I came slowly to myself on the morning of Thursday, November 5. I remembered immediately where I was—Room 245 in the Motel 6 in Yuma, Arizona—but it just didn't seem like a good time to wake up yet.
Thirty minutes later I gave up the ghost and creaked out of bed. The motel mattress was firm enough, but sometimes sleeping in strange places stiffens me up. I shuffled to my suitcase, retrieved my kit bag, lurched into the bathroom, and showered, emerging to find John already awake and watching one of the Final Fantasy movies on TV. I'm not sure which one it was. The premise involved asteroids, and aliens, and ray guns, and an insane amount of jumpsuits.
By and by we got road-ready. We hoped to hit the Grand Canyon with enough daylight left to set up a tent, and possibly an entire working campsite. At this time of year, that involved getting there well before 5:00 p.m. We needed about seven hours or so to drive to GCNP from Yuma. That meant departing no later than 9:30 a.m., if possible.
At 9:48 a.m. we were pulling out of the parking lot, threading our way through copious amounts of road construction, and weaseling back onto Interstate 8.
A few miles out of town we stopped for gas. As we were filling up, we're reasonably certain we saw Tom Petty pull into the parking lot, blasting his own music out of the speakers of a bright yellow late-model Ford Mustang. He parked, ran inside, came back out, got back in, pulled jerkily out of the parking lot (working the clutch inexpertly) and drove away.
Finished staring, John turned back to me. "Tom Petty needs to learn to drive a stick."
The Yuma-Phoenix run wasn't quite as scenic as I'd hoped. Extreme Southern Arizona turned out to be little better than Extreme Southern California. It was flat as a pancake, and whatever hadn't been bleached bone-white by the sun had been turned into mangy farmland with copious amounts of water.
After a few hours, we came into the environs of Phoenix.
Oh boy, I thought. I've never seen Phoenix, really. All I've seen are a few tantalizing glimpses outside the big plate-glass windows of Sky Harbor. Now I'll finally get a good look at the place!
Yeah, right. This is what my "look" at Phoenix consisted of:
Interstate highway interchanges can go take a running jump. That's all I've got to say about that.
Fortunately for my mood, the scenery improved greatly once we emerged on I-17 north of the city.
Not bad, eh? The first thing I noticed were the saguaro cacti. I'd seen them before, but not for about, oh, ten years. They were far more impressive in person than I recalled. So of course I badgered John until he pulled onto an off-ramp and we could have ourselves a photo-op.
As we continued on, the scenery rolled by like prickly waves on a greenish ocean. We traversed the Prescott area (where we saw the smoke of an enormous brush fire, which stayed in sight for more than an hour), and moved onward, ever upward, growing nearer to Flagstaff.
Flagstaff was actually nothing like I remembered. I'd been there once before, at the tender age of 13, during my family's epic move from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Apple Valley, California in 1999. All I remembered were a lot of rocks and pine trees, and a few bright yellow WATCH FOR ELK roadsigns.
There were rocks, yes. There were pine trees, yes. There were plenty of elk-related notices. But the layout of the town of Flagstaff was completely different than I remembered. The place seemed bigger, too. Either my memory was truly atrocious, or the place had undergone some changes in the last ten years. Either way, it was still pretty: the most beautiful stony hills surrounded the town, arching surprisingly high into the ethereal blue, coated with trees and reddish rocks.
We made a brief stop in Flagstaff to—you guessed it—drop by the Best Buy. John claims to have some kind of morbid, work-related compulsion. He says he has to go inside any Best Buy he sees, just to compare it to the others he's worked at. I think he might be jerking my chain. He did have some rather excoriating things to say about the level of customer service represented (or rather, not represented) by the Geek Squad at the Flagstaff branch, however.
Apart from that, our purpose in Best Buy was clear: John had to buy another kind of cable. I contented myself with poking through the store's R&B music section, which is my morbid Best Buy compulsion. I was, for the nth time, unable to locate the Black Keys album I've been questing for, The Big Come Up. (It stands to reason; that's probably their most popular album to date.) I struck gold in the next aisle over, however: Led Zeppelin III.
