Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 8

Good advice. We get out of the car and walk across the road. I look down over the dam, past the power cables, scanning the canyon for condors. It's a long way down. The walls, jagged layers of dark Navajo sandstone, draw the eye to where the turbulent waters of the Colorado River tumble out of a tube roaring with delight, I imagine, at their release after having been pent up behind the concrete wedge of the dam. No condors ride the thermals above the churning water.

"Before d.a.m.nation," as Abbey calls the time before the Bureau of Reclamation made it lie still for jet skiers and houseboaters, the Colorado was a great river. Now it's the most dammed river in the United States. The Hoover Dam, at the far end of the Grand Canyon, was the first. Completed in 1935, it stores up water for Las Vegas in Lake Mead and was at the time the largest electric generating plant in the world (it is now the thirty-fourth largest). Protests from the Sierra Club and from citizens such as Seldom Seen Smith, the hero of Abbey's novel of eco-terrorism, The Monkey Wrench Gang, prevented the bureau from turning the entire Grand Canyon into a gigantic reservoir, but even so the river b.u.mps into a dam every hundred miles along its 1,470-mile course from the Rockies to its outlet in the Sea of Cortez. Between here and there, 95 per cent of its water will have been siphoned out of it, and the 5 per cent that is left when it crosses the Mexican border evaporates in the desert before it can get to the Pacific. The mighty Colorado River no longer reaches the sea.

We could cross the river here, but instead we circle back to Route 89 and head for the bridge where the grocery girl said we might see a condor. A California condor might be just the thing to cheer me up.

CALIFORNIA CONDORS once covered about as much of the continent as we will on our trip. They were sacred to the West Coast natives for millennia: an archaeological site in West Berkeley, California, that dates back three thousand years yielded a complete, articulated condor skeleton arranged and buried exactly like the human corpses found at the same site. In eastern native cultures, wild turkeys were subst.i.tuted for humans in ceremonies that once involved human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism. Here in the West, that honour was given to the California condor, the bird most likely to have been the spark for the Thunderbird myths.

But the condor population has been in decline for many years, probably since the last ice age, which didn't favour large animals with a lot of surface area and specialized appet.i.tes. Not that condors were fussy eaters; so long as something was dead, they'd eat it. The coup de grace was European settlers, who reviled condors and shot or poisoned them at every opportunity.

By 1981, there were only nineteen California condors left in the wild; five years later, despite a vigorous program of removing eggs and chicks from wild condor nests and raising them in zoos, there were only five California condors living outside captivity. The best estimates were that the species was one bad meal away from extinction.

That's when the Condor Recovery Program, organized by the Los Angeles and San Diego Zoos, began collecting the last remaining adult condors from the wild and raising them in special breeding facilities, called "condorminiums." The last five condors on Earth became egg-laying machines. As the eggs hatched and nestlings matured, they were released into the wild in national parks throughout California and Arizona. While researching my book Vulture, I spoke with Mike Wallace, the condor specialist at the Los Angeles Zoo and leader of the Recovery Program, who told me that his long-term plan was to have three hundred birds reintroduced to the wild by the end of the twentieth century. By now, as Merilyn and I approach the Navajo Bridge, that plan has been accomplished, and wild condors are once again flying over wilderness areas where they haven't been seen for thousands of years. Sixty have been released in the Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area, which lies ahead of us.

We park at the south end of the bridge and walk out to the midway point. Another couple is already there, looking upriver with binoculars. They appear to be what Edward Abbey called, unkindly, New Yorkers: in their sixties, wearing pressed khaki and stout hiking boots. Abbey would have looked around for a Winnebago to sneer at, but I can see their car, a sedate sedan, parked not far from ours. And I, too, am wearing khaki and hiking boots.

"Peregrine falcon," the woman says when we come up to them. The man points to a spot along the cliff face. We can tell from the quality of their Bausch & Lomb binoculars that they are serious birders, and by the fact that they don't talk except to convey information. And sure enough, there is the falcon, perched on a narrow ledge about halfway between the river and the lip of the canyon, above an arrow of white guano that identifies the ledge as its regular roosting spot.

"Have you seen any condors?" I ask the woman.

