POINT OF VIEW

EDITOR'S NOTE: This essay was originally published in our June 2007 issue. Chuck was a longtime contributor to Arizona Highways. When we needed words, he gave us the very best. Sadly, we lost Chuck on August 30, 2014. The void remains, but his words are as wonderful today as the day he first penned them.

Piñon pine and juniper stand black in the gray light as the first feeble licks of dawn seep into the eastern sky. The road is more rock than anything else, the air clear and silent. Yesterday, at the south entrance to Grand Canyon National Park, the line of cars reached back more than 2 miles. I'm 20 miles west of there and alone except for the three cow elk that stand by the road and one spike bull that seems like a giant statue as I grind past. The ravens now slowly emerge from the darkness and fill the beginning of the day with their croaks.

South Bass Point suddenly snaps into view. That is the enduring quirk of the Canyon, the thing that has stunned people for centuries you never see it coming. There is rock, old grayed limbs and trunks of fallen juniper and pine, a maze of forest, blue sky, and suddenly the world ends and there is this huge hole in the heart of the planet. Every approach to the Canyon means rolling through tablelands, flat ground with scrub or trees, nothing that would suggest the chasm waiting nearby. At South Bass, the stone remnants of an old cabin stare one in the face. The trailhead down to the river slips off the rim. William Wallace Bass came here in 1884 to cure an illness. He stayed, had a family, raised kids, carved a trail to the river, put in a cableway across the Colorado, carved a trail on the north side up to that rim, had mines, even got a strata in the Canyon named after him and was part of the beginning of the tourist industry in this area. Now his home ground is silence, and for me, a trigger to memory as I stare down at the Inner Gorge where the Colorado River churns at Bass Rapid. Once, I clambered off the North Rim and went down to Bass Rapid, the ground below the rim spread as an emerald-green smear of life. Now I stand on the South Rim and look into my past and the past of everything else that has ever lived. It's all in the strata, there right in front of me, hundreds of millions of years of life and finally, that dark rock called Precambrian, stone that hails from the beginning of planet time itself and is almost 2 billion years old. Color codes time itself - cream, grayish white, yellow, white, rust red, red, tan, purple, a procession of tints and pigments - a clock made like a rainbow. As a species, we tend to walk to the edge of the Grand Canyon, look, and then not know what to do. The names of formations roll off the lips in close-order drill - Kaibab, Toroweap, Coconino, Hermit, Supai, Redwall, Muav, Bright Angel, Tapeats - on and on as the mind spins ever deeper into time. And then a jay clatters in the nearby piñon and the mind returns to the immediate moment as the eye floats over the Canyon. Numbers hardly help at those places we call vistas because the numbers are too big. The mind must try to encompass a gouge in the Earth 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, on average a mile deep. There's one number I keep repeating like a prayer and yet can never comprehend: All the rivers in the world total 300 cubic miles of water, but in the Grand Canyon one river has moved 800 cubic miles of material in creating this big hole. What we see at these viewpoints lining the Grand Canyon depends on what we bring to the rim. And we see more if we go to those obscure places, the ones with primitive roads and no facilities, because then we face this warp and woof of time alone and in silence with only the bubbling of love and memory to keep us company. The camera stays in the case, there is no guardrail, or signs. Nothing protects us from ourselves or this wound in the Earth that harbors the bones of all our ancestors, plant and animal, and their ways and dreams. Time stops, literally. The sun seems to move across the sky, but this is little noticed. Birds sweep through the trees, a blue mist hangs over the Canyon, and the slot of the Inner Gorge winds its way far below. At some points the actual river can be seen, and without exception, I always think I can hear the water moving a mile below.

Sometimes I bring a book. At Bass Rapid I once knocked off a scientific study of passenger pigeons. At Lees Ferry, the starting point of the Canyon where the Paria River ripples into the Colorado, I finished Carl Sandburg's massive study of Abraham Lincoln. But eventually, the book is set aside. That is the moment I crave, when time stops, when the world as I know it falls away and when I think but do not think, that state of mind I imagine Zen monks savor in those manicured rock gardens where they contemplate the depths of life. There is no machine noise, no car doors clunking shut, no engines turn-ing over, no radio, no speech, save the song of birds. And the breeze boiling up out of the Canyon itself. At Toroweap, hours of bad road lead to groves of trees and then a 3,000-foot cliff where the Earth seems cut as if by a knife. I have a tiny camp stove for making coffee, and I am always stunned by the roar it makes and blessed by the curtain of silence that rolls out the instant I turn it off. Each time I use it I am appalled, as if the mayhem of modern life had followed me as a stowaway disguised in this piddling stove. Maybe that's the reason I bring it - so that the roar of the burner will make the silence all that much more delicious when I turn it off.

Lying over, no radio, no speech, save the song of birds. And the breeze boiling up out of the Canyon itself. At Toroweap, hours of bad road lead to groves of trees and then a 3,000-foot cliff where the Earth seems cut as if by a knife. I have a tiny camp stove for making coffee, and I am always stunned by the roar it makes and blessed by the curtain of silence that rolls out the instant I turn it off. Each time I use it I am appalled, as if the mayhem of modern life had followed me as a stowaway disguised in this piddling stove. Maybe that's the reason I bring it - so that the roar of the burner will make the silence all that much more delicious when I turn it off.

ity Viewpoints are a curious product of the human mind. We insist there are promontories that enable us to see more. I doubt this very much. Every inch of the rim brings to our eyes more than we will ever understand, and yet at the same instant, everything we see we understand at some deep level within ourselves and this understanding is beyond our abil-