I miss my flight to the Grand Canyon.
It’s ten days before Christmas, near the bitter end of 2018, and snow dusts the mountain campus of my soon-to-be alma mater. I’m in the last few moments of my penultimate semester of college, and I’m milking it for all its worth. Instead of stumbling out of my boots and through a metal detector, instead of having my inner thighs patted for contraband by a bristling TSA agent, I’m curled on a dorm room twin mattress, saying goodbye to someone. We bide our time—we’re trying to end on a good note, if there is such a thing—and so I miss my flight.
It’s quite a flight to miss. I’m to meet my father in Phoenix, who is hauling the family Prius out from Los Angeles. From there we’ll head several hours north to the mouth of the Grand Canyon. We’ll do what’s known as a rim-to-rim-to-rim hike: starting on the Canyon’s popular South Rim, descending to its basin and along the banks of the Colorado, up a vertical mile to the North Rim, then doubling back along the river and reascending the South. It will take us five days and four nights, which will be the most amount of time we’ve ever spent alone together. We will try to inoculate ourselves with memories against the onslaught of time so that, years later, we won’t stew in regret of what might have been. We will also be in a commemorative mood. Dad turns 60 in March, I graduate in May and his father, my grandfather, just died of cancer in September.
Hours later and hours late, Dad and I rendezvous at baggage claim. I’m honest with him: I fucked up. I could have lied and blamed JetBlue (who doesn’t?), and it’s tempting to do so— silly, inept, unorganized people miss flights, and these are traits that I’m desperate to prove to him I’ve killed. But, given the gravity of the trip, the truth feels important. He’s irked, but tries to swallow it as we scoop my bag from the carousel. He wants to start on a good note.
My tardiness ensures that we drive through boundless dark. Occasionally our headlights splash over eyeshine and an eight-point rack: elk, hulking on the road shoulder. “You don’t want to hit one of those things, boy,” Dad muses. I leech his hotspot to submit an essay assuring my English professor that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was really a Rudyard Kipling allegory.
In the wee hours, we pull into Tusayan, a small, stucco town to the Canyon’s immediate south. We studiously ignore the fact that there’s an airport here, too, and find our hotel rising like a neon ghost from the snow. Up in our room at last, Dad uncaps a bottle of scotch.
“Cheers, buddy,” he says, smiling under insomniac eyes, knocking his plastic cup into mine. “To you.”
The Grand Canyon welcomes us with a colorful cartoon placard of a blond man on all fours, vomiting. There’s nothing to get lost in translation. For the many visitors of many dialects who wander through the rift year after year, barf is a universal language.
When it comes to demise in this national park—a place carved as deep into American identity as it is into the Arizona shale—we tend to worry about, well, the grand: namely, tumbling headlong into the open air. But in the region’s searing summers (and springs, and autumns) heat radiates between the canyon walls, turning it into something like the world’s largest microwave. Being cooked in the chasm turns out to be far more common than falling into it. The previous July, 162 EMS calls were made in the park, over half of these due to heat-related injuries. The hapless blond (whom we affectionately dub “Vomiting Hal”) is a literal poster boy for heat sickness, a particularly nasty and unforeseen peril of the Canyon.
Thus, Dad and I hike in winter. Ice crusts the trailhead as we tiptoe up to the void. Beyond Hal’s fountaining bile lies the splendor: a snow-capped skyline in rock. Towers, high rises, neighborhoods, stilted homes, entire cities stand delicately and endlessly in the earth. We stand at the edge, from which our vocabularies plummet.
“Wow,” I say.
“Yeah,” Dad counters.
Like father, like son, we descend.
In the desert, death seems ubiquitous. It’s not, as any ecologist will tell you, but we certainly treat the biome as barren. It’s where we test our bombs and dump our trash. It’s where we erect wild, freewheeling squatters’ cities free from the government’s grip. When asked what draws him to the desert in Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O’Toole’s title character quips simply: “It’s clean.” The desert is the frontier, both geographic and existential: in its apparent emptiness, the landscape affords us the opportunity to commune with death in a manageable dose.
I take a note from the wilted air, leaning into the morbidity. How is Dad feeling about his 60th?
“Well,” he sighs in his signature way, rounding a switchback, “it’s hard not to be a little sad. I’m definitely in the back half now.”
The back half is all the tougher to stomach so soon after burying his own father. Dad reminds me of some serendipity here: Grand Daddy Fred, as we called him, worked as a lawyer on the set of Brighty of the Grand Canyon, a 1966 picture mythologizing the Canyon’s beloved real-life mule who was named after Bright Angel Trail (the same one we’re currently, painstakingly picking our way down). GDF brought his family on the job, which was Dad’s first time on a film set—shot, in Hollywood magic, near a Utah ski resort. Though he doesn’t remember much aside from a ski instructor hitting on my grandmother, decades later Dad would find himself in Los Angeles, pursuing a career in film. It’s not for us to know what hidden blessings and curses our parents gift us until it’s far too late.
