Cabin Life. Chapter One. Introducing the reader to Carl Johnson 'of course'

Chapter IX: Grand Canyon Lodging

IX. Grand Canyon Lodging

This cabin was mobile, since it was made of fabric. The bed rolled up and got stuffed into a bag. The Swedish cooking stove packed neatly with my pots; it relied on a homeless person's fuel, Sterno. I used that winter soldier's cook set for 15 years, bought on sale when I was a starving student. The cabin kitchen did graduate to a modern trekker stove; other furnishings gradually improved from garage sale substitutes for sound gear to sound gear.

I had seen the Grand Canyon as a boy, and once again on a cross country tour in college. After I came to live in Arizona it became what it is: the ultimate experience for those who love the earth. I have spent more time in a tent in that great abyss than in some cabins that were fixed to the ground. I went down to the river for the first time in 1984. In that descent, a pianist and I inaugurated for the second time a love affair fated to fail from the first. We went on the worst trails, where the tourists and the mules leave their refuse. We camped by the river in the common site near Phantom Ranch. I recall to this very moment the taste of the cold beer I purchased there at its admirable store. Taking the sun on the resting day, Ms. Keys leaned back against a rock as old as god, raised her shirt and showed god's world her perfect breasts. I was already in love with Ms. Keys. On that trip I fell in love with the canyon as well.

In the more lasting love affair, I contracted a mild case of Canyon fever. Symptoms of this infection include a need to throw oneself into the abyss again and again and the desire to try a more difficult way each time. It is a disease hard to cure. I have gone in 30 times and come out as many. I did the descent and the ascent twice in the year that I reached seventy years of age. I ain't bragging. Those numbers make me a piker compared to trekkers who suffer from a Canyon fever so bad it often turns fatal. Nothing in my account implies any expertise in Canyoneering or a heroic pursuit of danger. These vices belong to others, to Colin Fletcher, the crazy Harvey Butchart, and to Jan, the Polish autoworker from Cleveland.

One nice summer day I strolled into the permit center on the North Rim, contemplating a night on top with a short descent just to get the view. I was to get just that in the single most beautiful car camping spot I have ever enjoyed...verily I could have driven 15 feet forward and 1 mile down. My forested spot was right on the rim, where at sunset I watched the light burn out on Vishnu Temple, the same great monument I had seen clothed in winter snow from the bottom, as revealed later in this tale.

At the permit center, a stout man in his 60s stood ahead of me in line. He spoke English with a thick accent. Jan turned out to be a Polish immigrant. He had spent 30 years on the assembly line in Cleveland, "builtink them bad Ford 6s." I considered the 1970s Chrysler beater I had seen parked outside, with the obese woman in the passenger seat. Ohio plates. "Where are you headed?" I innocently asked. "To the river," he innocently replied. I warmed Jan up with a couple of tales of my adventures and misadventures on the secret trails and obscure routes I had mastered, or failed on. I wanted to show my stuff to this old Slav. He looked at me as if I were a child. "Oh I dunna go on the trail, I go on the river...." My puzzlement was manifest; it provoked him to explain. "Ya see I got caches down there along the river, sausage and cheese, so I just move along the edge until I get to one. There's lotsa edge routes, you know." The Canyon does offer these and then it closes them off abruptly, sheer walls coming down on both sides of the surging Colorado. That's often where the rapids and the whirlpools are, between those stern cliffs. Hesitant now, fearful of inducing a larger lie, I asked "Well, what do you do when the edge runs out?" Jan smiles a big toothy grin. "I got an air mattress and I blows her up and float down...."

The ranger asked Jan why he wanted a general area permit and what trails he would use. I heard him make up trail itineraries that had nothing to do with using an air mattress in the Colorado River. He got his permit and turned to leave. "My wife shes gonna drive me to where I like to go down. She comin' back in a week." As he slouched off, I hoped he was not going to contribute to the greatest book written in the English language: Death in the Grand Canyon.