If you ask me to do something on Friday, June 4, 2027, I can’t. I’m busy. 

And you’ll never imagine what I’m going to be doing. 

Unless you are a highly sought after meeting or wedding planner, your 2027 calendar is likely wiiide open. Mine sure was, until just the other day when I added some dates to a post-it note and then created a manila file for said post-it note because let’s be honest, there is zero chance I’m going to keep track of a small purple post-it for four entire years. 

I named the file “Grand Canyon Reservations.” 

As incredible as it is to have plans four years hence it is almost equally incredible that twenty-two years ago I walked into a post office in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood and mailed a check to the National Park Service. That $100 check earned me a spot on an exclusive waitlist, a list of people who hope to travel down the Colorado River via boat as it winds its way through the 277-mile-long ancient geological formation that is Arizona’s Grand Canyon. 

I first saw the Grand Canyon at age five in the 1970s as my mom and I drove across the US in our red VW Beetle but somehow, I hardly remember it. The next time I visited the Canyon I was in my early twenties and the experience was unforgettable. After a long day of driving my friend Hether pulled our 1984 white Jetta up to a rest stop on the South Rim. Stepping out, I couldn’t see much other than a few people congregating at a low stone wall and a vast expanse of concrete for parking. Suddenly, I had the impulse to be alone, so I walked toward one end of the rest area. Approaching slowly, I realized the barrier was positioned exactly on the rim of the Canyon.

I waited until reaching the wall to lift my eyes, and there it was. A vast, shimmering painting in reds and pinks and browns and blues unfurled before me, a space so great my brain had trouble registering the size at first. What to take in, the rim across from me, so far away I wasn’t sure I could make it out, or the immense curvature of the canyon, cutting to my left and right, wisps of clouds visible at the far ends? Or were those even ends at all? And waaay down, difficult to make out, a glint of what looked like a thin strip of silver, ahh, the Colorado River. In those first few seconds, I began to understand the power of water, able to carve a canyon so deep, so beautiful, so mind-blowingly gigantic. Overcome, I allowed the tears to stream down my cheeks.

Remembering that sacred moment helped me maintain my spot on the Grand Canyon waitlist for the next twenty or so years, informing the Park Service of address changes, dutifully responding to their periodic inquiries…did I still want a river trip, did I want to keep my spot? Yes, I did. Always keeping in mind a space on my nebulous future trip for that same friend, Hether, now an experienced river guide with multiple trips through the Grand Canyon under her belt.

And then, this January I received an email from the Park Service offering me, as one who has been on the list for a predetermined amount of time, a chance to enter a one-time lottery for a launch date. They asked for my top twenty launch dates, and $400. I complied.

A few days later, an email. “You WON!” Incredibly, I got my first requested launch date (probably helped that it was four years from now), and a guaranteed life-changing river trip.

Will it be worth the twenty-six-year wait? There’s no doubt in my mind.