by Jeff Soloway
The low sun cast long shadows across the Canyon’s middle reaches and bathed rock faces in a rich blood-orange light. Grant was right; now was the perfect time to arrive. The Grand Canyon is one of those rare sights that defy electronic reproduction. So many tourist classics look just as good on a computer. The Mona Lisa is very like its jpeg. If you see it in the Louvre, you can sometimes get close enough to study nuances of color and brushwork unavailable to Wikipedia surfers, but at the same time you have to endure all the barbarities of museum-going—the glare of overhead lighting off protective glass, the breath and chatter of hordes of tourists, the constant imposition of camera phones and (worse) iPads in your line of sight. Once you’ve finally boxed out a decent viewing position, you have to endure the stink-eye of other temporary art lovers waiting to take your spot. For some masterpieces, the endlessly reproduced iconic image is actually superior to any real-life view. Buildings like the Taj Mahal, Notre Dame, and Fallingwater are always disappointing unless seen at the perfect time, in the perfect light, from the perfect vantage—when they look exactly like their posters.
But no single image can capture the Grand Canyon. Shadows and color are part of its essence, and they change minute by minute. Even in the few moments I’d been staring, the sinking sun and passing clouds had altered the light enough to reveal a new crag, crooked but mostly triangular, like a broken nose, jutting from a previously enshadowed butte. New details kept appearing. Colors brightened. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the twilight, I could tell that the little dark-green smears on those lower plateaus were trees. Farther up, more trees, closer and therefore more lifelike to me, clung to the cliffs, some as proudly green as the Irish flag; some paler; some tinged brown. Birds wheeled far below. There was life everywhere in the Canyon if you knew where to look. Could it all really be threatened by one resort hotel? Certainly Jewel had thought so.
I started to walk forward, over the jagged, sandy ground, on one of the informal trails that snaked down toward the first steep drop-off. I realized I was not alone. Two photographers were setting up tripods on flat boulders farther on. I could hear them discussing which of the scraggly junipers on the rim would be the most picturesque to shoot through. A pair of kids were clambering up on nearby rocks. Some determined adults were making more ambitious forays out closer to the rim. One of them gazed longingly at a thin outcrop thrusting like a knife out into the Canyon, with sheer drops on three sides—a point tinier and much more dramatic than the famous Grandview Point. And unprotected. To get there would require some careful scrambles and maybe even a few leaps between rock protrusions. No one had tried it yet, but anyone could. There were no rangers around, no fenced-off areas. Nothing protected us but our own common sense.
I realized my throat was dry and my heart pattering. Seeing the Grand Canyon is not just a sensuous experience but an emotional one—and the emotion it inspires is fear.
More and more people were venturing out around us. A woman joked about pushing her husband off a ledge. “It’s called a Grand Canyon divorce!” Gusts from below—spring is the season for wind in the Canyon—made people sway on their feet, clutch their baseball caps, and titter at their nervousness. All of us knew it would be easy to die. The signs warn you, the guidebooks warn you, others tourists warn you if you get too close to the edge—none of the warnings are necessary. I’ve never liked roller coasters or horror movies, but here fear increased my pleasure. It raised the price of the Canyon’s beauty and my appreciation of it.
Could Jewel have died just from a gust? Anyone could. But death from a gust and a push was much more likely.
I glanced back and saw that Victoria too had ventured off the walk and through the pines to explore this vast rimside playground. She stood slouched in an inadequate sweater. I approached her.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “And nobody’s satisfied with it.”
She was right. As the overlook filled and more people came wandering our way, some of them began to get bolder. They were now jumping onto rocks for better views and scrambling farther down the dirt trails and onto outcrops or ledges that promised still less obstruction, still more degrees of panorama, still fewer competing tourists.
“I just talked to Marlene,” she said. “She’s got a key to the security lockup. I asked her to show you Jewel’s things. She doesn’t want to. You’ll have to persuade her. Where were you?”
“Meeting Freddie Bridgewater.”
“He’s here?”
“Grayson chased him off. But he’ll be back.”
“How do you know he’ll be back?”
“I think he told me.”
The light made her cheeks look like polished copper. I followed her toward the Canyon. Far away, a sliver of the Colorado River flashed in the sun. That this slim little thing could have carved up so many hundreds of miles of stone seemed not so much a joke as a lesson in perseverance.
I heard a mechanical belch behind me and turned to see, through a gap between trees, the door of a pink Jeep pulling up to the walk. A group of tourists, swathed in blankets, poured out toward us. The gusts by now were freezing. I noticed that almost everyone wore a windbreaker, sweatshirt, or parka; those without were giving up and returning to their cars. Victoria shrank further in her sweater. I started to take my sweatshirt off.
“Don’t,” she said. “Grant might come by.”
I didn’t mind her objection. I didn’t even mind that she had given Grant those reassuring caresses in the van. Love is a kind of habit and takes time to unlearn. Nothing mattered now that she and I were conspiring again.
“What if we got a little house,” I said, “right there on that mesa.” I pointed to a rock formation that might have been miles away.
