Shade of Avocado - Part 37
Inspiration (Avery)
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The rising sun was behind us. A second night of peaceful sleep energized us for this day. We were back underway, headed west on I-40 toward Williams, AZ, from which we would take the highway north to Grand Canyon Village.
Piper had never seen this natural wonder before and, though I visited it several times in my life, the canyon’s splendid vistas would never appear jaded to me. I looked forward to the sparkle in Piper’s topaz eyes at her first view across the rim of the great chasm.
It only took us about three hours to arrive at the National Park entrance and we made it without incident. We had to drive further up the road to the village.
While she drove, Piper gazed out the windshield with anticipation. “How much farther is this thing? There’s sure a lot of trees!”
“Right,” I chuckled. “The first Europeans at the canyon had to be led here by Native Americans. You’ll know when you're there.”
The ranger gave us instructions where to park for our bungalow, which was still among a dense area of alpine forest. We walked along a trail to the South Rim.
Piper froze where she stood in speechless astonishment. I made the conscious effort to study Piper’s face for this moment, as she absorbed the canyon’s awesome beauty. Her mouth was open, laboring to breathe. Her topaz eyes reflected the red-orange layers of the eroded canyon walls and mesas. They were unblinking, unable to look away from all the magnificence before her.
She regained enough breath to speak again. “You see the photographs, but it can never prepare you for…this.”
I took hold of her hand. “Come on. You’ve only seen the beginning.” I led her further down the pathway, closer to the railing to take in the full magnitude of the Grand Canyon, experience its depth and regard its extent.
“It’s unbelievable, Avery,” she said. “I’m awed, I’m joyful, sad, frightened a little, all at once. I don’t feel physically here, because my emotions are overwhelming me. I’m having a spiritual experience right now.”
I sighed listening to her. “You sound more than normal to me, Piper. I think you described the first sight of the Grand Canyon to perfection. You almost carried me back to my own first visit here.”
She put her arm around my waist, still transfixed by the spectacle before her. She leaned in against me and I worried she was fainting. No, she was sharing her experience of this with me, wanting to convince herself of the physical reality and of our presence here together. I understood what she was doing because I have also had that disconnect here. Needing to reestablish my integration of emotion and spirit with body and mind. This place has such an effect on people.
I moved Piper along the pathway with me, the landscape changing across the enormous gap in the Earth every few feet. Following the intricate strata, the play of sunlight and shadow on the formations carved over millennia. Discovering, far below, the narrow, sparkling ribbon of the Colorado River, which sculpted this treasure and is still at work on how it will appear when we are no longer around.
Piper used her phone to take some pictures and scanned across the horizon with it to take a video. She reviewed her shots and shook her head. “A photograph doesn’t capture it. The way it really looks when you’re here. It’s too much.”
We spent almost two hours strolling the rim pathway in the village. I suggested it would be a good time to have some lunch. The restaurant's expansive windows still afforded a view of the canyon.
After lunch, we checked in to our bungalow, a rustic structure more substantial than a cabin but less appointed than a motel room. You were in the woods here. Two sliding glass doors gave you a feeling of being outdoors while indoors. Especially when deer would wander right up to graze on wildflowers protruding through the gravel patio.
We relaxed much of the afternoon, planning to catch the canyon again at sunset and in twilight. Piper prepared a simple dinner from the van’s kitchen, then we hiked back to the South Rim.
As the sun descended below the western horizon, the rusty shades of the rock turned even redder than ever. Shadows of deepest black began to fill the gorge until only the top layers of mesas and plateaus became islands in a dark sea. Planets, then stars emerged from the velvety sky. Though the vast expanse of the Grand Canyon must remain before us, we were enrobed in a night darker than either of us were accustomed to. It created an anxiety, an urgency, to move away from this spot. It was almost a sensation that the canyon itself would open further to engulf you.
We proceeded to return to our bungalow, using the small LED on our phones to light our path. When we got back inside and turned on the lights, we startled a doe and her baby nosing around the window, and they scampered off into the night. Piper and I laughed, and she wondered what other wild animals we might encounter here.
“If we wake up early enough in the morning,” I said, “we might find some bighorn sheep close up.”
“Well, let’s set an alarm then.”
