Part 7 (1/2)

”We'll have a great dinner and go for a stroll, and by the time we get back we'll be too tired to notice the room. We'll push the beds together,” he adds, sounding inspired, ”and get candles at the gift shop.”

”Is there a bathtub, at least?” A hot bath is my solution to just about everything. It's the only place I don't think.

Wayne opens door to the bathroom. It's relatively clean. There is another window, and a small tub underneath it. Maybe I could sleep there. I look back into the bedroom and shudder.

”I don't think I can stay here.”

”But it's the last room,” Wayne points out.

”I don't care,” I say. I cup my hand over my eyes to s.h.i.+eld them from the overhead light. ”We'll have dinner, then drive somewhere until we find a better room. We'll drive all night if we have to.”

”What about seeing the Grand Canyon?”

This gives me pause. Of course: that's why we're here. I look out the window. It's not like me to give up so easily. I feel myself resisting and relenting at the same time.

”It's not quite dark yet,” I say at last, the gla.s.s-half-full part of me in ascendance. I wipe my eyes, blow my nose, straighten my shoulders. ”Okay, let's go for a walk, then come back here and change for dinner. Maybe I'll feel better by then.”

WHEN Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Niagara Falls in the summer of 1835, he was filled with dread that the falls would fail to live up to his expectations. So haunted was he ”with a vision of foam and fury, and dizzy cliffs, and an ocean tumbling down out of the sky,” that he stayed in his hotel room for three full days before finally steeling himself to confront them. Why rush to be disappointed? he asked himself.

We aren't going to stay in our room for even three minutes. We step outside the guest lodge and turn left onto an interlocking paving-stone path that runs beside a low parapet, not knowing quite where we are going-and there, to our utter astonishment, is the Grand Canyon. The sudden shock of it renders us speechless. There is the stone parapet, about knee-high, there is a ragged cliff edge on the other side of it with a few scraggly trees growing out of bare rock, and then there is-nothing at all. The setting sun illuminates the opposite face like a reading lamp trained on an enormous stack of books. Our eyes travel down to the distant bottom of the canyon, where a thin trickle of silver, the Colorado River, meanders among soaring chimneys and hoodoos. How immense is it? the mind wants immediately to know. Niagara Falls could be at the bottom of the canyon and it would be all but unnoticeable from where we stand. We would point down and say, ”Oh look, is that a waterfall over there?”

The canyon follows a fault line where two vast chunks of North America came together (Niagara Falls is on another). The silt-laden Colorado River cut down through the fault like sandpaper through balsa wood. Each layer on the canyon walls represents the bottom of an ancient ocean; when there was no ocean, and therefore no acc.u.mulation of sediment, there is no rock. This absence of rock is called a nonconformity. We are living in a nonconformity now, since the top of the canyon is a limestone slab that is already 230 million years old and has nothing on it but a tsunami of tourists with their requisite hotels and restaurants.

Once we have taken in what is there-the pale earth tones, pinks, greys, and siennas of the various strata; the play of light and shadow on the ledges; the trees gripping sheer rock faces with their gnarled roots; the distant specks that are birds (gulls? peregrines? condors?) riding thermals above the river-we slowly begin to appreciate what isn't there. There is far more absent from the Grand Canyon than there is present. In fact, the Grand Canyon is one colossal absence, billions of cubic metres of sedimentary rock carved away almost overnight by that thin silvery trickle of water we see enlivening the canyon floor.

Indeed, it is a trickle compared to what it once was. In its heyday, when John Wesley Powell led the Powell Geographic Expedition down it in 1869, the Colorado River flowed through the canyon at the rate of 250,000 cubic feet of water per second. Powell found the rapids so treacherous that half his crew deserted after three months. The water, in Edward Abbey's words, ”flowed unchained and unchannelled in the joyous floods of May and June, swollen with snow melt. Boulders crunching and clacking and grumbling, tumbling along the river's bedrock bed, the noise like that of grinding molars in a giant jaw.”

