Simon & Rosie's Travel Journal: The Grand Canyon

Some things are too big for words. Those thoughts, concepts or feelings which are just too great to capture, too liquid to hold, too fleeting to retain or too abstract to describe. It's that moment when a word or a name hangs on the tip of your tongue yet remains so utterly out of reach that it might as well have never existed in the first place. A mere sensing of an answer rather than the answer itself. Like those nights when we lie awake in bed or find ourselves alone and staring at the night sky. We churn the universe over and over in our minds, the immense size, the unthinkable numbers involved, the planets and galaxies, the atoms, the stars, the solar systems, the vacuous distances between them. We try desperately to imagine what lies beyond that which only the most powerful telescopes can see, a present lying beyond that in which we exist, the line between the physical and metaphysical. Yet, each time, no matter how far we reach, we fail. We return to the here and now with nothing but a blurred outline of the answer spotted in a brief window of meditated thought, a momentary sensation of what the outstretched fingers of our imagination could not quite grasp. Not a crystallised concept or an answer ready to be put to paper, but merely a sensation more akin to a new smell or an unfamiliar taste, fleeting and imagined, a perception that can only be experienced.

It is this feeling, this failing of language, which our current circumstance so frequently brings me to. What is it to travel? How does this feel? What is this like? I return to the same picture, to the same hint of a fragmented answer upon which I cannot build or elaborate, and it is this: As we move around this planet, whether it be by plane, on foot or sat inside a cramped, airless motor bus, the sensation is not of our own movement and the distances we are creating between us and the safe and familiar, but that of the earth moving beneath us, as an undulating, ever changing mass, rolling around in space while we, in our familiar world, stay absolutely still. As our car rumbles along the tarmac of the American highways, for example, our wheels do not move us nor does our engine push us. Instead, they put into motion and roll the very earth beneath us - as if we were spinning some giant globe in an antique wood-panelled library, stopping it with our fingers to arrive in each new town while the room around us remains constant and unchanging. We do not move around the globe, the globe moves before us. So today, as we climbed two thousand vertical feet out of the Grand Canyon, hiking back along the three mile trail to take us up and out onto the canyon's south rim, it was not our bodies being lifted upwards by each arduous step, it was the ground on which we stood that moved, that sunk down under us. The entire planet extended in all directions, the steep path ahead, the line of tiny trees marking the summit and the Canyon's rim, all were being pushed downwards by our dusty boots. The pedalling action of our climb bringing down to our level each new vista, each twist and turn of the trail, each rock we clamber over and each boulder upon which we rest, all sliding down, under and behind us as we walk.