Pondering O’Connor in the Canyon 6 comments

By Brian Volck

In the novelist’s case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist of distances.

—Flannery O’Connor

I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet. Furthermore, I’m no novelist. But the O’Connorism above–familiar to readers of Image–took on new meaning as I hiked the Grand Canyon with my family earlier this month.

While the desert is the landscape of my heart, anywhere below the rim of the canyon is at the heart of my heart. “You laugh more here,” my wife said with a smile as we walked along Bright Angel Creek, deep in the canyon’s own heart, and she’s right.

It must be annoying to hike the canyon with me, because I want to share everything I love about it. I’m a pathologic explainer and demonstrator, and the canyon’s a place that must be seen up close, touched, heard, and smelled before one can begin to intuit its inexhaustible riches. Yet it’s all so vast, so much an encounter with virtual infinities, that the attentive viewer soon starts to tremble, and not merely out of fear. Such infinities are, in themselves, occasions of aesthetic and spiritual transcendence.

In that whirlwind of emotion, memory, knowledge and sensory experience, I had several delightful conversations with my twelve year old daughter, Maria. Sometimes, the two of us took turns seeing far things close up. During our long, final climb to the rim, an ascent of nearly a mile in elevation, she said in a worried voice, “We still have a long walk, Daddy,” to which I responded by pointing out how far we had already hiked, how far the river had fallen behind us, how close the once distant rim now appeared. Later, as we watched two desert bighorn sheep gnaw on a trailside shrub, she said, “You know, Daddy, when you think you’re nearly there, you have still have a long way to go.”

One my favorite moments occurred the previous day, deep in the canyon, on the banks of the Colorado. I had just shown her whitish bits of fluff clinging to the fleshy sides of prickly pear cactus which, when rubbed, burst with a carmine dye known as cochineal. Turning from the cactus, we looked up to study the craggy angles of the inner gorge. I began explaining how the rock walls were once buried deep beneath mountains over a billion years ago, or so the geological evidence suggests.

“There were mountains here?” she asked, surprised. “Where was the river then?

“There was no river yet,” I said. “Scientists think it only began cutting this part of the canyon a few million years ago. That’s a long, long time for you and me, but nearly nothing compared to the age of these rocks, which are hundreds of times older.”

She paused a moment before admitting, “I don’t understand.” In all honesty, neither did I. What I could see were, for me, among the most beautiful walls in the world–rock draperies alive with raking afternoon sunlight–and my feeble mind crumpled at the thought of mountain peaks miles above in some unimaginably distant past.

The next morning, before the hike out, I sat on a rock alongside Bright Angel Creek and said my morning prayers. The psalm–number ninety–included these verses:

“Before the mountains were born
or the earth or the world brought forth,
you are God, without beginning or end…

To your eyes a thousand years
are like yesterday, come and gone,
no more than a watch in the night...

Show forth your work to your servants;
let your glory shine on their children.
Let the favor of the Lord be upon us;
give success to the work of our hands.”

During the hike out, I pondered the Psalmist’s words, my daughter’s, and Flannery O’Connor’s. Meanwhile, the river carved imperceptibly deeper into bowels of ancient mountains, desert flowers burst into bloom, and nesting canyon wrens sang with delight. The entire canyon shone upon me and my children.

That evening, walking back to our rim hotel after dinner, the whole family looked out on the canyon. The light had dimmed such that judging distances was no longer possible.

“Why do you love this place so much, Daddy?” Maria asked.

“I don’t know, Maria. I feel at home here,” I said.

And, as the outlines of walls we had so recently climbed were erased in the gathering darkness, her small hand found mine, and we watched together in silence.