“They don’t have houses on that thing. An expert could climb it. But Cottonwood Creek, over to the west”—she traced the way with her finger—“isn’t far. You could follow the trail across that long flat table, called the Tonto Platform, and camp there. Lots of people do. I could hook you up with a guide.”
I saw the pale little thread laid across the long plateau far below. That was the trail. I wondered if there was water in Cottonwood Creek or if, as so often in the Canyon, what was called a creek was just a dry wash except in a storm.
“I wouldn’t want to go there with anyone but you,” I said.
“Just me?”
“Just us.”
“For how long?”
“Forever.”
“We’d have to come up for supplies every few weeks,” she said. “Food and water. New books to read. Maybe take a shower. So not forever.”
“I’d be happy with a few weeks. But no visits from your husband.”
She glanced back toward the parking lot to see if Grant was coming.
The bundled-up tour group, stepping slowly so as not to trip on their blankets, passed near us and wandered down the paths toward the edge. Not into danger, but a little nearer to it. I wanted to venture out with them, to sit with Victoria on a lonely rock until nightfall.
One of the men in the group, now some distance below us, tossed his blanket to his wife, jumped down over a gap, and stepped onto a flat boulder that protruded out into space.
“What’s he doing?” murmured Victoria.
“Be careful!” his wife called.
The man minced out across the boulder, closer to the edge. His Denver Broncos sweatshirt fluttered in the breeze. He turned toward his wife, his face bathed in flames, and raised both fists in triumph, though he was too nervous to hold them much higher than his head. “Take my picture. Quick!” A gust rose and his arms dropped, his grin vanished; onlookers laughed.
The gust died. The man looked around the sides of his boulder, left, right, behind, three sure paths to death. Even returning the way he came would mean a difficult leap back up over the gap to a higher stone platform.
“Got it!” said his wife. “Come back.”
“He’s crazy,” Victoria said.
“He’s just makin
g a moment,” I said. “He’ll never forget it.”
“Neither will she.”
A ripple of confusion passed over the man’s face. No wind had risen, and the only sounds were the low murmur of rapturous sightseers, the clicks of professional-grade cameras, the crunch of feet over gravel. Victoria and I kept staring. So did many others. The daredevil stretched out both arms to their fullest length. His Broncos sweatshirt flattened against his chest. His hands shook like leaves.
“Carl!” his wife shouted.
His long arms began shaking, windmilling. He stumbled backward, close to the boulder’s far edge.
“No!” His wife lunged forward. She was still twenty feet from the gap, but she stopped short. Panic was pulling her both ways.
The man shouted a single “Oh!” and stepped back over the edge. There was a collective gasp and then a flurry of shouts. I started down the nearest path that seemed to wind toward the boulder. I told myself not to run; I didn’t want to slip and tumble and die, especially not with Victoria watching.
The man’s head shot up from behind the boulder. “Ta da!”
I stopped. The path I had chosen now provided a view of the man from a different angle. I could now see that there was a ledge sticking out behind the boulder. None of us had known it was there. The man had simply jumped down to it. He grinned and began edging his way around the ledge. There was a path on the slope below the boulder that he would be able to clamber to. From there it would be easy to scramble back up to his wife. He’d be lucky if she was still waiting for him.
I turned to look for Victoria. She was slumped over in relief. Suddenly she stood up straight, turned to the road, and waved back at Grant.
He was calling us to the reception.
Chapter 12
A broad stretch of flat, boulder-free ground on the other side of Grandview Point had been roped off for the reception. It was an open-air theater with the world’s most dramatic backdrop, the Grand Canyon, and it was now filled to capacity. Glenda Greenbaum, Tusayan’s mayor and the general manager of the Grand Chalet, stood tall in her heels midstage, graciously condescending to schmooze with writers. The self-effacing wife I’d seen in New York was gone. This was a woman supreme in both politics and commerce. She wore no unsightly fleece over her black silk blouse. She was confident and animated. She looked like she could even have won a real election, which is probably why she’d been selected to win the fixed one. Beside her, his bristly white hair tinted red by the light, stood Gus Greenbaum. He bore a proud and somewhat thankful smile, like a father at a high school graduation, pleased with his child and at the same time a little nostalgic for his old authority. Around me I heard writers whispering the names or positions of the local celebrities around us: the district’s congressional representative; Arizona’s senior senator’s chief of staff; and most impressive of all, the coach of the University of Arizona’s football team, along with a small entourage of assistant coaches and their wives. The Grand Chalet’s tourism allies were also present, including tribal leaders from the Hualapai, here to cross-promote their Skywalk and proposed rim-to-river tram at Grand Canyon West. American Indian business groups and the Grand Chalet liked to present a united front against National Park Service regulations. The handful of older men in suits and overcoats whom no one named or gossiped about were, I assumed, the reception’s real intended audience—potential investors. I wondered what they knew about the Greenbaums’ background.
