TRIAL BY FIRE

Light and Darkness Inside the Grand Canyon

What follows is portion of a longer account about a trip I took through the American Southwest in 1982, from my book Under a Sacred Sky. The trip took place shortly before my 30th birthday, during what had been a difficult time for me; my first relationship of five years had fallen apart, and I watched from the sidelines as other people my age were moving up the professional ladder while I struggled to gain a foothold on any rung at all. My father had also suffered a heart attack shortly before, and while he survived, it faced me with my own mortality like nothing before. As a result of these and other developments, I took what money I had saved up and decided to spend the bulk of it on traveling that year, hoping that the change of scenery might help clear my head and open me up to new ideas, perhaps even stimulate the writing aspirations I’d begun fantasizing about. The following short passage describes an incident which unfolded for me down in the Grand Canyon during the midst of that trip.

Prelude: The morning I was set to leave from Illinois on my trip, I had a striking dream in which I had sex with a powerful black woman, who had blazing tongues of fire on her head in place of hair. I could feel the heat yet I was never burned. It almost felt like an initiation, and was both ecstatic and terrifying at once. I awakened with a jolt, and the lingering feelings from the dream were so pungent that I sat on the edge of my bed for several minutes wondering what it meant, and whether it foreshadowed anything about the journey ahead of me.

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My plan was to hike down and spend several nights camped out at the bottom of the Canyon. Over the years this area had come to take on near-mythic importance for me, and as my 30th birthday approached I saw the chance to spend time down inside of it as a personal vision quest of sorts.

I drove in from the far eastern end of the Canyon just as the Sun was starting to set, and the further I proceeded along the Canyon rim the more expansive and colorful the views became. By the time I reached the visitor’s center, the entire Canyon was bathed in an otherworldly glow, and cloaked in deep silence.

That night I slept in the campground near the visitor’s center, and had a series of intense dreams—all of them involving fire in some way, curiously. I awoke in the morning and packed my gear, then said a small prayer as I made my first steps onto the Kaibab trail that meanders down to the Canyon’s bottom. As the crow flies, the distance from rim to Canyon base is a full mile, the equivalent of four Empire State Buildings stacked atop one another. The trail itself is considerably longer than that, though, since it weaves in and out much like the crow doesn’t fly. Along the way I'd pass through three distinctly different weather systems: on top, it was snowing, midway down there was rain, and at Canyon’s bottom, it was dry as a bone.

I had a growing intuition over the previous weeks that something meaningful was in store for me on this leg of the trip, and that feeling only grew stronger as I drew closer towards the bottom. I decided soon after beginning my hike not to take photographs during my stay down here, since I didn't want my memories of the experience boxed in by tiny snapshots.

Making my way down step by step, I reflected on the vast spans of time indicated by the sedimentary layers visible alongside the trail. The Canyon was formed over a billion years, the books tell us, as layers of sediment were deposited by ancient oceans and the Colorado River later sliced through and exposed these rocky tissues to the open air. In a sense, this area represents a geological time machine, with each step downward taking one further back in time at the rate of thousands of years per foot. There’s something paradoxical about the effect a place like this can have on one, since your ego is increasingly dwarfed by the immensity and antiquity of it all just as your soul feels enlarged by it.

Descending further, I began focusing my awareness on each step. It almost felt as though I was peeling away layers in my own psyche, with the descent symbolically plunging me deeper into some part of myself. Shedding non-essentials and going deeper—those are things I'd felt blocked about doing in my own life over the previous year, and having a ritual like this seemed to help focus my mind. Picking up a rock along the trail, I imagined that I was pouring all my negative thoughts and unpleasant memories into it, and resolved that when I crossed the footbridge at the Canyon’s bottom I’d drop that rock into the river while visualizing those negative energies transformed by the river’s waters.

