Bob Bell's Letter From America - the Grand Canyon
June 1980 The Grand Canyon and beyond
Got a ride out of town, and was dropped at the turnoff for the Grand Canyon, Highway 180. The wind had dropped and the late morning sun was warm on my face, hopefully highlighting my hitch-hiking grin. Within fifteen minutes a station-wagon pulled up, and a young woman leaned over and opened the passenger door. “I’m going through to Utah, to Provo, almost all the way to Salt Lake. I’d appreciate the company if you wanna come all that way.”
Heck, if she was going all that way, I’d most certainly appreciate her company too. A no brainer… She opened the back and I pitched my bag in and got into the passenger seat. Her young daughter was sleeping in a child’s seat in the rear, and the mother told me they had just been visiting her former husband in Flagstaff and was now returning to Provo, where she taught at a local school. She had not planned on going by the Grand Canyon, which was a bit out of her way, but her daughter had never seen it, and obviously, by my sign, I was wanting to see it. And what the hell… She had a few hours to spare, so let’s go!
I looked at her - she was about my age, blond, pretty and it turned out as we spoke, very intelligent, well-read with an off-hand humour that wasn’t afraid of speaking the truth. Her eyes flashing with laughter as she illustrated her points with passion and a crazy and chuckling wit. Her name was Marie and she taught literature, and so we spoke of the great American writers - Faulkner, Twain, Emerson and Thoreau. And then on to the more modern ones like Miller and the Beats. And then on to Europe with Sartre, Camus, Celine and Genet. We talked while her daughter slept, she hadn’t even woken when I had got in the car, and she continued sleeping while 180 curled to the west of Humphrey’s Peak, a twelve thousand plus foot hunk of mountain, which still had traces of snow. Soon we were on 64, and driving due north.
It was still daylight when we arrived at the Grand Canyon and parked the car, and Marie, her three-year-old daughter Jeannie and I walked a short distance to the rim, to Yavapai Point.
And there before me was a sight like I had never seen before. So immense, so huge, so magnificent, it was just about impossible to comprehend that the scene me was three dimensional. Indeed, it seemed as if I were looking at a massive and vast postcard. It wasn’t just a canyon - just one canyon - however grand. There were canyons within canyons, sheer escarpments, tumbles of scree, strata of red rock, yellow, white, grey, and the eye descended down and down and down, tumbling from strata to strata, scree to scree, sheer cliff to mind -numbing drops where vision failed and the imagination took over. The scale of it all was past staggering, outside the range of imagining, further than thought. In places it is eighteen miles wide and over a mile deep, but looking at it those measurements mean nothing. The distances shimmer beyond the range of credibility, beyond credulity, far behind the limits of reason and knowing. To look upon it is to surrender all thoughts of scale, all ideas of permanence. Millions and millions of years stare you in the face. The Colorado River has carved all this out over aeons, millennia becoming seconds, centuries just milliseconds, and the bones of the earth gleam in the sun, sulk in the shade, witness to time on an incomprehensible scale.
My charming driver had seen all this before and was anxious to push on, so after spending about fifteen minutes contemplating about six million years, we got back in the car and split, driving along Desert Drive along the southern rim, toward Cameron, Route 89 and the way north. The station wagon ate up the road, and by dusk we were close to the Utah state line and pulled into a rest area with a camping sign.
Marie had a tent with her, and together we put it up, and unrolled sleeping bags inside, while her daughter ran in and out the entrance, giggling at the great adventure of it all. The accommodations erected, we sat at a picnic table, and Marie unpacked sandwiches and uncorked a bottle of wine, and we ate and talked, the only people in the area.
Two cars pulled in, and several very clean cut and besuited young men got out, set themselves up at a neighbouring table, and then came over to us. Making small talk about the child, they attempted to engage us in conversation, and it quickly became obvious they were Mormons, out fishing for souls. Clean, polite but obviously horrified to learn we weren’t married, as they had assumed. We didn’t educate them as to our so far very short-lived relationship, which as stated by the one single, rather small tent, was raising their eyebrows to the heavens, but they eventually returned to their table, leaving us in a state of happy and unrequited sin. Such was their obvious and self-righteous disapproval at our presence, they would have been secretly disappointed to learn that yes, we did sleep together that night, in that we both got into our separate sleeping bags and slept next to each other, but nothing carnal occurred other than a chaste good night kiss.
Morning arrived in the usual manner… A cold chill around 4 am, and then highway sounds, sunlight and the promise of a new day. A short breakfast, strike the tent, back into the car and we were off, north to Utah and inevitably more Mormons.
We rode 89 as it twisted and turned navigating magnificent Utah, skirting the edges of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, through Orderville, Alton, Hatch, past signs to Bryce, a place Marie insisted I visit while I was in the country, and then on through tiny Panguitch, Spry and settlements and farms. On occasion, one of the fields we passed would boast some ageing vehicle or another, old tractors and farm vehicles, perhaps a gloriously weathered relic from World War Two, such as a Dodge Ambulance in faded olive drab, or a battered GMC CCKW, six-wheeled workhorse put out to pasture at long last.
We made Provo by late afternoon, and I was invited to join Marie at the house she was staying at, together with four of her friends. The fact that I had a little coke with me was by now known by all, and after we had eaten a backyard meal of barbecue and salad, lines were laid, and it was soon gone. The cool high aside, I was glad to see the back of it, as I was becoming increasingly paranoid about walking around with it. Getting busted for something as stupid as that would have been beyond a bummer, it would have put the entire summer at risk. The evening turned into a fine party, and the cassette tape that the Governor had made me during my stay in New Orleans was a big hit, containing as it did such tunes as ‘Flat Fleet Floogie’ by Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart, ’The Things I Used to Do’ by Guitar Slim, and ’The Devil Came Down From Georgia', by Charlie Daniels. They knew about Charlie Daniels of course, but Slim and Slam, Guitar Slim and many of the others were like visitors from outer space to my hosts, and they responded by dancing into the night, smiling with the rhythm and laughing with the blues.
In the morning there was discussion about my next direction. I was invited to spend the day and night with them - and then the next day, one of the guys, Jerry, who was a carpenter and had the following day off, could take me a ways out of town, east along Interstate 80, into Wyoming, and drop me at that point where Route 189 split from 80, and headed for Yellowstone. One and all had agreed that I would be criminally remiss if I didn’t go north through Wyoming, see Old Faithful in Yellowstone, and then go on through the big sky country of Montana and on to Idaho. From there I could move west through Idaho to Washington and hit the coast, the fabled Pacific Ocean, that place where this great continent ends and where you just can’t go any further.
It all sounded good to me. Just the names of these places were poetry: the reality of seeing them up close and smelling the air… well, heck, lead on brother, lead on. And so that night, exhausted by a long day of sightseeing, more partying and long into the evening discussions, I was happy to unroll my sweet and trusty down sleeping bag on the living room floor and drift off to sleep, and dreamt strange dreams of unknown lands, long and lonesome deserted roads, and distant horizons, forested in purple and green, never becoming any closer.
