"We'll have a great dinner and go for a stroll, and by the time we get back we'll be too tired to notice the room. We'll push the beds together," he adds, sounding inspired, "and get candles at the gift shop."

"Is there a bathtub, at least?" A hot bath is my solution to just about everything. It's the only place I don't think.

Wayne opens door to the bathroom. It's relatively clean. There is another window, and a small tub underneath it. Maybe I could sleep there. I look back into the bedroom and shudder.

"I don't think I can stay here."

"But it's the last room," Wayne points out.

"I don't care," I say. I cup my hand over my eyes to shield them from the overhead light. "We'll have dinner, then drive somewhere until we find a better room. We'll drive all night if we have to."

"What about seeing the Grand Canyon?"

This gives me pause. Of course: that's why we're here. I look out the window. It's not like me to give up so easily. I feel myself resisting and relenting at the same time.

"It's not quite dark yet," I say at last, the gla.s.s-half-full part of me in ascendance. I wipe my eyes, blow my nose, straighten my shoulders. "Okay, let's go for a walk, then come back here and change for dinner. Maybe I'll feel better by then."

WHEN Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Niagara Falls in the summer of 1835, he was filled with dread that the falls would fail to live up to his expectations. So haunted was he "with a vision of foam and fury, and dizzy cliffs, and an ocean tumbling down out of the sky," that he stayed in his hotel room for three full days before finally steeling himself to confront them. Why rush to be disappointed? he asked himself.

We aren't going to stay in our room for even three minutes. We step outside the guest lodge and turn left onto an interlocking paving-stone path that runs beside a low parapet, not knowing quite where we are going-and there, to our utter astonishment, is the Grand Canyon. The sudden shock of it renders us speechless. There is the stone parapet, about knee-high, there is a ragged cliff edge on the other side of it with a few scraggly trees growing out of bare rock, and then there is-nothing at all. The setting sun illuminates the opposite face like a reading lamp trained on an enormous stack of books. Our eyes travel down to the distant bottom of the canyon, where a thin trickle of silver, the Colorado River, meanders among soaring chimneys and hoodoos. How immense is it? the mind wants immediately to know. Niagara Falls could be at the bottom of the canyon and it would be all but unnoticeable from where we stand. We would point down and say, "Oh look, is that a waterfall over there?"

The canyon follows a fault line where two vast chunks of North America came together (Niagara Falls is on another). The silt-laden Colorado River cut down through the fault like sandpaper through balsa wood. Each layer on the canyon walls represents the bottom of an ancient ocean; when there was no ocean, and therefore no acc.u.mulation of sediment, there is no rock. This absence of rock is called a nonconformity. We are living in a nonconformity now, since the top of the canyon is a limestone slab that is already 230 million years old and has nothing on it but a tsunami of tourists with their requisite hotels and restaurants.

Once we have taken in what is there-the pale earth tones, pinks, greys, and siennas of the various strata; the play of light and shadow on the ledges; the trees gripping sheer rock faces with their gnarled roots; the distant specks that are birds (gulls? peregrines? condors?) riding thermals above the river-we slowly begin to appreciate what isn't there. There is far more absent from the Grand Canyon than there is present. In fact, the Grand Canyon is one colossal absence, billions of cubic metres of sedimentary rock carved away almost overnight by that thin silvery trickle of water we see enlivening the canyon floor.

Indeed, it is a trickle compared to what it once was. In its heyday, when John Wesley Powell led the Powell Geographic Expedition down it in 1869, the Colorado River flowed through the canyon at the rate of 250,000 cubic feet of water per second. Powell found the rapids so treacherous that half his crew deserted after three months. The water, in Edward Abbey's words, "flowed unchained and unchannelled in the joyous floods of May and June, swollen with snow melt. Boulders crunching and clacking and grumbling, tumbling along the river's bedrock bed, the noise like that of grinding molars in a giant jaw."

From our vantage point on the parapet, it doesn't look like there's much grinding and clacking going on. We walk along for a while, hardly taking our eyes off the canyon, watching the pinks turn to purples and the greys to black. Snow is still falling, but gently, as though someone has upended a great scenic snow globe of the Grand Canyon and then righted it again. Eventually we come to an impressive four-storey log structure with wings stretching out almost to the canyon's rim. Through a row of lighted windows in the main building we see white-shirted waiters setting up tables in a huge dining room; through another window, an enormous Christmas tree soars to the top of an atrium. People wearing expensive sweaters sit casually about in the lobby, reading, talking quietly among themselves, sipping drinks. We have come to the El Tovar.

