The Canyon's Edge

These opening chapters readers introduce the protagonist, Nora, and her father, who are both struggling physically and emotionally with the aftermath of the shooting that took her mother’s life. Bowling quickly establishes the novel’s central conflicts: character versus nature and character versus self. These external and internal struggles inform the novel’s main themes: Healing From Trauma, The Keys to Survival, and Finding the Courage to Live. Nora’s poetic descriptions and reflections about the Southwest desert reveal its personal significance to both her and her father and convey a strong sense of place. Walls symbolically represent Nora’s inner barriers.

As Nora describes their present-time trip to the canyon, she references her and her father’s emotional backstory, gradually building the grim picture of the tragedy that forever altered her “normal.” She notes that this year’s birthday canyon trip marks the one-year anniversary of her mother’s tragic shooting death as they celebrated a birthday meal at Café Ardiente. In Spanish, ardiente means “burning”—and fire has a symbolically destructive role in the novel. Dad was also shot and seriously injured in the shooting. His wound, Nora realizes, represents the literal, physical damaging effect of a bullet. Nora, though physically unharmed during the shooting, is emotionally damaged by the bullet, as is Dad. She reflects that one bullet “can tear a hole in your life […] so painful you’ll feel it every second for the rest of your life” (8). The tragedy is life-defining for Nora, who now views her life as divided into two parts: “Before” and “After.”

Mary, her therapist—whose remembered voice appears in italics and who formally calls Nora by her full name, Eleanor—suggests that Nora and her father “haven’t fully processed or accepted what happened” (15). Instead, each is coping with their trauma in unhealthy ways, which causes their internal conflicts. Both Nora and Dad show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nora’s haiku accuses Dad of “hypervigilance,” a symptom of PTSD in which someone who has experienced trauma constantly monitors their surroundings for danger. Since the shooting, Dad fears being around people and isolates himself and Nora for their protection. Nora, too, has trouble coping with her traumatic memory of the shooting. She builds an emotional wall to avoid thinking about her feelings and actively represses her memory of the shooting and her nightmare, refusing to confront and overcome her fear. Nora is terrified of dying, and because her emotions are on a hair-trigger, she momentarily panics when she discovers that Dad has a flare gun. Guns represent death, loss, and fear to her, but the presence of the flare gun foreshadows its future use as a lifesaving device. While Nora recognizes that she and Dad both build protective walls around themselves, Nora is beginning to see that her mental wall creates isolation and that Dad physically insists on keeping them from recovering and living fully.

Writing is one of Nora’s coping strategies for her PTSD. It provides a positive connection to Mom and an outlet for emotional and mental release. When she’s frozen in fear on the rock wall—and when she’s confronted with the approaching flood—Nora lets her mind “escape,” detaching from the frightening situation and finding refuge in her poetry. Composing her poetry—whether on paper or in her mind—allows her to channel and express her emotions and manage her fear. Nora shares two poems in this opening section: two that are free verse, like most of the poems to come, and one haiku, which she uses to encapsulate Mary’s therapeutic advice on coping and moving forward. The haiku illustrates Nora’s appreciation for order and patterns, a need that illuminates her search for meaning later in the novel and informs the theme of Finding the Courage to Live.

Mary thinks Nora’s writing has the potential to help heal her emotional trauma by allowing her to confront and reframe her fears, but Nora still keeps protective walls up around her emotions. She doesn’t even want to share her poetry with Dad, saying, “Maybe it’s just for me” (7).

Nora’s poems and her prose narrative in this section reveal her skill as a wordsmith. She uses figurative and sensory language to describe the desert world around her. For example, the mountaintops are “jagged like the edge of a serrated knife” (7). Nora uses simile and onomatopoeia to describe the sound of the cactus wren’s “ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,” which is “like an engine that won’t turn over” (9). Nora uses repetition, alliteration, and assonance to give her poem rhythm, as she describes the layers of the rock wall: “rough spatters of rainbow red / [...] pitted and pockmarked pink” (17). Nora’s descriptions of the natural world show that she shares Dad’s love of the desert. She can recognize and identify the desert flora and fauna, from jojoba plants and brittlebush to kangaroo rats and wolf spiders. She has followed in her parents’ footsteps as a practiced hiker and climber and has explored other canyons with her parents. The peace of the natural world and its removal from people eases Dad’s paranoia and helps him partially return to who he was “Before.” Nora is shocked to hear him humming—a sign of contentment. Both Nora and Dad think that their outdoor adventure can help them “come back to life” (22).

Dad and Nora are aware of the inherent dangers in rock climbing and hiking, though Dad believes that the natural world is comparatively safer than civilization if one is vigilant and prepared. Ironically, the canyon walls, like Nora and Dad’s emotional walls, trap them rather than protect them when the flood arrives, setting into motion the true external conflict of character and nature.