Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 6

"It's Christmas Eve," I say after a while, pus.h.i.+ng the words out into the silence. "Everyone's probably safe at home." My voice sounds small. It sails off into the darkness without resistance. Even the insects are settled for the night.

Wayne is rummaging in the trunk. He pulls out a bottle of wine and the chocolate truffles we bought in Sacramento.

He slides the cork out of the bottle.

"Wait!" I open the glove compartment and lift out my camera. "Go stand on the Route 66 sign. With the wine."

I crawl into the driver's seat and flick on the headlights. Wayne squints. He is standing between the two sixes, holding up the wine in one hand, his gla.s.s in the other. Then he thinks better of it, takes a long drink, refills the gla.s.s, and resumes his pose.

I snap a picture. Wayne is a pale ghost hovering on the road. I lean back into the darkness of the car and snap a couple more.

I'm cheating, I know that. When Garry Winogrand travelled across America on his Guggenheim, ten years after Robert Frank, he took his pictures through the winds.h.i.+eld, too-while he was driving. The hood of the car, the dirty gla.s.s, the dusty dashboard are all part of the composition, which creates an odd effect: the road that seemed so vast in Lange's and Frank's photographs seems familiar in Winogrand's hands, just another highway to anywhere. Viewed from the seat of a car, the endless desert shrinks to the size of a movie screen, neatly framed. Something that can be understood, ignored. The yearning is still there, but the forlorn, gentle randomness of Frank's roaming is cranked now to an edgy frenzy. It isn't hopelessness or the urge to move on one feels in these photographs, so much as impatience, an unwillingness to stop.

But we have stopped. I stow the camera in the glove compartment and join Wayne on the road, where we sip the last of the Willamette wine and hold truffles in our mouths until they melt.

"Happy Christmas," we say at exactly the same time, which makes us laugh, and then we kiss.

6 / GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA.

MY head hurts. We started Christmas Day with fresh-squeezed orange juice and some cheap bubbly we bought in Anderson but didn't drink, the setting being too downscale for even faux champagne. Even here, it doesn't seem to have agreed with me. We're in Needles, California, which feels at this moment like a town of addicts, though I know the place is named for the sharply pointed spires of rock we can almost see from our motel window.

We have driven 2,250 kilometres, some 1,400 miles, since we left Vancouver. Last night, we decided we owed ourselves a treat. Instead of a Motel 6 or a Super 8-or "Suppurate," as Wayne quips at every opportunity-we pulled into the parking lot of a brand-new Best Western. The plump young woman at the desk did not seem pleased with our late-night arrival.

"I just want to get home to wrap my Christmas gifts," she grumbled as she reached for a key.

I smiled and, without argument, accepted the price she offered. It was Christmas, after all.

We nosed into the parking spot in front of number 4. Beside us was a s.h.i.+ny black Harley. Wayne grunted, man-speak for "This isn't going to be good." The window in front of the motorcycle glowed blue. As we walked past, I glanced in: a p.o.r.no flick.

I didn't even put the key in the door. "It's Christmas!" I moaned, turning back toward the office and calling over my shoulder, "This won't take long, I promise."

Wayne does not believe in switching rooms. You take what you're given, that's his motto. No matter if it's across from the ice machine or beside the elevator or over the all-night bar. He sees it as a kind of karma: you get what you deserve. He'd rather stay up till 3 AM rail-ing-" What? Do I look like a b.u.m? Like I don't appreciate a good night's sleep in clean sheets in a decent bed?"-than ask the desk clerk to see another room.

"Oh, no," I groaned when we pulled up outside number 18. It was tucked beneath a staircase blockaded with lumber and bags of concrete. I imagined air hammers and power drills in the morning.

The girl gave me another key. No neighbours, no construction.

"This looks good," I said cheerily.

"What did you say?" I learned to read lips as a child, watching American movies dubbed into Portuguese. I think I missed a couple of Wayne's words at the beginning, but that was the gist.

"I said, This looks good."

We were yelling. A sign outside the room was buzzing like a giant hornet.

"One more time," I begged.

"It's Christmas Eve," I said to the plump young woman. Even I could hear the whine in my voice. There was room at the inn, obviously, but what we wanted was a decent room. "We're a long way from home," I pleaded. "Please. Do you have something nice?"