From our vantage point on the parapet, it doesn't look like there's much grinding and clacking going on. We walk along for a while, hardly taking our eyes off the canyon, watching the pinks turn to purples and the greys to black. Snow is still falling, but gently, as though someone has upended a great scenic snow globe of the Grand Canyon and then righted it again. Eventually we come to an impressive four-storey log structure with wings stretching out almost to the canyon's rim. Through a row of lighted windows in the main building we see white-s.h.i.+rted waiters setting up tables in a huge dining room; through another window, an enormous Christmas tree soars to the top of an atrium. People wearing expensive sweaters sit casually about in the lobby, reading, talking quietly among themselves, sipping drinks. We have come to the El Tovar.

”Let's go in and confirm our dinner reservation,” Merilyn says, her voice trembling.

One of the appeals of travel is that we get to live our fantasy lives for a brief spell. Merilyn wants to live in a hotel. When she was seven her family moved to Brazil, and they lived in a hotel for several months while their apartment building was being constructed, a rather nice hotel, with wide, carpeted corridors, a dining room with its own pastry chef, unsalted b.u.t.ter that came in small curls on a silver platter, a grand piano on a raised dais, doormen at the revolving doors, and by the elevators on each floor, tall, umbrella-stand-sized ashtrays filled with white sand with the hotel's initials pressed into the surface.

It isn't the luxury of living in a hotel that attracts her, I think-not the fact that she would never have to cook or serve food, or repair a screen or wash a floor or a dish again (which would be my first thought)-but rather the quiet efficiency of hotel management, the sense of everything running smoothly because everything is in its proper place, and in good repair, and the staff all know where it is, and when you look, it really is there: the iron is in the closet, in its little wire basket; extra pillows are in the linen closet, beside the neatly folded and pressed (!) sheets; the salt and pepper shakers are always full and free-flowing, the coffee is always hot, the croissants always fresh, the poached egg always perfectly poached (the white solid but the yolk still runny), sitting proudly on its mound of perfect, pan-fried hash browns. Not all hotels are like that, of course, but a surprising number of them are, and you can tell you're in one the minute you walk through the door. As soon as we enter El Tovar's lobby, with its thick carpet, its chandeliers and cus.h.i.+oned sofas, the soft cla.s.sical (not Christmas) music coming from hidden speakers, the concierge's desk in one alcove and the front desk across from it, I know this is a hotel where Merilyn could live.

The El Tovar was built in 1905 by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. The ATSF hired Charles Whittlesey to design the hotel and Fred Harvey to build and staff it. Whittlesey, a Chicago architect, imagined the Grand Canyon setting to be vaguely alpine and conceived the hotel as a kind of overgrown Swiss chalet. It was originally to be called the Bright Angel Tavern, because it was situated at the head of the Bright Angel Trail, but in the end it was named the El Tovar after Pedro de Tovar, the Spanish conquistador who led a scouting expedition out of New Mexico in the grip of one of the most powerful exploration myths of America: the search for the Seven Cities of Cibola.

When the Moors were overrunning Spain in 1150, seven bishops from Merida fled with the church's gold, jewels, and religious relics to a distant land, where they founded two cities made entirely of gold: Cibola and Quivira. Nearly four hundred years later, a Franciscan friar named Marcos de Niza claimed to have seen one of them in what is now New Mexico. In 1540, the Spanish governor of Mexico sent a huge expedition under Francisco Vazquez de Coronado to find it. Guided by the friar, Coronado travelled up the west coast to what is now southwestern Arizona. De Niza's ”city of gold” turned out to be a small Zuni pueblo village, the walls of which contained mica, which flashed like gold in the setting sun.

Just to make sure there wasn't something more, Coronado sent two smaller expeditions farther north. The one led by Pedro de Tovar made it into Hopi territory, where he heard about a large river that flowed westward to the Pacific, but he never bothered to check it out. It was the Colorado. I find it interesting, and amusing, that the hotel we are standing in was built by the Santa Fe Railroad, which didn't go to Santa Fe, and named after Don Tovar, who never saw the Grand Canyon.

