Day 5: Arizona- Grand Canyon
27 June 2008I didn’t think I would have any strong emotions about the Grand Canyon– going into it, I figured this was really my mom’s rodeo and I was just along for the ride. “Isn’t it kind of just a hole in the ground?” I emailed to Julie the day before we went. “I didn’t think of it as a hole in the ground, but I was constantly consumed with thoughts of all the different ways I could die there when I visited,” Julie responded, adding a new fun layer to the cake. This was the second mention of death in the canyon that day, the first coming when I texted Feeto say that I was in her home state and very confused about what time it might be, and she responded that I should check out the book in the gift shop about all the people who have, in fact, died at the Grand Canyon. So I bought it. And it’s actually called Over The Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon and it’s been revised fourteen times. Last night (this will ruin the illusion of the day to day recaps, but we spent last night in california just over the border from, I think, Nevada) we collapsed into the seediest motel I’ve ever seen and my mom pulled out a Jodi Piccoult book to decompress, I read the Suicide and Murder chapters of Over The Edge, which was not a wise decision considering we were in the middle of nowhere and I was convinced no one would be able to hear my screams for help. I’m never worried about random acts of violence when I’m in New York, but as soon as I get out here I become convinced that there are serial killers everywhere. Anyway.
I learn something new and exciting about myself almost every day (like today, when I learned I could be thrilled to pieces by the sight of state corrections officers escorting shackled prisoners off of a van and into the very rest stop where I was standing so that they could use the facilities) but I was not prepared to discover that I’m the kind of person who cries the first time they see the grand canyon. I mean, really. At least the other lame things that make me cry are (kind of) points of pride– I have trouble quoting my favorite passage of The Velveteen Rabbit or making it through the end of Field of Dreams without crying, but both of those, I think, say a lot about my interests and values, and I don’t know what crying at the grand canyon says about me.
Eventually I stopped acting like a little bitch and got my life back together. And took many, many pictures. Very few of them have both my mom and I in them because this was the first place where I didn’t feel comfortable marching up to anyone and shoving my camera into their hands– no one was speaking at a decible above library level, and they were each in their own kind of reverie. I didn’t realize how great this was until we went to Bryce Canyon the next day and and I almost threw someone over the edge of it when they let their cell phone ring go beyond 8 notes before answering it with “Who is this?”
We hiked one of the trails for a bit (and by that I mean we walked on a slight incline for about 10 minutes and then turned around and walked back up and patted ourselves on the back for being so athletic) which made me realize that I actually missing hiking, which made me realize that I probably wasn’t allowed to think that considering hiking was never something I regularly did. I, once, spent three weeks doing nothing but hiking during outward bound, but at that time I was mostly consumed with thoughts like “Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die” and didn’t have the brain space to comprehend that hiking could kind of maybe be fun.
I did force some unsuspecting bystander to take this one of the two of us together, but I mostly spent my time making my mom take pictures of me where it looked like I had no idea my picture was being taken, and had been caught in a pensive moment of singing What A Wonderful World to myself.
“I’m going to stand over here– you go over there and take my picture for my Facebook profile.” My mom is a woman of enduring patience.
When I wasn’t busy taking the kind of pictures that would annoy me on someone else’s blog, I was busy stalking hilarious foreigners. We wound up on the same shuttle circuit as a group of elderly japanese tourists who were all wearing hats and gloves and spent a lot of time hiding from the sun.
I also applied myself to the task of finding the most ridiculous thing in the gift shop and then talking myself out of buying it. In this case, both were pretty easy to accomplish. I had already bought Death in the Grand Canyon and didn’t feel the need to own this great piece of literature alongside of it:
There’s a special markets sales rep somewhere who’s terribly proud of herself for this one.
I’m also learning many lessons about my tiny video camera as I go along– first up, the software isn’t allowing me to use songs that I bought of iTunes so I have to fall back on the array of stuff I uploaded from actual CDs or downloaded illegally during college. This is unfortunate for you guys, since I have, shall we say, interesting taste when buying complete albums. Lesson two– stop trying to walk and film things at the same time. I would delete all of these clips but that would make my mom cry, so instead I’m just subjecting the world at large to them:
Grand Canyon from Cristin Stickles on Vimeo.
4 Responses to “Day 5: Arizona- Grand Canyon”
June 28th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Honestly, I think this is the biggest compliment you could pay the Grand Canyon. Just out of curiosity, what song did you want to use?
June 28th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Those iTunes songs are encrypted. If you burn them to a CD and them rip them back onto your computer you can break the encryption.
June 29th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I really wanted to use either the theme from jurassic park or dragonheart. Next time!
June 29th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
There is *nothing* wrong with Journey.