The first travelogue: The Grand Canyon, October 1997

Background for this particular trip
Salutation
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10

It was 1997, and I was due for some extended time off. It had been a long time since we had had a long vacation, and Higro had never seen the Grand Canyon, so we decided a grand American family-style road trip was called for. ...continue reading...The only real concern we had was Merry, who at the time was not quite two years old, and who we were afraid would not enjoy the trip and could make the trip less than enjoyable for the rest of us. Here my parents came to the rescue. They offered to let Merry stay with them for two weeks while the rest of us gallivanted across the American West.

Now the issue was how to get Merry into my parents’ hands, since they lived ten hours away from Austin, in Heavener, Oklahoma. After some discussion, we decided to make use of the fact that I was regularly traveling to a client in Fort Worth, which was roughly halfway between my and my parents’ houses. I had a business trip to make to Fort Worth whose date was in my control to a certain degree, and so I timed the trip for just before the beginning of my vacation. My parents agreed to meet me at the hotel.

At the time, I was training a new employee, Tina Scott, who despite her name and her pure East Texas drawl is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. It was always fun to introduce her to clients who had dealt with her extensively over the phone and were now meeting her in person for the first time; the double-takes were always dramatic. Somehow they never seem to picture a Chinese-American behind that drawl and that name. At any rate, Tina was the last person to receive the old small-company kind of training we used to do: for two months I dragged her around with me everywhere I went. She was right in the middle of this training period when my vacation time rolled around.

Although my children hadn’t gotten to spend much time with Tina, they knew her and liked her and were accustomed to seeing me ride off to Fort Worth with her. In fact, Kegan, who at the time was five, had a couple of weeks earlier shocked his mother. Tina had come by the house to get me, and Dessie and the kids had stood in the yard and waved until we rounded the first street corner. Once T’s car had disappeared from view, Kegan turned to his mother and asked, “When are Daddy and his girlfriend coming back?” His mother’s reaction was an explosive, “WHAT?!?” He stuttered rapidly, “I mean, I mean...his friend...that’s a girl.”

At any rate, I bundled Merry’s car seat into the back seat and strapped her in, and then Tina, Merry and I set off for Fort Worth. I never got so little attention paid to me in my life; Tina and Merry had a blast while I chauffeured. Then we got to the hotel. Here we dragged out of the car Merry, her car seat, luggage for Merry for two weeks, my garment bag, Tina’s garment bag, two laptops – it was time to find a cart. With all that stuff piled onto the cart, we made our way into the lobby and stood in line. I’ll give you three guesses as to who was holding Merry, and if you guessed me, then try again. Anyway, as I stood there looking around the lobby, with Merry giggling in T’s arms, I got one of those sudden shifts of perspective. “Hey, T,” I said, “you realize, I suppose, that all these people in here are looking at us and thinking, ‘Man, that guy’s got some SERIOUSLY dominant blond genes!’”

I was wrong, of course, as I realized a couple of months later when telling the story. For no doubt they were actually all just thinking, “Second wife.”

My parents arrived, and we all headed for the Olive Garden. Now, if a television’s on in a restaurant, even if it’s a shopping network, I have to watch it. It’s a compulsion kind of thing. And it just so happened that Game 6 of the National League Championship Series had just reached the ninth inning as we walked in; I knew this because the bar was at the front of the restaurant, and the game was on all the televisions in the bar. “Okay,” I said, “we have to sit someplace where we can’t see the TV’s.” Obligingly, the hostess led us around a corner, back to a secluded part of the restaurant with no line of sight to any video screen. We sat down; we ordered; I leaned back – and there, perfectly reflected in the window, was Kevin Brown winding up. This, I considered, was fate, and my father agreed; so we excused ourselves and made for the bar, leaving poor Tina and my mother to make conversation with each other until the game was over.

Amazingly enough, this was not the last time Tina agreed to accompany me on a business trip.

