When I say high desert, I do mean high desert, for just east of Gallup we crossed the Continental Divide at 7,000 feet above sea level. I was last in Gallup about fifty years ago and had no specific memories of the place. We parked downtown on the main drag (old Route 66 again) and took a walk around. Unlike many of the towns we’d seen, Gallup actually seemed alive; there were a lot of people out and about, many of Native American descent. Shops selling Native American crafts abounded.
We stepped into a coffee shop where Albie was welcome, and I chatted with the young woman making my iced mocha, who also happened to own the place. She was a self-described “military brat” who’d grown up mostly in New Mexico and Virginia and returned to Gallup five years ago.
“I love it here,” she told me. “It’s the town that time forgot. There’s no Starbucks [a big plus, I suppose, for a coffee shop owner] and none of the tourist trap things you find in other places.”
This struck me as not quite right since downtown was chock-full of shops catering to the tourist trade, and I was sure the Gallup I was in fifty years ago was smaller and quieter than the one we were in now, even if I couldn’t summon a particular memory of it.
I mentioned that we were making haste across the Southwest because we were determined to see the Grand Canyon and get across the Mojave before the extreme heat arrived.
This elicited a comment from a well-worn gentleman sitting at the counter listening to our conversation.
“You sound like you’re from the 19th century,” he said to me. “Cars don’t overheat anymore.” His tone betrayed no playfulness; he sounded as if he were challenging my manhood.
“Is that so?” I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. There was no point in getting into an argument with a perfect stranger in a coffee shop in Gallup, New Mexico, about the state of automotive technology. Instead, what I did say was, “I’m actually from the 20th century and I can’t take a chance with a dog in the car. If we get a flat or break down the pavement will be too hot for his paws.” It didn’t make me sound any more masculine that I was concerned about Albie’s tender feet.
“I’ve driven into California at Needles dozens of times,” the long, tall stranger in jeans and cowboy boots said, as if he were again suggesting I was a wimp for not giving it a go.
At this point, there were two conversations. The one we were actually having and another that was taking place entirely inside my head.
“OK, wise guy,” I thought, “give me your phone number and if we break down I’ll call you and you can drive 450 miles and come pick us up.”
Cars have indeed improved since the 19th century from whence he insinuated I had come—after all, the first automobile wasn’t built until around 1890—but cars can still overheat for many reasons, a busted radiator hose or a deranged thermostat are two that come to mind. I’ve listened to “Car Talk” on National Public Radio for years and I know there’s no end to what can go wrong with a car. We could run over a nail and get a flat. The air conditioning could develop a vacuum leak leaving us with no way to cool the car. The fuel pump could fail. It’s almost a hundred and fifty miles across the desert from Needles to Barstow and I wasn’t going to drive it when it was a hundred and ten degrees outside, especially when someone else was depending on me to keep him safe. I had nothing to prove to a stranger in a coffee shop in Gallup, New Mexico.
A short while later we crossed into Arizona and stopped in Winslow where, of course, my main mission was to take a few pictures of Albie standing on a corner. “Take It Easy” has been one of my favorite songs for decades. As we set up for a picture, a small, elderly Native American man whose wizened face was strikingly weathered from sun exposure walked slowly past us staring straight ahead carrying two hot dogs, one in each hand. Like the elderly man we glimpsed making his way toward his house in Connecticut our first day on the road, I wondered what life he had led out here in the desert. From the looks of it, it had been one tough row to hoe and it likely bore little resemblance to a life lived in suburban Connecticut. His was one of those faces I glimpsed but for a moment, but can still recall, many months later, quite vividly.
We lingered in Winslow only long enough for a few pictures. Just a mile or two west of town we got a faint glimpse of what had haunted the Dust Bowl refugees. The air all around Winslow was a hazy reddish-brown. Strong winds had kicked up a lot of desert dust, nothing nearly on the scale of the miles-high clouds of dust that rolled over and buried towns in Oklahoma and Texas in the 1930s, but enough to obscure the blue desert sky. This was not, apparently, an unusual phenomenon, for road signs west of Winslow warned drivers to beware of blowing dust.
