Chapter 27

As dusk gave way to night, John built a small fire to stay warm, and made himself something to eat in the small frying pan he had purchased earlier that week. The meal was beans and hot dogs, and, despite his crude tools and limited supplies, John couldn’t recall a meal that had ever tasted better. Perhaps there was something to be said for simplicity.

     As the stars began to come out, John heard a rustling in the bushes beside him, and immediately grabbed for his knife. Upon further reflection he noticed it was his friend the coyote again, who had returned for another visit. John saw him shivering in the cold, and noticed the protruding ribs that had begun to show through his fur. He decided he would take a chance.

     He grabbed one of his hot dogs and gently tossed it in the direction of his new friend, hoping he would take the offer of something to eat as a sign of friendship.  The coyote took a long look at him, and then hobbled over to the hot dog and gobbled it up, obviously ravenous and in need of immediate sustenance. It looked like it was dying, and John felt for a minute a kind of compassion for a creature that appeared to be at the end of it’s time here. He could relate to the idea, if not physically then emotionally.

     The coyote eventually came closer to John, and looked at his frying pan full of beans and licked his lips. John extended the pan out to his new friend and he immediately came right into John’s camp and began to devour what was left. The coyote seemed completely unafraid, and John had no fear of the animal either. For this moment they were simply two lost souls in the desert, and John had what the animal needed to survive, at least for another night.

     Eventually the coyote drifted off to sleep at the edge of the fire, and John felt it was time to do the same. He had expected to spend the night looking at the stars and contemplating his destiny, but fate had provided other plans. He looked over at the sleeping coyote and felt compelled to pet the animal, despite the fact that it could be dangerous. Right now John didn’t really care. He walked over to the animal and gently stroked its fur, thinking as he did what it must feel like to be so close to the end. He used to feel good knowing he had a wife and daughter who would be there when his time came, but now they were gone. He felt for just a moment that maybe there was someone else who could be there for him. It seemed a strange idea, but for a moment he entertained it. Perhaps a small piece of his hope was returning.

       He woke up very early the next morning and noticed his new friend was gone. He felt oddly comforted knowing the animal was sleeping just outside his tent, and he found himself wondering why his guest had left so abruptly. He felt good that he had helped the animal, and was reminded for a moment of his patients back home, many of whom were also wounded, sick, and discouraged with their lives. They had counted on him for guidance, and it was a challenge he had always risen to, despite his own failings and inadequacies. He was thinking now that he needed to do it again. To engage with those that needed him, and perhaps in doing so, reengage with a piece of his own life force that had died. He could feel a small spirit rising inside of him. He looked down at the remnants of his small fire from the night before.

Perhaps he could rise from the ashes. 

Chapter 26

After he had walked for most of the morning, he stopped again to look at his crudely drawn backcountry map, and decided that he would make his camp. Although he couldn’t be exactly sure that be had found the spot he was supposed to go to, he knew that there wasn’t another person around for miles, and he wanted to set up his camp. He found a flat spot in the bottom of a little valley and began to unpack. Thinking about what may be in front of him.

     As he sized up his location at the bottom of the valley, he thought about his friend the coyote, and how he may be a sitting duck down here if animals decided to attack. Right now he wasn’t all that concerned, although that did seem a kind of gruesome way to go. 

      He found himself thinking of Joseph Campbell again, and in particular a phase he called “the belly of the whale.” This stage referred to the biblical tale of Jonah, but was also reflective of a number of myths across different cultures. Essentially this stage was where a person felt they were in some kind of “holding pattern”, often in a dark and mysterious place without an immediate way out of these circumstances. 

     John certainly felt like he was in the belly of the whale right at this moment. He was at the bottom of a canyon, with limited supplies, a small knife, and 15 miles to talk straight uphill to get back to civilization. He knew he would be tested soon, both physically as well as emotionally.

