Desperation Point

I … hurried on toward the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The canyon is the most famous vista in the park, the subject of a well-known painting by Thomas Moran that hangs in the Capitol building in Washington DC. Moran’s watercolor sketches, produced during an 1871 expedition to the area, helped convince Congress to make Yellowstone our first national park.

There are several places to view the canyon, but I choose Inspiration Point, a famous spot where a rocky promontory projects out beyond the normal line of the canyon wall, making it easy to see for miles both upstream and downstream. From the swarming parking lot, I followed the crowd out onto the promontory. Then I stopped breathing.

Yards away, the sheer canyon wall plunged down a thousand feet or more. My mind projected the event over and over in slow motion: sliding to the ground, rolling to the edge, tumbling over the precipice, bouncing off the trees, and splatting on the boulders far below.

I am a descendant of the kings of Scotland (and I’d like it back, thank you), so you would think I might have inherited a Highland gene or two. But apparently not. My mother was also afraid of heights. And she hated seafood and loved potato chips, as I do. As we learn about our genomic architecture, I suspect more and more of human behavior will be attributed to DNA. It is not in our stars, but in our cells, that we are queasy.

I was frozen in terror. But as usual, the people around me felt nothing of my fear. While I stood quaking on the rocky cliff, everyone else strolled blithely out to the rim and leaned over the railing to enjoy an unobstructed view of the grandeur of the canyon and the falls beyond. Some perched far out on the rocks, just a teeter (or totter) away from doom.

I closed my eyes and steadied myself. I had driven three thousand miles to see this sight. Nothing was going to make me miss it. But my knees did not agree.

But my feet are braver than my knees. Slowly they inched toward the brink of the precipice. Each time someone brushed past me, I winced and halted, desperately wanting to sink down right where I was, close my eyes, and crawl back to my car. My feet lurched forward, never leaving the ground, hugging the rocky surface. At any moment, I imagined, the ledge would give way and I would plunge to my death. But bracing myself on the metal railing, shuffle by stiff halting terrified and excruciatingly cautious shuffle, I managed to move onto the upper level of the viewing platform.

Out on the platform, my fear was subsumed by the astonishing spectacle. I still felt terrified. I just didn’t care as much. It was the aesthetic experience on the grandest scale. There was nothing to do but see, and the seer was the least of the equation.

Over thousands of years, natural forces (including the Yellowstone River, which flows through and out of the canyon), have carved an enormous v-shaped chasm deep into the mountains. At the south end of the canyon, the current drops hundreds of feet into the canyon basin in two magnificent torrents. The Upper Falls descend straight down over one hundred feet. The Lower Falls plunge more than three hundred feet to the canyon floor. To the north, the still backward river flows, shining for miles past the sharp-edged mountains, winding through the base of the cleft on the way to Paradise.

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