At any rate, Merry was safely deposited with her grandparents, and in short order the rest of the Pierce family hit the road.

My company had provided me with a laptop computer. Now, I had never taken a laptop on a family vacation, and I had thought of several geeky things to do with it. For example, I had spent hours poring over an atlas, building an immense spreadsheet that had mileage between each scheduled stop and landmark, estimated rates of travel, benchmark ETA’s, etc. Also, I couldn’t wait to send e-mails to my parents rather than using the telephone. Unfortunately I never could get my e-mail to work; so the e-mail file kept getting longer and longer. My parents didn’t get the e-mail until we reached my sister’s house in Oklahoma City, where we met them and Merry at the end of the trip; then they got all the e-mails at once, in a single document.

And that was the first of the travelogues.

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Folks,

Kenny here. I have no intention of trying to describe the sights. That’s what slide shows are for. (No, we’re not really going to inflict a slideshow on you.) Just occasional random bits from a Pierce-style vacation I thought y’all would enjoy.

Day 1

We discovered somewhere after Junction, Texas that I had typed 145 miles instead of 245 into the time-and-distance Excel spreadsheet for one leg of the trip. We also realized that there is no campground at the place where my elaborate schedule intended for us to camp. Detour to Guadalupe Mountains National Park, arriving at 2:00 a.m. – Mountain time. This is why most Pierce planning is done by Dessie.

I might add that whereas most campgrounds in October are full of recreational vehicles and devoid of tents, there is nothing to do in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park except backpack, so that the tent campground was already full and we were left with an RV parking place. This means that all six of us slept in the van that first night. I reiterate that most Pierce planning is done by Dessie.

Day 2

At the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns we stopped to eat lunch in the underground cafeteria. Sean needed to go the bathroom, so I told him he could go. Shortly thereafter, the sound of somebody yelling at the top of his lungs emanated from the men’s restroom, and, having a fairly good idea of who that somebody was, I charged off to silence the offender.

Sure enough, Sean was in a stall amusing himself with the echoes. “Sean!” I said with that quiet but piercing voice mastered by every parent who doesn’t want to make more noise shushing his child than the child was making to begin with.

The yelling stops. A cheerful, “Hi, Daddy,” comes from behind the closed door of the stall.

A brief but pointed lecture follows in which Sean learns of the excessive rudeness involved in making echoes in a National Park bathroom adjoining a large dining room, as well as of the fact that such rudeness will not be tolerated, on pain of...well, on pain of severe pain. The lecture ends, followed by two seconds of absolute silence. Then, from behind the closed door there comes an untranscribable sound along the lines of, “Ffffthththbtt!”

And before I can recover enough to ask what he’s doing, a small but bitter voice says emphatically, “I just threw a cake at you, Daddy.”

Day 3

Nice day, but there was little of interest for people who weren’t along for the ride. Just a little nervousness due to the fact that the sign that said, “Next gas services 80 miles,” was lying, the next gas services being actually some 140 miles away. 12.5 gallons went in when we finally found a filling station, meaning we were running on fumes. A little while earlier, upon being asked to pray that we wouldn’t run out of gas, Sean had intoned reverently, “Please, gas, don’t run out.”

Halfway through the next tank, the gas gauge quit working. We have since depended on the trip odometer, a less than ideal solution since it means depending on my remembering to punch the button whenever we fill up. (Hey, I’ve only forgotten twice.)

Day 4

On this day Dessie discovered that the Grand Canyon is rather larger than she had imagined it. No children fell over the edge, which is hardly an automatic for kids who have no fear of heights and who are accident-prone enough to require (in Sean’s case, at least), seven emergency-room visits before birthday number five. Note to Mom Shirley: not your kind of national park.

