I mean that I’ve always lived near the ocean: which for many people, for many millennia, was the boundary of the knowable world. California, especially, was insulated: cupped between what we now call the Pacific, and what we now call the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I’ve been thinking, lately, of a trip I took a few years ago, when Greg and I left our accustomed haunts on the western shoreline, heading east. Heading east, into the great American deserts—where I drove faster and faster, because the speed limit was 75 and there were no other cars on the road.
We started from Greg’s Orange County, taking a two-lane road through lifeless gravel-dunes. And it wasn’t until now, years later, that I wondered if that was the Mojave Desert.
I mention it because so much of this post is about names. “Mojave”, you see, was the name of the first (and practically only) eye-shadow I ever bought. The eye shadow was a coppery bronze color. The Mojave Desert (for so it was) was dry brown, with a suggestion of gray--the color of rotting telephone poles. When Greg and I finally crossed into Arizona, how turquoise the Colorado River seemed: it was the only color of the rainbow I’d seen in the landscape for hours.
The Arizona desert was much redder than the Mojave, craggier and alien and vast. Most towns in the desert were ghost towns; we blew through them more quickly than we could say their names. Chiriaco Summit. Vidal. Shinarump Drive (which kept making me think of a large lady rubbing a pink feather boa across her rear end…).
As the desert widened around us, the Christian radio stations spread through the FM, until we were faced with a choice between sermons, mariachis, and one fuzzy classic rock station on which, through the brambles of static, occasionally emerged the haunting chords of an electric guitar. It seemed to fit our surroundings—and we listened to it until we entered the mountains again.
Just before Phoenix, we left Interstate 40 to head north again on Route 66, passing the town of Tusayan, which we later learned means “mountain lying down”.
In typical fashion, our first view of the canyon was utterly unintentional: we’d reached a cluster of cabins, but the GPS was going haywire trying to locate our specific lodge. Bickering and stressed, I pulled the car uphill into a parking lot to turn around…and there it was, just beyond the Hondas and Chevrolets. A slice out of the Earth, glowing in layers of orange, yellow, and red. Immense. Terrifying. Intoxicatingly beautiful. “Whoa,” I said.
Greg laughed. “Yep. That’s pretty grand.”
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The Hopi name for the Grand Canyon is “Ongtupqa.”
Greg’s favorite part was the snow. A child of the Southern California urban deserts, he’d been waiting his whole life for the chance to interact with snow.
It was February, and the digger pine forests of the South Rim were heaped with the stuff. There we were, on the lip of the wondrous abyss, and Greg had eyes only for the mounds of white powder. He left the trail, giddy, sinking up to his thighs. A young boy behind us wailed, “I want to go in the snow!” and his mother declared, glaring, “It’s not allowed!”
Once we actually managed to find our lodge (and Greg had finished kicking the snowdrifts outside it), we asked a woman at the information desk for itinerary advice, given the limited duration of our stay. She stared at us over the top of her glasses. “It takes time to bond with the canyon.”
“Well, tomorrow we’re driving to—”
“Las Vegas?” She smiled knowingly. We managed, I think, to give her the impression of being squirrelly, one-dimensional kids. The next day, I temporarily dislocated my right kneecap by trying to check the back of my jeans for mud. Because Greg and I are, on occasion, a couple of squirrelly, one-dimensional kids, we watched Tool Academy on TV while the swelling went down.
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One of the most interesting structures on the South Rim was the Hopi House, in which Greg read Death in the Grand Canyon while I perused the feathered bracelets. It had low, curving adobe and sandstone architecture—doors that even a short woman like me had to stoop to enter—a careful use of shadows and thick walls…but it was not built by the Hopi.
It was designed by Mary Jane Colter, and has been open since 1910 as a concession stand of Indigenous American crafts.
Native Americans inhabited the Grand Canyon, and its rims, for thousands of years. The Pueblo people considered it a sacred site, and made pilgrimages to it, leaving some of their intricate cliff dwellings behind.
We don’t know any of their names.
We do know the name of the first European who visited the canyon: Garcia López de Cárdenas, a Spaniard, in 1540. I haven’t read any account he wrote of the “discovery”. I’m afraid that, whatever awe he might have felt on viewing Ongtupqa, his record would have been a narrative of conquest, rather than respect.
It would be wonderful to read an Ancient Pueblo woman’s account of Arizona. But the Pueblo people didn’t write. They took their history with them.
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To a person who thinks in terms of oceans and mountains, in terms (in other words) of California, a canyon is…well, new ideological territory. A new world to stare into, gaping across.
We could’ve ridden mules into the canyon—but we didn’t have the time.
Our bus driver joked, “There’s never been a tour bus that went over the edge. You guys ready to be the first?”—but he didn’t drive in.
In traveling, as in affairs of love, the things you don’t do can take on a kind of rhythm of their own. Greg and I only got to stare at the canyon. The closest we came to entering was when he leaned over the edge on his stomach, taking a video that would later terrify his parents. Even then, we couldn’t see the thin, blue river that we knew must be at the bottom.
I was only near the Grand Canyon for a day and a half—and then it was west to Las Vegas, driving too quickly, and on with the radio again. Searching for that lonely electric guitar once more.
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