Edge of Transformation

GRAND CANYON'S RIM DIVIDES LOSS FROM REDEMPTION BY PETER ALESHIRE IN THE SPOTLIGHT Sun parts powdery clouds to highlight Comanche Point north of Desert View as a storm rolls away from Navajo Point.

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I fled the storm of my life into the storm of a lifetime, up Interstate 17 toward the nowhere that was somewhere different than the flounder of my career, my family and my home. The bitter 40-mph wind hurled the sleeted snow at the windows of my battered Trooper as I picked my way by headlight through the premature night. I had nowhere to go. I had no business on this road. I had no hope of redemption. ▼For I had screwed up my life beyond recognition, and now felt as baffled as a man reading a compass atop the North Pole.

Not long before, my pride and carelessness got me fired from the only newspaper in the state that paid enough to support my wife, three kids, one dog, two cats and one mortgage. A top-scale reporter in his 40s, I'd sent resumes to a hundred newspapers without provoking a single call back. Cheaper to hire some recent J-school graduate, I guess. So I'd been crashing back and forth through my life, making my wife cry, drinking too much and worrying my kids. I should have gone to law school, toed the line, tried harder, saved my money, sold real estate-anything but indulge my writer's ego while ticking off random editors.

So I made up a lie about having a freelance assignment and fled the house with the overdue mortgage and the forlorn Christmas tree. I ignored the strident travelers' advisories on the radioin truth, the storm drew me. I yearned to lose myself in the wind and the snow and the fury.

Stupid. But what do you expect from a man who can't hold a job or support his family?

Past Flagstaff, I headed down the long slope off the backside of Humphreys Peak, whose feeder tubes spewed lava just 1,000 years ago. Humphreys Peak gathers storms to her perhaps because she rises above 12,000 feet. Perhaps because the Katsina spirits of the Hopi people live there, speaking in thunder.

Suddenly, I was going to the Grand Canyon. Perhaps I had been going there all along, but I didn't know it until I started down that long slope into the Painted Desert, exchanging pines for juniper and finally for the aching purity of Navajo sandstone counterpointed by snow. I pictured myself standing on a slab of Kaibab limestone looking over a 600-foot cliff, wrapped in the storm. I knew then the Canyon had been there all this while, waiting.

Filled now with purpose, I drove through the storm, into the night, toward the Canyon.

I gave the ranger most of the cash left in my pocket to enter, and drove to the lodge parking lot in the dark. I got out, barely noticing the cold in my light jacket and jeans as I walked through the slanted snow in the darkness. Standing at an overlook, I stared intently into the void.

Nothing. I might as well have squeezed my eyes closed.

Filled with the storm, the Canyon released not a single photon of light. It was the most absolute black I'd ever seen. I was a blindfolded man in a closet-except for the wind and the penetrating chill of the snow accumulating on my hair, around my collar, against my cheek. I could walk off that cliff and never know it until I hit the bottom.

I slipped past the guardrail and groped my way to the edge of the great wedge of rock that formed a jutting promontory into the ocean of darkness. I brushed the snow off the stone, made of the skeletons of creatures that died their pointless deaths 270 million years ago in the warm waters of an inland sea. I sat on my island of skeletons, soaking myself in the absolute dark until I was as numb and smooth as the stone. The wind died and the snow came down with perfect grace, weightless and slow. I don't know how long I sat there. But finally I rose stiffly, blocky and thick with the cold, and crawled back to the guardrail, to the path, toward the twinkling lights of the lodge. I considered entering there, to seek the fire, to sit steaming until I could feel my feet again. But I had no money for a room and felt alien and strange and unable to explain myself.

So I stumbled back to my Trooper and ran the engine and the heater until I got warm again. Then I wrapped myself in the sleeping bag I always carry and reclined the seat.

I slept like a dead man.

I awoke abruptly, as though someone had called my name. My breath, moist and vital, made a cloud. Snow covered the window; I was in a womb, reborn. The silence was perfect, except for my breath and the beating of my heart.

I struggled out of the sleeping bag, pulled on my cold boots and opened the car door, creating a flurry off the roof. I took my camera out of the bag and loaded the film clumsily. The camera was heavy and cold, reassuringly solid in my chilled hands.

