Silence

The bus was rank with the smell of our sweat. We sat with our shoulders pressed together, muscles still hot and aching, staring out the windows- waiting. A few people rested, eyes closed, against the glass while its rattling held their dreams at bay. Every other word I wrote was interrupted by the need to itch my skin, or by an escaped laugh thrown from Satheesh, whose presence was impossible to ignore. He was a person as contagious as an illness. His dark, molten skin was smooth and pure, unmarred by the Utah brush that had cut up my own legs and feet. His spirited laugh was what had caught my attention, and what I liked best about him. It lit up his face, slit his eyes and coursed through his gangly six-foot-five body. He spoke with a Malaysian accent and his appreciation of life exploded through his lips as he said to me: "d'eym so bleessed". He laughed, again, this time accompanied by a wide grin. Something outside caught his attention, and now I'm the one laughing as he proclaimed "harses"! at the paint mares in the field out the window.
My feet are beyond sore, and seem to be permanently aching- a feeling I'm sure the majority of the van shared after seven days of strenuous hiking. It's trips like these where every muscle, even bones, are in pain. Dying of heat by day and freezing at night, we might begin to question why we are here; why are we doing this? The answer is not found in asking why, but in remembering who. As I write, my arm is bumping the tanned forearm of Logan, who is impatiently reading through his National Parks Passport that he picked up in Arches. He faithfully turns the pages, looking from Alaska to Maine, and I can feel his entire body tense before he turns to Satheesh and moans "I want to beee there, man". Logan is from Ukraine, but has spent his summers in Montana. I watch him continue to flip through the maps and as I study his face I can see the same controlled frustration there that I feel in myself when I think about everything I want to do in my life. We share that manic impulse somewhere in our heads or hearts that signals us to constantly be reminded that life is too short. Logan has shared with me his touching belief in his religion and and his desire to see all of the kingdom God's created on Earth.
My train of thought is again broken by Satheesh, who in the midst of the quiet on the bus leans over to happily whisper to Logan and I,
"D'eym so glad you geys are here. D'eym so lucky. Thank you, love you", as he pats Logan's knee, leans back to his seat and lets the silence resume.
Logan laughs at each word Satheesh attempts to pronounce in English, while Satheesh is too enthralled and fascinated by each moment and he doesn't notice. Logan and I look at each other, and smile softly. The atmosphere is so pleasant, I couldn't have repressed the happiness if I had wanted to.
I can hear Green Day pounding out of Abi's headphones behind me, every now and then followed by the sound of his Indian accent muttering along 'don't wanna be...'. This time the guitar solo seems to have woken Josefin, who was sleeping peacefully on his shoulder. She pushes back her blonde hair, revealing her electric blue eyes and groggily turns them to watch the red rocks streak past the window panes as we drive. She doesn't say much, but when she does it is poised and meaningful. Perhaps being the oldest of the group at 23 (and ironically the shortest), she feels more inclined to watch our antics rather than take part in them. Her Swedish heritage is heard in her tone when she knows we're being dumbasses, but her smile softens the lecture that's sure to follow.
A few others have woken now, too. Andi suggests we stop to meditate, but the idea is quickly shut down by Brad who makes a snide remark to the Thai/Aussie native. Andi's response is a quick and cool "That's fine, mate", and again, the conversation is only between the open window and the wind. We are all too exhausted, too grungy and too sick of being cramped in the car to really care that we're not talking. Logan shifts to take his sweatshirt off, a feat in such a cramped car. In a while we'll talk about our favorite part of the hikes, the funniest parts of the trip, a near-death experience, or mention how sore we are, how we can't wait to get back home to Bozeman...but for now, as I begin to close my eyes and drift back to sleep, the still of the silence is enough.