She put her hand over the telephone mouthpiece. When I came in, she was saying, "Look, I'll be there as soon as I can, you get started, you can do that much, can't you?" She leaned over, took number 25 off the hook, and threw it on the counter.

"Thank you," I said, but she was already back on the phone, giving instructions as to what went in the stockings, what under the tree. She must have had her babies when she was twelve.

"This is fine," Wayne said, challenging me to disagree.

And it was. A second-floor room that looked out over a row of palm trees to the desert and, if we stretched, those rocky spires. Yes, it was at the top of the stairs, and yes, everyone in the place would pa.s.s by our door in the morning, but how many people would be staying in a motor hotel on Christmas Eve?

"And it has Internet!" I said. "We can Skype the kids and it won't cost us a cent."

Except that I couldn't get the Internet to work.

I dialled the front desk and asked how to hook it up properly.

"I wouldn't know," the disgruntled young mother replied. "I've never been in any of the rooms."

IN THE morning, we pack our bags, rinse out the champagne gla.s.ses, and return the key. A different woman is sitting at the desk, an older woman, which makes me happy. I want that plump young woman to be home with her kids. I want to be home with my kids.

When I get in the car, I tie the red ribbon from our Sacramento shortbread around the rear view mirror.

"There," I say brightly. "Now it feels like Christmas."

Though it doesn't, not at all. Christmas morning is supposed to be sticky buns and coffee with Baileys and stockings full of toys and treats and silly, sentimental, useless stuff. Then presents, really good presents, with turkey perfuming the air for hours, the kids huddled over a jigsaw, or around the piano, or suiting up for the toboggan hill.

I cast about for something else to prop up my mood. We watch birds for a bit, I do a few Sudokus, stare out the car window. My head still hurts. I consider asking Wayne if he'd like me to read him my novel, but instead I pull out the newspaper I picked up in the motel office. We haven't seen or heard the news for almost a week.

"The Denver airport is completely snowed in," I report, scanning the headlines. "Las Vegas has been hit by a blizzard for the first time in a hundred years. That's not far from here, is it? Nothing about Canada, but in Minnesota, there's no snow at all. It's the warmest December since 1931. How weird is that?"

"Sounds like El Nino."

Never travel south in an El Nino year: how could we have forgotten that traveller's rule? To be fair, the boy child of world weather has been a bit of a brat: he shows up whenever he feels like it, every two years, maybe seven, which isn't exactly something you can plan for. Typically, in El Nino years, the weather in the southern part of North America is wet and cold, while the north is treated to a warmer-than-usual Christmas. And there it is in big, bold print: temperatures across the northern United States are six to twelve degrees above normal, which means our kids probably haven't pulled out their down-filled jackets yet.

There's a cold draft blowing up my summery skirt. I turn on the car heater, close my eyes, and rub my temples.

We have made a terrible mistake. We headed south to avoid snow on the Prairies; now here we are in Arizona, without the kids, freezing in the desert, a champagne headache on Christmas morning: it's all wrong, wrong, wrong.

WE cross the Colorado River into Arizona at the same place the Joads crossed it, going the other way. They would have been stopped by armed guards, employed by the factory-farm owners to prevent union organizers from entering the state; we stop of our own accord to take a closer look at the river.

Even after coming down through the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River is still a major watercourse, about two hundred feet across, I'd guess, curving somewhat desultorily around a bend to the east, past an expensive-looking, Spanish-style house with white stucco walls and a red clay tile roof. Since there doesn't seem to be anyone around, we walk down the sloping drive to the river's somewhat precipitous bank and look over the edge. The reeds Steinbeck noted are still there, leaning and waving downstream. The river glints in the morning sun, and we s.h.i.+ver beneath the highway in the shade of the metal bridge. We keep forgetting it's December.

We climb back to the car. At Kingman, Route 66 takes a loop north to a town promisingly called Peach Springs, but we veer instead onto the I-40 and press on. Speed is the thing now. We have to be at the Grand Canyon by five for our dinner reservation. "Speed," wrote Jean Baudrillard, the French post-structuralist who visited the United States in 1985 and, like me, fell in love with the desert, "creates pure objects." I take it he meant that when you're moving at speed, your eye doesn't have time to focus on inessentials: you see a tree as an isolated object, not as a living organism surrounded by other living organisms. It isn't pine or spruce or oak, it just registers as tree.

"We'll turn north at Williams," Merilyn says.

"What about Flagstaff, Arizona?" I say. "And don't forget Winona."