Over her shoulder, I can see Merilyn gesticulating wildly for me to come and come quickly. She has continued walking along the bridge and is almost at the far end. I excuse myself and hurry down to where she is pointing triumphantly to a black object resting on one of the bridge girders, slightly below the road level. At first I think it's a raven, but when I focus my binoculars, I realize with a jolt that it's a California condor. There is no mistaking its bald, goofy-looking pate, its baleful eye, and the way it sits hunched on the girder, as though shrugging its black shoulders at the world and only incidentally keeping its featherless neck warm. It's odd how vultures manage to look repulsive and comical at the same time. The bird appears uninterested in us, probably because we are still breathing. There are bold white squares on each of its shoulders, painted with the number 50. All released condors have radio transmitters implanted in their shoulders and under their tails so that their movements can be traced telemetrically, and they are numbered so they can be monitored visually, too.

"h.e.l.lo, Condor 50," I say to it. No response, unless its eye becomes slightly more hooded. In my notebook, I have a list of all condors released in Arizona since 1992. As much is known about the bloodlines of these condors as about most racehorses. Condor 50, male, hatched at the World Center of Birds of Prey in Flagstaff, April 9, 2001, released in the Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area on December 9, 2002, along with a female (Condor 41), four days younger. I scan the cliff faces with my binoculars, but there is no sign of her.

On our way back to the car, we tell our fellow twitchers about Condor 50.

"Yes," the woman says, "we saw him when we left the car. He's here every day. He's quite a handful, when he wants to be. Last year, down in the canyon, he tore a hole in a camper's tent and stuck his head into it looking for food. I guess captive-bred condors aren't shy around people."

"This is my first," I tell her. "A beautiful bird."

She beams. "If you want to see condors, you're in the right area," she says.

We thank the couple and head back to our car, where, before heading up the highway, I take out our checklist and put a satisfying tick beside "California condor."

It's barely nine o'clock in the morning, and as far as I'm concerned, it's already been a good day. After witnessing the wreckage of a great river, it's good to see something that we as a species have done right.

MEANDERING, that's how we're travelling. Going toward whatever destination presents itself.

"We'll make a plan as we go along," I say cheerfully.

"Or not make one at all," Wayne counters.

"Right." It is one of those marriage moments when we acknowledge the difference between us without feeling it an abyss.

We're on the other side of Marble Canyon, in the Arizona Strip, a wedge of five million acres tucked between the Colorado River and the Utah border. The road swings close to the rise of monumental red b.u.t.tes known as the Vermilion Cliffs.

It's still cool, but the sun is out, drawing oxblood and ruby from the stone. I roll down my window and snap pictures that I erase as soon as I see them. This landscape resists the frame. And yet, it feels familiar precisely because it has been so frequently framed, in endless commercials for tough trucks and as the backdrop for all those Hollywood westerns that made an icon of the American wagon train conquering the West.

I think of those first white travellers, plodding for days across this red plateau, stopped in their tracks by sheer walls of rock dropping to the Colorado. They couldn't know that if they turned left, they'd be faced with the vast chasm of the Grand Canyon. The lucky ones turned right and came to a place where the plateau knelt down to the water, at a crossing that became known as Lee's Ferry, a narrows that gives access onto the Arizona Strip.

"Look! A house!" I exclaim.

"Where?"

"Under that big stone."

Close by the foot of the cliffs, a red tongue of rock licks out over a wall of roughly stacked adobe, held together by nothing but hope. Sc.r.a.ps of wood painted Arizona turquoise crazily frame the low openings of a window and a door.

"Somebody lives here?"

"I doubt it." The shack looks like something Wile E. Coyote might have built from a cheap Acme kit that included a bottle of water and a bag of sand. "Look, there are more."

Under every overhanging hoodoo, a crumbling ruin of mud brick, here and there a thin cedar pole. We make out a house, maybe a chicken coop, a shed, an animal pen, an outhouse with its back to the road.

"There's a town marked on the map," I say. "Cliff Dwellers Lodge. Could this be it?"

In the desert, we are discovering, the definition of "town" loosens to embrace the faintest human breath. Cliff Dwellers Lodge is not a village, not a settlement, not even a lodge. It is a pause in the grey coiling road, the spot where Blanche Russell's car broke down one day in the late 1920s. Blanche was a dancer with the Ziegfeld Follies. When her husband, Bill, was diagnosed with tuberculosis, she hung up her tap shoes and drove him west in search of the hot, dry climate the doctors said would be the cure. The Navajo Bridge was brand new then, so they crossed the Colorado at the same place we did rather than a few miles north, at Lee's Ferry.