"Let's go in and confirm our dinner reservation," Merilyn says, her voice trembling.

One of the appeals of travel is that we get to live our fantasy lives for a brief spell. Merilyn wants to live in a hotel. When she was seven her family moved to Brazil, and they lived in a hotel for several months while their apartment building was being constructed, a rather nice hotel, with wide, carpeted corridors, a dining room with its own pastry chef, unsalted b.u.t.ter that came in small curls on a silver platter, a grand piano on a raised dais, doormen at the revolving doors, and by the elevators on each floor, tall, umbrella-stand-sized ashtrays filled with white sand with the hotel's initials pressed into the surface.

It isn't the luxury of living in a hotel that attracts her, I think-not the fact that she would never have to cook or serve food, or repair a screen or wash a floor or a dish again (which would be my first thought)-but rather the quiet efficiency of hotel management, the sense of everything running smoothly because everything is in its proper place, and in good repair, and the staff all know where it is, and when you look, it really is there: the iron is in the closet, in its little wire basket; extra pillows are in the linen closet, beside the neatly folded and pressed (!) sheets; the salt and pepper shakers are always full and free-flowing, the coffee is always hot, the croissants always fresh, the poached egg always perfectly poached (the white solid but the yolk still runny), sitting proudly on its mound of perfect, pan-fried hash browns. Not all hotels are like that, of course, but a surprising number of them are, and you can tell you're in one the minute you walk through the door. As soon as we enter El Tovar's lobby, with its thick carpet, its chandeliers and cushioned sofas, the soft cla.s.sical (not Christmas) music coming from hidden speakers, the concierge's desk in one alcove and the front desk across from it, I know this is a hotel where Merilyn could live.

The El Tovar was built in 1905 by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. The ATSF hired Charles Whittlesey to design the hotel and Fred Harvey to build and staff it. Whittlesey, a Chicago architect, imagined the Grand Canyon setting to be vaguely alpine and conceived the hotel as a kind of overgrown Swiss chalet. It was originally to be called the Bright Angel Tavern, because it was situated at the head of the Bright Angel Trail, but in the end it was named the El Tovar after Pedro de Tovar, the Spanish conquistador who led a scouting expedition out of New Mexico in the grip of one of the most powerful exploration myths of America: the search for the Seven Cities of Cibola.

When the Moors were overrunning Spain in 1150, seven bishops from Merida fled with the church's gold, jewels, and religious relics to a distant land, where they founded two cities made entirely of gold: Cibola and Quivira. Nearly four hundred years later, a Franciscan friar named Marcos de Niza claimed to have seen one of them in what is now New Mexico. In 1540, the Spanish governor of Mexico sent a huge expedition under Francisco Vazquez de Coronado to find it. Guided by the friar, Coronado travelled up the west coast to what is now southwestern Arizona. De Niza's "city of gold" turned out to be a small Zuni pueblo village, the walls of which contained mica, which flashed like gold in the setting sun.

Just to make sure there wasn't something more, Coronado sent two smaller expeditions farther north. The one led by Pedro de Tovar made it into Hopi territory, where he heard about a large river that flowed westward to the Pacific, but he never bothered to check it out. It was the Colorado. I find it interesting, and amusing, that the hotel we are standing in was built by the Santa Fe Railroad, which didn't go to Santa Fe, and named after Don Tovar, who never saw the Grand Canyon.

"Why don't we ask if they've had any cancellations?" I say to Merilyn.

"Do you think?" she says, her face brightening for the first time today. Then it clouds again. "I did call about an hour ago. And we already have that other room."

"It won't hurt to ask," I say, leading her to the front desk. I'm still going to let her do the talking. The clerk is a young, officious-looking man in a black suit with a bronze pocket badge that says "Ronnie." When Merilyn asks him if he has a room, Ronnie gives her an admonitory look and asks if we have a reservation.

"No," Merilyn says. "But when I called earlier someone told me you might get a cancellation. Would you check?"