Once clear of the dust, far in the distance, more than sixty miles away, I could make out the silhouette of Arizona’s highest mountains straight ahead of us. The San Francisco Peaks rise thousands of feet straight out of the flat desert, the highest being Humphreys Peak at 12,633 feet above sea level. Winslow is below 5,000 feet so the peaks are dramatic. Being able to see more than fifty miles in all directions around you is such a novel experience for an easterner. It’s simply astonishing how vast and sparsely populated so much of the West is.
Something I did remember from my travels here half a century ago is how dramatically the landscape and the weather change as you climb the Coconino Plateau on the approach to Flagstaff where we would spend the night. Land that can barely nourish a single tree suddenly becomes densely forested and within ten minutes the temperature dropped nearly twenty degrees, down into the upper fifties.
Warm and sunny in Winslow gave way to a chilly rain in Flagstaff, a bustling city of 71,000 inside the Coconino National Forest. (When I was last here Flagstaff was a quiet town with little more than 20,000 people.) Flagstaff feels like a Rocky Mountain ski town, something out of Twin Peaks, and not the kind of place you normally think of when you conjure images of Arizona.
Flagstaff was to be our jumping-off point for the Grand Canyon, a little more than an hour north. I had hoped Albie and I would camp there: it’s why I’d packed a tent and a sleeping bag. Alas, after days of worrying about the wall of heat about to suffocate the Mojave, the forecast for the canyon for the next day was still a high of forty-four with wet snow.
When I was in my mid-teens, in the late 1960s, my parents signed me up with an outfit called Outdoor Travel Camps, based in Killington, Vermont. For two summers I hiked, backpacked, and rafted through the mountains, deserts, and canyons of the West, and was I ever smitten. Having grown up in suburban New Jersey, I was awestruck by the vast, empty landscape, the otherworldly rock formations, and the grandeur of it all. We hiked across snowfields in the Rockies, camped deep in the Tetons, backpacked through the Sierras, and floated in rafts between sheer canyon walls on the Green River in Utah. Those experiences made me passionate about conserving wild places and protecting the environment, a passion still with me today.
But no place rivaled the Grand Canyon. Twice I hiked from the rim to Phantom Ranch at the very bottom of the canyon, a hike that begins well before the break of dawn in summer because of the heat. I shook scorpions out of my hiking boots in the morning and watched the sun set early over the canyon rim from a mile below. There was, back then, a far less traveled part of the Grand Canyon few visitors saw, many miles west of Grand Canyon Village. To reach the ancient town of Supai in those days, you had to drive about fifty miles down a dirt road from the town of Peach Springs to the trailhead, and then hike eight miles down and through Havasu Canyon to the village. Just beyond are Havasu Falls, a series of waterfalls that put you in mind of Shangri-La. The water flows over deposits of travertine that make the water aquamarine blue. Today, you need to reserve a campsite here online; the word has gotten out since 1968.
So, I was very much looking forward to seeing the Grand Canyon again, even if I was no longer adventurous enough to hike to the bottom, and, perhaps less able than I was at fifteen, to hike back up. And Albie, with his gradually progressing arthritis, certainly wasn’t up to it. But I jus
t wanted to walk along the rim trail and stare for a few hours at one of Earth’s grandest sights, and certainly its grandest canyon, and share this natural wonder with Albie, who would experience it in his own particular way. I didn’t think he’d appreciate the view, but perhaps in his own doggie way, he’d find something new and exciting to appreciate, such as the smell of the pinyon pines or the great sense of empty space that is the canyon itself.
Unfortunately, nothing about the forecast had changed. Indeed, on the morning of our drive up to the canyon I had to clear some wet snow that had covered the car overnight. Whatever had accumulated on the ground had already melted. My previous trips here had all been in summer; it was now May 2. I had seen pictures of the Grand Canyon in snow and they were spectacular, so perhaps we’d be treated to views of the canyon partly dressed in white. (Snow never reaches the bottom, where the climate is markedly different than at the rim; the elevation difference is, after all, a mile.)
