Boundary Conditions
by Jim Curtiss

The scruffy Utah landscape occupied my attention through the passenger-side window as Bjorn, my Swedish traveling companion and fellow graduate student manned the wheel. It was the first time Bjorn had driven my flashy little Pontiac during the trip and I had just relaxed enough to take in the darkening sky.

“I like twilight,” I ventured. “It’s just so… so…neat,” I concluded, feeling I had captured the entirety of the human condition.

Bjorn looked sideways at me, his upper lip bulging with Swedish snus, and said, “Oh James, that’s brilliant. Thank you for your wise words.”

I had grown used to Bjorn’s verbal jabs and pretended to ignore him, but he was right – I was being superficial. Thus spurred on to think about what I really enjoyed about twilight, I continued staring at the blurred middle-distance until it came to me; it wasn’t twilight itself that I felt poetic about – what intrigued me more was the boundary between day and night. The boundary condition that twilight represents – the ambiguous mixing of light and darkness – is what I really enjoyed.

I shared this thought with Bjorn, noting how all boundary conditions are inherently fascinating – the ocean pummeling the land, the mountains clawing at the sky, the past sneaking up on the future…

Apparently satisfied with my revised observations, Bjorn grunted, turned up the music and I was left to my musings once again.

Leaning my head back, thoughts of boundaries pulled me back to the summer I had spent next to the Pacific Ocean trying to overcome the differences between me and a blonde Kansan. Geography and religion were the boundaries that we explored that summer – she an ardent Christian from the Midwest and I a transplanted Californian atheist. In the end, those boundaries were more than enough to drive a wedge between us.

The sigh of the wheels, the floating clouds and the rolling waves of the Pacific carried my thoughts back to a nearly-forgotten weekend in Canada, and somewhere along the way the ocean’s calm was replaced with the relentless crashing of the Niagara Falls.

I remembered with a shudder that late one night after many beers I had climbed over the railing and scrambled down onto a huge stone block not ten feet above the Niagara River. Standing on the edge, my ears were assailed by the cacophonous roar of water rushing downward and I swayed in vertiginous fascination. I was at a boundary between primary elements – air and water and earth – indeed, at the boundary between life and death had I been lulled into jumping.

I stood there atop the Niagara Falls in awe until I regained my senses in Utah, where it occurred to me that this spring break roadtrip Bjorn and I were undertaking was also about boundaries. Aside from being on our way to perhaps the most profound border area of them all, our various cultural boundaries kept springing up. This was illustrated just moments later when the radio announcer mentioned some important fact about the World Champion New England Patriots, an American football club.

Upon hearing the “World Champion” turn of phrase, Bjorn launched into a rant on the arrogance of American baseball and football teams who win a league title and declare themselves world champions. The tirade went on for awhile and after he had exhausted himself, he declared, “America is not the world.”

Bjorn’s rant had made me fidgety, partly because I knew he was right, but also because I wasn’t able to muster any defense for the “world champions” custom. Left with nothing else to do, I ejected the cassette and played with the radio. Clean signals were hard to come by on the FM side, so I switched over to AM and hit scan. The digital numbers ran completely though their entire spectrum – a new experience for both of us – before locking onto something. We were in luck – folksy philosopher Paul Harvey was in the middle of telling his listeners about the various talents of the world’s countries. We listened to a few half-truths about central Europeans before Harvey boomed, “And the Swedes, of course, are great at woodworking.”

I looked over to a grimacing Bjorn.

“So you’re a carpenter, eh,” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said solemly. “We Swedes are all great woodworkers.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “The only wood you’re well-acquainted with is the bartop at Barney’s Pub.”

We laughed and continued to ridicule Harvey’s generalities until we pulled into a sleepy roadside motel for the night.

As we dealt with the room transaction, the hotel clerk - a roundish young kid wearing bib overalls - detected Bjorn’s accent and asked where he was from. When Bjorn said ‘Sweden’, the clerk just grunted. Then, as we handed over the cash for the room, he asked, “Do they have money over there in Sweden?”

Bjorn hesitated for a moment until he saw that the boy was honestly asking the question, and then he said of course we have money and pulled out some Swedish bills and coins. At first the whole scene was fun, but after the kid gave us five That’s so cools in a row, Bjorn paid his way out of the conversation with a Swedish coin.

