The Only Thing That Matters

It was the farthest north anyone had ever brought a bicycle. Anyone that I had ever met, anyway. People have probably taken bicycles to the north pole by now, but for Caleb and Seth that would have been impractical. They were talking about Alaska, the northernmost place in North America (for cycling purposes), where they individually began the same quest: to ride a bicycle from the arctic to Tierra del Fuego, halfway around the planet. 

“Did you see the northernmost spruce?” Caleb asked Seth, who was drinking a beer while standing in the Colorado river. He looked sunburned, caked in dirt and sweat.

“I found it on Google Earth, but I never saw the fuckin’ thing!” Seth said to Caleb, who was sitting in the shade and nursing his own PBR, “I feel like everything up there is the furthest north thing and just gets old after a while” He shuffled his feet, pulling his baseball cap lower over his sunburned eyes.

“Yeah man! like furthest north trash can, furthest north rock, all that shit!” Caleb said. He was giggling, causing the tips of his handlebar mustache to poke upwards at his cheeks. He’s barely broken a sweat today and we’ve run almost forty miles. The high was 85. We had just finished the hottest section, running through miles of flat desert in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The mushrooms we had taken were unexpectedly powerful, causing the previous few hours to take on a dreamlike quality. Miles passed by in seconds as we sprinted through prismatic stonework and massive yucca plants baking in the heat of the afternoon. After that, the languid waters of the Colorado were heavenly.

“Furthest North muskox at that particular moment” Seth added on, picking a dried apricot from a plastic bag. “Did you have trouble with chipmunks?” he asked Caleb, who had made it all the way to Mexico the previous winter before having to go back to work.

“No, not really. Bears though, for sure” he said, as though fending off bears with a .45 wasn’t a big deal.

“Crazy, the chipmunks were fucked! I had to throw so many rocks” Seth was laughing again. We all were. We’d run across the grand-canyon one and two-thirds times and we weren’t even done. There were other people around, campers staying at Phantom ranch who had taken a few days to cover the distance we had covered in a morning. Normally we would have stayed quiet and let them enjoy the beach in peace, but after forty miles you tend to stop caring what other people think.  None of us were particularly excited about the hike out, which involved walking from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the top of the Grand Canyon and is exactly as tough as it sounds. But the beer was good. I took my shoes off and joined Seth in the river. We were waiting for the rest of the group, which was fine by me. I could’ve stayed in that water for the rest of my life.

The rest of the group showed up over the next twenty minutes. Ryan and Quinn showed up first, immediately climbing into the bushes to dig out their beers. Ben came in last, face pale as a sheet. We all crowded into the shade to rest, laughing, stretching and reciting lines from the hikers we had passed on the trail. We asked each other how we were feeling, with answers ranging from “just okay” to “I ate rotten summer sausage and I’ve been puking for ten miles”. The last one was Ben, who had clearly not been having a good time. We all offered medical advice that he no doubt already knew and deliberated about who should drink his beer now that he couldn’t have it. All in all, the group was doing pretty good. Better than last year, at least.

We meet here every fall, coming from wherever we are no matter how out of shape or unprepared we might be. Caleb and Seth started the tradition in their freshmen year of college, and ever since they’ve run rim-to-rim-to-rim every year. This was the seventh year in a row, meaning they had run across the Grand Canyon a total of fourteen times. According to them, it doesn’t get any easier. This is my second year, and while I’ve been feeling better in general, I know just what they mean. The Grand Canyon hasn’t gotten any smaller.  

We enjoyed our beers for a while, then stumbled to our feet and limped to the water spigot. The handle was sticky and caused the water to wash out in either a bare trickle or a raging torrent with no in-between. We didn’t mind, it was hot and the spray of cold water was a welcome surprise. Filled up, with our final snacks in hand, we began the walk to the rim. 

“How do you think we should cross the Darien Gap?” asked Seth. They were planning on meeting in Sayulita before biking through Central America and across the notorious divide between continents. The land crossing was far too dangerous, and they needed to find passage on a boat of some sort.

“I heard there’s Indigenous fishermen that will sail to Colombia, we just need to have our papers straight,” Caleb answered, “but we should get the fuck out of this canyon first.” He said before dashing up the trail at a pace that none of us could match.

“Goddamnit” Seth uttered in response, “I have to follow that guy through South America”.

“Yeah. But only once you get the fuck out of this canyon” I said. We giggled and picked up our pace, taking the switchbacks with purpose and following the trail to the edge of the sky. The canyon dropped away and echoed with the heat and light of the day, washed in colors bright and dusky, colors you could only see there, in that moment.

