Today’s title could allude to a lot of things, such as something financial, emotional, or possibly even intellectual, but the reality is much more mundane, though the gravity of the hole is immense. This hole of immensity is mere hours away from our home, and for those encountering this blog post who have the knowledge that we reside in Arizona, it should be apparent what this reference means. That’s right, we are going to the Grand Canyon National Park, which lies just 217 miles north of us.
I’d love to find an appropriate metaphor to stand in for the destination and relate our adventure to some esoteric thoughts I’ve recently been reading or writing about, but trying to be real, we are going somewhere beautiful and likely extremely cold to go walk with one another because that’s what silly people in love do. Sure, we could walk around Phoenix and save the expense, but our mission to help keep the American economy humming demands that we rent a room on the South Rim for a couple of nights.
The other benefit of this brief excursion is that it will inspire me to photograph things that will force me to write about our experience, so I might offer the appearance that important events happen in our lives other than eating, defecating, and sleeping. But here I am at the coffee shop hunting for wit instead of heading home to finish the last-minute packing and making lunch that would allow us to skip out of town, but as I’m not impossibly feeble (yet) to control things, I’ll add a period to this sentence, call it a paragraph, and get moving.
Living only three and a quarter hours from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon allows us to leave at nearly any time, but it was our intention to catch the sunset in the canyon, so leaving at 1:00 p.m. would give us plenty of margin. Sure enough, it’s shortly after 4:00 as we reach the park entrance. There will be no selfie here as we’ve got that photo from a previous visit, maybe more than one. Then again, we likely have many versions of the next image, too.
A little more than 28 years ago, we made our first visit together to the Grand Canyon. Just a few days before, we’d gotten married in Las Vegas on a trip from Frankfurt, Germany. Back then, we had no idea that one day we’d be living in America; as a matter of fact, it would be the following year, in 1995, that we packed up and headed west. As I sit here at the lounge in El Tovar following dinner trying to write this, I apparently don’t have enough fingers to be able to count how many times we’ve been to this corner of Arizona, but I’d guess we’re approaching a couple of dozen times.
Once we arrived at Yavapai Point, we were not interested in chasing the setting sun. We could be happy right here. I could be cynical and say we’ve seen it all before, but that would somehow diminish the intensity of feelings still experienced as maybe the view is no longer new, but the memories we’ve shared with so many friends and family continue to echo out of the depths and crevices that have captured our oohs, aahs, and astonishment.
Have you noticed that all three photos are of the same location? Can you tell that Caroline froze to death where she was standing as I asked her to wait one more second until the light was just right? It’s a brisk 32 degrees or a big fat ZERO Celsius for our friends in other countries, and with a bit of breeze, we were slightly, but only slightly, chilly, probably in part because we are wearing those warm, cozy things Caroline has knitted for us just for these occasions.
As we were losing available light, it was time to head up the road to the Bright Angel Lodge, where we were spending the next couple of nights. Without dinner reservations, we were hoping to get a table over at the El Tovar, and with luck on our side, we were seated without so much as a 10-second wait. That put us here in the lounge with an after-dinner Old Fashioned for Caroline and a hot chocolate for me. By 9:30, the place is empty, our bill is paid, the stars are certainly out in the millions, and after we bundle up into these many layers of winter clothes, we’ll take the short walk over to our hotel.
Nothing is really as easy as it first sounds when it involves doing something in a timely way when we are in a place of such immense beauty. With the moon out of the picture, the Milky Way screamed out at us for our attention while absolute quiet surrounded us. Where is everyone else who should be out here gawking at the sky? Caroline points out how lucky we are that they are already tucked into their warm rooms and cabins because if they were here stargazing, they’d probably also be chatting up a storm. Instead, it was just us and millions of dots of light as we strained our hearing, certain we’d pick something up of that far-away light that worked so long to reach us.