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------- ------- ------- -------GRAND CANYON ------- -------My grandfather gave me a copy of The Chapter in Your Life Entitled San Francisco a week before we left on our tour of the West in the summer of 1947. I was almost twelve, and it was only the second time in my life that I’d be away from my parents. -------The first time was earlier that summer when I’d gone to a camp in the Ozarks with my friend Robbie Jeske. It was a boy’s camp for just the first two weeks of the season. The counselors were used to girls, so they didn’t make us do anything hard. My parents told me I had to learn to be tough, but I said why couldn’t everybody else learn to be nice, and they didn’t have an answer. They worried about me. Even Robbie Jeske was tougher than I was. He played baseball at the camp. I took tennis with the camp doctor. -------The bridge over the creek got washed out in a storm, but it was fixed by the time we went home. They always have horses at a girls’ camp. We got a long ride through the woods every other day. We even forded a creek on horseback. I liked the horses, except for the time a horse named Dynamite ran away with me. He stopped by himself, and I didn’t get hurt. The man who took care of the horses was mean and dirty. -------I read The Chapter in your Life Entitled San Francisco. It wasn’t very interesting, but I learned a lot about San Francisco. I was plenty excited about the trip. We were going to drive seven thousand miles and be gone for six weeks. We’d see Yellowstone Park and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. We’d stay in hotels and eat in restaurants. I didn’t eat much. I weighed only seventy pounds. I had a lot of postcards of the West that my grandparents sent me when they went to California the year before. There was one of Yellowstone Falls and another of a car driving through a big tree at Yosemite. My favorite picture was the Golden Gate Bridge. It was really beautiful. Granddad said it was as far west as you could go. I’d read about it in Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels. The postcard of the Grand Canyon was strange. The canyon was dull red and brown, and it didn’t even look very deep. Granddad said it was better when you were there. -------The day we left, my mother woke me while it was still dark. I got dressed and kissed my mother and father goodbye and got into the back seat of my grandfather’s 1940 Buick. I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly it was daylight, and we were halfway to Hannibal, Missouri. I looked out the window at the corn fields and caught a glimpse of the Mississippi, and tears started rolling down my cheeks. Ma and Granddad didn’t say anything, and finally the tears stopped. -------There were advertisements for chewing tobacco and toothpaste on all the barns, and there were Burma Shave signs along the road. I made up stories about the people in the farm houses. -------We got to Hannibal at eight o’clock and had breakfast at the Mark Twain Hotel. I was hungry. I had orange juice and two fried eggs with bacon and toast. It was the biggest breakfast I’d ever eaten. Ma and Granddad were pleased. The water glasses were cheery red and thick and heavy. -------After breakfast, Granddad asked me if I’d like to ride in front with him. After that I rode in front the whole time. Ma slept in the back seat. Granddad and I talked about the things we saw. -------That night we stayed in the Harrison Hotel in Clarinda, Iowa. We had dinner in the restaurant, and I ate a steak. We walked up and down the street after supper, but there wasn’t much to see. In the bathroom there was the biggest bathtub I’d ever seen. It had feet like a lion standing on croquet balls. I stayed in the tub so long I got wrinkled. -------After breakfast the next morning, we started for North Platte, Nebraska. I had to squint because of the sun. I thought about that for a while, and then I said to Granddad, “If we’re going west, why is the sun in front of us?” Granddad didn’t say anything and he kept driving for another minute, but then he slowed the car and turned around. We never talked about it, but I think he was glad it was me in front and not Ma. -------Granddad had made reservations all the way to California. That’s the way he did things. He’d been a time-motion man for the Mallinkrodt Chemical Company and had retired seven years before as a vice-president. He loved to take long car trips. Ma told me he would have driven farther every day, but he wanted to leave time for me to see things. Once, years before that, Granddad and two other men drove all the way across the United States in three days. I really liked my grandfather, but you didn’t want to make him angry. My grandmother was very sweet, but she did dumb things sometimes, and Granddad would holler at her, “Jesus, Emily!” -------Nebraska is all wheat fields. It’s very flat. I took a picture of a long train that went past us for half an hour. It was really hot, so we stopped for a coke at a gas station. The thermometer said 115 degrees. I told Granddad, and he said the thermometer was in the sun. It was the best tasting Coke I’d ever had. That night we stayed on the tenth floor of the Nebraska Hotel in North Platte. There are taller buildings in St. Louis, but I’d never been in any of them. -------The next day the country started to look different. There were no more farms, and there were funny dry hills everywhere. It was the Great Plains, Granddad said, the beginning of the real West. I watched every line of hills sink down as we got nearer and another one came up in front of us. Wyoming was even wilder than Nebraska. It was all sand and rocks and almost no trees. There was one place where Granddad took the car out of gear and let it roll up a hill. He said it was an illusion, the road really went down, but the way the mountains were tilted it looked like we were going up. -------We stopped just outside the east gate of Yellowstone Park, at Pingrey’s Teepee Resort. I thought we’d sleep in teepees, but they were just little log cabins. The cabins were new, and they smelled nice. Ours had a fireplace and Granddad made a fire, but it didn’t burn very long. -------The next morning I got up early and went outside. It was very quiet except for the sound of a little stream in the trees below us. The tops of the mountains on either side of Sylvan Pass were lit up by the morning sun. It smelled wonderful. I stood there without moving for two or three minutes, and suddenly I felt really strange, like someone was looking down at me from up