"We'll have to get our kicks at the Grand Canyon," she says, although it doesn't sound as though kicks are likely to be in our future.

It's Christmas Day. I wonder what our kids are doing now. It's nice, we tell ourselves, to be "free of all that," driving through this desert, looking at creosote bushes and p.r.i.c.kly pear cactus instead of Scotch pines and Christmas presents, and for a kilometre or two we actually believe it.

"We'll phone the kids from the Grand Canyon," Merilyn says.

"How will we know where they are?" I ask.

"They all have cellphones," she says, almost sadly. Having a cellphone is like being bedridden: you can always be reached.

"Are we still in the Mojave?" I ask, and she checks her maps.

One desert tends to look a lot like another, unless you look particularly closely. Technically, Arizona's Mojave is a transition desert between the Sonoran Desert of southern California and southern Arizona and the Great Basin, north of the Grand Canyon. It is defined by the presence of the Joshua tree, Yucca brevifola, a squat, cactus-like plant that nonetheless deserves to be called a tree: it has a woody stem, and can grow to fifty feet even in the arid desert. Some of them live a thousand years. It was named by the Mormons, who thought its stumpy, upturned limbs made it look like Joshua praising G.o.d as he led the Children of Israel through the Sinai Desert. If this tree is praying, I think, then it is praying for rain.

"Stop!" Merilyn yells. "Stop the car! Stop the car!"

"What is it?" I ask, pulling over to the side of the road, not an easy thing to do on an interstate.

"Back up! Quickly! Not too fast!"

My brain is clumsily trying to decipher these contradictory injunctions while simultaneously slowing down and checking the mirror for oncoming transport trailers.

"Bird," she says softly, as if it could hear. "Oh, a nice bird."

"Nice bird" is code for "I don't know what it is but we haven't seen it before." I quickly back up slowly until we are abreast of a largish, grey-and-black bird sitting on a fence wire about thirty feet in from the roadside. At that moment, the bird flies down into the gra.s.s beyond the fence and we groan, but when it flies back up and perches on the wire again, we madly focus our binoculars. It's about the size of a robin, but is grey with white shoulder patches, a black tail, a hooked beak- "Shrike!" we shout simultaneously.

Loggerhead shrikes are extremely rare in our part of Canada. Peterson lists the bird as "diminis.h.i.+ng; gone from most of its range east of the Mississippi River." A native, in summer, of the Great Plains and southern Prairies, the loggerhead moved eastward, turning up in Ontario in 1860 as more and more forest was cut down for cropland, creating the kind of open-meadow habitat (we call them farms) that shrikes and coyotes prefer. Shrikes live on mice, smaller birds, and gra.s.shoppers, kabobbing their prey on the thorns of hawthorn and buffalo thorn trees.

As its new habitat succ.u.mbed to the twentieth century, the loggerhead shrike population dwindled. But we tend to forget that a bird spends only half its life in the north; Arizona is where it winters, and here it seems to be doing just fine. As we drive, we see two more loggerhead shrikes, more than most Canadians see in a lifetime of looking, both of them perched on fences lining the road, hopping off regularly to forage for food in the desert.

We feel as though we have just been given a Christmas present, which is a good thing, because we didn't give each other Christmas gifts this morning. We haven't really talked about it, but we seem to have tacitly agreed that the trip is the gift.

"I hope you didn't get me anything," Merilyn said before we left Vancouver, "because I didn't get you anything."

I had planned to stop somewhere and buy her something expensive, as it is an axiom of gift giving that the later you leave buying the present, the more expensive it has to be. I did bring a backup from Kingston, so I was happy enough to say, "Of course I have something for you, but it can keep until our anniversary."

The whole gift-giving part of Christmas makes me unaccountably sad. I have memories of walking slowly through department stores in late December with a dollar, looking for something wonderful and thoughtful to buy for my mother. I'd lean against the gla.s.s jewellery display case (by which I mean the case displaying gla.s.s jewellery) in Woolworth's and look at clip-on earrings and brooches in the shape of floral wreaths and despair at the inevitability of it.

Parents get even by asking you what you want for Christmas, and then dividing your answer by ten. I remember going through a Sears catalogue when I was eleven or twelve, circling the things I'd like. Sears Roebuck was a big American department store and sold the kind of things the Cleavers would give the Beav for Christmas. I was fascinated by the page displaying a range of Chemcraft chemistry sets, the ads showing a studious boy in a striped T-s.h.i.+rt and a brush cut (he even looked like the Beav) pouring something from one test tube into another, a look of intelligent concentration on his face.

