If There are Angels - A Story for the Oregonian

N. Rakha, Colorado River Mile 134.5. Tapeats Creek.

On Sunday, April 14th, the Oregonian will publish an article I wrote about Kaitlin Kenny, the young woman who drowned in the Colorado River while on a 29-day river trip though the Grand Canyon.

I first wrote about Kaitlin on January 16th, four days after her friends woke at Tapeats Creek to find her missing. I wrote about her again in February after hiking to the river, and then again just recently after her body was finally found and returned home.

Jeff Baker from the Oregonian asked that I write about how words can sometimes reach out and touch people in ways a writer can not expect. That is true about my essays on Kaitlin. I certainly never expected to be drawn into her life as I have, and I feel very grateful to have been able to play a small role in helping people come to terms with loss.

You can link to the on-line version of the Oregonian article here: Words Open Path Toward Healing in the Grand Canyon.

This Porous World

 My experiences related to the canyon have been on the order of a spiritual awakening which has left me as porous as the canyon's sedimentary strata, where rain water cleaves and carves and emerges later as beautiful clear springs.

I take power naps. Total shutdowns that last twenty minutes—max. I lay down, close my eyes, and off I go. During yesterday's nap I dreamt I was walking within a pink fog. There was no telling where I was, it was just pink, pink, pink hovering over and around me. A myopic's sunrise? I didn't know. Then I heard water, and soon saw a small clear stream covered in parts with the tiny pads of bright green duck weed. And then there were frogs, dozens of them hoping from one round stone to another.

I love frogs.

And so the dream was good in its dreamy, pink-ceilinged-froggy kind of way. Then a piece of pink fog broke off the roof of my dream and fluttered to the ground. A flamingo feather? Cotton Candy? I leaned down and picked it up. It was a leguminous shaped flower, like a sweet pea, but as small as a baby's eye tooth.

I looked back up, and now I could see beyond the pink to the hulking outline of the canyon. I must have learned about the redbud trees at Indian Gardens in the Grand Canyon somewhere. Maybe I read about them in Canyon Crossing (a book I recommend anyone with an interest in the canyon read.) Maybe I noticed them when I was hiking the Bright Angel Trail in February. Though I doubt that. They would have been fairly nondescript without their blooms or heart-shaped leaves. At any rate, it doesn't matter how I knew about the trees, what mattered was that my dream took me to this desert oasis. A patch of green half way to the river, half way to the rim. Native people sheltered here for more than 10,000 years before the white guys came. The native's planted crops, even orchards.

In the pink-tinged dream I could smell the creek water, taste it in the dry air, hear my feet crush the brittle remnants of last autumn's leaves.

After twenty minutes I woke, put on my glasses and looked out the window of my Oregon home. The hail that had fallen earlier still covered the ground, the sky was still gray. I heaved a great heavy sigh, feeling sad and stupid, longing for the canyon like a regular person might long for a human being.

Redbud trees at Indian Garden on the Bright Angel Trail taken by Willie Holdman

I walked into the kitchen and saw the mail had come while I was hiking at Indian Gardens. Among the bills were two packages for me.

The first package was from from Brian Kenney. It included the program from his daughter, Kaitlin's, memorial, a short note, and a cd the family had put together of music that reminded them of Kaitlin. I read the memorial, thinking of the route that had brought me into this family's life. I have had several people write to tell me they thought the purpose for my residency at the Grand Canyon was so that I could write the essays I did. To be a vehicle, so to speak. Someone who knew the canyon and could speak to loss. Put it in a frame that could be held and reckoned with. I don't know. I don't know much about anything, really. Not much at all.

My son put the cd in our stereo. That cd is playing now, and I am captured by a song I had never heard before. If I was a Raven is sung acapella by Bonnie Paine.

If I was a raven
I'd fly off to the heaven
I'd fly to all my love ones
If was a raven.

If memories are worth saving
I'd savor the feeling
Of knowing love and loving
I'd remember the feeling

Some say up on that mountain
There is many a raven
They call out to the living
From somewhere far beyond them

From the sweet love that has flown on.

