Walking Down The Canyon

By Garrison Keillor

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.

The descent is much harder than the ascent, but you don't know that yet. The novice hiker is leg weary as you near the cottonwood trees of the first oasis, 3,000 ft. below the rim. It's much hotter here than at the trailhead, and you flop down in the shade and briefly commune with 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 the ascent you have a clear goal ahead, and you get happier and happier as you keep pressing upward, one switchback after another. You overtake other climbers. You feel great. At a trailside shelter you run into teenagers weeping into an emergency phone. Two girls trying to convince a park ranger that they really, really, really, really can't go another step and need to be airlifted out. Two well-fed American girls in nice clothes, both ambulatory. One of them sobs in a well-practiced way, and if you weren't here to see her, you'd think she had crawled for 10 miles through cactus dragging a broken leg behind her. She cries out, "But my dad will pay for it!" They beg. Please, please, please.

You refill your water bottle, and now, feeling more righteous than is good for you, you ascend purposefully and without pause to the rim and accept the silent admiration of the tourists there, who step back to let you pass. And you stride into the lodge and go to your room and shower and put on clean clothes and order a hero-size gin and tonic and sit on the balcony and look out at the canyon blazing red and orange in the sunset, and you feel a moral superiority that only time can diminish. What is a vacation for, if not to make you feel better about yourself?