise.
A couple of hours into our hike, on the first switchback up the Redwall, I glance over my shoulder, as I have done from time to time, to check on Jim. He’s not there. I downshift for another switchback, but still no sign of him. Shit. I backtrack down and around a bend and find him off-trail, picking his way up the rubble of an immense, steep rockslide.
“Hey man, where you going? Trail’s this way.”
“No, it’s over here. I saw a rock-pile.”
“Well kick it down; I guarantee that’s not the way.”
Jim is reluctant to give up any elevation. He stands his ground. “Well it must mean this is a shortcut. I’m sure I’ll meet up with you just a ways ahead.”
“OK,” I say. “Whatever. I’ll catch up with you later.” And I turn away from him and head back up the trail. How to explain this? A flash of sudden cruelty like a knife blade, of the sort that siblings can be capable of? Maybe. I’ve seen it in myself from time to time. Flawed reasoning? It did seem possible, sort of, that Jim was right, that the trail might well loop back through that boulder field where I left him. Still, considering that I broke a cardinal rule of canyon hiking by leaving him alone there, the word reasoning hardly fits, even if it was flawed. Perhaps I can blame stupid fatigue, a visceral event—food run low, sleep sparse, fierce weather. I’ve been there many times, that place where vision grows fuzzy at the edges and the brain clamps shut and all bets are off. However it be explained, my action was one of the worst blunders of my backpacking career, or for that matter of my career as a brother: an abandonment in a budding emergency.
Ten minutes later, with the trail angling steadily away from where I left him, the realization jolts my fogged-in brain: What the hell am I doing? What the hell have I done? I hit the brakes, pivot, and tear down the trail yet again. Back where we parted, I peer up into the boulder field. The cloudbank has dropped lower now, there’s sleet mixed in with the rain. No sign of Jim. I call out his name, loud then louder. My voice is made small by the low-hanging clouds. I throw off my pack and head up the slope, slipping on the rocks, using all fours, calling, listening, moving some more. Finally, he answers, his voice equally small, and edged with terror.
“I’m up here. Help me.”
I find him wandering among the boulders without his pack. The words pour out, panic’s flashflood: “Thank you for coming back. I never thought I’d see you again. I put down my pack to look for the trail, and now I lost my pack. I’m fucked. I’m sorry…” His face is wet with rain and tears. There’s a look of anguish in his eyes.
“Jim, it’s OK. Sit down.” I rest my hand on his shoulder for a moment, and then—because the sleet is falling faster, because nothing will begin to get better until his pack is found—I move off in the direction where he thinks he left it. After a time I come upon it, put it on, and go back to him.
“This sucks. I don’t want to be here. Let’s get out of here,” he says.
“I agree. Let’s go.” He follows me down to the trail where, rain be damned, we stop for our meager lunch. He follows me closely in the tortuously steep trudge up the Redwall. (I match my pace to his this time.) When we achieve the top of the cliff, the snow is falling fast, and we’re soaked, cold, and spent. Nightfall is still several hours away, but there is nothing to be done but pitch the sodden tent in the first passably flat patch of mud and crawl inside.
I call the place Panic Gulch, a name that heaps the burden of what happened onto Jim, that hints at my heroism in setting things right. I like it like that. I like how, for the remainder of our trip, I am out in front, breaking trail through the snowed-in upper canyon, breaking the lock on the door of the old ranger station where we seek sanctuary, navigating the confusion of forest backroads to keep us on course. Secretly, I like how, in the hour before dawn on the last morning, when the moon cuts free of clouds and blue light fills the forest and a tribe of coyotes erupts in joy, Jim is disoriented by fear and begins walking back the way we’d come, and I have to show him boot prints in the snow, prove that they are ours, before he’ll turn around.
I should have been disturbed that he finished the trip the way he started it, behind me. I should have been haunted by how he must have felt—diminished, inadequate, dependent—the exact opposite of the traits you want to cultivate on a canyon journey. You want to be made larger, more than merely adequate; you want to experience excellence and commit to the goal of sustaining it. You want to be exhilarated, not short of breath, to be made aware of your own vast inner spaces and depths. You want to come fully into the profound fact of your freedom.
Could I have restored some of this for him? My journal from those last few days is blank—it always goes blank in the most urgent, potent times—and so is my memory, for the most part. But I like to think that I brothered him, sought to reconjure the lightness from the earlier part of our trip: unveiled a last, forgotten treat from the bottom of the pack; provoked food fantasies to make us swoon; instilled an extra-large dose of optimism—“Of course we’re going to be all right; how can there be any doubt?” I hope that during our long walk to the paved road that took us forward and apart, I admitted to myself and to him that the mistake which shattered the aura of our hike was mine, that his panic was the natural response, my abandonment unnatural. I hope especially that I wandered at length the granite depths of regret, discovered at last a seep-spring of humility. I hope—but I guess I doubt this—that I knew how to ask forgiveness.
