Off to the Grand Canyon

Maria and I are off to the bottom of the Grand Canyon for a week of hiking, camping and reflection. Which is just another way of saying that no new entries will be posted for a few days. The internet does not reach to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Nor does electricity , except at Phantom Ranch and we won’t be going there.

We hope to spot a California Condor or two, some other interesting birds and no Grand Canyon rattlesnakes.

We’ll be taking a small, light camera and hope to return with a few good photos. But we’re not holding our breath. The Grand Canyon is huge and does not reduce well to two dimensions. Even the eleven dimensions of string theory seem too few to encompass the place and very few photographers can ever hope to do it justice.

For those of you who know me personally, you know that Maria is not the name of the woman in my life. But don’t worry. I’m not taking a mistress to the Grand Canyon. Maria is my walking stick. I almost lost her once, so I named her; hoping that I would not walk off and leave something that I had gone to the trouble of naming. So far, it’s worked. I was on a camping trip with my young children the last time I left her. We trudged back to the site where I thought I might have left her but she was not there. We were sitting on a log, the three of us, and I was trying to be philosophical about the whole thing; explaining to the kids that the stick was important to me because of all the miles we had shared but that it was not good to be too attached to anything in this life when three Texans came by. I mention that they were from Texas only because like almost all Texans I have ever known, they were friendly. I told them that I’d lost my walking stick and one of them showed me his carefully carved walking stick which he had carried with him for as long as he could remember. It had a name which I forget but I remember him. I told him what my car looked like and asked him to put my walking stick under it if they happened to find it on their hike.

The next day we returned to the trail-head, my son ran ahead to the car, looked under it and found the walking stick there.

She is hickory wood and named for the wind.