ROUTE 66 AND THE EPIC GRAND CANYON ROAD TRIP OR HOW I CAME TO SPEND THE NIGHT AT THE SOUTH RIM WITH SAFEWAY GROCERY BAGS FOR LUGGAGE

Route 66
Lyrics by Bobby Troup

If you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
Get your kicks on Route 66.

It winds from Chicago to LA,
More than two thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on Route 66.

Now you go through Saint Looey
Joplin, Missouri,
And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty.
You see Amarillo,
Gallup, New Mexico,
Flagstaff, Arizona.
Don't forget Winona,
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernandino.

Won't you get hip to this timely tip:
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66.

Won't you get hip to this timely tip:
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66.
Get your kicks on Route 66.
Get your kicks on Route 66.

Daddy always played and liked that song and I didn't get it. That's because when I was a kid and he was playing it, I didn't know about Route 66 - now I do. I not only know of its history because I read about it - now I know part of it first hand.

Somewhere today I saw someone mention driving a Mustang down the epic Route 66, and I thought "I've done that." Not the entirety of Route 66, but a portion of its heart. In fact, it was only a few years ago when I did that.

I began to think about that trip. It was a crazy, spur-of-the-moment, Maverick kinda thing I would do. :) I could blame my Texan-ness on those "Maverick" tendencies I have, but I come by them honestly from my Dad, Louie.

Either one of my two sisters would have been game for this hare-brained last-minute idea (as they share that "Louie" DNA), but, as it was, my sister Carol was the one who was with me.

We were in the middle of freaking nowhere for a good deal of the trip, and some would think two girls alone in the desert driving bat-out-of-Hell style from Vegas to the Grand Canyon is risky - a little too much "Thelma and Louise". Maybe it was, but I don't think so. We had a blast.

In this case, The Middle of Freaking Nowhere began in what is officially referred to as the "Mt. Wilson Wilderness Area". Aptly named, if you ask me. It's a "wilderness" alright.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. This story actually begins with Las Vegas.

I had just sold my first book for publication and I had a little extra money - very little. :) Anyway, I was supposed to go to a writing conference in Vegas, and I was also going to have a meeting with my agent there. I asked my sister, Carol, to go with me because she had never been to Vegas.

So off we went via American Airlines to Las Vegas where we found ourselves driving up the strip in my rented red Mustang hard top. It had some forward motion to it - just a little bit. The sound of an engine like that makes my foot suddenly become heavier. :)

On Friday, things with the conference were not yet in full swing, so we had decided to take a little trip down to Hoover Dam just to see the historic monolith. Off we went. It was very interesting and imposing. Wow! If you ever get a chance, check it out.

During the tour, etc., I got a burr under my saddle (as we say in Texas) and started thinking how fun it would be to see the Grand Canyon. I had a map, and I was familiar enough with the territory to get there (so I thought). I had a rental car that moved and an itchy "trigger" foot. :) It seemed a shame not to exercise both.

It was 2:00 in the afternoon. I was thinking this trip was about 175 miles and with all the lead out of it, about 2-1/2 hours. We could watch the sunset over the Canyon, grab a bite to eat on the way back and be back in Vegas in the nighttime. So I thought.

Well friends, from Hoover Dam it is 241 miles to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and no matter my speed, it's still about a 4 hour trip. This was October and I was driving against the setting sun. So, my calculations on distance and time were wrong and I had not taken into consideration the fact that I would be driving east.

Of course my sister totally agreed to the trip. We hopped in my rented car, crossed the Hoover Dam (very narrow two-lane road, usually loaded with tourist traffic and it takes a bit to get all the way across). Once across we were officially in Arizona. We plowed down US Highway 93. That bad boy opens up into the aforementioned Mt. Wilson Wilderness Area a/k/a "The Middle of Freaking Nowhere".

You see nothing for miles and miles, and when I say "nothing" I really mean NOTHING. There are no gas stations, no roadside stops, no other merging highways. You look to the right of the highway and there are miles of flat, brown, dusty landscape and a big row of mountains. You look to the left of the highway and there are miles of flat, brown, dusty landscape and a big row of mountains. You look straight ahead and there are miles of flat, brown, dusty landscape and an open road.

Maybe, if you're lucky, off to the side, you'll see some lone, random mobile home waaaayyyyyy in the distance at the end of a narrow, rutted, dirt road.

Maybe.

If you're lucky.

You lose cell service out there shortly after you leave the Hoover Dam area. You pick it up again about 30minutes later. How many miles were we without cell service? Well, I don't know. I only know the minutes, not the miles.