"I have checked," Ronnie says, but he clicks the keyboard on his computer anyway and looks at the screen. "Half the people in this lobby have asked me the same ques-Well, I'll be," he says, incredulous, "a cancellation just came in this second. Seems we do have a room, after all. I can let you have it for $166."

Merilyn looks at me. "It's awfully expensive," she says, and I'm afraid she's going to try to get a better rate. People from the lobby have begun to rise out of their chairs, murmuring ominously. I hear the clerk at the next wicket telling another couple that a cancellation has just come in.

"We'll take it," I tell Ronnie before the others can reply.

By the time we have checked in and brought our luggage over from the Bright Angel, and I have brought the car around to the El Tovar parking lot, it is dark. I can see Merilyn's shadow moving behind the curtains of our room as she sets up our acquired goodies for a pre-Christmas-dinner repast. The room is on the second floor and has a view of the kiva, which will be splendid in the morning. But now night has fallen and it is still snowing gently; to my right I sense rather than see the huge void that is the Grand Canyon at night. Thomas Wolfe, arriving in 1938 at this rim at about this time in the evening, described the canyon as "a fathomless darkness . . . fathomlessly there." But I find it comforting, perhaps because it is so much like being beside a large lake after dark, the water holding the warmth and filling the air with a life-infused almost consciousness. The words "Thank you" occur to me, and I address them silently to the canyon.

MY expectations of the Grand Canyon have been shaped by books. I peer over the rim and see searchlights; I look back and see the El Tovar in flames. It's the view from Vita Sackville-West's novel Grand Canyon, a futuristic fantasy when it was published in 1942, though it doesn't seem quite so far-fetched now, after 9/11. Sixty years ago, no American would have considered the possibility of being attacked on home soil, let alone at the brink of the Grand Canyon, the gaping symbol of American grandeur. In Sackville-West's story, it becomes America's last trench.

Sackville-West's characters are in the desert on holiday, as are we, and the scene she sets is eerily similar to the one I see around me, except that the porters and maids are no longer Navajos in costume, their long black hair tied up in red ribbons. And nowhere do I see the huge outdoor dance floor she describes: "parquet from California forests laid in patterns at the canyon's edge."

Sackville-West was British and obviously had no patience for American hubris. As the tourists retire to their beds, Germans swoop down from Canada to bomb the American forces huddled on the desert plateau. The manager, a villainous spy in cahoots with a worldwide n.a.z.i alliance, sets the hotel on fire, turning the lovely log structure into a flaming beacon for the bombers.

I look at the logs now and see them as so much kindling, look at the path down into the canyon where Mrs. Temple scurried with the other guests, trying to outrun the blast.

I long to walk alone down that slender trail, to sleep at the water's edge on a bed of ferns, to follow the river night after night on foot or float its length in a canoe. That would feel real. I think of Powell, the first white man to see the canyon from the bottom. Like all white explorers, Powell christened everything he saw: Music Temple, Marble Canyon, Flaming Gorge, Split Mountain, Bright Angel River. The names, though fantastical, don't begin to represent the overwhelming strangeness of what is really here, the soaring spires and gaping arches we can barely make out from the rim.

Maybe if I could see it from Powell's perspective, looking up from below, I would feel like I was seeing the Grand Canyon. But gazing down into its enormity, I go blank. I can see the depth of the hole in the earth, the striations of colour, but I can't take it in. I float like a gnat on the edge. I am minuscule; it is monstrous. How can we establish any kind of relationship?

When Simone de Beauvoir visited America in 1955, six years after the publication of her feminist landmark, The Second s.e.x, she saw a Grand Canyon akin to Disneyland. "The most ingenious efforts have been made to transform a natural marvel into a kind of amus.e.m.e.nt park," she wrote. There was a tower at one end where a person could look through a slit and see the canyon upside down or manipulate its image on huge sheets of gla.s.s. On an upper terrace, telescopes offered views of the canyon and the violet-and-red plateau that is the Painted Desert beyond: glimpses of landscape sold off for a nickel. Now there is an interpretive centre with lectures and dioramas, which seem relatively non-invasive compared with the Skywalk, a U-shaped gla.s.s bridge the Hualapai Indians have extended seventy feet out from the western edge of the abyss.