The song, of course, made me think of Kaitlin Kenney, and the canyon and its ubiquitous ravens, and my own desire that when I die my ashes be scattered in the Grand Canyon so that I can be part raven and part river. Part pinion, part cacti, part ponderosa pine perched on a shelf of the rim. Part canyon dust that may one day be part canyon wall.

I turned my attention to the second package, a blue plastic bubble-wrap envelop. Grand Canyon return address. Inside, I found a beautiful letter from my friend Kristi Rugg, the ranger who I hiked part of Hermit Trail with and who dropped me off at South Kaibab for my decent to the river. She had written an ode to the canyon. Beautiful heartfelt words about humans' connection to place.

"Generations of people have made Grand Canyon home. The Hopi emerged from its depths, and to it they return when their time here is over. Tiyo, the first person to travel through the canyon's depths by way of the river, found wonder and mystery so far removed from the outside world, sheltered in the unforgiving walls. When he emerged he was changed. He found love, discovered new information, and met his connection to the wildness, Spider Grandmother. Similarly the Diné, Havasupai, Hualapai, Paiute, Apache, and Zuni all have ventured down to be connected and be uplifed.

You are counted among those...the people who find their hearts somewhere in the granite and sandstone....."

In addition to the letter there was a small box. Inside, was a little bear carved from pipestone. Kristi said the bear it is meant to symbolize the devine. Which may explain my ache. My experiences related to the canyon have been on the order of a spiritual awakening which has left me as porous as the canyon's sedimentary strata, where rain water cleaves and carves and emerges later as beautiful clear springs.

I am not talking holy-roller, church-going, give-me-god kind of awakening. I am talking about a sense of connection, to land, to people, to story, and history, to the sky, to water. To life. A sense that there is more to this world then I will ever know or understand and that there are no answers. Nothing definitive. And that nothing, not one thing exists in isolation from another.

Vasey's Paradise Grand Canyon river mile 30

And now, just now, as I write those words, I get an email from my rafting buddy, Bert. He tells me a friend of his knew Kaitlin's family. And the day before that my brother calls to tell me he knew their parents. Years ago, when he lived in Chicago, he would occasionally go to Denver where they worked for the same company. My brother lost touch when he left that job, and he did not put my writing and his connection with the Kenny's together until he saw the mother's name on my Facebook site. He remembers her talking about Kaitlin playing the violin and taking up dance. About them going to music festivals. Kaitlin would have been six or seven then. Just a child.

I close my email, and hold my bear, and listen to Kaitlin's music. I have no idea about much of anything. No answers. No certainties, but this—love is a good thing. It pries open our hearts and makes us available to the world. Porous people with the ability to see and connect in ways we can not when we approach our days with pain, fear and anger.

There is a good path. It has redbud trees in bloom right now, a small stream with duck weed and frogs, and all you have to do to walk it is be open to what comes.

I hope to go back to the canyon in October—to hike to the river under the full moon. I hope to be there in April next year to hike to Indian Garden and lay beneath the redbuds. I hope to raft it in every season of the year. Silty red of monsoon to clear green of winter.

Maybe this is what Georgia O'Keefe felt about New Mexico. She had to be there. It was her muse, the place her heart soared. That's what I feel when I'm at the canyon—a wild soaring heart.

-Naseem Rakha 4/7/13

Remember to Live - Kaitlin Kenney

"It's a steep learning curve out here in the Grand Canyon. The elements are fast teachers that can be very unforgiving." Kaitlin Kenney, Day 8-River Journal

Newspapers reported this week that the body retrieved recently from the Colorado River was Kaitlin Kenney. She was found by rafters 30 miles downstream from where she had last been seen on January 11th, at Tapeats Creek in the Grand Canyon.

Poor Kaitlin.
Poor rafters.
Poor family and friends.
Poor park service employees who took that emergency call in January, and flew into the canyon, and searched the campsite and the drainages and then the water,
finding nothing. Not one single thing. And who then had to make calls to the family and sit with them, and look them in the eyes and tell them what to expect.

