I’m just back from three wonderful days at the Grand Canyon with Emily. It really is an amazing place. I’d been once before, about fifteen years ago, but didn’t remember too much about it. We took a lot of pictures, some of which I’ll post here soon, but trite as this sounds, they don’t do it justice.
The Grand Canyon isn’t the most beautiful or picturesque or captivating of the many canyons to be found in the American Southwest. It’s simply the biggest. To appreciate it, then, there’s really no alternative to standing on its rim, looking thousands of feet straight down to the canyon floor and out across of miles of gullies and plateaus.
One gets a sense, not only of its great physical proportions, but of the extraordinary expanse of time it embodies. To see the tiny (from a distance) Colorado river and imagine it carving this vast canyon inch by inch is literally mind-boggling. Conceptually, one can envision the river carrying away bits of sediment, eventually triggering large landslides in which tons of shale collapsed into the emerging pit, but it’s impossible to contain within the human brain a true sense of the hundreds of millions of years required to produce this magnificent landscape.
As a species, we have difficulty pondering even much shorter time-scales. The current controversy about global warming and the consequences that our actions today may have in the future demonstrates how poorly we incorporate even the next few human generations into our moral calculus. In all likelihood, human civilization will run its course and fade from the memory of the universe and, despite the frantic work of the Colorado, the Grand Canyon will appear to the last set of human eyes to gaze upon it indistinguishable from the way it looks to me today. There is nothing like staring into this geological abyss to remind you of your own impermanence and that of your entire species.