”Why don't we ask if they've had any cancellations?” I say to Merilyn.

”Do you think?” she says, her face brightening for the first time today. Then it clouds again. ”I did call about an hour ago. And we already have that other room.”

”It won't hurt to ask,” I say, leading her to the front desk. I'm still going to let her do the talking. The clerk is a young, officious-looking man in a black suit with a bronze pocket badge that says ”Ronnie.” When Merilyn asks him if he has a room, Ronnie gives her an admonitory look and asks if we have a reservation.

”No,” Merilyn says. ”But when I called earlier someone told me you might get a cancellation. Would you check?”

”I have checked,” Ronnie says, but he clicks the keyboard on his computer anyway and looks at the screen. ”Half the people in this lobby have asked me the same ques-Well, I'll be,” he says, incredulous, ”a cancellation just came in this second. Seems we do have a room, after all. I can let you have it for $166.”

Merilyn looks at me. ”It's awfully expensive,” she says, and I'm afraid she's going to try to get a better rate. People from the lobby have begun to rise out of their chairs, murmuring ominously. I hear the clerk at the next wicket telling another couple that a cancellation has just come in.

”We'll take it,” I tell Ronnie before the others can reply.

By the time we have checked in and brought our luggage over from the Bright Angel, and I have brought the car around to the El Tovar parking lot, it is dark. I can see Merilyn's shadow moving behind the curtains of our room as she sets up our acquired goodies for a pre-Christmas-dinner repast. The room is on the second floor and has a view of the kiva, which will be splendid in the morning. But now night has fallen and it is still snowing gently; to my right I sense rather than see the huge void that is the Grand Canyon at night. Thomas Wolfe, arriving in 1938 at this rim at about this time in the evening, described the canyon as ”a fathomless darkness . . . fathomlessly there.” But I find it comforting, perhaps because it is so much like being beside a large lake after dark, the water holding the warmth and filling the air with a life-infused almost consciousness. The words ”Thank you” occur to me, and I address them silently to the canyon.

MY expectations of the Grand Canyon have been shaped by books. I peer over the rim and see searchlights; I look back and see the El Tovar in flames. It's the view from Vita Sackville-West's novel Grand Canyon, a futuristic fantasy when it was published in 1942, though it doesn't seem quite so far-fetched now, after 9/11. Sixty years ago, no American would have considered the possibility of being attacked on home soil, let alone at the brink of the Grand Canyon, the gaping symbol of American grandeur. In Sackville-West's story, it becomes America's last trench.

Sackville-West's characters are in the desert on holiday, as are we, and the scene she sets is eerily similar to the one I see around me, except that the porters and maids are no longer Navajos in costume, their long black hair tied up in red ribbons. And nowhere do I see the huge outdoor dance floor she describes: ”parquet from California forests laid in patterns at the canyon's edge.”

Sackville-West was British and obviously had no patience for American hubris. As the tourists retire to their beds, Germans swoop down from Canada to bomb the American forces huddled on the desert plateau. The manager, a villainous spy in cahoots with a worldwide n.a.z.i alliance, sets the hotel on fire, turning the lovely log structure into a flaming beacon for the bombers.

I look at the logs now and see them as so much kindling, look at the path down into the canyon where Mrs. Temple scurried with the other guests, trying to outrun the blast.

I long to walk alone down that slender trail, to sleep at the water's edge on a bed of ferns, to follow the river night after night on foot or float its length in a canoe. That would feel real. I think of Powell, the first white man to see the canyon from the bottom. Like all white explorers, Powell christened everything he saw: Music Temple, Marble Canyon, Flaming Gorge, Split Mountain, Bright Angel River. The names, though fantastical, don't begin to represent the overwhelming strangeness of what is really here, the soaring spires and gaping arches we can barely make out from the rim.

