Ain’t No Reason to Go in a Wagon to Town

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Canyon Storm

“Canyon Storm” oil on canvas by Sally Hall

It took me a week or more to get accustomed to the altitude on the North Rim (about 8,000 feet). Just the walk from my cabin to the back dock of the kitchen where I worked wore me out. I also seemed to catch and then share strep throat with my coworkers. Those were minor obstacles. The hard part was slowing down and learning how to see the canyon in a more than just a superficial way.  At first, the canyon looks like a postcard. If you’ve been to the canyon, maybe you know what I mean. You’ve seen views of the canyon your whole life. I found it disconcerting to be there—at the Grand Canyon!!—and not have fireworks exploding or at least hyperbolic signs posted around saying things like, “This really is the fabulous place you have heard so much about.”

Lucky for me, by the time I shook off the altitude sickness and the streptococcus, I was also beginning to adjust to North Rim time.  I think it may be different in the national parks now—more sex, drugs, and cynicism probably. There were sex and drugs back in the day, too, but probably not the cynicism, at least among the Mormons and me. Instead of, or in addition to any s & d, the young workers were encouraged to put on performances for the dudes.  Why not? I’ve already told you we—the workers and the dudes—were a million (80) miles from anywhere and it was before TV made it up there, let alone WIFI and smart phones.  So, there were talents shows and comedy routines and singing to the dudes at dinner and singing them away in their Utah Parks Company buses in the morning.

Where was I? I remember: things to do at the rim.  You could walk out from the lodge patio and saunter along the little path to Bright Angel Point.  One time a friend introduced me to the joys of sparking in the dark.  Probably not what you think, and it certainly wasn’t what I was worried about.  When it is dark outside, if you crush mint (I think) Lifesavers in your mouth you can see little flashes of light.  It worked at Bright Angel Point and the Mormons did it, too. What astounds me right this minute is that when I just Googled what kinds of mints one uses for sparking, I came up with, “About 868,000 results (0.31 seconds).

Other pursuits Like the young creatures we were, my friends and I often gamboled around, in this case, on and off the rim. Just writing this discomfits the parent (for almost four decades) and old person (I’m trying to get used to it) in me.  The walk from the lodge to Bright Angel Point is only ½ mile round-trip.  We used to make fun of (to ourselves, not publicly) the moms and dads who held onto their children with grips of steel.  That was wrong and I have realized it ever since I held onto my own children with grips of steel at the Yellowstone hot springs. Also, I now feel nervous on narrow trails on mountains or in canyons. Furthermore, for some reason— sun glinting on bifocals, bigger butt, etc.— trails in general seem narrower than they used to. Even worse, the last time I was on the walk to Bright Angel Point, I huffed and puffed the whole damn ½ mile.  I could pretend that it was just because I wasn’t used to the altitude, but mostly it was because I was out of shape and getting older.  I am happy to report that I am now in much better physical shape, but I do keep getting older.  Enough unsettling reverie, I’m going back to talking about the rim of my youth.

On their days off, many of the young workers went hiking. One of the guys, who worked with me in the kitchen pantry, was an especially avid hiker. Throughout the summer, several people might take the 23 (give or take) mile hike cross the canyon on their day and ½ off and then catch a ride back from the South Rim to the North Rim. In the same amount of time, this particular friend could hike across the canyon and back. What would he pack for nourishing food?  He would take loaves of Wonder-style sandwich bread and squish them into handy, easily portable little balls.  While I never tried that one myself, this friend also turned me on to grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  I wish I had one right now, but I am controlling myself because I want to be in shape for the next time I hike the canyon.

Vocabulary malfunction I will name our friend Sally right here online. She’s on record somewhere anyway as Tom and my maid of honor. When she was a child, Sally spent many of her summers at the North Rim. Sally’s dad, a zoologist, studied the Kaibab squirrels that live only on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Sally’s dad was a genial person and I interacted with him many times through the years. I remember one particular conversation I had with him. I think it was by Bright Angel Point, when we were talking about the canyon. I am still embarrassed about this discussion. I kept saying the Grand Canyon was far-out. At that point in my life, I am sorry to say, I didn’t seem to have any other words to describe the place  As I said, he was a genial man, but Sally’s dad looked mildly disgusted at my words.  I had a college degree and was an English major type to boot.  There may not be words available to adequately describe the canyon, but I wished I had at least been able to come up with some more specific and less clichéd vocabulary.  I am sitting here now, though, and trying to think of apt modifiers and I still can’t do it. What? Fabulous, stunning, deep, wide, multi-colored, changeable, unchanging—I still can’t do it.  I just asked Tom to give me three words to describe the canyon.  He said, awesome, magnificent, and stupendous. See what I mean?  If you haven’t been there yet, I hope you get to go to the canyon some time and spend some time behind the postcard.