This is what happens to a drowned body. It sinks until it eventually floats, face down, arms stretched out like wings.

Kaitlin's body was helicoptered to the Medical Examiner's office in Flagstaff. A week later they confirmed, 'Yes.' This was the girl they'd been looking for. Twenty-one year old Kaitlin Anne Kenney. The missing University of Montana student who had been in the midst of a 29-day, 277-mile-long rafting trip when she disappeared from camp. The gifted fiddler, the dancer, the girl who would wear fairy wings, and tell jokes and gathered friends like light gathers life, and who wrote in her river journal after her first day in the canyon:

"I am going into this experience with the intention of opening my heart to whatever is presented to me in whatever form. This trip is a continuation of breaking down walls to let my heart shine. Cheers Universe, and thank you for this amazing opportunity. May love be, give and see. Shine night, Shine bright." KK, Day 1, River Journal

I only met Kaitlin after she disappeared. She came to me through Google. I was getting ready to drive down for my own one month stay at the canyon, and needed to know the weather, so I typed Grand Canyon and hit news. The first item in the list was an article about a missing Colorado woman. I clicked the link and found myself staring at this picture. I searched for more articles on the missing woman, and it was clear she had probably slipped into the river sometime in the middle of the night, and was gone.

Kaitlin Kenney

And because I love the canyon, and have rafted it, and almost died doing it, and because I know how the canyon shapes not just stone but every human bone that dips itself into its waters, or climbs its paths, I started to write about the girl I did not know, and the ways we live and die. I wanted to say that though tragic, perhaps there is some comfort knowing Kaitlin was living a full and big life right until the moment she was gone.

Most people can't say that.

Risk, vulnerability, hardship, ignorance, fear, they guide so many of our actions, keeping us from diving fully into our lives. Not Kaitlin Kenney, who decided to spend a winter month at the bottom of a cold canyon, to turn twenty-one away from old friends or bars or even civilization, to challenge herself to be open to whatever came. Kaitlin Kenney inhabited her life. And that is rare, and precious, and important.

"I feel like part of the lesson in this is to push my will power and strength to get what I seek (and more) out of this trip plus really further explore parts about myself. I'm open to whatever feelings, thoughts, emotions, or experiences arise on this trip and I full heartedly intend to face them and rise to the challenge." KK, Day 2-River Journal

Kaitlin Kenney prior to running Hermit on her birthday, January 6, 2013.
© Sophie Danison 2013

Kaitlin's parents shared their daughter's river journal with me after we spoke on the phone. This was the day before Easter, and just a day after they learned the body recovered at mile 165 was indeed their "Special K." There really hadn't been any doubt in their minds, and they were as prepared as parents could be for such news. At least now their Kaitlin was home, and they reached out to me in hopes I would tell others. They had read that first short essay I had written, and appreciated that it did not speculate about Kaitlin's death, but focused instead on what she might have gotten from her last days of life. "Kaitlin would have liked that," her mom said.

I imagined Kaitlin's parents talking to me through their kitchen's speaker phone. A mother and father sitting together at a table telling stories about their daughter. She was the youngest of four children, a "surprise angel," with wise, "old soul" eyes. She took up the fiddle when she was just five, hiding in her room to play so others would not feel cheated by how gifted she was. She studied Irish dance, would dress up in her big sisters' clothes, and loved to tell jokes. "You can lead a horse to water," she wrote as a seven-year-old. "But not to a volcano."

Maybe not a horse, I thought as her parents and I laughed at her proverb, but I bet Kaitlin would have been eager to climb to the very top of a volcano and look into its depths. She probably has already done this. Kaitlin grew up in Colorado, and spent last summer backpacking and studying with the Wild Rockies Field Institute. Her blogs from those weeks tell of a woman coming into herself—an ardent conservationist with a love for this world and the magic its wild places hold.

"We've been practicing 'Leave No Trace; which entails leaving the environment we travel through in the same if not better condition... I must say though, the natural mountain environments of the Northern Rockies have left quite the trace on me. I feel humbled by the innate beauty of these places that are so intuitive and efficient without any human touch to make it this way. I feel connected to, even tapped into the web of life." KK, 8/26/12, What Today Leaves and Tomorrow Brings.




