Flowing Rocks and Skinwalker Portals: Antelope Canyon

March 30, 2015 — “Are they trying to rip us off?” The man at my car window had a near-impregnable Eastern European accent and a fingertip grasp of English, so that’s not exactly what he said. But it was the gist.

A cold, sporadic rain had my family and me sheltering in the car. We were parked in a dirt parking lot on Navajo land outside of Page, Arizona, waiting for our scheduled tour of Antelope Canyon. I knew what the guy meant. It had cost me like $50 a person to get the tour. I told him that we’d paid the same amount he did, that he wasn’t being taken advantage of for not being English-speaking. I left off the part of the explanation where it was impossible for any Native American to rip off a white man, all things considered.

But I assumed Antelope Canyon was worth every bead. I mean, just the images online made the place seem unreal, especially this image, which recently broke the record for most money paid for a photograph at $6.5 million. If just photographs of this place were worth that much, the experience must be priceless.

Finally, it was time to load up into the back of the safari-style truck. There were five others in our group, including my Eastern European friend, whom I guess decided I wasn’t lying to him. Our driver and tour guide was a young, laid-back Navajo named Ryan. I would later find out he worked the gig for extra cash in between studying music theory at a college in Phoenix. I would also eventually give him a nice tip both for his unfeigned enthusiasm for the place and because my infant, who got to ride up in the cab of the truck with my wife because of the chill, cried the whole return trip right in his ear.

Antelope Canyon is a slot canyon, meaning it’s an extremely thin passageway created by flowing water. There’s an Upper Antelope Canyon and a Lower Antelope Canyon, each on separate tours. We opted for the former since it seemed like the most dramatic photos came from there, but also because it was easier to access and we had an infant with us. Lower Antelope Canyon involves clambering up and down a series of ladder-like iron stairs.

The truck took off across a wide ravine of flat, orange sand veined with tire tracks from previous ventures. After three miles of nothing except skeletal transmission towers, an outcropping of sandstone about 120 feet high rose into view. An ominous dark vertical line slit its face. A few other tour trucks were parked outside, their occupants already swallowed by the rock.

“You picked a good time of year,” our tour guide told us. “In the summer, there’s like ten times the number of tours going on. You you only have a little bit of time to try to get pictures. It gets crazy in there.”

As we stepped inside, I couldn’t fathom there being room for more than our tour group. We were at the beginning of a winding passage the space of which varied from a small room to a couple chest-widths. The floor was covered with a thin layer of fine sand that almost seemed like it had been imported and carefully spread with Zen garden rakes. Above, the thin sliver of light that was the top of the crevice was often blocked by twists in the rock wall. At no point did it not feel like we were in a cave, even with the snatches of sky high above our heads every once in a while.

But there was nothing dank or dark about the cave-like slot. It was beautiful. Enough light filtered in to set a comfortable, ethereal mood, and the walls were gorgeous, almost glowing with internal like and shaped like frozen waves, as if someone had sculptured the soft sandstone with a cake icing tool.

In fact, it was water that had done all the sculpting. Even though the place was bone dry on our visit, it is extremely prone to flash floods. That was terrifying to me, being trapped in that claustrophobic space, underwater, knocked against all the beautiful whorling outcrops of rock. And that wasn’t just fancy. People have died in Antelope Canyon. In 1997, 11 succumbed to a flash flood there. In 2010, a group was stranded until the waters abated. It was one of the reasons why only guided tours are allowed access.

I was hyper-aware of the gray clouds that had covered our trek to the canyon and the rain that had pattered on and off all morning. Mostly, I wondered how much I should be trusting a music theory major for judging weather conditions.

The rocks themselves were overall a dull pink, not the vibrant orange that I’d seen online. Partially that’s because of the time of year we visited, with only the winter sun feebly penetrating the canyon top. Partly it’s because the rocks seem to come out more vivid in general in photos. Unfortunately, our winter timing also meant that we didn’t get to see any of the canyon’s famous shafts of light that penetrate the dimness like UFO tractor beams. But that was a fine compromise to escape the crowds.

