Page 38 of Every Beautiful Mile

“Fine, an impressive hole in the ground.”

His smile is faint and fleeting.

I sit next to him and hug my knees to my chest.

“It’s insane, really. Water flowing the way the water just flows, did all of this.” I stare out into the bigness of it, trying to comprehend how such a place exists.

“Oh yeah, this place has some major jubilee vibes, right?”

Marin smiles, her short sandy hair blowing softly in the breeze. She’s right. Dickey would most definitely say the formation of the Grand Canyon is no different from the random abundance of mullet on the Mobile Bay shore.

From where we sit, we can see a fenced-off lookout below us. The people that fill it—doing everything from taking photos with expensive cameras to leaning on the railing with teary eyes—are as unique as the formations they gape at. Big guys who rode in on motorcycles, covered in tattoos and leather vests, look on with the same expression as the elderly woman with a walker. Gay, straight, old, young, Mexican, Asian, and everything in between. A dozen different languages are being spoken at once as the darkness starts winning the war against the light in the sky.

Wandering souls, all pulled here for one reason or another, looking for beauty, meaning, and whatever else they can find in a cracked-open section of the earth. Beauty that exists regardless of the pain and emptiness each of us feels in the holes in our hearts that make us human.

A deluge of emotion washes over me at the enormity of it all.

“Mind if I pull up a seat?”

An old man stands behind us with a collapsed canvas chair and a wide smile.

“By all means. Seems to be big enough for all of us.”

I smile, gesturing toward the canyon in front of us.

He’s wearing a navy-blue Mackinac Island sweatshirt that pulls tightly across his belly and a hat that says World’s Best Grandpa! over a head of short gray hair. He drops into his chair and sighs at the view.

“Don’t see stuff like this in Iowa!” he says with a chuckle.

“Florida either,” I reply.

“My wife always wanted to see this place, but we never made it. Cancer took her in January,” he says to the emptiness.

I don’t say anything, thinking of Travis and him also never seeing it.

“My wife always said that the Grand Canyon proved God is a glass half-full kind of guy.”

“How so?”

“My wife, Margie, she said that you wouldn’t go to the Grand Canyon and look for what’s not there. You’d look for what’s left. Said the Colorado River ran through here and took a lot, but what it left behind is the real treasure. She’d say, ‘Ned, canyons aren’t about the absence. They are about what remains. Artifacts of survival and patience and slow weathering. If people looked over that edge and only looked for the missing ground, they wouldn’t see the beauty. It’s God’s glass half-full.’ She was ever the optimist, right until the end.”

His friendly eyes look sad, but still—he smiles.

“My husband wanted to come here but also never made it. He would have probably agreed with Margie.”

“Then you know,” he says.

I look at him, not sure I do, and he reads my silence as his signal to go on.

“You know about the people who come into our lives with their love and change us as much as the Colorado River changed this unforgiving landscape. The ones that cut right through you and carve you into who you are supposed to be. They move slow and steady, eroding what we were away. What they leave behind are the ruggedly beautiful remains that remind us forever of their existence.”

“The rivers that run through us,” I say.

“The rivers that run through us.”

Then we’re quiet, because ultimately, words don’t matter when sitting in a place like this. My days have been easier, but as I stare out into the humongous gorge that stretches out in front of us, I feel Travis’ absence as much as I feel the ground beneath me. As sure as I’m sitting on this ledge, he is not.

“Mom, listen, about earlier.” Finn fumbles with a small rock in his hands. “I shouldn’t have said that stuff. I was just hot and...”

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