On reaching the Canyon floor several hours later, I walked through the womb-like cave that leads to the suspension bridge spanning the two riverbanks, and stepped out over the river. Arriving in the middle of the bridge, I paused for a moment, focused my thoughts, and gently dropped the rock into the water. Looking up, I saw a flock of six white birds flying downstream towards me, which then flew under the bridge directly over the spot where I’d dropped the stone, and were then joined by a seventh bird. They continued flying downriver and disappeared around the next bend.

At the far end of the bridge, I stopped to sit and rest for a few minutes before continuing on to the nearby campground, where I found a place to pitch my tent. I struck up a conversation with a fellow in the campsite next to mine, a twenty-something with waist-length hair who'd just come off the road after following the Grateful Dead around for two years. When I finally opened up to him about my thoughts about the Canyon, he described a realization nearly identical to mine. He’d been going through a major life-change those previous months, and himself sensed that his hike into the Canyon was somehow bringing it all to a conclusion. I was surprised when he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small rock he found while touring with the Dead, and went on to explain how he decided that upon arriving here, he would drop it into the river as a way to ritualistically signal the end of that chapter in his life.

A few minutes later we walked down to the river and he reached into his other pocket then handed me a joint, saying, “Here—you might try this at some point while you're down here. It’s good stuff.” Being a Deadhead, I suspected he was good for his word on such things. I put it in my pocket, and we headed back to the campsite.

I pitched my tent and noticed he was planning to sleep right out in the open, without any tent at all. When I asked him whether he was concerned about the possibility of rain, he replied, “Nah. The rangers assured me it almost never rains down here at the bottom, it evaporates before it gets this far, so I figured I’d save myself the extra load.”

Shortly after midnight I heard the booming sounds of thunder, followed by a heavy downpour, along with the sound of my campsite friend scrambling to erect a makeshift shelter, muttering "Fuck! Fuck...!" I shouted out that he was welcome to come and stay in mine, but he declined, saying he'd manage somehow.

Fire Walk With Me

After breakfast I packed up my gear and began the slow ascent back up the Canyon, this time using the Bright Angel trail. It made for a difficult climb in the growing heat, and I had to stop frequently. After a number of hours, I eventually arrived at the campground located roughly midway between the bottom and the top of the Canyon, and found a spot to pitch my tent.

Shortly before sunset I took a walk out to the promontory that extends out beyond the campground proper. I climbed up carefully onto a large boulder where I could sit and observe that part of the Canyon as the Sun set. The view before me was unlike anything I’d seen before, and within all that vastness I couldn't see a single other person anywhere. The enormous rock walls arched up around me like a cathedral, and the majestic natural forms gracing those formations seemed like the work of some cosmic Michelangelo. It’s little wonder early explorers to this region chose to identify these formations and outcrops using names like Vishnu, Brahma, and Osiris, since these forms really do evoke the qualities of gods rather than mortals. The late afternoon light cut down on a slant across this horseshoe-shaped stretch of the Canyon. Far above, I could barely make out the specter of birds gliding silently along the uppermost rim of the Canyon, which was still cloaked in snow. I’ve visited many beautiful natural sites in my life, but without a doubt this was the most spectacular of them all.

I took the joint from my pocket given to me by my campsite neighbor earlier that morning and lit it up. It was more powerful than I expected, in ways both marvelous and terrifying. The late afternoon light caused the Canyon walls around me to glow as if incandescent, revealing subtle hues I hadn’t noticed before. It's nearly impossible not to feel a sense of eternity in this place, I thought to myself.

But the herb was proving a bit too strong. A wave of paranoia began flooding through me and built in momentum as the minutes passed. I'd heard of anxiety attacks before—was this one of those? The tangle of worries and neurotic concerns I’d been grappling with the previous few years were coming to a head, as if a cellar door had sprung open and unleashed its subterranean denizens into the light of day. I began to feel overwhelmed, and started shivering uncontrollably, my heart beating faster. Looking around, I even found myself wondering how I would climb down off of this boulder I was on without injuring myself, since I could no longer see the footholds I used to climb up onto it.

