The Wind in the Pines, Part II 3 comments

By Brian Volck

The Canadian woods provided my first, faint intuition of transcendence and grandeur (with a dash of terror on the side) but the Grand Canyon has schooled me in the sublime ever since. In that incomprehensible immensity, I’ve witnessed flash floods, distressed hikers, rafting near-disasters, and “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” My love for the Canyon is unrequited: it doesn’t care about me (nothing personal, it doesn’t care about anyone), and I’m more at peace there than anywhere else on the planet.

So of course my time on the Navajo Reservation included a visit to the Canyon’s North Rim. Closed from November to May by heavy snows and remote even in summer, the North Rim is less visited than the tamer, more accessible South. Fewer tourists make it easier to reach the best location in the Canyon: at least a hundred yards from anyone else.

I turned the radio on as I pulled out of Tuba City, Arizona, on my way to the Rim, listening to a Flagstaff station until the signal faded into crackles and noise. Then, more by whim than deliberation, I popped into the CD player a recording of J.S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue by the Emerson Quartet.

D-A-F-D-C# began a solo violin, soon joined by its companions, and as I headed west in the lee of the Vermilion Cliffs, the rise and fall of contrapuntal lines and terraced harmonics echoed the contours of the landscape. Bach builds a sonic universe from a D-minor chord and an abbreviated scale, much as the desert is formed through elaborate arrangements of a handful of common chemical elements.

Art of the Fugue, Bach’s vast musical valediction, attempts to sum up the composer’s lifetime in counterpoint, a style already considered old-fashioned when Bach died, the work still unfinished. The task, in the end, seems to have exceeded even Bach’s genius. The final quadruple fugue reaches for and almost grasps the ineffable, then suddenly breaks off, the musical line abruptly silenced like one last heartbeat.

Bach sounded in my mind the rest of the day—on the hike to Uncle Jim’s Point, reading on the patio of the deserted Lodge, even while listening to stories from the Navajo rug buyer at the inn where I spent the night. It was still there in the morning: muted, like distant thunder. But as I began a hike into the Canyon, even that surrendered to profound silence.

Descending from the rim through strata I called out by name—Kaibab Limestone, Toroweap Formation, Coconino Sandstone—I read their history backwards, as if starting a book at the index and reading toward the frontispiece. Before the dinosaurs, this was sea bottom; before that, coastal waters; before that, sand dunes. I could have rung the geologic changes clear to the Colorado River that day had I the time and a camping reservation.

Growing upon the silent evidence of past worlds is an equally compelling catalogue of life: feathery cliffrose, carmine-flowered penstemon, and Ponderosa pine, the freshly peeled bark of which carries a faint scent of vanilla. Except for a rare hiker and the clop of my feet on the stony path, the world was enchanted by quiet.

Stopping at a bridge to rest and catch my breath, I heard the wing beats of an approaching bird in flight. I turned, expecting a raven, and was astonished by the brilliant blues of a Stellar’s jay, alighting on the branch of a pinyon pine. He eyed me with a tilt of his crested head, alert for crumbs of trail mix that might fall from my hand. As much as I love the Canyon, I was the stranger here, a guest in his home.

On another day and not too far from that spot, a friend of mine had been hiking alone when something—a small sound or change in the light—made him turn his head. There, on a rocky overhang above him, sat a mountain lion, casually eyeing him. The two stared silently at one another until my friend cautiously backed away and turned uphill. The sudden, bloody pounce he steeled himself for never came.

Grateful that all I faced was a jaybird, I considered hiking further in, but knew it was time to head back. The Canyon punishes those who overreach and rarely forgives the unprepared. I began my rimward ascent, sweating in the sun, breathing heavy in the thin air, pausing often.

On a water break atop the Coconino Sandstone, I sat in the shade of a Ponderosa pine leaning toward the abyss, its middle branches askew and crown tilted forward like some young Ent cautiously peering over a cliff in Fangorn. I nearly wept, overwhelmed by the Canyon’s immensity, its age, its dangerous beauty, rendering me so small, a mote in a giant’s eye.

It was then, for the first time that day, I heard it—the very thing, I suppose, Bach and canyon silence had been preparing me for all weekend: the wind in the pines. Trees were all around me, rising in phalanxes to the rim, their branches stirred by a freshening afternoon breeze, and I smiled, astonished once more by peace.

The Navajo word for “Holy Wind,” nilch’i, as manifold and complex as the Hebrew ruach or Greek pneuma, carries some of the same connotations of irresistible power and complete freedom as its Jewish and Christian counterparts. Too vast to master, too subtle to comprehend, it surprises mortals with its suddenness, its whimsy, and sometimes its crushing force.

The wind is always free, dancing the fine line between beauty and terror. From it we take life and (O happy etymology!) inspiration, its unbidden appearances marking our lives.

Perhaps that’s why, when I contemplate the Holy Spirit, it’s not falling doves, rattling windows, or misplaced flames that come to mind. What I see is the dance of green branches; what I hear is wind in the pines.