I took out my new pair of hiking boots and laced them up. Outside, high feathery clouds arced in from the west, a portend of storms. I drove to Selah and turned onto a gravel road leading me closer to the Yakima River Canyon. Several miles later, I came upon a primitive parking lot that’s near a trailhead leading into the L.T. Murray Wildlife Area. One of my hiking books mentioned something about a chemical toilet, and emphasized there was scant water available — none at the trailhead and only a sip or two from a creek along the 12-mile Skyline Trail. I indeed found the toilet. It sat on a small bluff, and was riddled with bullet holes. An easy target for bored hunters. Not a good omen for a hike, I thought to myself.

Beyond the toilet, I could see the trailhead. There was no sign as promised by the hiking book, but the trail seemed well established. However, I could tell few had walked its rutted path in recent weeks. Tumbleweeds crowded the trail. I kicked some aside, hoping to clear a way for others to follow. I took several branches of the light brown tumbleweed in my hands, and hiked up the steep slopes. I passed by wild sage. To one side, a songbird called out, repeating its tender song as long as I would stand still. But I had to move on, and the song, so gentle to my ears, ended as abruptly as it had begun.

The air was now still except for the pounding of my boots on the dirt path and my labored breathing. I’m not a hiker, but I like to take long walks to think things out. On this morning in early October, I had much on my mind. Despite growing older, I have come to realize there’s little that has changed since the days of my youth and those of a white-haired man who’s logged 55 years. Age-old questions still seem to evade answering, the very same questions that pushed me 30 years ago to take on a far different hike, deep into the Grand Canyon.

Released from my two-year commitment to the Army, I was adrift, trying to reconnect with who I was and where I was headed. So my wanderings took me to the canyon’s North Rim the day before Thanksgiving in 1973. For our three-day trek, a longtime friend and I had stuffed our backpacks with cans of apricots, olives, bread and wool socks. I wanted to fast on Thanksgiving, a test of my spirit and a way, perhaps, to shine light upon what lay ahead. We left at sunrise, a whirlwind of snow and the swaying of pinyon pine to send us on our way. We had to cover two tough miles before reaching a desert plateau, walking through clouds of snow and mist along the South Kaibab Trail.

“The snow drifted along the path as our boots dug into the crushed rock seeking a hold, anything that would secure us from falling off the edge,” I wrote in my journal. “Wind whipped itself into a fury, torquing through the deeply cut caverns and driving snow like sharply honed pins into our faces.“It was nonetheless beautiful. Magical, like descending into a dream.” Our descent would take four hours, dropping us from 7,250 feet to 2,500 at the canyon’s floor. There, we would camp, and on Thanksgiving, I would fast and watch the clouds skitter by overhead and the gin-clear waters of Bright Angel Creek stir to life. I would find, much to my surprise, mystery and meaning in the cold, dank chambers of the canyon.

“My hands are as numb as they were two nights ago in the car. But what if my writing style becomes a bit cramped when I have been flying all day instead, soaring to be exact. “I am turning into a different wave length, a frequency that surfaces with the river swells, that glistens green as the moss, that is as permanent as granite and as brilliant as the sandstone.” Despite going without food, I found strength in just being there, alone in quiet meditation.

“The night has clawed her way past day. I can barely make out the lines of this paper. ... The blue-black clouds have all gone home. Above the sky is blue. A fat robin fusses with her feathers and bounds in nervous leaps searching for bits of food. “I am tired. My legs are tight and weary with the jarring climb up and down this valley of the underworld. Yet paradise could not be better, so here I will make my bed and dream about the other world that lays beyond the rim. “Darkness and the abyss — tonight they are my bedfellows.”

Of course, I left the wonders of the Grand Canyon and returned to a modern world filled with abundant food, chaotic motion and shrill sounds. I was no longer a “soul uplifted” as I wrote so eagerly in my journal, but as a lonely figure troubled by doubts, by the questions that still haunt me today: Who am I? Where am I headed? And, how do I get there? “Nothing changes,” I wrote a week after my trip to the Grand Canyon. “I am in a rut and yet last week I paraded myself around like I was a visiting guru from Orion’s Belt Buckle . “Face it. I am lost. Abandoned.”

It’s surely a human condition, this sense of loneliness. You never expect to find someone else as adrift as yourself, and yet there are many. There’s even a saint among us. On the threshold of her sainthood by the Catholic church two weeks ago, officials revealed Mother Teresa had also written about despair and a terrible separation, wondering if God had indeed abandoned her while she cared for the homeless and the dying in the slums of Calcutta. When does it end, this questioning? When do the doubts fade like the storm clouds that once parted over the Grand Canyon?

That is why I took that hike two weeks ago. I felt lost again. Abandoned. It had been a year since my youngest son had died, and I needed time to heal, to be alone. So I climbed the steep trail overlooking the Yakima River Canyon. I sat down on a bench made of rocks, and from my backpack — it was my son’s — I took out a rock that I had found earlier this summer on a beach at Lake Roosevelt. It was a place my son had played on years ago. I put that rock there within the strewn stones of L.T. Murray.

I will return in the spring. And amid the blooms of buttercups, yellow bells and lupine, I will retrieve the stone. I will see then how far I have traveled, and no doubt, ask the same questions that troubled me 30 years ago. For there is one thing that I have learned in all the miles I have walked: Truth comes in the asking. It always will.

October, 2003

We thank Mr. Hatton and the Yakima Herald Republic for permission to re-print this article.