Travel Log: Confronting Vastness at The Grand Canyon's Rim (US West part 2)

The Grand Canyon, a little below the rim. Photo by Guy Podjarny

One of the strongest experiences I’ve had during our trip to West US was the scale of everything. There’s a strong sense that the cars and roads, the sprawling cities, perhaps even the people themselves expanded to fit the sheer vastness of the American landscape.

This experience was particularly powerful in two places: standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon and the Tunnel Viewpoint at the entrance to Yosemite Valley. The pictures in this post surely would look familiar—these are among the most famous views in the world. Still, standing at these spots, I felt my own insignificance in comparison to the landscape around me in a way that I’ve never felt when looking at pictures. The moment of in-situ, in-person experience is worth a thousand pictures. It’s an embodied encounter.

Tunnel View, Yosemite Valley. Photo by Guy Podjarny

Like the nature writer Lucy Lippard, I didn't think about my insignificance while I was immersed in these views, hiking in the Grand Canyon or watching climbers scale El Capitan. Indeed, I didn’t have any kind of philosophical thoughts. I focused on getting to the end of the trail or finding the specks of colour on the sheer cliff face. But I knew I was experiencing something that would take me time to process. I tried to collect as many sensory details as I could while there: running my fingertips on the coarse layers of the Canyon, committing to memory the scent of sap, learning the difference between Ponderosa and Sugar Pines.

When I came home, I re-read my pages, and only when I reflected on my experiences did the existential crisis come crashing down like a tidal wave. To be fair, I’ve had my first existential crisis when I was about six and had them relatively often since. But this has been a strong one. For several days, I felt as if nothing anyone ever said could have any meaning compared with the vastness of our planet, which is a speck of dust in the universe. I was gasping for meaning. It took me a while and a lot of self-care, using all the tools I’ve gathered over decades of therapy, to accept it and move on (for now).

I find myself clutching at previous writers’ words. For instance, having an existential crisis or self-dissolution in response to the vastness of nature is apparently a common reaction, described by the concept of “the sublime” in philosophical and romantic writings. I’m not the first to experience this. But other writers’ words are not why I blog, not why I became a writer.

I feel like I cannot trust my own perception. I’m not clever enough or eloquent enough to find adequate words to explain this silent, immobile force of nature. I cannot solve this riddle of existence: why am I here? I intellectualise the experience, try to explain cause and effect. Is that why we tame nature: an attempt to subdue this terrible feeling that we are insignificant? Is the entire American Project basically an attempt to domesticate the continent's vastness into manageable landscapes?

That’s all been done before, though, by much cleverer writers. What’s become very clear to me over my years of hiking expeditions is that these are futile attempts. We cannot tame nature. We exploit it instead, erase it into submission, endangering our very survival in the process. I cannot abide by this path of thinking. Finally, after days of angst, I compromise on simply sitting with my feelings.

Sitting with my feelings had produced no insights. I mean, at some point I settled into “I can’t control the meaning, I can only control my actions”, but I have nothing to allay this fact, that I am insignificant in the Grand Scheme of Things. It reminded me of the story of the boy chucking starfish back into the water one by one. The old man says, “But the beach is full of them; you are not making a difference”. And the boy keeps chucking starfish back into the water. “Made a difference for that one,” he says. Am I comfortable with only making a difference for this one? I don’t know. But it’s what I can do right now: cook a nutritious meal for my family, tidy up my desk, light a pine-scented candle and write a blog post about my travels.