At one point we all had to hug the wall or scatter and backtrack as the other tour groups returned from the far end of the canyon. I honestly don’t know how they fit so many more tours through there during the busy season. After our guide walked us through the history and conditions behind the formation of the canyon, he spent most of the tour pointing out shapes in the rocks, everything from bears and cats to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Tourists love rocks in the shapes of presidents. But then he pointed at a bit of the wall and said something fascinating.

It was a flat section of rock, about six feet tall or so, inset a bit and rounded at the top. It’s nothing I would have noticed on my own.

“That’s a door between worlds. My people believe we entered our current world through something like this. It’s also how the skinwalkers get around. Those are our boogeymen.” Tales of interdimensional portals and shapeshifting monsters. That’s how a guide will earn a large tip from me.

After about 45 minutes, we exited out the far end. The length of the canyon was only about 660 feet. We could have raced through it in a minute. Outside, the guide pointed to initials carved into the rock and some bullet holes. “That’s one of the reasons we don’t let people come here by themselves anymore. But in the long run it doesn’t matter. The stone is so soft, the water will eventually wear it away.”

After that we were given free rein in the canyon, where we alternated spending time by ourselves in the various twists of the passage and running from skinwalkers with my eldest. Then we all loaded back up into the truck for the return trip.

I know I started out this piece crassly, talking about money, but sometimes I have to do that. However, the place was fantastic. Well worth forking over my pennies and putting up with the cheesy presidential rocks.

Unnatural Wonder: The 1956 Grand Canyon Mid-Air Collision

March 29, 2015 — So I wasn’t completely forthright about my first impression of the Grand Canyon. Everything I wrote about it was true, but I left out one detail: The morbid bit. I thought about skipping it entirely in light of the Germanwings crash, but it’s kind of now or never with this one for me.

As I mentioned, my first view of the Grand Canyon was at the Desert View lookout point, near the east entrance of the southern rim. The lookout’s most prominent feature—besides the 18-mile-wide crevasse it overlooks—is the 80-year-old, 70-foot-tall Desert View Watch Tower. The lookout’s least prominent feature is a placard attached to the guardrail below the tower. I assumed the placard was about rock strata or river erosion or some such science. I went over to take a photo to read it later, as I often do. Instead, I discovered a terrible few paragraphs that changed how I was viewing that awe-inspiring landscape.

On June 30 1956, two planes, a TWA Lockheed Super Constellation and a United Airlines Douglas DC-7 on transcontinental flights—both having left Los Angeles International Airport mere minutes apart—collided right there, 21,000 feet above the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 passengers and crew. At the time, it was the worst commercial air disaster in the United States. Back then, pilots were on their own when navigating the skies, and the general theory is that both planes were either trying to avoid the same clouds or were giving their passengers a better view of the Canyon. Within a year or two, the FAA was instituted, as were various safety procedures, mostly because of this collision.

The placard labeled the two buttes, Temple and Chuar, over which the debris and death were spread. Actually, still is spread to some extent, as not every piece of wreckage or personal artifact was removed. Last year, the site was dubbed a National Historic Landmark, and the isolated area further protected from anyone visiting it.

Now, I’ve been to my share of elaborate flight crash memorials thanks to The New York Grimpendium, but something was different about this simple placard. I mean, before I’d read it, I’d been gazing at the spot with my jaw dangling trying to take in its vastness and beauty. Now, my open-mouthed fascination was out of horror and sadness. It really stuck with me.

You can see the two buttes in the middle of this photo. The prominent flat one 
just below the horizon and the one in front running perpendicular to it.

That’s why, three days later, when we found ourselves in Flagstaff, I detoured us to Citizens Cemetery, near Northern Arizona University. There, we found the mass grave of 66 of the 70 crash victims from the TWA plane. Most of the dead from the United Airlines plane were interred at the Grand Canyon’s Pioneer Cemetery, which I didn’t seek out while we were at the canyon. I don’t know why. I probably didn’t think I’d still be thinking about it three days later.

