After a breakfast of cold oats and an orange, I take Highway 95 a few miles to Rec Road 633, which comes in on the north between the Colorado and Dirty Devil rivers. This crimson track traces around the base of a thin rock wall decaying into fins. I ride the red, flakey shale for one mile, park on some desert pavement, load up with water, and hike over frozen dunes of pillow rock down to the Colorado. ‘Down’ is a relative term here, since the river’s about a thousand feet below my feet. I follow the river along the rim of Narrow Canyon, a six-mile straight gorge that connects Cataract with Glen canyons.

The sheer walls are coated in desert varnish. As I climb up and down the cornflower domes of Navajo Sandstone, testing the crumbly shelf rock, I enjoy leaps up and down, using my upper body to climb down pour-offs.

Rocks out here flirt with you to climb them. If you spend time with them, natural steps and clefts, ladders and walkways make themselves apparent. They invite you to test them, to wander yourself up and down all over their wide backs. Wild rock, no less than Michelangelo’s blocks of marble, is sculpture, shape waiting to be liberated, and climbed. And that liberation happens naturally all over the face of this rocky planet. No one has to help it along. Erosion and mass wasting are automatic processes. It’s as if someone wrote a program. Someone slept and dreamt the rocky world and, once set, the stone begins to dream itself, to sculpt itself. We, too, are in the process of that becoming, sculpted and sculpting ourselves. That was the answer to the question I asked myself on this trip: What was I supposed to do with my life? I was ‘supposed’ to allow myself to happen, to let myself take shape.

At Narrow Canyon, I found a way down to the lowest tier of cliff, one step below the mushroom rock that caps the desert out here. I couldn’t get any lower without a sheer drop to the river. I had to abandon my backpack to do it, trusting I’d find it among the ubiquitous domes of ivory sandstone.

Almost as soon as I’d left it behind, my mind began to obsess on that pack. You’ll never find it. The slickrock here stretches for miles in waves and everything ends up looking the same.

I committed a series of landmarks to memory. One of my natural cairns was an oblong rock about two feet across with a small head. Three pedestals of sandstone with circular makings all the way up and down them held it aloft from the ground. The pedestals were small beehives with parallel bedding, the way wet clay looks when it’s spun on a potter’s wheel. It looked artificial. I crouched down to make sure someone hadn’t set the oval rock on the three supports. The tops of the pedestals bore signs of natural cement that had glued the feet to the caprock, and that meant an erosive process. It looked like a three-legged tortoise.

I climbed down to last ledge of cliffs before the walls dove a thousand feet down. I got down on my hands and knees and inched up to the lip of the scarp and spied the river, limned in by wide beaches of willow and tamarisk.

The cliffs in Narrow are remarkable for their lack of talus all the way down to the riverbanks.

You’ll never find it.

“Find what?” I asked myself. You have to be pretty schizoid to not know what your inner voice is telling you.

You’re backpack, dummy.

“Sure I will. Relax.”

Everything looks the same out here. Someone else’ll find it and think you’re lost. They’ll send a medivac chopper out for you and you’ll have to pay them thousands and thousands of dollars.

I needed to pour calm over everything, like Belden Lane had written in Backpacking with the Saints, the book I was reading on this excursion into the desert. So, as I dropped down to that final terrace of rock over the river, I made myself enjoy my view of the sharp turn miles upriver at Mille Crag Bend, where half-formed scarlet statues hundreds of feet high stood in the million-year process of liberating themselves from sheer rock walls. Would they become cathedral saints standing in the alcoves, or stupas? Everything always in the process of becoming. Nothing ever finished, for as soon as it stands as one sculpture, the rain and ice and wind begin chiseling it into something else. Stone always in dissolution, always in consolidation.  We never reach an end. We’re always midwifed into something else.

My hike ended at a towering bay carved in an almost circular shape.