****                                                                 ****                                                                  ****

I pulled each leg forward; kept hoping each step would be my last. I'd never wanted to stop so badly in my entire life. I swear, my bones hurt. I kept my eyes cast down, focusing on the changing layers of rock. The pattern bumbled from red to strange shades of grey and green, but my eyes caught and focused on the deep mocha color of Satheesh's calves.
Left foot, right foot. I ignored the burning in my thighs.
I watched his muscle ripple as he climbed in front of me; sliding his feet on the smooth sandstone where mine quickly followed. I took three steps to his one, his stride twice the size of mine. I struggled to keep up. Satheesh was weird. He was possibly the strangest man I'd ever met. His smile never left his face, except for the rare occasion when he looked down and his eyes glazed over, the fear extinguishing his can-do-it attitude. The canyon bed we had just climbed out of had a 1,300 foot elevation gain, only one hundred feet shy of the height of the Sears tower. And Satheesh, was afraid of heights.
In a strange way, Satheesh is everything I'm not. A black male, standing at six five, he's over a foot taller than me. I admired him for nearly all his qualities. We hiked the red rocks by day, and sought refuge in the sandstone arches at night and everything was utterly beautiful to him. The canyons, a clear morning hike, our thoughts, a floating piece of garbage on the horizon.... it didn't matter. Satheesh would say to me, "Woulda you look at that! Leea, Life is a great adventure." He was very right, but I couldn't suppress a laugh when he was overcome with fascination by my Camelbak.

"The vater is just right there!" He rushed to show Logan, who was not quite as enthralled by it's majesty.

We had the same process each day after our hikes; set up camp, get a fire going, then relax our tired bodies. Tonight, the fire cast a comforting glow as we watched our shadows play a flickering game of tag. We huddled for warmth- standing closer to one another than any other circumstance might allow since Utah nights are below freezing and we had to keep the fire small. Satheesh's body was pressed close to mine on the left, his warm skin radiating heat while Logan stood, slightly more distanced, on my right. As I stared into the flames, listening to the pop of wood- the only sound amongst the silence, Satheesh slinked into my peripherals. He was crouching, bending his knees, hoovering at my eye level. I could mostly see his teeth and his eyes, and I allowed him time to give me a huge grin, then returned the favor. He whispered so that only I could hear,

"D'ey wanted to see what life was like, from your point of view!" He laughed.

Somehow, no matter what he was saying, there was a needed exclamation mark at the end.

His comment ate me up though; made me think, like most of the things he said. Maybe it's a Malaysian thing, but everything he uttered seemed to be profound. The more I thought about it, the more I admired Satheesh, and everyone else accompanying me on this trip. These people came from all places, thousands of miles away, not a single one of us calling the same region home. By some twist of fate that life so often likes to deal, we ended up in Bozeman together, and now, here we are, scaling cliffs in Utah's rolling canyons.
In some ways, the time I spent with Logan, Satheesh and the others, cramped in the van mobbing to Utah,  the late nights exposed on the slickrock looking out at the stars bouncing reflections on the Colorado,  defined a part of me. I'll never forget something Satheesh explained to me and the six other strangers as we were poised around the fire;
"D'em just like each and every one of you." There was a pause, as he thought. Not a single eye strayed from his dark face as we waited for him to resume speaking.
"D'ey have 5.5 liters of blood in my body. D'em tall dark and handsome... D'em just like most of the guys out there. D'em just like every one of you- learning, wanting, enjoying life to it's fullest. It's Heaven and Hell, you know? This life..." His sentence trailed off, Silence resumed again, and I don't think any of us spoke until the fire was  exhausted and its smoke rose out toward the stars.

Deep in Cataract Canyon, the morbid walls of red rock rise and fall, plunging into the earth, turning with bladed precision, etched from centuries of the wild river systems murmuring through the ground. As I looked out at the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, and watched them violently run together to create one great body of water, I couldn't speak. Silence swallowed me and lingered in my belly, in my soul. Satheesh, Logan and I had hiked the short hike to what we had thought would be another viewpoint of the same sight... but we were wrong. As John Wesley Powell had discovered hundreds of years before us, the confluence was not just two rivers colliding. The world all around fell down into the canyon- each of our heads empty; thoughts floated away with the current. To borrow words from Powell; "We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things." Whether the three of us were there for minutes, hours... I couldn't say. The rivers ran their paths leaving us as bystanders. I wanted to become part of the landscape, run with the rivers, melt into the rocks. Instead, I chose to become a small part of Satheesh, a small morsel of Logan. Each memory we created together, only we could understand the gravity of its existence. Nature will do that, bring people together in a strange way. Being there and feeling the how the land has a life of it's own- a soul even... it leaves me unable to explain. We each walk away changed, and let Silence say it all.

