All Gone to Look for America (37 page)

I’m more tempted than ever now to just wander off rather than join the horde of icemen on the bus but I’m only too aware that I really have no idea where I’m going, can’t even see the canyon from here and could head off in the wrong direction and spend a couple of hours wandering aimlessly in the woods (think of the Franciscan friars). Also the bus is revving up now and will surely take me to a better view than I’m likely to discover independently.

There was also the sobering factor of a book I’d noticed at the inevitable gift shop entitled
Death at the Grand Canyon
. Here’s a resumé: the earliest recorded tourist death was that of Lewis Thompson who on 22 March 1925, while attempting to take his own photograph with an early push-button-wired remote, took a step sideways, stepped on a crack, lost his footing and toppled over backwards into the abyss.

In September 1946 fashion model and media celebrity Dee Dee Johnson was persuaded that a ‘canyon shot’ was just what she needed to give her that extra push towards stardom. She duly obliged, posing near one of the south rim’s best known scenic vantage points in nothing more than pedal pusher pants and a then highly risqué halter top.

It took two admiring rangers to realise all of a sudden that her outfit wasn’t the most ‘daring’ aspect of the shoot. They had just time to shout ‘Get her away from the edge’ before the photographers, fearing that their one chance to get a truly memorable shot was about to disappear, flashed their big bulbs and Dee Dee duly disappeared – backwards to attain a celebrity she hadn’t quite envisaged.

Less than a year later, on 17 July 1947 Herbert Kolb and his girlfriend in a romantic mood crawled under one of the few barriers with their legs dangling into eternity. They stayed like that for about half an hour, Herb’s arm slung round his sweetheart, until the moment when they decided to get up and old Herb did a whoops-a-daisy and disappeared from his true love’s sight.

He disappeared so completely that even when the rescue party arrived to recover what they knew could only be a corpse, they were unable to find him until they tied together a straw bale, took it to the precise point where Herbert and his bereaved had been sitting and eased it over the edge. They then watched its brutal bounce down the cliff face and deduced where it had most likely ended up. Sure enough, when they got down to the spot they had estimated, 930 feet below the lip, they found not only a large quantity of
shredded
straw but also the broken bodily remains of Herbert Kolb.

The list goes on and on and it is to the great credit of the American way of life, that the entire perimeter of the canyon at the most visited sites is not cordoned off behind barbed wire, iron railings and Plexiglas screens. In Britain it would be.

Scarcely a week before my visit, a little girl of barely four years of age, who had been walking the rim with her parents, suddenly – as small children do – spotted something interesting and ran off. Before they knew it she was a
dwindling
scream heading for a rock face below. Rescuers and her distraught father reached the scene of the tragedy within little more than 20 minutes. The child had fallen no distance at all in relative terms: barely 130 feet. It did not make much difference.

I’ve just digested all this when the bus makes its first stop at the canyon rim, and I realise all of a sudden the blindingly obvious: why it was so easy for early explorers to miss such a colossal phenomenon. It goes down, not up. Obvious, you might say, but all photographs you have ever seen of the Grand Canyon focus on the opposite: the buttes, mesas, whatever you want to call them, the whole 3
D
-ness of the canyon, the vast ups and downs of it. But of course, if you are approaching it from any direction – other than on a boat down in the Colorado River as Powell did – especially on foot, it simply isn’t there until you walk up to the rim and it takes your breath away.

The Grand Canyon is one of those wonders of the world that you worry won’t live up to expectation, simply because you have seen it so many times before you even get there. Like the Pyramids at Giza – or on a lesser scale the Eiffel Tower or Sydney Opera House – it is an image so pre-imprinted on the retina of the average twenty-first-century human’s eye that it almost seems
unwise to visit the real thing for fear of disappointment. Particularly when approaching it from a tour bus with a gaggle of baseball-hatted camera-toting middle-aged American tourists. But the canyon can cope. The canyon can cope with anything. It is more a question of whether you can cope with it. And right now, there on the edge of it – careful, step back a bit – face to face with the sheer, jaw-dropping, physical immensity of it, I’m not sure I can. Really not sure at all. The first thing it inspires, even in a group of noisy, trivia-minded tourists, is silence, a great, timeless, noise-swallowing silence. The silence of the abyss.

The Paiute Indians who inhabit the area of Arizona-Utah closest to the north rim call the Grand Canyon ‘a mountain lying down’. It is hard to think of anything better, as long as you imagine that as not just one mountain but an entire mountain range lying down. Inverted, hollowed out. I once knew a professor of topographical mathematics at Oxford who was reputed not only to be able to use equations to turn the visible world inside out but to be able to visualise it in his head. Seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time is like a glimpse inside his universe.

