Red by Terry Tempest Williams

Author:Terry Tempest Williams [Williams, Terry Tempest]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55940-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

Brooke and I awake on a winter morning before dawn to watch the sun rise over Canyonlands. Island in the Sky. We walk on top of the snow, a hard, wind-blown crust. Pifions and junipers offer handholds as we begin our descent on icy slickrock. Once on the rim, our legs dangling in space, we watch first light slowly traverse the deeply veined canyons below.

For as far and wide as I can see, past the Henry Mountains, beyond the canyons of the Escalante, hundreds of miles west, there is not a glimpse of civilization, no evidence of an imprint, not a road, not a building, not any sign whatsoever of human habitation, only the eroding crust of Earth splayed open like a great wound.

Aware of my own breathing, I enter the calm indifference of the Colorado Plateau. My eyes soften. The landscape blurs. The sky, so much sky, seems to lift with the swell of light. The blue horizon curves down.

I listen to the hum of dawn that exists below the silence—the sound of heat being absorbed into the rocks, the whizzing of ice between columns of sandstone, expanding and contracting, the melting of snow, the yielding sand as it warms to the acceptance of water.

Brooke, nearby, carves a small piece of sandstone in his hand with another.

Because you found the trouble-shard

in a wilderness place,

the shadow centuries relax beside you

and hear you think:

Perhaps it's true

that peace conjured two people here

out of clay vessels.

—Paul Celan

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