All Gone to Look for America (36 page)

It might seem insulting to call the Grand Canyon ‘second’, even to Niagara Falls, but I use the word only in the historical sense. Niagara was a
much-visited
‘wonder’ long before there was even the slightest prospect of Arizona joining the union; it didn’t become a fully-fledged state until 1912 making it the last to join before Alaska and Hawaii. It says a lot for the vastness and
physical
inhospitality of much of America which we Europeans frequently find it hard to come to terms with that it was only late in the nineteenth century that anybody in the United States of America really noticed the canyon much at all.

Native Americans had lived near – and even in – the canyon for thousands of years. The oldest culture that has been positively identified is that of the Anasazi, frequently referred to as ‘Pueblo Indians’ because the Spaniards who first encountered them thought their intricate system of cave dwellings were like towns. Later archaeologists have preferred to call them ‘basket-makers’ because that is what they did, as well as hunting deer, rabbits and ‘bighorn’ sheep. There are 2,000 sites associated with the Anasazi within what is today Grand Canyon National Park, although most are extremely small and the most impressive – called Tusayan Pueblo – is reckoned to have been home to just 30 people, albeit around the end of the twelfth century.

The first European to set eyes upon one of the world’s most spectacular natural phenomena was a soldier come north from Spain’s new central
American
colonies in 1540. His name was Garcia López de Cárdenas and as far as he was concerned the vast chasm he’d come across was simply annoying. He had been sent by his commander to get as far north as possible. The canyon put a definite – if dramatic – stop to that ambition and he returned to Mexico only to be court-martialled for failing to get any further.

More than two hundred years later a couple of Franciscan friars –
Francisco
Atanasio Domínguez and Sylvestre Vélez de Escalante – left the by now well-established Spanish settlement of Santa Fe in search of an overland route to Monterey (which translates as Royal Hill) in California. They succeeded, travelling over the Rockies, through northern Arizona and Utah, crossing the Colorado River in Glen Canyon just a few miles away, but almost unbelievably
missing out on the 277-mile-long Grand Canyon itself. They failed to spot it on the way back either. Like I said, sometimes it’s easy to forget just how vast and empty this part of the American West was. And still is.

It was only in 1848 after the Mexican-American War that anyone set out to explore the area in detail. Even then, it was not exactly appreciated to the full; US Army Lieutenant Joseph Ives, who reached the canyon in 1857, reported back: ‘Ours has been the first and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locality.’ Lieutenant Ives’s depressing report put other explorers off for a dozen years and it was not until 1869 that another soldier, Major John Wesley Powell, one of those adrenalin-driven souls whose thirst for danger had not been slaked by the blood-letting of the American Civil War – in which he had lost an arm – decided to make a 1,000-mile navigation of the Colorado River.

He took with him four stout wooden boats and few rations – on the grounds that they would be bound to lose most of them when the boats inevitably
capsized
– and just nine men. The conditions they faced were awesome: searing heat, ferocious rapids – in which as predicted the boats repeatedly capsized – and no idea of what lay round the next corner, least of all that they were about to enter the greatest natural cauldron on the planet. Three of the nine died, but Powell survived and being the kind of man he was – barking mad – he did it again in 1871–72, taking copious notes which finally filled in the map on one of the least known regions of the emerging continental nation.

Powell was not only brave, possibly to the point of idiocy, he was
intelligent
, educated and humane, and went on to found the US Geological Survey, the Bureau of American Ethnology championing Native American rights and negotiating several crucial peace treaties. He also happened to be one of the first to understand the importance of ecology and advocated strict measures to control the use of water in the region, which are only gradually being
rediscovered
– and, as we shall see, still widely ignored – today. It was Powell who routinely used and publicised the term ‘Grand Canyon’.

