Living Deliberately

Down in the canyon, you notice how short the sunshine is, tall agate walls rising around you, your slice of sky an acute angle compared to the bowl of heavens over the tablelands above.
Ten miles down, the dusty dirt seeps through your shoes, hennas your feet and ankles with soft silt. Your footprints and the mules’ sit side by side on the path, the beasts of burden next to the beasts whose burdens they bear.
Here, the water redefines colors you thought you knew—it is more turquoise than turquoise, more stunning than the bluest eye you’ve ever seen. In these waterfalls, infused with limestone and travertine, the Platonic ideal of water melds with the real thing. This is a place where myth feels true, where paradisiacal gardens walled off from the world seem a likely place for humanity to have begun its world-weary game.
Havasupai means “the people of the blue-green water”, and is the name of the American Indian tribe inhabiting this small tributary of the Grand Canyon where I have brought the seven teenagers I teach in order to show them another world within their country. I want them to be transported from their California comfort zones, to discover who they are when they are far from home, to sleep with nothing between themselves and the stars, to face fear and find resilience. The Havasupai are one of the only tribes living on their ancestral lands (after fighting for centuries for the right to do so) and successfully preserving their language. I want to show my students an ancient place, and the simplicity (and poverty) in which the Havasupai live – the price paid by first peoples in an invaded land.
Most of the students find their way back to the frolicking of their childhoods here, but not Anna, whose anxiety gnaws at her, a dog with a dry bone. I have just found sleep when she wakes me, asking me to help her stave off the darkness. This is the first time she has ever asked me for help, and we walk up the dusty path flanking the river, absorbing the starlight and the sounds of crickets. She wonders if she will ever not be scared. I say someday. I say keep trying. She says I’ll be a great mom, which I file away with the other bits of seldom praise teenagers give as gifts. We sit waiting for the moon to rise, but the canyon walls are so high it never comes. We walk back to the tent where the other girls are sleeping, and I read to her until “Anna, are you awake?” yields nothing but soft breathing and the sound of blue water running through the dark.