A Grand Canyon

My mother said she always wanted to see the Grand Canyon. Actually what she said was "I always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, but I guess I'll never get there." Then the guess fell silent, the comma disappeared, she was sure she'd never get there, and the pause between the two clauses grew so short the thought was one, desire and disappointment a single breath. She wasn't going to see the Grand Canyon before she died, and to her it surely seemed a melancholy measure of her life. It did not bother her that she had never seen the Pyramids or Paris; she couldn't understand why anyone would want to travel abroad "when there are so many wonderful things to see in this country." And for a while after her retirement she did see a little bit of the United States—on a senior tour bus she went to Nashville, New Orleans, and Niagara Falls, sharing a room with a widowed acquaintance who lived too many miles away for any other social congress, but then her acquaintance moved to Arizona, the tours got too expensive, and she never did get west. Once, she told me, they were planning to go, they being my parents, but my father's brother, John, told my dad he wouldn't like it, and that was that; they went fishing in Wisconsin. We always went fishing in Wisconsin.

Whether theyincluded we, my brother and me, or not, I don't know. Though I recall no such plans, the season between our departure from home and their divorce was brief, and my parents were not of a class that traveled without children. It's possible that the plans were only my mother's wishful thinking, but in either case it wouldn't have mattered to me—I loved the Wisconsin trips, on which I was free to tromp about the woods, to swim at will, and best of all, when my father got back from fishing, to take the boat. But my mother hated them; she hated staying in the cabins at the fishing camps, hated the bathrooms up the hill, and more than that she hated fish. Yet on those few occasions when she must have insisted on another destination, my father's Ford invariably developed car trouble. "Did you hear that noise?" he would ask. "Oh my God," he would keen, and there was nothing to be done but turn around and drive straight home, where the suspicious rattle, squeak, or chuff that none of the rest of us could hear always turned out to have been a false alarm. We went to the Lake of the Ozarks and stayed a single night. We drove to Albany, taking three days to cross Pennsylvania on Route 6 because my father didn't want to pay the turnpike tolls, but when we got to New York we didn't even spend the night, never mind that my mother hadn't seen the sister who lived there since she was a child. Missouri was where my mother had been born; she had family there too, though I don't recall stopping in St. Louis to visit. On the other hand, Wisconsin was where my father's family lived, and on our way to and from the northern lakes we always stayed with John in Menomonee Falls and at the farm outside Eden with his sister, Marie. My mother couldn't stand John, and though she had no quarrel with Marie, she resented the farm, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner for ten meant she never got out of the kitchen. Yet after her divorce she nurtured a conviction that if it hadn't been for that, hadn't been for the divorce, she and my father would have spent a happy retirement traveling together. "All the things we could have seen, think how good we would have had it," she lamented, and when I reminded her that he had never wanted to go anywhere she wanted and that wherever they did go all they did was fight, she would say, "Even so." I think she fixed on the Grand Canyon because it was big enough to hold everything that had failed to come her way in life.

She was seventy-nine years old when I decided to take her. After all, seeing the Grand Canyon isn't that much to want out of life, I rationalized to the friends who told me I was either crazy or a saint. I had seen it myself, for my husband's mother too had always wanted to visit the Grand Canyon, and in the summer of 1978 she and my father-in-law brought us along. Besides, I had traveled with my mother before—by her late seventies she no longer drove, and when she came to visit I liked to treat her to an overnight or weekend trip. But the truth is I didn't really decide to take her to the Grand Canyon. One night when she began "I always wanted . . . ," I snapped, "I'll take you," because I never wanted to hear the rest of that sentence again.

It is probably needless to mention that my husband chose not to go with us, though it wasn't just the thought of eleven days in a car with his mother-in-law that kept him home. Michael had been there and done that. He has a pathological fear of heights, and one look over the edge nineteen years before had been more than enough grandeur for him. But it was unthinkable that I leave our fourteen-year-old son behind; Max was the person I really wanted to travel with. We enjoyed traveling together, for we shared a love of nature and a passion for North Carolina's Outer Banks; we hiked the mountains, looking at insects, examining mosses, watching for birds. He was eager to go. He knew what to expect; he had traveled with his grandmother before. One of his first memories is chasing seagulls on the lawn in front of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry while my mother and I sat eating our picnic lunch; he was two. At five he chewed the neck of his Superman t-shirt into a wet rag as he trailed us through Asheville's Biltmore House; at six we rewarded him for enduring the endless tromp through Charleston's historic houses with a ferry to Fort Sumter's cannons and a search for lizards at Middleton Plantation; at ten he helped my mother feed the pigeons along the Cape Fear River while we waited for the water taxi to visit the battleship USS North Carolina. At night in the motels my mother took one bed, I took the other, and he spread his sleeping bag beside me on the floor. We played poker for matchsticks, and every hand he had to tell her again which cards trumped the others. She never won, and every time she presented a pair she called a full house, he and I would laugh together. "That's called a halfway house, Mom," I would say.

I made an agreement with my mother. Though I was finishing a novel, one of my back-burner projects was a series of miniature American landscapes titled Because the Land Is Big and Art Is Small, which was to include two images in Polaroid transfer from every state. I would pay for the trip and make all of the arrangements but wanted to go off by myself sometimes at dawn and dusk to photograph. "That's fine," she said on the phone, the same way she always says, "Well, I'd better let you go," adding without pause, "Oh, by the way, did I tell you . . . ?" It takes at least three or four better-let-you-go's for the words to take effect. I was glad that Max would be along to distract her.

And so on the afternoon of June 18, 1997, Max and I sat in the Albuquerque airport chatting about our plans while we waited for my mother's delayed flight from Chicago. He had a list: he wanted to see a roadrunner, a jack rabbit, a Gila monster, some Western hummingbirds, and a coyote. I was looking forward to the Painted Desert, for its barren and ragged silver-striped hills had seemed almost lunar when Michael's father drove us through nineteen years before; I felt as if I'd gone to another planet instead of another part of the country.

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