The surface of the Colorado River drops 17 feet in a quarter of a mile across Granite Rapid. By contrast, the drop across the half-mile stretch of the river above Granite Rapid is imperceptible. This coupling of a fairly flat, tranquil liquid tread with a steep, turbulent foaming riser is repeated 160 times along the course of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. these 160 rapids account for only a tenth of the length of the river from Lee's Ferry to Lake Mead but fully half of the 1886-foot drop in river-level. This staircase on the water surface does not mimic a staircase in the riverbed. the watery staircase is a hydraulic effect of constriction at the rapids. Virtually all the rapids in the Grand Canyon occur where the Colorado River is constricted by debris fans at the mouths of tributaries. Because they are much steeper, tributaries are competent to deliver to the riverbed individual boulders and aggregate debris flows too large for natural floods of the Colorado River (much less the post-Glen Canyon Dam discharge maxima) to clear readily. The debris fan of Monument Creek was augmented in 1984 by a debris flow a tenth of a cubic mile in volume. This debris flow, triggered by slope failure after heavy rain, took only two minutes to deliver boulders nine feet in diameter to the fan.
The rock of the Inner Gorge at Mile 93 is all Vishnu Schist except for the prominent light-colored band cutting the cliffs. This straight band is a highly differentiated igneous sill composed of Trinity Gneiss, intruded into the schist late in the Mazatzal compressive episode, 1.7 billion years ago.
Dana Butte, 2680 feet above us on the skyline, is composed of vertical-walled Mississippian Redwall Limestone over Cambrian Muav Limestone. The saddle connecting the knob of Redwall Limestone at the end of the butte is a lens of Devonian Temple Butte Limestone.
--Robert Hutchinson
The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings.
AFTERNOON CLOUDS, SPARKS, NEVADA
He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.
COLORADO RIVER BELOW GARNET CANYON
A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.
He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
--Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Grateful Dead: Truckin'~~The Other One~~Morning Dew...12/31/72
All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf...
--Andreï Makine The Life of an Unknown Man
Allman Brothers w/ Jerry Garcia: Mountain Jam...12/31/73
it was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank
an old man said to me "won't see another one"
and then we sang a song, the rare old Mountain Dew
i turned my face away and dreamed about you
the boys in the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay
and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
--Matthew Arnold Dover Beach
"a cold coming we had of it,
just the worst time of the year
for a journey,
and such a long journey:
the ways deep
and the weather sharp,
the very dead of winter."
and the camels galled,
sore-footed, refractory,
lying down in the melting snow.
there were times we regretted
the summer palaces on slopes,
the terraces,
and the silken girls
bringing sherbet.
then the camel men
cursing and grumbling
and running away,
and wanting their liquor
and women,
and the night-fires going out,
and the lack of shelters,
and the cities hostile
and the towns unfriendly
and the villages dirty
and charging high prices:
a hard time we had of it.
at the end we preferred
to travel all night,
sleeping in snatches,
with the voices
singing in our ears, saying
that this was all folly.
then at dawn we came down
to a temperate valley,
wet, below the snow line,
smelling of vegetation;
with a running stream,
and a water-mill
beating the darkness,
and three trees on the low sky,
and an old white horse
galloped away in the meadow.
then we came to a tavern
with vine-leaves over the lintel,
six hands at an open door
dicing for pieces of silver,
and feet kicking
the empty wine-skins,
but there was no information,
and so we continued
and arrived at evening,
not a moment too soon
finding the place;
it was (you may say) satisfactory.
all this was a long time ago,
i remember,
and i would do it again,
but set down this
set down this:
were we led all that way
for birth or death?
there was a birth, certainly,
we had evidence
and no doubt.
i had seen birth and death,
but had thought
they were different;
this birth was hard
and bitter agony for us,
like death, our death.
we returned to our places,
these kingdoms,
but no longer at ease here,
in the old dispensation,
with an alien people
clutching their gods.
i should be glad
of another death.
A samurai once asked
Zen master Hakuin
where he would go
after he died.
Hakuin answered
"How am I
supposed to know?"
"How do you not know?
You're a Zen master!"
exclaimed the samurai.
"Yes, but not a dead one,"
Hakuin answered.
The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew. It passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal. It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead. Men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Through many dangers,
toils and snares,
we have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought us
safe thus far,
and grace will lead us home.
--John Newton Amazing Grace
We took a few steps, and the whole magnificence broke upon us. No one could be prepared for it. The scene is one to strike dumb with awe, or to unstring the nerves; one might stand in silent astonishment, another would burst into tears. There are some experiences that cannot be repeated--one's first view of Rome, one's first view of Jerusalem. But these emotions are produced by association, by the sudden standing face to face with the scenes most wrought into our whole life and education by tradition and religion. This was without association, as it was without parallel. It was a shock so novel that the mind, dazed, quite failed to comprehend it. All that we could grasp was a vast confusion of amphitheatres and strange architechtural forms resplendent with color. The vastness of the view amazed us quite as much as its transcendental beauty.