The really top-of-the-line set, the one I asked for, cost $49 and was as big as a tabletop; it had at least twenty-five chemicals, with names like sodium ferrocyanide and phenolphthalein, and included a rack of eight test tubes, a pair of gla.s.s pipettes, a graduated cylinder, a retort, and a spirit burner with its own jar of spirits. A thick booklet described hundreds of experiments, some with acids that would eat through metal, others with foul-smelling substances that would clear a room in seconds, still others involving combinations of harmless ingredients that, when mixed in the wrong order, would explode in your face.

If this were Leave It to Beaver, there would be a long family discussion over pot roast about responsibility and trust, the value of a scientific education, and the need to clean up after oneself, and then the mother would smile at the father and the Beav would get the chemistry set. In real life, there was no such discussion. The set I got was the least expensive. About the size of a cigar box, it cost $12.95 and contained six chemicals, one test tube, a set of tongs, and a candle. There were only two or three experiments I could perform. I did one on Christmas morning: I combined a blue-coloured chemical, probably cobalt chloride, with water and got-hey presto!-blue water.

As a consequence, I tend to over-gift when it comes to my daughters. I'm the same with Merilyn. She always says that what she wants is a simple Christmas: the whole family at the table, the turkey, the small, sensible tree, the stockings over the fireplace, a light snow falling outside the windows, and the recording of Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales" on the stereo. Every year she tries to put a limit on how much we spend on presents; one year, she suggested that all the Christmas presents be handmade. Everyone was thoroughly delighted. After the others went home, I gave her a pearl necklace and she gave me a Montblanc fountain pen.

I look over at Merilyn in the seat beside me and see Christmas sadness. I want to give her the world, but I didn't even remember to bring the Dylan Thomas CD.

WILLIAMS APPEARS as little more than an exit ramp. We turn north and begin the climb up from the desert floor to the rim of the Colorado Plateau, a huge chunk of sedimentary rock thrust up from the sea floor 250 million years ago. More recently-20 million years ago-its northeast end heaved up another six thousand feet, causing the rivers running across it to run faster and dig deeper into the plateau's soft sedimentary rock. The biggest of these was the Colorado: it ran so fast and cut so deep that it formed the Grand Canyon in just over a million years, carving out a gorge a mile down and ten miles across that exposed layers of rock dating back almost 2 billion years, half the age of the planet.

That I have never seen the Grand Canyon I count as a serious mark against any claim I might have to being a well-travelled individual. I think I flew over it once on a flight from Los Angeles, but it might have been some other gorge, or I might have been asleep and dreaming. (It is unbelievably huge; if the entire population of Earth were packed like smoked oysters into a cube, that cube could be hidden in the Grand Canyon.) Seeing the Grand Canyon is supposed to be humbling, as though its immensity just might save us from the sin of pride, of thinking we're too big for our britches.

It might even save us from dying. In 1958, novelist Edward Abbey was visited at his campfire in Arches National Monument, in southeastern Utah, by a Bavarian in lederhosen with a case of Lowenbrau beer under his arm; it was such an unlikely occurrence that Abbey made room for him and they began to talk. The Bavarian opined that America should have joined with Hitler during the Second World War to fight the Russians and went on to list a string of arguments in support of anti-Semitism.

"I could have opened his skull with a bottle of his own Lowenbrau," Abbey writes, "and was powerfully tempted." But, he says, he didn't have the heart to do it. "After all, he hadn't seen the Grand Canyon yet."

As we drive, the sagebrush gives way to chaparral, then to thicker stands of pinon pines; the ground around them is sandy, with little tufts of cranky-looking gra.s.s sticking up here and there. It reminds me strongly of northern Ontario. I remember reading somewhere that every thousand feet you climb in elevation is the equivalent of travelling eight hundred miles north in lat.i.tude. The Colorado Plateau is seven thousand feet above sea level, which means we've been spirited approximately 3,800 miles north since leaving Needles, which puts us, in effect, in boreal forest verging on tundra, somewhere around Whitehorse, in the Yukon.

As if to prove my point, it even starts snowing-thin, wispy threads of white that whisk like spilled sugar across the highway.