We were lucky this morning to find a few sheep on the ledges below and a smaller-sized one hanging around behind a rail fence near the restaurant. It was the beginning of another gorgeous day viewing the Grand Canyon. Later, we drove out of the village along the road to access several other picturesque views at Cape Royal and Desert View before another fiery sunset.
The next day, we began a gradual route back toward New Mexico. As we stopped to have lunch, gathering clouds rose rapidly in our path. The storm had not developed by the time we finished eating, but the winds were gusting. So, we kept a close eye on the weather.
We traveled south on US 89 and were not far along when the thunderstorm unleashed a torrent of rain mixed with some small hail. The rain increased to the point it was nearly impossible to see ahead. I decided I needed to pull off until it let up.
“This shouldn’t last too long,” I told Piper.
“It came on fast,” she said nervously.
Then we heard a loud thud to the right rear of the van. Piper cracked her door to look back. “A bunch of water is flowing behind the van, and it’s covered the wheel. You should pull it forward before we get stuck.”
I put the van in gear and slowly pressed the accelerator. The van lurched forward about two inches and would go no further. It was a four-wheel drive and three of the wheels were on solid surfaces. Something was in the way.
I had Piper move around into the driver’s seat while I went to take a look.
“Please be careful, Avery!” Piper called over the wind and rain noise as I closed the driver’s door.
We were on the edge of a growing stream of runoff, and it was swirling around the rear wheel well on the right side. As I got closer, debris lodged around the tire, and it appeared to be a thick tree branch jamming the wheel.
I looked back at the mirror and Piper’s terrified expression as she watched everything I was doing. I edged up to the front of the van and asked Piper to lower the window a crack to talk to her.
“There’s a piece of tree branch stuck between the tire and the wheel well,” I informed her. “Inch the van back – like an inch or two – and I’ll try to pull it out.”
“Okay,” she acknowledged. “Stay out of the way.”
Piper put the van in reverse and it barely budged as she applied power. I signaled for her to stop, hoping the branch loosened enough to pull out. Splashed with water and mud, I gripped the piece of wood blocking the wheel. With my first attempt, I broke off a smaller limb, but the heavier piece was still jammed. I tossed the broken limb away just as a static buzz raised the hairs on the back of my neck. The electrical potential of this storm was reaching out at me.
I had already been hit by lightning once in my life. Though I survived, it changed my life. I had no interest in being hit again.
A bright flash – I didn’t see the streak itself – lighted up everything around us, then two seconds later a loud crack rang my ears. Okay, I thought, still a quarter of a mile away.
I turned my head seeing Piper watching me in the mirror, her hand to her mouth. I took hold of the branch, about two-and-a-half inches in diameter. If it broke here, at least it would be easy to clear. I used both arms and firmly pulled toward me. I couldn’t make it budge.
Another, much closer lightning bolt and a startling clap of thunder froze me. I was not hit, and I wanted to climb into the relative safety of the van until this passed by. Piper was about to make me come back inside. I looked around where we were stopped in the area of a wash. We were in the worst possible place for a flash flood. From the amount of rain that was falling here and on nearby hillsides, a torrent through this wash would sweep both of us and the van away.
More determined, I grasped the branch and prepared to pull. At the last second, I instead decided to push forward. The wedged branch moved to the back of the wheel well and I slipped it out from between the tire and the compartment.
Looking to my left, a wave of water was heading down this wash a few hundred feet away from us. In twenty seconds, six feet of rushing water and debris would be here. I worked to maintain a firm connection to the ground and already felt one foot slipping in the ankle-deep current. My fingers clutched at the side window frame of the van.
“Piper, go! You need to move away from here!”
She called back to me. “Get into the van, Avery! I’m not leaving you!”
“You need to go now! The wheel is free!”
Instead of the van moving, the passenger door popped open, and I scrambled to reach it as more swirling water surrounded my calves. I started to slip, taking a dive forward, but I was just able to grab the door handle. I drew myself up with my arm and put my foot onto the step, tumbling into the passenger seat. The van was moving forward as I slammed the door closed against a bright flash accompanied with a loud, rattling burst of thunder.
With determination, Piper accelerated Jade onto the highway.
“What the hell were you thinking?” she said once she reached cruising speed. “Did you think you were going to outrun the water?”
“I wanted to make sure you were out of the way,” I explained. “I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking about you.”
