Tethers and Eddies
You cannot step into the same river twice
-Heraclitus
I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics.
-Richard Feynman
Deep in the Grand Canyon, shadows rose up and descended like dark curtains against the stone. Early morning brought a lip of light to the rim which found its way down to the river by mid-morning. Late afternoon dropped the shadows, slow and steady, until the mouth of the canyon closed to the sun and we lived again in the dark. We were on a sixteen-day raft trip down the Colorado river in a spring of poor snow melt and war. Below the rim there was no internet or daily news. I found it hard at first to be present, due to my own worries about falling out of the raft and drowning, and the challenges of being outside all day in storms, heat and frigid water, with no respite at night from blowing sand as we slept under the stars.
There was so much to experience but what stays with me is the mysterious— light from the water against stone from deep in the earth’s crust, and ghost sightings in slot canyons, recounted in stories read to us by guides before bed.
Mystery abounds in our understanding of life in this universe. Although physicists can create equations and probabilities about how the subatomic world works, they admit to no agreed upon concept of reality when it is not being observed. Quantum mechanics has dramatically changed our understanding of reality by revealing the important interconnectedness between the observer and the observed. Prior to the 20th century, Newton’s classic physics gave us confidence about the physical world, stating that forces and particles and waves could be measured and understood as fixed realities. Gravity, mass and movement of particles and waves were predictable, measurable and explained by equations. Quantum mechanics upended those theories, replacing them with a field that is rife with probabilities, and paradox, deepening the mystery about what is real.
Months before the trip, stashes of gear overflowed on the floor. Shade hat and oar gloves, sunglasses that wrap. Headlamp, splash jacket, non-polluting soap. I tended my fears about the trip, which presented its dark lists of risks when I most needed to sleep. I would turn seventy-three on the voyage down the Colorado River, my first river rafting experience ever. Years prior, I almost drowned in the Chama River in New Mexico, pinned underwater against stone by an overturned canoe. Fear reminded me of the dark wet cold, where I was unimaginably calm while starting to drown. Fear faithful to what ifs: injury, disease, mistakes. I tried to soothe it like a child of mine, breathing in box shapes. I lay awake for hours like this, imagining the layered walls towering, and a river of stars above. The massive yawn in the earth.
My mother had been preparing to die for over a year, on and off hospice, having moved into a nursing home from assisted living. On her regular walk one day, she fell on the sidewalk and fractured her right humerus. Prior to the accident, my independent mother often walked five miles a day, cooked for her friends, attended book groups and was active in the church she helped to start. Her life changed radically afterwards, due to Covid and the fact that her injury prevented her from being able to live on her own. She stayed with us while we sold her house and her car, packed up the life she had lived as a single woman for decades. Her once richly full life eroded away over the following four years. As her only daughter and oldest child, her caregiving fell to me and my wife, and she resented us greatly for the loss of her home, her independence, her hiking boots. We bathed and fed her for many months in New Mexico before and after surgery to repair her shattered right humerus, then moved her back to Colorado to live in a retirement home where she could move up the tiers of increased care when needed. Her four sons were her fantasy princes, ready, she imagined, to rescue her from life’s unraveling. They visited from time to time, made her day. They had been raised differently, not as caregivers, but as money makers, world shakers, an artist. She and I had a history of closeness and conflict, and held widely different views of reality, especially related to past events and family faultlines and fractures. A short time after her death, my closest friends and chosen family invited me to raft in the Grand Canyon.
Before the trip, I dreamt the canyon walls were animate—stone particles vibrating and alive, like aspen in a breeze. Time pressed earth into strata, which flitted like bats at dusk in the dream. Nothing was solid: fields of dancing sand, light reflected on water. Once in the Grand Canyon, I continued to sort through my gear. Each day was a new list of what was lost: random green sock, fleece mitt, toothpaste. I was tethered to possessions, missing and found, that reminded me of home, gear that felt essential to survival. The canyon, though, is a monastery of impermanence, with daily lessons about letting go. I hoped to relieve my obsessions about things, to widen my view, to let my mind soar, as the condors did daily, above.
On the Colorado, slow pools of swirling eddies could snag a raft into circling for a while. Fish swam in water clear as glass. Just below the flow’s surface—tadpoles in mud, chubs. Freezing cold, a river green as grass, in confluence with the powder blue of the little Colorado. Calcium carbonate dissolves from limestone in springs along its flow creating its stunning hue. The confluence harbors a rich ecosystem of endangered fish and native plants and wildlife. It is a sacred place to some of the eleven sovereign indigenous nations associated within the canyon. The Hopi place their emergence into the world from a spring nearby.