MY heart sinks. Snow? In Arizona? Sitting in our little Echo in my summer clothes, I feel ridiculously unprepared. For the weather. For this trip. What were we thinking, setting off without a plan?

There are an alarming number of tour buses on the road, giant double-deckers, their windows packed with faces. Cars with large plastic boxes guyed to their roofs vie for lane s.p.a.ce with camper vans and Winnebagos. I suddenly realize that although we have a reservation at the El Tovar Hotel dining room for Christmas dinner, we have not booked a room, either at the El Tovar or anywhere else.

It never occurred to us that all of Arizona and half of j.a.pan would want to spend Christmas at the Grand Canyon. In the snow. Snow is a novelty here in the South, I suppose. It rea.s.sures me only a little that there is as much traffic coming toward us as there is heading our way.

"Maybe these are all day trippers," I say feebly, turning on the cellphone.

It is early afternoon. I open a travel guide and start calling hotels in Grand Canyon Village. Nothing at the El Tovar, nothing at the Hampton Inn, the Marriott, the Holiday Inn, or the Days Inn. All the tour buses and family vans must have booked ahead, probably as far back as a year ago. Finally, at something called the Bright Angel Lodge, described in the brochure as a "rustic main lodge, guest lodge and cabins forming a picturesque village on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon," I snag a room.

"Someone who booked ahead must have died," Wayne says.

"Is that the best price you can give us?" I ask the clerk. There is a guffaw at the other end of the line. "Okay, we'll take it, we'll take it."

Wayne and I exchange glances. We feel like Joseph and Mary arriving in Bethlehem a day late and finding the manger still available. "What's wrong with the manger?" they must have asked themselves.

We skim through Grand Canyon Village, a strip of chain hotels and restaurants, and head on to the rim, to the Bright Angel. I try to be cheered by the name, to stall my descent into what feels like post-Christmas depression, though Christmas Day isn't even half over yet.

"What the . . . !" Wayne exclaims. He is hunched over the steering wheel, manoeuvring at a crawl past the hordes of tourists that take the road for their sidewalk, which they must since the sidewalks are packed tight. It looks like Coney Island in July or Whistler on the day the lifts start up. Swarms of tourists stroll among the trees and along the walks, mill in front of the hotel, sit on benches and curbs and on the bare ground itself, as if they're waiting for a parade to begin.

"Whose three-ring circus is this?" he says, then, always careful to attribute a quote, he adds, "Carl Sandburg."

The main lodge is surrounded by a vast parking lot crammed with cars. We snake up and down the aisles until we are half a mile from the hotel.

"I'll find something-you go check us in," Wayne says, dropping me at the entrance.

I hurry in, worried now that the laughing clerk has given our room to someone else as punishment for my cheek. The lobby is a seething ma.s.s of bodies in hiking gear sitting on backpacks and drinking water out of plastic bottles, apparently waiting for room cancellations or no-shows or patrons with att.i.tude. I take my place in line in front of the check-in desk and stare up at the cathedral beams of the ceiling, trying to quell my anxiety. I feel a surge of desperation as the clerk searches for our name, a rush of euphoria when he finds it. By the time I see Wayne hauling our suitcases into the lobby, I am such a stew of emotion I don't know whether to kiss him in triumph or cry with relief.

We thread our way along a gangway of souvenir shops to a side exit that opens into a covered causeway that leads to the door of the guest lodge, a term that to my mind implies a long s.p.a.cious lounge made of logs with quaint rooms giving off indoor balconies that overlook a ma.s.sive central stone fireplace. It turns out to be a semi-subterranean maze of dark, dank, wood-panelled corridors with numbers keyed to the site map in my hand.

Our room is in corridor E-6. The door is chipped and dented and sits loosely in its jamb. It has a vent at eye level, like the one in our cellar door back home. When I unlock it, the door swings halfway open before b.u.mping into a bed. The room is barely larger than the two cots and battered dresser it contains. All the light comes from a fixture in the ceiling, which, like the walls, is covered with wood panelling painted a regurgitated shade. There is a musty smell of mould. Above the beds, a small window looks out onto a path at ground level. Legs scissor past a drift of dirty snow. I can't help it; I start to cry.

"It's not that bad," Wayne says hopefully. It's so unlike him to be optimistic that I know it really is very, very bad. "It's only for one night."

"But it's Christmas night!" I wail, giving in to sobs.