The isolation of the North Rim has created a home for unique plants and animals.  The shy kaibab squirrel, an example of evolutionary change through geographic isolation, is easily identified by its charcoal-gray body, distinct tufts of fur on the tips of its ears, and its pure white tail.  Its close relative, the Abert squirrel, inhabits the South Rim and other areas of the Southwest. -  “Grand Canyon: The Guide.”  National Park Service, 2005.    


1. Defeat

The 2004 elections left me feeling burned and bitter.  I was living in Ohio, and that made it even harder to bear.  I and a few other local volunteers had spent three long weeks canvassing my neighborhood on the west side of Dayton and making lists of probable Democratic voters.  On Election Day, we were up at six a.m. to mind the polls, check names off the lists, and bring the stragglers in.  With some out-of-state support from Indiana, we went down to the wire, pulling registered voters away from their TVs or their 40-ouncers to cast their ballots.  At the end of the day, we honestly thought we had won.  This was before we knew about the eight-hour lines at majority-Democratic polling places in Columbus, and before the unseen tide of Bush voters rolled in late, as if on cue.  Like many others, I still wonder how those extra millions, undetected in any pre-election surveys, managed to rise up and march like the children of the corn.

    I still don’t know if that election was fair and square.  Did Diebold Corporation (of Ohio) rig their machines?  Were the polling places deliberately designed to frustrate and deter Democratic voters?  Was gay marriage deliberately introduced as a “wedge” to mobilize Evangelicals and peel off some conservative Democrats?  All were possible, likely, probable or certain.  What the conspiracy theories didn’t explain, though, was how we managed to screw up what should have been a sure thing, and large numbers of mainstream American folks voted for George W. Bush in the midst of a foolish war, not because they believed that he was sent by Jesus to revive the Holy Crusades, but because they couldn’t cozy up to John Kerry, believe him, or believe in him.

    Several encounters from that time on the pavement stuck in my mind.  There was a white guy who lived down the street from me, who worked three jobs and was still struggling to support his family.  He was a registered Democrat who had a sixteen year-old daughter with one baby and another on the way.  However, he opposed abortion, and did not know who to vote for. He said, “I don't want my daughter getting a day-after pill without my knowing about it.” But then he said something else: “You know what I'd like to see?  I'd like to see a working-class guy running for President. How come we never see that?”

    Good question.

    On another block, two middle-aged black guys sat on their front porch, drinking beer out of plastic cups, smoking cigarettes, and bullshitting. One guy said, “Man, I ain't gonna vote for either one of them. They say John Kerry was in Vietnam. Shit, I was in Vietnam. They say he ran away or somethin' when he got shot at.” I responded, “Hey, John Kerry was in Vietnam getting shot at while George Bush was getting drunk in Alabama somewhere. What else do you need to know?”

    Then the other guy chimed in with another good one: “Can I ask you a question? How come John Kerry keeps talkin' about how he wants to help the middle class? Man, I'm poor.”

    I tried to explain that positioning oneself as a representative of the poor is not seen as a good way to win national elections in the United States, in part because the poor don't vote, and in part because many people who are actually poor consider themselves to be "middle class."  But these observations did not blunt the edge of his question: how come we can't get someone who represents and speaks to us?  This is not merely a problem, as the right-wing media likes to proclaim, of “liberal culture elitism.”  It is a problem of class, a disconnect between the circles of power and privilege to which most politicians (and those who fund them) belong, and the real worlds in which most Americans—in either “blue”or “red” states—actually live.  


2. Descent

Six months after the election, I sat in a wooden armchair on the deck of the Grand Canyon Lodge. This stately resort, maintained by the US Park Service since 1937, rests on the lip of America’s most dramatic natural wonder.  Traveling here was not my idea.  I had seen it a couple times before, when I was in my twenties, usually on the way to wandering somewhere else.  Now married with a young child, I had no burning desire to mingle with the pasty suburbanites in sneakers driving up in their air-conditioned SUVs, hopping out to videotape the view, then heading straight to the McDonald’s conveniently located a hundred yards away.  But the panorama of the Canyon, stretching out into the hazy distance, immediately overwhelms any attempt to describe, much less package or sell it.  T-shirts and post cards aside, the place really has to be experienced.  This is easier to do on the North Rim, where there is no McDonald’s.  Unlike the South Rim, which is located within convenient driving distance of Phoenix and Las Vegas, the North Rim is high in altitude and low in accessibility, and therefore has millions fewer visitors every year.

