Leaving Eden

“In their hearts they turned to each other’s hearts for refuge…” –Jackson Browne, Before the Deluge

For a long time now, I have been under the impression that there was one place in my life, in our lives, into which the outside world could not really intrude. A personal and professional Eden, a paradise where lost childhood could be regained, and all social and political distinctions become as unnecessary for us as gills. In Grand Canyon, we joke that “World War III could be happening and we’d never know it”. At first uncomfortable with the lack of daily communications from the usual information sources, our guests slowly adjust and in the end become oddly proud of their lack of knowledge, and how unimportant all that knowledge really seems to be. Truly, we all find Eden in this canyon for a short time, happy in our innocence.
On September 12, 2001 we were given the “apple” and forced to eat it. All that day, traveling through the narrow limestone walls of the Muav Gorge, we had noticed the lack of planes—both the big jetliners that usually cross the canyon from la to points east and back again, but also the smaller planes that fly over that part of the canyon on their way from Las Vegas. We noticed this, but it didn’t really sink in, so intent were we on our 30-mile day, so raptly did we watch bighorn sheep families picking their way delicately over cliff faces and talus slopes all day. That night in camp the outside world crashed our party. While we were cooking dinner, guides from another trip told our guides what had happened to New York and Washington dc the morning before. We stood in tight knots talking as dinner cooked. We smiled and laughed still, slightly anxious, but still unbelieving. Not really unbelieving, it’s just that the taste of that apple hadn’t really sunk in yet.
Then I remembered the planes. The sky above looked deceptively calm and peaceful. And then I looked around at our group, happily celebrating Marilyn’s anniversary. Marilyn, who to all of us had been a stranger just twelve days ago, was now surrounded by her clan, celebrating the day she and her absent husband had joined in marriage. Marilyn, whose son Otis, whom we all felt like we knew as a friend by this time, had just moved to New York City to teach bilingual elementary school. And then I understood. I was going to have to tell these people that their world had forever changed, that loved ones and friends had died. I was going to have to be the one to take them by the hands and lead them out of Eden.
We forced smiles around the circle that evening, listening to Marilyn’s poetry, and laughing about the sweet pictures she handed around of her husband and son. I nervously declined a request to tell stories, hoping that everyone would retire to bed and leave me and the other guides alone with our fears and uncertainties. I spent a lot of the evening on the satellite phone gathering as much information as I could, finding out which among our group had been affected. I learned that Mark’s family and Marilyn’s son were fine, but that her best friend’s brother was missing from the Trade Center, and that her husband was trying to contact her.

They were happily in bed, sleeping to the mutter of the river and the brilliance of the stars. I lay awake most of the night, thinking about the role we would play in the morning. We are the guides in this paradise, showing people the way down the river, up the cliffs, and back into themselves and their bodies—happy places. And now we were going to have to guide them through sadness and fear and loss. In the morning we moved slowly, watching the glorious, gilt-edged clouds build over National Canyon. Peach and cobalt, silver and violet let loose in a pounding fifteen minute storm. Lightening shattered the sky and a rainbow stitched it all back together at the end. It was time to talk to the group. I talked individually with the people most affected by the events, and then I asked everyone to gather in a circle. I could tell that they were curious at the unusual request, and my stern expression. I told them in the simplest way I could and as I talked, I watched their faces crumble and their bodies sag against one another for support. I wanted to take it all back, swallow the words and move backwards a few hours in time, anything to be able to erase those expressions and give them back their canyon. Afterwards people wandered the beach for solitude. Some sat by the river and watched it swirl by. Others sat with loved ones on the rocks and held each other, sadness and confusion and disbelief in their faces and their bodies.
It wasn’t until later that morning, while resting in the silver-gray womb of Fern Glen, that I lost it. I watched a swallowtail butterfly with tattered wings float by, pure fragility holding up against the ravages of its life, and I began to cry, thinking of all we do to hurt and destroy, and how resilient our spirits are in the end.
Our group stayed in the canyon, in all ways. We played fiercely that day: wiffle ball and tag and mudfights. We laughed and we cried and we splashed and bathed and gloried in the mid-September sun. And by the end of the day, the separate little knots of people had broken up and rejoined to become one again. Our tribe had survived its exit from Eden, even though that knowledge stayed with us, and we knew things would never be quite so innocent again.
Now, when all I hear on the radio is the rhetoric and political analysis of terrorism, bank accounts, fanaticism, weaponry and hatred, I am left with a bitter knowledge that I know I always had, but hoped I didn’t have to believe. The canyon is not apart and separate from the world. Whatever happens out there will reach us here. But this place and places like it must shelter our souls and our spirits so that we can survive what happens elsewhere. We must have the world of nature’s making to nourish and support our humanity when the world of our own making seems senseless and inhuman. With the sorrow of taking people away from paradise comes a sense of wonder at what I observed. In the early days of our trip, I watched a group of strangers become friends. When we exited Eden together, I felt us become part of a family—the family of man.
Christa Sadler