"Tom Petty needs to learn to drive a stick"

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.