    It was Ernie, my brother-in-law, who had insisted on this epic family outing.  An Italian-American from Brooklyn, he had traipsed the American interior while following the Grateful Dead on tour years earlier, and raved about the glories of the North Rim.  Now an accountant (he once appeared on the David Letterman Show, in a segment called “Those Crazy Tax Laws”), he had the foresight to reserve cabins a year in advance for an extended collection of cousins, in-laws and kids from Oklahoma, New Jersey and Puerto Rico.   So it was that we had staked out an entire hillside of cabins, well stocked with sandwiches and beer.  Sitting around the lodge for hours at a time, or playing poker on a folding table propped precariously on the slanted earth between the cabins was relaxing enough, but it was not quite the Grand Canyon Experience that all of us had in mind.  So Ernie and I decided to take the plunge and hike in, joined by Israel, our father-in-law, who in his mid-60s was still more fit than most men half his age.  

    We left the cabins at five-thirty in the morning and hit the trail by six.  Normally the heat would build steadily as the sun ascended, but we were blessed with intermittent cloud cover and the slightest touch of rain, and we reached our destination at the Roaring Springs, 2800 feet below the canyon’s edge, by nine a.m.  Along the way, we encountered folks of all ages, from all over the country and all over the globe.  All were friendly on the trail, bonded in the sanctity of that pilgrimage, to whatever extent they pursued it.  We spent about half an hour resting and cooling our feet in an oasis created by running water and the shade of trees clustered in the canyon’s recesses, then started back up.  To my own surprise, my muscles responded readily as I entered the rhythm of the arduous climb.  My feet seemed to unconsciously pick their way among the rocks and roots, and I watched the changing view emerge around each sharp switchback like a masterpiece being endlessly unveiled.  In those moments I felt as though things were fitting together, body and mind and world, and I was free from most of the usual daily anxiety that dogs so many of us pitiable modern creatures: houses, cars, bills, jobs, bosses, not to mention Bush, the unholy mess in Iraq, global warming and so on.

I recalled a story told to me years before by a weathered drifter in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He was an alcoholic who claimed to carve beautiful sculptures out of pear trees when he wasn’t scrounging the gutters for change. One day, he had visited the Albuquerque Zoo after dropping acid with a friend, and a captive bald eagle looked them both in the eye and said, “You sons of bitches.  You mother f___ers.”  I clearly remembered him sitting across from me, in the homeless shelter where I worked in the summer of 1991, pale eyes staring from behind thick plastic-rimmed glasses, summarizing the meaning of this tale with one simple and elegant statement: “The universe is alive, man.”

After all, everything was tied together, and the canyon, which we always imagine as a symbol of division, actually converges at the bottom, where the water is.  But you have to go to the bottom to see that.  Somehow that man, who had bitten bottom so hard and so many times that the taste of cement and the taste of vodka, in all likelihood, were forever intertwined in his addled but prescient mind, had managed to cut through all the sediment that choked our communication and clouded our comprehension.  What else was it but lost awareness of this fundamental fact, that we all exist within a shared organic whole, that cut us off so tragically from that world, ourselves, each other?


3. Division

That evening we drove to a campground in the surrounding Kaibab National Forest to attend a cookout hosted by my wife’s uncle.  He, his wife and their granddaughter had driven their mobile home and parked it out in the forest free of charge, rather than staying in the crowded cabins with us.  A Baptist minister, originally from Oklahoma, he now resided in Texas when he wasn’t traveling the planet saving souls for Jesus.  If ever there was potential for a blue and red duel, this was it.  As a young, left-leaning professor, raised and educated in the industrial North, I imagined I must represent an almost perfect opposition to everything he stood for.  I might not be red, I thought, but I sure would be meat.  

The wind was whirling the sparks around the campfire where we gathered, in a clearing on a plateau surrounded by pine trees.  The minister uncle said that he had heard of a way to make coffee, cowboy style, which involved boiling water, coffee grounds and an egg together over an open fire.  We agreed to give it a try, and seated ourselves on folding chairs and tree stumps while the experiment proceeded.  Honestly, I don’t remember much of our conversation, but it was amicable enough.  There were no politics, just the tentative attempt at communication between people who did not really know that much about each either, in spite of the bonds of family.  

    My wife’s uncle talked, in a matter-of-fact way, about the life of a preacher, how it involved the constant possibility of having to move to the next position, how his profession was subdivided into the ranks of the big-money superstars, the wandering journeymen, and all those in between, doing time for the Lord in parishes large and small.  I realized then that it was not so different from the world of academia that I had recently entered, and which was then subjecting my family to our third interstate relocation in five years.  My issues with right-wing Christianity and my own “mother faith” of Roman Catholicism aside, I could recognize the link between those of us, on either side of the secular-sacred divide, who sought to reconcile the clash between calling and career, and to re-stock our daily mundane pursuits with the fire of faith, whether that be faith in ideas, or beauty, or human possibility, or in a God whose will you hope to know.

