My feet felt like hamburger meat might. Somewhat abused. Yards of gauze I had been carrying for years found their calling on this trip, encasing my patties snugly. If my boots were a bit too roomy and that's why I got all those blisters now there was thankfully room for both feet and gauze.

Returning to Phantom Ranch

Returning to Phantom Ranch, photo: David Boothby

Clear Creek, photo: David Boothby

This feeling of unease felt strangely familiar, like it had been building for a while.

It certainly hit me at the end of the first day, when we were warned about the Colorado River and its potential for menace, the example two kids who leapt from the Kaibob bridge and simply...vanished. The river suddenly felt powerful and threatening and even malicious.

It was building yesterday as we got hotter and hotter, our water dwindling with the shadows, our momentum dwindling until we simply had to stop, the recognition that we would continue to dehydrate even as we dug ourselves into an embankment to escape the sun casting an appalling shadow of futility and stupidity.

Clear Creek Campsite

To the preparations for the trip, when I realized how out of shape I was and how unlikely I was to fix it. I had been worrying for months that I wouldn’t keep up with David, who I knew to be in great condition…worrying, but too busy to attend to the issue and stupidly left with this niggling concern at the periphery of my consciousness, sapping my self-confidence.

And deeper still:

To the office, where the recent lack of success in our interviews with potential clients left me frustrated and tentative. I felt as creative as ever, and as excited about the projects as ever, but I wasn’t making these interviews successful and for the life of me I couldn’t explain why. I was losing my edge, my touch, my zing, and this creative anemia was undoing me.

Most fundamentally though was a growing sense of dread as the economy collapsed under our collective feet, a glacier of financial doom crushing opportunity and possibility and all of the idealism I try to muster every morning on my way to the office. Watching opportunities diminish frays the nerves. That I would evade obliteration seemed more and more unlikely, and the corollaries to that eventuality slowly clouded my perspective and obscured the horizon. Up and down no longer felt secure, the avenues of escape ever diminished. This hike felt like running away.

David encountered the snake later that evening. It was getting dark, we needed more water, he was heading down to the creek, and I heard only a grunt. I can’t speak for David’s state of mind, or just how close things got, but reptile and mammal managed a standoff and no harm done.

written by  roel krabbendam on May 12, 2009 from Clear Creek Campground, United States
from the travel blog: Heat
Send a Compliment

---

comment on this...

Information has made my relationship to the sun has more complex.

Nonetheless, we left Phantom Ranch too late and with insufficient water, and we didn’t figure that out until it was too late to turn back. We wasted precious and cool morning hours as I dealt with my disastrous blisters and tried to decide whether we should postpone continuing for a day. Then, an hour into the hike, after climbing the 1200 feet out of the shade and onto the Tonto platform, the sun hitting us like a fever and already well into the first water bottle, we found two bottles we had forgotten to fill. A couple of cute girls distracted us as we were filling up at the communal pump before the hike, pathetically confirming all of your male stereotypes. You’re welcome.

No Shade (The Tonto Platform) photo: David Boothby

He’s rarely so pithy.

The conversation with my feet went on for an hour and forever, the sun really got down to business, we saw no more large boulders, but we did not stop until we finally looked down on Clear Creek Campground and found another little hole to crawl into. No more water, and two miles down off the plateau to the creek: at our pace it would take us an hour or more. 20 minutes of further dessication and we started down, two raisinettes in boots and blisters, down a steep and narrow set of switchbacks across dark red dirt on a south-facing slope that had been baking all day.

Clear Creek Campsite

Clear Creek Campsite

Well...we didn't really pay attention to that at first...

“Start your hike well before sunrise. Plan on reaching your destination by 9am. Rest in the shade between 9 AM – 4PM. Plan your hike to accommodate this siesta”.

Blew that off too, at first.

“Your body expends tremendous energy while hiking and trying to stay cool. Doubling your calorie intake helps to maintain your energy. Eat double the amount you normally would.”

Eating has never been a problem, personally.

“[The Clear Creek Trail] is the only trail traversing the Tonto Platform on the north side of the Colorado River. Because the slope is south-facing, the hike from Bright Angel Campground to Clear Creek is warmer than most trails in the fall and spring, and is nearly impassible during the summer months.”

We routinely ignored this kind of language when we were younger...and you're only as old as you feel, right? Wrong.

“The nine mile stretch from Phantom Ranch to Clear Creek is south facing and consequently is in the sun from sunrise to sunset. Expect neither shade nor water for the entire length of the trail. During spring, summer, and fall months it is best to hike this trail in the extremely early morning or in the evening.”

Well. we'll get to that.

I drove up to Phoenix, picked up David at the airport, and we drove north to Flagstaff. The Sonoran Desert gave way to conifers and the temperature dropped 10 degrees. At a final stop for food and supplies we found our permit, that permit we had applied for, and paid for, and been admonished by the National Park Service to have with us at all cost or face punitive consequences…that permit, had been left lying on David’s desk in Nashua, New Hampshire. For this, fortunately for us, we have fax machines and helpful wives.
We spent the first night car camping at Mather Campground near the rim, amid families and college students, eating steak, drinking wine, taking stock, packing up.

