Many years ago, I had occasion to hike from Moab, Utah, through the desert to the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers– about 10 miles from the nearest road. Moab has become a vacationing and recreational destination in recent years. But in those days, before the development of the nearby national park and the laying of roads and trails, it was a quiet, dusty place, alone in the empty desert, and kind of eerie.

The hike was arduous. The tracings of a foot trail gave the faint suggestion of a route, but basically the trip was a matter of hiking west until I reached the river. I had been warned in a Moab bar about scorpions and rattlesnakes in the desert, especially in the rocks I would have to cross, but I didn’t see anything of them.

It took nearly four hours to reach the river, where I found that the hike was worth the effort. The confluence of the Green and Colorado was spectacular. It lay at the bottom of a 1,000-foot-deep gorge, completely inaccessible from where I stood on the rim. The canyon was bounded by reddish-brown walls, as vertical as if they had been chopped by a meat cleaver, surrounded by skirts of talus below. There were strips of greenery clinging to the banks of the rivers, but otherwise I could see nothing but reddish brown rock.

To the horizon in every direction lay smooth plates of sandstone covered with rubble, polished and fractured through eons of time. 

And there was no sound. Only the wind nattering the brim of my hat and the ageless rushing of the rivers below. 

 The sudden appearance of something so vast and unexpected in the flat stony desert drew a gasp from me and a charge of vertigo. I was overwhelmed by it, it was something beyond my capacities to comprehend. As I stood there alone on the brink, my mind reeled and wandered. I felt that I had stepped across a threshold of some kind, off the brink and into thin air., into the endless depths of blue sky.

I realized how alone I was in this universe of emptiness, but in the silence I felt no loneliness.  There was a sense of waiting, almost foreboding, as enormous tectonic forces moved within the landscape, infinitely slowly, toward a sought-for future. The rocks were alive, and they seemed to roar just below the level of my hearing. I could feel a frightening sense of the immense power beneath the rock, a sense of potentiality, a sense of something dramatic.

The quiet rock felt fraught with tectonic movement; geologic time was stretched and expanding; and infinity became wildly plausible. As I stood, suspended between the depths of sky and the empty depths below the rim, the rock moved, rolling through endless time. And for a brief moment my passing life was riding with it.