A Camera in Canyon

"Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you..." 

--Theodore Roosevelt

"Dad, can I borrow the camera?"

It was like hearing the roar of a Tyrannosaurus, this sentence emerging from extinction.  We are in the depths of the Grand Canyon, just south of the Colorado River, seven miles into a 10-mile hike.  My 13-year old and I are trailing the rest of the crew, save for our guide who intentionally staggers behind.  

There are so many things about the sentence that grab me, not the least of which includes the fact that she spoke to me.  We have a fine relationship, but she's 13 and I am, well, her father.   But here along the Havasu Canyon there is nothing to do but talk, spot the occasional waterfall, eye the hikers who come and go, the sad mules hauling crates of groceries to the village, or backpacks for those unable to carry the load.

And so she speaks to me. 

And the sentence fills me up.  She asked if she can borrow "the" camera.  Not a camera, because in this wifi-ravaged section of the world there is only one camera and it is a camera.  One that you hold with two hands (no selfies), that zooms in and out with buttons labeled W and T.  Okay it's not exactly a Nikon and my pockets aren’t filled with yellow boxes of Kodak film, but for a moment we are back in time.

It is a question I asked my dad dozens of times as a kid.  Sometimes I probably got an "Okay" and others I may have been warned against the shrinking number of pictures in the roll.  Similarly, I warn her there will be no outlets and she needs to be careful how long the camera is on and how much battery she might use.  Make sure not to look at all the pictures because it's such a battery suck.

She excitedly snaps a shot of a distant waterfall.  The kind of photo that won't mean much in a day or so, nobody is in the picture, the distance too great to be memorable.  

But it was what we, as parents, wait for, the reason we take these trips.

Our days in the canyon are filled with moments like these, that mean little to the kids, but everything to us.  Watching them play cards in the day's fading light, the songs they sang along the trail, the games they invented as the miles of endless rock passed by.

There is this need within us to go back, not to a happier time, but a simpler one where our days are focused on fixing the next meal, the footing on a narrow pass, the depth of the water, warmth at night.

We pay money to leave our expensive lives and spend time in a place that escaped civilization.  

We meet a park ranger who brings us a jar of goo. He tells us about how the tree was struck by lightning and as they removed it he discovered the treasure of a honeycomb.  "Have a taste," he says with infectious enthusiasm.  And as we share a spoon with this tribe of travelers, we wonder how we could get this excited about our jobs?

Then we take seven hours to walk the miles out of the canyon, past the waterfalls, through the Indian reservation, around the rock formations and then up, up, up the narrow pass to the safety of the plateau, where we load our car.

An hour into the drive we hit a hotspot and everyone's phones begin chirping, lights blink, the car fills with voicemails and Snapchats, we clog the chargers.  Our children's eyes no longer lit by the golden sun of the canyon, but the green glow of their screens. And then they are gone, back to the future and into their world, and so are we.