Laden with yet another mysterious cable and some succulent classic rock, we paid our money and made our egress.
At John's suggestion, we gassed up on our way out of Flagstaff. Then we got down to the business of being confused about which route to take. John had been showcasing his lovely Garmin GPS system all day. It worked well, and had a multitude of useful user-friendly features. Unfortunately, like MapQuest, it occasionally had a debilitating tendency to send us on nastily circuitous routes. The only difference was that John's GPS sent us on these nastily circuitous routes in an irritatingly calm, feminine voice. After realizing that we were not on I-40 (which connected up with Arizona State Highway 64, leading to the south rim of our destination), we turned around and returned to that interstate. We turned onto the 64 at about 3:30 in the afternoon.
Now it was a straight shot to the Grand Canyon.
After all the stops we'd made and electronics stores we'd criticized, I never thought we'd make the national park with any sort of light left. But we did. Following a deliciously scenic drive down the two-lane AZ-64, during which I almost broke my neck craning to look at a Lockheed C-121 Constellation parked outside the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Valle (more about that in the next installment), we pulled up to the park entrance sometime after four. John stumped up the $25 entrance fee, and we made a beeline for the nearest campsite: the Mather Campground near Market Plaza. Fortuitously near Market Plaza, as it happened.
We turned down Juniper Loop and began scanning either side of the lane for a suitable campsite-cum-parking spot. We chose one a ways in, a little too near an elderly couple's RV, but suitably close to the Dumpsters and lavatories. It had a flat expanse of ground for a tent, a wooden picnic table, and a fire pit. After clambering out of the car and donning an extra layer against the cool Northern Arizona evening, we promptly busted the tent out of the trunk and set it up. Our practice run on Tuesday night paid off. We managed to erect the thing with little trouble. While pounding the tent stakes in, we encountered a frustratingly wide patch of bedrock at the southwest corner; but with the aid of my military-surplus entrenching tool, I discovered its boundaries and was able to find a decent spot to embed the stake. We threw the pads and sleeping bags unceremoniously into the tent as the dusk gathered and then turned to the more interesting idea of dinner.
We had a stove to cook on, but both of us realized that it really wouldn't be camping without a campfire. And we had no wood. And there were signs all around saying NO WOOD GATHERING. Well, shoot. John got back in the car and manfully found his way to Market Plaza to get us some flammable materials. I bustled about the camp, installing batteries in the lantern, setting out the cooking utensils, and generally organizing the campsite. I called John on my cell phone (there was barely enough signal to be heard) and requested that he bring back some more water. He agreed. I also hunted around for the triple-A batteries. I couldn't find the darn things anywhere. We'd picked up a few in Lucerne Valley along with the groceries, intending to use them in the fancy LED headlamp my mother had loaned me, but they'd disappeared in the meantime. Oh well, the heck with it. I had my Doomsday flashlight, anyway (one of the ones you charge by shaking).
The darkness quietly completed itself as I worked (and searched fruitlessly). After a time, there was little to do but sit at the picnic table in the small white patch of illumination thrown by the lantern and hum a little tune as I waited for John to return.
I didn't look up during this waiting period. It's a shame I didn't. I was missing out on quite a show.
In due time, John returned with fire-starters, lighter fluid, bottled water, a six-pack of Stone Brewery's Levitation Ale, and three bundles of split cedar logs. He set the water on the table and the rest alight. The cedar wasn't well seasoned, and was more fond of smoldering and smoking than actually burning; but after moving the logs closer to one another and throwing a few more fire-starters on (and a few liberal squirts of lighter fluid), we soon had a cheery blaze going. Then we got down to brass tacks. John set up our new camp stove, pulled out a saucepan, opened a couple cans of Dennison's Chili, and set them to warm. Soon, we were chowing down on hot chili, crusty French bread and beer, with the quiet night all about us and the fire crackling away, sending fragrant cedar smoke over us as the breeze swung to and fro.
"Marvelous" isn't quite the word for that meal. John and I chatted away as if we hadn't recently been separated for three years, joking and chuckling. The smoke curled away, up into the night.
