It is not possible to stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and not imagine falling in. The extraordinarily vast emptiness where solid rock should be, pulls with long-winded fingers, drawing eye and breath and balance downward. A person cannot but search the descending slope beneath them for a safe way down, a path to traverse, a way to safely discover what lays at the bottom. Vertigo snakes out, threatening to push a body over, making it necessary to shut the eyes, reach out for a railing, turn towards safe ground in order to rebalance. Even the bravest feel a nip of fear deep in the stomach, knowing that pain and death are only one wrong step away; an ending preceded by a long, rock-pierced, dusty tumble to the canyon floor.
Yet crowds line the edges, testing their resolve, wondering at the depth and distance. It is the same in other such places. Niagara Falls- where the water has the potential to crush, wash away, annihilate, and drown, as well as mist and fascinate its visitors. Alaskan bound cruises- where people seek to know the cutting glaciers, the jagged mountains and the untouched edge of wilderness, safely aboard a slow moving vessel. Helicopter rides over the Hawaiian volcanos- teetering over the steaming craters and lava-hot peaks, reveling in the swooping ride over untouchable danger, but knowing that solid ground is only moments away. It is the threat of danger, the opportunity to imagine disaster close-up, that drives people to those destinations, ever ready to pronounce that they did it, they tried it, they survived to bring home a postcard and a picture of themselves next to the sign.
Lute Balthasar and Ari Stone had been there- yawned at the Grand Canyon, blinked at Niagara Falls, passively passed over the volcanos and pyramids and hungry rivers of the world. They weren’t looking for postcards or snapshots or clichéd, prepackaged adventures. Through ten years of trying, the two men had spent more time lamenting the inability to find truly novel experiences then they had doing pretty much anything else. Everywhere they went, no matter how distant, how uninhabited, how off the edges of the guide-books’ maps, they knew that someone had been there before them.
They had found gum wrappers on mountain tops, burnt-out fires in deep caves and frozen gloves on Artic wastelands. There was no place new to discover, no final frontier. The world, for them, was simply not big enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment