Grand Canon

Gustave Baumann

One of Baumann's handwritten manuscripts included the following:

When one's working radius, which was four miles in my Nashville days, expands to twelve hundred it gives one a kind of all-over-the-lot feeling in the southwest where intimacy of landscape is hard to find if at all. The mountains are too high and the Grand Canyon too deep to behave properly within the limits of a frame, and yet as a discipline to put man in his place there is nothing like the Grand Canyon. You see it and then you don't as clouds suddenly tear into it from nowhere. It is a bewildering place, distance means nothering. The nearest habitation on the North Rim is fourteen miles, but you travel two hundred to get there unless you are willing to take a chance on a shaky bridge that crosses the river.

Some day “Old Cautious”—that's me—is going to take the long way around. Probably what I'll find is that I could have staid [sic] where I was just as well, sitting in my favorite hiding place just under the South Rim.