Ten minutes on July 9, 2008

Ten minutes on July 9, 2008

Yampa, part one.

Full disclosure: my life is pretty damn sweet sometimes. June is like a diving board: one bounce for my last exam, another for the minute after I turn grades in, a third for when Bailey is done done done with the school-as-job 6am up back at 4 homework and do it again schedule. June is turning a corner and seeing, just down the road, bigger than life, the sun, beckoning and promising.

So June came and I flew to Salt Lake on Bailey’s birthday (June 20) and the minute I hit the tarmac I felt like the adventure was on: five days on the Yampa, five days on a wild undimmed river with canyon walls like the cathedrals a Greek god might fashion while working him- or her- or itself up to the Temple of Poseidon. Like the cathedral walls someone might dream and then downscale into the rich marble interiors of the Duomo in Firenze. The colors would make a Manhattan interior decorator speed dial their color consultants; the richest, deepest grays browns blacks impossibly weathered and textured. And all seen through the clearest, cleanest air in thousands of miles, as though the doors of perception had been powerwashed from both sides.

 I’m glad I didn’t see any pictures of it beforehand; I wanted to turn that corner and see the river, the River, and the first bend of it, and then the scene around that bend. I wanted surprise, sublimity, surrender. I wanted the floor of time to drop out from under me.

And so was it twenty of us? congregated on the town of Vernal, a town of giant plaster dinosaurs dressed up in cowboy clothes with lightbulbs for eyes and standing 25 feet tall, forever about to lunge at the gas station just to its left. We slept and ate and drove to the put in and watched mosquitoes in randomly moving gangs mug our friends and suck their blood, and force them to spray large amounts of Off! And other protective liquids onto their unclothed and clothed parts.

The tiny reminders that we are oh so easily distracted. And the big river pouring by, high with snow melt and volume, regarding us, or rather disregarding us, until we enter in rafts, and then carrying us on its back, one more stick or branch to be ferried past some of the most jaw dropping canyons in the West.

I could show you pictures. Or. You could just, you know, go. Or, you could tune in tomorrow for the next installment.

But I will say this. Just as when I got off the Green River a couple years ago, on the Desolation Canyon trip, just as when I spend more than four days anywhere backcountry, or deep in Yosemite, traveling at the speed of water, or legs, once again I felt as close as I have ever felt to holding, if only for moments, a feeling in my chest and along my skin that I don’t even know I crave until I sense it. And then I understand moments in Whitman, in Wordsworth and Shelley, and in the best of the modern writing on our interaction with, for lack of a better term, the natural world. Wordsworth writes about this general experience of the beautiful and sublime elements of the natural world:

Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Perhaps all things are simply mirrors of our perception. But places like the Yampa, like great and productive works of art, help us see something, feel something, beyond our usual words and sensations. Perhaps we cannot fully sustain this seeing “into the life of things” that the Romantics imagined would allow us to shape our modern world into something more just and more beautiful, more sustaining of the best in the human spirit. I left the river and got on a plane and then another plane and spent nine days on the East Coast, and even though I went to some beautiful places and the trip was just fine, the magic of that post-Yampa body I was sporting certainly faded. To quote another Romantic,

"the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure."

I think some of the giddiness, and paradoxically, the humility I feel coming off a great river like the Yampa stems from this tantalizing sense that just out of reach, just beyond words, lies so much that we need, like food, like air, to do more than survive, to live, that enigmatic verb.