They weren't much past Marble Canyon when their old Ford broke down at the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs. Blanche, looking around, must have thought it might not be such a bad place to hole up for a while. It was definitely hot and dry. She threw a tarp against the biggest of the wind-carved rocks and set up house. There was nothing around for miles except homesteads abandoned to the drought, a sprawling herd or two of longhorns, and people like the Joads on their way to somewhere else. Blanche and Bill collected stones and pressed the endless sand into adobe bricks, shaping rooms as they felt the need. Pa.s.sersby who stopped to gawk were invited to help in exchange for a meal. Before long, Blanche was running a diner, serving sightseers who came up by bus from the Grand Canyon. She installed a hand-operated gasoline pump when tourists started driving out in their cars to see the North Rim for themselves. And she sold water from Soap Creek and pigeons she raised in a coop to Mormons travelling the Honeymoon Trail to St. George to have their marriages sealed.

I like to think of Blanche and Bill ending their days in this splendid ruddy isolation, but they lasted only a decade. Blanche sold her collection of makes.h.i.+ft structures to a local rancher who turned the restaurant into a bar during the war, then pa.s.sed it on to a couple who kept the place going into the early 1950s, when the nuclear bombs the government set off in the Nevada desert shook the ground so profoundly that Art Johnson, who was charged with keeping up the place, thought it would surely fall on his head.

It's hard enough to imagine settlers crossing these barren plateaus, almost impossible to imagine anyone staying. No telephone. Radio only on a good day. Tourists now and then. Nothing but arrowhead hunting to pa.s.s the time-and watching the windswept curve of boulder that was roof, wall, and sometimes both, wearing steadily away, s.h.i.+mmying now and then to a blast that could be neither seen nor heard.

People seem to take up such places by accident. I hear the story of Blanche Russell from Wendy, who owns the new Cliff Dwellers Lodge, which we find around the next bend in the road: another spread of low buildings made of stones tumbled from the cliff, but cobbled together in a more organized and rea.s.suring way. Twenty-six years ago, Wendy came here for the summer to wait tables at nearby Marble Canyon Lodge, fell in love with a river guide named Terry Gunn, and never left. Now they have a son whom she home-schools rather than put him on a school bus at six in the morning for the slow, convoluted drive into Page.

Bob, who brings us weighty plates of eggs, sausages, and hash browns at the lodge restaurant, is another itinerant, a self-described couch surfer who worked both rims of the Canyon and sometimes down in Flagstaff, mostly living in his truck until he stopped in at the motel one day and stayed. Now he presides over the kitchen that serves the best road food we've had yet: the hash browns are good, not perfect, though they are real potatoes, grated and fried with fresh onions, just a little underdone.

"Why didn't anybody at the Canyon tell us about this place? Or Marble Lodge?" I ask Wendy. When we inquired at the Grand Canyon, everyone said the same thing: Page'd be your best bet.

"Travel rule number 21," Wendy laughs. "Never ask a local."

The combination general store, fly shop, and gas bar attached to the lodge offers an astonis.h.i.+ngly varied display of groceries, hardware, sports clothing, fis.h.i.+ng gear, and, yes, books. We have nowhere to go, nothing we have to do: we met our only deadline two nights ago at the El Tovar. We are definitely on freefall holiday now. We each buy a hiking s.h.i.+rt impregnated with UV block against the blazing sun. We're in the desert, after all. We go up and down the aisles, pick up sunscreen and mosquito repellent. Wayne lets loose a little yelp when he spots The Monkey Wrench Gang. I discover the Mormons.

Rediscover, I should say. I first met them in the guise of two very cute boys in slim black suits who drank numerous gla.s.ses of water in my parents' living room for most of one sunny afternoon. I was fourteen, home alone. When they knocked on the door and I invited them in, they turned and looked at each other as if their prayers had just been answered.

