In March, 1993 I was barely 24, with a new baby and a job I was beginning to dislike more and more. We lived in a claustrophobic apartment on the south end of Salt Lake valley and a long, snowy winter had kept us trapped inside for what felt like an eternity. It was the same routine – get up, go to work, ride the bus back home and start again the next day. I understood Antonio Porchia’s aphorism about being wearied by the superficial. I, like Porchia, needed ‘an abyss in order to rest.’ But unlike Porchia’s figurative abyss, mine was quite literal. Pam was going to Idaho with the baby to visit her grandparents for a few days and I planned on heading the other direction, to a deep and remote crack in the desert on the Utah/Arizona border called Buckskin Gulch.
Pam and I have been vacationing separately, off and on, since soon after we got married, and after the time I dragged her out of bed one morning at 5:30 am to watch the sunrise over Snow Canyon in Southern Utah. I had intended it to be a romantic gesture, but the chilling cold and sleep deprivation served as a catalyst for one of our more memorable blowouts in our first year of marriage. After that, we decided that sometimes it is better if she does her thing and I do mine. Pam’s thing involves airports, subways, taxis and food cooked by someone in a white toque and a double-breasted jacket. I need sagebrush and sandstone, a tent and a walking stick. Even when we travel together, we try to find time to go our own way. We are both solitary people – one of the traits in which we are perfectly in sync – so while my family saw our vacations alone as a red flag, some marital discord that we weren’t sharing, it was actually the opposite. It’s part of the formula that has kept us together for the better part of twenty years. I’m not saying it’s for everybody, but it works for us.
I left for Southern Utah after half a day’s work on Thursday and drove all afternoon. The sun was setting along the Vermillion Cliffs as I passed through Cockscomb Wash east of Kanab. I turned left off of the main road and pulled into the small parking lot at the White House trailhead on the Paria River. In the morning I would hike the six-mile stretch down the river to the confluence where the Paria and Buckskin meet. That night I chose to forego the somewhat developed campground – this was before the popularity of Buckskin grew and this early in the year I had the entire area to myself - and laid the tent out on a sandy delta in the wide, shallow wash between the tamarisks and willows that lined the riverbank. I watched the stars through the open flap of the tent door. So many stars! In the moonless sky, they brightened gradually, almost imperceptibly and cluttered the sky until they melded into the familiar, translucent ribbon of the Milky Way. It was as if I was lying on the bottom of a river looking up and watching the light glisten on the ripples from below. The Paria whispered past me, swift but shallow on the other side of the sandbar, adding an audible rhythm. It was a language in a foreign tongue, that complimented the celestial river above me and lulled me to sleep.
It was still dark when I awoke. The star-scattered canopy had flattened to a deep, inky purple, punctuated by the sliver of a moon the shape of a fingernail. A jagged edge marked the eastern horizon where the sky was torn off and the world below it fell to a singular mass of negative space, flat and black. I heated some water in a pan while I packed what I needed to take with me into my pack and threw the unnecessary gear back in my little Chevy Sprint – the car that Pam and I inherited from her parents when we got married. The cold had stiffened my legs and numbed my fingers, but the act of packing and the warmth of the stove had thawed both sufficiently that I felt ready for the full day of hiking ahead. All the morning activity done, I turned off the hissing stove and stood on the bank of the Paria, watching the western rim of the canyon brighten in the morning sun as it broke over the horizon behind me. The quiet rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the completion of all my zipping and rustling. Only the ticking of the contracting metal in the stove burner was left. Soon the intervals between clicks slowed, like an exhausted cricket being smothered by silence. In the quiet, I finally understood what the river was whispering the night before. “You are alone…”
I suddenly thought of everything that could go wrong hiking alone. Simply twisting my ankle if I was deep into the canyon could be an ordeal. Relying on finding water later and missing a seep or spring cold be fatal – little chance of that on this hike though. There is always water in the Paria, if I’m desperate. In fact, all of this was running through my mind when I took my first step into the water to cross the river. The canyon had closed in from the wide-open desert at the trailhead to a boxy canyon with short walls and a wide, flat wash between them. It reminded me of a main street in a small town where all the storefronts are made of stone and the streets were surveyed by a drunkard. The river winds back and forth across this street swerving from one wall into another so that even though it only spanned a third of the wash, I had to cross the river every 20 yards or so. The first step in was a shock. The water was freezing, but after fording the river a few times, I soon became unaware of the cold rush against my calves and the silt packing into my shoes.