"The tourist is offered every possible artificial means of taming these exuberantly natural spectacles," wrote de Beauvoir. "In the same way, people in America consume 'conditioned' air, frozen meat and fish, h.o.m.ogenized milk, canned fruit and vegetables, they even put artificial chocolate flavour into real chocolate. Americans are nature lovers, but they accept only a nature inspected and corrected by man."

"What's the good of having a canyon if you don't exploit it?" the manager of Vita Sackville-West's hotel argues. He may be a turncoat, but he's American in his bones.

I expected to be profoundly moved in the face of this grandeur. To be swept off my feet. But nothing happens. The canyon feels fake, like one of those buildings with windows painted on a blank brick wall.

"Very impressive," Wayne says, "but why did they put it so close to the hotel? That's a quote, I don't remember from whom."

But who are we to talk about fakery? When we went back to the Bright Angel to move our things to the El Tovar, I approached the reception desk with heaving breaths.

"I can't stay here," I gasped.

The clerk looked at me with concern. "A lot of people have trouble with the alt.i.tude," he said solicitously. "No problem. There won't be any charge."

I nodded, and put my hand to my chest. The fake asthma attack already felt real.

Now the whole day feels fake. Two atheists celebrating Christmas at a natural phenomenon tarted up for tourists, a geological wonder I seem to see only through the eyes of dead writers. I turn away in disgust.

I can't even do that without being reminded of Howard in Richard Ford's story "Abyss." Howard, an otherwise decent real estate agent from New England, has ducked out of a conference in Phoenix to drive to the Grand Canyon with Frances to continue their ongoing illicit affair. Frances steps over the low wall to take a picture, the same low wall that I am standing in front of. One minute she's there; the next, she's gone. Howard steps over the wall, too, to see how far she has fallen, then quickly steps back, as if in that motion, everything can be returned to what it was. He's on the right side of danger, but nothing is the same.

"What you did definitely changed things," he says to the absent Frances.

Wayne and I understand Howard and Frances. We understand in the worst possible way how what we do changes things. The life we have now is built, at least in part, on sadness and pain, not only ours. We feel it most keenly at Christmas, when what we want more than anything is for our family to be safe together under the eaves. But our notion of family is not the same as our children's, and here we are, thousands of miles away from them.

I return to the El Tovar to dress for dinner and to join Wayne for a preprandial. It was good of him to allow me these moments alone, though I could tell he worried about my mood and my being so close to the cliff edge. A woman is playing Christmas carols on the grand piano in the lobby: the strains of "O Come, All Ye Faithful" penetrate our room even after I close the door. We call the kids, one by one, and wish them a merry Christmas, discovering that, in fact, it is merry, even without us. We open a bottle of good champagne and, linking arms awkwardly across the bed, clink our hotel gla.s.ses.

On the table is the gift I bought Wayne just before we left Vancouver: a silk tie with a repeating pattern of a Haida raven, the trickster-hero who brought the sun, the moon, and the stars to life.

Wayne brings out a small velvet box. Inside are a pair of gold dragonfly earrings. I've always loved dragonflies. Dive-bombers, I call them. They show up in the spring just after the blackflies. I'll be working in the garden, swatting and swearing under my breath; then the dragonflies arrive, swooping close, devouring the cloud of flies at my mouth.

"There were dragonflies on Earth a hundred million years before the rock outside our window was formed," Wayne says. "They survived two ma.s.s extinctions."

On our way to dinner, Wayne wearing his new tie and I in my earrings, we stop in the gift shop, where we see the dragonfly motif on necklaces and pottery, a stylized double-bar cross.

"What does it mean?" I ask the clerk, a nice-looking young man, smart and well-spoken, though he is keen, I sense, to be elsewhere.

"For the Navajo, dragonflies are symbols of pure water," he recites, then warms to us a little and leans forward, as if to share a secret. "Some say they represent renewal after a time of hardship."

WAITERS in the El Tovar dining room the next morning are wearing white shirts, black trousers, and long white ap.r.o.ns tied behind their backs. They move efficiently among the holidayers- families, mostly, and older couples dressed in matching heavy-knit sweaters.

"But they aren't Harvey Girls, are they?" Merilyn confides when our young man has deposited my stack of waffles and Merilyn's poached egg atop a heap of-alas-daintily cubed but darkly deep-fried hash browns.