Higro (our Brazilian exchange student, for those who don’t know) pronounced himself unimpressed. He claims that the Grand Canyon bears a strong resemblance to his swimming pool back home. As you can see, he is obnoxious enough to fit very well indeed into the Pierce family, which may account for the fact that Kasia has taken to introducing him as Igloo Pierce. (Higro is pronounced IG-roo, but the r is a palatal flap that comes out of Kasia’s mouth as a palatal liquid.)

The Voice of Experience Speaks: if you intend to eat s’mores, you should first shave off your beard and moustache.

Day 5

A simple enough day in prospect, but that was before we stopped to shop at a Navajo Indian roadside stand and Dessie locked the keys in the car. Okay, okay, I admit it was really me. Had you going for a second, didn’t I? Anyone? Oh, well...

With the help of several friendly Navajos we coat-hangered the thing open and continued on. This was enough time for me to learn in conversation that (a) it had snowed there last week, (b) that every time it snows there, several cars slide off the road at a particular curve, a high percentage of those cars being driven by persons of the Japanese persuasion, and (c) that my Navajo informant’s granddaughter believes that she knows why Japanese people can’t seem to keep from sliding off that curve. The four-year-old’s explanation is that it’s hard to see when you pull the corners of your eyes so far sideways.

We learned that the North Rim is the last refuge of Mormon polygamists, which inspired us to the following ad-lib verse to the old “Oh, You Can’t Get to Heaven” camp song:

Oh, you can’t get to heaven (Oh, you can’t get to heaven)
With just one wife (With just one wife)
’Cause just one wife (‘Cause just one wife)
Don’t cause enough...stri-i-i-ife
Oh, you can’t get to heaven with just one wife
You need two or three or twenty-five
Ain’t gonna grie-ieve my Lord no more.

No disrespect intended to non-Mormon polygamists, of course.

Four Corners turns out to be a Navajo Tribal Park that closes at 5:00, so we didn’t get to see it. Fortunately we had decided to detour through Monument Valley and the Painted Desert. Next American vacation, we have now determined, has to be Utah. Great detour, best decision so far this trip.(Relax, I’m not going to describe either Monument Valley or the Painted Desert.)

We reached Mesa Verde to discover that the campground at the place where my elaborate schedule intended for us to camp (Mesa Verde) closed for the winter October 13th. We are now in a motel where the door next to us bears the legend – I kid you not in the slightest, and I have just walked outside barefooted into 34-degree weather to get the wording precisely correct –303. COUNTY JAIL. VISITING HOURS 1 P.M. – 4 P. M. MON. WED. FRI. This is why most Pierce planning is done by Dessie.

At least, as you perceive, I can get and send e-mail.

Hope y’all are having as much fun this week as we are.

Kenny

Well, actually I realized I don’t yet have the new computer configured so that it can send out e-mail, so y’all didn’t get this at the end of Day 5.

Day 6

Took the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railway from Durango to Silverton and back. We recommend this very highly indeed, and strongly suggest the open car, even in winter. (Just wear lots of clothes.) In retrospect we’re happy that the closed cars were all sold out. Which sellout just goes to show that if you’re going in the summer you’d bloody well better get your reservations early.

Ate at the same restaurant (Handlebars) we ate at on our previous visit to Silverton four years earlier; food still just as good. The biggest attraction, however, remains the sense of humor of the proprietors. Example: bumper sticker on the wall reading, “EARTH FIRST – We’ll mine the rest of the planets later.” Further example: menu item, “Choice Rocky Mountain Oysters,” because “Sometimes you feel like a nut.” Okay, I’m overstating it; the food is the biggest attraction. Deeeelicious chicken-fried steak.

Special note to grandparents, others please skip: as we got off the train we were stopped by a lady who just wanted to compliment us on how well behaved our children were. You are to be congratulated for having done such a fine job as grandparents.

Higro has now seen snow. He has yet to see a bear.

Day 7

Decided to skip Mesa Verde, since we were already in Durango and would have had to backtrack. Didn’t get away in time to see the train heading back up to Silverton, which upset Kegan severely. When I told him, “It’s okay, we’ll see a bunch of stuff today,” Kegan announced, “I hate seeing a bunch of stuff that looks like...not trains.”