     He built a small fire and laid back and looked up at the sky. He remembered the idea of “cloud busting” as he did, which was a technique where people reported being able to change the shape of clouds simply by willing it to be so. He thought about all of this as it related to perception. Perhaps it really all was about how we chose to look at things. As Oscar Wilde said a long time ago, “we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

     As he continued to lie in the increasingly hot afternoon sun, he began to have visions of his early days as a child when he used to lie in his hammock in the back yard and look up at the sky, sometimes for hours at a time. Back in those days he used to dream of running away to exotic places, and would spend the time in his backyard trying to picture those places in his mind. 

     And here he was, at the very bottom of one of the greatest wonders of the world, wishing he could be back in that place one more time. Better to have lost and loved according to the poets, but he didn’t believe this for a moment. His life had consisted of very few moments of clarity, but several of those were when he had experienced real love. In the scheme of things it was a very small period of his life. A tiny fraction that he couldn’t visualize carrying him through the rest of his life. Right now he couldn’t see that.

     He drifted once again back to his youth, this time to his teenaged years, when he was having a difficult time with his mother and most of the rest of the world as well. He remembered feeling that life was never going to change and that he was destined to be unhappy for the rest of his days. The transactional analysts referred to this as a “tragic life script”, and at many times in his life John had felt he was destined to enact this script in his life.

    And yet he had surprised himself. He had made peace with his mother for one thing, and despite his current unhappiness, his life had been far from completely tragic. Maybe he still had the capacity to surprise himself.

He certainly hoped so.

Chapter 25

He woke up very early morning and felt that unique kind of chill that comes with sleeping in a tent all night. He resisted the urge to stay in his sleeping bag, gathered himself, and stepped outside into the cool autumn air. He wandered back down to the Colorado River and once again looked up to see what he had accomplished the day before. As he mediated on his journey, he thought about the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” a book about another middle-aged man on a quest. 

Specifically, he remembered a line that had always stuck with him, “You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.” His mission today was at once both complicated and very simple. He would wander far into the wilderness of the Grand Canyon, miles from the next living soul, and make his camp for the night. That part was as simple as following a map. The hard part came in trying to recapture a feeling he had the last time he was here, where he felt a kind of communion with something scared that he had never experienced since. It was a daunting task, and a part of him realized that, as the Buddhists said, “No man can walk into the same river twice. For he is not the same man, and it is not the same river.” He had changed a great deal since his last time at the bottom of the canyon, but his desire to experience some kind of truth was just as strong. 

As he packed up his gear, he reminded himself to write down some of these thoughts he had been having, and took it as a good sign that a part of him wanted to share them with the world someday. It meant that he was at least contemplating the idea that he had some kind of vision for a productive future self, and that was something he hadn’t experienced in a while. 

He took one last look at the Bright Angel campground, and the safety it represented. As he did he found himself thinking about Joseph Campbell, who talked about life as a heroic journey based on myths that dated back to the earliest history of man. John had drawn on Campbell’s work in a number of his writings, and thought now about what Campbell had setting about crossing thresholds between safety and danger. He remembered a passage, “The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.” It captured how he was feeling right now almost perfectly. 

He started his walk into the backcountry, noticing as he did the birds circling the water of the Colorado River. They had found there way back to safety, and so could he. He thought about this as it related to the life force all human beings had inside of them, and vowed to at least give his a chance to reawaken. 

He had walked a couple of hours when he decided to stop and take a break. As he found a rock to rest on, he noticed a small coyote in the distance that seemed to be watching him from afar. It was scraggly and thin, and looked like it was on the verge of starvation. They locked eyes for a moment, and John thought for a second how much they were both fighting for some kind of survival. Although he had plenty of food and water, he could empathize with the animal’s plight. 

Eventually the coyote lost interest and scrambled off, and John wondered if he was actually in any kind of danger from the animal. He had purchased a large knife for his journey, but doubted his ability to fight off any kind of wild animal should the situation arise. He put the thoughts out of is mind, and began to walk again, thinking as he did about the mangy animal, and hoping he would find a way to survive the upcoming winter.