You see that whole "open road" thing makes my foot start feeling that extreme heaviness again, and then there's the Mustang hard top... let's just say this girl was pedal to the metal. Did I mention that the middle of nowhere also has nearly zero traffic and no cops?
                           
Juice under the hood. Gas in the tank. No traffic. No cops. Get it?

So 30 minutes were (cough) quite a few miles. I was putting a lot of asphalt under the wheels in short order. :)

Then we arrived in Kingman (check those song lyrics, folks). We continued along Interstate 40 for a while - that's one wide open divided highway. Then on down the way, about halfway to Williams, Arizona is where you can hop off onto The Legendary Highway, Route 66 and continue eastward until you get to Williams (Williams is where you change roads to get to the Grand Canyon).

I cruised down Route 66 in my rented Mustang thinking about the road's great history. I thought of Daddy. He would have loved it.

By the time we got to Williams we were running out of daylight in a big way. We were not going to be watching that autumn sunset from the South Rim. So, we pulled into a Safeway in Williams and got a few things we needed:  toothbrushes, tooth paste, deodorant, some soap - you get the picture. Everything we needed for the night was in our Safeway Plastic Grocery Bags. Uh-huh, our "luggage".

Remember our original plan was to see the sunset at the Grand Canyon and then drive back to Vegas. With no daylight we weren't going to see the Grand Canyon until morning, and we didn't drive all that way not to see it. So, we were staying the night somewhere until sunrise. We had no idea if we could even find a room when we got to our destination. We might have been sleeping in the car for all we knew.

Hopped back in the 'Stang and blasted up Highway 64 out of Williams headed for the South Rim and a little town called Tusayan, Arizona. It's nice. I recommend it.

Along the way you increase elevation and you travel through a very dense, piney forest - Kaibab National Forest, which blends seamlessly into Grand Canyon National Park. I did not know this until the next morning (when I could see it), but that forest extends all the way up to the South Rim of that yawning, mile-deep abyss. Meanwhile, it was already utter blackness and we couldn't see much of anything except what was in our headlights.

Arriving in Tusayan we drove up to the South Rim and checked on availability in the lodge there in the Grand Canyon park proper - none. We drove back into Tusayan on the road that went right past the South Rim lookout. We couldn't see a thing, but I swear I could feel the immensity of the gaping hole to our left as we drove by in the pitch darkness - eerie.

Back into Tusayan proper and we proceeded to try to find a room. First place we checked had none, zero, zippo. I was getting worried. There aren't a lot of options up there.

It may have been early October, but keep in mind we were dressed for Vegas and the Hoover Dam. Not cold there in October. South Rim of the Grand Canyon - COLD in early October. Sleeping in the car was looking far less attractive at this point.

The next place we tried was this quaint little lodge on the main street. It had one room left. We parked the Mustang and checked in, with our "luggage". We laughed about that "luggage" all evening. Hell, we still laugh about that.

We had dinner at a little diner and then back to our room. We slept and arose at 4:00 a.m. Checked out and drove on up to the lookout over the South Rim. We waited about an hour in the car, in the dark. The temp was right at freezing - not kidding. We were freezing our butts off with no coats. Then finally as the sun began to shed some of its light from the east, we got out and walked to the rim lookout. The below is only some of what we saw that very early morning.

 

 

Then it was back to reality. I had a 1:00 p.m. lunch meeting with my agent on the schedule. I was 5 hours from Vegas in the same clothes I wore the day before and I looked like crap. It was time to get high behind.

We were driving through the Kaibab forest at a pretty fair rate of speed when we spied a bull Elk on the side of the road - and he was facing the road, as if he was thinking about crossing it. This thing was immense! I had to take my foot off the gas, because if you hit one of those you're dead. He would walk away, but we and our car would be the road kill! That's an animal about 5 feet at the shoulder with a weight from 700-1,000 lbs! It's like running your car into a brick wall. So, light on the gas until we passed him. He looked at us like he was bored and then turned and walked back into the forest.

Magnificent beast.

Disaster averted. Back to pedal to the metal.

A brief stop for breakfast in Williams and then hell bent for leather back through Kingman, The MOFN Wilderness, over the Hoover Dam, and then blew through Boulder City, Henderson and Viva Las Vegas!!

I had slightly more than 1 hour to get ready for the meeting with my agent. Back to the hotel, speed shower/makeup/hair/nice clothes and Voila! There I was at a table in Olive at the Bellagio  having lunch with my agent, just as planned.