‎"This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone." -Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p.58-59

I wake up around 3:45am, every morning. Like clockwork, my dreams stop and I'm forced back to consciousness, usually by the sound of my own voice. I missed Utah, I missed feeling it breath beneath my feet. I'd felt this loss ever since returning and tonight I woke with my windows open. The crisp breeze floated in from my seventh story perch, dragging with it the collective sounds of lives carrying on- living, right outside my four walls.
I wished I could see the stars. My body moaned for the bright moon projecting on the canyons, longed to watch it shed its light just once more.
Nights like these, I go to the window, to what seems like the edge, and press my forehead against the chilled glass. I close my eyes and stand there, with nothing but the screen, the glass and the darkness separating me, from the rest of my world.
I listen for a while.
Blurbs of conversation flutter up from the staggeringly drunk in search of the safety of their beds. Laughter, trivial sounds- I don't bother opening my eyes. Rap music bumps into their words from somewhere far off, and it cooks like a melodic jambalaya of sounds.
It fades.
Someone is dragging their shoes as they walk. Someone is locking up their bike, the chains react violently against the metal rack and pierce the air. A car swooshes past on the still damp ground- they need to get their foot off the gas, I can hear my father getting livid as the tires spin faster, faster. The wind in the valley is blowing through the trees. I can hear it navigate around the sounds outside, slipping between branches, trying hard to leave them undisturbed, bringing me the complacent nostalgia of a childhood in the windy city. That thought is quickly shattered though, and I open my eyes to watch it slide to the floor. Ohh, but my eyelids want to close, and I let them, once again. I like to listen to life outside my window, when my body is tired but my head won't sleep. I listen again, this time harder, wanting to hear the familiar quiet that I love so much.
C'mon, c'mon...
A skateboard battles the pavement in a rumbling duel.
C'mon...
I know she's there, I know she's waiting, just how she was in Utah. I'm a veteran at this endless game of hide and seek, but Silence is asking me to try harder as I beg for her to appear. I start to wonder how many others are up playing, sitting at their windows, looking out, searching for the still of the Silence too...

I was perched atop two massive fins, in Canyonlands. The rocks balanced precariously as I looked out at the sunset melt into an abyss of deep red. I leaned forward, like I was trying to caress the air- the jagged landscape pressed cool and smooth against my mind; the needles that reached towards the sky scraped my skin. The mesas swam into a sea of colors, and away I was swept, up high into the air. I looked down and saw my body, still sprawled up on the rocks, all alone. The harder I tried to get back, the more distanced I became until I struggled so hard the air wouldn't flow into my lungs, and Silence took over my body.

I awoke under the stars, sweating on the ground, to an unbounded black Utah sky. My entire body was tense, preparing for the moment it took to realize the exchange between reality and delusion. I saw Satheesh and Logan on either side of me, protecting me I liked to think, they way they often seemed to do. My startled awakening must have roused Logan, who looked over at me coddled in my bright blue mummy bag. Groggy, I watched a suppressed smirk leak into his eyes at the sight of my frightened expression, illuminated by the wild stream of light my headlamp tossed about, and immediately I laughed. That nightmare still plagues me though, even now that I'm tucked safely back into my tidy little room in Bozeman. Nights like these where I'm without Logan or Satheesh to calm me... Perhaps it's the very reason I wake so frequently, go longingly to my window, and pray for Silence to drown me in that same sea of sound once again.

Now, she arrives with the sun. I can't tell if I've fallen asleep again, or if time just moves faster at the early hours of the morning. Silence now illuminates the mountains, embraces them with her lanky grip, and the world begins to melt. In the still of the Silence, I can hear the grass existing, I can hear my pulse throb in my ears. I was swallowed by Silence in the canyons of Utah, happily never found. But now, I lock my eyes shut, as they should be, and listen. I can hear the feel of the wind, the vibrations of this Earth. I hear the taste of the fresh morning, listen to the melody in the warm sun rising. Sometimes, Silence can seem so loud. I breath out a sigh, and with it slip away my thoughts.

Sleeplessness and Silence and Sadness... the three spin circles in my mind. Day to day I fight, looking for some sort of balance that will beat the sadness and instill the silence, let me sleep. The cycle ended in Utah. I'm not sure the answer was was slipped somewhere between the jagged rocks, and I can't claim the hours of hiking are the cure. But those precious moments between Logan, Satheesh and I were pure human to human connections with no interferences. The silence in the canyons allowed us to override stereotypes and overcome the insignificant noise of everyday life. Even if for just a moment, those canyons gave us the gift of drifting away from a world so loud into our own drowsy silence.