An intro for a paper on my grandpa

My grandfather is history and my grandfather is the earth. He endures with a stubborn, unexpected strength like a Juniper beaten by time and the elements clings to a cliff face where all other plants would have given up hope. The history flows from him like an inexhaustible spring, impossible to plug. It moves as freely as water running down a mountain swirling up and down and into every crevice of his memory without regard to whom is listening or how long he has been listening. My grandfather is the earth, but the earth is not friendly. He is as harsh, blunt and stubborn as the lowest point of the Great Basin, and tough, unchanging and permanent as the highest point of the Great Basin. He is a wind worn, craggy mountain of the high desert. He has no soft, forest bedding and he has no majestic pine trees. The white hair on his head is not snow; it is a cracked, bristly, dried up Artemisia Tridentata you will find growing on top of a high desert mountain. If you thirst for his wisdom, don’t look out south and west to the alpine country, look out east and north where the pine trees stop and the sagebrush begins. You will find a land that is harsh and hazardous and will not apologize for either of these.
My grandfather is this land, and they belong to each other. He has left more footprints on these hills than twenty representatives of my generation put together. The weight of his stories and memories could fill Lahontan Reservoir twice over and feed all the fish as well. My grandfather is this land and he does not apologize for it.
Until the age of six, he grew up in the Old Country. He is Basque and carries with him an ancient, mysterious legacy. His people were there before history was counted and his homeland was there before the peaks of the Alps had matured. He comes from the timeless Pyrenees where his first memory is chasing a chicken near a river. I can see my grandfather as a child running barefoot over the rich Pyrenees clay, dashing into a river and playing boyish games with the chicken – me boy; you chicken; I chase; you run.
When he came to America, all he left in the Old Country were his footprints and a dead chicken.
He leaves a new set of footprints now. He is old and bent over; he doesn’t have any feeling in his right hand and his left knee doesn’t work right. He has been through one heart attack, and we’re pretty sure a stroke. He has a calcium growth on his right collar bone and a large scar on his forehead from an accident that should have claimed his life two years ago.
We don’t let him walk in the desert alone anymore because one wrong step and we fear the worst. But this is our fear, not his. I once saw him pick up and carry an eighty pound rock – half has body weight and eleven less his years – and with the determination of someone who knows he will live forever purposefully drop it right where he thought it should go. And since my grandfather is the earth, he would know. If my grandfather could have his way, he would be romping through the hills picking up old cans to recycle collecting money to send to missionaries in Spain or Italy or Indonesia. He would be setting traps to catch weasels and skunks and gophers to keep them out of my father’s front yard. He would be in the land everyday collecting more stories and more history to pass onto this generation.
My grandfather is my predecessor, the footprints he has left in this land call to me with a jealous ferocity. I would love to respond and go back to a simpler life. But this is no longer possible. I fear technology has been the fall of my grandfather. The same things that have saved his life more than once is the same thing that slowly hastened the waning of my grandfather’s truly epic and timeless life. Who knows? Maybe if you look hard enough you will see some of his footprints across Spanish Springs and Lahontan Valley.
Their call will always remain as long as the earth remains with, hopefully, this question: Would you listen? Would you follow?