In the past 24 hours I had driven 536 miles, seen the Hoover Dam and the Mt. Wilson Wilderness Area, driven on the Legendary Highway/Route 66, seen the Kaibab National Forest (complete with intimidating bull Elk) and watched sunrise over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Oh, and I had seen the Safeway in Williams, Arizona and invested in some of their "luggage". ;)

It's one of the best drives I've ever made in my life. :) Wooo-hooo!!

So, there you are - that's how I came to spend the night at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon with Safeway grocery bags for luggage. :)

Freaking Epic.

Polla filia,
J.F.

THE LINE OF WORDS

"The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood-carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year...The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool."

    - Annie Dillard

"There's no writing, there's only rewriting."

   - Lisa Cron

I wrote in my last post how challenging this writing life can be (challenging is a euphemism, in case you wondered).

Today I printed out the first 90 pages of this current manuscript.

For reasons too complicated to go into here, I wrote a new part onto the beginning of it, then bridged that to what was already there, and now I need to go through the "already there" part and bring it into line with this new beginning. For this I decided I needed to print it out and just work it with a red pen.

There is an author named Gerard Houarner who once wrote a post about the "Span of Control" a writer tries to have over the whole of the work. An artist can look at her painting or sculpture and see it whole in one glance. Not so much for a writer. We hold the story in our brains, and in my case I run it back and forth like a film - fast forward, stop, rewind, play again. To hold it in its entirety within one glance is not possible.

Keep that in mind - it's important for this ramble.

I couldn't work without a computer. In fact, I'm a bit of a techno junkie (but not completely addicted).  It's so easy to type all the stuff that's in my head and then revise it and save it and there it is. I could never do that with paper and a typewriter. I thought about that the other day. Lord! They used to type all this stuff! No wonder Steinbeck had his wife type everything! (Check the dedication on "Grapes of Wrath" - "To Carol, who willed this book" - he should have also mentioned she typed it, again, and again, and again...). Still, even the computer can be a challenge.
   
All of that being said, between the rewinding of the "Span of Control" in my mind like film, and the sitting for hours at the computer writing that new beginning.... well, I was feeling so down about the work.

I was pushing hard to get this new beginning finished up, and then to connect it to the prior beginning. Last night I got there, but then I was tired - in the emotional sense. We writers and artists are emotional beings (or else we couldn't write or create art - that takes some pretty intense sensory faculties, which breed strong emotional reactions).

So, to bed I went last night, fatigued and telling myself the book was crap, and praying to God I could capture what I'm trying to say in all those rewrites I know I will do. I woke up feeling the same way. It's a rotten way to wake up.

I hate to tell you this, but, that feeling is a common occurrence in this writer's world. It is juxtaposed against those moments when I feel I have just written something so brilliant it cannot possibly be mine - when I look back at it and say "Did I write that? I know no one else has been in my manuscript typing. Huh, well I guess I did write it. Hell, that's good! I'm good!"

I will also go on record as saying I think those awful moments of thinking I've just written the worst thing known to mankind - they are necessary moments. These moments are the ones that light the proverbial fire under my feet. It is analogous to the sentiment expressed by this old axiom:  "Debt is to a man as spurs are to a horse." Well, those down moments are spurs to me, people - dig 'em in and watch me run!

Now add this equation:  Span of Control not being felt by looking at the computer screen (irrespective of my love of technology) + gloom and doom over the latest efforts at writing = my conclusion:  print this bad boy out on real paper - all 90 freaking pages of it!!

Get it in front of me in 3D!!

Me to myself:  "Just do the work, you idiot! Nothing great will be written while you piss and moan about how bad it is."

Occasionally, and only occasionally my alter ego makes some pretty good sense. :)

Low and behold, I picked up those 90 pages off of my wonderful little laser jet, and as soon as I had it in my hands my whole aspect changed. BOOM!

This is going to be a real book! I can do this, I've done it before.

This ain't my first rodeo! (I know, spurs, horses, rodeos - I'm Texan, deal with it. Also, I literally have ridden in a rodeo when I was 11 - in the opening parade and the junior barrel races, so the rodeo thing fits); but, I digress. :)

Looking at it in print brought back all that familiarity with the process, I guess. I've been published before. I know this drill.

Tonight with those 90 pages in hand I will not wield a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, or a surgeon's probe as Annie Dillard would suggest.

This artist will wield the red pen like the sculptor's chisel. I will make that block of writing "rock" breathe life!

I will sculpt the line of words into that true vision I have in my mind, and heart and soul.

Polla Filia,
J.F.