Whiffs of Mortality, Part I

The first thing you notice after you plunge off the rim of the Grand Canyon on any of its hiking trails is the silence; the immense awesome silence. I’ll come back to that silence, but first I have to list some other things you notice. The second, at least if you are on one of the primitive wilderness trails, is the rocks. There are big rocks and underneath them, middle-sized rocks. Under those you find still smaller rocks. All those rocks rest on a bed of ball bearings on slopes steeper than the angle of repose. The third thing you notice, unless you are careful, is one or both of your knees. I wasn’t careful.

First, I wrenched my right knee. It didn’t hurt and I just kept plummeting down the trail. Pretty soon, again without any pain, the knee simply collapsed as I was negotiating one of the frequent three foot drop-offs in the trail. After that, I made what any rock climber will tell you is a stupid mistake; I slowed down and started placing too much of my weight, and that of my pack, for too long on my leg muscles. Rock climbers say that you have to keep moving on a rock face. Nothing fatigues muscles faster than standing still, hanging on. “Plan your route and move,” they teach. I knew that, but my brain did not dredge up the knowledge until it was too late. Before long, I started noticing my leg muscles as well as my right knee. They weren’t working well. They were trembling.

At that point, any veteran Grand Canyon hiker with an IQ at least equal to that of a dead rock would have turned around and marched up and out of the Canyon. Going up is so much easier than going down. Me? I just kept plunging. Pretty soon my hiking companions were ferrying my pack down the trail while I hobbled along on legs of jello. Our planned one-day descent to the Colorado River turned into a two-day descent with my companions still ferrying my pack. I am unsure how my pack made it to the bottom. All I know is that they carried it, which was more embarrassing than if I had shown up at a formal dinner naked.

I attribute these troubles to dissolute living.

Always before my legs and knees have taken me and my pack wherever I wanted to go. Up mountains, down canyons, across plateaus; it didn’t matter, they just took me there. But now my legs and knees are older. They live in a nice home with all the modern conveniences. There is ample food and good wine. Good books surround me. A woman who loves me and is an excellent cook and companion lives with me. Comfort can usurp exercise in such circumstances. Quadriceps shrink. Disuse atrophy sets in. Vigilance is vital. Complacency kills. You can quote me.

Next time I will exercise for months before the trip. I am not as young as I once was. Incipient fogeydom skulks at the door. Caffeine tolerance is down; testosterone is down – no longer do I spend my hiking time daydreaming about girls, cold weather requires a jacket, the ground is harder, the bladder less likely to make it through the night. Knees and legs resist abuse.

That was my first whiff of mortality on the trip. I had another before it was over.

But enough about me. I started by talking about the silence. A vast bowl of silence, filled with sky and rocks. Ravens and raptors soar in an infinity of sky and red, green and gray rock. The silence, like the canyon itself, is really beyond language. You can no more write about it than you can photograph it. It is too big, too much to be reduced to two dimensions. I quail before the task as my quads quailed going down the Tanner Trail. But I will try anyway. So, tune in for our next thrilling episode, “Earrings along the Colorado” or “Escalante Escape.”
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PS. On Halloween I posted two short segments of Rocky and Bullwinkle episodes in order to comment on them. Today they are gone. Apparently Warner Brothers hasn’t read that part of copyright law about fair comment and the episodes have been removed from YouTube and are therefore no longer available here either. Every Rocky and Bullwinkle episode ended with some funny, punning title for the next episode. Warner Brothers can’t copyright that idea so I used it to title the next Grand Canyon post. My other planned comments on the two short videos are now meaningless since you can’t watch them. But, I am flattered that a big corporation is reading my blog. I’ll have some things to say about big corporations one of these days. They won’t like it.

Tags: death, exercise, fair comment, geology, Grand Canyon, knees, legs, mortality, quadriceps, quads, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Tanner Trail, Warner Brothers