There is no more three-dimensional view on earth and certainly not one that at the same time can suddenly project a more
trompe l’oeil
illusion of two dimensionality. It is the scale of the thing, in part, the fact that the opposite rim here is more than 10 miles away, half the width of the English Channel, and yet you can see it clearly. But there is not simply a gulf in between; it would be easier to cope with if there were. There is an entire landscape, inverted, a world of scooped-out pyramids. I had always imagined that what would strike you about the canyon was how the great buttes of uneroded rock jut up from the depths; it is not, it is the great mountains that climb downwards to the all but invisible inverted summit. You sense, you almost physically feel the process of millennial erosion, of 17 million years of slow continuous irresistible wearing away.

The silence of course doesn’t last and by now there’s the usual
roundabout
of people taking photographs and being photographed and asking other people to take photographs of them with their camera – and I even join in for God’s sake – because I have to have a picture of me here, a snapshot in the mouth of infinity. But then I’m back chasing the silence, moving out and away from the mob who are, awfully but all-too-humanly, already coming to terms with it and chalking it up there with the Eiffel Tower after all. The tour guide is telling us details, dimensions, widths and breadths and so on, but none of it really seems to matter compared with just looking at the damn thing. Looking
across it. At the other side, at the sides all round. You can play tricks with your own eyes: just look out ahead – don’t look down – and it’s flat. The other side is flat, perfectly flat. You are standing on a plain, a very flat plain, one of the flattest plains in North America, that just happens to have a hole the size of an entire mountain range gouged out of the middle of it.

Just for the sake of comparison here, let’s put those other world sights in perspective: you could pick up St Paul’s Cathedral and pop it down anywhere you liked in the Grand Canyon and if you could still see it, it would look like a tiny toy. Not something you lift up with both hands: something you position between thumb and forefinger in a giant landscape. The same for the Eiffel Tower: it would look like a carpet tack. Same goes for the Empire State
Building
even – not quite a carpet tack perhaps but a child’s toy nonetheless, one that would barely reach a quarter of the way towards the summit and even then could get lost in the great immense meandering maze of rock formations four times its height. Even, I fear, the Great Pyramid of Giza, 4,500 years old, would be like a modern pimple next to this 17-million-year old chasm that would have looked pretty much as it does today when the pyramids were being built.

I haven’t even mentioned the colours: the red-end spectrograph of pinks, ochres, vermilions, crimsons, that uncannily merge with the blues, the purply greys and in the distance, the far far distance, the dark green of the Colorado River itself, flowing through its handiwork. I use my camera, with an
impressive
enough 15-times optical zoom, to focus in on a tiny puddle of it far away. At seven-times magnification it increases to a wide river in between high cliffs, with a few odd coloured specks in it. At full stretch, fifteen times, those specks are only just identifiably multicoloured rafts with people on them,
whitewatering
on the greatest ride on earth. I make a mental note to do that one day. Once it was chic to take helicopter rides down the canyon: it must have been an awesome experience, but horribly defiling of this almost spiritual
experience
for everyone else. There were also a lot of accidents! Now only overflights are allowed, and over distant parts of the canyon. Most tourists barely graze the rim. You can walk down, but numbers are limited and without an overnight pass you have to walk straight back up and as it’s three hours down and six back up, that’s maybe not the best plan. Burros descend too, though no faster.

On the rough red face of an escarpment jutting out to my right I focus in on a small party, ant-like in perspective, with one burro, making their way down a line scraped across the face of the precipitous rock. This, the guide has told us, is Bright Angel Trail. Almost all the tracks used today are those used for millennia by the Native Americans. The eastern edge of the canyon is a Navajo
reservation, to our west are reservations of the Havasupai and Hualapai tribes, while the Paiute are to the north on the border with Utah. It is over there that I glimpse the looming, building bulkhead of a storm brewing. I scan the skies and just in the distance, out above the emptiness, there’s a dark shape wheeling that might, just might be a California condor, a Thunderbird. What is certain is the darkening grey brooding as it spreads and settles beyond the utterly flat line that separates the sky from the bowels of the earth: the plain is so flat that you simply cannot see beyond the canyon, the rim is the horizon in every direction. Just as it is invisible until you reach it, standing on the edge it
consumes
the world in every direction. Except behind, which is back to the bus. And the train. And civilisation.

