Grand Adventures
"Kudos to you, having three boys!" the waitress says. She has steered my three children and I into a booth by the window.
"That must be hard work." She smiles, nodding slowly, watching as the boys hustle for the best spot on the banquette seats. I nod and smile back.
When she is out of earshot my eldest, Max, who is nine, asks, "Was that a compliment?"
"I think so." I say.
It's an all you can eat buffet breakfast for $7.99 and the kids are beyond excited about second helpings of pancakes, french toast, maple syrup and muffins.
We are staying at the Grand Hotel in Tusayan, Arizona. The hotel lobby is decorated with dead animals, the heads of bison, moose and elk are stuffed and mounted above the check-in desk. Along another wall is a coyote, some birds, a bobcat, and a leaping cougar. I insist it is a cougar although I don't know for sure. My husband is traveling with us but has gone in search of decent coffee in this town that hangs onto the highway towards the Grand Canyon. Tusayan houses the Grand Hotel, an outlet of Wendy's, a McDonalds, two pizza joints and a general store. The guide book I got from the library before we left says "No independent visitor to the Grand Canyon would or should choose to stay in Tusayan." I knew we'd make some rookie mistakes but it seems you need to book up a year ahead to get lodging within the park. Even my kids dental appointments don't get that kind of forward planning.
One thing I should have planned better is music for the car, or a CD audio book. The journey was five hours from Las Vegas with a brief stop at the Hoover Dam and most of the time the boys couldn't keep their hands off each other, mauling one another, squealing with laughter one minute, shrieking with pain the next, flip flopping between fierce friends and bitter rivals. I've noticed that sometimes their chatter is like listening to someone sleeptalk. It makes so little sense it's impossible to process, impossible to remember. While my husband drove, I frantically tried to find some children's stories on a podcast on my phone but each one was no more than twelve minutes long and when the juice finally died, the shrieking resumed. They clamored for iPad time and I relented until that, too, ran out of battery. And yet again their bickering spilled out into the car until I snapped,
"For God's sake, just behave! You shouldn't need screens in order to behave! They are like pacifiers, suck, suck, suck and without them you're like crying babies."
Silence. Then, "What's a pacifier?" asked my five year old.
Max, the loyal one, reached his hands around the passenger seat headrest and tried to massage my shoulders.
"Don't get stressed Mum" he said and for a brief five minutes they didn't play the imaginary grenade throwing game I had interrupted with my outburst.
The drive had taken us through flat barren scrubland peppered with the hardiest of low profile vegetation. It was easy to imagine pioneer wagons rolling through this desert.
"Look out of the window!" I'd said, trying to get the kids to grasp the enormity of it all. It seemed a hopeful place, things actually grew here, in this parched wilderness. The boys may have glanced up. The terrain was the same for miles. Then my husband and I saw what looked like sweet wrappers and strewn litter in the far distance. It turned out to be a settlement of impoverished homes.
"Humbling" said my husband.
That same evening we make it to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. We watch the sun set over one of the seven wonders of the natural world. Half as old as the earth itself, I know I shouldn't take my eyes off it, even for one minute, as the play of light changes and yet with three boys to keep from the edge, there is only so much vastness I can contemplate. I try to explain the word "tranquility" to the five year old and the seven year old, holding their hands as I walk along the South Rim Trail, conscious of the fact that there are people here seeking just that, in spite of our arrival. My efforts fall flat; the boys squeal as much as they did during the car journey, when I try to take pictures against the stunning backdrop, they garrotte each other, give each other bunny ears, lift each other up and stick out their tongues. I begin to think of the Grand Canyon as a metaphor for my children. The terrain dominates the viewfinder and yet no picture seems to capture it. I want to absorb every detail of it, find out its secrets, I want to watch how it changes imperceptibly and yet sometimes trying to take on its enormity makes so little sense it's impossible to process.