The spot at Citizens Cemetery was a large rectangular grassy space outlined in cement and low chains. A pair of plaques listed the names and explained the existence of the oversized burial plot. It was a quick stop on a rainy morning, soon to be pushed out of my head with all the adventuring we would be doing later that day. Still, it’s one of the things I now think about anytime I hear about the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon death is actually a pretty captivating topic. The Wikipedia article for the natural wonder even features a section dedicated to it. Apparently, there have been 600 deaths recorded at the national park, very few of which are people falling over the edge and 23 of which include outright murder. But by far the largest percentage of that number were those 128 lives lost in 1956, 128 people who technically weren’t even visiting the place.

My God, It’s Full of Clouds: The Grand Canyon

March 27, 2015 — You almost don’t have to go to the Grand Canyon, right? If you live in the U.S., you hear about it all the time. You’ve seen tons of television, movie, and Internet footage of it. You’ve listened to a thousand similes and metaphors using it. You’ve witnessed David Copperfield float across it, Cindy and Bobby Brady get lost in it, and Thelma and Louise drive into it.

But that’s going to happen when your country’s most impressive geological feature is also one of the tops on the entire planet and possibly solar system. And its seeming omnipresence in American media and conversation is why I guess I waited this long into my life before even trying it to see it with my own grapes. Still, I couldn’t make it the point of the trip. For us, the Grand Canyon was one stop on a more massive road trip that just happened to encircle it. I was fully prepared to treat it like Clark Griswold. “Great. Let’s go.”

Our route had us entering at the east entrance of the southern rim of the canyon. It was January, and the northern rim was closed for the winter. We pulled into the Desert View lookout point right before sunset.

And we saw it. And it was grand.

I immediately realized another reason why the Grand Canyon is easy to overlook (figuratively speaking): it’s im-im-poss-poss-ible-ible to fathom. I looked down, and the drop was vertiginous and terrifying and exhilarating, but like any other cliff in that way. But then I looked outward and saw the slopes and cliffs and buttes and mesas stretching off into the distance and it looked almost two-dimensional, like a matte painting or something hallucinated, something that couldn’t possibly be there. My brain couldn’t accept it. I can’t get it. Its age. Its scale. The inexorable forces that carved it. If I could, I wouldn’t be able to make such dismissive remarks like the ones that began this article. Instead, just the phrase “Grand Canyon” would send me into a grand mal. Possibly, I’d sacrifice sheep to it.

Finally, night began to fall, and we reluctantly pulled ourselves away from the gargantuan gorge to check into a hotel. The next morning we were up early enough to see a group of Rocky Mountain Elk dodging trees in the forest (although it wasn’t until later, sorting through the plush toys at the visitor center gift shop, that I was able to name the species). I at first thought that would be the highlight of the day, but when we got out at the first overlook we came to, the entire canyon had changed.

It was full of clouds.

Now, I don’t mean wisps of them tugged at buttes and boulders. I mean, it was a thick atmosphere tamped down like they were in the bowl of some deity’s pipe. Basically, and as cliché as the phrase is, it was a legitimate sea of cloud. It felt like I was on Jupiter, waiting for air-whales or something massive and tentacular to breach the surface. It was heady and dizzying.

We hurriedly took pictures, thinking it was morning fog that would quickly burn off. But it stayed, thick and stuck like it was spun cotton candy. The bright fog pushed against the sides of the canyons like it had its own tides. I checked the Internet right quick, and the breaking news for the canyon was that we’d inadvertently timed our once in a lifetime trip for a rare natural phenomenon: a total temperature inversion.

Under normal circumstances, the higher you go, the colder it gets. Every once in a great while though, the arrangement flips and the warmer air stays on top, trapping the colder air and fog within the canyon more secure than a Tupperware top. It happens every several years or so (although the day we were there was the second time that season).

