Washing me down, washing me down

Take me to the river, dip me in the water. Photo by David Lansing.

I am thinking about something the River Buddha said after dinner as three or four of us were drinking brandy and admiring the surface of the water glitter in the moonlight: “The river always takes you downstream.”

It’s an obvious truth but, like much the River Buddha says, there’s a lovely wisdom to it, even if he didn’t intend there to be.

The river not only takes you downstream, it takes you back. Towards where we all came from.

Listen: I started this journey in an air-conditioned hotel room in Moab, then transitioned to a cot in a tent before deciding it was too much trouble, really, out here in the wilderness, and so I borrowed a rubber mat from the crew and slept near the bank of the river in a sleeping bag. But even that became too much. So, for the past week, I have taken a single wool blanket and dug a hold in the sand, like some feral animal, and slept outside with nothing but a soiled sheet for cover. In another week, no doubt, I’ll be sleeping in a loin cloth on bare ground. Perfectly happy, I’m sure.

In Frederick Dellenbaugh’s preface to the book he wrote about the 1869 Powel Expedition, he wrote: “The…River teaches much that is not geology.”

Amen to that.

The river always takes you downstream. It takes you back. Its muddy waters are the thick soup of our shared experiences. I am camping on the sandy bank of the river, perhaps close to where Powell and Dellenbaugh camped 140 years ago and I feel their presence. As if I am part of a long chain that extends back to Dellenbaugh and even before that to the Utes and Navajo that the Powell party came across on their expedition and, before them, the Anasazi whose granaries and stone dwellings, built almost a thousand years ago, still stand in the shadowed recesses of the canyons we passed this week.

Dellenbaugh said the immensity of the river tends “to produce a feeling that the Canyon has a personality—that it is something that might swallow you up as if you were a mere chip in a whirlwind.”

I don’t feel like she wants to swallow me up so much as just wrap a warm blanket around me. The river feels benevolent. But then again, we haven’t yet reached Cataract Canyon. So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my real baptism is still to come.