Seeing my kids and their families was the primary reason I’d come. Everything else was merely a want; a little iceing on the cake as it were. A Father is what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’d wanted 7 and was thankful for the 4 I got. I hear of many parents who bitch and complain and “can’t wait for the day when that kid turns 18″. I dreaded that day 4 times. I was correct only three thank God, as I still have Mark living with me now.
Technologically speaking, Jon didn’t leave, he was left behind. Don’t let him tell you he was abandoned, he was concious and fluid the last time I saw the dude. It wasn’t long before he met up with Maria, so that pretty much got him gone for good. I was going to put up a defense but after meeting her, I saw the futility and started enjoying her and the eventual grandkids. Olivia was a couple years old and Ava was a newborn when they came up for the last time before moving. They moved to Tucson, Az and then again to Prescott Valley and had a son, Owen, born in the process.
Matthew bailed, pure and simple. I think Matt’s had a vision of what he’s wanted to do from about the same age I did. Not long after graduation he signed up with a hiring company and worked for an auto supplier, painting parts. It wasn’t long before this company paid off his pimp and hired him on full time. He’s still doing the same type of work but on a much larger scale and for a lot of people who pay attention. He moved to Grand Rapids where he met Hoa (which is flower in Vietnamese). She truely is too. There, they had Mia, and I’d get to see them every couple months or so. Last Fall, they moved to S. Ogden, Ut., and born their son, Henry.
Katrina gets her own series this fall, so I’ll let her lurk in the family shadows till then.
We arrived at the Marble Canyon Lodge, at 4:15, exactly 10 hours from Salt Lake City. I didn’t think about how long we’d spent on the ride until I figured it up. When we’d left that morning at 6:15, it was 45º and now it’s 90º. I was the only one who wore long pants, but until we got to La Verkin, I was glad I had them.
Around here, the closer you get to the lake, the cooler it gets, out there that comes with altitude. Traveling down I-15 from SLC, it stayed in the 60’s with a North wind. That air was coming from Canada via the snow covered Rocky Mountains, and it channeled right down through the Great Basin. When we turned left, we left the cool temperatures behind and into the domain of Old Mexico. The wind from La Verkin to eventually, the Grand Canyon, originated in Mexico and heated up the entire way.
That damned wind blew, at speed, from the time I walked off the airplane in Salt Lake City, until two days after I got home. From what I understand, it’s blown like that since Jesus was a boy and will continue to do so, until he show’s up again. In the next segment where I’ll have pictures of the Grand Canyon, you’ll notice a haze. I asked Jon about it thinking it was from moisture, but it’s blowing sand.
Between La Verkin and Marble Canyon Lodge, there are two ridges we had to travel over; their tops were around 7,000′ and the bottoms 3,000′ and we’d open and close the windows as we traveled along. The last stretch along the Vermilion Cliffs were traveled with the air conditioner on, so I wasn’t prepared when I opened the door. “Dry heat, like an oven”, doesn’t do it justice. Geneticaly, I should be hiding in a cave in Northern Germany this time of year, rather than on the threshold to hell, and it felt like it. The sunlight actually has weight, I could feel it pushing down on me as I walked from the van to the nearest shade. As soon as I got to Matt’s I went over to a drug store and bought some SPF 70, because they didn’t have 80, or better yet 10,000. If I had had this stuff when I was a kid, I’d still have two tear ducts working, and a couple square centimeters of skin. For all you Mom’s and Dad’s of the Arian/Celtic/Nordic genre, please use this stuff on your kids.
Marble Canyon Lodge is a community and a lodge. It has it’s own gas station, trading post, metalworks/jewelry, post office, a very nice restaurant, lodgings on both sides of the road, and a friggin’ AIRPORT. It’s all in one nice compact little unit using maybe 10 acres out of a zillion acres of “Holy Crap”. Sorry, but that’s what kept going through my head every time I looked out the window or walked around. It was EVERYWHERE. The compound sits at the extreme East end of the Grand Canyon, and is surrounded on three sides by vermilion colored cliffs, hundreds of feet high. Time and distance become confusing when trying to judge their sizes. What looks to be 10′ tall and 100′ away becomes 100’s of feet high and thousands of feet away.