The walls of the Paria gradually narrowed around me rising higher and higher above my head. No longer the cozy hometown proportions I felt earlier in the canyon, now the walls rise like skyscrapers, a Neolithic Wall Street. The difference is the color. The walls absorb the morning sun, and brighten even the bottoms of the canyon. The golden light is mirrored in the muddy river, which only dramatizes the height of the sheer sandstone walls. Honey-colored light seems to come from everywhere. A few more miles and I came to the confluence where the Buckskin and Paria meet. The clear water from the Buckskin broke the silty waters of the Paria, and marbled into the milky liquid until is swallowed by the larger flow. A cool draft blew from the breach that leads deep into the gulch. I dropped my heavier pack and propped it on a sandbar against the canyon wall, removed my shoes for a while and ran my hands across the desert varnish, feeling the smooth wall give way to the more abrasive sandstone. From here, I would travel light, only carrying my water and a camera.
Author and activist Edward Abbey spent a time in Southern Utah working as a ranger for the National Parks Service. It was in country not far from this part of the Paria that he formulated ideas for his book Desert Solitaire. I like Abbey, but my journeys into the desert are more eremitic. Where Abbey saw no trace of God in the desert, I found him everywhere; the perfect symmetry of a desert primrose or the mossy seeps that spring life from solid rock and, in turn support other life in the desert. The seeps provide drinkable water to jackrabbits, crows, coyotes, deer and innumerable lizards and insects. Everything is intertwined, interdependent, ordered. My apologies to Abbey, but I see nothing here left to chance. Chance, here, is a death sentence. Nowhere was the epic of deity more evident to me than where the Buckskin and Paria meet. Here was religion primeval. Where the hand of Yahweh divided the light from the darkness. I stood in empyreal light, staring into the crack where the earth was cleaved open and the wanderer can look into the First Day. I walked into the narrow gulch and left the light behind me.
“Cuando lo superficial me cansa, me cansa tanto, que para descansar necesito un abismo.”
El abismo. Soledad.
Inside, the walls of the Buckskin are worn into forms that have a dark, almost human quality - rough-hewn sculpture left unfinished and reclaimed by the wind and water. They reminded me of Michelangelo’s Captives, the twisted forms of slaves the sculptor started for the papal tomb of Julius II and then abandoned, but these bodies emerge from sandstone instead of marble and are coated in the patina of a million millennia. The forms rise up, up, around a bulge in the wall that is mirrored by a void on the other side the way a hand cups over a fist, leaving bluish halos of light around the silhouettes 200 feet or more above my head, but no view of direct sunlight or even sky. With my neck stretched back, I felt a sense of vertigo at the dizzying height (or in reality, depth) that extended even higher out of view. The walls had quite literally closed in. At the confluence, they were 40 feet apart. Here they have pushed in to where I could nearly touch both at the same time. The bottom of the crevasse is deprived of sunlight for all but a few minutes out of the day. As a result, the undersides of every node and wave cut out of the rock is coated with frost, even though it was midday, and probably 70 degrees or more on top, where the crack opens up to the sun. On the upper side of the protuberances, the radiant energy from what little light ricocheted down into the canyon had melted the frost and left the walls with a glossy, sticky feel. The air hung with the cool humidity of a cave and in the deepest parts I could see every breath. Pools of clear, still water had gathered in the concave turns where the gush of floods had scooped out the sand away from the canyon walls earlier in the spring. Fifty feet or so above my head a logjam was impacted into the narrow slot. A hanging mixture of trunks and branches, tumbleweeds and grass cemented together with hardened clay that looked like a giant spider, which only added to the creepiness of the deep chasm.
Between four or five miles into the gulch, a pile of boulders 40 feet high blocked the canyon. I thought about climbing up them with the aid of a rope that someone else had left anchored somewhere at the top of the barricade, but the rope looked iffy. It was crusted with mud and I had no idea whether it would take my weight or whether it had been worn through, abraded raw on the rock somewhere high above and out of view. There was a rope in my big pack. It was stupid of me not to bring it. I noticed how the bravado that I carried at the beginning of the day had waned and I had become less confident as I wound my way through the recesses of the Buckskin. Had I run into the obstacle at the mouth of the gulch I would have simply climbed over it, but now the darkness was heaped on me and I didn’t feel like I could overcome it. I had become aware of the gloom of the canyon – dark and beautiful, yes, but alternately depressing and heavy to bear. My solitude had turned to loneliness. I sat for a while at the base of the rockslide and drank most of the water I had brought with me. Somewhere deep in the pile of rubble a trickle ran down the rock. It made a comforting tapping noise that echoed between the boulders as it slapped the sand and was sucked up.
