Canyons Read Online Free Page A

we’re going, back up in the canyon and camp by the spring.”
    Brennan looked up at the canyon. It seemed to be all rocks and cliffs—he could see no evidence of any kind of trail at all. The bed of the canyon, which lay straight before them, seemed to be an old riverbed filled with enormous boulders. It was impassable. To get “back up in” the canyon it would be necessary to work along the river and Brennan couldn’t see a way to do it.
    “I don’t see a trail,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. He still did not want to ruin this for his mother.
    “Don’t worry. There’s one there,” Bill said. He gave each boy a sleeping bag to carry and shouldered a pack, motioned Brennan to take another pack and Brennan’s mother to pick up the rolled-up tents. “Really, it’s not hard at all.”
    Which was not quite accurate.
    It was true that it wasn’t impossible, as Brennan had thought, but it was hard enough so that Brennan had to help some of the smaller children in a few of the places—just to climb over boulders and cuts across the trail—and even Brennan’s mother felt it was a bit much.
    “Do we have to go all the way to the rear of the canyon?” she asked at one point.
    “Aren’t there some nice places, you know, closer?”
    But Bill insisted. They worked their way up on a small trail that led along the dry riverbed filled with bouldersand smooth, dishlike bowls made by an ancient river that had roared down the canyon. In some places newer runoff had cut across what little trail there was, carrying it down into the riverbed, and here they had to drop into the cuts and climb out the other side.
    Whatever else he is or isn’t, Brennan thought, watching Bill up ahead with the pack on his back and helping the small boys—he isn’t a wimp. Brennan was in good shape from running and he was soon breathing hard and his mother, who did not run or exercise very much, was almost staggering.
    It was the sort of place Brennan would have loved, had he not been with the rat pack, as he thought of them by this time. The canyon walls rose straight up into the late afternoon sky; towering red and yellow with dark streaks, one bluff feeding to another up into the mountains. To say it was beautiful, he thought, seeing them shoot up over him, was just not enough. The beauty seemed to come almost from inside his mind, so that he saw the cliffs and canyon walls as if he had almost painted them. Here and there a scraggly pine hung on to life and yucca plants and cactus in bloom made color spots that seemed to make the cliffs even more striking. Art, he thought—it was like art. The year before, he’d taken an art appreciation class—largely because he had to—and the teacher, a short woman named Mrs. Dixon, had spent many periods trying to get them to see the art.
    “See it,” she would say to them, holding up a picture of a painting by Rembrandt or van Gogh or Whistler. “Really
see
it, inside it—see the brushstrokes? See what the artist was trying to do?”
    And he tried that now, to really
see
the canyon, see what the artist was trying to do with it.
    God, he thought—that was the artist. What was God trying with this?
    Except that he was seeing the beauty with one eye while he was trying to watch ahead with the other and keep up with Bill and his mother and the kids, who were all over the place, sticking their fingers in cactus and screaming, throwing rocks down into the riverbed to hear them bounce, spitting off of boulders, hitting each other, jerking their pants down and mooning each other, throwing rocks at each other …
    It was hard to see the beauty.
    It took them almost two hours, until evening, to get up into a point where the canyon seemed to flatten out a bit and then another half hour of walking to get across a grassy area to a place where a trail dropped down into some small cottonwoods that were growing around a tiny pool of green, clear water.
    “Oh,” Brennan’s mother said.