We are firmly in Mormon country here on the Arizona Strip. Lee's Ferry was built in 1871 by John Doyle Lee, a Mormon settler with nineteen wives and sixty-seven children. Into the early 1900s, his was the only ferry crossing the Colorado between Moab, Utah, and Needles. (Before Lee built the ferry, the river was forded at the Crossing of the Fathers, which is now under Lake Powell.) Lee's seventeenth wife, Emma, managed the ferry while her husband was off with the Mormon militia, fighting the United States Army for authority over the Utah Territory, which the Mormons had organized as a kind of theocratic democracy under Brigham Young. They were fighting the influx of non-Mormon settlers, too, sometimes masquerading as marauding Indians in order to frighten them off. At Mountain Meadows, a wagon train from Arkansas was raided and the men, women, and children who surrendered-120 people-were murdered. Seventeen children under the age of eight were spared to be distributed among Mormon families, while the corpses of their families were left to rot in the sun. Nine men were arrested for the killings, but only Lee was convicted, then executed by firing squad at the site of the ma.s.sacre.

The cute boys didn't tell me that. Wendy does. There must be a dozen books on her shelf about the Mormons.

"I'm hooked," she says. "The Honeymoon Trail ran right close to here."

For a religious sect that encouraged multiple marriage, they certainly didn't make it easy. To marry, a Mormon settler had to travel from his homestead somewhere in the midwest to the town of St. George, tucked in the far southwestern reaches of Utah. Here the faithful had built a glistening white church of plastered sandstone, a castellated Gothic affair that was the first temple dedicated west of the Mississippi River. It is still the oldest operating Mormon church, with eighteen "sealing rooms" in which marriage rings are exchanged. In the 1800s, that journey, by foot, horse, or cart, could take weeks. As the young couples moved along the trail, they'd stop to chisel their names into boulders and cliff walls, the same impulse, I suppose, that prompted Alexander Mackenzie and Lewis and Clark to carve their names in trees. For years, Wendy's husband, Terry Gunn, has been recording Mormon graffiti with his camera: Ed Finney 1882. Adams, Joseph, from Kaysville to Arizona and Busted on June AD 1873. Ferrin, Zobedia Nov. 12 1882. 1885.

Each new betrothal meant another trip on the Honeymoon Trail. John Doyle Lee must have pa.s.sed this way eighteen times. Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially disavowed polygamy in 1890, the practice of "plural marriage" and "spiritual wives" continues among splinter fundamentalist groups, both in the United States and in Canada. I think of the polygamist Mormons of Bountiful, British Columbia, recently in the news as a haven used by Warren Jeffs, one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, accused of arranging marriages between his adult male followers and underage girls. Jeffs is apparently husband to more than fifty women.

"To be interested in American ident.i.ty is to be interested in marriage," Nancy Cott concludes in Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. The same might be said of Canada, or of us-no doubt about it, marriage affects ident.i.ty. As the Harvard historian points out, the so-called Christian model of lifelong monogamous union between one man and one woman wasn't the standard on this continent until just over a hundred years ago, a pretty short history for what politicians like to call one of their "traditional" values. Among First Nations peoples, marriage and divorce were often fluid. The first Europeans adopted the practice of "bush wives," a version of bigamy. Among early settlers, women were at such a premium that land-hungry bachelors would line up at railway stations to whisk single girls off to the mayor's office so they could stake a larger claim as married men. Americans were seen as particularly wild and woolly. In fact, many of the strict marriage laws in early Canada-no deviation, no divorce, no remarriage- were put in place specifically to protect us from the corrupt, immoral influence of the United States, a civic fence erected against a boisterous and bawdy neighbour.

"A viable society depends on stable families, which depend on stable marriages," trumpeted an editorial in the Calgary Herald last summer, supporting Prime Minister Stephen Harper's announcement that Canada's Parliament would consider reopening the same-s.e.x marriage debate in the hopes of reversing an earlier decision that allowed gays and lesbians to marry. (On July 20, 2005, Canada became the fourth country in the world and the first country in the Americas to legalize same-s.e.x marriage nationwide.) At the same time, in the United States, President Bush was calling for a ban on gay and lesbian unions, invoking the sacred spectre of "family values." But the truth is that marriage, especially here in the Wild West, was not a tradition so much as a metaphor for voluntary allegiance and permanent union, the moral bedrock of the freshly minted United States of America. No wonder polygamous Mormons were hunted down and arrested: they were terrorists in the bedrooms of the nation.

"Ready to get back on the trail, pardner?" I say to Wayne. Something about the desert has put a John Wayne tw.a.n.g in my talk.

"You all have a good time now," Wendy says as we head for the door.

"We will," Wayne and I reply in unison.