All morning the descending notes of the canyon wren cascaded down slopes above. You could cook a cake on a hot plate of flat black slab at midday. Condors and eagles flew in thermals above the cliffs, and on sandy banks, great blue herons sat like sentries, sword beaks at the ready. Agave stalks with tall, dried blooms like craggy spinal cords, swayed on windy slopes. Lizards performed push-ups on branches at camp above our heads. Clouds of bats filled the sky as light waned. Frogs croaked from their stoops in the mud as the river’s flow became invisible. Shooting stars made arcs of light in night’s milky dark. In the morning, flowers the color of cream opened their blooms in the sand.
On the day before my birthday, I washed my hair in freezing water, standing on a stone. My old stories, pressed down by the spell of generations, dissolved in the liquid that keeps us alive. This was my first birthday where my mother no longer lived on earth and my grief was intense. Who was I as a daughter without my mother to tend? Could even the oldest stories float back to bedrock, be undone? I also didn’t need to prove my worth any longer to a mother who was disappointed in my queerness and disliked the fact that I spoke out about the violence in our family, shining the light on history she wanted to forget.
I like to think that I can reach out and touch ‘reality’ and that it doesn’t go anywhere, just because I am not looking at it. According to quantum mechanics, reality doesn’t exist until it is observed. Experiments in quantum mechanics reveal strange behavior of the very small, such as photons, particulate elements of light which are massless subatomic particles that travel at the speed of light. Light, then, is observed in particles, and also exists as a wave. Or at least, those are the aspects of light we can observe. It may be that light is neither, but instead a mysterious force that shows up in paradoxical forms when measured. In classical physics, electrons, the components of atoms, and photons, components of light, are thought to exist in certain states regardless of how they are observed. In truth, a singular reality cannot be pinned down. One way this is demonstrated is by the famous double slit experiment, where photons or electrons are sent through two slits in a container one at a time and measured on a detector behind the slits. The pattern that develops after sending individual electrons or photons through the slits is a wave-like pattern of interference, (when waves interfere with each other, they either boost the waves in each other or cancel each other out), making bands of white and black appear on the detector. In this case, each electron or photon had to have to have traveled through both slits simultaneously as a wave would. When a sensor is placed on each slit to see which electrons travel through which sensor, the resulting observation on the final detector shows a pattern of particles with no interference, meaning the electrons being measured at each slit now behave only as particles, not as waves. In other words, the electrons and photons show up in different states depending on how they were measured. They may exist as clouds of possibility until a sensor detects and ‘interacts’ with them. It should be noted that physicists don’t agree on what ‘measurement’ actually means in quantum mechanics and there are still many unanswered questions.
In the canyon’s reflected light, we observed layered walls that were rough, sculpted. Pink, mauve, green, red—a palette of sandstone, shale and limestone from ancient seas and floodplains. Each new layer of stone was a delight: A clue of textured color would appear underneath the already seen, then emerge fully into the light as we descended further down river. The sun painted shadows on the walls and slunk back down in the afternoons. Seeps dripped from rocky overhangs into small ponds of sand spikes on cliffs, below maiden hair ferns, which hung on the wet stone walls. Always ahead, the rumbling of water churned white—a storm of rapids that tussled our rafts, as we clung to straps bound to the frame and ropes on the yellow rubber outer rim. The force of water hit solidly, knocking us about, sometimes sending us flying out of the rafts. We were drenched and scoured out. We learned to lean into the hit, take a bite right out of it.
I had not learned healthy ways to deal with my fear and pain as a child or as an adult. Instead, my tendency was to avoid facing the perceived threat and tender it with endless worry and rumination. In my early thirties, I told my mother I was inseminating to get pregnant with my girlfriend. She told me ‘the world already has too many children,’ and that my desire to get pregnant was a selfish one. She adored the grandchildren she had and supported my brothers as they made families of their own. I was devastated by her hostility and lack of support, and instead of leaning into the conflict, I never told her how much that hurt. I never gave birth, though did adopt my daughter in my mid-forties.
Every time I was hit by a large wave, I grew more sturdy and sure, excited for more of the same. The river’s power was a force that could harm, but I embraced it with a sense of courage and aliveness hidden in me until the water made it visible. With each impact, the thoughts of those earlier harms lost their rough edges and darkness.