We found and settled into our room, and after we had occupied our respective beds, another of those unexpected cultural differences manifested itself: even though we were on the ground floor, Bjorn insisted on keeping both windows wide open. Obviously he had never heard of “Psycho” or the Bates Motel, and while he slept like a baby, I slept with one eye open.

Next morning we were on the road early. We had to make Arizona by noon if we were to make our destination by sundown. The late-March day was sunny and temperate and we drove with the windows down but our jackets on. Every now and then we spoke, but for the most part we were quiet. We were both looking forward to getting to the Grand Canyon.

My first visit there years before had been so overwhelming that I had dreamt of it for months afterward – sometimes flying deep inside the gorge, so near the muddy Colorado River that I was afraid I’d fall in, and sometimes just standing near a lookout, peering over the abyss.

Anticipation hovered as Bjorn drove – he was all keen on the destination now, and sitting there with little to do, I tried very hard not to build up the canyon too much. I didn’t want to spoil it for Bjorn by talking it to death – but in the end I just had to hold forth.

“I’ve been thinking about boundary conditions,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And I think the Grand Canyon might be the ultimate one. I mean, not only does it violate the laws of space and relativity…”

“What the hell are you talking about,” he interjected, “‘violates space and relativity’?”

I shook my head at him. “Things are all distorted there, man. The thing is, you’re looking at something ten miles across and your mind just can’t grasp that it’s so large and so far away. Like you’ll be looking at some rock, wondering what kind of puny insect is milling around it, and then you get this blast of recognition – it’s a group of people walking around it, and the rock that your mind originally thought must be quite close suddenly goes through this terrible vortex shift of distance, and you actually feel… I don’t know if dizzy is the right word, but definitely disoriented… It’s just a strange place.”

“Well, stop telling me about it and let’s get there,” he yelled. “I’m gonna get it up.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Uh… do you mean giddyap?”

“Yes! Giddyap. I’m gonna giddyap!”

He looked over at me for permission to speed up and I shrugged my shoulders; he had been driving well, so why not?

The answer to that question came in the form of an Arizona Highway Patrolman, who clocked us doing 85 in a 55 zone.

“Where you boys headed,” asked the husky officer as he ticketed us.

“The Grand Canyon, sir,” responded Bjorn.

“Well,” the cop shot back, “it ain’t goin’ anywhere, so how ‘bout keepin’ it to the speed limit?”

Bjorn nodded and after the cop eventually pulled away, he turned to me and said, “You drive.”

So we switched places and continued on our way in relative silence, our destination drawing ever nearer. I tried not to ponder the boundary conditions that were haunting me, but in the end they were too compelling. I thought of both the vast distances involved in our road trip and the relatively short time Bjorn and I had before we would eventually go our separate ways that summer. I pondered the relative importance of the cultures that spawned and separated us, as well as the geography that had brought us together.

We arrived at the North side of the canyon an hour before sunset, at that magical time when the Grand Canyon starts to show off its rose and auburn glows, and after parking we took a short walk to a lookout. Being together in the car so much had made us appreciate our privacy, and I sat on a picnic bench enjoying the sunset while Bjorn walked off somewhere.

Sitting next to the Grand Canyon, blissfully noting how it toyed with my senses, I suddenly saw myself five years older, already looking back at this trip with nostalgia, knowing that the most important remnant of the trip would be a vision of the Grand Canyon glowing with a poetic twilight radiance.

But even more than that, I suddenly realized that I wanted to be like the Grand Canyon; I wanted to overcome boundaries such as time and geography. But looking at the majesty of the prehistoric cliffs, formed over millions of years, I saw that’s not how the Grand Canyon does it at all. Instead of struggling against boundary conditions, the Grand Canyon has just been. And perhaps the trick of it is just that – to just be and to somehow proactively allow ourselves to be shaped by the forces that act upon us…

These were the thoughts running through my mind as Bjorn approached. I looked at him there in his hiking boots and white Scandanavian sweater, a ruddy, long-haired photograph come to life, and we smiled at one another.

“This,” he said, sweeping his arm over the already nostalgic view, “is why we are here.”