Growing Up in the Grand Canyon

I weighed 90 pounds and carried a 60-pound pack. But who's counting?

Raised by a fashionista? Epic failure to fall close to that tree.

Going Deep

Suddenly, I had the thighs of a Valkyrie, the stamina of a long-distance runner, and a tan that could’ve inspired an Eagles song.

It had been eight months since my sullen and rebellious arrival in Arizona. Being away from home, this time in a far healthier atmosphere than the Idyllwild reform school, allowed me glimpses of a less cringing and fearful self. The regular, densely typewritten letters [from my mother] full of back-handed compliments and condescension seemed less threatening when read on a warm outcropping of red rocks.

“Thanks also for your little note. Especially the one you left upon leaving. It was sweet and thoughtful, and I appreciate the effort. I’m afraid I am sometimes too impatient for you to grow up and then disappointed when you seem not to be doing so.”

I threw them away, little suspecting that forty-some years later I’d discover a trove of carbon copies that set my teeth on edge. These words come from beyond the grave—how can they still sting? She did warn me toward the end of her life that I would find things among her papers that would be “upsetting.” Understatement of the century.

I was now attending a progressive boarding school in Sedona (my third boarding school). On the one-week orientation hikes that began each academic year, youthful faculty and students often skinny-dipped together in Sedona’s rocky creeks.

My mother had often gone naked around the house and backyard when I was growing up. This was purportedly a sign of her lofty progressive chops, but in reality, just one more opportunity to show off the still-lithe body of which she was hyperbolically proud. Yet she seemed more focused on the supposed academic excellence than the liberal-to-a-fault social reality. Other people’s nakedness was of less interest than her own.

I thrived in Sedona.

By the time I started at Verde Valley School, the culturally and geographically diverse spring field trips had been expanded with journeys into the natural world. A group went sailing in two-man skiffs in the Sea of Cortez; several of the students almost drowned.

I signed up to hike 150 miles in the Grand Canyon. My motivation is still buried in the sands of adolescence. On the trip were five boys, one other girl, and the school’s tennis coach. I was fifteen years old, weighed 90 pounds, and had never owned a pair of hiking boots, but I had read all of Carlos Castañeda.

I don’t think any breathless description of the Grand Canyon can possibly prepare one for that first glimpse over the rim. The eye has trouble comprehending the vastness, the redness, the layers, the ancient history, trying to place it in some previously known context that as of this moment no longer exists in your brain. It almost literally blew my mind.

We started off for a break-in hike at the south rim, away from which most tourists never stray. We hiked down the Kaibab Trail to the bottom of the canyon where the temperature is always twenty degrees hotter than at the rim. A lodging called the Ghost Ranch is nestled in the cradle of the canyon floor; most people who visit arrive on mule-back, which may be slightly more comfortable than walking. May be. Slightly.

The Grand Canyon is Very Deep. After walking at a precipitous downward slope for 10 miles in my new hiking boots, I had two heel-sized blisters. The trapped seas of saline squooshed painfully inside my cool new boots at every step, as though I were walking on water balloons.

At the Ghost Ranch, we spent the night in a dorm-like structure. I was tucked up in my fresh new sleeping bag on top of a crinkly new foam pad. There was a shared KYBO (this stood for Keep Your Bowels Open; it’s now known as a Porta-potty). My little Brentwood-raised body had never been subjected to such intense physical exertion and registered profound shock: I spent much of the night in the KYBO, gushing from both ends. The next day, we shouldered our packs and hiked straight back uphill to the rim, this time on the Bright Angel Trail. The school van then drove us 100 miles up-river to our trailhead, where we loaded our packs with enough supplies to last 15 days and then set out to walk back down to the Bright Angel Trail on the Tonto Platform. This is a spectacular plateau that snakes in and out of the ancillary canyons about halfway between the rim above and the Colorado River below.

I punctured and drained all the blisters, hoisted up my 60-pound pack (two thirds of my body weight—but who’s counting?), and set off behind the others.

The other girl in the troupe was six feet tall and all ebony muscle, a statuesque modern dancer and choreographer. Teresa also carried a 60-pound pack, as did the five guys who rounded out the team, wiry urban cowboys with boots that had seen a lot of action and sleeping bags that told tales I didn’t want to hear. Or smell. It was all about equality. It never occurred to me that I was totally out of my depth and heading into the middle of nowhere with one 22-year-old tennis teacher as the sole “responsible” adult.