"Meaning?" I say.

"And you'll notice our meals are not served on blue plates."

"I wonder, my dear," I say gently, "whether the trip is proving too much for you."

"Not at all," she says. "I have a point. The Fred Harvey who built this hotel was the first chain restaurateur in America. In the 1860s, he got the railway to let him build restaurants in all its stations. Tired of rowdy male waiters-"

"Our waiter is perfectly tame," I interject.

"-he advertised in East Coast newspapers for 'Young women, 18 to 30 years of age, of good character, attractive and intelligent.' He paid them $17.50 a month plus room and board and gave them a train pa.s.s to the restaurant, where he dressed them up in black dresses with Elsie collars and hems no more than eight inches off the floor, and called them Harvey Girls. They were credited with civilizing the West: they ended up marrying all those cowboys and getting them to settle down. There was a Judy Garland movie about it, the one where they sing, 'Folks around these parts get the time of day from the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe. All aboard!' It's been running through my head all morning."

"Thank you," I say, wincing, "now I've got the earworm, too."

"In those Harvey Girl restaurants, the daily specials were served on blue china, hence the term 'blue plate special.' See? I did have a point," she concludes, carefully sc.r.a.ping her egg onto a side plate, leaving the hash browns in their puddle of grease.

The dining room is a vast, L-shaped affair, full of dark, heavy furniture. Some of the tables are long, with room for a dozen or more diners. Ours is a table for two tucked away in a quiet corner, with a view through the windows of the Grand Canyon, into which a light skiff of snow is softly falling. On each of the walls is a large, colourful mural depicting scenes from the life of one of the four Indian tribes that originally inhabited the area: Hopi, Navajo, Apache, and Mojave. I am facing the Mojave mural, which shows a group of men wearing feather headdresses, doing a bird dance to give thanks for a good corn harvest. Around them as they dance, a flock of red-winged blackbirds clean up the loose corn in the fields. The dancers are thanking the birds that no corn is wasted.

"Interesting," says Merilyn. "European settlers shot blackbirds for eating their grain."

After our waffles and egg, we walk part of the way down a trail leading to the bottom of the canyon, then turn back to trudge up again to the top, against the flow of younger hikers skipping jauntily downward with the aid of walking sticks and gravity. Some are on donkeys, sad-looking grey beasts (I mean the donkeys) that step thoughtfully close to the edge of the trail as they pa.s.s us. We had contemplated the donkeys at the lip of the canyon, but the matter was settled, as far as I was concerned, by a small sign advising that no one weighing more than 170 pounds was allowed to ride. The whole scenario begins to look like an allegory of aging, the young gambolling down the slippery slope, the decrepit clawing their way back up.

Just when we stop to collect our breath, a largish, whitish bird with black wings flies over our heads and lands on a promontory a few hundred feet behind us. We have our binoculars and field guide, and after some page shuffling, we concur: a Clark's nutcracker, our first. William Clark first saw the bird on August 22, 1805, on the Columbia River. He thought it was "of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r kind," but Lewis thought it was more like a jay. To settle the dispute, Lewis had York shoot half a dozen of them and collect their skins. Years later, the eminent ornithologist Alexander Wilson named it Clark's crow, but it isn't a crow, it's a nutcracker, which is what it's called now.

I like it that Lewis and Clark seem to be tracking us east.

After puffing our way to the top of the canyon, we pack our bags and what's left of our Christmas goodies and check out of the El Tovar. Reluctantly. We think about staying an extra day, but the expense and the busloads of tourists that continue to arrive decide us against it.

At the Visitors' Center, we pick up a checklist of local birds: I put a mark beside the Clark's nutcracker. We are on the fringe of a small group listening to a lively lecture on Grand Canyon geology delivered by Geology Jim, a tall, thin man in a ranger's uniform. At one point, Geology Jim throws a beanbag the size of a grapefruit forcefully to the terrazzo floor and shouts, "Bang!"

"Imagine," he says, fixing each of us with a fanatical glare, "that this beanbag is a raindrop." We try. "Rain hits the desert with incredible force, much harder than it hits land covered with vegetation because there's nothing to stop it, and over time it does a lot of damage. We like to think that rain is good in a desert, don't we?" We nod obediently. "But like most things in nature it's both a bane and a blessing, depending on how you look at it."

