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Outside Magazine, June 2005

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Ain't it Just Grand (cont.)


	LUMINOUS EMBRACE: morning departure from Tuckup Camp (Kurt Markus)

BY OUR SECOND WEEK, the canyon isn't the only thing changing: The wind and water have started to peel back the more constrained layers of people's personalities. Doug Vavrick, a political consultant from Seattle, and his wife, Kathleen, frolic naked in the shallows during the evenings. And Pat Newman, who started the trip shy and withdrawn, has turned giddy. Each morning, she dashes around camp giving everyone a hug.

"Hugging's done an awful lot around here," Litton observes after accepting a postbreakfast embrace. "It's what the younger generation seems to like to do." (Newman is 60.)

The only person who hasn't transformed is Vernita Allen, but that's because she doesn't need to.

A 73-year-old retiree from Kansas City who's been down the river three times, Allen has undergone extensive

Deep in the canyon, I'm suspended in time—pivoting and floating in the luminous embrace of a pink-and-emerald haze that—right here, right now—strikes me as our true destination, the marrow of our journey.

cancer treatments and is now so weak that every day the guides have to set her in and lift her out of the boats. She knows this is her last trip. And in the process of bidding farewell to each feature of the canyon, she long ago arrived in the cerebral zone that the other passengers are just now discovering.

"I've seen a few people go down this canyon and not get changed, but not many," she said to me one day. "There's just something about how minuscule you feel compared to how long it took to put this place together. It seems to put things in balance. It wakes you up. It opens your eyes. And afterwards, things are not the same. It's that space in the middle—that's why I come here."

When Allen said this, I had no idea what she meant. But then, below Dubendorff, something happens and I do.

While floating along and staring up at the pinkish rock walls, it suddenly seems as if the canyon has reached out and cupped me lightly in the palm of its hand. Part of the sensation has surely come from bobbing down a current of warm air on the surface of a cool, green river. More than that, though, the feeling of languorous buoyancy has arisen from where I find myself in time. The circumstances I've come from seem irretrievably far behind: things that weighed on me at work are now irrelevant. Yet I'm also far enough from the end—of the trip, of the canyon, of this particular moment—that it's unnecessary to brace for reentry. I am suspended in a state of betweenness, not unlike the rocker of a dory. A state in which I can pivot and float in the luminous embrace of a pink-and-emerald haze that—right here, right now—strikes me as our true destination, the marrow of the journey.

A few minutes later, we pull over for lunch. After finishing my sandwich, I spot Litton sitting in the shade of a tamarisk and wander over to ask if he's gotten something to eat. He looks up at me, his blue eyes momentarily vacant, still lost in his thoughts.

"Thank you for asking," he replies after a long pause. "I've had everything I could ever wish for."

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