This was the mouth of Rock Canyon, a mostly dry slot that emptied at its confluence into Narrow Canyon. It formed a cylinder from my eye level all the way down to its talus base. On the opposite side, where its circular shape met the straight edge of the river cliffs, the grotto ended in a sharp, bull-nosed face about 40 feet across, which held to a straight façade from the clifftop down to the water’s edge. The faces so erect, so vertical that even on my hands and knees, I couldn’t see the cliff bottoms.

Natural rock is sculpture. It’s not delusion to envision that shapes within a cliff face long to break out and be touched by wind and sun and rain, a new skin awaiting birth. At the end of my pilgrimage, I’d found the shrine.

But your backpack . . .

This time, in the presence of my beloved monuments, something else answered back the little, whining voice inside:

Stay here awhile. This voice came from a deeper, surer place. Stay until you really feel what’s here.

That’s what I did. Besides, I wasn’t ignorant enough to leave anything of value in the pack. With that said, I feel pretty ignorant, much of the time.

Ignorant in the ways of people and the world, to which I always compare myself and where I always find someone a little better, a little bigger; where my strategy is to bolt things on like hair coloring or bigger muscles; where the smaller I feel, the more I want to slap on the armor so you can’t see in. Out here, I’m the smallest practical unit, the smallest object of comparison. I am 5’11 ½”, 165 pounds, versus thousands of feet, dozens of miles and billions of tons. And yet I don’t feel small.

Out here, I’m not ignorant. I know what to do during a storm. I realize I need to camp on the dry side of a mud wallow in a road. To find my way, I use landmarks and the place of the sun in the sky instead of Google Maps, which doesn’t work out here anyway.

I, too, am a carving in the process of ancient becoming, as old as the rock; a mind millions of years in evolution, which, as long as it remains in the moment, always knows what to do. In the now, I always have all the information I need to make the decisions I need to make. In the present, I know what I need to do. My career? The rest of my life? Who the fuck knows about any of that? Not even God, I suspected, because whatever God was, It could only live in the moment, too.

I stayed here for a while, at the confluence of Rock and Narrow canyons. Really here, beside this chasm, watching the unmoving bend miles upriver. The primordial stone across the soaring cylinder at the mouth of a canyon hundreds of feet over the river etched in iron red and manganese black. When I could be here and now, even for just one moment, I stepped outside the world and its time and insistences. Yet since the world was in my mind, I only stepped outside my own babbling thoughts and lived as a god stretched throughout eternity, spanning the rift below in a great sail of being.

A voice inside said: Now, you can go.

And in the same moment, I also became aware that what I was ‘supposed’ to be doing with my life was whatever gave me joy. Not excitement, but joy. That meant writing. It didn’t matter that it didn’t pay or that I wasn’t regarded by the masses. It meant that I was supposed to be writing this. To do what I’m called to do this very moment. I ask for direction far into a future, yet I’m only given knowledge of the next step. Because it’s always only now. I’m always only here. Down this long gorge, I can see for miles, but I can only take the next step.

Before this trip, during this trip, I had a small wave of self-pity wash over me because I felt a little useless. I didn’t want to think about the future because I didn’t think I had much of a future to come back to.

Frothy clouds wafted over the mottled gray of the Little Rockies on the brim of Glen Canyon farther west. Those clouds scarved the summits as the sharp peaks tore them like cotton. Mountains of mystery, poured with awe. The higher peaks of the Henry’s – Hillers, Pennell and Ellen – which I glimpsed between the passings of storms, hinted of snow gathered in their granite clefts.

In this moment, everything came flooding in. There was so much to my life, so much to do, so many ways to help. I was stricken with gratitude. Heaven came back. Not the heaven that comes with mystic beauty, not the one burgeoning with the hope of some future promise, but the paradise born of love for my very good fortune. Life, having seemed empty when I looked at it through the prism of the wastes of time which bespoke of an empty future stretching years until my gray death, flooded with possibility, culminating in reality when I lived Now.