The phrase “I hate,” by the way, has become Kegan’s standard way to respond to being told “No,” and as of this afternoon he gets to do five pushups every time that particular four-letter word (I refer to the h-word) crosses his lips. The first time this punishment was enforced we pulled over to the side of the road, he did his pushups, and as he was climbing back into the car he announced, “I hate doing pushups.”

Stopped at the top of the pass between Durango and Silverton (Moray Pass? Molar Pass? something like that) to play in the snow. I was corrupted by Higro into stripping to nothing but short pants and frolicking for the camera’s benefit. (I had thought all these years that the combination of testosterone and immaturity was deadly; apparently testosterone on its own is sufficient. Unless I can blame my testosterone and Higro’s immaturity.) However, since Higro had not seen snow until the day before, he was innocent of such tactics as the snow down the back of the shirt and the snowball attack just before the shutter snaps. His innocence is now lost.

I mentioned sometime back that Sean had required seven emergency room visits before his fifth birthday. That number is now out of date. As I type in a playground where Kasia and Kegan play and Higro works on English homework, a doctor next door at the local clinic is stitching up the results of Sean’s lunchtime nosedive off a playscape into gravel. Nothing terribly serious; just a couple of stitches next to the left eye, you know. In fact here come Sean and Dessie now. Earlier than I expected, which is a good sign, and Sean is bounding up and down like a rabbit instead of walking, which would be another good sign except that it probably means he’s forgotten the pain and is now ready to find another playscape to dive off of. For my long-term-memory-challenged boys pain is no deterrent, which is why we have to be creative with punishments.

On the road again...doop doop do-doop dooo...

It’s pretty sad. We appear inured to disaster. In support of this claim see:

Exhibit A: When I locked my keys in the car, Dessie just said something like, “Oh, you haven’t done this in a while. So how are we going to get the car open?” In fact the Navajo girl who was the most help said halfway through the proceedings, “You know, you people aren’t nearly as upset as most people who do this here get.”

Exhibit B: At the end of the railroad day, after eating at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that turned out to have great food, I said to Dessie, “You know, things have just gone really well for us this trip.” This earned me a long what-planet-are-you-from stare from Dessie, who at the time had already had to put up with a nonexistent campground, a minivan-turned-RV, a broken fuel gauge, weather way colder than she was prepared for, and getting the keys locked in the car in the middle of the desert a $140 service call from the nearest locksmith. Imagine if she’d known she was going to get to call 9-1-1 the next day.

Exhibit C: When Sean nose-dived into the gravel, Dessie’s and my conversation ran about like this, all in a calm, nice-weather-we’re-having tone of voice:

D: “Wanna go see how bad it is?”

[I pick him up and there’s blood all over the side of his face.]

K: “Not too bad, just bloody.”

D: “Stitches?”

K: “Probably. Take a look.”

[I carry him to D for inspection.]

D: “Yeah, I think so. I’ll get the first-aid kit.”

[I set Sean down and wipe some of the blood off one of my favorite sweaters with no comment other than a mental shrug. I make mildly encouraging noises to Sean and dab the blood off his cheek with a paper towel as D. rummages for the first aid kit.]

D [a bright idea has just occurred to her, which makes her sound cheerful]: “Why don’t you get my cellular out of the car and call 9-1-1 to see where an urgent care center is? They can’t charge us too much for that call.”

[Et cetera, et cetera.]

I am happy to report, by the way, that the doctor decided not to stitch Sean up, opting instead for some high-tech new bandage that stays on for four days and then falls off automatically (or something like that). We are now trying to decide whether the insurance company will treat this as a visit to an urgent care center (since the sign outside the small building in Ridgeway said “Family Medical Center”) or as a visit to an emergency room (since the sign over the little room in the back where they checked Sean out said “Emergency” instead of “Examination Room 5”).