I walked under the canopy that surrounds the building and took one rotation to see what the place looked like. The grounds were well kept with evidence of irrigation used to keep some of that stuff alive. Lots of shade trees for the central court, and I didn’t find the kids. As I came back to the van, Matt walked up and gave me the keys to our room. It turned out, Jon’s room was right in front of where we parked and they were coming out as we knocked on the door.
This is what was waiting for me. There have been a few times when reality came up and smacked me in the face: Returning to my grade school and finding the water fountains are knee high, not chest. Telling someone who worked for you to “Turn that crap down” because it was loud, and it was crap! Then to look down at your granddaughter who was theigh high and now is giving me a hug around the waist. An infant who’s now latching onto my leg like she’s never going to let go, and a little boy who’s wondering who the hell I am.
Mark and my room was still being cleaned so we all went into Jon’s, took some pictures and talked about our trips.
First off, the rooms. “Austere” and “Spartan” were the words used to describe the Lodges berthing by past patrons. I didn’t see it that way at all. The room is well insulated, nice thick curtains covering the spacious windows, and an air conditioner that would allow you to hang meat. There is nothing austere or spartan when there is a working air conditioner in the room. The rooms were impeccably clean, the sheets crisp, and the shower, functional. Jon told me that when it gets real hot down there, it’s impossible to get cold water out of the cold water tap. We keep our water lines buried to 42″ here in Michigan, to protect it from freezing. There they bury it deep enough to prevent tripping over it.
The two ladies that cleaned the room were very friendly and extremely helpfull as they were the first to warn us of the rattlesnakes.
Except for Miria, who was raised near Bisby, Arizona, none of us were familiar with the foilage and fauna of the area. Michigan has a couple native cactus’ and we see Yucca plants in much of the landscape, but there aren’t lizards and rattlesnakes hiding in them. When these two ladies saw how liberal we were with the youngin’s movements, they came over and warned us. They also warned us to look at the ground whenever opening the door in case there’s a reptile hoping to get in. All of the employees are Navajo, and I’m sad to say, I had them stereotyped into what Hollywood leads us to think. I was expecting personalities along the lines of Geronimo, and got the Inuit from “Northern Exposure”.
Being the father of four, I’ve traveled with various ages of various amounts, over various distances, and they can make or break a long trip like this. We had two with us, but Hoa has a nice van whereas Jon drives a mid-sized car, and a third kid. Even if just one of these five kids were having a bad time of it, we all would be. It didn’t turn out that way at all. All of them were quite cheerful and acted as though they grew up next door all their lives. I would very much like to take credit for this, but it has to go to Mark. Last Christmas, Mark gave Matt and Hoa a portable DVD player. Mia wasn’t much of a traveler and Matt had some serious misgivings about the trip to Utah. Matt hooked it up behind his seat so Mia could watch it, and the only time she became upset, was when they were getting out of the car. Matt foresaw the problems that might be facing Jon, so he mailed it down so they could use it on the trip. Hoa’s van already had one included, and it entertained our two for 10 hours and Jon’s for 4.
Being a fair and balanced observer, I must bring up the downside of those things. Mia and Henry love Dora the Explorer. There is nothing wrong with Dora the Explorer, she teach’s some good behavioral practices, but she hangs with this friggin’ monkey who drive me absolutly fucking crazy. She talks, he chatters, and then they break out into a song. “We did it! We did it! We did it all together” If I live to be two hundred and seventeen, I hope I can do it without listening to that again.
By then it was dinner time. Jon and Miria had brought along a lot of lunch meats, but I took the opportunity to buy them all dinner.
The Lodge is used primarily, for groups of people about to take rafts down the Colorado River. It is also used by a wide range of outdoors people, from fly fishing to bird watching, and outdoors people, by nature, are good folk. Mixed in were the usual “wanna bee’s”; the ones that spend several thousand dollars to do the same thing I do, in torn bluejeans and a tee shirt. I live in a “Vacation Destination” myself so we deal with some of the high end/high maintenance visitors too, but I don’t bother with those dudes anymore. And I very rarely dress like a vacationer, the people who live there won’t recognize ya.