Once we hit the highway, snow showers alternated with bursts of tiny frozen pellets of hail. The mountain peaks around us wore new blankets of snow. We turned off Interstate 40 and onto the two-lane road leading north to the canyon. My hopes for the weather rose and fell with every small change in elevation across the gently undulating Coconino Plateau. One minute there was no snow, then, after gaining a few feet in elevation, we were surrounded by snow on the ground and covering the trees, then, dropping back down a few feet, bare ground and snowless trees again, so exquisitely sensitive was the snow line to slight changes in elevation.
We arrived at the entrance to Grand Canyon National Park expecting the crowds to be sparse. It was early May and it was cold. We were wrong. (Well, Albie probably didn’t have any thoughts about whether there’d be crowds, but at this point our separate identities were merging into one, despite our cognitive differences.) Though no doubt even more crowded in summer, the slushy parking lots and walking paths were mobbed. For the first time since I’d walked Albie in twenty-seven-degree temperatures along the Skyline Drive in Virginia I put my winter parka on. And for the first time in nearly half a century I was just yards away from taking in the sight that had so captivated me as a teenager. Albie sat patiently in the back seat while I slipped his harness over his head and then alighted into the slush. We walked past the cars and tour buses for the first overlook we could find. And there we stood, at the very edge of the great Grand Canyon, one of the true wonders of the world. We could see absolutely nothing.
A thick fog completely filled and obscured the canyon. You could sense it, this great crevice in the Earth, and you could hear the great silence, but you could not see it. And because of the heat coming to the Mojave we couldn’t linger another day in the hopes the weather would improve as the forecast suggested it would.
I looked at Albie and spoke to him, explaining my plan . . . our plan. “Albie, we’re gonna wait all day if we have to, but we’re not leaving. Maybe it’ll get better.” He looked at me as I talked as if to say, “Whatever you say. You’re the boss!” He’s nothing if not agreeable.
For the next couple of hours, we walked along the South Rim Trail, really a paved walkway. Many of the tourists were from Asia, traveling in large, luxury buses. Several of them wanted to meet Albie, shake his paw, and have their picture taken with him, and he happily obliged.
The farther we got from the parking area the fewer people we encountered until we were utterly alone with the great yawning invisible silence of the canyon literally at our feet. I hadn’t brought waterproof shoes and my Vans and socks were thoroughly soaked from walking through the slush. As the stubborn fog persisted, my disappointment grew. It was entirely possible we’d come all this way and would never see the canyon. Occasionally, a patch of blue sky would suddenly open above us, but they were just teases. The fog lingered in the canyon and the sun wasn’t burning it off.
We soldiered on soaked and disappointed for nearly two hours when the fog and the canyon began playing an elaborate game of peekaboo. For a few seconds, we could see down the canyon wall for a hundred feet or so, enough to whet our appetite and raise our hopes, only to have the fog roll back in and again obscure the view. This continued for about a half hour during which we briefly had one glimpse all the way across the canyon to the North Rim. By now we had walked back to the parking lot, but I wasn’t ready to give up. As I put on dry socks and shoes, tiny pellets of hail started dancing off the windshield. Albie and I shared some cheese slices.
Two night earlier, in Santa Fe, I had the epiphany that Albie was utterly indifferent to what we saw on our trip. The magnificent moonrise over the mountains mattered not at all to him. As desperately as I was hoping the skies would clear so we could see the canyon, it wouldn’t matter to Albie one way or the other. He had no way of appreciating how the Colorado River had over the eons carved this canyon into the Earth. He could not be awestruck by it. He enjoyed our wet walk along the trail because he liked eating the snow, smelling the juniper bushes and pinyon pines, and seeing the occasional squirrel darting about. Grand Canyon? What canyon? I had to beg his indulgence for a few hours more to satisfy myself that we’d done our best to see what we, or I, had come to see.
“We’re going to stay until dinnertime,” I told him. He didn’t disagree.