Dawn's flush hushed the trees, the stone, the crystals of snow. The snow had transformed the parking lot, turning the ugly metal forms of the cars into fantasies-internal combustion snowmen finally at peace. I released a breath, surprised that I'd been holding it, hoarding it. I moved through the snow toward the Rim, noting the piñons, junipers and ponderosa pines. Every bough sagged with a load of snow, untouched, perfect. I released another breath, a cloud, a puff of life.

I have always loved the ponderosas, with bark that smells of vanilla and does not become golden and beautiful until the tree has proven itself a survivor. The world's greatest expanse of drought-tolerant ponderosas sprawls across Arizona's Mogollon Rim Country. I wondered at all the winters these giant yellow bellies had outwaited. Did that monster there stand here when Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's brave commander García López de Cárdenas in 1540 stumbled upon the impassable Grand Canyon in his quest to confirm rumors of a large river?

I turned and walked through the pristine snow toward the Rim, regretting the smudge of my footprints, but needing now to see the Canyon filled with light.

LOOKING DOWN INTO THAT MYSTERY OF ROCK

IN THE UNSPOILED LIGHT OF MORNING FELT ODDLY REASSURING.

The Canyon opened up at my feet, the towers and spires rising from the mists of dawn like the kingdoms of mythology. Shadow and light, breadth and width, rising up and falling down. The Earth suddenly dropped her veils to reveal herself.

I gazed, without comprehension, upon the Canyon's revelation of almost 2 billion years of Earth's history. The short time we human beings have existed washed off the Rim long ago, a trifle not worth mentioning. But beneath the 270 million-yearold Kaibab limestone on the Rim lie the layers with hypnotic names-Toroweap, Coconino and Bright Angel, Supai and Hermit, Redwall and Mauv down to Tapeats, a white layer of trilobite-bearing sandstone formed in the bottom of a Cambrian sea 525 million years ago, before flowers and their ilk made the land's surface fit for such as you and me. Then down beneath more than 1 billion years of missing rock I could see the inner gorge, with its treasure of 1.8 billion-year-old Vishnu schist and intruded Zoroaster granite. It's all a mystery as far as the eye can see. The geologists argue fiercely about the origins of the Canyon, partly because the tributaries flow into it at the wrong angle in its upper stretches. Some geologists believe that a different, older river once flowed north into some great interior basin and eventually changed direction and flowed south. But five or six million years ago, when a plate shift opened the Sea of Cortes, a new, younger river system back-cut into the rising plateau until it captured the drainage of that older river. In any case, over the last five million years, the river chewed through the uplifted layers of sediment and flowed down into the rift assuming roughly its present configuration. Looking down into that mystery of rock in the unspoiled light of morning felt oddly reassuring, reducing my fears to the miracle of the warm cloud of my breath.

I turned then from the spectacle of the Canyon to gaze on the intimate wonder of the snow, glittering with the scattered diamonds of dawn.

I followed the snow-covered trail, leaving it repeatedly to go out to the tip of some ridge jutting into the layered abyss. Each turn of the trail astonished me. Each new view into the Canyon flummoxed me. I felt like a simpleton stirring from amnesia to look upon trees and clouds and water droplets for the first time he can remember.

It was as though I had never in my life seen snow spar-kle, the grain of limestone, the bark of a piñon, the bris-tle of pine needles, the fluff of fresh snow, the pattern of coyote tracks, the fur of a squirrel, the flay of a raven's wing, snow on a pine bough, a hawk on a thermal, snow avalanching off a branch, the gradations of sky or the billow of a cloud.

Sitting, marveling, on the cliff edge 2 miles along the Rim from my forgotten car, I caught movement at the corner of my eye. Turning my head slowly, I saw a small mule deer with jaunty, 9-inch-long ears standing at the edge of the Canyon, browsing casually. The deer ignored me. So I carefully raised my camera to my eye. The deer continued to move toward me.

I finished the roll of film, then simply sat in the snow watch-ing her. She eventually looked straight at me, curious but fearless. I wanted to explain myself, but realized I had no need. We each had our reasons and our right to be there.

She drifted right past me, nibbling as she went.

I sat alone on the edge of the Canyon after she left, in my right and proper place. I could scarcely remember my own storm-although I have remembered the fall of the snow into the dark Canyon perfectly ever since.

Then I went home to be a husband and father and a writer. It was a good Christmas, without many presents. I raised my boys into fine men. I sold some articles. I wrote some books. I got a teaching gig. I lucked into the world's best job with the world's best magazine. But I have never forgotten the gift of the Canyon and the deer and the waking up. Al