Walking Down The Canyon

As a child, I was made 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 nature. I prefer parks, ones with radios going chuckawaka chuckawaka and the delicious whiff of bratwurst and cigarette smoke.

Rocky coastlines are not that interesting. Nor are beaches: you just wind up staring at the ocean. Forests are nothing but trees. Deserts are beautiful for about 15 min., but they're always out in the middle of nowhere. As for mountains, an occasional range 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 be 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 visits us, and we can't do enough for them, but then this is a flat state, and we are extremely nice people.

My favorite scenic attraction is the canyon, or reverse mountain, especially when it occurs on a flat surface, such as the Grand Canyon. You get the best of both worlds here: levelness, or platitude, and de-elevation. And the magnificence of the erosionary process. And when you go visit, you don't run into flinty-eyed people busily despising you for your yellow plaid walking shorts and a T shirt that says SAVE THE WHALES. TRADE THEM FOR VALUABLE PRIZES. The canyon belongs to the world. (I believe 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 white.)

You put on your whale T shirt and shorts and walking shoes with wool socks 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 a hundred or so feet down, once you come around the second switchback, all the hubbub of the rim vanishes, and you enter into a magnificent silence.

The trail switches back and forth, and though there may be hundreds of hikers on it, you are often alone, and you can peer over the edge at 2,000 or 3,000 ft. 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 Scandinavian hikers is high on the trail, most Americans preferring the video version, so it's a foreign-exchange experience. You meet sinewy, tanned, multilingual Europeans striding purposefully upward, talking, one assumes, about man's fate and the future of culture and such things. And you see the occasional large, pathetic, flabby American sitting on a rock and gasping for breath, sweating off the Big Macs, thinking about coronary occlusion. There are moral fables everywhere you look. Despicable, whiny teenagers slouch along, and valiant geezers pass them. It's Pilgrim's Progress in real life.