The thunder claps in the distance as we board the train but rain fails to
overtake
us on the two-hour journey back. Katie tries to get a party atmosphere going, more hindered than helped by the horseback ‘Great Train Robbery’ and the pistol-toting bandits: ‘We’ll take anything except husbands and children.’ But with a couple of her cocktails inside – I recommend she stock up on Grand Canyon beer next time – by the time we grind back into Williams we’re even laughing out loud at her jokes: ‘What do you call a two-legged cow? Lean beef. What do you call a cow sitting down? Ground beef.’

Which reminds me I have just time for a last meal: an almost perfect steak fajita from a little Mexican restaurant near the tracks, rare chargrilled beef served with an eye-wateringly lime and chilli spiced salsa that is the most
delicious
I have ever eaten. With just the slightest suspicion I may come to regret it.

It’s raining now as I pick up my rucksack from the hotel. And dark, which means it must be time for me to go. There’s a white van out front and two men standing beside it, waiting to take me to an abandoned clearing in the middle of the forest.

I HAD BEEN WARNED
off Los Angeles. By just about everybody who had ever been there. Including myself. That may seem odd for a city variously dubbed Tinseltown, the Dream Factory, the Street of Stars. But all those refer of course to one particular part of Los Angeles: Hollywood. And even then they mean the product, not the place. That was one of the worst bits, friends had told me.

I got warnings that were little short of horror stories: ‘Don’t stay in a motel in Hollywood or the door’ll get broken in and you’ll get robbed or raped or both’; ‘Don’t go out at night on foot or you’ll get mugged’; ‘And stay clear of downtown, people get shot.’ And anyhow there was unanimous agreement that actually Los Angeles didn’t have a downtown. Not as such.

What it had instead, glimpsed vaguely through the smog when landing at the airport, was a motley cluster of skyscrapers grouped together for dubious effect, towering out of a neglected urban wasteland amid a vast sprawling jungle of single-storey clapboard houses inhabited by gun-toting poor people. What you did on arrival in LA, I was told, was grab a car and head for the hills:
Beverley
that is, if you had an invitation, otherwise out beyond to sedate suburban Simi Valley or up the coast to Malibu and other millionaires’ playgrounds. I could hardly argue otherwise. My own single previous experience had been on a journalistic job a dozen years ago, covering the aftermath of riots, and when I took a wrong turning in my hire car the cityscape metamorphosed without warning from shacks to dark streets of old department stores transformed into seedy bargain warehouses, crowded by resentful-looking people.

Los Angeles didn’t even have a name, not properly. Just LA: the first city to be known by its initials, like PJ Proby or PJ O’Rourke or JFK, who of course also became an airport. Angelinos are probably the only people outside New York who also refer to their airport almost exclusively by its international call
sign: LAX. Even though it has no reference to anyone famous and to the
uninitiated
looks like an abbreviation for a bowel purge or a Jewish form of smoked salmon.

Coming in by train, from the clean air of the desert and the natural
splendours
of the Grand Canyon, does not give much more grounds for optimism: I pull my head from under a colourful Indian blanket – or sort of Indian blanket: ‘made of acrylic, sir, top quality’ – picked up from a Navajo woman selling stuff on Albuquerque platform when we stopped for a cigarette break the evening before – and all I can see is the same nondescript clutch of skyscrapers
loitering
with intent in an unruly group under a smoggy sky. In the foreground, beyond the tracks and sidings, stand cold storage warehouses and loft
conversion
companies.

And then we pull into Union Station – they do lack originality with the names, but I suppose the railroad built the union – and everything changed. All of a sudden I was no longer dreading a world in monochrome shades of smog inhabited by rejects from the cast of
Blade Runner
. Instead, I had stepped straight off the train and onto the set for
The Long Goodbye
. In colour.
Technicolor
, come to that. Los Angeles station is on a par with any of the great termini of the world, yet completely unlike any other. It feels as if I have just stepped into the baronial dining hall of some Mexican-inspired plutocrat’s mansion: great red-brown wooden beams soar to make a ceiling, from which art deco chandeliers hang over a patterned floor in ochre and white marble. Sets of squared-off art deco leather armchairs sit in formal groups where passengers lounge with newspapers if they’re not leaning at the smart little bar where a great arch links through into the next chamber of the mansion. I half expect to see Humphrey Bogart buying Lauren Bacall a drink, while Peter Lorre lurks behind an LA
Times
. I haven’t my iPod plugged in but if I had it’d be playing Al Stewart, singing about a morning from a Bogart movie in a country where they turn back time. LA?