We had expected a canyon--two lines of perpendicular walls 6000 feet high, with the ribbon of a river at the bottom; but the reader may dismiss all his notions of a canyon, indeed of any sort of mountain or gorge scenery with which he is familiar. We had come into a new world. What we saw was not a canyon, or a chasm, or a gorge, but a vast area which is a break in the plateau. From where we stood it was twelve miles across to the opposite walls--a level line of mesas on the Utah side. We looked up and down for twenty to thirty miles. This great space is filled with gigantic architechtural constructions, with amphitheatres, gorges, precipices, walls of masonry, fortresses terraced up to the level of the eye, temples mountain size, all brilliant with horizontal lines of color--streaks of solid hues a few feet in width, streaks a thousand feet in width--yellows, mingled white and gray, orange, dull red, brown, blue, carmine, green, all blending in the sunlight into one transcendent suffusion of splendor. Afar off we saw the river in two places, a mere thread, as motionless and smooth as a strip of mirror, only we knew it was a turbid, boiling torrent, 6000 feet below us. Directly opposite the overhanging ledge on which we stood was a mountain, the sloping base of which was ashy gray and bluish; it rose in a series of terraces to a thousand-feet wall of dark red sandstone, receding upward, with ranges of columns and many fantastic sculptures, to a final row of gigantic opera-glasses 6000 feet above the river. The great San Francisco Mountain, with its snowy crater, which we had passed on the way, might have been set down in the place of this one, and it would have been only one in a multitude of such forms that met the eye whichever way we looked. Indeed, all the vast mountains in this region might be hidden in this canyon. Wandering a little way from the group and out of sight, and turning suddenly to the scene from another point of view, I experienced for a moment an indescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to be alone in such a presence. With all this grotesqueness and majesty of form and radiance of color, creation seemed in a whirl. With our education in scenery of a totally different kind, I suppose it would need long acquaintance with this to familiarize one with it to the extent of perfect mental comprehension. The vast abyss has an atmosphere of its own, one always changing and producing new effects, an atmosphere and shadows and tones of its own--golden, rosy, gray, brilliant, and sombre, and playing a thousand tricks to the vision.
I was continually likening this to a vast city rather than a landscape, but it was a city of no man's creation nor of any man's conception. In the visions which inspired or crazy painters have had of New Jerusalem, of Babylon the Great, of a heaven in the atmosphere, with endless perspective of towers and steps that hang in the twilight sky, the imagination has tried to reach this reality. But here are effects beyond the artist, forms the architect has not hinted at. The explorers have tried by the use of Oriental nomenclature to bring it within our comprehension, the East being the land of the imagination. There is the Hindoo Amphitheatre, Shiva's Temple, Vishnu's Temple, Vulcan's Throne. And here, indeed, is the idea of the pagoda architechture, of the terrace architechture, of the bizarre constructions which rise with projecting buttresses, rows of pillars, recesses, battlements, esplanades, and low walls, hanging gardens, and truncated pinnacles. It is a city, but a city of the imagination. In many pages I could tell what I saw in one day's lounging for a mile or so along the edge of the precipice. The view changed with every step, and was never half an hour the same in one place. Nor did it need much fancy to create illusions or pictures of unearthly beauty. There was a castle, terraced up with columns plain enough, and below it a parade-ground; at any moment the knights in armor and with banners might emerge from the red gates and deploy there, while the ladies looked down from the balconies. But there were many castles and fortresses and barracks and noble mansions. --Charles Dudley Warner The Heart of the Desert 1891
inside a broken clock splashing the wine with all the rain dogs taxi? we'd rather walk huddle a doorway with the rain dogs for i am a rain dog too o how we danced and we swallowed the night for it was all ripe for dreaming o how we danced away all of the lights we've always been out of our minds
the rum pours strong and thin
beat out the dustman
with the rain dogs
aboard a shipwreck train
give my umbrella to the rain dogs
for i am a rain dog too.
o how we danced with the rose of tralee her long hair black as the raven o how we danced and she whispered to me you'll never be going back home
*it's knowing that your door is always open and your path is free to walk that makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag rolled up and stashed behind your couch and it's knowing i'm not shackled by forgotten words and bonds or the ink stains that have dried upon some line that keeps you in the backroads by the rivers of my memory that keeps you ever gentle on my mind
it's not clinging to the rocks and ivy planted on their columns now that bind me or something that somebody said because they thought we fit together walking it's just knowing that the world will not be cursing or forgiving when i walk along some railroad track and find that you're moving on the backroads by the rivers of my memory and for hours you're just gentle on my mind
though the wheat fields and the clothes lines and the junkyards and the highways come between us and some other woman crying to her mother 'cause she turned and i was gone i still might run in silence tears of joy might stain my face and the summer sun might burn me 'til i'm blind but not to where i cannot see you walking on the backroads by the rivers flowing gentle on my mind
i dip my cup of soup back from the gurgling crackling cauldron in some trainyard my beard a roughening coal pile and a dirty hat pulled low across my face through cupped hands around a tin can i pretend to hold you to my breast and find that you're waving from the backroads by the rivers of my memory ever smiling ever gentle on my mind
When
it comes
to life,
the critical thing
is whether
you take things
for granted
or take them
with gratitude.
--G. K. Chesterson
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare.
They are consumed in twelve minutes.
Half-times take twelve minutes.
This is not coincidence.
--Erma Bombeck
I can no longer
hear my voices,
so I am
a little lost.
My suspicion is
they would know
far better
how to tell
this story.
At least they
would have
opinions
and suggestions
and definite ideas
as to what
should go first
and what
should go last
and what
should go
in the middle.
They would
inform me
when to add detail,
when to omit
extraneous information,
what was important
and what was trivial.
After so much time
slipping past,
I am not
particularly good
at remembering
these things myself
and could certainly
use their help.
A great many events
took place,
and it is hard
for me to know
precisely where
to put what.
And sometimes
I'm unsure
that incidents
I clearly remember
actually did happen.
A memory that
seems one instant
to be as solid
as stone,
the next seems
as vaporous
as a mist
above the river.
That's one of
the major problems
with being crazy:
you're just
naturally uncertain
about things.
--John Katzenbach
(from The Madman's Tale)
