Editor's Letter

I‌f you’d never been, you’ll never know. Not anymore. Like dancing with the vagabonds at a Grateful Dead concert, you had to be there. You had to experience it with all of your senses. You had to feel it.

The North Rim of the Grand Canyon was someplace special. A place from another time, where time was unhurried. There are others. I remember feeling it in Garfagnana, an isolated village in Tuscany. And maybe Woodstock, too. But even that small town in Vermont has been compromised. The North Rim, however, was more insulated. A grand anachronism unaffected by advances in technology, the polarization of society and everything else.

It was a place you could go to escape the real world for a few days. Or a few weeks, if you were blessed. And the people you’d meet in the lodge or in the rocking chairs outside were more agreeable than the people on the South Rim. On the south side, there’s an endless scrum of casual observers jockeying for position, intent on getting the perfect selfie against a backdrop that often seems secondary to social media.

The north side, as it was, was different. That’s because it took more of an effort to get there. It was a destination, not a drive-by. And those who made the journey weren’t up there checking a box. They were checking themselves against something more important: the beauty and the power of Mother Nature, and its ability to put things in perspective.

I‌ronically, I was in a rainforest when the Dragon Bravo Fire jumped the line in the arid woods surrounding Bright Angel Point. A few hours later, around 4 a.m., I got a call from a friend in the national park. “This is the worst,” she said. “You’re so lucky to have been there a few weeks ago.”

She was right, it was bad. Dreadful. The worst. The Grand Canyon Lodge was gone. And so were so many of the historic cabins. And the trees. Those ancient trees — majestic druids born in the days of Coronado. I wanted to cry out, but my daughter was still sleeping in our small hotel room. So, like a cliché, I just sat there and stared. In shock. It’s how I felt on a Monday night in 1980, when Howard Cosell announced that John Lennon had been shot.

Wait! What? No … are you sure? Oh my God. As my daughter slept, dreaming of cats, I was pounding through my memories, over and over, in a desperate attempt to lock them in. Eventually, I drifted off, emotionally fatigued. When I woke up a half-hour later, I thought maybe it was all just a dream. A nightmare. But it wasn’t. The spiritual essence of the North Rim was gone. And so was the effort to hide my tears. My daughter jumped out of bed, rubbed her eyes and wrapped her arms around me.

There’s a difference between grief and grieving. “Grief is the feeling that you have, the sort of intensity that just overwhelms you — that sort of momentary experience,” says Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arizona and the author of The Grieving Body. “Grieving, on the other hand, is the way that grief changes over time without ever actually going away.”

As I write these words, I’m still overwhelmed by grief. It’s the grief that comes with knowing that things will never be the same. Not in my lifetime. Not in my children’s lifetime. Not for a very long time. I’ve seen the devastating effects of too many wildfires, and I’ve hardened, but I didn’t have the prerequisites to process the extent of what was happening on the North Rim. Or the associated emotion. I feel like a part of me is gone.

And so it is.

When you fall in love, Dr. O’Connor says, the brain encodes a bond. It creates a we. “When a loved one is no longer there, we actually experience it as if a part of us is missing. At a very neural and coded level, our representation of the we has a hole in it.”

She was referring to human relationships, but I think something similar happens with places like the North Rim. We fall in love with the charm of historic buildings and the allure of big trees. I asked her about that.

Yes, she said, we can feel that kind of love for beloved places. Her place is a narrow canyon in the Santa Catalina Mountains. “I love returning to this canyon,” she says. “The feeling that wells up in me can only be described as love, and as we believe with other bonded relationships, I feel that the canyon is waiting for me even when I’m not there.”

In between the visits, we cling to our memories. I have so many memories of the North Rim:

Watching the meteor showers every summer, late into the early morning. Sitting on the sun deck for hours with my buddy Mike Buchheit, listening to his animated stories about the backcountry. Cold beer with my father in the Roughriders Saloon. Dinner in the lodge after a rim-to-rim, including in June with my brother and his two boys. Camping in the campground. Conversations with Chuck Stretch, who worked at the Sinclair station next to the campground, wearing an old-school gas station attendant’s uniform. Sunrises. Sunsets. Kaibab squirrels. Steller’s jays. Mountain lions. Hammocks.Hiking Uncle Jim, Ken Patrick and Widforss, my favorite trail
in Arizona. May you rest in peace.

The best memories, though, are of my wife and two daughters in that land of aahs. When the twins were 2, we dressed them in fluorescent pink so they’d stand out against the earth tones when they’d bolt toward the edge of the Canyon. I can’t remember what they were wearing during COVID, when we escaped to the North Rim to find refuge in an isolated place, grateful to be out of the house and in the arms of Mother Nature. Everyone who’s ever been has memories.

“The lupine, the paintbrush, the ponderosa too big to wrap your arms around,” says Amy S. Martin, a friend and photographer. “Bike rides back from a veranda beer at the lodge to my trailer, past aspen, their ghost-eyed bark lit by the full moon. It always felt like I was experiencing life in a different time.”

The loss is devastating. That said, it doesn’t compare to what the families are feeling in the Hill Country of Texas. You can’t equate old buildings and Engelmann spruce to the victims of floods and earthquakes and tornadoes, but there’s devastation in this story, too. The lives of every single person who lived and worked on the North Rim have been affected, including Denton.

I met Denton, a beautiful Navajo man, about a mile below the North Kaibab Trailhead. It was approaching dusk, and he was down there encouraging hikers. “There are only three more switchbacks, about a hundred yards each,” he was telling everyone, as if to say, “You’re almost there … you can do it.” I was climbing out with Molly, a hiker from Houston. That night, we talked about Denton. “I thought he was an angel,” she said. “A guardian angel. Or maybe a mirage.” I thought the same thing, but the next morning, I saw Denton tending a garden of flowers outside the lodge. He worked there. The North Rim was his home. Now his home is gone. Along with so much of the old-growth forest that surrounded it.

It’s hard to reconcile the painful loss of Mother Nature’s handiwork. There’s a word for how it makes us feel. It’s called solastalgia, and it’s used to describe the profound despair that’s caused by environmental change. Not everyone is affected, but most of us, to some degree, lament the loss of the natural wonders around us. We hate to see them go, because they’re a part of us. Like a loved one.

“The experience there will never be the same,” says Bruce Aiken, an artist who lived in the Grand Canyon for more than 30 years. “But we can always rely on the Canyon itself to provide its stunning details and magnificence.”

“The poetry of the earth is never dead,” Keats said.

Someday, the trees will come back. The lodge and the cabins, too. Maybe. But new buildings won’t be the same. You can’t re-create historic charm — it took almost a hundred years for that to ripen.

“I have so many memories,” says Shari Erickson, a cartographer from Colorado. “The North Rim has been a uniquely special place. I will mourn this loss for the rest of my life, as though it were a loved one.”

Like Shari Erickson and so many others — the men, women and children who had the privilege of experiencing that special place — I’ll mourn this tragic loss and cling to my memories. If I could go back in time, that’s where I’d go. To my beloved North Rim. In early October.