Cradled by crumbling walls of deep red sandstone that shield the corners of a vast blue sky, a group of 10 slightly sunburnt and sore-footed backpackers follow the gentle meander of the Dirty Devil River. We have spent a week in this canyon, socks and sandals strapped tightly to our feet, learning how to navigate this wet and wild landscape where no trails exist to show us the way. Each morning we spread out the map, stiff and creased with use, and trace a winding thin blue line with our fingers until we reach the smudged triangle symbol that marks our next camp spot–measuring the distance as we go. Is it 5, 6, 7 miles today? We’re never quite sure, the improvisation of a journey with no established path doesn’t allow for perfect calculation. So we trudge onward with nothing but an estimate and the packs on our backs, prepared for another ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ kind of day.
It’s Day 8 and by now, we’re well acquainted with the Devil. Some of us choose to wade through the muddy water while others follow cow trails up on the banks. Following the river’s path directly may be the easiest to navigate, but one risks being swallowed waist deep into the thick, mucky bottom at any given moment. Rather than live in fear of each step, many of us, myself included, prefer to scramble up the sandy banks and bushwhack through the dense vegetation that lines the river on both sides. Neither is really more efficient than the other. We all roll into camp at the same time, half of us covered in twigs, leaves, and bloody scratches, the other half caked in mud.
One of the themes we have been exploring on this course is the power of intimacy with land–what it means to truly know a place. Does that knowing take weeks, months, years, decades? Does it mean understanding every moving part within an ecosystem or every living species that exists among it? Could it be knowing every trail, road, campsite, seep, and spring in an area? Or maybe it’s simply an appreciation for a place’s natural beauty? Finally, does one backpacking trip through the landscape cover this knowing or does your family have to have resided there for generations?
These are questions I ponder as I whack my way with violent frustration through tamarisk and rabbitbrush. In the thicket, nothing could feel more intimate than being ripped to shreds by the riparian shrubland of the Dirty Devil. I look out to my friends in the river who are periodically being sucked in to their thighs. Surely nothing could possibly be more intimate than THAT! But just as I’m about to lose it, I break through the brush and am greeted by a new expanse of towering red rock canyon wall that takes my breath away, as it has countless times before. Fifteen million years of geologic history stacked in distinctive layers right before my eyes remind me that I am a mere blip in the story of this ancient stone. That my passing is microscopic in the grand scheme of deep time. These rocks contain the memories of the old ones–dinosaur tracks, fossils, petroglyphs, cliff dwellings. Some have emerged into the light, while so many others remain buried within. Perhaps my footsteps will one day join these relics in nature’s natural history museum. More likely they will be washed away by the Devil along with all other traces of my journey through this ephemeral world.
Here I am struck by my smallness, my briefness. How could I ever truly know the entirety of this dynamic system? I would have to spend a lifetime, two lifetimes, no, millions and millions of lifetimes here to even begin to grasp its complexity. I would sit and stare as dune fields turned into braided rivers and then back into piled sand. I would watch patiently as deposited material lithified into rock, encasing buried treasures for eternity. The plateau would uplift and rivers would carve deep and narrow canyons as I sat and twiddled my thumbs. I would be ancient like the stone. Would I then finally win the award for “most intimate with land”?
I don’t think there is one right answer or a “correct” way to intimacy. Intimacy after all, is something that is felt within. This nine week WRFI course on the Colorado Plateau is child’s play to someone like Gaymarie, a woman whose entire lived experience exists within these canyons and their rimlands. And then there are the Indigenous peoples who’s sacred lands we have had the honor to move across for the last three weeks. Their very ancestors are those who marked these canyon walls thousands of years ago.
I don’t think it’s a competition. It shouldn’t be, because intimacy with place isn’t a merit you earn. I believe it is a practice. A practice of humility and of surrender. It is swallowing your pride and asking the little shrub by your feet, “Who are you, plant, what is your name?” It is greeting the sandstone like an old friend. “Hello rock, tell me your story.”
True intimacy is simply having the courage to listen to their response.