The thing is, even though I never knew Kaitlin, I feel I did. She is that person you see dancing on the beach, or balanced on a train-track. She is there, dressed as the mad-hatter while peaking around the fence, or jumping into the frigid water of a glacial-fed creek. She is the woman who volunteers at shelters, and cares about the poor, and wants to help. She is the one people gather around and listen to and laugh with and love. The one at the party playing music and getting others to sing. She is just the kind of person parents think of when they make dreams for their children—happy, healthy, loving, loved, awake, alive, inspirational. Inspired.

Be Here Now, she wrote in her river journal. Love people. Stop judging. Stay true. Explore. Rise to the challenge. Be full hearted. Trust yourself. 

She was, "A magic maker, an unconditional lover to all and a bright shining light in a weary world," wrote a young man who described he and Kaitlin as first loves.

"She was my 'remember to live' buddy," wrote her hiking partner, Tash, in a letter to Kaitlin's parents.

If people are born to learn how to live a good life, if that's the purpose of all this, then clearly, Kaitlin Anne Kenney figured it out early.

"On new years we did a little fire circle go-around and what I said I want to work on in 2013 is to let go of fear because it doesn't serve me. And since then I 've been facing my fears head on and not letting them get the best of me." KK, final entry-River Journal.

Some might say fear, a good healthy dose of it, might have saved Kaitlin. She might have laughed off the offer of a river trip through the nation's most dangerous national park. She might have stayed home. Safe. Sound. And maybe that's true. But then Kaitlin Kenney would not have been the person so many people loved. Her mom and dad understood this.

"Parents are always reluctant to let their children go on such journeys, but we let you go....This was a spiritual trip for you and you were truly connected with the beauty of the earth and this universe. Thank you for blessing our lives so deeply and profoundly. We miss your physical presence but you will always be with us in our hearts. We love you so much, my little ladybug fiddle fairy. Mom" 

Last summer, while camped somewhere in the Rockies, Kaitlin told her friend Tash that she believed that after death, life somehow goes on, just in a different way. "Maybe a real fairy world," she said.

I don't know about a fairy world, but life, ours, opened, dusted, stretched out and given wings can be one way Kaitlin lives on. Remember to live, she would say.

Remember to live.

-Naseem Rakha 4/3/13

The wise, "old soul" eyes

No More Secrets - What I Learned at the Bottom of the Grand Canyon.

This morning I told the world a secret. It has been something I have been carrying inside of me for 16 years, and has only come out now because of my month in the canyon. While there I wrote about many things: the weather, the beauty, the geology, the people, the way we live and the way we die. But never in that time, or in any time, did I write about a stain I had carried with me since shortly before I entered the canyon for the first time - back in 1996.

That changed today, when the Sunday Statesman Journal published my feature story about what I learned at the Grand Canyon. As I wrote this piece, it became clear that I was not the same person who had drove to that canyon in late January. That somewhere in those days and nights fixed on a cliff, I had been shaped into someone stronger and more aware. We have very little time on this planet, and we can spend it letting our wounds shape us, or letting them be part of the whole tapestry of who we are.

Beginning today, I choose the later.

Here is a link to the article. Lessons of the Canyon

-Naseem Rakha 3/24/13

What I Think About While Sitting on a Beach in Maui

My favorite picture of Hawaii can be found on Google Maps. I don't know how they did it, but somehow the satellite image shows the underwater topography of that island chain, and the story that image tells is amazing.

While most people consider Hawaii to be "paradise," looked at from a larger perspective we see the current islands are nothing but the most recent pearls on a strand that continues to form and then break. Tiny and temporary, each island is simply the spilt over contents of an overcooked Earth. Specifically an overcooked Pacific Plate.

