The Seventh Week - Day 38: The Grand Canyon Puts Me Back In My (Oh So Small) Place

The Seventh Week - Day Thirty-Eight: 

The Grand Canyon Puts Me Back In My (Oh So Small) Place

7/18/11:

July eighteenth rolled around and I found myself partaking in two favorite childhood activities: playing with mud and wielding a water-soaker. Well, sort of.  Noah, Yelena and I were back up at Grand Canyon National Park, continuing to stabilize the Tusayan Ruins. Today, however, I found myself promoted from thwacking rocks to mixing concrete and spraying water.

In the 1930s, when the ruins were first excavated, Portland cement was used to preserve the Tusayan Pueblo’s room blocks. However, Portland cement was stronger than the original stones and ended up cracking and damaging many of them. In order to combat this, the Grand Canyon archies today must methodically mix and test the cement they plan on using, while also taking note of the cement’s color and texture (as they want to maintain the most authentic appearance possible). These archies have developed a fairly consistent mixture: four parts soil to two parts sand to one part cement (and they do get awfully excited when talking about it!).

It was my distinguished duty to assist in this mixing process, and along with the other archies, I donned plastic gloves and grabbed a shovel. After creating a few tubs full of cement, we hauled the lot of it over to the ruins and began re-mortaring the structure. The work we had done earlier (rock thwacking at its finest) was pretty important at this stage, as we relied on the markings and notes we had made on site photos to determine which rocks needed to be sealed with cement.

Glop of cement in hand, I began the work of filling in cracks and bonding stone, Noah or Yelena periodically spraying the cement to keep it from drying too quickly. When the exhaustion of the job overtook one of us, we traded off, although admittedly, squelching cement between my fingers and menacing Noah with it was most definitely my preferred task.

Our cementing was progressing at a decent rate, and then the monsoon came a-rollin’ in. We all hastily covered the parts of the site still undergoing work and headed for the government vehicles. After a prolonged bit of rain, the Grand Canyon archies decided a brief jaunt to Desert View Watchtower was a more worthwhile endeavor then our current non-activity.

At seventy feet, Desert View Watchtower is the highest point on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Designed by Mary Colter and built in 1932 to emulate a prehistoric Native American tower, Desert View perches close to an epic drop into the Grand Canyon. “From Desert View…aptly named because of the view to the east of the Painted Desert…you can see the Colorado River make a big bend and continue to the west, the North Rim more than 10 miles away, and a panoramic view for well over 100 miles on a clear day.”

We were by no means visiting Desert View on a clear day, but the vista was still mesmerizing. The canyon was caught up in sheets of rain, heavy clouds laboring slowly across the horizon, as in the distance, bluer skies and marshmallow clouds made themselves tantalizingly known.

Once again, I found myself taken in by something that seemed far too rough and too untamed to exist in our world today. The Grand Canyon, carving itself out of the earth in rocky grooves, seemed to me too beautiful and too wild.

And I was so very, very small.

Photos: 1. Tusayan Ruins 2., 3., & 4. Views from Desert View Watchtower