Nearly twenty years ago now, my wife and I visited Arizona’s Grand Canyon for the first and, so far, only time. We had driven north that morning from the hamlet of Williams, where we had booked a stay of several nights in a bed-and-breakfast run by a former NHL hockey player with such enthusiasm for the state’s geological treasures that he had chosen to settle there after his own first visit. What follows is a lengthy diary entry I wrote that first evening upon our return to Williams, on August 11, 2016, and thus possesses an immediacy that cannot be duplicated by memory alone. We were awestruck at our first sight of the Canyon, and its memory is permanently fixed in our minds, as it undoubtedly will be for every first-time visitor. Photographs cannot convey the majesty of this extraordinary place. Being there is everything.
We were at the Park gate before 9 a.m. and parked our rented Chevrolet at Mather Point on the South Rim. Words failed me when I tried to describe the experience of seeing the Canyon for the first time. It is not, as the journalist Bernard Levin pointed out so wisely years ago, that words do not exist to describe the effect of what every tourist in possession of a soul feels, but that I had not the wit to find the words then, perhaps not even now. Suffice it to say that it is the ultimate incarnate mystery of time and space, shrouded in silence. It brought Louise and me to tears to behold such awesome magnificence: alp on alp, certainly, but on a scale too vast to comprehend, a vastness that renders the Alps themselves puny. Looking across to the Canyon’s North Rim, a distance of ten miles as the raven flies– yes, there were some of these birds in evidence there, much bigger than crows, each with a dark blue tinge in their feathers, and a distinctive curved beak– one is aware, of course, of the majestic silent peaks with their flattened tops, row upon row, rank upon rank, with deep, deep canyons between them, and far, far below, muddy and sullen at the bottom, one mile below, the Colorado River at their base, but when one realizes that the canyon below is all eroded rock, split and sundered, ravaged by time over millions of years, and by weather, wind, and rain, and that, were it not for this erosion, one might have been able to drive arrow-straight from Williams up a gentle incline at 65 miles per hour, the speed limit on the highway that leads across the 6,000 feet high plateau to the other side of the Grand Canyon in a mere 10 minutes or so–if it were not for the fact that one has to stop… at the edge: there is no getting across because the rock that supports this plateau has been worn away beneath.
