And it’s everything that it’s cracked up to be. The Grand Canyon isn’t just grand though. It’s mind-blowingly grand. Carved over millions of years by the Colorado River, it snakes a couple of thousand miles across the USA’s southern-mid-west in the desert state of Arizona.
Road-tripping through 11 states with my brother-from-another-awesome-mother, Nighthawk, and his funky wife, Morning Star, our third day on the road started with a visit to a smaller slit in the earth that anyone with a PC has a picture of in their machine.
“When the canyon floods,” our Navajo guide, Cory, began to explain, “the waters surge through at about a hundred miles an hour.”
Located just outside of Page, Arizona, this slot canyon is divided into the upper and lower Antelope Canyon. In the Navajo language, the upper is called: Tsé bighánílíní, which means ‘the place where water runs through rocks’. The lower canyon is known as, ‘Hasdestwazi’, meaning ‘spiral rock arches’, so called by the Navajo Parks and Recreation Department.
The rock faces are smooth, lined with millions of years of stories, carved from flash floods and sand.
The danger isn’t rain in the canyon itself or a busload of tourists desperate to pee. In fact, you could visit on a bright, sunny day like we did (which also happened to be the hottest day of the year with the thermostat just cracking the 120° F, melting my sandals). The danger lies further upstream, in the canyon basin where, if it rains, you might be on your way to feel what a flash flood surging through a tiny crack at a hundred miles an hour might feel like.
Which is what happened to unfortunate group of tourists back in August, 1997, where 11 people were swept away to their deaths. In October of 2006, a flash flood lasted 36 hours and shut down operations for five months. But still, you stand a greater risk of tripping over your own two feet as you walk through, astounded by the formations than getting taken by a flash flood.
Emerging onto the planet’s surface an hour later, we headed off to Horseshoe Bend Canyon.
I’ve seen many a majestic, breath-snatching sight that Mother Nature has carefully crafted over the course of millions of years (only for us ‘umans to destroy it in a hundred) but I’ve never seen anything like Horseshoe Bend Canyon.
We hiked the ten-minute trail from the car park to an un-fenced, thousand-foot cliff-drop where the dark waters of the mighty Colorado River swung around a huge outcrop of land that give’s the place it’s name.
I couldn’t believe I was looking at what I was looking at. That my very two eyes were taking in this incredible vista, unlike anywhere else on this planet. At least, anywhere I’ve been. As we stood in awe a rumbling resounded. I looked at my stomach.
Nope.
I looked up.
The sky darkened with heavy clouds.
“Might be time to go,” Nighthawk suggested.
The outline was to drive cross New Mexico throughout the night and hit Dallas, Texas by morning, to reach Nighthawk’s family. I took the wheel, giving him a break, driving the entire length of the 47th State in the rain. By the time the sun poked over the horizon, the impressive, almost alien-looking wind farms of northern Texas dotted the flat landscape.
When I gave the driver’s seat back to Nighthawk, we continued on the highway only to hit a giant eagle that flew across the road at windscreen level.
What kind of raptor flies across a highway at windscreen level?!?
We clipped its wing as it turned – mid-flight – to give us a look that said, “You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” as Nighthawk screamed along with Morning Star. I looked back to see the eagle pick itself up, shake itself down and fly back across the highway – again at windscreen level.
“And it’s OK!” I announced.
We spent a week in Dallas, top golfing for Nighthawk’s brother’s birthday, picnicing at man-made White Rock Lake and visiting the sixth floor of the former Texas Book Suppository Building – now called the John F. Kennedy Museum.
Lunch was on the grassy knoll in Dealy Plaza on Elm St, a white ‘X’ marking the location where JFK took three of the deadliest bullets in political history. A title he held until November 4th, 1995, when three deadly bullets killed any chance for peace between Israel and the Palestinians when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. The tragic energy of that fateful 1963 day still resonates in downtown Dallas just as it does in Tel Aviv at Rabin’s Square.
We continued to Kansas to visit Nighthawk’s sister and hubbie with their almost 2-year-old boy. We arrived mid-afternoon and I was excited to be in Kansas.
And not cause the kid and I both wore the same Ninja Turtles shirt.
“Cause once we leave,” I explained, “I can officially say, ‘Were not in Kansas anymore, Toto.’ Of course, I have to find someone named Toto.”
That and perhaps the chance for a tornado.
“You think we might catch one around here?” I asked Nighthawk’s brother-in-law.
“It would be incredibly rare,” he explained. “I’ve been here for a few years now and I’ve never seen one.”
We were standing on the balcony and between the trees I saw what appeared to be the exact cloud formation that, when at sea, I would shit bricks, build a protective hideout from them and curl up in the fetal position inside it, hoping it might skip over us.
It never skipped.
“What about that?” I pointed.
“Holy shit,” Nighthawk reacted.
“Huh,” his brother-in-law casually added. “I don’t know if that’ll turn into a tornado… but it does look heavy.”
An hour later someone kicked over a bucket of black paint across the sky. We were indoors when the first thunder erupted. I glued myself to the glass and watched something I had never seen in the 35 years I’ve been on this blue ball.
Black sky – pitch black. Lightening shooting at every imaginable angle and thunder shaking things up. Gale force winds of about 60 miles an hour. The colours though. Holy Batman. Flashes of blue, green, red, yellow and white.
Were aliens invading disguised as a ruthless storm?
The next morning we drove around staring at the huge trees had that had crushed cars, crashed onto houses and blocked roads. Power was cut to about 20,000 locations.
After a few days in Kansas we drove to Iowa to catch up with Nighthawk’s buddy before we pushed up through Minnesota and Wisconsin to Lake Gogebic, Michigan, for a few nights at Morning Star’s parents.
From there we hit our final destination – Marquette, Michigan. I spent the next month hiking in pine forests, jumping off cliffs into the frigid waters of Lake Superior and even surfed it when a freak storm provided some solid waves (really, someone needs to warm those waters up). Mountain biking through other forests on small islands, driving around the UP (Upper Peninsula), sitting in saunas, camping under the Perseid meteorite showers and the solar eclipse, meeting everybody’s dogs and even hit Morning Star’s 10-year high school reunion, pretending to be ‘that’ foreign exchange student who came for a semester yet no one remembers him.
I was introduced to the Marquette tribe and was invited to partake in the celebration of one of the couples wedding.
“Is it a fancy wedding or can I do the whole jeans and sandals thing?” I gingerly asked the bride.
She gave me a look that didn’t need words to follow but just too make sure it was clear:
“It’s a very fancy wedding. There will be two people who I predict will be in jeans.” She took a step closer. “You will not be one of them.”
Noted.
I’ve never shed a tear at a wedding no matter how close I am to the marrying couple.
I met this couple perhaps twice more before the wedding but due to the dynamics of this tribe, I was sucked up into the emotions of the event. Along with myself, there wasn’t a dry eye under the canopy of the UP sky by the shores of Lake Superior.
One thing was for certain,
We’re weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.
Photos courtesy of the author.