Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

From June 28th through July 3rd, I had the privilege of being on a raft on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. This was part of a family trip “for the guys.” On a trip put together by my father-in-law Allan, his two sons, me (a son in law), my three sons, two other grandsons, one grandson-in-law, and one great grandson spent five days and five nights on the Colorado River. These blog posts are part of the story.

The dominant topic of conversation in the Grand Canyon is water. There is either a lot of water or no water.

The canyon was created by water. Millions or years, billions of years, I don’t know how long, but over a long period water washed away the dirt and left the canyon.

Every day, we would look 40 or 50 feet up the canyon wall to see a log or a bunch of sticks perched on a ledge. That wood was placed on its perch by a flood of the river a hundred or so years ago. It was sitting there before people used telephones or flew in airplanes.

The wood doesn’t rot. Rot needs moisture. Sure it rains in the canyon, now and then, a little bit. There isn’t, however, enough rain to do anything to a log perched safely above the river. Instead, the sun bakes the wood. I don’t know what you call that process or what really happens to wood when it bakes, but that is what happens in the Grand Canyon.

Then in another hundred years, after the man-made dams deteriorate and disappear, there will be a rainstorm, a flood, and some other logs will be placed way up there on the canyon wall to bake for a few centuries. The water will reshape everything.

There is the mud. Well, there are the rocks that look like mud. We would walk along and see a large boulder with one side caked with dirt. That dirt covered the rock when a rainstorm washed a few tons of mud down the wall some centuries ago. That was centuries ago, but there hasn’t been much rain since then. Instead, the sun baked the mud and turned it into rock. It looked like dried mud to me; it looked like I could scratch off some mud, but I couldn’t. I was rock hard.

This is hard for me to understand, i.e., the stretch of time between when something is wet. A rainstorm washes mud down the wall a bit. Another rainstorm happens a thousand years later. There are no rainstorms between, no other rainstorms in the intervening thousand years. Water formed the boulder and the absence of water made the form permanent.

This is truly hard for me to understand, but that is part of the wonder of the canyon.