But inevitably what really made America sit up and pay attention to this big hole in the ground somewhere out west was the discovery in the late 1870s and early 1880s that it contained valuable deposits of zinc, copper, lead and that wonder material of the age, asbestos. While no one was looking, as it were, the miners moved in, and in remote areas of the canyon small-scale mining still continues. Amongst the metals it contains is uranium. The main campaigner for a railway was William Owen ‘Buckey’ O’Neill, who was mayor of the town of Prescott, Arizona, and had staked substantial mineral mining claims at the
canyon and built himself a log cabin on the south rim. He wanted a railway to get his copper and iron ore out. It took years for O’Neill to persuade
investment
companies in Chicago and New York to put up the money until one bank finally took the risk in 1895.

O’Neill meanwhile had made his own name in other ways, becoming sheriff, jumping from a moving train to capture a prisoner and surviving a treacherous river crossing in which even his horse drowned. By the 1890s he had signed up with future president Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders,
fighting
in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He organised a makeshift band of miners, cowboys and loggers into the Troop A, 1st US Volunteer Cavalry whose success was remarkable given that their horses been left behind in the United States. It was while serving as infantry therefore that O’Neill met his end, taken out by a Spanish sniper at dawn on 1 July 1898.

It was to be another three years before his dream was realised when the Atchison, Santa Fe and Topeka Railway finally finished its line to the canyon. By the time it got there it was discovered that money could be made not just by providing transport for the miners but for another valuable commodity which the railroads themselves had effectively created: tourists.

And here I am with a gaggle of them, lined up next to the tracks at 8:00 a.m., ready to board our train to the rim. First though, there is the inevitable bit of tourist hokum: a Wild West show, with various baddies and goodies shooting at each other outside a saloon bar prop frontage. It’s primarily for the kids, of course, and as we’re now outside the school holidays there are more adults, which is reflected in the jokes: ‘Are you staring at my weapon, ma’am?’

And then finally it’s onto the comfortable restored coaches from an earlier age of rail. I’m in the Pullman car, literally: 1923 Harriman coaches built by the Pullman Company (it even says so on the door). Unfortunately the steam locomotive only runs in summer so we are being hauled by a 1950s vintage diesel. (I know someone out there will be wishing I had got its number.) As far as I’m concerned though it’s more important that the Pullman car has hot coffee and ‘muffins’ for breakfast and a bar for later.

Or not much later as our hostess Katie, an effervescent post-punk-platinum blonde would have it: ‘You’re on
VAC-
ATION
folks, which means it’s all right to have a real drink at 9:00 a.m.’ And also, of course, because it means Katie gets more tips. But she deserves them, with a routine of slapstick jokes and keen commentary as we wind uphill through a landscape of tall pines and gorse scrub. ‘Now, you see those trees, those are aspens. And they may look
like a whole lot of separate trees to you, but they’re all interconnected through their root systems. Basically the whole forest is just one big organism.’ Wooh, spooky. Katie shares our sentiment: ‘Isn’t that kinda weird or what?’

‘Keep your eyes open for big black birds,’ she says a few minutes later. ‘If you see a real daddy, it just might be a California condor, one of the rarest birds in the world. They were nearly extinct until a breeding programme back in the nineties. Even today there are only a couple of hundred pairs in the wild, most of them right here around the Grand Canyon.’

‘How will we know if it’s a condor?’ asks one middle-aged woman with large gold earrings, looking extremely worried.

‘He’ll have your daughter in his mouth,’ says Katie, with a laugh. ‘No
seriously
, you’ll know: they’re big big black birds with a wingspan of maybe nine feet across. The Indians call them Thunderbirds, ’cause they follow the storm. And we’ve had a good monsoon this year.’

I look at her sceptically. Monsoon? Arizona? I mean, doesn’t the very name come from the Spanish for arid zone? Looking out the window it’s hard to imagine much rainfall around here, though there are those aspen pines…

‘Yessiree, we get some real storms out here. The whole works: thunder and lightning and everything. You need to see one over the canyon. That’s
something
. A lot of the year we don’t get no rain at all, but when we do, we do.’

I start eyeing the sky in a whole new way, but even if the temperatures are a little nippy it still looks faultless blue. And there’s – regrettably – no sign of any big black birds.

