Day 4
Monday, March 5
Williams, Arizona to Moriarty, New Mexico

I made it to the Grand Canyon by 9 AM. The approach up 64 mostly straight north—facing a single mountain like an island above a flat sea. You can sense the impending canyon before you ever see it, like a lip to the edge of the world.

vast emptiness
carved by water
defined by rock, by light
measured by ravens and wind

I don’t know—it was so huge that my brain made no sense of it. It was there, I would look at it, but I couldn’t process the enormity. Cold and windy at the edge of what? Something not measureable through visual cues. The eyes want to focus on scrub blackened by fire along the trail, or the little juncos that hop out of the brush. Anything but that great gaping deepness.

The highlight of the day was the scenic route from Grand Canyon to Flagstaff--Highway 180. Just a two-lane road through stands of evergreens and leafless aspen with their smooth white bark. A smattering of clean white snow.

Something about the simplicity of the mountain, the trees, the quiet little road against cold clouded sky.

The low point was taking a detour off I-40 to see the meteor crater only to find it controlled by private owners. Looks like a penitentiary with brick buildings and tall fences. There's nothing but a few black cows on the rocky land for miles around! Pay for tickets. Noisy ads through a loudspeaker near a ticket booth manned by a lethargic woman in the middle of nowhere Arizona. Could not even get a glimpse of the two-mile wide crater. When I parked at a rest stop, I stood on great red rocks with the meteor crater still not visible but not far to the south, a train moving its way east to west, and the beautiful Humphrey’s peak against azure sky marking Flagstaff in the distance.

How beautiful the west is.

Yesterday, there was so much to see, but I was strangely unmoved. I recognized beauty, but felt little except for the trains. Today, as I drove in the silence behind Humphrey’s Peak, I was terribly moved, my heart opened and everything came to life.