The Canyon's Edge

Nora’s physical struggle to survive in the harsh desert environment escalates, as do her internal battles with PTSD and with maintaining her emotional wall. Although she doesn’t want to die, her efforts to detach from painful emotions and thoughts show that she isn’t embracing the fullness of life and is existing rather than living. The canyon walls that trap Nora mirror the mental walls she erects against feeling.

Nora shows physical and mental strength as she begins her quest to reunite with Dad. She reveals that, despite her fear of heights, she takes after her adventurous, desert-loving parents and remembers what they taught her about the desert landscape, reflecting the theme of The Keys to Survival. Nora knows that the Mojave rattler is one of the deadliest snakes and treats it with fear and respect. She knows that only one barrel cactus is safe to consume. She wisely puts mud on her skin to protect against sunburn. Nora uses her impressive knowledge and survival skills to source water in the drying canyon and find food in the form of mesquite pods. Nora has significant physical injuries—including cuts, bruises, scrapes, torn toenails, and cactus needle punctures—and endures sunburn, dehydration, hunger, dizziness, and fatigue. Despite all these physical challenges, however, Nora fights to survive: She stays strong and focuses on finding Dad. Even during her terrifying free-solo climb, she listens to Mary’s internalized voice, telling her to focus on her strength and self-confidence rather than on defeatist thoughts.

Nora’s poetry reflects her love of the desert. She finds beauty and resilience in the natural world. Dawn inspires Nora’s figurative description comparing the quality of light to different textures of cloth as the sky turns “from speckled black velvet / to deep purple satin / to beautiful pink silk” (85). In addition, she relates the natural world to her own life, comparing a strand of her “Before”/“After” hair to a ring in a tree to show how external events can affect life. Nora’s radiant imagery and in-depth knowledge of the desert landscape reveal that the desert is an important, intrinsic part of her character.

Nora displays her mental strength by overcoming her negative inner voice and persevering, as the theme of Healing From Trauma plays out. She doesn’t let the painful loss of the heart-shaped stone overcome her. Her determination to survive and find Dad shows that Nora doesn’t want to die. She pushes down unhelpful “what if” scenarios, unable to finish the thought that Dad might be dead. Nora still believes, or wants to believe, that Dad is working his way back toward her. At this time, Nora still relies on Dad to find her and rescue them, not yet confident in her own “self-efficacy.”

While Nora endures physical hardships that would defeat a stronger adult, she’s struggling emotionally. She works hard to stay alive and worries about the likelihood of dying in multiple situations but at the same time admits that she often doesn’t care about herself or her life. She futilely searches for meaning and fatalistically feels “[l]ike [her] life doesn’t matter” (138). Her PTSD symptoms escalate. Nora’s memories of the shooting return vividly in her nightmares, when her mental walls are weaker, causing panic and fear. As “Keep Moving” conveys, she wants to keep trying to find Dad—and avoid falling asleep again and enduring another nightmare. A second acrostic poem again spells out an identity of the Beast, “MONSTER,” and reveals her continued repression of her emotions.

Nora attempts to use her grounding techniques to control her seething emotions, rooting herself in the present through her senses—feeling the desert earth and smelling the sage—but after climbing to the cave, she gives in to her overwhelming anger. She self-harms, something that Mary warned her never to do. According to Matthew Tull from Verywell Mind, self-harm is more common among those with PTSD than people without: It can be a way of communicating and dealing with negative emotions and “may also provide a temporary escape from emotional pain” (Tull, Matthew. “Forms of Self-Harm Common in People With PTSD.” Verywell Mind, 28 Aug. 2020). Nora’s violent, bloody act of hacking and pulling out her hair is a brutal way of grounding—coping with the pain of her current terrifying situation, the uncertainty about Dad and her future, and the bittersweet memories of her “Before” world.

By destroying her “Before” hair, Nora attempts to purge herself of the painful feelings she still has for the loss of her mother and her stagnant friendship with Danielle. In “Numb,” Nora rebuilds her emotional wall with even gorier materials than ever before: blood, mud, and tar, which reflect her desperation to keep the wall in place. Choosing to emotionally detach, however, has a price: By refusing to feel, Nora rejects life. Mary’s voice warns Nora that “no longer feeling means / you are dead” (160).

Bowling continues to use imagery of walls to symbolize both protection and obstacles. Walls keep things out but also trap things within them. The cactus wren and the pack rat make walls of cholla spines to protect their shelters, using “pain as protection” (129), much as Nora takes her hurt and makes her emotional wall. Nora, however, ironically walls her pain inside in her effort to block it. As long as she maintains her wall, she can’t move forward and heal.

The page border art, showing narrowing gray walls, returns in three poems in this section—“Endless Walls,” “Anxiety,” and “You Can”—and visually creates a sense of confinement, symbolically illustrating the depths of feelings that Nora must plumb before she can heal. The canyon symbolizes Nora’s descent into her own psyche: a deep dive into the emotions she doesn’t wish to confront. In the canyon, Nora comments, “I am completely hidden, and yet, / it seems there’s nowhere to hide” (128). Physically, no one can see her in the canyon, but she can’t find a place to shelter. Emotionally, at the bottom of the canyon, trapped by its walls, Nora can’t hide from her thoughts—or herself. She physically conquers the wall, sheltering in a cave halfway up, halfway out of the literal canyon and her emotional stagnation and alluding to the theme of Finding the Courage to Live.