Slice of Lucy: Looking Back

 

Driving thousands of miles provides the opportunity to mull over ideas and things that have happened. So it is three nights later that some nuggets of wisdom have bubbled up from my experience at Lower Antelope Canyon in Page, Arizona. Lower Antelope Canyon is a slot canyon on Navajo land. Physically, the canyon is surprising and stunning. From the high desert, one descends seventy-five feet to the canyon floor, then wends through the water-carved chambers for a quarter mile. Every step reveals novel shapes of flowing stone, and the colors crafted by light and shadow are indescribable and ever-changing. In fact, what you see depends on the time of day and season you visit. Our guide, Trey, laughed at people's attempts to take pictures early in the tour. He said, "Come on, we're not even to the good part yet." In retrospect, I think he was really laughing at the idea of capturing anything permanently in that space. 

That said, based on professional photographers' tips and TikTok videos, Trey could take your phone, quickly change several settings, and click an awe-inspiring image, worthy of any social media platform, like this:

Trey took that picture in less than thirty seconds with my Samsung. In retrospect, I think he was doing that because he recognized I thought that is what I wanted, plus it definitely generated gratuities from everyone on the tour. At one point, though, he told me nonchalantly that he does not take pictures in the canyon for himself. I don't think that is because he goes there three times a day; he is not apathetic or underwhelmed by the canyon. He just knows it cannot be captured. As a picture-taking, semi-obsessed scrapbook-building woman, his wisdom gives me pause. What can I really capture of my life and my people and my world to keep on a shelf?

Halfway through the canyon, Trey and I were slightly ahead of the rest of the group, and he gently reminded me to look back. He said sadly, "Everyone always forgets to look back where they came from." This Sankofa-esque moment stopped me in my tracks. I wanted to go back to the beginning of the canyon and start over, looking forward and backward, up and down, inside and out, with just one goal of seeing the canyon. Of course, that's not how a tour or life works.

Looking back, those perfectly composed pictures mean nothing and show less. They do not reveal what the canyon meant to me, at all.