I read a lot of books. They're a mixture of nonfiction and fiction. But I'm not into "literary" versions of these genres. I buy nonfiction in order to learn something. I buy fiction in order to entertain myself, usually in the spy/thriller/espionage sort of writings.
(The Gabriel Allon series by Daniel Silva that I enjoy a lot comes closest to literary fiction, being very well written; however, I doubt Silva's books truly qualify as literary fiction.)
However, near the end of 2024 I saw a list of 100 recommended nonfiction books published last year. I figured I needed to broaden my reading horizon, so chose to buy the only book whose description appealed to me.
It was Kevin Fedarko's A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon.
I'm really glad that I read it. Beautifully written. Captivating story. Informative history of both the Grand Canyon and the Native Americans who lived in the area both before and after the canyon became a national park.
Fedarko and his National Geographic photographer friend, Pete McBride, set out to do what few other people had been able to accomplish: walk the Grand Canyon. This is both extremely difficult and extremely dangerous because almost all of the trek has to be done between the rim and the river, as it isn't possible to walk along the Colorado except for short stretches.
So a through-hike happens largely by venturing up and down the hundreds of side canyons that feed into the main canyon. This is largely uncharted territory, far off the usual tourist path. There are lots of ways to die: extreme heat, lack of water, falling off cliffs, injuries, exhaustion, becoming lost. Fortunately, Fedarko and McBride found help from more experienced Grand Canyon hikers along their way.
Here's some excerpts from the book that illustrate Fedarko's talented writing style. This passage is on the second page of the prologue. As soon as I read it, I knew I was going to be hooked on the book.
The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon's rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the stone to tremble, as if the ground itself were gasping for breath.
But the most striking element of all, the detail that could burn a hole in the center of your consciousness, was neither the brilliance nor the ferocity of that heat, but its heft: its thickness and weight as it draped itself over the top of your head and across the blades of your shoulders, as if it were a blanket braided from material that was already in flames when delivered into the hands of its weaver.
The prologue ends with this passage. It shows the honesty of Fedarko in assessing the limitations of McBride and himself.
Needless to say, we were in over our heads, a condition stemming not only from our specific medical problems, but also from a deeper and more debilitating disorder. An affliction that could be addressed neither with antibiotics nor bed rest because it was not a physical ailment so much as an impairment of character -- an infirmity rooted in the complexion of our personalities as well as the delusions we harbored regarding our competency and prowess in the outdoors.
Ours was a conflation of willful ignorance, shoddy discipline, and outrageous hubris: an array of flaws that we had been denying (perhaps, like the sores on my feet, in the hope that it would simply improve or disappear) ever since the moment Pete had gotten the two of us into this mess by pressing me to join him for what he'd billed, quite literally, as "a walk in the park."
A misguided odyssey through the heart of perhaps the harshest and least forgiving, but also the most breathtakingly gorgeous, landscape feature on earth. A place filled with so much wonder, replete with so many layers of complexity, that there is nothing else like it, anywhere.
There's quite a bit of practical philosophizing in the book. This passage applies generally to life's difficult journeys.
Sooner or later, every difficult journey collides against a moment that crystallizes the imperative of accepting that the outcome of any ambitious undertaking can neither be ordained nor engineered by its participants, and that the heart of an odyssey is reached -- and its deeper truths begin to reveal themselves -- only after the illusion of control is permitted to fall away and disappear into the gathering night, like a loose pebble over a cliff.
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