CHAPTER XVI
THE GRAND CANYON AND THE HAVASUPAI CANYON
A GLITTERING day, cool and sweet. Long shadows slanted through the scented Coconino Forest. The Gothic silences of the woods were clean of underbrush as an English park. Endless rows of pines had dropped thick mats of needles on the perfect road, so that our wheels made no sound. Beside these pines of northern Arizona our greener New England varieties seem mere scrubs. Then, unexpectedly, we passed the forest boundaries. Driving a few rods along the open road, we had our first sight of the Canyon at Grand View Point, with the sun setting over its amethyst chasm.
Years before, stepping directly from an eastern train, like most tourists I had seen the Canyon as my first stunned inkling of the extraordinary scale on which an extravagant Creator planned the West. This time, Toby and I had the disadvantage of coming newly to it after being sated with the heaped magnificence of the Rockies. Would its vastness shrink? Would it still take our breath away? I don’t know why people want their breath taken away. In the end, they usually put up a valiant fight to keep it, but at other times, they constantly seek new ways to have it snatched from them. But we need not have worried about the Grand Canyon. It is big enough and old enough to take care of itself. It could drink up Niagara in one thirsty sip, and swallow Mt. Washington in a mouthful. It could lose Boston at one end, and New York at the other, and five Singer buildings piled atop each other would not show above the rim.
Not that I mean to attempt a description of the Canyon. To date, millions have tried it, from the lady who called it pretty, to the gentleman who pronounced it a wonderful place to drop used safety razor blades. They all failed. The best description of the Grand Canyon is in one sentence, and was uttered by an author who had never bought a post-card in El Tovar. “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him!”
As I cannot leave blank pages where the Canyon should be given its due, I must be content with skimming along its rim, and dipping here and there down among its mountain tops, like the abashed little birds that plunge twitteringly into its silences. It is so great a pity that most of those who “see” the Canyon do not see it at all. They arrive one morning, and depart the next. They walk a few rods along its edge at El Tovar, visit the Hopi house, and hear the Kolb Brothers lecture. If adventurous, they don overalls or divided skirts, mount a velvet-faced burro who seems afflicted with a melancholy desire to end his tourist-harassed existence by a side-step over Bright Angel. They speak afterward with bated breath—the tourists, not the burros—of the terrors of a trail which is a boulevard compared to some in the Canyon. The first moment, it is true, is trying, when it drops away so steeply that the burro’s ears run parallel with the Colorado, but after several switchbacks they point heavenward again, until Jacob’s Ladder is reached. Few trails in the West are so well graded and mended, and walled on the outside to prevent accident. Being centrally situated, the Bright Angel gives an open vista of the length and breadth of the Canyon where the coloring is most brilliant and mountain shapes oddly fantastic. It is an excellent beginning, but only a beginning after all.
There are so many ways to “do” the Canyon, that vast labyrinth that could not be “done” in a thousand years! The best way of all is to take a guide and disappear beneath the rim, following new trails and old down to the level of the pyramidal peaks, to the plateau midway between rim and river, then wind in and out of the myriad of small hilly formations clustering about these great promontories which spread out from the mainland like fingers from a hand. The river, a tiny red line when seen from the top, froths and tumbles into an angry torrent half a mile wide. Its roar, with that of its tributaries, never is out of one’s consciousness, echoing upon the sounding board of hundreds of narrow chasms. It is remarkable how soon the world fades into complete oblivion, and this rock-bound solitude is the only existence which seems real. I once spent ten days on the plateau. At the end of a week I had forgotten the names of my most intimate friends, and on the ninth day I spent several minutes trying to recall my own name. I was so insignificant a part of those terrific silences, to have a name hardly seemed worth while. One could forget a great sorrow here within a month. If I had to die within a stated time, I should want to spend the interval within the red walls of the Grand Canyon, the transition to eternity would be so gradual.
IN THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO.