Once we learned it was there for the day, we meandered from lookout to lookout, marveling at the phenomenon and the regular lack of guardrails. I’m surprised there aren’t more deaths at the canyon out of pure nature hypnosis. I mean, seasons don’t fear the Reaper. Nor do the wind nor the sun nor total temperature inversions.

If you look in the upper right corner, that's my wife—just for some scale

But we had a blast. Sure, because we were experiencing a rare natural phenomenon on top of a rare natural phenomenon. But also, honestly and mostly, because it was January. The weather was what we would call Fall-ish here in the Northeast. The crowds were fractional, so there were plenty of moments where we got a particular overlook to ourselves. And we had the freedom to drive the entire southern rim route. During the busy season you have to take a shuttle to do portions of it.

Once we hit Hermit’s Rest at the west end of the rim, we doubled back to exit out the east side. There, the fog had dispersed, if it had ever actually gathered at that end in the first place, and we could see the bottom again, so we got out and peered down like the Roadrunner watching Wile E. Coyote fall. And I don’t know which was more staggering, the open air or the sea of clouds.

All I do know is, man, you must go see the Grand Canyon.

My Griswolds.

Spawned on the Bayou: The Birthplace of Kermit the Frog

March 25, 2015 — Leland, Mississippi, is a town of 5,000 people. But I was there for a frog. A felt one.

There have been 1.7 billion hours of footage featuring the Muppets, but the peak of all things Muppet was the first three minutes of the 1979 The Muppet Movie. Kermit, sitting on a log by himself in his home swamp, playing the banjo, and singing wistfully about rainbows and lovers and dreamers while carefully separating himself from them. That was it. Something about those few pre-Dom DeLuise minutes summed up everything that was right about the Muppets and the life work of Jim Henson.

So when I found out we were going to be headed through Mississippi, renowned for its swamps, its blues, and its omnipresence on third grade spelling bee lists, I had to go see Kermit’s birthplace.

Now, Kermit the marionette-puppet was born in Maryland, when Jim Henson was attending college and putting his home economics degree to good use. I told that story when I visited one of my most favorite statues on the planet. However, in the Muppet-verse, the character of Kermit hails from a small town called Leland, Mississippi, on the winding western edge of the state, a town which is more or less the childhood home of Henson himself.

Henson was born next door in Greenville, and his family lived at an agricultural experiment station where his father worked, in nearby Stoneville. He went to elementary school in Leland. There he would catch lizards and turtles and, yes, frogs in Deer Creek with a friend of his named Kermit Scott. It was that idyllic bit of boyhood that eventually inspired him to turn a swamp frog with ping-pong-ball eyes into the fringed face of an entertainment empire.

And back in humble little Leland, they celebrate it.

Our first sight in the town was a giant, colorful sign with a waving Kermit that proclaimed, “Leland, Mississippi: Birthplace of the Frog.” It was next to a small, weathered, wood-paneled building with another bright-green Kermit waving to us from a window. The place was technically the Leland Chamber of Commerce, but it was mostly taken up by an exhibit on Henson and his Delta childhood.

We arrived before it opened, so we spent time sitting at a picnic table on the bank of the very same cypress-lined river that helped inspire Kermit and which meandered behind the museum. Here and there a turtle popped its head from the water and all along the edge the cypress knees protruded knobbily from the mud like blunt stalagmites as I tried and failed to imagine inventing a universally beloved character just by sitting there.

Eventually, the building opened and we walked into a small room. Two glass cases filled the center, pictures adorned the walls, and in a corner a viewing area was set up in front of an old tube TV. The Rainbow Connection scene was playing on it as we walked in.

We were greeted by Cecilia, who was nice enough to walk us through the whole exhibition, told us about the Frogfest the town celebrates every year, and took our photos with an oversized stuffed Kermit in another corner.

Most of the items on display were donated by the Henson family. In one case was a replica of Kermit himself, sitting in a swamp diorama, holding a banjo. In the other were the original puppets used in the “The Song of the Cloud Forest” bit in the “Fitness” episode of The Jim Henson Hour from 1989.