7 / THE MARRIAGE ROAD.

WHAT we see of Page, Arizona, doesn't inspire us to search for a gourmet restaurant, and anyway, after our splurge last night, we have to get back on budget. We find a cheap motel and, for dinner, make further inroads into our Christmas goodies from the comfort of our room, which looks out across an alley to the back of a grocery store. After the splendour of the El Tovar, Merilyn is looking a bit glum, so during the meal I tell her about a theory I'm developing about motel-room towels. My theory is that motel towels start life as hotel towels, large and thick and white, with unfrayed borders and neat corners, and when one enfolds oneself within them after bathing they hardly seem to get wet. Big, expensive hotels buy them, and after washing them a few dozen times, they replace them with newer, thick, plush towels and sell the old towels to smaller, less expensive hotels. Then, after a few more washings, these smaller hotels sell them to even smaller hotels, maybe to the chain hotels, the nicer chains, which, when they are done with them, sell them to the economy-line motels. Eventually the towels are sold in auction lots to the sub-economy strip motel chains like the one we are in. By then they are grey and stained and so thin as to be transparent, cut down into ever smaller sizes and roughly re-hemmed. They now hang limply over racks in small bathrooms, wincing at the sounds of plumbing and the smells of drains, surviving on their faded memories of happier times, when they had nap.

Merilyn looks at me sadly, as though to say, The Four Hors.e.m.e.n on the rampage again, are they?

"We have really nice towels at home," she says glumly.

Some motels can take the nap out of people, too.

IN THE morning, I walk to the grocery store in the strip mall to buy some breakfast things. I take a blue plastic handbasket from a stack by the door and walk up and down the aisles with it over my arm. Cereal. Milk. A sad-looking peach. I scrutinize the meagre cheese selection for cheddar, but all they have is something called Kraft American. Merilyn asked me to look for Scottish oatcakes, but curiously there don't seem to be any on the shelf with the nachos and party dip.

"Excuse me," I say to the woman at the checkout. She is young, thin, her dark hair tied back except for a fringe that covers her forehead down to her eyebrow studs. Her eyeliner is so flawless I suspect it is tattooed. "Do you have any oatcakes?"

"Oat what?" she says, looking alarmed.

"Cakes."

"Cakes don't come in until after," she says.

"After what?"

She shrugs. She has nails to buff.

"What about demerara sugar?"

"Baking supplies is aisle 5."

"I looked there. You just have white and brown."

"Then I guess no," she says. "Is this all then?"

I take the cereal and milk and Kraft American out of the basket, wondering what besides the poor peach I can get for Merilyn. The hash browns are all frozen: they're thin, shaped into patties, but I don't think we can heat them in the coffee maker. "I don't suppose you have any almond milk?"

This time she doesn't even look up. She's. .h.i.tting the cash-register keys hard. Get this wacko out of here before he goes postal.

"Is there a good place around here to see California condors?" I risk, keeping my voice conversational. Her finger hangs poised over the cash register. I wonder if there's a 911 b.u.t.ton. "It's a kind of bird. A vulture. There are supposed to be lots of them in this area-I just wondered if there was a specific place where we could see them."

"You tried down at the dam?" she says. "They're all up and down the canyon. You'd probably see them for sure at the Navajo Bridge." She looks at me. "What? We did a school project on them. You want a bag?"

"No, thanks," I say. "And thanks."

"Uh-huh."

AFTER BREAKFAST, we drive down to the dam. Unless you know its history, there's nothing particularly remarkable about Lake Powell. It's a fake lake, created in 1957 by the Glen Canyon Dam. In one of his sadder essays, "Down There in the Rocks," Edward Abbey, sitting on a boat on Lake Powell, tries unsuccessfully not to think of what is down there, hundreds of feet below the surface: "Glen Canyon as it was, the wild river, the beaches, the secret pa.s.sages and hidden cathedrals of stone, the wilderness alive and sweet and charged with mystery, miracle, magic." This is Abbey in elegiac mood, in metaphysical funk, mourning his lost love. "All that was living and beautiful lies many fathoms below, drowned in dead water and buried under slime. No matter. Forget it."