If silence is an island then this morning at sunrise my island was invaded by two car loads of tourists.

Looking west at Pima Point

I had driven out to Pima Point, about seven miles west of Grand Canyon Village. The place was empty. The entire road there—empty. Heaven, I thought.

The sun was just a rose glow to the east as I left my car and put on my gloves and walked to the cliff edge. Pima Point offers one of the best views of the Colorado River from the South Rim. From there I could see and hear Granite rapids, a class 8 rollar-coaster which I had rafted just five months earlier.

It was was a beautiful morning. Cold, cloudless, not a voice to be heard. Not a car, not a plane. So I sat on a rock, my legs tucked beneath me and watched the sky turn that pale peach color I associate with babies’ palms. Soft. Wondrous. And within a little while the sun crested the eastern ridge, and hit the canyon walls, igniting them into colors I associate with the the Colorado Plateau: Kaibob Limestone, Coconino Sandstone, Hermit Shale. Twenty distinct layers of different aged stone dropping lower and lower until until they reach the canyon’s roots: 1.8 billion year old schists and granites named after Vishnu and Zoroaster.

And just as I was thinking how grateful I was to have this quiet place all to myself, up come two cars filled with tourists. And I thought, well, whoever it is that is now opening their doors and slamming them shut, whoever it is that is parenting those screaming kids, whatever person has just hit their key-fob so that the car’s horn just beeped, and now beeps again and then again, that those people, once they see this site and see me posed like Siddhartha, that they will understand. This is a time for silence. For veneration. For grace.

I was wrong.

They ran, skipped, jumped down the path, laughing, talking so loud you’d think it was mid-day at a football game. Not one single second of quiet ensued. The group shouted about this, and shouted about that, and then for a good three minutes – they shouted and shouted and shouted into the canyon, trying their best to launch an echo off those ancient walls.

Had we spoke the same language, I might have told them that if they were quiet they could hear the river. I imagined miming my message. A finger in front of my lips, a hand cupped to my ear, and then pointing to the white water below. But I felt so frustrated with them, so disappointed and annoyed that what I really wanted to do was just yell right back at them. Shut the hell up!

Silence. What a treasure. And how easy it is to quash. It happens so regularly, trumping silence for the noice of our cars, our music our voices.

There is a wonderful interview on the web entitled How Silence Works, Emailed Conversations with Four Trappist Monks. Trappists follow a “vow of silence,” speaking very rarely, and briefly when they do. When asked what silence adds to their lives, one monk said.

Looking North at Pima Point

Reading this I understood why I was so frustrated with this morning’s interlopers. Had they approached the canyon like a temple, rather than an amusement park, had they realized they were in the presence of a shrine older and grander than anything built by man, had they given the canyon the “silence of adoration,” then we might have arrived at “a deep communion.” One that would not have needed a common language, but instead feathered itself in the down of our reverence.