All the Waters I Have Seen – The Colorado River

 

If I was upset when I was younger I would run to the trees. I would stare up at them and hope that they might know me. I would stare intensely, my whole neck tilted back, and I’d hold my body still so that when the wind came through I would feel like a mountain overlooking the sea, the clouds and the water and the tilt of the earth spinning around me, like I was the one steady thing in this world.

Far from my sea of ferns and cedars I found a greater steadiness. The desert is a place of slowed time. Ancientness is everywhere. As we perceive it, the ruins and petroglyphs speak of eternity; they are time capsules; they are symbols of both immortality and fragility.

All around are ancient seabeds, arroyos and washes, eroded cliffsides half-digested by rain. A millennia of changes, visible before my eyes, and yet from my place, from my senses and from all the shortened count of human time, this land has lived forever.

As I follow the cairns between sagebrush I am completely alone. At last the trail is empty. I stop, just briefly, and hold my breath. Nothing. Nothing at all. No wind, no tussle of blackbrush, no cries of ravens. No hiking boots, no hot breathing. For this moment I am underwater. I am in space.

I find water. The sun softens. I want to jump in and swim against the river currents, but I don’t, because it is too close to sunset, and I don’t want wet hair when the night grows cold. Instead I stare at the plumes of white and I try to imagine what the water might feel like as it tosses and pulls its way through faded colors—gray, blue, and sandy red—past the Grand Canyon, past cow pastures, past ancient time to some desert basin. This, the Colorado River, will not reach the sea as it once did. It is a dying river. For some reason this is what breaks my illusion, the spell of a desert afternoon; this is what sets the world in motion again. Maybe I am moving just the same as any of them, and there is no such thing as steadiness.

Tagged: All the Waters I Have Seen, Colorado River, Desert, Intermountain West, Life, Nature, photography, Prose, Prose-poetry, Random, Thoughts, travel, Water, Writing