Our feast concluded, we cleaned up the dishes with the aid of icy water from an old-fashioned water pump near the lavatories. (Only the next day would we discover that there was a sink for dishes at the rear of the building.) Then we pulled up a cooler by the fire and watched the stars, which we'd just noticed. I don't want to sound trite, but they were glimmering like diamonds. Off in the distance, a couple of campsites over, a solitary flute began to play. The flautist was undoubtedly a novice; his or her repertoire was limited to the major scales, and a few lilting notes in no particular order. But the effect was stunning, especially in that darkness, especially in that strange and majestic place. Less than a mile from the Grand Canyon, under an adamantine sky, warm fire-glow and cedar smoke filling the air, a delicious meal in our stomachs and beer in our hands, John and I listened to that tinkling flute filter through the trees with a visceral reverence. It was the perfect complement to an evening of subtle splendor.
"It's Ian Anderson!" I postulated.
There remains little to tell. We secured whatever belongings we weren't going to sleep with inside John's car; disposed of our trash in the proper receptacles; and adjourned to the tent with flashlights, cell phones, and warm pajamas (sweats and long-sleeved shirt for me, a polypropylene body glove for John). John attempted to read a few Bible verses by the light of the lantern, but pronounced the illumination too dim. I was more stubborn. I laid awake for another half-hour with a flashlight in one hand and my new copy of Alcott's Little Women in the other. Between paragraphs, my friend Allison administered the daily grammar quiz via text messages. (The word was "gravid," I believe.) After an engaging electronic conversation, she signed off. I stayed conscious just long enough to finish the chapter, then put the book aside, switched off the flashlight, and laid my delightedly weary head to rest.
And upon the morrow rested the golden promise of the canyon itself...
I'd like to conclude by adding that I considered entitling this piece "Canyon dig it?" but I thought better of it.
One evening earlier this week I was sitting in my best friend John's room at his parent's house, nursing a Blue Moon and a virulent case of cabin fever. The two of us had finished watching a few episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion and were listening to a little music on John's souped-up surround sound system. As we sat there in reflective silence, John, who'd been having some girl troubles, suddenly perked up at the corners. He asked me if I was free on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
I told him I was. I had nothing on the docket except possible flying lessons, but I hadn't scheduled those yet. "Want to go on a road trip?" John asked, a characteristically mischievous grin on his face. Let's review. I had cabin fever. I spent every day sitting in my room trying to force myself to write banal travel articles that always came out like travel brochures. Apart from that I was doing little but editing a few daily pages of my nascent novel manuscript and reliving my irresponsible college days with some rediscovered video games.
So of course I said yes.
Hell yes. John fetched some maps and atlases and, after some brief indecision about which direction to go, we settled on Arizona. It was proximal. I'd never been to the Grand Canyon, and John had only been once, when he was too young to remember. That clinched it. We'd take the scenic route to the finest geological formation in the States, and camp there. With a clear sheet of plastic laid over the Arizonan atlas page, we traced out our route with a marker. We'd take off sometime around noon and spend a few hours on the road, spending the first night in the town of Yuma, Arizona, just over the border. The second day we'd traverse the state, passing through Phoenix, Prescott, and Flagstaff, to reach the Grand Canyon before dark and set up a tent. The third day we'd break camp, scout out the canyon, and head home on Interstate 40.
We held a brief reunion on Tuesday night to compare tents. My mom loaned me a little orange two-person Marmot that she'd taken along on a bicycling trip across North Dakota. It turned out to be a bit small for John's lanky, six-foot-four frame. John's family, on the other hand, had a three-person Hillary that, though it was a tad complicated to assemble, was admirably spacious. We split, packed, assembled what gear we could from our families' respective stores, and met up at my house at 10:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, to load up and hit the road. After a quick stop in Lucerne Valley for my half of the groceries (bagels, peanut butter, strawberry jam, cheese sticks, fruit, and some batteries), we headed southeast down old Highway 247.
We got into the rhythm of the thing right away. John had a black notebook in his backpack that we rapidly came to refer to as "the log." Whenever anything noteworthy happened—say, we passed by a palm tree farm, or neared a natural landmark, or got stopped by the Border Patrol—I would enter it in the log. In this way, we recorded our passage through Yucca Valley, where we switched to California Highway 62; our subsequent traversal of Morongo Valley, and our merger with Interstate 10 East; and our eventual connection to Interstate 8, after a little meandering on State Highways 86, 78 and 111. During this languorous tour of the Southern Mojave, we passed the impressively vast Salton Sea (none of my pictures of which came out very well). We also drove through the tiny, grubby town of Brawley, near El Centro, where every third person's immigration status was cast into severe doubt. Here we appropriately stopped to go to the bathroom. Eventually we entered upon I-8 and headed east toward Arizona. The weather was fine: 70s and 80s, with a light breeze and broken clouds. John's iPod was hooked up to his Chrysler Concorde's superb stereo, and a steady stream of country and contemporary tunes was wafting out of the speakers. Both of us had our sunglasses on and were feeling freer by the minute. Our minds had been heavy. My financial situation was deteriorating rapidly, and John was having some personal relationship problems of his own. A road trip was just what the doctor ordered. We execrated every jerk who passed us, commented on the scenery and the music we listened to, and made masculine small-talk.
And so, after a few short hours of sand dunes, creosote bushes, scant farmland, and a nominal encounter with the Border Patrol (they asked us if we were American citizens, and then let us through), we found ourselves in Yuma, Arizona. We signed into the nearest Motel 6, dumped off our heavier suitcases, and sallied forth once more into the gathering dusk. John had to get himself an adapter cable for his iPod. As an employee of Geek Squad, he was dumbfounded by the minuscule size of Yuma's Best Buy. It was cramped and laid out illogically, he said. He found his cable while I checked Facebook on the nearest Snow Leopard.
We were also at a loss for a camping stove. My family possessed several, but during that morning's trials, all had proved to be either inoperable or undetectable. So John and I had ventured forth that morning resolving to stop at the soonest Wal-Mart or Target and purchase a stove instead. Serendipitously, as we exited the Best Buy, we spotted the telltale Target logo across the street. We entered just as the red sun's last dying rays lit the storefront, the voice of Taylor Swift still ringing in our ears. We located a small
$28 stove and a bottle of propane, purchased both, recrossed the highway, stopped for cabbage at Wells Fargo, and finally set our minds to the problem of nourishment. There happened to be a tasty-looking Mexican restaurant a few yards from our motel. This being Yuma, within shouting distance of the border, we figured we couldn't go wrong with Mexican food this night. The restaurant's name was Chretin's, after Señor Chretin, a World War II veteran who constructed the eatery in 1946. Since then, apparently, the venue has entertained some of the most famous names in America: everyone from John Wayne to Kim Basinger to George Bush the Elder has eaten there, according to the guest list hung on the wall. The food bore that litany out. Consisting of fresh vegetables and meat, accompanied by homemade tortillas and chips, the beef enchiladas were far more authentically Mexican than anything else I've sampled. John's tacos, he said, were incredible. Moreover, the service was excellent. Neither of us ever lacked for drinks. Speaking of drinks, we adjourned to the bar after paying our bill. I had an Ultimate Margarita (mixed by the lovely new barmaid, Leah, late of Huntington Beach) and John sipped a beer. We cast occasional glances at the World Series on the TV, and I flirted a little with Leah, competing with the middle-aged, polo shirt-wearing man a couple of seats down. Leah took it all in good grace, I with a few grains of salt on the rim of my margarita glass.
Concluding our after-dinner libations, John and I settled up and retreated to Room 245. There we watched a nameless Bruce Willis flick (in which the aging warrior faces down both a trio of petty crooks holed up in a rich man's home, and a shadowy gang of masked conspirators seeking a mysterious DVD). During the commercials, John fired up some music on his laptop and introduced me to Mathisyahu, a full-bearded, hat-wearing, card-carrying young Jew who nonetheless can reggae like a professional. He regularly performs live, and his beatboxing is nothing short of miraculous. Take that, Muhammad. Then we turned in for the night.
Interstate highway interchanges can go take a running jump. That's all I've got to say about that.
Fortunately for my mood, the scenery improved greatly once we emerged on I-17 north of the city.
Not bad, eh? The first thing I noticed were the saguaro cacti. I'd seen them before, but not for about, oh, ten years. They were far more impressive in person than I recalled. So of course I badgered John until he pulled onto an off-ramp and we could have ourselves a photo-op.
As we continued on, the scenery rolled by like prickly waves on a greenish ocean. We traversed the Prescott area (where we saw the smoke of an enormous brush fire, which stayed in sight for more than an hour), and moved onward, ever upward, growing nearer to Flagstaff.
Flagstaff was actually nothing like I remembered. I'd been there once before, at the tender age of 13, during my family's epic move from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Apple Valley, California in 1999. All I remembered were a lot of rocks and pine trees, and a few bright yellow WATCH FOR ELK roadsigns.
There were rocks, yes. There were pine trees, yes. There were plenty of elk-related notices. But the layout of the town of Flagstaff was completely different than I remembered. The place seemed bigger, too. Either my memory was truly atrocious, or the place had undergone some changes in the last ten years. Either way, it was still pretty: the most beautiful stony hills surrounded the town, arching surprisingly high into the ethereal blue, coated with trees and reddish rocks.
We made a brief stop in Flagstaff to—you guessed it—drop by the Best Buy. John claims to have some kind of morbid, work-related compulsion. He says he has to go inside any Best Buy he sees, just to compare it to the others he's worked at. I think he might be jerking my chain. He did have some rather excoriating things to say about the level of customer service represented (or rather, not represented) by the Geek Squad at the Flagstaff branch, however.
Apart from that, our purpose in Best Buy was clear: John had to buy another kind of cable. I contented myself with poking through the store's R&B music section, which is my morbid Best Buy compulsion. I was, for the nth time, unable to locate the Black Keys album I've been questing for, The Big Come Up. (It stands to reason; that's probably their most popular album to date.) I struck gold in the next aisle over, however: Led Zeppelin III.
Laden with yet another mysterious cable and some succulent classic rock, we paid our money and made our egress.
At John's suggestion, we gassed up on our way out of Flagstaff. Then we got down to the business of being confused about which route to take. John had been showcasing his lovely Garmin GPS system all day. It worked well, and had a multitude of useful user-friendly features. Unfortunately, like MapQuest, it occasionally had a debilitating tendency to send us on nastily circuitous routes. The only difference was that John's GPS sent us on these nastily circuitous routes in an irritatingly calm, feminine voice. After realizing that we were not on I-40 (which connected up with Arizona State Highway 64, leading to the south rim of our destination), we turned around and returned to that interstate. We turned onto the 64 at about 3:30 in the afternoon.
Now it was a straight shot to the Grand Canyon.
After all the stops we'd made and electronics stores we'd criticized, I never thought we'd make the national park with any sort of light left. But we did. Following a deliciously scenic drive down the two-lane AZ-64, during which I almost broke my neck craning to look at a Lockheed C-121 Constellation parked outside the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Valle (more about that in the next installment), we pulled up to the park entrance sometime after four. John stumped up the $25 entrance fee, and we made a beeline for the nearest campsite: the Mather Campground near Market Plaza. Fortuitously near Market Plaza, as it happened.
We turned down Juniper Loop and began scanning either side of the lane for a suitable campsite-cum-parking spot. We chose one a ways in, a little too near an elderly couple's RV, but suitably close to the Dumpsters and lavatories. It had a flat expanse of ground for a tent, a wooden picnic table, and a fire pit. After clambering out of the car and donning an extra layer against the cool Northern Arizona evening, we promptly busted the tent out of the trunk and set it up. Our practice run on Tuesday night paid off. We managed to erect the thing with little trouble. While pounding the tent stakes in, we encountered a frustratingly wide patch of bedrock at the southwest corner; but with the aid of my military-surplus entrenching tool, I discovered its boundaries and was able to find a decent spot to embed the stake. We threw the pads and sleeping bags unceremoniously into the tent as the dusk gathered and then turned to the more interesting idea of dinner.
We had a stove to cook on, but both of us realized that it really wouldn't be camping without a campfire. And we had no wood. And there were signs all around saying NO WOOD GATHERING. Well, shoot. John got back in the car and manfully found his way to Market Plaza to get us some flammable materials. I bustled about the camp, installing batteries in the lantern, setting out the cooking utensils, and generally organizing the campsite. I called John on my cell phone (there was barely enough signal to be heard) and requested that he bring back some more water. He agreed. I also hunted around for the triple-A batteries. I couldn't find the darn things anywhere. We'd picked up a few in Lucerne Valley along with the groceries, intending to use them in the fancy LED headlamp my mother had loaned me, but they'd disappeared in the meantime. Oh well, the heck with it. I had my Doomsday flashlight, anyway (one of the ones you charge by shaking).
The darkness quietly completed itself as I worked (and searched fruitlessly). After a time, there was little to do but sit at the picnic table in the small white patch of illumination thrown by the lantern and hum a little tune as I waited for John to return.
I didn't look up during this waiting period. It's a shame I didn't. I was missing out on quite a show.
In due time, John returned with fire-starters, lighter fluid, bottled water, a six-pack of Stone Brewery's Levitation Ale, and three bundles of split cedar logs. He set the water on the table and the rest alight. The cedar wasn't well seasoned, and was more fond of smoldering and smoking than actually burning; but after moving the logs closer to one another and throwing a few more fire-starters on (and a few liberal squirts of lighter fluid), we soon had a cheery blaze going. Then we got down to brass tacks. John set up our new camp stove, pulled out a saucepan, opened a couple cans of Dennison's Chili, and set them to warm. Soon, we were chowing down on hot chili, crusty French bread and beer, with the quiet night all about us and the fire crackling away, sending fragrant cedar smoke over us as the breeze swung to and fro.
"Marvelous" isn't quite the word for that meal. John and I chatted away as if we hadn't recently been separated for three years, joking and chuckling. The smoke curled away, up into the night.
Our feast concluded, we cleaned up the dishes with the aid of icy water from an old-fashioned water pump near the lavatories. (Only the next day would we discover that there was a sink for dishes at the rear of the building.) Then we pulled up a cooler by the fire and watched the stars, which we'd just noticed. I don't want to sound trite, but they were glimmering like diamonds. Off in the distance, a couple of campsites over, a solitary flute began to play. The flautist was undoubtedly a novice; his or her repertoire was limited to the major scales, and a few lilting notes in no particular order. But the effect was stunning, especially in that darkness, especially in that strange and majestic place. Less than a mile from the Grand Canyon, under an adamantine sky, warm fire-glow and cedar smoke filling the air, a delicious meal in our stomachs and beer in our hands, John and I listened to that tinkling flute filter through the trees with a visceral reverence. It was the perfect complement to an evening of subtle splendor.
"It's Ian Anderson!" I postulated.
There remains little to tell. We secured whatever belongings we weren't going to sleep with inside John's car; disposed of our trash in the proper receptacles; and adjourned to the tent with flashlights, cell phones, and warm pajamas (sweats and long-sleeved shirt for me, a polypropylene body glove for John). John attempted to read a few Bible verses by the light of the lantern, but pronounced the illumination too dim. I was more stubborn. I laid awake for another half-hour with a flashlight in one hand and my new copy of Alcott's Little Women in the other. Between paragraphs, my friend Allison administered the daily grammar quiz via text messages. (The word was "gravid," I believe.) After an engaging electronic conversation, she signed off. I stayed conscious just long enough to finish the chapter, then put the book aside, switched off the flashlight, and laid my delightedly weary head to rest.
And upon the morrow rested the golden promise of the canyon itself...
I'd like to conclude by adding that I considered entitling this piece "Canyon dig it?" but I thought better of it.