    In that conversation we also stumbled onto the potentially inflammatory topic of health care and medical insurance, and several of us, myself included, offered some measured opinions on this.  The minister paused, and then said something to this effect: “I believe that people who are ignorant about something should not speak on it, and therefore I’m going to keep my mouth shut.”  We all laughed, and let it go at that.  I had imagined that preachers, like professors, would love to hear themselves talk on any topic imaginable, but sometimes it was a relief to not pontificate.  It reminded me of a Spanish proverb that my wife and I once found in a fortune cookie, which we now keep it tacked to our refrigerator.  It says “En boca cerrada no entran moscas”: the closed mouth admits no flies.  Perhaps with such simple rules we might all be a little more peaceful.     

    We drove back to the cabins as the twilight descended, my body still exhausted and exhilarated from the morning’s hike, my belly now pleasantly full of burgers and potato salad.  At that moment, in the crowded car, I felt something like a surge of love for the world and all it contained, in spite of its conflicts and contradictions.  My reveries were interrupted, however, by a darting phantom that turned out to be all too solid.  A single deer brought our happy caravan to a halt on the gravel shoulder, its gasping, bleeding body kicking in the grass beside us.   The collision swiftly shoved us back into the dirty world of suffering and death, shattered headlights and insurance premiums.  However, as we reported the incident to a ranger, we were assured that the injured animal, dispatched by a plastic bullet, would provide needed food for the resident condors, still recovering from near extinction.  

 
4. Downtown

When you're alone, and life is making you lonely
You can always go
Downtown
When you've got worries, all the noise and hurry
Seems to help, I know
Downtown
                          -Petula Clark, “Downtown”
       
Just as abruptly, we journeyed from the majestic to the absurd.   It only takes one afternoon to drive from the tranquil North Rim to the hustling boomtown of Las Vegas.  Like the Canyon, people descend on the famous Las Vegas “Strip” from all over the world.  To see them as equivalent spectacles would be a monumental injustice to nature.  Yet Las Vegas still stands as an essentially human monument of a kind, the ultimate golden calf, perhaps, conveniently located just down the road from the vaults of heaven. 

    In spite of all its neon, noise and motion, however, Las Vegas is something of a dead place, oriented entirely around the clink of coins and the gratuitous display of excess.  In the air-conditioned casino hotels, a cup of coffee will set you back $2.75, a bottle of water in your room is $4.25, and local calls run a buck and a quarter. The swimming pool for our hotel was about a mile hike down a glistening underground hallway, lined like everything else with opportunities to spend.  Did I mention that it’s damn hot in Las Vegas?  They have not yet managed to air-condition the exterior of the Strip, but of course that just forces you back into the casinos, so why would they? After one day in this joint I felt like a tiger in the Siegfried and Roy show: Get me the hell out of here.

    Fortunately for me, some relief was found inside taxi cabs.  We had three rides, from three drivers, who hailed from three different continents, and each one taught me something.  On our way to the Strip from the airport, where we had dropped off the damaged rental car, Mohammed, an immigrant from Iraq, gestured at the artificial opulence all around him and summed it all up like this: “People come here to make money, but it is an illusion, a lie.  How do you think all this was built?  The house always wins.  The house always wins.”   

    Ishetu was from Ethiopia, “the only country in Africa that was never colonized.” He shuttled us from where the celebrated Monorail ends to the old downtown. It is celebrated, it turns out, precisely because no public funds were used to build it.  The Monorail costs $3.00 to ride in one direction (if you get off and get back on it costs you again) and it only takes you as far as the end of the Strip. You would think a city train would take you downtown, but even the “public” transportation in Las Vegas is a private cash machine for the Strip casinos, and they had no interest in subsidizing their low-rent competitors, who happen to reside downtown. 

    “Downtown,” Ishetu said,  “is a whole different world.”  About this he was correct.  Going downtown was sort of like journeying from the spanking new colony, full of occupying forces, to the abandoned one that has now been reclaimed by natives.  You will find casinos there, of course, the original Golden Nugget and a cluster of other, seedier spots, where the opening bets are smaller and the slots are looser, according to our cousin Tommy, who wanted to go there for that very reason. You will also see more of the cheap touristy crap of the Strip, with less of the pretension.  It was hot, sweaty, and dirty, but overall I preferred it.  Fremont Street, the main downtown attraction, is limited to pedestrians and boasts the world’s largest laser light show, projected on a massive overhead canopy.  There is also a giant glowing cowboy who appears to be advertising a store for western wear, but when you go inside it’s just another tourist junk shop.  That’s because the original store no longer exists, though the sign has been preserved in all its gaudy glory.  This sign, like most of the others on Fremont Street, is part of the “Neon Museum”, an elephant’s graveyard of yesterday’s glitz.  It seemed to express the other side of Vegas, the flip side to the false promise of easy money and fast fame, the refuge of the burned-out, busted, outmoded and rejected.  

