Tag: grand canyon

Not this year(3) – Grand Canyon

A series of posts about things I thought or hoped or feared I would do in 2008.

Of all the things I know I’m not doing this year, not going back to the Grand Canyon disappoints me the most.

When I was 24 and living in Chicago, I read a long article in the Sunday paper about a river rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. It just… seized me. I cut the article out of the paper and put it in my bedroom. Then I wrote to the rafting company and asked for a brochure… it couldn’t hurt to ask, right? The brochure came, along with the pricing list for that year’s trips and next year’s. And I just about cried. I was making extremely little money, and the trip plus airfare plus supplies and expenses was probably in the neighborhood of 10% of my net income for a year. And the thing about living lean is that there’s just not 10% left over, you know?

But I read the article again. And again. And I got stubborn (I do that, sometimes). I instituted the Grand Canyon Invisible Savings program. Every time I got a paycheck, I would deposit it into the bank and then deduct $10 or $20 or whatever I could manage and write it down on a little piece of paper in the back of my checkbook register. Because if I couldn’t see it, I wouldn’t spend it…

But of course, sometimes I needed the money, and then it had to come out of Invisible Savings and back into the Real World. But I just kept reading the article in my wallet, so many times that the paper became soft like an old t-shirt.

About a year later, I had about 70% of the money saved. So I called the company and booked a trip for June. I sent in the deposit. I bought hiking boots and a rain poncho and worked like a demon to scrape together the rest of the trip money before I got on the the plane. I think that when the flight lifted off, I had something like $47 left in my checking account, or some equivalent no-responsible-adult-would-do-this amount.

I flew to Las Vegas. I stayed overnight in a cheap casino/hotel. One of the luxuries I’d budgeted for myself was $50 in betting money, and that evening I gathered my courage, went to the $1-ante blackjack tables, and asked the dealer to teach me how to play. I lost my $50, but I got 4 hours of entertainment and a couple of free drinks out of it. And it made me feel brave. It was the start of my adventure.

They picked us up the next morning and took us in a van to the river, about 25 customers plus three guides. They put us on two ginormous pontoon rafts. And away we went, into the canyon.

It was so beautiful and powerful there. It felt like being home. It was like letting out a long breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding. It was the most enormous quiet I have ever felt in my usually noisy mind. People on the boat thought I was odd because I didn’t want to chat — I didn’t want to compare stories about our jobs and our kids and talk about my favorite TV show. I did want to shriek at the guy who spent the whole first day looking at his watch (his watch!) and saying, Well, back in the office they’re having the marketing meeting about now, ha ha! I get it now — it was his way of letting out his breath — but at the time I just wanted to drown him.

We rode the river for 6 days. We slept on the river bank in the darkest darkness I have ever experienced. The guides cooked incredible meals. Every day there was at least one stop where we could choose to hang out at the river, or follow one of the guides on a side trip — to a spring or down a side canyon or up to a vantage point. We went over some E-ticket rapids.

And at one point deep in the canyon, the walls going so far up above us that the sky was a narrow strip overhead, the boatman pulled our boat over against the canyon wall.

He told us all to touch the wall. And when we did, he told us that the rock under our hands was two billion years old.

So I want to feel that rock again. I want to be on that green river under that blue sky. I want to fill myself up with the place again.

And when I go, I’m going with Arizona River Runners — the same company that took me there 22 years ago. And I hope, I hope that when I am in the boat, when I ride the rapids, when I wake up under the stars, when I touch the rock, that it will still feel like coming home to something about myself that I’ve never found anywhere else.

Grand Canyon, 1986

Taking care

It’s one of those days, snarky, and I can’t get into my work… which is dull and corporate in nature anyway and I woke up with a splitting headache and that dreadful phrase in my head, “what’s the point of it all?” And my co-workers keep telling me that my underwear is showing and I can’t really do anything about it. I think the bottom line, after reading Virtual Pint and a few dozen Ask Nicola‘s is that everyone is reaching out from their various corners of the earth, myself included, for reassurance that whatever path we are taking or abandoning or considering is ok and that there other people reading and writing and drinking and eating and fighting traffic and picking blueberries or apologizing to a lover. It’s compounded need for company in this world they say is getting smaller but actually is so freaking enormous that its impossible to even scratch the surface. And, Kelley, your forum is a great hostel for all of us looking for the point of it all. It is so important, especially in this out of control world, that we all can talk. And share. And listen. That we write. And we read. Work out lyrics and try new things based on recommendation. Kudos, Kelley. What would be a good brew to try on a day like this?

anonymous

I’m sorry you had a snarky day and hope this one is better.

One particularly unhappy year, chock full of snarky days, I was living in Chicago with very few personal connections, no money, no sweetie, and a roommate with a coke habit that didn’t quite hide her vast sadness. I worked in television production and watched the few women I knew in the business become brittle and barbed from the same battles I was fighting. I was beginning to understand that I wasn’t going to be an actor. So I started spending at least two evenings a week in a lovely hot bath drinking a homemade chocolate milkshake. Did it make anything better? Hard to say. At the time, it felt like I was hanging on by my fingernails; now it seems to me that I did a pretty good job of taking care of myself during a hard time.

I was reading the Sunday paper that winter –” white sky, gray trees, snow blowing against the living room window. On the front page of the travel section was a picture of people in a pontoon raft on the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon, the hot sharp light of summer. People in motion. People doing something large. I read the article and felt large myself, and also sad, a sort of miserable, resigned ache. And that just pissed me off, you know? So I cut the article out of the paper and carried it in my bag for a year. Every time I got out my car keys or my wallet, I saw it. It turned so soft from handling that it felt like a cloth handkerchief. I started the Kelley Eskridge Invisible Savings Plan (a way of hiding money without actually putting it out of reach). I ate a lot of potatoes and tuna sandwiches that year, and sixteen months later I was on the river myself. And it was fucking amazing, not only because it was as near as I’ve been to a sense of the sacred, but because I felt in motion myself, driving instead of drifting.

So that’s my strategy for the bad times: find small ways to live large while I’m working on the large ones. I talk to Nicola. I laugh as much as I can. I drink Stella Artois or Oranjeboom. I listen to music that makes me feel bigger in the world. I cook myself the potato-chip tuna casserole my mom made when I was a kid. I read an old favorite book. I watch an oh-my-god-if-I-could-only-meet-that-person movie. I dream. I still want to be in a movie, meet U2, have a bestseller, earn an aikido black belt, write a kickass screenplay for one of the women in Searching for Debra Winger, spend two weeks in Moorea, design and build our own house, be fluent in ASL. And go back to the canyon. I’m working on it.

I’m glad you enjoy the virtual pub. I do too. It’s become important to me in ways I didn’t expect. I’m grateful for the conversations here. I like the mix of idea and experience, personal and general. The talk of hopes and fears jostling with reports on the state of the world from our particular corner of it. Sometimes a warm fire and a beer and the sense of companionable folk at nearby tables is just the ticket. Look, there’s your chair.