Ain’t no reason to go up, ain’t no reason to go down You can take U.S. Route 89A from Marble Canyon or from Fredonia, Arizona up to the Kaibab Plateau. At Jacob Lake, you take Arizona State Route 67 through the Kaibab National Forest to the North Rim.  Beetles, fires, and encroaching civilization have had their effect on the forest. Even so, I can still just barely imagine Rivendell back in there somewhere, but now the Orcs have been making inroads into the forest.

A few weeks into that first summer, our chef organized a party out of the national park and into the national forest.  That may have been because it was easier to drink out there—as I recall, our chef was partial to the now-defunct Olympia beer.  It was night in the forest and I sang (in my mind or aloud) lines from Joni Mitchell’s “Songs to Aging Children”:

Does the moon play only silver
When it strums the galaxy
Dying roses will they will their
Perfumed rhapsodies to me

I didn’t know what the lines meant then, but they struck a chord. If we were aging children then, I am sure I don’t know what we are now, but I still like the lines.

Point of information: I wrote my Masters’ thesis on An Analysis of the Imagery, Structure, and Theme in the Song-poetry of Joni Mitchell, so Joni and related characters tend to pop up in these pages. I guess it is my version of David Copperfield’s Mr. Dick. You probably shouldn’t bother to look for the thesis.  I think there is a copy in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. My original copy is in a box somewhere in our temperature controlled storage unit at 1525 Putt-Putt Place in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Back in the day, I dreamed of sending a copy of the thesis to Joni. At the dollar a page good copies cost back then, it would have been hundred-plus dollars that we didn’t have.  Now, I have a hundred dollars, but the time has passed.

One day I wondered alone in the forest and I found a bee-loud glade. One day, or maybe it was the same day, I considered jumping from the rim to a rock outcropping that would have let me actually stand within the Roaring Springs side canyon. My natural cautiousness stopped me. I found out years later that Tom had come across that same place and contemplated the same action. I guess if we had jumped— like some nature-crazed lemmings— into Roaring Springs Canyon, we wouldn’t have had to think about memories and meanings and mortality now.  On balance, it has been worth it keeping on, but I would have liked to have stood on that rock.

Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream Here I am, back at the dream (bars) where I began this reverie a few posts ago. I love thinking of my mother and father and my brothers in the pleasant peninsula of my childhood.  I love thinking of the canyon and those days and nights with my friends, the rocks, and the forest.  Time has passed, slowly or not, but Wordsworth was right:

… Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But, oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration

Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” 1798

Cookies on the North Rim

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Canyon Storm

“Canyon Storm” oil on canvas by Sally Hall

In the summer of 1971 I worked in the kitchen of the Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Less than a week after I got to the rim, I fell in love with a handsome young cook. He was the one who was always seemed to be cutting his hands and the one who actually washed his hands. (I’m not compulsive about hand-washing, but you might be amazed at how rarely I saw food preparers wash their hands).  He worked at night. I’ll tell you his name: Tom. It’s easy to remember his name because he has been my husband for most of these last forty years. At night, Tom prepared the box lunches for the dudes who the following morning would ride the mules down the North Kaibab Trail to Roaring Springs. He also prepped food for the next day’s cooking and did general kitchen clean up. I worked during the day, but, besotted with him—just friends I said to everyone—I stayed up late talking with Tom while he worked. To have a more practical reason/cover for being in the kitchen, I decided to make cookies for the help.  As kids, my brothers and I had made lots of cookies (dream bars, hermits, Swedish nut cookies, brownies and more), so I thought I knew what to do.  I just had to figure out how to make cookies for, I’m guessing, fifty or more employees.  I did figure how and I remember I made the old standards like oatmeal or peanut butter. Later on, other friends got into making the cookies. Maybe this was partly because we were young and homesick even up there with the wind in the ponderosas and with all our brand-new friends from everywhere.  People would make runs off the rim for the chocolate chips and that was no mean feat. At least back then, there didn’t seem to be chocolate chips in Fredonia, Arizona (73 miles away), so usually people went to Kanab (80 miles away, i.e., 160 miles round trip for a few packages of Nestle’s Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels).  On occasion, people picked up the goods in Cedar City, Utah 168 miles away.

