GOD’S RIVER

We arrived in the middle of the day, our bones tired from all the rowing. As we pulled into the base camp for the night, the river’s ribbon of water reflected the bright afternoon sunlight and the chiseled walls of the towering canyon. I pulled my gear out of the raft and helped set up the tents. After a snack and a catnap in the shade of a brushy tree, someone said, “Let’s hike up there.” I followed the extended index finger to an outcropping of rock. “Up there” was about six hundred feet straight up, but I could see how the path winding away around the corner might lead there. A little exploring was in order.

A moment later, one of our guides was showing us the path leading into the brush. She said, “This’ll be a kick,” and we believed her. I grabbed my disposable camera, and half the group set out. The sunlight was well past midday, but the soft golden orb above the canyon wall left the impression we had a few hours to get up there and back before it got dangerous. The climb began to get steep. The guide told us the ranchers in the canyon used to drive cattle along these paths, and I thought: There’s barely enough room for me, how is a cow going to get through this? Our guide drove us on.

We left the safety of grass and brush and found ourselves moving among rocks. The strata were gorgeous in the orange glow of the sunlight. The sky was still blue, and several patches of cirrus had appeared high above us. The rocks constantly crunched under my feet. There was a point where the path was no wider than a sidewalk, with cliff straight above us and cliff beneath us. A cow? So she said.

We neared the end of the path, at least for the day’s journey, but the “view” she kept talking about was hidden. We had curved inward toward the canyon and were headed for another curve, this time to the left ahead of us, where I would see it. “It’s close,” she said.

We rounded the curve, and it was before me: beauty. Beauty is objective. It is discoverable. It is the glory of God. And it is found in Idaho. I praised God in that first instant, because there was nothing else to do save gaze in wonder.

Before me was twenty feet of flat rock outcropping, followed by a hundred miles of canyon–canyon I didn’t even know existed. At least I hadn’t felt its presence. I discovered that while traveling on the Snake, we were in the inner canyon of a much larger crevasse. (Where exactly and how exactly had Evel Knieval jumped this thing?) And I had thought the inner walls were massive. I now saw they were merely the embedded, lower v of a capital V that was twenty miles from tip to tip. The land looked like a giant brown blanket was snapped over the earth and allowed to come to rest in any formation it pleased. I was agog. There was the jagged. There was the smooth. There was grass, there was rock, there was river. There was force, there was calm. There was quiet. There was the handstamp of God.

When He was creating the earth, I like to think He cracked the edge of His hand across the surface and carved out places like this and named them sacred. I was on holy ground. We were looking back on the river we had already traveled. Like so many before us we had fought the currents, caught glimpses of beauty, but now we had seen the glory, the reason for it all. Here it was in your face, no questioning.

The brown grasses rolled toward the peaks and still-higher peaks. Lifted high like penitent worshippers raising their arms toward the heavens, the cliffs rose into open sky. We stood there for a long time. The sun slipped past the western rim of the canyon, and we marveled as the cliffs transformed from gray to orange to lavender to gray again. I was staring into the Shangri-la of the Western Hemisphere.

One of Stretch’s friends carelessly tossed a stone off the cliff, disturbing the peace. My head was reeling, but he was staring straight down, watching a rock that had taken millennia to get to its resting place up here kerplunk into the waters below. I wondered what it would look like if the weight of the boulder he threw had unbalanced him and sent him over the edge. He was clearly not getting the same spiritual vibe. I shook my head and returned my focus to God’s handiwork, of which, admittedly, Stretch’s friend was a part.

I read once that Bhutan–where Shangri-la was thought to be located–is one of the last areas on earth still untouched, pristine in all its vistas; it is called a place where nature and people live in harmony. Untainted flora and unhunted fauna live among humans in a symbiosis unheard of in the developed world. The beauty there astounds all who see it. I fancied myself a monk, finding my peace and place in life hung in the air between God and the canyon floor; this would be my monastery, my quiet place to return to in the meditation of my memories. I felt small–compared to the earth. Not the bad kind of small, but rather the uncomfortable cleansing terror of something bigger. This was something good. If you’ve been to the Grand Canyon, you know what I mean. Any adventuresome thought of seeking Satan in Hells Canyon was erased immediately. God stood here among the humans, and His land remained defiant of any names they might impose.

Our guide told us this place was called Suicide Cliff, a name I’ve heard given to countless high rock formations. She said two lovers climbed up here to end it all because they loved each other and their feuding families couldn’t abide that. I put my own spin on it. I imagined them climbing up here, looking over the horizonless jagged grace before them and changing their minds. Filled with hope, they resolutely climbed out of the canyon, higher up until they had to go down again, running away to an exquisite existence. Passing cows all the way.

My father, uncles, and I stood with the vista behind us and asked our guide to snap a quick photo. The blurry image we got back made me wonder if I was the only person on the planet who could hold a camera still. But then, maybe that sacred place wasn’t supposed to be photographed. Its out-of-focus image registering on the silver halide crystals remains just one step short of blasphemy, all God afforded me of physical evidence of this place.

We struggled to find footholds as well as words to describe our experience. We climbed back down to camp. I climbed into my tent and fell asleep.

But God wasn’t done with me, not yet. A light clicked on over my tent’s window, trickling through the nylon screen. It woke me up. I thought my uncle was messing with me, as he’s apt to do sometimes, shining his flashlight in my face. But no one was there. I looked around; my father wasn’t in his sleeping bag.

The light was coming from the night sky. I left the tent, and I saw the moon hanging on the rim of the canyon. Imagine a nighttime sun, just dim enough to view without pain. Hundreds of miles from any city haze, it was perfectly clear. This night sky was alive. I looked closely and saw His face reflected there. There were millions of stars, so bright and so populous, I felt small again–this time, in view of the cosmos. At the same time I realized something: as God was laughing and hanging His ebony sheet, ensconcing the universe and only letting the full radiance of His glory shine through the little pinpricks in the fabric He designed, He was already thinking of me and including me here, at this place, at this time. A small piece of cosmos am I. It’s too enormous to get my mind around sometimes, but that night I stretched my mind, my being, enough to understand. I knew it right down to the core of my cellular structure, in my hidden places.

It was so bright I could walk without a flashlight. I found my dad and my uncles by the river. I put my arm around my father. He understood. My uncles prodded me in amazement, which is all one can do when there are no words. We basked in the experience. We all laughed. My status had been upgraded.