Aging My Way
I’m currently reading Ann Zwinger’s Wind and Rock: The Canyon Lands of Southeastern Utah. It’s a landscape that I spent many hours exploring when I lived in Northern Utah, back when hiking was part of my life.
The book is one of more than 20 on natural history that Ann wrote before she died in 2014. Another one is Down Canyon, which is about her rafting trip through the Grand Canyon in the mid-1990s. I read it after my own 1990 trip through the canyon, but before a second adventure rafting the Colorado through the canyon in 1999, which was a 60th birthday present to myself.
The two trips were entirely different: The first was for the pure adventure and thrill of the river’s wild rapids. The second for the experience of the canyon itself. I couldn’t help but be influenced in how I saw it because of Ann’s detailed descriptions in Down Canyon of the little things that she saw as much a part of the canyon as the river itself.
Her book made me more aware of the whistle of a canyon wren, which I sometimes awoke to in the mornings, and such things as the orange globemallow and blue penstemon wildflowers that added color to the canyon floor.
Meanwhile, I’m reading Wind and Rock because in late September, I will once again be driving through southern Utah, through places like the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument, Garden of the Gods and Lake Powell. I suspect Ann’s book will once again have an influence on how I see the red-rock landscape as we drive through it.
Books are magical. Don’t you agree?
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
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