Travel Reference
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at least I had seen it. Feeling semisatisfied, I turned around and walked back towards the
car, content now to move on. On the way, I encountered a young couple coming towards
the edge. They asked me if I'd had any luck and I told them all about how the fog had
parted for a few seconds. They looked crushed. They said they had come all the way from
Ontario. It was their honeymoon. All their lives they had wanted to see the Grand Canyon.
Three times every day for the past week they had put on their moon boots and honeymoon
winterwear and walked hand in hand to the canyon's edge, but all they had seen so far was
an unshifting wall of fog.
“Still,” I said, trying to help them look on the bright side, “I bet you've gotten in a lot of
good shagging.” I didn't really say that. Even I wouldn't say that. I just made sympathetic
noises and said what a shame it was about the weather and wished them luck. I walked on
inareflectivemoodtothecar,thinkingaboutthepoorhoneymooners.Asmyfatheralways
used to tell me, “You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.”
And I always used to think, “So?”
I headed north on Highway 89 towards Utah. The radio was full of more news of bad
weather in the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas, and of roads closed by rock slides and heavy
snow,thoughhereinnorthernArizonatherewasnosnowatall.Absolutelynone.Tenmiles
beyond the Grand Canyon it just disappeared and a few miles after that it was like spring.
The sun came out. The world was warm. I rolled the window down a little.
I drove and drove. That is what you do in the West. You drive and you drive and you
drive,advancingfromonescatteredtowntothenext,creepingacrossalandscapelikeNep-
tune. For long, empty hours your one goal in life is to get to Dry Gulch or Cactus City or
wherever.Yousittherewatchingthehighwayendlesslyunfurlandtheodometeradvancing
with the speed of centuries and all you think about is getting to Dry Gulch and hoping by
some miracle it will have a McDonald's or at least a coffee shop. And when at last you get
there, all there is is a two-pump gas station and a stall with an old Indian woman selling
Navajo trinkets and you realize that you have to start the process all over again with an-
other impossibly isolated hamlet with a depressingly unpromising name: Coma, Doldrum,
Dry Well, Sunstroke.
The distances are almost inconceivable. There is often thirty miles between houses and a
hundred miles or more between towns. What would it take to make you live in a place
where you had to drive seventy-five miles just to buy a pair of shoes-and even then they
would look as if they came from a funeral home? The answer to my question, of course, is
that not many people do want to live in such a place, except for Indians, who were never