I couldn’t say how long it took to get to the rockfall. The time didn’t matter. I traveled slowly, examining every little thing on the way in. I had no schedule to keep. As I walked out, my pace was more deliberate, I wanted to get out of the confines of the gulch and back to the easy security of the Paria. The gulch looked different from this direction and I thought that if there had been any other way than the one straight shot to the confluence that I may not recognize the way out at all. I imagined myself in Daedalus’ labyrinth, with no thread to guide me. In reality, the exit was not difficult or even long and I began to wonder why I had become so overwhelmed at the rockfall. In much of the gulch I could now see direct sunlight on the upper reaches of the wall and this brightened my mood considerably. I was still happy to see the cottonwoods that marked the confluence of the two canyons, mostly bare this time of year, but tinged with bright green leaves pushing from their buds that signaled life again in the Paria.
It was only mid-afternoon and I could have walked back to the White House trailhead before dark if I wanted to hump it, but I decided to make camp not far from the confluence. There was a relatively open area with a sandy bank that looked like it would give me some high ground if it happened to flood – probably a false sense of security because the canyon would most likely fill with water wall-to-wall. I laid out my tent, heated water for my ramen noodles and spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening pacing up and down the canyon, bored and waiting for a reasonable hour to go to sleep.
I woke up around midnight, chilled to the bone. It was much colder here in the canyon where the rocks never see enough sun late in the day to retain the heat. At the trailhead the night before, I had pulled an extra blanket out of the car and doubled it over my sleeping bag for warmth. This time I only had the sleeping bag, and with the frigid draft coming out of the gulch, it wasn’t near enough. I tried to sleep, but for the next few hours, I rubbed my feet and hands, pulled the sleeping bag over my head until I ran out of air, pushed my head out to breathe and started the ritual all over again. Finally, I decided to do something about it. I got the camp stove out of my pack, pumped it up and lit it in the tent. In minutes my little nylon capsule was warm again and felt like I could go back to sleep but with the stove burning, I was afraid I would catch the sleeping bag on fire. I shut the stove down and the smell of propane filled the tent. I thought I would die from carbon monoxide poisoning if I tried to sleep with a tent full of gas fumes, so I crawled out of my sleeping bag, into the cold night air and pulled everything out of the tent. I opened the windows and hoisted the tent over my head, waving it like a giant windsock to air it out. All of that warm air I had built up in the tent was gone, but at least they wouldn’t find my body lying in my tent, dead in the middle of the Paria because I was stupid enough to light a stove in a confined space. Let me die in a flood, let me fall from a cliff, bury me under a rockslide or let me fall victim to some exotically poisonous bug, but please don’t let me suffer the eternal torment of dying in the folly of my own stupidity! I hope that if I ever die doing something that imbecilic that a cougar will drag my carcass from the tent and turkey vultures will mercifully pick the flesh off my bones. I want my death appear more heroic upon discovery. I spent the rest of the night as cold and fitful as the last few hours but I lay there with the consolation that I would, at very least, awake again in the morning.
Wrapped in my sleeping bag, I sat and waited for the sun. When the first rays hit the canyon, I walked five minutes or so from my camp near the confluence to fill my water bottles with the clean water trickling from the seeps in Buckskin. My legs and shoulders were stiff from the walking the day before and the rough and sleepless night, but the little walk was enough to loosen my muscles. As I exited the confluence and headed back to my camp on the sandy hill, I caught sight of a coyote that had come to drink, silhouetted against the amber reflections in the water of the Paria only a few yards away. I startled him and he jumped with a jerk as soon as he saw me - in fact we startled each other – but to my surprise he didn’t run away. My heart was racing until my brain could tell it, relax you fool, it’s only a coyote! Unlike wolves, coyotes don’t attack anything bigger than themselves. They are more solitary, so they don’t have the advantage of a pack to back them up. The lanky canine sized me up for a while, his legs separated in an awkward pose; head slightly lowered and ears erect. I stood perfectly still until his alarm subsided and then, supposing I was no threat, he turned from me and casually walked down around a bend in the canyon and out of sight.
For my part, I felt buoyant, even relieved. Not that the encounter had ended - coyotes are scavengers. I’ve never even heard of a person being attacked by one and I have never witnessed any other behavior but avoidance from them in the past. My relief came because I found what I was looking for in the Paria, even though before that moment I didn’t know what that was. I had found my rest not in the abyss of the Buckskin but in the acceptance of the coyote. To him, I was no longer an intruder. I had become a part of the canyon.