A wave broke over the boat. Another one caught me in the face. My boat partner, Ben, held on to avoid being swept off. Life was reduced to its natural, pre-civilised state. Everything I normally did — working, going to the store, paying bills, texting, phone calls — did not need to be done. What I did need to do was devote my total attention to not flipping our raft.
Civilisation seems to require from us an almost constant state of divided attention. On the river, my mind cleared. Food tasted particularly good.
Reading by flashlight before sleep was exquisite. Each sentence in my book seemed so good, leaping out in utter clarity. Heavy rains back in January had triggered an unusually great show of native wildflowers that spring. Prickly pear cactus was covered with showy pink blooms, and claret-cup cactus with flowers the colour of arterial blood. Pastel orange globemallow and white evening primrose twined over the rocks and sand.
Clumps of cardinal monkeyflowers shone like vermilion beacons around seeps and springs in the shade of side-canyons. But it was the canyon walls themselves that made the deepest impression. Drifting between rapids, I gazed up at the top of the cliffs surmounted by even higher escarpments: a vertical mile of rock, fossils and various forms of life comprising 1.
In the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River slopes toward the sea at an average of eight feet per mile, so as we floated downstream, the rocks at river level got older. Five miles downriver from where we launched our boats, the river runs through million-year old shale out of which a geologist chipped a fossil dragonfly with an eight-inch wingspan. Thirty-two miles further on, the river cuts into limestone formed just before the Devonian extinction million years ago — when more than half of all marine genera and the first vertebrates to crawl out of the water, onto land, were wiped out.
