When I found myself in Houston with a few hours to spare, I made a pilgrimage to the Rothko Chapel. I knew nothing about it, except that many had praised its quiet transcendence: art critics, Presbyterians, the Mevlani Whirling Dervishes, the Dalai Lama. I knew Rothko's luminous paintings, the way they floated off the canvas, hovered in consciousness. I thought I was prepared. But when I walked into the chapel, his enormous black canvases stopped me cold. They hung on the walls of a harmoniously proportioned octagonal space. They surrounded clean-lined central benches. The room pulsed with quiet. Très élégant. But at once my chest tightened and my eyes began to tear.

I'm in the presence of the oppressor.

This high-art heresy made me squirm, but I can't deny what I felt. Suffocation by the static. Equilibrium not as dynamic balance, but as extinguished movement. I recalled Rothko had killed himself. He'd been trying to come to terms with the Ultimate as Abstraction. Or the Abstract as Ultimate. I doubted he wandered much. I stayed an hour, working to breathe deeply, trying not to panic. Then I walked across the carefully kept lawn to the Menil Collection. There I unexpectedly found myself in galleries filled with the antithesis of the abstract: Oceanic art, African sculpture, innumerable Cycladic figures from early Greece. Every piece throbbed with life, with the specific, with the multiplicity of this world, despite its glassed-in, guarded state. I felt waves of relief.

My tent sits at the upstream end of a small island, on an exposed crescent of smooth, cliff-colored stones: rust-red, dun, ash-grey, ivory, black. The dawn river glows and shimmers. Across the pale peach sky, a peregrine streaks toward the brightening canyon wall, her long pointed wings beating hard. In a breath she vanishes behind a blunt sandstone fin, then as abruptly reappears in unbounded air above the rock and rushing water.

Periodically I'm gripped by a black fury. It always arrives hard upon the same grim mire: I'm wrapped with invisible sticky threads; every part of my life has sprouted hooks and an anchor. The hooks hooked in me. No anesthetic. What I crave to calm that fury is also always the same: I want to wander.

Wandering catalyzes a transparency beyond the realm of light. It generates a barrierlessness to movement, of movement; the membrane of self becomes more permeable.

I am on a river trip with twelve others, monitoring peregrine falcons. In orange inflatables, we float Ruby and Horsethief canyons, seventy-five miles upstream from Moab on the brown Colorado.

Although many claim peregrine means wanderer, the dictionary lists instead derivations from words that mean foreigner and through the land. Like a pilgrim, the peregrine travels through foreign lands, speeding on her erratic path, in constant, roving search. At the proper season, peregrines migrate in patterns that have their own mysterious order. A peregrine doesn't wander aimlessly at all, no more than I do, however ambiguous our destinations.

I can never engineer my own transparency for very long, never quite wander to lands so foreign I recognize nothing. My roaming zigzags. Its indirection allows space for what's beyond my skin. And whatever's scrambled and tight inside unscrambles at its own speed, in unpredictable flow.

The canyons we raft down aren't wilderness; train tracks run along one bank, a holdover from roadless days, and passing engines blast air horns at us. We know conductors alert Amtrak passengers in advance that they might spot rafters out their safety-glass windows and just maybe get mooned. At night Freud has nothing to do with my dreams of long freights tearing through camp, preceded by their powerful head lamps raking the canyon walls. I doubt this trip could be called a wilderness experience when we eat curry for dinner, French toast for breakfast, smoked oysters and ripe brie for hors d'oeuvres, carrot cake for dessert.

The life we encounter recalls peculiar neighbors, deadlines, traffic noises. A feral Chinese goose has escaped from her pet yard and with her pale exaggerated forehead bump waddles and paddles from camp to camp, noisily begging food. Weighed down with water and spotting scopes for a view across the channel to a bald eagle nest, we trek along the train tracks. In the huge stick nest, a pair of nearly fledged chicks bob and jostle like awkward hand puppets. When we hear the train, we scramble down the cinder slope and watch graffiti-washed cars clatter by.

Wandering has long been an impulse of humans, long a problem for established order. Think only of Cain and Abel. Abel's wandering seems blank, unproductive, irresponsible; Cain's wandering is punishment for murdering his wandering bother. It's an unspeakable burden. Abel's wandering, I remember, also reflects the movement of everything that lives.

Water rush mixes with willow swish punctuated by staccato calls from hidden yellow-breasted chats and melodious songs from blue grosbeaks. Upriver a storm has darkened the sky, and a new fresh wind blows the smell of rain past us. From the shore a loud crack explodes from a dead cottonwood, and we look over in time to see half its branches tumble to the ground.

Phenomenologists say consciousness is always consciousness of something. Wander is always wander in some place.

My raptor-spotting abilities have improved after days on the river, and I've become proficient at distinguishing new peregrine whitewash from old golden eagle whitewash. Golden eagles engage in projectile evacuation from their ledges, making distinctive messy splashes. Newer whitewash shines whiter.

Turkey vulture vees dot the sky. Swallows loop in bogus Brownian motion along the cliffs. A canyon wren rings the air with clear cascades. Water swirls into an eddy behind a polished black boulder, its dark smooth surface puckered into unlikely wave forms by the constant river. Two billion years ago during the Precambrian, when life hadn't evolved much beyond single cells, the boulder's molecules had solidified into rock.

Those black boulders. Rothko's black paintings. How sad he must have been. How hard he worked to solve his life. How much he thought about it all. How badly he failed. Why hadn't he at least tried to wander?

The water races past all the rocks. The river follows the canyon. The peregrines never guess we're here to watch their wings beat and beat against the brilliant air.

Mary Beath, “The brilliant air”
Collected in Hiking Alone, 2008