The bottom-line on the cookies The other workers liked the cookies. Most of the workers were high school and college students, who were energetic and open to making new friends.  Many of our co-workers were Mormons and cookies and milk seemed right up their alley.  There were also a few older workers at the rim, too.  One kindly, capable woman—my roommate’s aunt—managed the curio shop. Another older woman (I call her older now, not old, because I have now attained the age she was then) from Goshen, Utah supervised the housekeepers and one friendly older guy ran the gas station.  There was one dour old man—the night watchman.  I was a little scared of him. He seemed so scrawny, old, and wizened and his skin was mahogany (or something) from his years as a sheepherder.  Being the little Midwestern rube that I was, the man seemed exotic, but I didn’t seem to be able to connect with him.  Then along came those cookies, made in the romantic (but chaste) night kitchen. When the cookies were served, the sheepherder loosened up.  It was a long time ago now, but I think he smiled.  My lessons: cookies almost always work—there is something to that sharing food thing. There is something else I often still forget even now, so far down the road from that summer. All those clues we think we get from a person’s exterior (book/cover) aren’t true.

Tomorrow: Ain’t No Reason to Go in a Wagon to Town

Dream Bars

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For almost three years now, I have been discarding books, clothes, papers and other relics of my life so far. I believe during this process I have been trying to discard physical bits while retaining the stories behind the things. I am just now finishing up a book about this process. My husband says the book is about mortality. I don’t know.  You can read that book when or if it gets published.  Today, though, I just wanted to go through the one remaining bag of books, magazines, recipes, and other oddments.  I’m going to start with a packet of my mother’s recipes.

Dream Bars
½ C shortening
½ C brown sugar
1 C flour
Mix to a crumbly mass and pat into a shallow pan, 8 x 12 inch
Bake in a mod. oven (375°) for 10 min
Remove mixture from oven & spread on top a mixture of
1C brown sugar
½ tsp. baking powder
2 eggs
¼ tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla
1 ½ C shredded coconut
2 Tablespoons flour
1 C nutmeats
Bake 20 more minutes
Cool slightly & cut in barsHermits
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 Tbs lemon juice
2 ½ cups pastry flour (sift before measuring)
1 tsp soda
¾ tsp cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, salt
¼ tsp cloves
¾ cup butter or shortening melted
1 cup seed raisins
Beat eggs, add sugar, lemon juice. Mix flour & dry ingredients, sift
into egg mixture & beat until well blended. Add butter and raisins.
Drop by tsp on baking sheet
Bake at 375° 10 to 12 minutes.Date Nut Bread
2/3 cups boiling water
1 pkg pitted dates
¼ cup butter
2/3 cup sugar
¼ tsp salt
1 ¾ cup flour
½ tsp salt
1 cup walnuts
Put dates, butter, sugar in bowl, pour water over—add flour, nuts
line with wax paper Boston bread pans: 4 in diameter, 3 in deep,
5 in long
350° i hr.

making cookies

I’m quite sure that the dream bar recipe was written on the index card in my mother’s hand and with her recipe-writing narrative style, but I think the hermit recipe might be written by my aunt.  When my aunt died a few years ago, my sister-in-law gave me my aunt’s recipe collection.  I think through these years of winnowing, reorganizing, and moving, maybe I’ve inadvertently mixed some piles together.  Like all the ladies from way back in the last century, both my mother and my aunt wrote a fine hand, but I think my aunt was probably more likely to have used a fountain pen than my mom was. (Another clue is the recipe for Normandie Cake I see in the pile. If my mother ever made Normandie cake, I missed it, and that would never have happened).  I don’t think it matters and what am I doing writing to you about cookies anyway?

Note: Like some others of my own generation, I am somewhat uncomfortable providing certain specific types of information on the Internet. So, I just deleted my aunt’s and my sister-in-law’s names from this text. It reads better with their names, but, at least until I am more comfortable with this format, I’m going with general terms. I seem to want to spill my guts for the world to read, but, at the same time, remain vaguely anonymous.

I want to throw away these remaining scraps of paper, but I do not move It is another day and I plan on throwing away all of the index card recipes except for the one for dream bars.  I’ll do that on yet another day, maybe.  I also seem to be having a little issue throwing away the old-fashioned pickle recipes. I think that my mom and I made the nine day pickles one summer. Now that I’ve told you that, I am going to throw away the recipes right here at the Starbucks (Second and Fillmore, Cherry Creek, Denver 8.29.12) Days later: I still have the pickle recipe card sitting on the table next to me.