The stars at night were brighter than I had ever seen. Milky light, meteors, satellites orbiting—these were our bedtime shows. I had been reading about how carbon atoms are assembled in the heat of stars and shed in expanding clouds of gas and dust to become the building blocks of life on earth. Our bodies, sedimentary stone, planets, lizards and fish, are mostly composed of carbon atoms in particular patterns. When we die, the carbon atoms reconfigure to make other patterns. Carbon atoms that were assembled in stars from lighter atoms fused together billions of years ago, live in us now. Death is carbon’s invitation to find new forms.
One day we saw a bighorn sheep’s carcass on the bank, ribs exposed, hide rotted around the crook of her neck. A ewe, fallen from the cliff above, twisted, horned head at an odd angle. Eye slots full of air among a froth of willow. It was sad to witness her torn and broken form alone in the sand and stone. It was lambing season, and ewes and lambs were often spotted near spring-fed waterfalls and on steep slopes leaping from boulder to boulder. Once, a ram stood on a rise above us, preening, scratching his butt on a boulder while keeping a close eye on us below. We saw pink rattlesnakes that didn’t strike when we nearly stepped on them, and dragonflies the colors of sky. Spiderwebs, a fragile gloss between branches of cottonwood, willow. Waterfalls surrounded by prints of the thirsty—deer, sheep and bobcat. Moonlight painted graffiti on dark stone. Dawn brought the single note wake-up call of a Say’s Phoebe. Granaries, which hid stored seeds, sat high in cliffs above ruins of homes of the ancient Puebloans who once populated the canyon during summer months and grew corn, beans and squash near the river’s edge. As the powerful Colorado River loses water and force through drought and overuse, what seeds will we leave for new possibilities and remedies for life in the canyon? What will we be able to shed, to heal, create, and fight for, to keep magic alive on our planet?
Physicists don’t agree about notions of reality. They write equations that predict the results of experiments on the tiniest of particles, compute the probabilities of locating them in space. Some theories suggest there may be many parallel realities, many different worlds of possibility, existing simultaneously, sparking debate and wonder. My sense of myself as an adventuresome hiker had to be shed as I learned to ask for help with handholds on thin cliffs above the canyon. I let go of lost socks, and obsession about gear as I was pushed to my limits physically on the trip. My anger towards my mother softened into a sense of tenderness, thanks to the river’s alchemy and its invitations to grieve.
Toward the end, my mother spent days sleeping, then rousing to eat a meal. Calls from hospice increased until the day came when they said to come. I didn’t make it in time for her death. Her body lay in a darkened room with one brother and a priest, waiting for my arrival. The room was quiet and still. I sat with her and touched her stone-like arm, said my goodbyes. We never made peace about the past; she remained resentful to the end about my role in taking away her independence and I about her denial of events in the past. The past few years had been hard on both of us and had created chasms, unbridged. Entanglement in quantum mechanics maintains that particles affect the states of each other, even when light years apart. Perhaps now, we could untangle all the misunderstandings and judgements we had held and let go. I felt empty, emptied of the future of us.
Her face was clear and calm, waxen. And into her open mouth, flowed light. Everything slowed, stilled. She was out of time, freed from the clock. Now without a body, the pattern known as my mother could be a breeze, a bird, a threshold of slot canyons that empty into the river’s heart. A rift in her lived-in rooms. Those of us left behind, still circling in eddies, tethered to memories, grief and regret. What I experienced after my trip down the canyon—and a river of memories—was a freedom and confidence I had never felt before.
Eventually, we descended into the chaos of Vishnu Schist, over a billion years old, scalloped black, veined with granite, situated below columns of basalt and lava flows. Earth’s basement, hot and shiny in the sunlight. We found a place on a steep bank of sand where pieces of the earth’s mantle sat in large and small boulders of iron oxide. We held them, heavy in our hands, fragments of the earth’s inner sanctum, rarely seen on the crust. How was that possible? How is life even possible? Are we only real because of interactions with each other and our environment? Full of paradox, we are ‘solid’ bodies that love, hug, and fight, made of star parts that are mostly space.
As we descended deeper into the canyon, its walls opened into giant mouths and waves grew wilder against the rafts. We tethered our sturdy crafts to trees or stone at night and for hikes during the day. Endless magic: pink rattlesnakes, canyon wren, black schist over a billion years old, being eroded away by water and windblown sand. Nothing to hold onto but straps on a rubber raft in this momentary journey, with its paradoxes and mysteries. When I returned home, I noticed my fingerprints had been completely scoured off.
GO deeper
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GO deeper 〰️
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