More snow play at Monarch Pass, interrupting a special interpretive reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Dessie and self. Said interpretive reading consisted of Dessie’s reading a sentence or two aloud and self’s translating for Higro’s benefit. Example:

D [reading]: “In the greenest of our valleys, / By good angels tenanted, / Once a fair and stately palace – / Radiant palace – reared its head. / In the monarch Thought’s dominion – / It stood there! / Never seraph spread a pinion / Over fabric half so fair.”

K: Beautiful house.

It was a homework assignment for Higro, but before admitting defeat he only made it as far as:

Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was
aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind,
for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages,
in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of
munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the
intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable
beauties, of musical science...

Which is a lot to ask out of someone for whom English is not the first language.

Since Dessie had never read it, she wound up getting into the story herself. It was actually pretty interesting, because Dess has never liked Poe. So when she started off reading the story out loud (I was driving), she couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice: no matter how hard she tried, you could tell she didn’t like it. But after about three pages she was falling under the spell, and by the last couple she was spot-on.

[Later note: having read this, Dessie tells me that she didn’t fall under the spell; she just got tired of my complaining and decided to read it straight rather than snide. Oh, well.]

Higro says this is the first reading assignment from that class that he has understood.

At the restaurant in Salida (great restaurant, by the way, but I seem to have forgotten its name), Kegan needed to do five more pushups upon arrival, having forgotten that “hate” is no longer in his vocabulary. He got of the car and was bending over to get in pushup position when I said in my best drill-sergeant voice, “Gimme five.” With a look of confusion he straightened back up, turned around and raised his hand to high-five me. I apologized for confusing him, and he turned back around and delivered five very nice, canonical-form pushups. “Hey, great pushups!” I said without thinking – “gimme five!”

The restaurant was a combination Mexican place and steakhouse. Fabulous sopapillas stuffed with beef and peppers, plus out of the same kitchen an outstanding Philly cheesesteak hoagie. That, my friends, is a chef with range.

The Voice of Experience Speaks: if you intend to eat your sopapillas with honey, you should first shave off your beard and moustache.

Picked a campground at random near Royal Gorge. Turns out that they quit advertising last week but are staying open out of sheer inertia “until the weather breaks.” They’ve also knocked a third off their prices since the season’s over. For sixty cents less than we paid last night to pitch tents and sleep in near-freezing weather, I’m typing in boxers at a table in a tiny but cute log cabin with a double bed, a set of bunk beds, and an electric heater. You know, things have just gone really well for us this trip.

To bed, to bed, said sleepyhead...

Day 8

Didn’t start out well. The Royal Gorge bridge turns out to be part of a chintzy little municipal amusement park, and they wanted $54 for us to drive across the thing. Yeah, right. The Grand Canyon takes $20 from you and lets you stay all week, and these guys want to charge us $54 bucks to drive across their bridge. We declined. Then we were going to take this scenic loop, but when we got to the start of it, it turned out to be closed for the winter. We did get to see a prairie dog town, but that didn’t seem to be enough to make up for what we weren’t seeing. Didn’t look like our luck was holding.

So we decided to detour along a little state highway through the Sangre de Cristo foothills. Even this started out contributing to the general oopsiness of the day, since when we stopped for Higro and I to climb rocks on the highway right-of-way, the paranoid survivalists living nearby sicced their dogs on us. (Higro can climb rocks pretty fast when properly motivated, we discovered.) I thought it was pretty humiliating for the survivalists myself (there but for the grace of God goes Timothy MacVeigh), but Dessie considered it humiliating for her, and she was more humiliated than I was amused. So that was a negative experience, too. We decided to just consider the day a washout and get to camp as fast as we could.

