When you open the green lodge door into the thin Arizona air, flakes catch on your eyelashes and hair. You begin to run towards the canyon and notice the weight of your feet, the jagged edges of your breath, and the startling, sudden flurry. You are forgiven for whispering to yourself no. I don’t think I can as you keep shuffling forward anyway. The snow falls faster, which you still can’t believe, but the Grand Canyon is a place of weather. Last night when you drove to the lodge, you saw the white ghosts of snow banked on the sides of the highway. You packed a down jacket and gloves in your carryon. Yesterday Phoenix was 80 degrees. You wore a thin dress and sunglasses and ate brunch outside at a farm spread out like a storybook. Around you, kale grew and chickens clucked and all the women who do not have to grow kale and tend chickens laughed over their huevos rancheros and mimosas.
Yesterday you were one of those fools who thought after brunch you’d drive two hundred miles to America’s most national park, and then sun would shine down on the 57 Chevys and the station wagons full of children, and everyone would stare at the canyon, then line up for ice cream and laugh. Then you’d put on your hiking boots and walk into the canyon desert. You didn’t hear the crack in the earth singing its low vibrating song: Here is where the world begins. Here is where the world ends.
You run towards a pinyon pine with nothing but emptiness behind it. At the rim, you first look out—then down. Oh God! Across the crack in the earth, on the North Rim, no one waves back. The elevation sucks your breath out of your heaving rib cage, and all you can whisper is oh God. Thank you. The snow falls—on your face, on the blacktop path lined with red rock, on the shards in the earth dropping six thousand feet, on the six million years frozen below in stone. Your stomach plunges downward; your emotional body hangs to the side of the canyon like the Ponderosa pines. Your brain yawns upward; you try to calculate the math in the geology, and fail. All you grasp is that the human world’s recoverable history lives in a crust as thick as a single history book. Below that crust plunge millions of years in the Kaibab, Redwall, Bright Angel shale, and finally the dark outlines of the Vishnu basement rocks, like a ladder towards the river snaking in turquoise below.
Six months from now, you will read about a woman the age of your mother who one cold March day walked up to this point on the rim. Snow swirled around her too. Did she look at the aspen and white ash, the Redwall, the sun cutting through the snow and landing on the pinnacles? Or did the magnetic pull of the canyon’s plunge draw her eyes only downward? She stepped off the trail towards a quiet place on the rim, closed her eyes (or didn’t), and jumped.
But you look up. You make the sign of a cross and raise your eyes upward and catch the light as it cuts through the snow clouds.
Six million years from now your body will be turning to fossil and dust, but your ghost will still be running along the rim of this canyon. Meanwhile snow falls towards the snake of blue water threading through the canyon floor. The shafts of light illuminate into red rainbows in the knobs of stone and the pinnacles both below and all around you. All you can say is God. God, Oh God. Oh God, like a praise chorus, then finally turn yourself away and begin again to run.
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Katie Karnehm-Esh resides in Indiana where she teaches English and yoga, sporadically attends to her garden, and trains for marathons. She particularly loves reading and writing about travel, nature, and the spiritual life. Her reviews, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Fourth Genre, Englewood Review of Books, The Other Journal, Topology, Whale Road Review, and Windhover.