As my anxieties snowballed, I decided to try and cope with them by slowing down my breath, in the hope that this would calm my mind. That helped slightly, and over the next few minutes the shivering lessened. But the turbulent emotions continued to well up every few moments, causing me to backslide into confusion and fear. In a last-ditch effort, I decided to simply surrender to the feelings rather than fight them, since resistance only seemed to make them worse. It was then and only then that they began to loosen their grip.

I then remembered something I'd heard on the car radio while driving towards the Canyon several days earlier, during an interview with a Japanese concentration camp survivor about the transforming power of love and forgiveness. That might hold a key for me now, I thought, as I began focusing my attention on love, on compassion—not just for others but for myself. My center of gravity slowly started shifting down from my head to my heart, and after about 10 minutes I felt much calmer, my breath dramatically slower, my anxieties gone.

With night starting to fall, I climbed down off the boulder, carefully, and headed back to the campground. I felt relieved getting back to my tent, but also felt as though something had shifted for me out there on the promontory.

That night I stayed up talking with some of the other campers on the site. One of them was an acupuncturist named Joseph. Like me, he regarded his own trip through the Southwest as a personal vision quest of sorts, with the Canyon descent as the cornerstone of that experience. That sort of thing happens here a lot, apparently.

Roughly around eleven o’clock, I headed over to an outdoor water spigot provided for campers when out of the corner of my eye I saw a bright flash of light. I thought nothing of it at first, but then I heard a voice crying out, “Help me!!! HELP ME!!!” I looked over and saw the silhouette of a person flailing madly inside of a tent, its walls lit up from inside by a flickering mass of flames.

I rushed over towards the tent, exactly as a horde of other campers clamored out of the darkness towards the fire. I watched in horror as a young man emerged through a hole that had burnt through the side of the tent, as the man tripped over the fabric of the tent wall and fell hard onto the ground, his clothes smoking. I heard someone near me shouting, “He must have been using his stove in there. I smell fuel!”

The frantic young man picked himself up off the ground as sheets of melted flesh drooped down from his outstretched arms, creating a horrid stench that seared everyone’s nostrils. Amazingly, he was perfectly ready to leap right back into the flames, since all he was concerned about was his camera and his backpack, which remained inside. From out of nowhere, a fellow camper appeared on the scene with a miniature fire extinguisher, and in a few moments put out the flames.

The situation jolted everyone into a state of adrenalized wakefulness, the atmosphere having become hyper-charged. The poor fellow looked seriously dazed, and the only thing he seemed able to say was, “How do I look? How do I look?” Just to calm him down, I said, “You look fine, you look fine.” Just then, another camper walked up and said, gasping, “Jesus…you look terrible…”—which naturally threw the hapless fellow back into a state of full-blown anxiety.

A young female ranger in charge of the campground hurried onto the scene, and carefully escorted him back to the small cabin at the far end of the grounds. None of us standing around could really think about sleeping after all that commotion. After roughly 15 minutes, the ranger came back out to talk with us, saying she had no real medical supplies on hand and was concerned how the young man would fare once the shock wore off and the pain truly kicked in, burn wounds being what they are.

It was too dark to helicopter him out, she explained, so she asked if any of us had medical experience. When no one else stepped forward, the acupuncturist I'd spoken to earlier, Joseph, offered to see what he could do. He headed back to the cabin with her, but came back out a half hour later, saying the acupressure treatment didn’t seem to make much difference. I had dabbled in my 20s quite a bit with hypnosis, so I walked over and asked the ranger if she’d like me to give it a try, to see if I could help ease the man's pain. She seemed a little skeptical at first, but obviously had nothing to lose at that point, so she said, “Okay, follow me.”

I stepped inside the cabin and saw the man seated in a chair, visibly shaking from discomfort. There was another camper standing alongside him, a bearded fellow named Ken who had some nursing experience. He was in the process of placing the young man’s hands into a large bowl of ice water. The sight of his burnt arms under the bright light was sickening, almost as much as the stench. Ken took me aside and said they needed to apply medicinal gel to his arms before bandaging them up, but they were anxious about applying any pressure since it could make his pain worse. They had no painkillers anywhere on site, so if I could help bring the pain down even a little bit, that would help enormously.

