Lying on soft sand beside a salt cedar one vertical mile down is as isolated a place as can be found in 21st-century America, and I don’t think about fish. I watch the stars creep toward the shadowed rim. Formal education says that the stars aren’t actually moving. I learned about the heliocentric universe in grade school, when our teacher brought a model of the solar system to class. She turned a hand crank that spun a series miniature bicycle chains, causing plastic planets to spiral around a lifeless, tiny sun painted off-white. It’s the first time I can remember being disappointed by science.
We are the only species capable of knowing information to be true without physically experiencing any evidence of that truth. Without that capacity, we wouldn’t have the divine grace of monastic clerics or the supreme convenience of microwave ovens. We also wouldn’t be acidifying the oceans or salivating and sobbing over credit default swaps. Still, it remains a verifiable fact that every creature consumes and craps, some more spectacularly than others.
Dawn brings bats feeding on the same insects that sustain the fish. The emerging sun paints a story on the walls of the canyon that only certain people can read. The hallmark striations of pastel sandstone, when properly decoded, say our arid Southwest swam under shallow seas a mere 300 million years ago. Down here by the river, the deepest layer of remaining sedimentary rock, Tapeats sandstone, abuts Vishnu schist, a dark, metamorphic layer spidered with sparkling veins of Zoroaster granite. According to geologists, that rock is more than 2 billion years old. It’s part of the welded base of the continent itself, the subfloor of America. As I deflate and roll up my plastic sleeping pad and stuff away my synthetic-fill sleeping bag, I stare at this texture change.
“I float all the way to the mouth of the creek with my head in the water and my eyes open, suckers parting around me.”
The line where sandstone meets schist represents a billion-year gap in our knowledge. Those same geologists who conjure scale by hundreds of millions of lifetimes dubbed it the Great Unconformity, proving once and for all that poetry and science are hemispheres of the same brain.
Hoping to catch fish on a fly rod in this muddy torrent is a fool’s errand, but standing beneath the Great Unconformity fills me with glandular, irrational hope. After all, this wilderness corridor survives at the doorstep of Las Vegas.
In the heat of the afternoon we wrestle our boats into the mouth of a narrow slot canyon. Turquoise water swirls before succumbing to the dark flow of the mainstem. This is Havasu Creek, an honest-toGod spring-fed desert oasis. The water is rich in calcium carbonate, tinting the river blue and painting the substrate brilliant white.
We secure the boats at the mouth of the creek and scramble up a rock wall to a narrow goat path overlooking the first clear water I’ve seen. Hundreds of flannelmouth and bluehead suckers, some of them two feet long, hover and jockey in docile pools. Even from this height, I can see that the bright orange of their fins matches the sandstone walls around them—some of the last surviving native fish here, molded and painted by this place.
For reasons I can’t fully explain, I don’t race back to the raft for my fly rod. This trip has lived in my brain for more than a decade. I’ve studied the history, the geology, the hydrology, the fish. Over the previous months, I filled a notebook with research—how to navigate the biggest rapids, tips on identifying native plants, side hikes with waterfalls, and little-known fishing holes. But since immersing my body in the river that first morning, I’ve hardly cracked the cover.
I climb down to a rock beside the creek, close enough to study the psychedelic splatter marks on the backs of the flannelmouths, the steely, blunted snouts of the blueheads. Until now, these fish have existed for me as abstractions only. I don’t want to study them; I want to watch them. The difference isn’t semantic.
In the pool upstream, naked, hairy human animals shriek and splash. After what feels like a lot of stillness, my backside goes numb, but my head still isn’t empty, so I slip into the pool. Fish scatter, then settle. I float all the way to the mouth of the creek with my head in the water and my eyes open, suckers parting around me. I didn’t catch any fish, but I did experience them.
Miles Nolte took his first trip down the Grand Canyon to research this essay. He hopes it will not be his last.