It looked strange to see bass boats in such a location, but there were several of those there also. Some were going to fish the river no less, and I’ll bet that’s one hellava ride! The bass boats I think, were going to Lake Powell which we went to the next day for some swimming.
There was a lesbian couple down at the end that were really nice. They came over Saturday morning saying that they had to call the manager to come get the rattler at their front door, so they could leave. Just my luck, I’d been wanting to take a picture of a rattler, and the lady down the way gets one delivered.
The seating is spacious but the chairs weren’t designed to promote a leasurely meal with an interesting conversation about snakes getting into your room. Mark didn’t think the pattymelt was up to par, but the salad I had was good, and everyone finished what they had. They served a beer there that was of note. They offer Oak Creek Amber, which is a fine full bodied Ale, and acts as a fire extinguisher for the deep fryed Janapino’s. I’m only allowed one beer a day and I sure as hell ain’t going to waste it on anything out of Saint Louis, Mo. Given the amount of competition this place had, and the quality of food provided, it was priced quite favorably. A similar meal served on Mackinac Island would have busted me flat, and the prices for the jewelry next door were compairably low. There is a metalworks gallery next to that, that’s owned and operated by a lady who’d came out on vacation and never went back. As you step out of the front door, you’re shown why with the late afternoon sun blazing across vermilion cliffs.
During dinner, one of the attendants mentioned that there was a swimming beach not far from there. The Lodge doesn’t have a pool and everybody, me included, wanted to go swimming. The season hasn’t started here yet and with the temperature in the 90’s, I was ready. The road led off the highway 50′ from the lodge which we took to the Colorado River. The site is called Lee’s Crossing because Lee thought of it first and made a living off of it. There is also a public launch site where you can board one of those huge rubber rafts and spend a couple days in wonderland. There are some rock formations along that road that are worth the ride themselves. Years ago, boulders the size of an apartment fell to the ground and did a pretty good job of compacting the soil beneath. Over the eons, the wind continued to blow and removed upwards of 9′ of terra ferma.
We drove to where the sign said a beach was, and us not knowing what these people considered a ‘beach’ continued on to the launch site. It really didn’t matter which spot we were going to swim at, be it rock strewn gravel or a concrete slab leading into the river, it was too fucking cold. I’ve swam in the Straits of Mackinac, and dipped my wick into Lake Superior a few times, but that water was beyond that. That river didn’t want me in there and I agreed and got my feet out. Once you’re down in there though, with the red rock cliffs narrowing the vision of the sky, and the water rushing against the boulders, you don’t mind the cold feet.
There were a couple rafts there with one man each aboard and I think they were waiting for a party to arrive. They were both packed to the gunnels with gear and tarps. By then, it was starting to get dark and I was wondering if they have rides that start after dark? Anyone know?
The moon was one day shy of full as it rose over the cliffs to our East and lit up the cliff’s to the West. They were all just as red, but with a different temperment. My three boys and I walked down to the Navajo Bridge, which spans the Colorado at the Eastern most point of the Grand Canyon. At 11:30 it was damned dark except for the moon and it was doing a fine job. Even up close to some of the rocks I’d seen in the daylight, looked totally different. There are two bridges there, one for pedestrains and one for vehicles. It’s a great place to observe how the two bridges were constructed and enjoy the beauty of the canyon you’re standing in. It’s also a great place to piss into the Colorado River. Once that thought crossed my mind I was on my way with Matt a half dozen steps behind. I think he saw the determination I had in my eye, or the way I danced around and pinched my crotch, I’m not sure but he knew. I was content with getting over open water but Matt went for the gold and headed for the middle. To this day he contends I was still over a boulder and I’m positive I was looking into green water when I let’er go. I wasn’t doing it because I wanted to leave my mark, or pollute the river, I was thinking of Patrick Roy.
The rock in question can be seen to the left and in the picture below is another perspective on the boulder I was under.
Anyone interested in staying in the Marble Canyon Lodge can click on this and check it out:
http://www.marblecanyoncompany.com/photo-gallery.html
Thanks for reading and I’ll be back soon with the visit to the Grand Canyon.