While Brighty-of-the-big-screen was more concerned with battling mountain lions and bringing scoundrelous claim-jumpers to justice, the Canyon’s real mules are responsible for its impossible infrastructure. A sheer mile into the earth, for example, there are bridges. There are cabins. There are operational toilets and faucets and water fountains, which require miles upon miles of piping. There are countless (mostly vomit-free!) placards and pamphlets explaining the Canyon’s geology, but for anything manufactured below the rim there’s a living, kicking reason.
Midway down Bright Angel that first day, Dad and I run into a train of the beasts. There’s about a dozen of them, festooned together and led by a pair of bona fide cowboys. We can’t help but laugh at each other: clad all in leather and wide-brimmed hats, they’re cartoons to us; they seem amused that we’re shouldering our own cargo. “How long you plannin’ on bein’ down there?” one asks, smirking behind whiskers that make Yosemite Sam look like a Bosley candidate. They tell us they make this trek twice daily: hauling down “steak and beer, mainly” in the predawn, hauling up trash in the afternoon. On that first evening, as Dad and I stumble, blistered, into Phantom Ranch—the fully functional village at the Canyon’s basin—we know whom to thank.
To stay at Phantom Ranch requires entry into a lottery pool 14 months before the fact. For those more prone to spontaneity—the flight-missers of the world, say—there’s a nearby campground beside a gurgling brook and an ominous sign hammered into the earth that reads “Rockfall, No Stopping.” And the Ranch will still treat you to dinner and a show. After meals, in a near-mythic act of bravery, the waitstaff is to make nightly toasts to the weary, calorie-starved strangers outnumbering them ten to one and armed with steak knives. But they seem to enjoy it. Our dinner waiter waxes philosophical, comparing wealth to seawater with a bespectacled grin: “The more you have, the thirstier you get.”
After our steak and beer, apparently, Dad and I are feeling pretty damn wealthy: back at camp, we polish off the scotch. We pass a flask back and forth as he tells me of the love he felt holding my older sister for the first time. Independence died when he had children, he says, but it’s a part of him he’d kill again a thousand times over. Beneath the slice of starred sky visible from the Canyon’s basin, I feel a flicker of empathy. I remember that Dad has lived a life well before mine, every bit as rife with pain and joy and struggle. Well into his back half, he seems wise. He also seems as all parents are: an omen, a proxy of what’s to come. He’ll turn into his own father, growing sicker and smaller and in need of my help, just as I’ve spent my life in need of his. And then, before I know it, it’ll be my turn.
Dawn the next morning, bleary-eyed over eggs, our breakfast waiter reminds us how special we are. “Only 2% of visitors to the Grand Canyon make it further down than the South Rim,” he says. “And that’s counting those who do so in free-fall.” Nervous chuckles ripple through the chow hall, some of us realizing that remaining opportunities for free-fall abound. I harbor pride; this does feel special. Even more so, knowing that, while the Ranch is the destination for many, Dad and I are just getting started. Our waiter instructs us, at some point in our journey, to take a moment to absorb one particular totem in the Canyon—a chunk of basalt, a raven’s feather, Hal’s flaxen spew—and commit it to memory. To select one highly individualized, highly unique image of this place that’s glimpsed, however briefly, by so many, and claim it as your own.
The next three days illustrate his point. It’s overwhelming. Every corner of the park affords views so staggering that at times you have no choice but to miss the trees for the forest. We pass the ruined foundation of a Havasupai village. We climb fourteen miles out-and-back to the North Rim, where the snowpack erases the road and crows descend from ponderosa pines, riddling our lunch bags with beak holes. We wander, dwarfed, through formations, statues, temples in the geology. Dad sees GDF’s face in the canyon walls, woven into a tapestry of a billion others, watching us like stolid guardians. We trace the Colorado south again, back up to little oases of fulvous cottonwoods growing straight and audaciously from the rock. We wake with cold, red hands, prying open cans of ground coffee while deer pepper the trail around us, hardly raising their heads from breakfasts of their own.
In reading Dad’s notes on the trip, he may have put it best. He’s a professional writer now, having come a long way from watching a ski bum try to cuckold his old man. He knows when to surrender the burden of trying to do a thing justice in words. He opts instead for the simple: “the impossibleness of it.”
Maybe, in the face of such impossibility, other unthinkable notions come into focus. Maybe once you let go of our desperate need to distill the world, you can distill it all the better— because, a few days later, he doesn’t mince words. “The planet’s done,” he tells me.
So, nearly, are we. The end is in sight. We’re a few hundred vertical feet below the South Rim Visitor Center. Ice and tourists, both so deliciously absent the past three days, cling to the trail again. This is one of many such breaks today, in part out of necessity—it is a grueling, calf-punishing climb to the top—and in part out of reluctance. We’re perched on a boulder, gazing into the abyss we’ve just scrambled from, missing it already. We’re biding our time. And so, over trail mix, we discuss the end of the world.
Overhead, contrails split the vast azure sky. Dad is reminded of a theory he heard from his arborist: the highly-combustible chemicals in jet fuels drift from their heights to settle on forest canopies. Provided a spark, trees go up like trick candles, burning hotter, longer, and harder to extinguish than they would otherwise. I don’t know if the theory holds water, but it doesn’t feel like it matters. Either way, the fires of the previous season shattered records, scorching California’s surface like a statewide crem brûlée. This is the year we literally watched Paradise burn.