"We already are," I add, taking his hand. Ride for a week in a buckboard to seal my marriage to this man? Sure. We're never so happy as when we're on the road.

Wendy laughs. "I can see that."

WHEN we leave the Cliff Dwellers Lodge, we drive up onto the steppes that rise toward Utah from the Grand Canyon's north rim. It feels as though we are climbing a stairway to a very large church. Repent, sinners; redemption is at hand.

Deserts have always been a.s.sociated with redemption: Brigham Young chose Utah over the California coast; Christ wandered off into the desert to deal with Satan; Moses redeemed the Children of Israel from the bread of affliction by parting the Red Sea and leading them into the Sinai Desert.

Much of early American literature is about the need for redemption. American culture is, despite its Hollywood glitz, a very religious culture. The five books held to be the American cla.s.sics, what critic Harold Bloom refers to as "the secular Scripture of the United States of America"-Moby-d.i.c.k, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Leaves of Gra.s.s-all deal with various quests for redemption: Ahab intent on ridding the world of evil (incarnate in the white whale); Hester Prynne redeemed of the sin of fornication through punishment, penance, and good works; Th.o.r.eau wanting Nature to redeem the careworn human spirit; the slave Jim redeemed from bondage by the actions of one kind soul. Bloom refers to Whitman as the redeemer of American poetry.

In fact, everything in America seems to be about redemption, even that which is ostensibly about something else, like losing weight. In 2006, a 410-pound man named Steve Vaught decided to walk from California across the United States "to drop a few pounds and find joy," as Steve Friedman writes in Backpacker magazine. Before Vaught even got out of California, however, he ceased to be a simple fat man walking and became thefatmanwalking.com, with a website, a ghost writer, and two doc.u.mentary filmmakers following him as he waddled off into the Mojave Desert. He eventually made it to New York, 114 pounds lighter and a lot wiser. His story, writes Friedman, is one of "suffering and redemption writ extra, extra large."

Perhaps this obsession with redemption comes from America's puritanical beginnings. ("Puritan" was originally a term of abuse. The Puritans preferred to call themselves "the G.o.dly.") According to this breakaway sect from the Church of England, mankind was by nature depraved and every circ.u.mstance was viewed as the judgment of an absolute and demanding G.o.d. The result, over centuries, is a state of confusion about the difference between a condition and a punishment: being obese isn't just the result of overeating or a sluggish hypothalamus, it's a punishment for gluttony. Those who are obese should feel guilty about it, and so losing weight becomes a quest for redemption.

Social psychologists studying the differences between Eastern and Western ways of thinking have found that, whereas Eastern cultures are capable of attributing small causes to great events (think b.u.t.terfly wings causing hurricanes), in the West we tend to equate the size of the cause with the magnitude of the event. Thus John F. Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination could not have been carried out by a lone gunman; it had to be a conspiracy involving top members of the government and the CIA. Similarly, 9/11 was not a catastrophe engineered by a handful of zealots; it was the opening salvo in a war between the United States and Islam.

I was in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory, on September 11, 2001. At six in the morning, I was at work at my desk, a week into a four-month stint as writer-in-residence at the Whitehorse Public Library, when Merilyn telephoned from home and told me to turn on the television. I was four thousand miles from New York and in a different country, and yet I felt the attack as though it had been aimed at me.

Jonathan Raban, in My Holy War, writes that the reaction in Seattle was similar to mine: this catastrophe could have happened anywhere. "The plane-bombs," he writes, "were squarely directed at the great abstraction of 'America,'" and that great abstraction, we know, includes Canada. Ottawa and Toronto were on the alert, and Merilyn, at our house between those two potential targets, felt no safer than any American citizen. Nor did I feel safe all the way up in Whitehorse: later that day, two Korean Air Lines planes that failed to respond properly to being hailed were force-landed in Whitehorse by United States Air Force fighter jets from Alaska. As Canadians, we were implicated in the attacks. "September 11 was different," Raban argues, "because it was so clearly and insistently about us." In Canada, we felt that "us" included us.

But Canadians didn't necessarily respond the way Americans did. That night, at a town meeting in Whitehorse, ministers and First Nations leaders took turns urging North Americans not to turn the incident into an excuse for war. After the meeting, I went to a bar with some friends and fell into conversation with Leo, a small, wiry man in his fifties, with steely grey hair, paint-spattered blue jeans, and a Grateful Dead T-s.h.i.+rt. He was from Ohio but had been living in Whitehorse for five years, working as a contractor. He wasn't having any of this turn-the-other-cheek stuff, he said.