God always was, and never will not be, yet can only be found Now. God never was. In the past, God had died. It had been trampled on by disillusionment, betrayed by our false memories and the abuses of history. In the future, God will never come to be. Always almost arriving in the promise of a better future, in the hope of heaven that never comes, like the next ossified dune rises as soon as I summit this one.

It’s all happening now – the past, present and future mingled together in a mélange of boulders in this place. I already have everything. When I live in time, I’m pining over what’s gone and will never be retrieved. Dead recollections. Ghosted things. In the future, what I hope always remains unrealized, always then and there. Worry and hope conspire to murder my soul in the glint of some awful, glorious future. Living in time is a way of undermining and betraying myself, cheating myself of the glory of the present tense.  Like the storms razing the mountaintops to my west, I cut myself off at the neck through expectation.  To look fondly on the memory of my grandfather, to leap to the child of the future slays God and pushes the Infinite away, and I pretend then and there that I don’t have it here and now. It is death to divide eternity into time, to slice the present into time.

I gaze straight below at the shelf beaches at the bottom of Narrow Canyon one more time before I head back. With just a couple of dead ends, I find my pack based on landmarks. Just like the LDS of the San Juan Expedition, I make it through this trip with minimal mishap. The Hole-in-the-Rock party lost no lives on their way down the west cliffs of Glen Canyon. Just like them, I manage to find my way without a compass, through the help of intuition, which is another name for Now.

On my way back, I catch a panorama of what Glen Canyon must’ve looked like before it was inundated by Lake Powell. I stop at the top of the slickrock formation that I’d floated on this whole trip. Centered by Hite Crossing Bridge, the silver arch that spans the Colorado, the red domes of Trachyte Point step up. Even higher, the leaden gray Henrys stand snowed in behind the crimson cliffs and mesas. The straight course of the Colorado through Narrow Canyon finally bends at the beginning of Powell, winding beyond vision. I watch a boat, having just run Cataract Canyon, pull in at Hite. A cold, wind-driven rain penetrates down to the joints of the earth, and my joints as well. But now, the sky clears overhead.

No clouds for miles around me. Yet new raindrops wet my face. I look up and can’t tell their source. Urine dump from a plane at 30,000 feet? Raven pee? No, turned to silver sparks by the sun, they’re gifts from that we can experience, yet never really understand.

On the drive back home, everything is burnished in sunlight. I practice seeing the beauty in all of it: utility poles, semis and semi drivers, farm implements parked along the highway, and Sleeping Ute Mountain, which snow and shadow mold in dimensions I’ve never seen before. All fired in the same light, a radiance which strikes out from my eyes and paints them all in clarity. After all, it’s my dream.

I practice spiritual beauty by freeing the supernal seeds occulted within the shells of things, a beauty masked by ugliness or even by an appealing taste which rides on the surface of every image. To see through the air cleansed by chill rain to the core of every fruit. The land greening. The fields lush, bright emeralds at the foot of the snowed-in slopes of the Abajos.

With little sleep, paltry food, miles and miles of walking and driving and climbing with feet and hands and truck tires, with sleeted sky that pushed into my bones until they softened like siltstone, I discovered a fire I always kindled within, a revolution in the way of seeing, and a gratitude that washed away the bitter rime of the past. It erased the transgressions that never even were and took away the need for hope for a future that never come. All I need to do is stay here, now.

To get to Narrow Canyon: Take Highway 95 south of Blanding, Utah. Just west of Hite, drive over the Hite Crossing Bridge. About a mile west of the bridge, a road will come in on the north.

© 2024 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s short story collection, Canyon Calls, was published by Zumaya Publications in 2009. Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

Mike’s other titles, including his novels, The Crippy and The Mind Altar, as well as Canyon Calls, are available through his websites, https://justmikejust.com and https://canyoncallsthebook.com or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Five of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, has been published by The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within

You Get the Two has been published by Hellbound Books and is available in print, eBook, kindle or audio format at Kids are Hell!- Anthology (hellboundbookspublishing.com)