    After one more night in our vacuum-sealed casino hotel, we escaped the Strip for good and returned downtown, finding our own refuge in a no-frills motor lodge where the rates didn’t triple on the weekends.  Our driver this time was Sergio, a portly native of the long slender land of Chile.  He told us that the size of the Las Vegas had increased ten-fold since he moved there, but business overall did not get any better, because the people who visited now were cheap tippers, focused solely on gambling and getting drunk, not displaying their largesse.  The cab filled with laughter as Sergio and my in-laws talked longingly of South America.  My mother-in-law began singing a song that she had learned from schoolchildren in Bolivia, while serving in the Peace Corps in the 1960s: “Yo quiero un mar, yo quiero un mar azul para Bolivia.”   I want a sea, a blue sea for Bolivia.  After three days in the sweltering desert, I could definitely sympathize with that desire.

    We had to settle for a little swimming pool, floating like a raft in a large parking lot behind the 24-hour bar at the motor lodge.  The pavement shimmered in the heat, but as we held our son aloft in the cool water, I felt that I was able to breathe again for the first time since leaving the North Rim.  Later, while sitting in the hotel bar, eating the food distributed gratis to patrons on Memorial Day and drinking dollar beers with my father-in-law, I saw that the attractive quality of downtown for me lay in its very real democracy.  There was no minimum bid here, no dress code, and no cover charge.


5. Declaration

In the wake of 2004, we were invited to imagine that there was some Grand impassable Canyon between those of us in the U.S. who drive four-wheelers, attend Baptist revivals, and watch NASCAR races, and those who listen to NPR, participate in pot lucks, and read Jane Austen novels.  The fact is, however, that such pop-sociology is a little too easy and ignores our underlying humanity and our shared struggles, as well our real social divides and our complexities as people.  I may drink cappuccinos and still be short on my rent.  You may drive a Ford F-150 and live behind a manicured hedge.  We may both be unsure of what to expect when the next round of layoffs is announced, when the ballooning utility bills shrink our check, and today’s tax breaks steal the bricks and steel for the cities and schools of tomorrow. 

    I don't agree with the fundamentalist conception of the Bible or America.  I don’t believe that Jesus wanted me to own a gun, though I do believe he would forgive me for whatever I might do with it.  Like many other Americans, I am equally skeptical of all those who use holy names and high concepts for power or political gain, of jihadists and theocrats who seem to scorn the liberal egalitarian society that I long for.  I don't understand why those who claim to be Believers or Patriots are not outraged by the deadly lust for the dollar, by corporate corruption and commercial dehumanization, by the worldwide growth in the populations of the poor and displaced, by the unnecessary wars that we fund, in distant lands, amid cultures that we don't try to comprehend.

    But I claim no purity for myself.  I don't wish to hide behind a sanctified or pre-ordained position.  I will only say, as I lift my cup or bottle or glass in the spirit of fellowship that I so often fail to find, that I prefer to cast my lot and find my place not in the shining city on the hill, but in the downtowns of the world: the back alleys and corner bars, the watering holes and trading posts, the card tables and campfires, the front porches and city parks, those cosmopolitan places where the walls of the canyon come down, where species mingle and people are brought face-to-face, to fight it out, or make peace, or simply acknowledge the right of each other to exist.

    The mid-term elections of 2006, which flipped both House and Senate to Democratic majorities, were a relief and a vindication.  Not because the “good guys” won—Democratic fat cats need their feet put to the fire too—but because it seemed to reaffirm the presence of a pragmatic center to American politics, populated by people who want to think of themselves not as mighty and righteous, but as good and fair; people who have limited patience for incompetence, ideological posturing and the constant litany of fear.  Of course, it took them a damn long time to figure it out, but finally they yanked the leash, showing they had not been brainwashed, but had indeed been sold a bill of goods.  They realized, perhaps, that there is a price to all of this arrogance and bluster, demonization and division. 

    Now, as the fall of 2008 fast approaches, we are tantalized with the promise of a political transformation, and the potential for more of the same.  Here we stand together on the canyon floor, after eight years of George W. Bush.  Perhaps, as we face the long climb out together, a movement built on appeals to our better natures, to our shared struggles, may yet prevail.   Our bitter splits with the world and each other may, we pray, be sidelined: for the sake of our common interests, our linked humanity, and our cherished, conflicted dream of democracy.