In the Beginning!

I come from a family of travellers. In another age we would have been nomads, Bedouins, shepherds or itinerant grave robbers. Instead we played the role of explorers and sojourners. Our permanent home was in Arlington, Virginia. From there we would begin our family jaunts to the Manassas  Battlefield for a picnic lunch or a week long vacation to Ocean City, Maryland. A longer trip would be to Boston or New Bedford, Massachusetts to visit my grandparents. This was in the fifties, long before the era of highrise condos and super-motels. Interstate highways were just being constructed under Eisenhower's administration. My parents rode up front with my youngest brother, while the rest of us, three boys and one girl, crammed ourselves into the back seat.

With reckless abandon we would set out before dawn. Actually, it was a well thought out plan since the children would sleep while my father drove without the constant whining of kids asking, "Are we there yet?" Or, "How much further?" Dad would drive while Mom played the role of flight attendant offering drinks and snacks and referee should any of us get into an argument in the back seat. Mom's decisions were, for the most part, final. Any disagreement or appeal on her ruling was handled by my Dad who would simply ask, "Do I have to stop this car?" The question, of and by itself, was simple. The manner in which it was said, was not.

Driving to Ocean city was a big thing. The night before departure Mom would make sure all of us had our clothes packed. I'm not sure why this was such a big thing; for the next seven days we would all wear swimsuits during the day and pajamas at bedtime. Of course we would have an assortment of toys and comic books or coloring books to keep us occupied during the drive. But the promise of the ocean and the boardwalk made us behave like it was Christmas Eve. Just beyond the horizon and below the sunrise was the promise of sand pails, shovels, sand castles, kites, fried clams, salt water taffy and swimming in the surf. It was sensory overload.

Mom would offer a reward to the first one who saw the ocean, but we could already smell it as we backed out of the driveway. Our nasal passages were filled with the scent of salt spray, suntan lotion, creosote from the boardwalk and pilings, french fries and the overwhelming odor of Noxema for the inevitable sunburns we were all going to receive.

Dad nonchalantly drove the family car over the Bay Bridge negotiating city traffic, intersections and route changes. I never saw him look at a road map. In fact, I never saw him study a map the night before we left. I suspect he may have had a Rand McNally Atlas implanted in his brain as a top secret experiment when he worked for the Navy. What I did see was his ability to load his pipe with tobacco from a foil pouch of Sir Walter Raleigh. He did this one handed because his other hand was holding a cup of coffee that Mom had just poured from a thermos bottle. With his pipe clamped between his teeth he could take a pack of matches with his free hand, open the pack, bend one match out and strike it on the flint strip until it lit. After several puffs he would have his pipe lit and with a flick of the wrist, put out the burning match.

For those of us awake to witness this feat he would add as a finale his ability to blow smoke rings in between sips of coffee and then launch into a dissertation on the history of the Chesapeake Bay. Using the tops of his thighs he could handle the steering wheel while gesturing, sipping and smoking. There were no seat belts, no shoulder restraints, no airbags, no cup holders, no crumple zones, no anti-lock brakes, just seven people travelling east in a steel projectile at 50 mph. With the windows down, we could smell the ocean.

I once read that the average tourist spends less than four hours at the Grand Canyon. Let's see, it's 277 miles long, in places it's ten miles wide and over a mile deep and the best these visitors can do is drive, or shuttle, from one vista to another, take a few pictures and get back in their car or board the next shuttle bus. They won't know what they've seen until the film is developed (old school) or they download the images onto their computer. The sad reality is that those pictures will never do it justice. The Canyon is too big to be digitized and then displayed on a 13, 15 or 17 inch monitor and I don't care what resolution the screen has; it just doesn't work. I have over a thousand pictures of the Canyon that I took during a number of visits, I've looked at them once and that's it; unless I show them to friends or family. The images that I do remember are all mental: visual, audio, tactile and olfactory.

There was a young couple hiking up to the rim on the South Kaibab Trail. It was late afternoon and the two of them looked as though they had been models posing for the cover of a sports magazine. Bright-eyed, fresh faced and clean they briskly walked past us toward the rim. At the trail head I had a chance to speak with them. They had left the north rim at 5 AM and were completing an annual Rim to Rim hike. It was his fifth and her first. That's a 21 mile stroll!

Hiking down the trail we were passed by a mule train heading up. The smell of leather, sweat and dung fill our nostrils. Someone wanted to know if it was safe.

"No ma'am, those mules all suffer from acute depression when they consider their lot in life. Quite a few of them have been known to just walk right over the edge and take their rider with them."

At the Bright Angel Lodge someone inquired at the information desk, "Is the mule train to the bottom of the canyon air conditioned?"

Watching people standing at the rim with their eyes focused on the screen of their smart phone, texting or playing an online game. The GC. OMG! GTG. BFF. LOL. A geologic wonder that's 80 million years old is reduced to a handful of acronyms; there's something wrong with that.

Walking down the trail there is the feel of sand and stone crunching under my feet. I realize that just two steps below the rim and I am geologically standing on a layer that predates the existence of humans. 

When Spanish conquistadors first saw the canyon and the river below, they noted that the river appeared to be no more than six feet wide.

These are the memories that I keep and revisit from time to time. The pictures I've taken are stored on CDs and backed up onto an external hard drive. It takes a few minutes to find those pictures. Closing my eyes I can retrieve all the other memories in a nanosecond.

So welcome to my blog. I'll be sharing my memories with you and may even include some pictures. There will be history and anecdotes. I enjoy travelling and telling the tales. Several people have encouraged me to start a blog; so here it is. You may be a traveller yourself, or just an armchair adventurer, but when you consider the fact that we're all passengers on this planet as it travels around the sun, then we're all travellers.

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God"
Kurt Vonnegut

Enjoy!