A few weeks back I shared an image of myself on Instagram. It was taken by someone I had only met a few days before. He was a complete stranger when I picked him up on the side of the road outside of Page, Arizona and he was still a stranger when I dropped him off a week later near Tucson. When I dropped him off I had yet to find out his name, he only went by Mammoth.
I had handed Mammoth my camera and tiptoed to the edge of the biggest hole in the world before turning around to pose as the sun shone silver through a thin veil of clouds that hung over what was likely Las Vegas. That was the second evening in a row that we had visited this perch on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
The day before we hiked a short way into the canyon when I stumbled onto a ledge that jutted off a cliff, leaving 1,500 feet of exposure below my boots. Yet, I felt comfortable on the table of solid rock made millions of years ago. Mammoth and I were not alone on the precipice, as a small tree had eeked out a living in an even smaller crack in the massive rock.
Junipers salt the rim of the massive scar, yet few had tenacity like this one. Stunted by lack of rain and nutrients and manicured by powerful storms that race across the canyon, this tree bore testimony to the hardships of a devilishly harsh land. Its age we could not be sure, but its bark told stories. From its perch, this tree, insignificant in stature, had looked into time and then became it.
Mammoth and I became entranced with our partner on the cliff. We set up shop, tripods placed in just the right spot as the sun began to fall to its knees in the mid-winter afternoon. We lounged on the stone platform, contemplating geology, hydrology, meteorology, politics, religion, and, above all, time. Second, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenniums; they all make sense to us. 1,800,000,000 years is unfathomable.
Our own cameras exploited the medium of time. When we had first come across the noble juniper, the sun was blasting the waxy needles of the tree. Click-clack. The mirror in my camera hammered up and down in just 1/320th of a second, exposing the outside world to the sensor 30 times quicker than the blink of an eye.
I lay back down on the outcropping and take another swill of wine from the box I had packed out before handing it to Mammoth for his share. The sun kept its slow death march to the horizon, drummed to the beat of our cameras exposing their sensors for fractions of seconds. Before long, the sun became more and more exhausted and it began to seek the sweet release of the horizon line with urgency.
Click--clack. The sun isn’t the only one getting lazier. Our cameras were slowly starving for light. At first, they soldiered on trying to maintain their previously established rate of fire. Now, though, those clouds over the western skyline began to filter the sun’s power even more. The last bit of fire in the sky allowed for 1/200th of a second.
The brutality if the sun was diminishing by the second. Click-----clack. The golden blast of the fireball was now gone. 1/60th of a second. Distant clouds hanging over the North Rim chased the sun, the upper altitudes reaching for it like fingers of a desperate man. Click-----------clack. 1/25th of a second.
Click-------------clack. The sun was just a memory now as cold air began racing off the plateau to fill the void below us. The only trace of the sun was the alpenglow evenly illuminating the deepening sky. 1/5th of a second.
As with all things, there is an end to even the power of the sun. It fought valiantly to spare the sky from the complexities of the universe beyond us. It poured every once into lasting just a few more seconds before succumbing to the powers the night. Mammoth and I sat silently as the last of the light of the 3rd of February, 2018 died.
Click--------------------------------clack. Thirty seconds.
