Ghosts

I am struck by how odd I feel to be here again, one of the most sacred places on earth to me. At least it used to be. Now the solitary traveler, I find myself strangely unconnected to this space.  I look over the South Rim, some ten miles to the other side and over a chasm nearly a mile deep, and I remember welling up with tears on many such occasions, overcome by the sheer immensity and beauty of this expanse of absence. I see it now, but the feeling doesn’t come. What is here are tourists, and their conversations are predictable and boring. The men need to bring this thing under control by talking about dimensions, geology, or history. The women are content to look and listen but seem to be thinking about other things. Children are happy or upset and completely unaware of what they are seeing when they bother to look at it. The pieces of conversation I pick up are depressing. One father tells his young son that if he throws another snowball at him, he will stick it in his ear. A mother says to her son, “Oh, Powell, we should go to Powell point and take your picture there.” There seem to be as many Germans and Japanese as Americans here, but no one speaks to me today. A raven attacks a poodle who is wearing one of those dog sweaters. People laugh, and I do too because, well, it’s a poodle in a sweater, and it’s a raven. The juxtaposition is just too jarring, and the poodle deserved it. I tell all the ravens I see “nevermore,” but it’s not funny, to me or to them.

Ghosts surround me. They are pleasant but, like all ghosts, they belong to the past. I remember meeting sixteen Buddhist monks in Mather Campground one year. We are still friends today, and they ended up living in the next town over from me in Massachusetts. Memories of students come back to me. Moonlit and midnight walks along  the South Rim Trail. Losing students after dark on every trip because they (always guys) had to try the Bright Angel Trail toward the river and never realized how long it would take, despite my warnings. That loneliness that descends with the darkness at the canyon, and the dread that comes upon you when you realize you are camping in the cold. It hurts to think about leaving the warmth of the lodge and other people and crawling into a tent in the snow. But this time I am in the Yavapai Lodge, not the Mather Campground. A man walking in front of me tells me that the wind chill is supposed to be minus twelve tonight, and I smile think of doing minus eight outside. Good memories, but they belong to another time and another person. I am glad I have come, but I will probably not return. One of the rules of the road: no backtracking. I resolve that further road trips will involve new paths and destinations

There is television in my room, and I am stunned by its power. I haven’t had television for many months, and the sheer magnetism of the thing surprises me. I grew up watching lots of television, like most of my generation, but now it seems like there is this strange creature in my room that I can’t stop looking at. Equally amazing is the ugliness of it. Go without television for seven months then watch it for an hour. You will likely be shocked, as I was, at how crass and creepy it is. Even good programming (I watched the film Friday Night Lights) is corrupted by the medium itself, becoming simply a longer commercial instead of a work itself. Of course I can’t turn it off either and end up going to sleep by it. I am happy to leave the Grand Canyon if only not to watch any more television.  And of course when I go to the restaurants and lodges I see the same commercialism that televisions breeds and feeds upon. The food is horrible, the clothing overpriced, and the atmosphere not unlike a Wal-Mart at a national monument. Why didn’t I see this before? I guess I must have, but the joy of being on the road with good company must have diminished the ugliness that I see now. The only escape is walking the South Rim Trail, which I do every day, most of the day.

I get up early on Friday, eager to leave the Grand Canyon, even though–remembering my love of this place–I have bought a year-round pass in anticipation of many returns. This trip doesn’t spoil the memories at all; in fact it makes them more precious, more meaningful. But allons. I decide to head down to Williams to eat at Old Smokey’s Pancake House, a trek I have made several times before. Backtracking still, but it’s too late to change now, and at least I have adjusted my expectations accordingly. It is as I remember it, and the pancake is as large as the large plate, and is delicious. One of the great joys of taking students on trips in the west was watching them encounter food they hadn’t seen before, and I remembered taking a photograph of one of these pancakes that Ethan had ordered. He was stunned by the proportions in the west. At the Uranium Cafe in Grants, New Mexico, the pancakes are even larger, and there are two of them. They’re free if you can eat them all, and our big guy on that trip, John, couldn’t do it.

South from Williams to Prescott, another one of my favorite places. It is, as the signs say, “Arizona’s Christmas City.” The Billy Jack films were shot here, and I have always loved this classic western town, even though I knew it was dressed up for the tourists. The ghost here is Sharon who stayed on for a while after her graduation from Prescott College but now lives in Tucson. Interestingly, I have an email from her now in my in-box. She hosted a group of us here once in her place on the outside of town. A rule of the blue highways traveler: you must give rest and comfort to travelers when they ask. We did, and she did. I need to use the bathroom, and instinctively I go to the east side of the courthouse where I know there is a bathroom. I even remember that it is unheated. It is a bit odd to have so much information about so many towns in America, but I have to admit I like it a lot. We are made of memories, and mine are made of towns and people I have met on the road. I pass a man standing on the courthouse square looking a bit lost. He calls out to me: “Sir, are you from Prescott?” Every time. Every damn time. Someone will ask me for directions. I have to admit I like this too, but I wonder what it is about me that makes people think 1) I know where I am and 2) I will them where they are. He is a nice gentleman in his sixties. “No, I’m not from here, but I know my way around. What can I do for you?” He is looking for the AAA office. That I don’t know. He has a vague memory of the address, a street that starts with a “C” or “K.” I pull out the iPhone, and say, “Let’s see if we can find it.” A few taps later, I click on the Google search result and the iPhone brings up the map application with the search results marked. We find it immediately. “Here it is,” I say. “Just turn right there on Gurley, and it becomes Route 69, then turn right and the next left.” “Is that one of them ithings?” he asks. I smile and say it is. “Where you from?” I ask him. “Orange County, California,” he says proudly, “but I’ve never been to Prescott before.” “I’ve been here a few times, but I’m from San Bernardino County, California,” I say. It sounds odd coming out of my mouth, and I let it linger in the air a while and contemplate the fact that I am now “from” southern California. We shake hands and the man thanks me. I feel that if we were to talk longer, we would be friends. Whitman: “What gives me to be free to a woman’s or man’s good-will? What gives them to be free to mine?”

South on Route 89 past Sharon’s old place and over the mountains toward southern California. Toward home. I go through Hope, Arizona, and a sign on the way out of town reads literally “Your Now Beyond Hope.” I think about stopping to photo the sign with its many layers of meaning, irony, and grammatical mistakes, but I decide it will be just another memory, just another story, just another ghost. Flannery O’Connor called the South “Christ-haunted.” For me it is the West, and my haunting is by ghosts who are all friendly, occasionally funny, and sometimes sacred.