Maybe if I could see it from Powell's perspective, looking up from below, I would feel like I was seeing the Grand Canyon. But gazing down into its enormity, I go blank. I can see the depth of the hole in the earth, the striations of colour, but I can't take it in. I float like a gnat on the edge. I am minuscule; it is monstrous. How can we establish any kind of relations.h.i.+p?

When Simone de Beauvoir visited America in 1955, six years after the publication of her feminist landmark, The Second s.e.x, she saw a Grand Canyon akin to Disneyland. ”The most ingenious efforts have been made to transform a natural marvel into a kind of amus.e.m.e.nt park,” she wrote. There was a tower at one end where a person could look through a slit and see the canyon upside down or manipulate its image on huge sheets of gla.s.s. On an upper terrace, telescopes offered views of the canyon and the violet-and-red plateau that is the Painted Desert beyond: glimpses of landscape sold off for a nickel. Now there is an interpretive centre with lectures and dioramas, which seem relatively non-invasive compared with the Skywalk, a U-shaped gla.s.s bridge the Hualapai Indians have extended seventy feet out from the western edge of the abyss.

”The tourist is offered every possible artificial means of taming these exuberantly natural spectacles,” wrote de Beauvoir. ”In the same way, people in America consume 'conditioned' air, frozen meat and fish, h.o.m.ogenized milk, canned fruit and vegetables, they even put artificial chocolate flavour into real chocolate. Americans are nature lovers, but they accept only a nature inspected and corrected by man.”

”What's the good of having a canyon if you don't exploit it?” the manager of Vita Sackville-West's hotel argues. He may be a turncoat, but he's American in his bones.

I expected to be profoundly moved in the face of this grandeur. To be swept off my feet. But nothing happens. The canyon feels fake, like one of those buildings with windows painted on a blank brick wall.

”Very impressive,” Wayne says, ”but why did they put it so close to the hotel? That's a quote, I don't remember from whom.”

But who are we to talk about fakery? When we went back to the Bright Angel to move our things to the El Tovar, I approached the reception desk with heaving breaths.

”I can't stay here,” I gasped.

The clerk looked at me with concern. ”A lot of people have trouble with the alt.i.tude,” he said solicitously. ”No problem. There won't be any charge.”

I nodded, and put my hand to my chest. The fake asthma attack already felt real.

Now the whole day feels fake. Two atheists celebrating Christmas at a natural phenomenon tarted up for tourists, a geological wonder I seem to see only through the eyes of dead writers. I turn away in disgust.

I can't even do that without being reminded of Howard in Richard Ford's story ”Abyss.” Howard, an otherwise decent real estate agent from New England, has ducked out of a conference in Phoenix to drive to the Grand Canyon with Frances to continue their ongoing illicit affair. Frances steps over the low wall to take a picture, the same low wall that I am standing in front of. One minute she's there; the next, she's gone. Howard steps over the wall, too, to see how far she has fallen, then quickly steps back, as if in that motion, everything can be returned to what it was. He's on the right side of danger, but nothing is the same.

”What you did definitely changed things,” he says to the absent Frances.

Wayne and I understand Howard and Frances. We understand in the worst possible way how what we do changes things. The life we have now is built, at least in part, on sadness and pain, not only ours. We feel it most keenly at Christmas, when what we want more than anything is for our family to be safe together under the eaves. But our notion of family is not the same as our children's, and here we are, thousands of miles away from them.

I return to the El Tovar to dress for dinner and to join Wayne for a preprandial. It was good of him to allow me these moments alone, though I could tell he worried about my mood and my being so close to the cliff edge. A woman is playing Christmas carols on the grand piano in the lobby: the strains of ”O Come, All Ye Faithful” penetrate our room even after I close the door. We call the kids, one by one, and wish them a merry Christmas, discovering that, in fact, it is merry, even without us. We open a bottle of good champagne and, linking arms awkwardly across the bed, clink our hotel gla.s.ses.