On the walls were pictures of Henson and the area. Of most interest was a letter from Henson dated November 1979, five months after The Muppet Movie hit theaters. In it, he politely rain-checked an invitation to visit Leland from the mayor of the town. The letter cited commitments in London for the next couple of years, those commitments, I’m assuming, being The Great Muppet Caper and The Dark Crystal. He enclosed a photo of himself with his Muppet creations, autographed and officially acknowledging Leland as the birthplace of the frog.

In an adjoining room were more glass cases, this time of Muppet memorabilia, most of it donated by fans, Cecelia told us, and about half of which I believe I’ve owned in my life at one point or another. It was in this room that I tried to explain to my then-four-year-old how awesome the Muppets were. She wasn’t having it though. Was going through a phase where animal toys needed to be realistic-looking. As long as Kermit walked on two legs, she wanted nothing to do with him. I’ve never prided myself on being a good parent. I still bought her a shirt in the gift shop, though.

Soon it was time for us to leave. It’s a small exhibit in a town you have to aim for to hit, but, honestly, I liked this simple perspective on Kermit much more than the character-as-giant-brand, Mickey Mouse version. As we left, Cecilia called to us, “Make sure you see the Rainbow Connection Bridge.”

That was, in fact, our next stop, a small span of Old Highway 61 a few blocks away and crossing over Deer Creek. It bore another brightly colored sign with a waving Kermit. I had expected the Rainbow Connection Bridge to be colorful, like Fozzie’s Studebaker after Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem got their paint cans all over it (“I don’t know why to thank you guys.”). Instead, only the guardrails were painted and only a solid green, but less Kermit green and more army men green. It ain’t easy bein’, you know?

On the other side of the bridge was an historical marker proclaiming the connection of the murky trickle to Jim Henson. After swinging by the elementary school that Henson attended, just across Deer Creek from the Chamber of Commerce, we broke for Arkansas and the home of another American legend.

Our time in Leland had been bright and clear, despite the tornado watch we were under. However, after we left, we were pursued and periodically caught be torrential rain all day. By the time we made it to our hotel in Memphis, the deluge caught us for real. But it soon spent itself, leaving behind a rainbow in the sky on the only exact day that I really wanted one.

More of Our Muppet Shenanigans:

Jim Henson Statue/Kermit at the Smithsonian/Hollywood Walk of Fame

Dark Crystal Skeksis

Dark Crystal Mystic

Famous Graves 2: Can I Get Your Epitaph?

March 20, 2015 — I visit famous graves all the time. Or the graves of the famous. Both syntaxes are applicable here. Sometimes I’m able to sneak them into posts on OTIS or into one of my books, but often there’s not much I can do with a picture of a me kneeling beside a piece of rock with a familiar name engraved on its surface. So I thought I’d pull together a bunch of those photos from the digital graveyard of my archives (like I did here years ago). Below you’ll find the final rocks of artists, leaders, literary inspirations, villains, and the monster clown from that one Stephen King story. Enjoy these graves. While you’re still above yours.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892): Union Cemetery, Amesbury, MA
I have a degree in English and a master’s in literature. And I sorta hate poetry. A lot of it anyway. Still, if the few vague phrases you stuck in truncated lines gets you fame, I’ll visit your grave. If you’re dead. Like John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet behind Moll Pitcher and Snow-Bound. It’s easy to find his grave in Union Cemetery. Look for the sign at the top of the tall pole bearing his cocky last name.

John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, MD
Who knows what more Abraham Lincoln could’ve accomplished without the pressures of the Civil War spoiling his gravy every night? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. But actor and assassin John Wilkes Booth ensured that we’ll never know. Booth was eventually shot and killed in turn, and his body took a circuitous route before being lain in a family plot in this Baltimore cemetery, including being carried aboard multiple ships and being exhumed multiple times. So you’re in fine company gawking at this villain in his RIP place. But if it’s a little too uncomfortable for you to make the visit solely for his grave, the cemetery also contains the remains of freakshow performer Johnny Eck, as well as the inventor of the Ouija board, whose gravestone has a Ouija board on it. I wouldn’t suggest contacting Booth.

