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E S S A Y

Garrison Keillor

Walking Down the Canyon

AS A CHILD, I WAS MADĘ TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW OF A moving car and appreciate the beautiful scenery, with the result that now I don't care much for naturę. I prefer parks, ones with radios going chuckawaka chuckawaka and the delicious whiff of bratwurst and cigarette smoke.

Hocky coastlines are not that intercsting. Nor are beachcs: you just wind up staring at the ocean. Forests are nothing but trees. Deserts are beautiful for about 15 minutes, but theyre al-ways out in the middle of nowhere. As for mountains, an occa-sional rangę is nice, but mountains tend to cluster and become a continuous piece of bad art, a painting you’d see at an estate sale and not buy. And mountain people are a pain. Vermonters, for example. tend to l>e very sniffy about who is worthy to set foot in their midst and use their toilet facilities. In Minnesota we are astonished and gratified if anyone \TSits us, and we can’t do enough for them, but then this is a Hat State, and we are extremely nice people.

My favorite scenie attrac-tion is the canyon. or rcversc mountain, especially when it occurs on a Hat surface, such as Uie Grand Canyon. You get the best of botli worlds here: levelness, or platitude. and de-elevation. And the magnifi-cence of the erosionary process. And when you go vis-it, you dont run into flinty-eyed people busily despising you for your yellow plaid walking shorts and a T shirt that says save the whai.es. trade tiiem for valuable PRiZF.s. The canyon belongs to the world. (I be-lieve there is a separate entrance for Sierra Club members, the Ansel Adams Trail, where they don’t need to encounter us and the landscape is black and wbite.)

You put on your whaleTshirt and shorts and walking shoes with wool sccks and a pack with a bottle of water and a bag of trail mix and head down the Bright Angel Trail from the South Rim. This is a splendid experience. You pass through a phalanx of men standing on the rim videotaping the canyon, panning from left to right and then right to left, and you plunge down the trail, which is broad and not too steep and studded with mule manure, and thirty or so meters down, once you eonie around the second switchback, all the hubkub of the rim van-ishes, and you enter into a magnificent silence.

The trail switches back and forth, and thougli there may be hundreds of hikers on it, you are often alone, and you can peer over the edge at 600 or 900 m of rock face. And then, when you

weary of geology, some folks come trudging along, and you get to switch to anthropology.

The proportion of young French, German and Scandina-vian hikers is higli on the trail, most Americans preferring the video version, so it’s a foreign-exchange expericnce. You meet sinewy, tanned, multilingual Europeans striding pur-posefully upward, talking, one assumes, about man’s fate and the futurę of culture and such things. /And you see the occa-sional Iarge, pathetic, flabby /American sitting on a rock and gasping for breath, sweating off tlie Big Macs, thinking about coronary occlusion. There are morał fables everywhere you look. Despicable, whiny teenagers slouch along, and valiant gcczers pass them. It's Pilgńms Progress in real life.

Tlie descent is much harder than tlie ascent, but you don’t know tliat yct. Tlie novice hiker l is leg weary' as you near the eot-tonwood trees of tlie first oasis, 900 m below’ the rim. It’s much hotter here than at the trail-head, and you Hop down in tlie shade and briefly commune \vitli Kit Carson and Charles Lindbergh and Sir Edmund Hillary' and wonder, “Can I make it back up?” The answer is yes. Absolutely yes. Yes, sir.

On tlie asccnt you have a elear goal ahead, and you get happier and happier as you keep pressing upward, one switchback after another. You overtakc otlier climbers. You feel great. At a trailside shelter you run into teenagers weeping into an emergency phone. Two girls trying to con\^rince a park ranger that they really, rcally, re-ally, really can’t go another step and need to be airlifted out. Two well-fed American girls in nice clothes, botli ambulatory. One of them sobs in a well-practiced way, and if you wcren’t here to see her, you’d think she had crawled for 10 km through cactus dragging a broken leg behind her. She cries out, “But my dad will pay for it!” They beg. Please, please, pleasc.

You reHll your water bottle, and now, feeling morę right-eous than is good for you, you ascend purposefully and with-out pause to the rim and accept tlie silent admiration of tlie tourists there, who step back to let you pass. /And you stride into tlie lodge and go to your room and shower and put on clean clothes and order a hero-sizc gin and tonie and sit on the bal-cony and look out at the canyon blazing red and orange in the sunset, and you feel a morał superiority that only time can di-minish, Wliat is a vacation for, if not to make you feel better about yourself?    ■

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