"Last year," he told me, "I had a guy renting a room in my house. One night he was having a party and I knocked on his door and asked him to quiet down, and he started pus.h.i.+ng me around. He was a big guy, and he hit me pretty good over the head a couple of times, and I thought, This guy is going to knock me out and then he's going to finish me off. I had my cordless phone in my hand and I managed to dial 911 and then I just jabbed the phone as hard as I could into his rib cage, and by this time another guy who lived downstairs had heard the commotion and come up and pulled the guy off me, and the police came and took him away. Anyway, now I keep a baseball bat right by my door, and a slingshot with rocks. The guy in the bas.e.m.e.nt used to be a bouncer in Quebec, and he told me the trick with the baseball bat is to coat it with Vaseline. If a guy starts acting up, you poke him in the chest with the end of the bat, and when he tries to grab it from you his hand will slide off because of the Vaseline, and then you hit him."

I nodded, but told him I was a little vague about his point.

"My point is," he said, "that after that, I said I'm never going to let anyone get me like that in my own house. They can beat me up in the street or in the bush or in a bar downtown, and okay, I can take it. But if anyone tries to beat me up in my own house, I'm going to kill them. And that's how the United States feels right now."

The events of 9/11 gave the United States a kind of reprieve, a chance at redemption, as any ill feeling other countries harboured toward it was held in abeyance while America mourned. It was as though America were an unpopular, belligerent neighbour whose wife had just died. Slack was cut for it. Judgment was withheld, for a time. How would it react? A man whose wife has died might take the opportunity to reconsider his ways, view his former bellicosity in the new light of his bereavement. Or he might lash out again at his neighbours. There was that moment of grace while the rest of us watched, holding our breath, ready to either welcome the man into the fellow feeling of the neighbourhood if he repented, or else shrug and turn away if he didn't, murmuring that we had tolerated the fellow only because of his wife.

And so, it seems, we are driving through the backyard of a neighbour who keeps a baseball bat by the door and a slingshot with rocks. A neighbour aching for redemption.

MOMENTS ago, we were in desert. Now, when we see the sign saying we are entering the Kaibab National Forest, we laugh: the trees are chest-high, scattered across sand.

"They call this a forest?" we say, almost in unison.

But the road climbs swiftly and the trees take on girth, and soon we are in a dense pine woods. It's as if for a moment we only dreamed we'd driven south and instead have reached northern Ontario. Then, just as suddenly, the road coils sharply down from the strangely forested plateau. When we reach desert level again, we come upon two enormous yellow snowplows pulled off to the side of the road. Two men in orange safety vests lean against their trucks, smoking cigarettes. Their forms waver like a mirage.

"I have to get a picture of this," I say to Wayne, and he slows to a stop. The men eye our Ontario licence plates, as though we are two Trickster coyotes come to bewitch them.

"What are you guys doing here?" I can't keep the laughter out of my voice. Snowplows? In the desert? Are they kidding? These machines are built for a four-day blizzard in Montreal.

"Big storm on the way," the younger one says.

"You get a lot of snow here in the desert, do you?" Even Wayne is snorting under his breath.

"Enough," the older one says.

"Do you mind if I take your picture?"

"Sure. I guess." He looks at his partner, who shrugs in the universal language that says "Crazy tourists."

Our plan is to make a loop of three canyons-from the vastness of the Grand to the sheer red cliffs of Zion and on to the carved pinnacles and spires of Bryce-then head north and east to Arches National Park, where Wayne wants to pay tribute to Edward Abbey. Then we'll turn south through Mesa Verde, Taos, and Santa Fe to pick up Route 66 again at Albuquerque. This detour will take us up through Utah, across to Colorado, and down into New Mexico, circling the Four Corners, the only place in the United States where four states share a common point.

We cross into Utah at Fredonia, which we recognize from a distance by the gigantic "F" on the hillside.

"Just like Hollywood," Wayne notes. "Follywood."

