I think both of us are picturing Thelma and Louise but we don’t say it because it’s so obvious and doesn’t really mean anything. It’s not like we’re going to drive the car off the side of the canyon.
Is it?
We take 180 for a couple of hours and then swing on to 68, heading north toward the canyon. We’re in the desert now, houses and streetlights and trees and even gas stations falling away behind us, civilization dwindling in our rearview. Rocks blur past, and more cacti, and little shrub-like trees. Everything is dust and stone; we are quite literally OUT OF THE WOODS. The greens and blues of Flagstaff give way to red.
And you know what? I am ecstatic about it. I am sick of fairy tales.
We pass a sign that says DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH GAS? NO PUMPS FOR 50 MILES.
Do we? I ask.
(Mom) glances at the dash. Should, she says.
I’m tempted to say something sarcastic, like, well as long as you’re sure, or whatever, but I don’t actually care. I mean, if we break down in the middle of the desert, what difference does it make to me? I don’t have a future that I can imagine anyway.
The sun is low in the sky now—it’s mid-afternoon. Sharp shadows angle from posts and shrubs, slashing the desert. The car brims with red light. My eyes unfocus and I just let the sand and dust blur past.
Then something moves, and my head snaps around—I catch a glimpse of fur, of swift low legs, a canine nose.
What? says (Mom). What is it?
Nothing, I say. I thought I saw a coyote, that’s all.
Could be, says (Mom). It’s the desert.
Yeah, I say.
After another hour or so we pull into Grand Canyon Village. It’s a weird little place, a whole little town that just exists for tourism. There are parked cars and RVs everywhere. We meander around a bit till we find a parking spot opposite something called Yavapai Lodge. (Mom) gets out and helps me to stand.
Come on, she says. This way.
You’ve been here before? I ask, incredulous.
Yes. A long time ago.
No wonder you didn’t care about coming here with me.
She stares at me. Well, you’re here now, she says.
I shrug. It’s an incontestable fact.
We buy passes and follow signs to Mather Point. At first I’m nervous, that there might be some sort of description of us out there, that APB I was worrying about before. Girl with bionic cast; older woman. But as I look around I see that we just blend in as if we were meant to be here. An overweight mother in unfashionable clothes, and her daughter, who broke her leg cheerleading or something. We’re ordinary. We’re everybody.
So gradually I relax as we approach the canyon.
Coming up to it, I have this sense that the land is about to drop away—like, I know the rim is coming up even before I see it. Some ancient survival instinct, from the beginning of man, I guess. Dizziness creeps up on me, stealing its way up my spine and into my head. Then I see the other side of the canyon, looming up above the rim, and suddenly we’re AT the rim, and I’m looking over. The sun is low to our left, casting its deep dark shadows through the canyon, illuminating other rocks like they’re stage-lit.
The whole thing is a light show, just for me.
I stand for a moment, just drinking it in.
You know how sometimes you’ve imagined something so many times, waited for it for so long, that it’s somehow about two thousand times more incredible than you ever thought; and at the same time it’s just like, oh, okay, that’s what it’s like?
Well, that.
Beautiful, isn’t it? says (Mom).
Yes, I say, which is true.
At the same time, it isn’t true. I mean, it’s so much bigger and more all-encompassing than the word “beautiful” can possibly convey. Right where we’re standing, the land basically disappears, it literally takes the earth from beneath our feet, and then it doesn’t rise up again until the fricking HORIZON—there’s just this gap in the world, so monumentally big that it’s not even comprehensible as a canyon or a valley or whatever, or even really possible to take in with the eyes, without just dwelling on little bits of it.
I look down.
Just past our feet, the rock drops away, striped and striated with red, and below is a thin ribbon of blue river. Trees are growing down there. And then for miles and miles it’s these little sort of cones and towers of red rock, rippling, shaded dark and light, until you get to the sheer red walls of the other side, which is very literally as far as the eye can see. In other words: all I can see is the canyon, and the sky, and so it’s filling the world, filling my vision. Everything is enormity and redness, of varying hues and shades, the whole thing like a painting by a madman with only a couple of colors in his paint set.
I mean, I’ve seen it before, on TV and in pictures. I knew roughly what it would be like. But I just had no idea how BIG it was, and it’s real, I mean, it’s not in the Dreaming or anything. When it’s on TV, it’s usually people talking about the forces that created it, the power of water and time to carry out such demolition, on such a colossal scale—which is kind of interesting, I guess, if it wasn’t already obvious from, I don’t know, the ocean that water can be intensely powerful. For me, though, looking at it—for me it’s not the way that it was made that’s interesting. It’s how it looks now—and what it means.
The way that the land is interrupted, like this
but then starts again, as if nothing had happened, in the same shapes and the same shades of red, only now higher, and rising into the mountains of Colorado.
It’s not a lesson in the force of water. It’s a lesson in endurance and continuity, a break in everything, a pause in the conversation of existence, and the thing about pauses is that they don’t last. That’s the lesson of the Grand Canyon. And okay, yeah, I read a lot and I know the word “caesura.” So sue me. And if you don’t know what it means, look it up.
Anyway, for quite a long time I just stand there and stare.
I feel like I’m hallucinating.
Like time has stopped.
Like I’m in a crack in the world.
Then, suddenly, the moment is gone, and it’s just a load of red rock. I look down, and I think about the secret heart of the world, and how I always thought that by coming here, I could see what was below the surface, below the earth’s skin, and somehow understand something about it.
Do I see the secret?
No. I see a few tents, pitched by the ribbon of river. A donkey making its way down a snaking path below us, some tourist swaying on its back. There’s nothing. Nothing under the reality, under the rock, under the dust.
The world just ends, and then a few dozen miles away, it starts again. It’s a gap. That’s all. And, at the same time, that’s the whole point and meaning of it.
That things stop, fall away—and then rise up again.
And I’m not stupid, I get that this relates to me. That there’s been a crack in my life, of devastating force, but that doesn’t mean it can’t start again, miles away, in a slightly different way—mountains instead of desert, cold instead of warmth. But this isn’t anything I didn’t know already.
Okay, I say. We can go.
Yeah? Mexico?
I guess.
She looks at me, then sweeps her hand, taking in the whole majesty and grandeur of this massive divide in the very earth with just one little gesture. It isn’t what you expected?
I think for a moment. It is, I say. But at the same time it isn’t.
And again, you know—I could be talking about my life.