Most volcanic chains occur where two plates meet. The Cascades, for example, are the product of the off shore Juan de Fuca plate slipping beneath the North American Plate (subduction). The compression, heat and friction caused by this action essentially melts away the crust. But that goo, like the chocolate bar that slipped between your car seats, has to go somewhere. Thus we have Mt. Lassen, Shasta, Mazama (the home of Crater Lake,) the Three Sisters, Jefferson, Hood, St Helens, Rainier and Baker - to name a few.

The 3700 mile Hawaiian Emperor Volcanic Chain (which includes the Midway Islands and runs all the way to the Aleutians) is different. Instead of it forming on the edge of a plate, it was created by the Pacific Plate riding over a "hot spot" beneath the Earth's mantle. Think of a plate of cheese slowly moved over a Bunsen Burner. Whatever section of plate that is over the burner will bubble up and eventually, as the plate moves on, cool. And that's exactly what the satellite image shows, the footprints of islands gone by.

In geologic time, all this island birthing and dying stuff happens pretty fast. Kauai, the oldest of the eight main Hawaiian islands, is just 5 million years old. Think Grand Canyon - its youngest layer of rocks (Kaibab Limestone) is 270 million years old. By that standard Kauai is still a baby. Nevertheless, the baby is dying. Its last eruption occurred about 1.4 million years ago which means the major island-shaping force on the "Garden Island" today is erosion. Give the place a million years, and it will be another in the long strand of submerged island pearls.

Not to worry, though. The Hawaiian Emperor Volcanic Chain is busy building itself a new island. Lō'ihi is located about 20 miles from the Big Island, and already has a 9000 foot tall mountain. Don't bother looking for it, though. Lō'ihi is still underwater. Geologists estimate it will poke its head above the ocean somewhere in the next 50,000 to 200,000 years. A blink of the eye - geo speaking. After that it is just a matter of simple biological succession - birds bringing in seeds, trade winds bringing in dust and polin, tides dumping debris. It won't be long after that that palm trees will be swaying and hippies will be selling pineapples and puka shell necklaces on the beach. "Paradise."

-Naseem Rakha 3/23/13

American Winter - American Shame

211. Remember that number. Imprint it in your mind like 411, or 911. It should come that easy.

What is it? Apparently it is A Great American Secret. You would think it wouldn't be, given that millions of people around the country have gotten help from calling that number. Still, not many people know that if you are in trouble—say your house is being foreclosed, or you can't afford medicine, or you are afraid to take your daughter to the hospital because you don't have insurance, or you husband just died and left you and your kids with bupkis, or you don't have gas money to get to your job, or, or, or...... Or, maybe it's not you, but your neighbor. No electricity. No heat. No food. You don't know what to do. How to help. Well now you do.

Walk over to them, hand them your phone, and tell them to call 211. An operator will answer and link them with help. Just like 911, but this emergency is poverty.

I didn't know about 211 until my husband, Chuck, was asked to be in a film about the help line called American Winter. The show premiers tonight at 6 PM Eastern, 9 PM Pacific time on HBO and will continue to air at various times on HBO through April. (schedule) The film features eight Oregon families who made that phone call, and boy is it eye opening. Raw. Real. We see the courage of people facing situations they never thought they'd face.

And that—their shock, surprise, shame and strength—is what makes American Winter such a powerful film. These people did not see poverty coming, did not notice the out of control economy rounding the bend. And when they did, they certainly didn't expect it to run right over their lives, just like it did millions of others.

American Winter puts a face on this problem, and gives pause to the ludicrous lies that are coming out of congress.

You know what drives a thriving economy? It's not the rich. It's a thriving middle class. They are the ones that create the jobs because they are the ones that create demand for goods. Period. Kill off the middle class, as we have been, and you kill off this economy.

Don't believe me? Watch this. It's stunning.



And so, American Winter. You can watch it tonight. Or you can watch it anytime on HBOGO. Or you can buy the film and show it at your church, or book group, or senior center, or have it playing at the bar, share it on Facebook, but turn it on and let people know.

211—there is help waiting.

-Naseem Rakha 3/18/13

Homesick

I am in a train going south from Seattle, Washington to Oregon, and this is what I see. 

