Unconformity

Facing Down the Apocalypse

The day before I left to spend twenty-three days floating by raft and dory through the Grand Canyon, I promised to place my hand on the Vishnu Schist deep inside the gorge and check the pulse of the earth. I have done that. The report is complicated. The pulse beneath my fingers was varied: occasionally strong and clear, often faint and barely detectable, sometimes a slow throb or a racing patter or skipped beats or a host of other arrhythmias that I will forever struggle to capture with words.

The Vishnu Schist mirrors the complexity of my time in the Canyon. The schist is actually a mishmash of original materials that include ocean sediments and fiery volcanics born between 1.6 and 1.8 billion years ago. The original rock was folded into the high-pressure heart of the earth and transformed into shiny blackness reminiscent of the obsidian flows in my volcanic homeland. Vishnu is the Hindu deity in charge of the preservation and protection of the Universe. They were undoubtedly looking out for the Grand Canyon when the ever-busy Bureau of Reclamation was drilling test holes for various dam sites downstream from Glen Canyon Dam. Those projects were abandoned under intense public outcry.

At Bass Crossing, 109 river miles downstream from our start at Lees Ferry, a licorice wall of schist juts behind our camp kitchen, cut and polished into glistening convolutions by the grit and grind of the river. One concavity is about the dimensions of an upright coffin. As Sun escapes beneath towering pink sandstone and our camp sighs into evening shadows, I insert myself into this black sarcophagus and warm my weary bones in the stored heat of the dying day.

In the lower canyon, the Vishnu Complex has been overlain by much younger rock. This has placed ancient basement rocks in direct contact with strata hundreds of millions of years younger, creating massive gaps of missing time in the geological record. Geologists call this the “Great Unconformity” in order to distinguish it from a host of other smaller unconformities that riddle the Canyon. I like the idea of unconformities. They are paradoxes. They make sense only after the underlying process is discerned.

Matkatamiba Canyon is a slot incised into Mauve sandstone, jeweled pools separated by short vertical plunges. A fern finds a toehold in the canyon wall, seemingly kept alive by the smell of dampness. One of my companions is a friend you want to have. He wades to his knees in the deepest pool to leave the ashes of his friend’s daughter. She loved this canyon and was taken too soon by cystic fibrosis. Genetics was my career, but sometimes I hate the brutality of it, the way we are rendered powerless by our own DNA when things go wrong. A drift of dry rose petals and ash spread across the transparency of water. Words from the poem “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” float on cool morning air. My friend staggers out of the pool onto a rocky beach, overcome. Pools well in my eyes.

We camp that night on the beach at Tuckup Canyon. White noise from 164 Mile Rapid sucks me downward into a dream. I am sitting on the edge of my cot. My father is there; not his face, but I could feel his presence off to my right. The weight of every loss seems to settle over my tired shoulders--all the people, all the beautiful places now gone, all the things I wouldn’t accomplish in the smallness of my life. I am submerged in a turbulence of grief, crying beyond any hope of stopping. I resurface into consciousness, gasping for breath. This is the unconformity that lies at the interface of grief and gratitude. We live and love. We lose. In the end, we become the lost.

We whoosh into Lava Falls, once (probably erroneously) listed by Guinness as the fastest navigable water in North America. We have 15 seconds or so of exhilaration along a perfect line, but the River isn’t having it. Our right oar is seized by hydraulics that reduce a human arm to inconsequential flesh, blood, and bone. The oar is slammed upward, jammed with its tether into the oarlock, and transformed into the broken stub of a wing. Our raft swings sideways into the first and largest wave of the Big Kahuna near the foot of the rapid. I throw my body against the blue bulge of the high side, vanishing beneath the heave and froth of the wave chamber. For a sickening two seconds I’m vertical in a vessel that should be flat to the river but is now tipped on edge. Vishnu must have been aboard. After clearing the last breaker, we are spit upright from the maelstrom. Reconnecting with our six compatriots in a downstream eddy. In an unconformity of emotion, we laugh hysterically, swear hard, and thank the River Spirits by pouring the tops off freshly-opened beers into quietly lapping water.

The magnitude of space and time in the Grand Canyon impose themselves daily in an ongoing erosion of one’s self-importance: schists nearly two billion years old; five-hundred-million layered years of sandstone carved by water into rosy buttresses jutting several thousand feet above the river; intrusions of black lava that poured forth one million years ago, the flick of a geological eyelash; granaries and dwellings of the Hisatsinom, ancestral Puebloans, tunneled into the rock a mere thousand years ago. On this scale of reality, my twenty-three days of gawk and awe become only a glimmer of bioelectricity along an overstimulated nerve cell. 

Somewhere in this immensity of rock, water, and sky lies a spiritual unconformity waiting for a human to happen upon it. Yes, a single life can vanish in the vastness. But the tiny heartbeat that maintains our ephemeral purchase on this planet becomes even more miraculous, more powerful, more important. Conscious attentiveness washes away nihilism, sending it downstream to be dropped on a sandy beach where it awaits transformation into something new. Only our voice remains--glistening, radiant, sometimes dark. Hard edges are polished smooth, becoming soft beneath the gentling fingers of those who reach out to us. We become ourselves.

***

In the dampness of an unseasonably cool Coast Range evening, I collapse into the plastic lawn chair on the front porch, hunch into my ancient down parka, and reach out to the unconformities of nightfall. Rattle of ice cubes, hot flush of bourbon. Spring bird chorus muted by earlier rain. Swainson’s thrush sending his upwardly bending weep into the gloom, but without his full-throated spiraling voice. Salmon-flank clouds swimming slowly south on a north wind, airbrushed onto the cobalt horizon. Moon half-full, pocked with silence, inscrutable between cloud layers. The lawnmowers are broken down. I am content beyond measure. Thrilled to have gone. Grateful to be home.