Mather Campground

Back in 1986, when I lived in Boston the first time, and after a condominium renovation had become endless and my wife had left me, and I had dropped out of night school, and getting laid off from my job seemed a definite possibility, I would walk around the city late at night handing my loose change to the men and women lining Arlington and Boylston near the park, or the doorways of Kenmore Square. I was hoping to buy some better luck I suppose, or maybe virtue to trade back later. God knows I needed a change.

You’ll say I should have saved my coin or bought a lottery ticket instead, because change was inevitable either way. I say, I went to bed feeling a little less sullied and a little more grateful for what I did have, and it’s rare that a small handful of quarters will buy you that.

This all comes to mind after meeting the guys a temp agency sent us to unload the moving van. After a last night in El Paso, in a La Quinta no less, though not one as delicious as north of Atlanta, we woke up early and made the final dash into Tucson to meet the moving van, arriving with 2 hours to spare, enough time just barely to call an agency and hire two guys to help us unload. At the end of the day, after 4 hours in triple digit temperatures, and a thorough soaking when a tiny little thunderstorm sidled over and spewed, these guys went home with $7/hour from the agency and a little extra I didn’t tell the agency about.

These guys sign in at the agency in the morning, arriving as early as possible to stand a better chance of a good place on the list, and then wait for the call. It’s marginally better than waiting on a street corner, something I remember from the years I lived in Los Angeles, but the agency gets half the money, and there’s still no assurance that the call will come. They are working, in any case, these two men, and they are poor. Strange to put a label ("poor") on two people that are no longer nameless or faceless. Strange and quite possibly insulting, categorizing, abstracting, sifting away their individuality.

That contrast between what little I can imagine of their life and what I know about my own, it gives a truly sordid “satisfaction”. Worse, it is based not on their real life, but on the life I imagine they have, a life I probably imagine in such a way as to maximize my own relief, that I am me and not them. Relief, not satisfaction.

Poverty and charity, the relationship between them, feels pretty simple. The emotions behind them suddenly feel very complicated.

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. ~Robert C. Gallagher

Levy says this on poverty in America, and the fact that large numbers of the poor are incarcerated in this country:
”And should we…conclude that [the US] has chosen to set up the penal state against that of the providential state, proposing a net of control that involves first police, then prison, as against a minimum income and guaranteed medical care? Of course not. I will not go so far as to say that. But that America is, just after Russia, the world champion of imprisonment is a fact. That it does not, however, actually have such a large number of major criminals incapable of rehabilitation into society is another fact. And that its prisons are participating in this way in a global system of producing and concealing, manufacturing and then condemning to invisibility, a population of the absolute poor, excluded from the space of the polis, who are turning into zombies, troglodytes-a physician would say “foreign bodies”-in a society that finds here the insurmountable defect in its armor and its image-that is a third fact, and one that is not the smallest result of my investigation”. (Levy, p245)

written by  roel krabbendam on July 30, 2007 from Tucson, United States
from the travel blog: Spare Change
Send a Compliment

---

comment on this...

It is, I suppose, their privilege, but it strikes me as a foretaste of oblivion. Levy visited Sun City near Phoenix and wrote this:

“The problem, in short, is that all this implies a profound break with the very tradition of civic mindedness and civility-I won’t even say of compassion-that was responsible, and continues to be responsible, for this country’s greatness. And this experiment in privatizing a public space at the expense of a community cannot fail to create a terrible precedent…if we ratify the principle of this gilded ghetto based on membership in a certain age and income bracket, then by what right can we tomorrow prevent the development of cities forbidden to the old?...In whose name can we resist the definitive balkanization of American space that could well result? (Levy, p 129)

“…I leave Sun City with a feeling of unease, no longer knowing if you come here to save or to damn yourself, to banish death or savor a foretaste of it”. (Levy, p130)

Of course, the Balkanization of American space is an old story. North of Atlanta, the experience of the poor black in New Orleans, now this “retirement community”…all products of fear or preference or probably both. This distancing from the “Other” leaves me profoundly conflicted. Were these insular communities active in the production of culture: unique, rich and interesting lives contributing to some larger communal and inclusive vision, then it would scare me less. New Orleans may be the exception, but I do not think that this is what is going on.

Personally, for now because who knows what I'll feel like at 80, I choose the “Other”. I choose variety. I choose difference and conflict and friction, the new. I choose a challenge. I choose dialectic and synthesis without end, each new result juxtaposed with each new opposite and engaged in discovering a new synthesis. I choose change.

I will admit to waking up now with the unsettling knowledge that we have lost our moorings. It is a peculiar vertigo, if I may borrow one last thought from Levy. If it takes some time to figure out this new life however, if we encounter boredom and frustration and indifference and feelings of unease, if sometimes we look at each other and ask “what the hell were we thinking”?, at least we will know this: we are alive, we are engaged in the world, we are trying something new and we are actively searching and ultimately, we will find our way. I am sure of it.

written by  roel krabbendam on July 30, 2007 from Tucson, United States
from the travel blog: Spare Change
Send a Compliment

---

1 comment...