So far at least there are also no signs of any of the other natives Katie’s been telling us about: the ‘rattlers’. The Grand Canyon is not just home to the common or garden Western rattlesnake, but also the Mojave rattlesnake – ‘strictly speaking a Californian interloper but don’t try telling one that’ – the Diamondback rattlesnake (after whom the locals endearingly named their baseball team) and the Sidewinder (after whom the Pentagon endearingly named a surface-to-air missile delivered in large quantities to the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan to use against Soviet helicopters, and latterly used with equal success by their rebranded successors the Taliban against American ones). The Grand Canyon also has its own Pink rattlesnake, an evolutionary variant colour-coded to blend in with the oxidised iron exposed over millennia by the rock striations. Now there’s a marketing exercise for you.

There are also the lesser-known Gila monster, one of the world’s only two poisonous lizards and the Thistledown ant: a nasty blue furry flying thing which delivers a venomous sting. Despite its name, it is actually a member of
the wasp family; there is just something about being blue and hairy that makes it that extra special bit scarier still.

By now Katie’s also coaxed a few of us at least into her special cocktails and we’ve hardly noticed it’s two hours gone by – the uphill route means the train barely goes over 30 miles an hour, even less within the boundaries of the national park – and we’re pulling into Grand Canyon halt. This is a mildly depressing start to my visit to the canyon proper, a tourist ‘village’ which is the headquarters of the ‘canyon industry’: the unsightly but inevitable and in some cases necessary panoply of national park management, rescue services and provision of food, drink and accommodation for the tourists.

With only limited time available and a reservation back on the evening train into Williams I’ve booked a seat on the motor tour of the rim which boasts of giving the most different perspectives of the canyon in a one-day visit. The bad bit about this is immediately apparent: we’re given tickets for lunch! Lunch? I can grab a bite later. But no, if I want to be on the tour lunch is part of the deal. Reluctant to get involved with this packaging of the experience, I have to admit I am hungry. Much as it seems perverse that the first thing to do on arrival at the scene of one of the earth’s great wonders should be to go to a
selfservice
canteen and stuff one’s face, that is what I – and two busloads of other sheep – end up doing. To my regret, the food is the usual pre-prepared canteen fodder – chicken, pasta and soggy vegetables – there’s no wine or beer, but what strikes me most is the complete casual disregard for even the lip service most Europeans now pay to ‘green’ measures.

Katie had already stressed on the train that despite the fact that the canyon had been carved by the fast-flowing abundant fresh waters of the Colorado River, the river is in fact a mile away – vertically! – and that there was an
ecological
price to be paid in ensuring supplies of fresh water at such a relatively remote location (without piped water) and then freezing it. She was wasting her breath. The soft drinks dispenser also has a sign asking users please to
conserve
ice, but without exception every single American using the drinks
dispenser
filled their glass with the stuff.

I opt for lemonade – when needs must! – prepared to pop in an ice cube or two if necessary, in that British way we have inherited from the days when refrigerators were a luxury, and perhaps because even today few of us have what we call an ‘American’ fridge, which is the size of a wardrobe and dispenses ice. But the lemonade straight from the machine is already so cold I can hardly drink it.

I decide to point this out in an environmentally friendly sort of way to
one elderly, rangy-looking man in a baseball cap (what else?). In response he stares at me as if I’m challenging his right to bear arms and ostentatiously fills his glass with ice before topping it up with iced tea. ‘The tea isn’t so cold,’ he adds gruffly, with a sort of ‘so there’ look before stomping off to wash down his mountain of stodgy food. I want to point out he hasn’t even tasted it yet. Just to give him the benefit of the doubt, I try some myself: the iced tea, straight from the dispenser, is so cold that it’s hard to believe adding ice won’t turn the entire drink into a solid lump of the stuff.

The moral lesson to this is rather depressing, and a parallel to what I had experienced in Montana: whenever green campaigners tell us to switch off the standby on our television or computer, or to replace a light bulb with an economy one, do it because you want to, but do not do it with even the
remotest
delusion that you are helping the fight against global warming, because on the evidence of my own eyes, one single rig-riding, ice-swilling American invalidates almost an entire European city’s attempts at energy conservation.