Excerpt from the essay, "Sixty-Two Thousand Reasons Why A River is Good for Your Soul: In Particular, the Colorado River in Utah, Above the Point Where It Becomes a Reservoir"

Silt. Healthy particles of silt are suspended in the river, buffed off eons of Wingate sandstone and the debris of flash floods fire-hosing through twisted arroyos. These tiny particles of soil, mud, stone, trees and bones scour our skin as we float in the slow, warm current of the river. We drift in silence, particles ourselves in the immense canyon, winding our way down the river with the pull of gravity, scarcely able to imagine what lies ahead.

Sand. We set up temporary evening homes on wide, sugary beaches. Winds have carved the sand into dunes that are baking in elegant windrows in the still afternoon. I can't help myself, and walk along the top edge of a dune, marring the smooth surface. Beneath my toes, rivulets of sand pour downward and fan out in deltas of repose. In days, maybe hours, none of my marks will remain, and the sand will continue its lazy abrasion and sculpting, eventually blowing into the river, into the atmosphere, into another river runner's ear.

Companions. We're drunk with the serenity of it all, the seven of us—my wife of 14 years, my good friend and his 17-year-old daughter, a woman from Grand Junction, and our two male guides. The guides are typical river rats, young, glazed dark brown from the sun, competent in all things wild. My wife likes them both because they're irreverent, funny and built of raw sinew, and because they live in shorts and sandals almost year round. My wife doesn't tell me this, but it doesn't matter because the guides are busy trying not to watch the 17-year-old too much.

Names. We're walking upriver, tiny specks in the canyon, on a jaunt to see what there is to see. Three-inch-long collared lizards dart nervously around our feet, vanishing and reappearing in skittish dances. A few hundred yards farther, I see the shell left behind by a scorpion, a small bit of parchment complete with tail hooked over its back, as if the creature had just stepped out for a quick dip. I lift my eyes and the canyon walls rearrange my psyche, the limestone, sandstone, shale, chert and siltstone piled in dizzying cliffs to form the Honaker Trail Formation, above which is the Cedar Mesa Sandstone, which is below the Organ Rock Shale, which anchors the Moenkopi Formation—and that comprises only half the height of the canyon. Curtains of desert varnish stand out high on the walls, a lustrous patina streaking the rock, a festival of black, brown, tan and orange minerals, as alive as I am but infinitely more interesting.

None of us has a watch, so time takes its proper place on the margins of reality. Somewhere over the course of our days, my wife, who's been immersed in a plant ID book, tells me that we're sitting under a netleaf hackberry, a small, deciduous tree that's providing a wide swath of shade, perhaps eight square feet. A few million years ago, she reads, the climate in the area was much wetter, and the hackberry thrived on higher slopes and plains along with cottonwood, willow, sycamore and other trees. The neighborhood changed, though, and the trees and other living things moved to where a water source was more assured. She wanders off to lose herself identifying more plants.

The guides are lounging down by the boats, probably telling lies to each other. I mention the hackberry, but they only grin and nod. They're both holding tall plastic cups of concoctions that seem to make them happier than they already are. I team up with my buddy to beat them in horseshoes, sand flying everywhere. Toward the end of the game, I don't even know I made a ringer until the men on the other end excavate the shoe, as if they were digging at an archaeological site.

Evening moves down the cliffs and the river seems a bit louder, as if our ears are tuning more sharply to the landscape to make up for what we can't see. We settle comfortably into an earnest conversation that condemns mining industries as we pass around various silt-free, cold liquids, in aluminum cans, fetched from big plastic coolers within arm's reach.

The night collapses peacefully around us.

^ top