Rather than continue walking in the slush I decided to drive the South Rim road toward what was surely a misnomer today: Desert View, about twenty-five miles east of Grand Canyon Village. It was like fishing. If you aren’t having any luck in one spot, change spots.
We weren’t even two miles down the road when the canyon suddenly came into full, take-your-breath-away view. I pulled into the first overlook I could find and hustled Albie out of the car. With snow on the rim and any flat surface it could cling to a few hundred feet below the rim, the canyon never looked as stunning as I saw it at that moment. Snow squalls swept through under dark clouds which only added to the drama. Weather makes the canyon seem more alive than seeing it on a clear, sunny day when only slowly shifting shadows slightly change the view. It’s static. But today it was all drama.
We took in the view from several different overlooks, sometimes with hail smacking us in the head. I so wished Albie could appreciate what we were seeing. Clouds, fog, shadows, and snow showers raced through the canyon as breaks in the overcast allowed the sun to illuminate large sections of it at the same time. Occasionally, you could see a huge illuminated section of the canyon behind the snow showers or a curtain of light fog would suddenly drop down from the sky. The wildness of the weather made for quite a show.
Of course, human stupidity always seems to be part of the show, too. People scrambled past barriers and signs warning them of the danger to clamber onto narrow pinnacles, seeking the most dramatic picture of themselves they could muster. Even the slippery wet snow wasn’t a deterrent.
All afternoon we played cat and mouse with frozen, pelletized snow, sun, and fog; views opened and views obscured. Our patience had paid off, at least for me.
En route to Kingman, where we would spend the night, I stopped just before we rejoined Interstate 40 in Williams, Arizona. Albie had been so patient as we waited out the weather, he deserved a special treat: a plain McDonald’s hamburger which he consumed in about three seconds. On a whim, we pulled off the highway in Seligman, one of those Route 66 towns orphaned by the interstate. The attraction of these towns is quite genuine; you can get a taste of the old Route 66 and imagine what it must have been like in its heyday. Here we again met many Asian tourists, and again Albie patiently posed for pictures with them. I can only assume dogs are not common pets in parts of Asia, or at least not large dogs like Albie, especially in cities where people live in small dwellings, because he sure was a hit. Because he’d been such a good ambassador, he not only got to have a hamburger this day, but now a vanilla ice cream cone as well, also polished off in about three seconds.
Between Seligman and Kingman, the roadside scenery became quite dramatic: jagged mountain ranges and huge boulders,
and every which way you looked you could see for fifty miles or more. Through breaks in the clouds, enormous draperies of sunbeams hung from the sky and brushed the ground, brilliantly lighting parts of the landscape as others sat in shadow. To our right a dust devil danced a jig and spun reddish dirt a couple of hundred feet in the air.
As we drove this stretch across the Arizona desert I felt like we’d really hit our stride. The strangeness of the road, away from home and the familiar routines, made our days seem surreal at times. It took a while for me to truly appreciate that we really were on this glorious trip. Tomorrow we’d cross the California state line, meaning, yes, we really had driven this little red car clear across the United States.
I was determined to enter California at Needles, just as the Joads had, my little, inadequate way of paying homage to the hundreds of thousands of Dust Bowl refugees who had passed this way in desperation nearly a century ago. Needles is where the Joad men bathed in the Colorado River, on the edge of their soon to be dashed dreams.
Most affordable motels in small cities and towns across America are clustered near exits off the interstate. There, side by side with all the familiar fast-food joints, these little villages of sleeping and eating franchises welcome weary travelers looking for a decent night’s sleep and something to fill their bellies. They’re all pretty much the same, which is why it often pays, once you’ve unloaded your bags, to drive another couple of miles into town, the real town.
There was something very appealing about little downtown Kingman, Arizona, where we walked at twilight as the sun set in the western sky. It wasn’t bustling, to be sure, but there were a few inviting eateries spread along Main Street (old Route 66 yet again) with retro art deco–style signs that looked to be original. The grounds around the multi-columned Mohave County Courthouse and city hall were handsome and the buildings themselves simple but attractive. It was clean, mercifully quiet, and peaceful.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 17