I walked over to the fellow, and struck up a conversation, focusing on everything except the injuries so as to take his mind off of those. At first all he wanted to do was apologize over having done such a stupid thing outside. “I just wanted to cook some food, but I shouldn’t have tried doing that in the tent like that, I know. I’m so sorry for causing everyone so much inconvenience, I’m just so stupid…” I tried to make light of the situation, and it was then that I learned his name was Rob and he was from a part of Illinois not far from my own home.

I had no set protocol for dealing with this sort of situation, so I was running on pure intuition. I kneeled down onto the floor and placed my left hand on the back of his head and began stroking his forehead with the fingers of my right hand, just to relax him. I told him to close his eyes and to slow down his breathing, which had been jerky and uneven up till then. I then gave him permission to let his body shake as much as it wanted, not to repress those feelings. That seemed to help a bit, since he'd been fighting those urges up to that point. After some initial violent shaking, he settled down considerably.

I felt a wave of compassion come through me, and it almost seemed as though I was pouring love through my hands into his body like a tangible energy. As I stroked his forehead, I sensed what he needed more than anything else was some caring and human touch, especially since he’d been so self-critical up to that point.

I started feeding him suggestions about how his hands and arms would grow numb, and that the healing powers of his own unconscious mind were now beginning to mend the wounds. I then took the risky step of telling him I was drawing the pain out of his body into my own. Whether or not that actually was taking place, the important thing was that he believed it—and at that point his shaking completely stopped.

I counted backwards from ten, telling him that when I reached zero, his hands would be completely numb, but that he would remain fully alert. When I reached zero, his face looked completely relaxed and peaceful. I then nodded to both the ranger and Ken, at which point the two of them now pulled his hands from the water and began applying gel across his arms. He initially felt a twinge of pain, but I gave him some more suggestions and the pain disappeared.

By the time it was over, twenty minutes later, his arms looked like two oversized Q-tips, the wrappings bunched up in thick wads around his hands. Both the ranger and Ken were worried over how he’d sleep that night, but after they walked him gently over to the side room and set him down on the cot, I kneeled down and once again gave him soothing suggestions, talking softer and softer, suggesting that he'd sleep soundly throughout the night, and wake up the next morning feeling completely refreshed. Before I’d finished, he was snoring loudly.

I walked quietly out of that room and back into the main office, and saw both the female ranger and Ken standing there staring at me. “That’s the weirdest thing I've ever seen,” Ken said. That made me feel self-conscious, so I just said goodnight and returned to my tent.

It was one o'clock in the morning by the time I returned to my tend and climbed into my sleeping bag, reflecting on how unusual of a day it had been. Then it dawned on me how, in a curious way, Rob’s struggle closely mirrored what I had gone through myself several hours earlier, with that anxiety attack out on the promontory. The suggestions I gave him for dealing with his own situation were the same as those I gave myself just hours before—slowing down my breath, cultivating love and self-acceptance, not fighting the dark impulses. There was something synchronistic happening here, I sensed.

The next morning, I stepped out from my tent to see Rob heading out to the promontory to be helicoptered out of the Canyon. He was glad to see me, and when I asked how he slept, he replied, “Like a baby! I didn’t feel a lick of pain after the hypnosis. I still don’t. It’s amazing.” I walked him out to where the helicopter landed, and waved goodbye as it whisked him up and away over the rim of the Canyon, as if by some hi-tech guardian angel. That’s the last I ever saw of him.

After assembling my gear, I began my trek back up to the top of the Canyon rim. I was joined along the way by the acupuncturist from the night before, Joseph. On reaching the trailhead up top, we walked over to his car where he offered me some food and drink from the cooler in his trunk. I was ravenously thirsty, but when I took a few swallows from the cold beer he handed me, it hit my system so hard I nearly fainted, as the ground around me suddenly glowed white hot.

Shortly afterwards, I climbed into my car and headed north to Colorado.

Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer based in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books and contributor to numerous anthologies. His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.