Time...and Stories

By Lyman Hafen

Stop a moment.

Stop along the slickrock trail.

A moment.

A minute.

And try to come to terms

With how it all came to be.

How the sculptor’s tools:

Water, Rock and Time

Left behind

The rim rising in soft relief.

Walls and ledges and ridges towering

And plunging

In a random order so artful

The heart has no choice

But to race.

For the past twenty-five years, I’ve looked at a stunning scene of Zion Canyon through my office window. It’s as if an artist created a magnificent painting of the canyon’s skyline and hung it in the space occupied by my window. That horizon, that perfect edge of the sky, is immutable. But the scene changes by the minute as the sun arcs across the heavens and clouds sweep through the sky. The changing light and shifting shadows give the scene life, mood, and mystery while day after day, year after year, the skyline remains firm and fixed. Over the past quarter-century, I have detected no change in the shape of those temples and towers.

And yet, as the seasons pass, the canyon does change: a rockfall here, a new streak of iron oxide there, another millimeter of the canyon floor washed down the river toward the sea. And I know that sometime in a future more distant than I can comprehend, that sacred skyline will change. Water, wind, gravity…and time will see to it. Yet within the finite spectrum of my life’s timeline, I can count on it to always be there.

One of the many things I’ve learned sitting at my desk in Zion is a deeper understanding of the concept of time. I’ve lived in this landscape for nearly seven decades. I’ve worked in the canyon across a full human generation. Looking out my office window helps me begin to come to terms with what a small blip I am on the canyon’s timeline. Right out my window, the sheer face of the West Temple towers into the chalky blue sky. Every foot, every twelve inches, of that vertical wall of Navajo sandstone represents a millennium. My time in the canyon, though long by human standards, barely registers on that continuum. What is three decades in the 10,000-year human history of this canyon? What is one person’s career in a canyon 200 million years in the making?

And that minute,

That sixty seconds,

What is it:

Time.

And why time?

Could it be, as Einstein said,

So that everything does not

Happen at once?

My dear friend J.L. Crawford grew up in the very scene I look at through my window. As a boy he worked in the family fields and orchards beneath the Temple and Towers of the Virgin. That was in the early years of the last century. He lived well into his nineties, and before he passed away more than ten years ago, he shared with me many stories of his adventures in the canyon. His father was not only a farmer but an excellent photographer, and J.L. and his brother waited in their bib overalls along the dirt road leading into the canyon for the cars of tourists. When one came along, they’d sell those wide-eyed visitors photographs of the canyon, black and white images of their own backyard. The boys were there when the most famous western movie star of their time, Tom Mix, came to Zion. And they were there to shake the hand of President Warren G. Harding when he and the lengthy parade of his entourage passed by their farm. J.L. always called the West Temple “Steamboat Mountain,” which is what all the local folks called it when he was a boy.

He spoke of his boyhood home in reverence, and one day, he shared with me how the edge of that horizon did change at least once in his lifetime. While he was away serving in World War II in Europe, a rock the size of a small room fell from the side of the Shinarump Ridge just above where the family homestead stood. When he returned from the war, he looked up at the same ridge he’d often looked up at as a boy, but in the absence of the fallen rock, he saw the profile of his father.

On another occasion, J.L. told me how an international journalist once called the Temple and Towers of the Virgin “the most outstanding skyline on earth.” He always shared that story with a twinkle of pride in his eyes. Afterall, it was the backdrop of his boyhood backyard.

J.L. Crawford knew the canyon as intimately as anyone ever has. He measured his time there not in days or years but in stories.

Time is made of minutes, hours, days, and years. Our lives are made of stories. And stories transcend the continuum of time. Our stories connect us with the roots of our human history and the even deeper realms of the geologic past that formed the landscapes of our lives. We continue to make our own stories in our own stunning landscapes, stories that will connect us with the generations to come.

What I’ve learned is that I don’t have to fully comprehend time. I simply need to learn—and learn from—the stories of the past, become part of new and good stories in the present, and share those stories in ways that contribute to a future that will allow my descendants to experience the same. What I’ve come to know is that if I take care of the stories, time will take care of itself.

What is a minute in

This deep canyon where

The river rolls endlessly on.

What is a moment among

These castles in the clouds

Where a millennium is

But a heartbeat,

Where Forever is now.

(Excerpts from the poem “Water, Rock & Time” by Lyman Hafen)

About the Author

Lyman Hafen

Lyman is the author of a dozen books intent on connecting landscape and story in the American South west. He is executive director of the Zion National Park Forever Project, and is past president of the national Public Lands Alliance. He’s been writing and publishing for more than 35 years, with several hundred magazine articles in publications ranging from Western Horseman to Northern Lights, and was the founding editor of St. George Magazine in 1983. He’s been recognized on several occasions with literary awards from the Utah Arts Council, and won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He lives in Santa Clara, Utah, with his wife Debbie, and together they have 6 children and 18 grandchildren.