My Last Visit to the Grand Canyon — A Post - Pandemic Sabbatical

After all that solitude during quarantine, I pointed my car west toward one of my favorite corners of the lower 48: the Southwest — New Mexico and Arizona. There is something about that part of America that has always felt different to me. Spiritual, somehow. I can’t quite explain it, and perhaps that’s the point. Somewhere after Albuquerque, as I head west on I-40, something changes. The landscape opens up, the colors become more ancient, and I feel an almost inexplicable surge of positive energy.

Somewhere between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon - where the road gets long and the pines begin. Exactly where I am supposed to be.

I often think about the Native people who walked these lands long before highways, cities, and state lines existed. You can feel that history if you slow down enough to listen. I don’t want to live there. Funny enough, I don’t even think I could. But every few years, I feel the need to return. A pilgrimage, perhaps.

On this particular trip, I slept beside the highway in a tent mounted above my car. It sounds less glamorous than a hotel, but it was one of the best nights of sleep I’ve ever had. There were other campers nearby. Strangers, all of us traveling in different directions, carrying different stories. We met, shared food, traded road stories, laughed a little, and watched the evening settle over the desert. The next morning, we packed up and went our separate ways. And that was it. We would never see each other again. There is something beautiful about that kind of encounter. No obligations. No history. No reason to pretend to be anything other than who you are. Just a few hours of shared humanity before the road pulls everyone in a different direction.

And then there is the Grand Canyon.

Where the river does what it has done for six million years, whether we’re watching or not.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see some extraordinary places in my life, but the Grand Canyon has a way of making you feel very small — and strangely important at the same time. You stand there looking into something millions of years old, and suddenly your own worries seem rather temporary. That, to me, is one of the gifts of travel.

At the rim, looking into millions of years, and your own worries feel very small.

People sometimes tell me, “We visited America. We saw New York, Miami, and Los Angeles.” Those are wonderful cities. But I always tell them: you saw America, but you didn’t really meet her.

If you want to know America, drive it. Get off the interstate occasionally. Stop in the little towns. Eat where the locals eat. Talk to people at gas stations. Sleep under the stars. Take the wrong road once in a while. America isn’t just its great cities. Its soul is scattered across thousands of miles of highway, desert, prairie, mountain, forest, diner, small town, and roadside conversation. You don’t truly understand a country by looking at its skyline. You understand it by meeting its people — and by getting lost in the landscape between the skylines.

After all the solitude during quarantine, the open road felt less like an escape and more like a reunion with the world. It gave me miles upon miles, a sense of freedom I had almost forgotten, and more than a few unforgettable nights.

But perhaps what I remember most is the feeling I get somewhere west of Albuquerque:

The road ahead.

The desert.

The ancient land.

And that strange, wonderful feeling that, for a little while, I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.