Where Time Breathes

You knew my dreams as if you had dreamed them yourself. Oh, my magician—at times I had to restrain myself to keep the church of my love and my desire in the village of propriety. We tackled the Rim Trail in proper hiking shorts, almost in matching outfits. We followed the edge, along a narrow, perfectly signposted ribbon between sky and abyss. The rock beneath our feet—Kaibab stone—was 270 million years old. Time congealed on the floor of an evaporated ocean.

At Ooh Aah Point we paused our pilgrimage. There the silence lay an octave lower than in the run-up to astonishment. The viewpoint owes its name to the oohs and aahs it draws from its audience. It lies below the Kaibab layer, already inside the canyon. You see Coconino Sandstone (about 265 million years old)—former migrating dunes—Hermit Shale—primeval river landscapes—the Supai Group—prehistoric coastlines and river valleys. Erosion creates a super-panorama: sheer walls, slanted flanks, overhanging rock noses—the play of wind and time with gravity. At Ooh Aah Point the canyon opens not only to the eye but also to consciousness. The landscape whispers in gradations of red, ochre, and gold: I am as old as nothing you have ever seen, and yet there is more life in me than in your brief journey through the world. Hikers spoke of a moment of deep emotion in the sudden confrontation with vastness and depth, geological as well as emotional.

At Mohave Point, an outback revelation cut across my presentness. In perfected desolation it suddenly became clear to me that everything is connected to everything else. Every encounter corresponds to a line in an invisible net. Our bodies and our voices extend lines, confirm and alter directions.

“You are my songline,” I suddenly knew. Oh yes, you knew my melody. My tide of desire flowed toward you in confidence. Trustingly would do as well. Through it all you stayed on guard. Carefully would do as well. You took nothing for yourself. At times there was something priestly about you. Your courtly love was tactful. I sensed which regions you had turned toward with other women. We looked at a wall that dropped nine hundred meters straight down—The Abyss. The canyon floor belonged to the Colorado and its rapids: Salt Creek, Granite, Hermit, Boucher Rapids.

The sandstone mesa called The Alligator was a landmark visible from far away.

At last we reached Hopi Point. Beneath a sky the color of oxidized copper, an ancient ritual unfolded under the signs of the present. Teenagers in cobbled-together ceremonial costumes… moccasins and jeans… feather headdresses and sneakers… moved according to the measure of the Katsi. Rarely had I seen anything so archaic as this stomp dance. Every step quoted the ancestors; every gesture corresponded to a syllable in varieties older than the oldest map of this region.

They danced to remember things that founded a beginning. It was self-evident to them to understand themselves as part of an ancestral chain. Our individualism must have seemed to them like a disease.

“From walkabout to Hopi dance,” I said. You said nothing. You were my sign. I grew dizzy thinking of your significance in my life.

I looked at you. Never again would I speak of my desire to you through veils and hints. What spoke from me now was naked longing, directed straight at you.

“I am ready,” I said.

Later I lay on a stone that responded to the heat like a breathing body. You heard more than just the wind moving through the juniper bushes.

“This stone was once sand on the floor of a shallow, warm sea.”

Your voice made me believe I could see all the way back into the Devonian. I got goosebumps. It wasn’t only arousal. It was a cocktail of sensation. Part of it was the intoxication of permeability I had grasped in Australia. I was guided by the knowledge that the body is a membrane, not a vessel.

As you leaned over me, I experienced sensations on the spectrum of geological time. Your breath was cosmic origin. I opened myself to you. As your body moved within mine, tectonic plates shifted.

We were no longer tourists. I had seen enough in museums and on information panels—how settlers had “discovered” the land, named it, measured it, and divided it up. I came aloud. You wanted to hear me.