“Maybe they’ll pass something,” I suggest. “Maybe Congress’ll outlaw the chemical.”
“No.” He denies it, quick and easy: “The planet’s done. Sorry.” Though the delivery is snarky, I know him well enough to know that it’s an act. He is really, truly sorry.
The comment echoes as we haul ourselves up toward the finish. Coming from him, it’s an especially tough pill to swallow. He is, without question, responsible for the ecological lens through which I view the world. He introduced me to the national forests around Los Angeles on camping trips where he would invariably sprain an ankle. He would ferry me, Brighty-like, to meetings and campaigns for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, where he also got me my first internship. Given an in at the dinner table, he will filibuster without shame about the mortal sin of single-use plastics. This is the guy who sculpted my hope, my anger and my yearning to understand our relentless assault on the Earth. This is also the guy who will, in the same breath, tell me it’s hopeless. It is difficult to hear the person who gave you the world so resigned to its taking away.
Not that this is the first time I’ve heard such a verdict. Doomsaying is something of Dad’s pastime. He is enraged that others don’t seem as enraged as he is—what else is possibly worth your vitriol than the Charles Kochs of the world?—but rage is about as far as it gets. No doubt, I’m guilty of the same. I drink in the dark, daily news of the world, feel the despair it brings, and then swallow it, remaining largely within the bounds of my life. Sure, we may compost, go vegan and head off on a backpacking trip to commune with nature. But, like death, total upheaval of our lives and societies—what would really be required to move the needle environmentally— feels too frightening, too daunting, too uncertain.
Several hundred feet from the rim, my thoughts are nearly shattered by a stone the size of a softball. The rock comes flying down the canyon wall and slams into the dust a mere yard ahead of me, then ricochets and continues its descent. Frozen, I look up: a gang of silhouettes stands behind the safety of a railing, backlit by the sun’s glare. Was there some guilty tourist up there, responsible for the near miss? Or was there no perpetrator at all—was it just the canyon itself, ever shifting, ever impervious?
Sobered, I weigh my luck. Had we risen two, three seconds earlier — had I popped one less handful of gorp into my mouth, had Dad not delivered his autopsy—that might have been it. The rock could easily have met with the top of my skull instead of the copper dirt of the trail and killed me, “back half” be damned.
In a moment of grim irony, I realize that I’ve secured the totem the Phantom Ranch waiter charged me to keep. It’ll be a hard image to forget. While Dad and I discuss end times, one of his parents gone and another soon to go, a literal chip off the old block nearly takes off my head and reminds me of the one truth we all know deep down: I’m grateful to be alive, grateful to be in this beautiful place with this beautiful man, but I won’t be for long. The rock may not have gotten me, but something will. Something gets us all.
On a good note or no, everything ends.
Years later, I stand again over that big hole in the ground. It’s the heart of summer, 2021, and I’m in the final hours of a road trip with my dearest friends on earth. Tomorrow we head home to Los Angeles, whose polluted skies mirror the state of the Canyon now—wildfires that make those of 2018 look quaint are smoldering across the southwest, filling the gorge with haze. And, though I keep my lunch, Vomiting Hal has my sympathies: it is goddamned hot out here in July. My friends and I keep close to the rim, from where we watch a rescue helicopter blare in place.
While I’ve dreamt of a trek like this since I met these guys, lately I’ve felt a desperate pang to make it happen—the same type Dad no doubt felt once my grandfather breathed his last. One of my buddies was recently diagnosed with the gene for ALS, the merciless neurodegenerative disease to which his mother succumbed in January. He knows all too well what his future may entail. He sat by her side for years, watching as her body began to cage her still-lucid mind, watching as she withered and shrank until her eye muscles were the only within her control. Soon after getting word of his diagnosis, I found myself frantically consulting maps and calendars, booking campgrounds, stockpiling gear. Time was suddenly terrifying to me. I can only imagine how it was for him.
So here we are again. The others have peeled off, leaving just the two of us wandering off the trail above the South Rim. We’re discussing family, weaving through the pines as temperatures climb into the triple-digits, when he stops mid-sentence. He’s spied something: a rotary phone, bolted to a black pole sticking out of the earth, right at the very edge of the void. The laminated inscription stapled below reads:
There are those who believe spirits of our loved ones gone before us ride the winds between these canyon walls. I have walked hundreds of miles up and down these cliffs and know this to be true. It is here I can hear my partner’s laughter in the wind and feel his breath on my cheek.
We have all lost so much. We held their bodies when they were living. Now the canyon holds their spirits.
Pick up the phone.
Dial. Speak. Listen. Connect.
Without a word, my friend approaches. Cradling the phone between ear and shoulder, he dials a number he knows by heart.
“Mom?” he asks after a few beats. “If you’re there, please say something.” He waits on. And on. “I love you,” he tells her at last, and passes the line to me. Though I have to look up the number, I dial a loved one of my own, gone before me too. I half expect it to ring.
On our way back to the car in the mounting heat, we walk apart in silence. Neither one of us heard a thing.