Where’s this story heading? See Cookies at the North Rim, coming soon.

Tree-of-Heaven

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tree-of-heaven

tree-of-heaven

This summer I have sometimes been annoyed at my next plot neighbors at the Gove Community Garden in Denver, Colorado. I think this is because I a) am too officious b) am too quick to take unintended offense, c) have too much free time on my hands, or d) all of the above.  As I understand it, the rules, or at least the culture of the garden, directs community gardeners to keep the paths between the individual plots neat and free of plants.* This doesn’t seem difficult, and yet, I have suffered morning glories and tomato plants creeping into the buffer zone (about three feet wide) between the neighbors plot and mine. I admit to having ripped the offending morning glory tendrils and moving the tomato vines back to where (I thought) they belonged. I love morning glories, by the way, but they have the same strangling habit as their aggressive perennial cousin, bindweed.

What has incensed me recently—I am not exaggerating and it is a good thing that I rarely see anyone in my part of the garden space—is that these neighboring gardeners have let a two-trunked tree-of- heaven (Ailanthus altissima, http://www.nps.gov/plants/alien/fact/aial1.htm) grow to about eight feet high right by the fence that separates their plot from a National Jewish Health parking lot.  Don’t they know what they are doing by letting this invasive get a foothold?  I looked earlier today and, sure enough, more branches are coming up even though we’ve already had a hard freeze.

I keep asking myself why this little circumstance bothers me so much.  I want to go over and rip out the hellish little tree with my bare hands. Worse, I have been wanting to rat on the neighbors to the leaders of the garden.  That is, I want to be a vigilante or a stoolie—not too impressive for a supposedly liberal, high-minded person (as I like to characterize myself).  The ice cap is shrinking faster than ever, the candidate I don’t want to be president is gaining in the polls, and I am fixated on this one clump of tree-of-heaven.  Furthermore, you probably remember that the tree in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a tree-of-heaven.  It seems disrespectful to rail against the lovely metaphor, so what’s with me?

Sometime in late 1976, my husband Tom, our daughter Sarah, and I moved from married student housing at the University of Utah to a little house on Iowa Street near the university in Salt Lake City. We thought we were moving up. Some of our friends lived nearby and Tom could walk to class and work. Also, on this decrepit little street, we wouldn’t be so relentlessly (but cheerfully and pleasantly) surrounded by peppy young Mormon couples and families. The house itself was more of a shack with a lean-to attached to the back of it.  Nonetheless, for all of its drawbacks, the house had a good vibe.  We always thought that  a very poor, but very nice, old lady must have lived there before us.

Initially, Tom and I were excited about having a place for a little garden. Like I knew how to garden back then, but I was hopeful and enthusiastic.  Well, it turns out our tiny backyard was a forest primeval of tree-of-heavens and it contained more layers of dog excrement than I have ever come across before or since. So, Tom and I pulled out scores or hundreds or thousands of ailanthus.  That’s how I know how easy they are to pull up.  We piled the dead plants into a huge pile by the side of the house. I’m not sure what we did with the dog crap but I assume we bagged it and tossed it on the pile.   If I remember correctly,  the landlord (I think there is a better title for him, but I am playing it cagey because I see on the Internet that this person is still around in Salt Lake  and that he is somewhat in the public eye) said he would dispose of the detritus if we would clean out the yard.  I don’t think you are surprised that he didn’t do so in a timely fashion.  Finally, after weeks of waiting, we called the city and complained anonymously.  After that, the trees-of-heaven and the rest of the mess disappeared.

zinnias, Thumbelina mix

Zinnas, Thumblina mix from Burpee image

I planted tomatoes, beans, peppers and all of the standard stuff and we made a little lawn of tiny zinnias (probably Thumbelina mix). In May 1977 our son Robert was born.  We have a photograph of his small self and his mom in front of a wild mass of roses that bloomed all the more radiantly when the ailanthus grove had disappeared. Note:  I would have inserted a Google Images photo of a similar rose, but I did not find any as wild and fine as those I see in my memory.

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*I confess that I myself have let a clump of lamb’s ears grow into the path across from my other neighbor’s garden plot. I had my reasons: this neighbor had a bigger patch of lamb’s ears crowding the path, so I thought my  smaller clump provided symmetry, I like lamb’s ears more than morning glories, etc. Be that as it may, I dug up the lamb’s ears today and left a bag of them next to the tool shed in case anyone else wants them.