The river is low. I go with the current, seeking the deepest channel, following the line of foam, the outside of the bends, under the overhanging walls, where the current of the river goes. Watch for mud, sandbars, waterlogged snags: I’d hate to have to get out into this forty-degree water to drag the boat free from some obstacle.

I pass more side canyons—Lathrop, Buck, others without names. Should stop and explore but the mouths of each are choked with a slough of quicksand, a jungle of brush. You’d have to fight your way in there with a machete or else slog through muck up to your thighs. Or both.

The willows, mountain ash and cottonwoods wear their autumn colors—bright gold against the somber red of the Moenkopi mudstones, the dark brown Cutler sandstone. The tamarisk is a rusty orange. Stands of wild cane with snowy seed plumes lean with the breeze, then snap back to an upright stance.

There’s a giant cottonwood log balanced on a rock, twenty feet above the present waterline, revealing an old high-water mark. Beyond the living things at the river’s edge rise the walls of rock, nude red sculptured stone surmounted by gargoyles, beaked heads, godlike profiles from the ancient times. Now and then I catch a glimpse of the high plateaus beyond the middle ground: the high rimrock of Dead Horse Point, Hatch Point, Needles Overlook, Grandview Point, Island in the Sky, Junction Butte. Most of these are places inaccessible from the river, cut off by perpendicular walls, one above another, of rotten rock.

I tie up my boat at the mouth of Indian Creek, on the left, and follow a deer path along the ledges into the canyon. I inspect the small Anasazi ruins in a cave—mounds of dust, stone parapets mortared with mud, the smoke-blackened ceiling, the potsherds and tiny corncobs, the usual clots of bat guano back in the corners—and then go on, through the clean clear light, up the canyon along a trickling stream. I pass more golden cottonwoods, each one special, unique, like humans, each displaying its individuality with a distinctive flourish of limbs, branches, masses of gold and green-gold leaves. The tracks and droppings of bighorn sheep precede me on the trail.

The canyon boxes up; I come to a vertical slot in the stone through which a cascade of silvery water pours, crashing down on the terraces below. The soothing white noise of falling water fills the canyon. Here I pause for an hour of abundant nothingness.

Returning to my boat, I become aware of the silence closing in again. As always when I’m alone in a deep and solitary canyon, I become intensely aware of the stillness around me, of a need to be strictly attentive, fully alert, cautious and delicate with every step, as if I were under some kind of preternatural observation. Something is watching you, I think—though I don’t for a moment allow the notion to take full possession of my mind. The feeling has nothing to do with fear; there is no fear in it but simply the belief, the intuition, the conviction, that I should proceed as quietly and respectfully as possible.