There are lots of parallels between distance running and meditation. Of course, I barely know anything about meditation, but from what I’ve heard it seems to be capable of revealing parts of yourself that are inaccessible in most other states of being. It is challenging to explain, but on every long run I’ve done I have found a second wind (or third or fourth) that allows me to run faster than I would if I had just begun. There’s probably a physiological reason for this, but for me the change comes in the form of a mental state that is resistant to pain. For example, when I ran my first marathon I hit a wall around mile 18. I started to fear that what I was doing was somehow impossible, that my muscles hurt to much to keep going. By mile 21, this had dissipated and by mile 23 I was picking up the pace. I finished that run at a dead sprint, which I had sustained for more than a mile as I passed joggers and people walking their dogs. The feeling was incredible, like I had broken into an untapped well of pure energy, always hidden twenty miles away.

Starting up the south rim I wondered if I would feel that again. I watched as Caleb took off, jogging the steep switchbacks as the rest of us hiked in pairs. I tried to picture that feeling, to summon the second wind, but nothing came. I figured it had come and gone in the flats, where Caleb and I had clocked nine-minute miles for an hour straight. I decided to walk with my friends, to enjoy the sunset and save myself for the top.

The Grand Canyon is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Everyone says it, and everyone is right. The scale of the place is insane, in a way that could never be captured in a picture and could never be understood from one angle. If you want to understand the Grand Canyon you have to see its depths, its heights and everything in between. On our way up the south rim, we began to see the miles we had travelled as they sank into the distance. The North rim, which we had climbed and descended over almost four hours, was a speck in the distance. Even after the sun set, the canyon seemed to hold light, illuminating the trail into the night. As dusk faded, I stopped and peeked over the edge of the trail and saw that I was standing on a two-hundred-foot cliff, on top of a two-hundred-foot cliff, next to a five hundred-hundred-foot cliff, on and on to the river. Above me I could see the headlamps of other hikers in a winding line that reached, Seemingly, to the edge of the sky. The difference between the top and the bottom was nothing short of a boundary between worlds.  Maybe it was the mushrooms talking, or the delirium from running forty-three miles, but I felt the urge to run.  

The day before we came to the Grand Canyon was my last day at work. It was awkward-just my boss and I in the truck maintaining a silence that spoke volumes about the previous few months. I was working at an environmental firm as an archaeologist, doing the thing I had dreamed about since I was a kid, and on that particular day I was full of doubt. I was leaving the company because of poor management, but also because I found out that I didn’t like it.  corporate archaeology isn’t all dig sites and stone tools-it’s mostly bureaucracy. It was my job to find pieces of the past and decide whether or not they were worth destroying. As It turns out, in the eyes of the law, the human past is rarely worth saving.

I had one short conversation with my boss that morning that ran through my head as I hiked through those hundreds of switchbacks. It went like this:

“you must really hate computers.” My boss said, through clenched teeth. He had been muttering under his breath for most of the car ride.

“I guess so.” I said, knowing that if I spoke my mind, I would probably get thrown out on the shoulder of highway 160.

The truth was that I don’t hate computers or offices or checking my outlook account. I regularly spend whole days behind my laptop writing stories that no one will ever see. It was the tone that got me, the implication that I was a failure because I was bad at paperwork and didn’t want to work 80 hours a week. As I started that final push, I felt the wind pick up. The last breathes of light escaped the canyon in pastel shades as stars slowly showed their cat-like faces above the Kaibab plateau. It was perfectly silent. I thought about Seth and Caleb, their visions of South America. The feeling of pure freedom we felt, running as fast we could through the Seussian desert and smiling until our cheeks hurt. The distance between the canyon walls faded to black as I started to jog, passing Ryan and Seth, full of that beautiful feeling, touching the well of energy at my core. This is the only thing that matters, I thought sinking into a wash of validation. This is the only thing the matters.

I pushed hard, hiking where it was steepest and running as much as I could, repeating that phrase in my head. This is the only thing that matters. By the time I rounded the corner on the final switchback I was nearly spent but I jogged the last stretch anyway, pushing as hard as I could. I came to a stop by Caleb, who was perched on a rock and was looking as worked as I felt. And I was worked- I’ve never been more sore than after running rim-to-rim-to-rim. It felt good. I laughed a little bit at how worried I was about life, about having a career at twenty-three, when the only thing that really mattered was making it back to the top of the canyon. I remembered the conversation back down at the river, the stories from the far north and the loose planning that would take my friends halfway around the world. It sounded a lot better than spending the rest of my life telling companies what should or should not be destroyed.

Over the next hour, the rest of the group joined us at the rim. We talked about the funny people on the trail, the sunset, the terrible state of our knees and how much we wanted to drink beer and go to sleep. The car ride was smelly and rife with laughter, bringing us to food from Calebs parents and a much-needed campfire. In the morning, we said our temporary goodbyes. If all else failed we would see each other again in a year, each of us in at different levels of fitness or preparation, knowing that somehow it would all work out. After all, we had no choice; this is the only thing that matters.