The majority of the guests were writers. There was Brian, constantly squinting over his champagne glass at name tags, like a befuddled old man at his granddaughter’s wedding. Magda and Jeannette were nearby. But the name tags of many writers identified them as Arizona locals. They were here to cover the press event itself—that is, to cover us national writers covering the Grand Chalet. I now understood Grant’s purpose in inviting so many undistinguished travel writers. He and the Greenbaums wanted the investors, government officials, and influential local journalists to see us mooning over their resort. I watched Magda tap notes into her phone and was confident that at least one travel writer, besides me, would disappoint him by writing something true. Whether we could get our pieces published was another matter.
The reception’s audience was swelled further by ordinary Grandview Point sunset tourists. They lined the red ropes to watch our celebration. Our glamour augmented the Grand Canyon’s prestige and spoke well of their vacation choice. They couldn’t tell the champagne glasses were plastic.
Waiters passed around drinks and snacks. Security guarded the ropes. Among workers, guests, and tourists, there were several hundred people in and around our patch of rimside terrain. Look to the sky. The ragged clouds above the canyon were now on fire. What if Grant’s security fears were actually justified? What if Freddie Bridgewater—or someone else—really had built a bomb?
Glenda Greenbaum had mounted a podium and was introducing a man named Tommy Handler, chief of the Grand Canyon’s Science and Resource Management team. He and Glenda smiled for photos meant to encapsulate their public-private partnership. Another scientist promoted from the lab to answer his true calling—public relations.
Off to the side, I saw a woman in a ranger uniform duck under the red rope. It was Florence Doby.
Tommy Handler leaned into the mike. His voice was casually thunderous. He began with a brief paean to sustainable tourism but quickly descended to a brass-tacks defense of his park’s collaboration with the Grand Chalet. The protests had apparently struck a nerve.
“When we heard that the Grand Chalet planned to pump groundwater, we said, ‘Not so fast, pardner! Let’s see that resource management plan!’ We’ve got the right to oversee every major tourist facility near the Canyon. None of them like it. Most of them hate it. What does the Grand Chalet do? They send on the plan. No hemming and hawing. All two hundred pages of it. Now that’s team spirit!”
Doby was at the back of the crowd, unnoticed, among those travel writers who were least interested in the speech. They were drinking, chatting, selecting snacks from trays, reuniting with opposite-coast buddies, taking group selfies with a Canyon background. If they didn’t care about water-use controversies, the Greenbaums certainly weren’t going to make them. What Doby was after would have interested them far more.
“You have to remember how water works,” Handler was saying. “Water flows downward. Water pools. Geographically speaking, water sticks around. When someone at the Grand Chalet washes a dish or—let’s get real, kids!—flushes a toilet, the water doesn’t shoot off into outer space. No. First it gets cycled through the GC2 wastewater system, of course—”
“Which anyone can tour!” Grant hollered. “We charge twenty bucks, half for kids.”
Handler laughed until a few members of the audience joined him.
“But then,” Handler continued, “it drains back into the ground, where it filters through underground pores, and ends up back in the aquifer. To be pumped up again! This is why everyone in Tusayan pumps groundwater. Our local wet stuff is not getting slurped up by some industrial farm and lost forever—we’re not using it to grow fat snack almonds like they do in California. And we’re not letting it evaporate and get blown in clouds across the country. We’re preserving our water. We have to! The aquifers that feed Tusayan also feed our precious Grand Canyon seeps and springs. Our job is to make sure they stay healthy. And they are.”
“Your sign says that Miners Spring has run dry!” I knew that voice from the back: Magda’s. “How is that healthy?” Her face was hidden in the crowd, giving her just enough courage.
“Some springs are seasonal,” Handler replied with a respectful smile. “Some springs are affected by the fluctuating water flow of the Colorado River. I don’t want to pooh-pooh anyone’s concern. But what’s important is data. We in the Grand Canyon Science and Resource Management team have worked beside the Grand Chalet’s hydrologists to install flow meters in every major spring that feeds off Tusayan’s aquifer. Each meter has a satellite
hookup that provides real-time water flow detail, twenty-four hours a day. The results go directly to our public website. You can monitor them on your phone right now. Please do! If the flow falls more than fifteen percent in any month on a year-to-year basis, the Grand Chalet has agreed to do whatever it takes to ease their water use. Or we’ll shut it down immediately! That’s the deal. But so far the meters have consistently shown a healthy flow overall. The small shortfall in Miners Spring is balanced by overflow in other springs. It’s noise in the data. That’s science, folks.”
When he was done, Handler left the podium to applause from his allies. Grant jumped up to announce last call before Gus Greenbaum’s speech in ten minutes. As the writers broke for the bar at the back, Doby shouldered her way forward. I started to follow her, then hesitated when she glanced back at me.
“Don’t be shy,” she said. “You’ll want to see this. Mayor Greenbaum!”
“Ranger Doby!” Glenda’s ironic smile suggested that she knew exactly what Doby wanted. Grant’s uncharacteristic blankness suggested—to me—confusion and distress.
“Can I have a word or three?” Doby asked.