the art of being present

Three rounds in the laundry and there’s still sand in my socks. I like the grit that remains. It’s been over a week since we took out from a bucket list rafting trip down the Colorado River. I adventured there with my husband and his eldest, 226 miles of the river’s reach, from Lee’s Ferry to Diamond Creek, traveling into the depths of what this great earth holds, a truly Grand Canyon.

New layers of rock revealed themselves to us each day as our seven boats moved downstream. Six oar boats and one paddle boat. Some of us slipped into kayaks at times. Us twenty guests in a continual rotation between boats, sometimes paddling, deep strokes into deep green cold water, or relaxing through some stretches, or holding on for dear life as we crashed through the rapids of Granite, Horn, Lava Falls. We pulled onto beaches for hikes into slot canyons, or to go swimming in the Little Colorado River, a tributary with otherworldly pastel blue waters. We passed through sacred lands. All of it felt sacred. I kept feeling like I needed to ask permission. I did, and felt (hope) it was granted. Navajo, Havasupai, Hualapai. And something deeper and more eternal, before even those people arrived, when this place was sea, inhabited by sponges, crinoids, brachiopods, lava flowing and transforming, land masses moving.

Our fellow travelers included young folks from the Hudson Valley and older folks from Washington State and Colorado. And the guides from Canyon Explorations were, it sounds like hyperbole, outstanding humans. The river and the Canyon have called to them, and—this is the important part—they listened. And so they were there, coming from their homegrounds in nearby Flagstaff, but also as far as Alaska, leaving behind loved ones to keep us strangers safe. It’s a challenging job, the love of being on the river coming at a cost. Yet there was so much laughter on the trip. Over strong coffee and bagels at first light, echoing off canyon walls while on the river, at day’s end, coming from the guides as they held their daily meeting alone.

There was also incredible silence. Moments in the boat where the only sound was the dip and release of oars into that essential element that made this place possible: water. Or the silent hike into a canyon where we could put our hands on the Great Uncomformity, a place where hundreds of millions of years of rock are missing between layers. And then some of the guides pulled out the instruments they’d had stowed away in some hidden dry compartment of their rafts and took turns filling the silence with song. Banjo, guitar, flute, human voices rising into the air like some ancient anointing.

And then there was exhilaration as we careened through rapids, awed by the strength and talent of those at the helm to (mostly!) navigate around rocks with names like “Cheese Grater” and holes that felt hungry. The river is dynamic, recently changed by flash floods that transformed rapids, that took lives. “The river gives,” one guide said to us, “and the river takes.” One of many lessons the place offers. The water was running low, Lake Powell a shadow of what it was, and Glen Canyon Dam, which keeps the lights on and the taps running for 40 million Americans, on the border of no longer functioning as the Western drought endures. The bottom of the canyon can feel like a wild place, but the river is controlled. The rains that feed the river, less so. There wasn’t a drop of rain during our trip. No tents were needed. We slept in sleeping bags laid out on a tarp under a staggering blanket of stars and the wash of the Milky Way. An astronomer was on the trip, and she showed us nebulas, the Andromeda Galaxy, the moons of Saturn. Our family had brought no watches. We tracked the passage of our sleep by watching Jupiter and Orion traverse the nighttime sky, blinking eyes open to catch shooting stars streaking. One night there was a red glow to the sky. Aurora borealis!

We saw condors and ospreys, great blue herons and one bald eagle. Maybe a peregrine. There were bighorn sheep, gazing at us as we passed, chins lifted. A tiny fierce scorpion glowing under a black light and a baby rattlesnake sleeping in the curve of a rock. There were the red pigmented outlines of hands of ancient peoples along the cliffs of Deer Creek, proclaiming, “I was here.” And petroglyphs carved into stone.

Sixteen days on the river. And then it was over. As I reluctantly turned my phone back on, opened the laptop, boarded planes, let people know I was alive, I tried to hold on to the experience of being down there on the river. (“This is the real world,” one guide had said, “not up there,” pointing to the rim.) I try, still, to hold on to it. What happened down there that seems so difficult to make happen up here is this: we were present. The thirty of us were there in that intense landscape, observing and experiencing it, together. Without phones and computers and newspapers and gossip picked up at the grocery store, we were completely PRESENT, to each other, and to the place. Every single time we open our phones, we are in communication with someone not there beside us. I’m trying to remember this. It seems just about right that as I slowly returned to checking the news, one of the first pieces I read was Ann Patchett’s piece in the New York Times about regretting getting email. Be here, now, my friends. Remember the rocks that are a billion years old, holding us up, and the stars being born overhead, that are illuminating us. A welcome perspective, to be reminded of eternity. I’m trying to hold onto all that, even as I run around reporting on a new story.

¡presente!

~meera

In other news, there’s still time to register for my class, Writing this Warming World, an Off Assignment month-long Masters Series that will feature a guest author each week, including Emily Raboteau, Elizabeth Rush, J. Drew Lanham, and Helen Macdonald. Register here: https://www.offassignment.com/shop/warming-world

And I have a new book review in Scientific American on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book. A snippet:

Nature provides many gifts, but it is easy to take them for granted. It’s not just the strawberries you buy at the grocery store but also the plastic container that holds them, made of ancient life-forms transformed into fossils and then feedstock for plastics. How can we better recognize the value of the natural world and build communities—and economies—that acknowledge such abundance?

This is the central question of The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. 

Thanks, as always, for reading.