This spring, we hiked a couple thousand feet down into the natural embrace of this wonder of the world.
The Grand Canyon's constantly changing hues of red, brown and green were cloaked in a violet morning haze. Hawks and an endangered California condor floated on thermals of a warming day.
A few hundred feet below the rim we encountered prehistoric tracks fossilized into a rock that scientists think were made about 275 million years ago.
Time decompressed.
We ran our fingers across the tracks, the same fingers we later would use to text insta-photos of this natural wonder of the ages.
Technology summons us to life on Tweet street in 140-character microbursts. The 30-second sound bite has become too plodding.
As we left the canyon that weekend, I checked my work email. The first was from a politician pleading for $3 to beat a midnight deadline to beat back the evil forces that she said threatened your Medicare. Who knew $3 had such buying power?
After having just spent three calming days beneath a beautiful blue sky in the awesome patina of the Grand Canyon, that kind of false time compression and histrionic approach to a long-term challenge made our political system look particularly absurd.
How differently would we approach our collective problems if we convened town halls and subcommittees around a rock with 275 million-year-old tracks? If everyone tried to comprehend the message that this creature inadvertently left in the dust of prehistory, today's problems may not look so big or insurmountable, and our tolerance for one another might get stretched to a more accommodating place.
This was not my first trip to the Grand Canyon. Almost 27 years ago, I spent several days exploring it by foot and helicopter. I was a USA Today reporter working on a story about government cartographers who were mapping the last hard-to-get-to pockets of the country.
For obvious reasons, much of the 217-mile-long gash we call the Grand Canyon was one of those places. For days we hopped from butte to plateau, sometimes stumbling across markers and rock piles left by the one-armed explorer John Wesley Powell in 1869.
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I'm glad I kept my notes from that trip. Reading them anew gave great comfort in the knowledge that this year, at 56, I had the same awe for the canyon that I had as a young reporter. You should never get too old to be surprised.
Back then, I'd followed a legendary U.S. Geological Survey mapper named Jack Dyer as he marked latitude, longitude and elevation, and as he and his crew verified and corrected place names inside the canyon.
At one point, atop a narrow outcropping with a 360-degree view of the canyon's spectacular beauty, Dyer turned to me and said, "Makes you feel just a tiny bit small, don't it?"
I was glad that I felt just as small on this latest trip. My notes from both visits contained strikingly similar observations about the inevitability of time: that we get older, that Earth gets older, and that the truest legacy is tiny tracks to a better world to follow us.
Both of my notebooks on the canyon noted how red could turn to auburn to a shade of brown, depending on the time of day. Dyer's partner, Kenny Church, had told me, "You could come out here every day of your life and see her different."
How right he was. You marvel at how the scale of everything and the purity of the colors simply humble someone. You renew your respect for the natives who lived centuries in this very place and left its essence unchanged.
My notes from '84 describe the "heavy ground haze over the canyon ... a blue haze ... a solitary hawk rolls by ... browns and blues and slate grays and reds and scarlets and oranges."
Then, a quote from Dyer: "That spot where your little feet are standing - no white man has probably stood before."
It makes you appreciate the Teddy Roosevelts and fellow conservationists who thought generations ahead to preserve such places. It forces you to confront the absurdity of winning the moment versus the legacy that outlives you.
It forces you to know with certainty that some places are bigger than words or the petty problems that steal your moments.
The Grand Canyon is one of those places. It should be required viewing for everyone.
Chuck Raasch writes from Washington for Gannett. Contact him at craasch@gannett.com, follow him at http://twitter. com/craasch or join in the conversation at http://www.facebook.com/raaschcolumn.
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