Back on the Road (beinge the parte onne of parts that shalt comme in threes.)

The dark was closing-in when I spotted a side road off to my right, sporting a sign marked ‘Grand Canyon’. In my hurry to beat the setting sun, I blindly followed the car in front, which had indicated right and turned down the narrow strip of asphalt. It wasn’t until we came to the key coded barrier that I think we both realised this was an access road for Park Rangers. However, the barrier was up and not being one to look a gift horse in the gob, through I went.  Off to the left and over a small hedge, a huge line of cars waited to pay to enter the park.   For a very brief moment I felt thirty dollars-worth of guilt, but it soon passed.*

Once in the park itself, it was still quite a drive to get to the Canyon’s rim.  The shadows were getting heavy and an orange glow painted the horizon as finally I pulled into a parking space and once again climbed down from the truck, the furious tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine seemingly hurrying me along.  A sense of urgency tinged with an expectation of being totally underwhelmed accompanied my short walk to the rim of the canyon.  This was a place I’d seen in films, the great old Westerns of my youth; a place I’d read about and heard about on the television; it was, in short, a place far removed from the reality of life in The Book of Rogers, and so to be here, a few short steps from the rim of the south side of the Grand Canyon was thrilling.  Couple this with the cynical voice of the aged, that voice in the back of the mind that can’t help fucking chirping in with gems such as: it’ll not be that good; it’ll be nothing like on telly; prepare to be massively let down.

Trepidation is the only way to describe the feeling as I took the last few steps through the low bushes and across the rocky surface and the canyon unveiled itself before me…

… My jaw hit the ground quicker than my ex-wife’s knickers when I was out at work.

Dear reader, it is almost impossible to describe the sense of awe, the sense of humility, the sense of insignificance I felt as I simply stood and beheld nature at its most beautiful!  Struggling with the sheer size and beauty and magnificence, I floundered for words, a blind man once again bestowed the gift of sight; and the vast, rugged beauty before me, a banquet for the senses and me a starving man too surprised, too shocked to eat.  I simply stood there, stripped of all pretences: the critic, the cynic, the miserable, the depressed drunkard, the happy-go-lucky, the clown – all personas gone.  There was just me and beautiful Mother Nature. We look for comfort and solace in the wrong place.

I really can’t say any more than that, other than it was a moment where I almost could have believed in one god, or another.  Standing there, at that precise moment in time, no barrier between me and a fall to certain death, I found my place in the universe: I am nothing, I am everything; I am no-one, I am everyone; I am insignificant, yet I am so very important.  I am here using-up air, on this beautiful blue/green gem because some bizarre, random set of events, that started with a cosmic orgy of violence, eventually led to one sperm out of 525 billion chatting-up an egg, allowed me to grow and bitch and moan and whine and whinge, and then plonked me there, at the rim of the canyon to let me know just how lucky I am.

I was unwilling to move, looking out over the vast depths for a long time, drinking-in every detail of every craggy rock-face. until it was too dark to see.  I knew I’d be sleeping in the truck that night.  There was no way I was going to miss the sunrise!

Talk about not getting value for money these days!

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