Then I walk out into the sunshine, with those trademark soaring California palms reaching on their spindly-looking mile-high trunks for a sky that is all of a sudden improbably blue. I turn to look back, across a sea of pink and orange azaleas at a station that, with its gabled frontage, ribbed red tiles and tall clock tower, resembles nothing so much as an over-scale replica of a whitewashed church in some Mexican pueblo. Maybe that defended by the Magnificent Seven. All of a sudden I’m suffused with a sense of deep, tranquil well-being, and then I realise why: I can breathe again. Back down to sea level, the warm air with just a hint of the coast in it – and, God knows, maybe the traffic fumes
my system recognises – has worked an irrigational miracle with my nasal
membranes
. I haul out my trusty pocket handkerchief and for the first time in what seems like months successfully blow my nose. Never had I thought I’d be so glad to see snot.

With air finally circulating through my sinuses, I feel more than up to finding my motel in Hollywood. Yes, I know, there’s the robbery and rape and mad axe men to put up with, but I’m in LA for heaven’s sake, how can I not stay in Hollywood? Happily also, there is public transport – an underground even – that gets there. And what’s more it’s clean and works, which is not
something
I had been relying on. I still remember Dionne Warwick singing about LA being a great big freeway where you had to put a hundred down to buy a car, before you could hope they’d make you a star. These days maybe they do it if you travel by metro. Get off at Hollywood and Vine and the station’s as good as anything at Universal Studios (really!), with mock palm trees supporting a domed roof of thousands of reels of film and ancient movie cameras on
pedestals
at the top of every escalator. Lights, camera, all that’s missing is the action.

That’s upstairs, above Hollywood and Highlands. At Mann’s Chinese Theatre. I haven’t even dumped my bag yet – I didn’t take the advice and am staying in a cheap hotel in Hollywood, I mean, really, where else? – and already on the pavement I’m swamped by stars of stage and screen. There’s Batman, right there: the Dark Knight himself next to that fat bloke in shorts, the great cape flowing to the ground and the harsh rigid bat silhouette of the mask. Except, I’m sure last time I saw the caped crusader he wasn’t wearing four-inch platform soles. It would make some of those athletic stunts a bit tricky. It does make him tower over the girls though. And the fat bloke in shorts.

And then there’s Spiderman too, good ol’ Spidey, crouched low in that trademark arachnid pose. Except that he must be wearing his second suit today – the one made of rayon instead of Lycra – which is a pity because that saggy arse with the clearly visible lines of his Y-fronts underneath really does dent the image a bit. Still never mind at least he’ll deal with that nasty-looking bloke with the skull-face and red hands who just might be Darth Maul, but then you shouldn’t really ask me, old Darth and I haven’t hung out together for years. And then there’s the bloke with the tri-cornered hat, the sash round his waist and the dodgy line in earrings. I wonder if he’s looking for Johnny Depp. He certainly doesn’t look like him.

But then the real celebrities outside Mann’s are the ones beneath your feet: the hand and footprints of movie stars down the years, persuaded to dip their appendages in wet cement by Sid Gruman who founded this preposterous
mock-Chinese pagoda cinema in 1927. Look down and there’s Bogey’s shoe prints with the hands next to them – remarkably long spindly fingers – and the scrawl: Sid, may you never die, till I kill you. The tough man even bent over with his hands in cement. There’s Gregory Peck’s, John Wayne’s, Maurice Chevalier’s, a tiny set belonging to Shirley Temple and Mae West’s – though no sign that he tried to get her to lie down to leave a more tangible
impression
. One star was more obliging. Not only did Roy Rogers leave both hand and footprints but he dropped his gun there too. And even Trigger planted a couple of hoofs.

But will these marks in the concrete be the only way anyone will
remember
Freddie Bartholomew? Or Constance Talmadse? Or Norman Shearer? I apologise to their fan clubs but I’ve never heard of any of them. Nor, I have to admit, of a vast number of the more than 2,000 ‘stars’ commemorated with physical stars set into the pavement along Hollywood Boulevard. I can’t help feeling maybe Hollywood lost its way when it first allowed celebrities from other walks of life to intrude. Jim Morrison and the Doors have their place in music, but a star on the Hollywood pavement? And what about the Harlem Globetrotters? All of them? Or was it just one season? And who were Frank Morgan, Eugene Palette and Norris Stoloff. The Ozymandias syndrome of the twentieth century. In multiple.