Then, suddenly, ten minutes later, we came around a curve and discovered Bishop Castle. I won’t describe this much since we’re going to put a full spread about it on our Web page. It’s a genuine castle built by hand by one guy, a high-school dropout who’s been working on the thing for twenty-eight years. You gotta see this thing to believe it. One of the towers is 160 feet tall. That’s right, 160 feet. And the thing is gorgeous. He’s never had blueprints, he’s fashioned all the ironwork by hand (e.g. an arched scrollwork bridge leaping from one corner tower to another a hundred feet above the ground), he’s fought off half a dozen government bureaucracies...it’s astonishing. Furthermore, you can do whatever you want and go wherever you want in the castle. That scrollwork bridge - it goes between two towers, like I said, but one of them isn’t quite finished up to where the bridge starts. So you’ve got stonework up to ninety feet, and then exposed iron framework sticking up in the air to where the bridge starts.

He let me climb up to the bridge.

Yes, that’s right. When I asked, the guy is like, “Sure, go ahead. My seven-year-old eats lunch there all the time.” I’m still flabbergasted that there’s a place in America that would let me climb up to an arch like that.

Admission, by the way, is totally free. Straight donation basis, and the guy is serious. He says he’s been poor all his life and thinks there ought to be something in America that poor people can use just as much as rich people.

Okay, that’s all I’m going to say about Bishop Castle. Except that I’m glad the other stuff that morning didn’t work out, else we wouldn’t have taken the highway past Bishop Castle and would have missed it. You know, things have just gone really well for us this trip.

While passing through a particularly desolate section of New Mexico, one of our boys suddenly discovered that he desperately needed a bathroom. We were five miles from town. He made it three. Let us draw a discreet veil over the rest of the proceedings, raising it only long enough to behold a single scene: me, dancing down the center line of a deserted highway in the middle of a 30-degree night in pursuit of a ... call it a befouled paper towel, in a stiff wind.

This left me a bad mood, which is very difficult for Dessie. She was therefore very relieved, half an hour later, to hear me say that due to static electricity “the hair on my chest is standing on end. In fact both of them are.” I can’t stay in a bad mood if people are laughing at my jokes, so she laughed very hard and then everything was all right again.

Couldn’t find a campground and finally, at about 1:00 a.m., decided to stop at a motel. Followed the signs into Shamrock to find an Econo-Lodge on a totally deserted four-lane street. Two blocks from the thing police lights appear in my rearview mirror. I can’t imagine what I’m being stopped for, but I get out. This very friendly, gregarious officer comes bounding up and informs me that he’s stopping me because I changed lanes without signaling(!). Doesn’t give me a ticket, you understand, just chats for a little bit and then lets me go. At the hotel I mention being stopped and why, and the clerk stares at me for about four seconds. Then he says, “He didn’t give you a ticket, did he?” I answer, “Naw, actually he was pretty friendly. I really think he just felt like he wanted to talk to somebody.” Light dawns on the clerk’s face. “He was a really country kind of guy, right?” I admit that he was. “Yeah,” says the clerk, “he’s one of our newer officers...”

Day 9

Enjoyable day to experience, boring to hear tell of. Reunited with Merry, who seems to have had as much of a blast in OKC as we’ve had on the road.

Day 10

Mom and Pop come in telling me that people are stranded all over Colorado and the Texas Panhandle with a blizzard. Sixty-mph winds, and they’ve had to call out the National Guard to rescue people from highway shoulders up in all the mountains we just drove through. Having personally experienced a few vicious, high-wind snowstorms (though not full blizzards) I am glad to have escaped. Dessie and Higro, neither of whom have had that experience, are disappointed to have missed it. Yeah, it would’ve been cool to be stuck on a road with a sixty-mile wind blowing snow all around the outside of the car, I admit. Right up until the first time one of the boys needed to go to the bathroom.

Actually, I think Dessie and Higro are just having fun with me, pretending to be sillier than they really are. (I don’t know about Higro, though; he’s still young and male enough to feel invincible.) At any rate, a pleasant farewell to the extended family, an uneventful ride home, and

FINIS