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by André Serge Patenaude (Author)
This adventure was all new for me. Here I was a thirty-two-year-old man with an ex-wife and a ten-year-old daughter. I don't have a job. I don't have a place that I can call home. I had been working since I was fourteen years old. And since my daughter's birth, I had been working two jobs to make ends meet. And now I've taken my life back and I have difficulty feeling the appreciation of this beautiful phenomenon in front of me. This was real. The Pecos River flowing into the Grand Canyon before my very eyes was real. Not a movie, not a picture but nature at her best and I was numb. The only experience I was having was my mind trying to figure things out and analyze the view. After about an hour of viewing the bluff and the two rivers meeting and the sound of waters rushing and the blue sky and the fresh air and my dog and myself, my mind started to quiet down enough so that enthusiasm and gratitude and appreciation could be felt. Then I started to look for a campsite.
I finally located a spot close to the rivers so that the sound of the rushing water would cancel out the traffic noise from Route 90. Again I built a fire, fed Krishna, dined on carrots and peanut butter, and finished off my feast with dessert, a Payday candy bar. While lying in my sleeping bag, a familiar fear started to creep in. Here I was on this beautiful site with the light of the stars increasing with every minute, the faint sound of the rivers and just enough of a breeze so that I can tell that the air is moving across my sleeping bag and I start to get paranoid. What if some redneck finds me and kills me because I have long hair, I thought. Or what if some evil guy comes by and robs and kills me. Or what if some cowboys know where I am and come and kidnap me and tar and feather me. Now I can't even enjoy where I am anymore. I'm not afraid that some wolf might come looking for my dog Krishna and try to eat it or that some bear may come and maul me or even that a rattlesnake (I've been told to be aware of them) might crawl into my sleeping bag and bite me. No. I'm afraid of human beings. How crazy and paranoid is that? What kind of messages am I walking around with about human beings?