Stacks of lumber and lines of trucks. 
Piles of rebar and blocks of concrete. 
Downed trees and over-grown blackberries. 
Water slick roads. Break lights. Trash. Rain.

It was sunny in Seattle when I arrived on Friday and it stayed that way for a full 48 hours. Two whole days so cloudless and benign, each person I spoke with commented on the phenomena. Can you believe this weather? Are you enjoying the sun? Have you ever seen such a sky? Groups gathered on sidewalks, faces pointed upward. Like storks swallowing fish, they swallowed in that warm glow, trying their best to get their fill. 

Piles of fishing nets, creosote ties.
Rusted bridges, grain elevators. 
Canyons of containers waiting to be stacked on a barge.

And now I sigh. 'Canyons of containers.' I can not seem to get the Grand Canyon out of me. I try, but everywhere I look I am reminded of where I would rather be. Yesterday, while walking though Seattle University I ended up in a strange outdoor alcove, surround on three sides by sandstone colored walls two to three stories tall. Straight ahead was a twisted unfortunate looking tree. A piñon, I thought, knowing it could not be. A piñon in a box canyon. 

Acres of abandoned cars, oil drums,  buoys—orange, blue, green. 
A backyard swing-set hung with a torn and mildewed flag. 

When I got to the Seattle hotel, my computer began to chirp with a weather alert. I looked. I had forgotten to change my settings. It was snowing in the canyon, white-out conditions, it warned. I dropped into the chair and logged onto my web site, hit web cam and stared at the now invisible canyon. Then I looked up and out the window. I could see buildings and cars and hear the buzz of the city. I shut the gauzy curtains and imagined instead that I was looking out the window from my desk at VerKamps on the South Rim of the canyon. Snow swirled, settled in drifts. Instead of city sounds, VerKamp's old steam radiators crooned and clanked in mutiny against the cold. 

Arby's and Burger King. 
Staples and strip clubs. 
Pot bellied homes sitting idly on the shore. 

This is what I think. People buy land, they get titles and pay mortgages. They stake a claim, punch in a post, build a home, erect a monument, dig a grave, and call it theirs. It is not. We can never own place. Place can only own us. And when it does, it does not let go. I belong to the Grand Canyon, or, more broadly, the Colorado Plateau, and there is not a cell in my body that is not being called home.

Puddles. 
More puddles. 
Bigger puddles. 
Ducks landing and swimming in puddles. 
Mallards, coots, buffleheads. 
Seagulls stroll the puddle’s shores. 

Sometime last night the rain returned, and with it descended something else. Melancholia. A furtive sadness. No more people just hanging around outside. No faces looking up. No one saying 'can you believe this weather?'  Because, of course, we can. Hunched backs, collars up, the blank face of resignation. There was a reason Lewis and Clark were happy to leave Fort Clatsop. They spent four and a half months on the Pacific Coast, almost every day of that time cursing the rain. 

It's not that I do not like the Pacific Northwest. I love it in many ways. It has a deep and awe inspiring beauty, more progressive politics then say, Arizona, and I love the fact that I can go from the Great Basin to the ocean in one day. It is just that Oregon has always been my transitional home. I agreed to move here in 1986 under the condition that one day I would return to the southwest. I didn’t know then what I know now—those interceding years—they go by fast. Blink too long and they're gone. Which is why, I believe, I can’t get the canyon out of me. Maybe we are salmon. Maybe we are migratory birds. Maybe we are wildebeest. But the call to return to where rock meets sky is deep in my blood.

Fog on the bay. 
Fog icing the tops of the hills. 
Gray silken scoops of ocean-flavored fog. 
Dense. Drowsy. Desultory fog. 

But I am not a lone salmon, not a wildebeest, or bird. I am a mother. A wife. A daughter, and each of these things keep me here, in the Northwest. It's not a bad confinement. Nothing to whine over, I know. Still, I catch myself watching the skies for chevrons of geese pointing themselves on. 

A ferryboat. 
An island. 
Wicker-colored reeds. 
A motionless heron, its feet planted firmly in the sound.

-Naseem Rakha 3/10/13