Iguazu Falls, Argentina/Brazil, July 2004:

otionless, I stood in the wake and mist of white noise/white water. My perspective halfway up the falls (with hundreds of feet above and below me it seemed) of the water’s quintessential strength and insurmountable volume ricocheted to my core. The high tones of spraying mist blended deeper into the rumbling bass of epic motion and I quivered. A tear or two left my eyes, but if anyone were around they wouldn’t have known; my face already filled with droplets from the mist.
The resonance of el Agua vibrated along with all the thirsty molecules in my mind. No longer desert dried, but rainy season saturated, I traveled in my heart…not to where I had been these past six months (equatorial Amazon, Mata Atlantica) but to that place far and away, where redrock rimrock scrapes against horizon, blue moon casts pallid shadows into canyon depths, and water rumbles and rages when its torrents are let loose. Where waters recede just as suddenly, and saturated mud cracks glisten with iridescence among the house-sized boulders, bones of bighorn, and gnarled branches of juniper.
I left the Amazon, its sprawling green and hot thick air the month before to satiate other curiosities in the southern reaches of the country. Skin tones went from brown to light, accents changed (the “r” appeared in pronunciation), floodplains gave rise to hills and mountains and I danced to Samba in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. I stayed on a farm for two weeks in the mountains and rode horses for transport. I froze my ass off in a hut with frigid nights of six degrees Celsius. I traveled the city of Black Gold (Ouro Preto) and basked in the romance and warmth of the coastal town Buzios (Bones).
But here at the falls, straddling the border of Brazil and Argentina, I knew I was ready for something familiar once again, to be stretched out and dried from the streets that the rains turned to rivers every afternoon, to return to the crunch of dry earth beneath sandaled feet, to walk between sandstone boulders, to delight in the discovery of a seep and maidenhair fern behind a crevice in a rock, to roll with travertine and drink in Mojave dusk after a rainstorm. To be again in a land that folds and faults, and reflects my folds and faults with time and memory.

***

Not until a few months later did I realize how strongly my energies were driven to return to Arizona. While living in the Brazilian Amazon I did dream of redstone landscapes, but I was also present, I lived equatorially, traveled by boat often and did what I came there to do (study sustainable development and volunteer with a couple ngo’s). Yet what I fully realized one afternoon while on Ihla Marajó (the largest fluvial island in the world, near the mouth of the Amazon) and reading the book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, was that I wanted to be and work at home. To give myself to the landscapes and people that formed and shaped my thoughts and ideas. I had started a romance of work and study while previously living in Flagstaff and I knew that I wanted to return in some capacity, not only to selfishly indulge myself in that landscape, but to work where I knew my efforts would be pure of heart and reason.
And somehow, through luck, fate, and dreaming I got there. Seven months after I returned from Brazil, after I stood in front of that big water on the border of Argentina and Brazil, I found myself floating in a raft, learning how to row, and then, a short while later, rowing my own boat, learning, making mistakes, making friends, growing, and hopefully beginning to give back a little of what I’ve received—striking a balance.

Ellen Wyoming

Ellen Wyoming just spent her first summer working down in the Canyon as a Grand Canyon Youth Volunteer and as a baggage boatman for Canyon Explorations/Expeditions. She is currently teaching at the Gore Range Natural Science School near Vail, Colorado. She is hoping to be back for the CanEx training trip this spring and for the end of the season after her teaching contract is completed.