Each day we walked between 10 and 12 miles, dropping down to the Colorado River occasionally to collect water for our canteens—and for reconstituting the highly anticipated “chicken-flavored a-la-king” dinners from their shiny foil packets. Granola was the breakfast and lunch of choice. Occasionally, we washed our bodies and hair in the river with biodegradable Dr. Bronner’s soap. Sometimes a raft-full of tourists would bobble by on the rapids and we’d wave and hoot, naked, at the wimpy river-riders who didn’t know the true way to shoot down the Colorado River: on foot. One hundred and fifty miles. Not as the crow flies—as the trucker trucks.

I wanted to be the dusty desperado, the nut-brown scrabbling desert rat, but my little body couldn’t cut it and I had to rest more often, so I slowed the others down; they quietly but pointedly didn’t like it.

Unsaid: It was me, not just the doughy raft-riders, who was a wimp. Most nights during the first week I cried myself to sleep.

Halfway along the Tonto Platform, we stopped for a “Solo,” a la Outward Bound. Each kid was assigned 150 feet of creek and supplied with a journal, pen, sleeping bag, and tarp, then left alone for three nights with a bag of granola. Even if you spied your creek-side neighbor at one end or the other, there was to be strictly No Talking for the duration. This sort of “find yourself ” time-out was ubiquitous in the late seventies.

Crouched under the red rock overhang, the front edge of my tarp dripping with rain, I tried very, very hard to Go Deep. I gazed at the stars and the spectacular rock formations limned against the velvet-blue sky and tried to ponder the big things: Destiny... Meaning... Humanity.

Instead, I wondered what Ian might be doing up at the top edge of my domain, or Eric at the bottom end. Had everyone else managed to keep their sleeping bags completely dry? How many packets of chicken-flavored a la king remained? Was our faculty leader sneaking food from the group cache? Although my mother and I had waved goodbye before my departure with a palpably false sense of mutual camaraderie, grins pasted on like disturbing clown-faces, the most meaningful piece of reflection to come out of those three days was a long letter extolling her excellent lamb stew. A rare show of affection, and later I even mailed it.

With time, I grew stronger. There were good days when the truckers just trucked, silently and purposefully without complaint, into and out of the serpentine little side canyons and back to the glory of the open plateau with the river sparkling far below. The main topic of conversation around the Bleuet stoves at night was the menu at the Fred Harvey restaurant at journey’s end.

“What are you gonna have when we get to Fred’s? Grilled cheese? A patty melt?”

“I’m thinking the full breakfast with bacon, eggs, biscuits ‘n’ cream gravy, and hotcakes with maple-flavored syrup.”

Each voice, in turn, waxed lyrical in the star-lit darkness. Maybe we’d just have it all. The world would be our oyster; we would have earned it and we planned to eat it.

I’ve lost track of the picture someone took of me the moment we finally hit the Bright Angel Trail, fifteen days after we’d set out. I’m caught in the act of placing one booted foot over the rocks onto the main trail, with the other foot still officially out in the wild. My boots are massive, especially plopped at the ends of my spindly little-girl calves. But my thighs are cut and muscular, the fringed cut-offs above them as short as shorts can get. My hair is long and blond and messy, and my brown face is upturned to the sun, wearing a wide and victorious smile.

In the end, I had gone deep. I’d climbed down into myself and seen my limitations—hey, everyone had seen my limitations. But at the bottom of the canyon, a hundred miles from a telephone or a car or an airplane, there was no running away and no shortcut to easy street. There was only the path ahead and the necessity of putting one boot in front of the other. Over and over and over again. And now I held in my heart the reward for that persistence: a thing of true and everlasting glory, all mine.

Just up the trail was a real bathroom, the first we’d seen in two weeks. Teresa and I made a beeline for the ladies’ side, falling-down eager to see what we looked like after those mirrorless days on the trail.

The image that truly endures from that journey is captured only in my memory: the single cracked mirror reflecting both our faces, Teresa’s round Black one directly above my dirty White one, great big shit-eating grins on both.

—Excerpted from Rottenkid: A Succulent Story of Survival, also available online at everyone’s favorite indie, Omnivore Books.

Four Tidbits For The Week of March 11

Brigit’s What I’m

DOING NOW ➡️ Working on the conjuntivo tense in Italian
CURRENTLY LOVING ➡️ Just finished "Absolution." Quietly brilliant. 
THINKING ABOUT ➡️ My next project: A novel!
LISTENING TO ➡️ Leon Russel's "Carney." What a strange world I'm living in...