Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Anything to which you give yourself fully, vest all your strength and risk all your vulnerability, will return you to your life annealed, magnified, both unselved and more deeply yourself. It can be a garden, or a desert, or a hare. It can be, perhaps most readily, a place. “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her stunning love letter to a mountain long before neuroscience found the seat of personhood in the hippocampus — the brain’s compass for navigating space. Places can become part of us, can imprint themselves on the soul like people we have loved. Because every place is part of a larger landscape, a cell in the body of the world, to fall in love with any one place — to contact its beckoning beauty, its vulnerability, its variousness — is to come to love the world itself more deeply.
That is what Ann Zwinger (March 12, 1925–August 30, 2014) invokes in Wind in the Rock (public library) — her breathtaking 1978 account of falling in love with Utah’s rocky canyons, finding a microcosm of the world in their desolate Martian landscapes threaded with cattle trails, touching both the immediacy of life and the size of time in their elemental majesty.
She writes:
There is an enchantment in these dry canyons that once roared with water and still sometimes do, that absorbed the voices of those who came before, something of massive dignity about sandstone beds that tell of a past long before human breathing, that bear the patterns of ancient winds and water in their crossbeddings.
That enchantment only comes at the price of tremendous courage, for encountering the canyons is no picturesque excursion — Grand Gulch divides the plateau in half, its walls a menacing vertical drop of fifty feet cascading downward into a series of undercut steps nearly impossible to descend on foot except with razor caution. But impossible is just what we call the limits of our courage and imagination. One night after dinner, Zwinger sets out to climb the talus slope above her camp, four hundred feet straight up into the gloaming sky. When she finally reaches the top, crowned with a narrow pillar of rock, she sits down to write in her notebook until the last light fades, capturing the moment in what may well be a prose poem:
The wind is fierce… but somehow it’s the right wind. Up here it is fitting that there is wind, keeping open the slot in the wall, charging through, honing the air, taking voices away. The moon sharpens and brightens, bringing Saturn with it, rising in an open quadrant of sky. I absorb the strength of the earth through feet rooted in the rock. If I could raise my arms high enough I could garner thunderbolts and grasp them like a bouquet of crackling light.
She descends back to camp in the darkness — “a declivity of mind and feeling” — and when she looks up at the slope the next morning, it seems impossible that anyone could climb down in the dark. She reflects:
Perhaps when one scratches the underside of heaven one is granted a special grace. But the euphoria remains, and I can still call back that feeling of being astride the world and what it was like to be charged with the energy of the universe. Perhaps one true gift of these canyons is that they become so deeply imprinted on the psyche that they can be invoked at will, bringing back their particular charge of serene energy whenever needed.
Over and over, Zwinger discovers what we all do if we live with maximum aliveness — that we fathom our depths only by pushing against our limits. She writes:
When I crawl across a foot-wide ledge with nothing below, nearly nauseated with fear; when I claw up a sandstone wall, plastered against its abrasive curve; when I heave myself onto the top rim to see a view of such splendor that wonder washes away all my apprehension about getting back down; when I do what I knew I could not do — then I have a taste of glory.
Over and over, her stubborn courage is recompensed with something beyond beauty, beyond gladness — a rush of pure being:
When I wake up to eternity I’d prefer it to be just like this: under a venerable cottonwood just leafing out, sunlight sliding down the canyon wall, the soft rustle of dried cottonwood leaves on the ground, a canyon wren caroling, and then the silence of an April morning.
Eternity, however, is always menaced by entropy — Zwinger finds herself trying to reconcile the ancient Indian cultures embedded in the canyons with the oil drilling now scarring the face of the mountain with the pockmarks of so-called civilization. She wonders:
Will those who come after me know what it’s like to wake up in one of these canyons, hear the tentative murmurs and scratchings, feel the sixth singing sense of quickening heartbeat of hunted and hunting, of life that shuttles and scuttles and plods and leaps, leaving tracks to tell who went where and sometimes why, and the wind erasing them so that it is only the cool sand that one ever remembers?
But one does remember, for such places embed themselves in the marrow of memory, become part of knowing ourselves, a map to the terra incognita of who and what we are. As she prepares to leave the canyons, she reflects on what these austere rocks have taught her about being alive:
Darkness comes so softly now. The cliffs seem to retain the last light of day as they retain the heat of the sun and give it back at night. The willows are in silhouette but rose and tan and gray still glow on the cliffs, silver still shimmers on the river. Stars appear slowly, only the bright tones, and then galaxies of flights flood this clamshell-horizoned sky.
I don’t think I’ve ever sat and watched for so long, hypnotized with the splendor of this time, this place, this sense of being. It is enough to know why I came here: to breathe in the solitude and the silence. I simply accept what I’ve been learning in these canyons, finding resources I didn’t know I had, stretching, accepting that there are times when one has no options, and I sit here in peace because of that. I know that I will never be content without risk and challenge and the opportunity to fail, to know pain, the chance to test my endurance, unwrap my horizons, know physical stress and the blinding satisfaction of coming through. If the cost is great, the rewards are greater. And I sit here in peace because of that.
In a sentiment evocative of Willa Cather’s splendid definition of happiness as being “dissolved into something complete and great,” Zwinger adds:
And then, in that star-dark lightness, I shake open my sleeping bag and stretch out to watch the stars. A parure of ten stars lies in precise alignment against the eggshell curve of the canyon wall. They stand time still, in poised perfection, before wheeling on to other appointments.
In the quiet, the air is singing.