“Were you? What made you believe I would feel better saving myself and the van and I’m watching you getting swept down the wash in my rearview mirror?”
“You’re right, Piper. I probably wasn’t thinking at all. I was reacting. As soon as the rush of water was coming, all I thought was to pull that branch away from the wheel so you could drive off. When you popped the door open instead of driving ahead, I reacted and jumped in the van. Thank you. You saved my life.”
Piper composed herself. “I guess I can understand how you reacted under those circumstances. You did what needed to be done. When you didn’t move to the door, I somehow knew I should open the door. It got your attention. You saved my life, too, Avery. We’ve survived everything this far. I believe we can trust each other. Let’s try to both live it going forward, okay?”
We glanced at each other and began laughing. We had to burn off all our adrenaline somehow, and the best way for us to process our idiotic responses to our dire situation was to laugh at our idiocy.
Upon settling from our laugh attack, we both thought a little more and looked at what our true emotions about the last ten minutes were.
“Piper, I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life. I feared there was no way out of this. I saw your face in the side mirror, and I knew how frightened you were, too. I had to do anything and everything I could right then.”
“I sensed how afraid you were, Avery. But I also recognized a man who had courage to face his fear. If I’m going to be scared, I would far rather be scared with you.” Piper paused and took a deep breath. “Both of us have been scared about getting into this relationship and what’s going to happen between us. Don’t you think it’s better for us to be scared together than to be scared alone?”
A swath of blue sky opened up in front of us as the storm clouds dissipated and we got out of the rain. We made the junction to Interstate 40 in Flagstaff and headed east.
Later, we found a nice RV park with an opening for the night. They also had shower facilities, which I needed badly. Piper and I put a simple dinner together in Jade’s tiny kitchen. We ate it at the tiny dining table, sitting close as the tiny bench required us to be.
“This trip has been an amazing adventure, hasn’t it?” I said to Piper. “More life than I’ve lived for quite a while.”
“For sure,” she replied. “I’m relieved I can still share life with you. So, Avery, this kept on bugging me the past few days. Do you think there’s a reason neither you nor I can recall the…to use a literary term, milieu, about our first kiss. We’ve been having these amazing experiences reliving that short moment while everything around it, before and after, is a blank. You don’t suppose something awful happened. Something we would regret?”
I was startled Piper would have thoughts so negative about an event so profound from our shared past. Now that she brought it up, I had to admit, our collective memory around it was mysterious.
“I can’t imagine anything terrible we’re forgetting conveniently,” I said. “There’s nothing about our kiss I have any regrets about, now I know how important it was to both of us. Our metaphysical experiences of it haven’t given us any indications of bad things resulting from it. Don’t you think thirty years later, any consequence would be meaningless? Maybe we’ve forgotten it because it was all truly forgettable?”
“I don’t know why I’m letting it bother me, but I put it aside a while and it won’t stop coming back. Like the stupid love interest for my main character in my story. He makes another distracting appearance she can’t ignore.”
“I question whether speculating what we were forgetting would get us closer to the real answer and whether it would make any difference all these years later. But I have to admit, the missing pieces disturb me, too. Well, what’s the worst that could have happened?”
“I’ve been imagining things I could have gotten in trouble for doing,” Piper said. “Did I try to run away to avoid moving? Did I argue with mom and threaten to stay with my father?”
“You weren’t so happy with your father then, Piper. I think that’s unlikely.”
“No, I wouldn’t have done that, even as a threat,” Piper agreed. “What if I hid at your house? Wait! What if I tried to sabotage the car?”
“Try to remember this,” I suggested. “Did your mom yell and lecture you all the way across the country as she drove you to Georgia?”
“I remember I cried a lot on the way,” she answered. “No, mom wasn’t mad at me at all during the trip. In fact, she was so comforting. She held my hand when she could spare it being off the steering wheel. She hugged me when we’d stop for gas or food. She understood it was hard for me being uprooted, having to change schools, missing friends…losing my best friend.”
Piper was about to start crying again. I put my arm around her and pulled her closer than we already were sitting at the cramped dining table.
“Piper, you have your best friend back now,” I said. “We’ve gotten through big things together already. I know we can withstand whatever discovery is lurking in our repressed memories. If it’s something we need to know, we’ll discover it together.”