George Lippard (1822-1854), Lawnview Cemetery, Rockledge, PA
Gothic writer and activist, Philadelphian George Lippard should be most known for his books, including The Monks of Monk Hall, but he’s mostly known as a good friend of Edgar Allan Poe’s, especially during a wild, paranoiac night in Poe’s life where “The Tell-Tale Heart” author reportedly spent a few hours in Lippard’s home city running from murderers, being thrown in prison, and hallucinating the dismemberment of his mother-in-law. That’s probably when you need friends the most. And that’s what your mom meant about choosing your friends wisely. Your posthumous fame might depend on whom you’re nice to.

This is Lippard’s second burial, as he was originally interred in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in the city until that graveyard was needed for the living. Lippard’s last words are reported to be, “Is this death?”

Edward R. Crone, Jr. (1923-1945), Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, NY
I was introduced to Vonnegut by an older cousin when I was too young to fully appreciate Vonnegut. But Billy Pilgrim has always stuck with me. Also the asshole-asterisk from Breakfast of Champions. Pilgrim is the main character in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the story of a young World War II POW who jumps through time to revisit points of his life thanks to aliens. Or is crazy, one of the two. Vonnegut based him on a real POW named Edward R. Crone, Jr., also called Joe.

Crone fought at the Battle of the Bulge and was held in a POW camp in Dresden where Vonnegut was also being held. Crone died a month before the war ended, starving himself to death out of despair. His body was originally interred there in foreign soil, but was then moved to rest in the family plot at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, also home to the victims of the infamous Torture Tree. Vonnegut himself visited this grave on the 50th anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden.

Osceola (1804-1838), Fort Moultrie, Sullivan’s Island, SC
Osceola was born in Alabama under the name Billy Powell. His father was British, his mother Creek, and he was raised with his mother’s people. They later moved to Florida and joined the Seminoles, where he grew up to be a fierce defender and leader during the Seminole Wars, gathering fame on both sides of the conflict. He was captured under a white-flag ruse, where he was eventually incarcerated at Fort Moultrie on an island in South Carolina. Osceola died three months later of some kind of infection or disease. He was buried at the entrance to Fort Moultrie, his only neighbors these day five of the 62 men who died aboard the U.S.S. Patapsco in 1865 when the ironclad monitor ship hit a Confederate mine.

James Buchanan (1791-1868), Woodward Hill Cemetery, Lancaster, PA
I’ve been to the graves and tombs of probably about a dozen U.S. Presidents. I usually don’t go out of my way to look for them, honestly, but if you hit up enough major cemeteries, you’ll stumble across those auspicious rocks. There are, after all, 38 and counting. The location of this, the final resting place of James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States, is in his home state of Pennsylvania. Fun facts: He launched a war against the Mormons of Utah and caused the Civil War. Don’t learn history from me.

Thelma Todd (1906-1935), Bellevue Cemetery, Lawrence, MA
Thelma Todd was a busy actress in the 1920s and 1930s, easily crossing the line from silent films to talkies and appearing in everything from the original Maltese Falcon to Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers. However, she’s become most famous for her own “the end.” She was found slumped over her car wheel in her lover’s ex-wife’s garage. She had a bloody lip and was dressed to the nines in that way that only women in the 1930s could. It was ruled to be carbon monoxide poisoning. Rumors of suicide, accidental death, and murder have all competed in her credit roll.

IT, Mack Cemetery, Middlefield, MA
I love this grave. Although it has spawned a few local legends, nobody knows anything about it. Just says IT. Sits in a cemetery apart from the other stones on the edge of a forest beside a town hall that used to be an elementary school. It’s as if the incidents that went down in Stephen King’s story of the same name were based on real events that happened at this in town and at that school. And that grave holds the evidence of a story that a group of life-long friends will each take to their own.