Age
How we think about time, we think about age
Aloha! Welcome to the merry merry month of Mei.1
Poetry Brain is a virus caught on the River infecting all of my writing at the moment. It latches onto words and patterns and anomalies. I fear this Substack is like a petri dish encouraging its growth. Please stay along for the ride. Very likely there will be both calm stretches and wild rapids ahead.
Age.
Last week I wrote about Time and to state the obvious, Age as a noun is a measure of Time. Age - a point or period in Time to which we attach meaning, meanings, about which I can sometimes obsess. Age is a verb as well - a process for me as a subject or a determination by me for an object.
Age.
The Freeflow Institute application to join the cohort that would descend into the Grand Canyon asked applicants to share three questions we intended to contemplate during the Canyon and River experience. One of my questions was about Age.2
Specifically, given that I was choosing this experience to mark my 70th birthday, I was interested in how the experience of Deep Time and ancient places might transform and inform my sense of self at this Age and in the coming years.
Age. 70.
It is not uncommon for people to tell me I do not look 70. I do not know what 70 is supposed to look like, although I do know that it typically looks older on us fair skinned folks than it does on my friends blessed with more melanin. Especially in an “Age” where the 30-somethings at the salon are getting injections of filler, where Zoom settings remove your wrinkles and add makeup with a couple of quick clicks, I have lost my bearings on what 70 or 35 is supposed to look like.
Whatever you look like unadorned is what you will look like in the Canyon. The sparse eyebrows and sun damage? No sense bringing an eyebrow pencil or foundation to be washed off with the first big splash of 50-degree water as the oarsman steers into the waves of a riffle just for fun. Within days the skin of your face and hands and ankles and any other part of your body exposed even a tiny bit will be chafed, peeling, blistered or some combination thereof, despite your attempt to hold it at bay with copious amounts of various salves. Exfoliation of the skin is a constant reminder that the Who you were in the Rim World is peeling away in the freshness of river flow.3
And everyone looks beautiful, alive, radiant, on the River.
Age. 70.
Now people feel emboldened to ask me whether I feel 70, or how it feels to be 70. Seriously? I have never been 70 before, I was 69 until a few days ago, how would I recognize when I feel exactly 70? I know it is not the same as 35 felt. Coach Garmin clocks my Fitness Age at somewhere between 60 and 62.5 depending on the week. Is that how old I feel? To “age” myself as a transitive verb - I just puzzle over the scale.
Scale.
Have you ever traveled with a geologist? Iʻm thinking about another story I have yet to tell here, of traveling by private train from Tucson to Mexico City through the Copper Canyon on the Second Mexican Mining Rail Excursion, imagined by the Mining Club of the Southwest in 1981 as a way to mark the 80th anniversary of the original Mexican Mining Rail Excursion4. On that trip I learned that geologists are always laying their rock hammer on or next to the object or formation they are about to photograph as a way of visually noting scale. I still joke “scale” out loud at random moments and find my companions clueless at the reference.
Sorry. I digress.
Or perhaps not. This question of scale, of units of measurement, is critical. Arbitrary River Units, rock hammer units, love affair units, named generations that only begin with the Greatest and go down from there, the rate of growth of a humanʻs whiskers or a horseʻs teeth, metric or Imperial or US customary units (I could write a whole essay or poem on colonialism right there). We structure entire lives, from routine daily actions to the most consequential decisions, around our belief in the meaning of units and the significance of scale.
My question for the Grand Canyon was birthed from this impulse to measure, to find some improved scale to meaningfully measure myself, my new Age. Could the height of Marble Canyonʻs walls or the rating of a rapid called House Rock at various cfs flows help me understand how to scale my human life? Did refreshing my memory that in the Cambrian Age sea covered everything, that in the Pennsylvanian Age creatures moved to the land, that the newest layers of rock are on top, could those facts about Age and Ages give me any guidance for understanding my place in the arc of a single human life, generically and specifically?
In Poetry Brain mode, it did. It does.
Iʻll unpack more of that next week, and hope you are curious enough to check back in then. Thanks for being here with me this week and for reading to the end.
I just learned that the Stephen Foster song references a poem written in 1599! How perfect for writing about Time and Age.
I asked others on the trip about their three questions. Most people remembered the application asking. No one I asked remembered their questions. Was I the only nervous overachiever who wrote them, put them into Notes on my phone, read them to a handful of trusted friends for accountability, copied them into my journal, contemplated them during the trip, and then read them again to those friends as I first began to unpack the experience?
In a side note I find hilarious, it took three weeks from my return to the Rim before the roughened skin peeled away and my laptop recognized my fingerprint again. Unlocking my computer screen became a mindful act. And in a reversal of aging, once the backs of my hands healed, all the dark “age spots” had miraculously disappeared! Or maybe this is not a side note. Maybe this is the whole story and the rest of this post was superfluous.
A poor graduate student at the time (1981), to pay for the trip I sold offers of coverage - articles and accompanying photos - a two-part series to Mining Engineering magazine and one for Mines Magazine. So far my only paid writing gig.
That would be a great discussion. What does 70 look like. I'll be 73 this month. Inside, I feel different ages depending on the day, my emotional state, or having sore muscles from shoveling manure and jogging. on arena sand, which a little arnica fixes just fine.
I just tell people that “most of me is 70.”
Even signed a couple of donors after that as an introduction 😎