It’s only clear just how much effort has been put into reviving the fortunes of the Hollywood area – as opposed to the movie industry, most of which is located miles away today – as I walk further down Hollywood Boulevard itself. By now I’ve dumped my bag at the motel on North Highland Avenue,
checking
the doors carefully for axe marks or other signs of breaking and entering (there weren’t any!), and negotiated the honking, parping traffic and the
inevitable
hustling bums by the roadside, back down to the main drag.

There is a moving borderline somewhere along Hollywood Boulevard where tacky turns into tatty. Hollywood and Highlands is the hub of the
restoration
project, with a new smart semi-open-air shopping-centre
development
and a view of the Hollywood sign – it’s forbidden to get anywhere within reach of the great absurd piece of sentimentally-hyped hubris, and has been ever since unemployed actress Peggy Entwistle earned her own little claim to dubious immortality by fatally leaping off the top of the h. The metal letters are 50 feet high, and have a claim to fame other than what most people imagine: the world’s most famous and protected estate agent’s hoarding, which is what they were built as back in 1923.

But Hollywood glamour seems a long way away already by the time my
footsteps carry me beyond the Hollywood and Vine metro. Long gone are such tourist traps as the ubiquitous Ripley’s Believe It or Not, the Waxwork Museum, even Frederick’s of Hollywood Lingerie Museum, famed in
particular
for displaying bustiers worn by Madonna and a few of Cher’s old bras. In their place are cut-price electronics stores, Levi retailers, fancy-dress sellers and a few tawdry porn shops. Anything vaguely reminiscent of the glitter has long faded by the time I reach Pantages, the ‘grande dame’ of Tinseltown, an extravagant completely over-the-top early art deco palace, opened in 1929 as Hollywood’s superlative cinema. Its fame soared until its glory days from 1949 to 1959 when it was the home of the Oscar ceremony. Following that, like so much of the city, it suffered gradual, later serious neglect to become shabby and embarrassing. Only now, after a major job of root-and-branch restoration has it come back to its former glory as a theatre for Broadway musicals. But you only have to stand in the entrance lobby and stare up at its gilt cornices,
elaborate
star-shaped ceiling centrepiece, emblazoned with gold, silver and pink like the palace of the Emperor Ming in some Flash Gordon fantasy to get a feel for the escapist magic that summed up the original Hollywood dream. But by now even the stars on the pavement are getting few and far between and it’s been at least 100 yards since I recognised a name.

Time to take the metro back towards whatever can loosely be termed the centre of a metropolis that is actually a sprawl of unplanned development
covering
much of two counties (there are 10 million people here and the urban
territory
is larger than that of the US’s smallest state, Rhode Island). I want to see if there really is such a thing as downtown LA. There is of course historically an area where the city first began, not far from Union Station, although even that wasn’t here in the eighteenth century when a couple of dozen Spanish settlers first founded
El Pueblo de nuestra Señora, la Reina de Los Angeles
(The city of our Lady, Queen of the Angels). Surprisingly, the city has managed not only to maintain, but in recent years also to refurbish a little area which is still known as ‘the pueblo’ and, spanning maybe half a dozen streets or so, includes most of LA’s oldest buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Inevitably there is a bit of a touristy feel to it with Mexican sombreros and carved donkeys on sale, but they are alongside genuinely good restaurants and food stalls. Olivera Street has been a market for all things Hispanic since the 1930s. Settling in for some tacos and a margarita at the Casa Golondrina with Spanish spoken all around feels more like the Yucatán than downtown LA, even if it does awaken a rumbling remembrance in my intestines of last night’s chilli salsa. But it is after lunch when I hit the Grand Central Market a few
blocks away that I really come to understand how much the Hispanic presence in Los Angeles has come of age. For all the size of the city this is hardly
Seattle’s
Pike Place but it is a bustling marketplace full of fresh farmers’ produce – mostly fruit and veg – but the remarkable thing is how little of it is labelled in English. Walk in and the first thing that hits the eye is a giant sign proclaiming
Especialidad en Chiles Secos
(Dried Chiles Our Speciality – the translation is mine, there wasn’t a word of English in sight). Next to it a neon sign is touting somebody else’s ‘
chiles secos
’ along with ‘
moles
’. There are stalls called
La Huerta
(garden) and
La Casa Verde
(the green house) and at least a few offer help: alongside ‘
antojitos mexicanos
’ the sign offers ‘Roast to go’. It’s apparently a famous downtown LA institution. The other elements in cosmopolitan LA are also on show: a Japanese restaurant and someone offering Chinese massage, translated into the vernacular:
Masaje Chino
.