on the mountain, and I felt like I was a part of everything. I didn’t say anything about it when I went back inside. -------Yellowstone Park was great. I saw fourteen bears and a moose. The moose was pretty far away, but I saw him with the binoculars. We went to all the geysers and hot springs. At Yellowstone Falls, Granddad let me climb down steps right into the spray and take a picture. It didn’t come out, but I took another one from farther away that did. Yellowstone Falls was the best thing I’d ever seen. We spent the night at the Old Faithful Lodge. I watched the geyser six times. The lodge was made of polished logs, and the lobby was four stories high inside. They wouldn’t let you climb higher than the second floor balcony, but I could walk into the big stone fireplace and look up at the sky. -------The next night we stayed at a motor court in West Yellowstone, Montana. Montana was my nineteenth state, because we’d driven to Florida from St. Louis a couple of times, and I’d been to Maine when I was four years old, although I didn’t remember much about it. The restaurant was full, and we had to wait for a table. Granddad said there was as truck driver’s convention in town. One of the drivers was at a table with his wife. He’d take a spoonful of soup and suck it in, making a lot of noise. Granddad said it was called “slurping.” I’d never seen anybody do that, not even at camp. Lots of people were looking at him. His wife looked sad. -------Idaho was all pine woods. We went only a couple hundred miles before we stopped in Pocatello, because it was my twelfth birthday. I had brook trout for supper, which was really good. Afterwards we went to a movie. I don’t remember what the movie was about, but there was a boy my age sitting in front of me with his arms around a girl on each side of him. I’d like to put my arm around at least one girl sometime. -------We stopped in Reno, and my grandmother played the slot machines. She let me pull the lever, although I think that was illegal. Granddad said he’d lost five dollars playing faro. I said they shouldn’t gamble. I was afraid we’d lose all our money and have to go home, but Ma said I didn’t have to worry. -------Yosemite was even more beautiful than Yellowstone, although it was the first place we’d been that was crowded. Granddad hadn’t been able to get reservations at the lodge, so we stayed in Bakersfield. Yosemite was the best smelling place I’d ever been. ------- San Francisco was wonderful. It was everything the book had said and a lot more. We stayed two weeks at the Canterbury Hotel, and we saw everything there was to see. We ate at Tarantinos Restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf one night. I wanted to go to Joe DiMaggio’s right next door, but I didn’t say anything. I was going to order abalone, but Granddad thought I might not like it, so I had swordfish instead. I’d never had swordfish before either. The only fish we had in St. Louis was whitefish and finnan haddie. Our family didn’t eat catfish. We also went to the Domino Club, where there were big paintings of naked women on all the walls. Granddad said it was a men’s club. I had a steak that was only four inches across, but it was three inches thick. ------- We went down to Palo Alto to see the widow of one of Dad’s friends, King Holliday. That was his name. He hadn’t really been a king. They had a daughter my age and a son a few years older. The son, whose name was Dirk, told his mother that he was going to Lake Tahoe for a few days with some friends, and she said that was fine. I liked Phyllis. She was very funny and had an answer to anything I said. I wondered if that was because she didn’t have a father. We drove around Stanford University and saw the bell tower. Phyllis and I played miniature golf. Afterwards Granddad took us to dinner at a restaurant that said it was The Original Home of Pea Soup. I thought that was great because I liked pea soup a lot. I’d liked it even before we went on the trip. I didn’t see how it could actually be the original home of pea soup, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t get a chance to put my arm around Phyllis. ------- We visited some other friends of Granddad’s across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County. I loved going across the bridge. We did it four times. The Smiths gave us roast lamb. I told them how great it was to have a home cooked meal, and they were pleased. Granddad asked me if I remembered what I’d had for breakfast the first morning in Hannibal. I said I did, and we talked about every meal we’d had in the last three weeks. I remembered them all, and so did Granddad. They asked me where we were going next, and I said Los Angeles, Boulder Dam, and the Grand Canyon. ------- We stayed only a few days in Los Angeles. Ma and I took the boat to Catalina Island and had a bus tour. Mr. Wrigley, who made Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum, the kind my mother chewed, had a big estate on Catalina. I saw people water-skiing. -------We were staying at the Biltmore, which Granddad said was the best hotel in town. I’ll always remember sitting in a chair in a corner of the big lobby and reading a letter from my parents that said we were going to move to New York City. My father had been transferred to the New York office, and they’d already been there and bought an apartment. I couldn’t believe it. I’d just read about the Empire State Building in Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels. ------- That was almost the end of the trip. We’d been away five weeks. I’d gained fifteen pounds, and I was ready to go home except that I wasn’t thinking about St. Louis anymore. I’d lived there all my life, and I was ready to go to New York. On the way back to Missouri we stopped at Boulder Dam. At the Petrified Forest, Granddad let me go on a trail by myself for half an hour. The best thing of all was when I got a barbecued beef sandwich at a restaurant in the Painted Desert. Ma wouldn’t go inside. She said it looked dirty. Ma won’t go in Chinese or Italian restaurants either. ------- We got to the Grand Canyon late in the afternoon. We’d driven a long way through flat rocky country dotted with little pine trees, and suddenly we were at the South Rim. The sun was low, and there were dark shadows down in the canyon. It looked exactly like my postcard, dull colored and not very deep. I didn’t want to hurt Ma and Granddad’s feelings, so I said it was really great. ------- The next day we drove past an old Indian selling baskets beside the road, but we didn’t stop. ------- 6 August 07 |