Life is a Journey

View from Mather Point, Grand Canyon
Photo by National Park Service

Over 30 years ago, while visiting the Grand Canyon, I observed something so extraordinary the memory of it has never faded after all these years. And I am not just referring to the experience of seeing one of the seven natural wonders of the world, though the view is absolutely wrapped up in my memory. That once-in-a-lifetime event also forever reinforced a crucial life lesson (and Ralph Waldo Emerson quote): Life is a journey, not a destination.

At the time of the Grand Canyon experience, my wife and I, along with our two cats, were in the midst of a four month cross-country camping trip. We mostly stayed in National Parks, along with the occasional Motel 6 overnight break for hot water and real beds. It was mid-May when we reached the Grand Canyon. We had already passed through the Blue Ridge Mountains (where we saw the Weather Channel for the first time), New Orleans and the Bayou (where we dodged incessant mosquitoes), and Big Bend National Park in Texas (where our tent collapsed at night during a massive thunderstorm). We bought a pup tent the next day and continued our drive to Mather Campground on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park.

The first thing we noticed about our stopping place was the light dusting of snow on the ground. Somehow in all our planning, we hadn’t checked on possible weather conditions in mid-May. Only mildly perturbed, we pitched our pup tent, set up camp, and delighted our neighbors with the unexpected sight of cats walking on leashes. Later, wrapped like mummies in our sleeping bags in our tiny tent, we commented that our cats – who were confined at night to the car – were living in the comparative equivalent of a castle.

By 2 am, the tent was dripping on us, our sleeping bags were soaked, and we were freezing. (Thus we learned about tent condensation.) Desperate for dry and warm, we relocated to the car, but instead of trying to go back to sleep, we decided to drive to Mather Point, a South Rim visitor lookout we had passed earlier that day while enroute to the campground.

With no one around, we were able to drive to the furthest edge of the lookout. The moon was new, and we could see nothing – no canyon, no cliffs, and certainly not the Colorado River that we knew was somewhere below all of it.

Photo by Joshua Wolfsun

We turned off our engine and headlights and looked toward the sky. As our eyes adjusted to the inky black, we were able to see, all around us, a dazzling expanse of stars stretching from one horizon to the next. There was the Milky Way, the Summer Triangle rising in the east, Cygnus and Cassiopeia, and dozens of shooting stars, silently crisscrossing the night. After some hours (we lost all sense of time), the sky began to lighten almost imperceptibly. And then, to our amazement, the canyon came slowly, slowly into view – at first just the barest hint of light and shadow, a pink blush off the cliffs, followed by deepening shades of orange and purple as the immense, astonishing landscape of raised plateaus and deep basins emerged in soft relief. Another hour passed, and the night gave way to the dawn, and we had to catch our breath at the beauty below us and all around. The silence, the turning of the Earth, the sheer age of the place, six million years, and all the peoples who had inhabited this sacred space – we could feel all of that in the passage of night into day and all the hours we had kept watch.

We were mesmerized.

At 5:20 am, a tour bus drove into the lot, parked, and opened its door. Dozens of passengers stepped onto the walkway and turned to the east. “The sun rises in five minutes,” announced the guide. People readied their cameras as the first rays of sun crested the furthest mesa. Five minutes later, the group piled back into the bus and departed.

I was utterly bewildered. “What just happened?”

“They missed all of it,” my wife observed.

From our multi-hours viewing perspective, the moment of sunrise was part of a greater unveiling, not more remarkable than the Milky Way, the meteors, the tendrils of first light.

We stayed for another hour, watched until the canyon shadows gave way to the full desert sun. In those pre-cell phone days, we didn’t even bother to rummage through our backpacks to pull out a camera.

Beauty is all around. In places like the Grand Canyon or when hiking the Robert Frost Trail or watching storm clouds approach from the Berkshires, the most transcendent experiences are not a destination, not a point in time, but a continuum, a journey.  When I returned to our sodden pup tent that morning all those years ago, I was a changed person.

Hay Bales at Sunset ~ Sunderland MA
Photo by Sharon Vardatira

Cloud spotters, of course, understand all this. Because no two clouds are ever alike, there is never a “one and done” to the experience. We wait, and watch, and project ourselves into the clouds, travel with them, or simply step back and breath deep. For those of you who are new to Head in the Clouds Amherst, welcome to our community of poets, artists, and dreamers.  And for those of you who have walked with us before, make yourself comfortable.

The view is endless.