The town was settled by Mormons. Some say the name is a commingling of the English "free" and the Spanish "dona," meaning "free woman," apparently referring to the Mormons' many wives. More likely it is just another town that took its name in the early 1800s, when Samuel Latham Mitchill was trying to get Americans to give up the name United States of America in favour of Fredonia as a more appropriate appellation for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Eleven states now contain towns called Fredonia, and for a very short time-forty days to be exact-there was a Republic of Fredonia in East Texas, declared in 1825 by a settler named Haden Edwards after he received a land grant from the Mexicans. Haden's plan was to conquer all of Texas and split it with the Cherokee.

I wish Mitchill had succeeded in his name-change campaign. It is a low-grade but constant irritant that this nation, squashed between the forty-ninth parallel and the Rio Grande, has appropriated for itself the name of an entire continent. Two continents, in fact. When Canada was created, it was considered part of the larger land ma.s.s known as America. (When Alexis de Tocqueville was sent by the French government to visit the American prison system in 1831, he understood that to mean both the United States and Canada.) When the United States began to call itself America, Canadians recoiled, as if we'd been annexed, as we have been, linguistically at least.

Fredonia-or Freedonia-has become something of a running joke in the United States. In the 1960s, Woody Allen, as a host on Candid Camera, asked people in the street, to hilarious effect, what they thought of Freedonia's bid for independence. (Rick Mercer in recent years took a page from that book to create his series Talking to Americans. In one famous segment, Mercer asks George W. Bush- the presidential candidate who claimed, "You can't stump me on world leaders"-for his reaction to an endors.e.m.e.nt by Canadian Prime Minister "Jean Poutine," to which Bush replied in all seriousness that he was looking forward to working with the head of state.) In the 1990s, the American satirical magazine Spy went further, successfully convincing several members of Congress to issue statements condemning "the ethnic cleansing in Freedonia."

Alas, the only nation of Freedonia is the fictional one conjured by the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. "Land of the Spree and the Home of the Knave," as Groucho puts it. In the movie, this tiny, obscure, autocratic nation-nothing at all like the great United States of America- is suffering from severe financial difficulties. Government leaders ask a wealthy widow, Mrs. Teasdale, for a loan to keep the country afloat, which she agrees to with the proviso that Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) run the country. On his first day in office, Groucho bursts into song: "If you think this country's bad off now, just wait till I get through with it."

"Must be George W.'s favourite movie," I say to Wayne.

WHEN Sharlot Hall, Arizona's " poetess laureate," as she was known, came along this route in 1911 in a covered wagon, she recorded seeing bison in the red canyons of the Vermilion Cliffs, "big-humped and s.h.a.ggy-maned and moving lazily down the trail," the scattered remnants of a herd introduced in 1906 by Buffalo Jones and Uncle Jim Owens, who thought the area would make excellent farming country. The semi-wild buffalo thrived for a time but soon ate themselves into an empty pantry, and the herd diminished. There are still some around, but they are not in evidence today.

What we do see are mule deer. Close relatives of the more familiar (to us) white-tailed deer, mule deer are so named because their large ears reminded someone of the ears of a mule. The males stand rigidly poised in the gravel clearings, staring hard at us as we pa.s.s, while the females go on kicking at the thin layer of snow that covers the desert floor. They have few other predators to worry about, wolves and grizzlies having long since been eradicated from these hills. There are still mountain lions in the forested areas, and coyotes might take the odd fawn. Ravens have been known to kill large ungulates by pecking at the eyes and a.n.u.s. But the deer we see don't appear to be leading particularly suspenseful lives.

MAUVE clouds roll in from the north, turning the sky that distinctive bluish-grey slate we know so well from home. We have left the desert and are in farm country, rolling hills dotted with m.u.f.fets of hay, sleek horses, well-tended houses and barns. There is snow on the fields, on the road, in the clouds racing up behind us.

"Let's skip Zion," I say when we get to the turnoff that leads west toward Hurricane and the national park. "Looks like there are a couple of nice inns near the entrance to Bryce."

Neither of us says it, but the clouds over Zion are distinctly threatening. If we were in Canada, we'd say they looked like snow.

In the years we were courting, I knew that as soon as the weatherman called for snow, or sleet, or hail, or even heavy rain, Wayne would be at my door. "Let's go for a ride," he'd say. The bigger the storm, the more his eyes would sparkle. My own capacity for risk-he'd say adventure-is not up to his, but even so, I'd laugh and haul on my coat, throwing a couple of chocolate bars and a candle into my pocket, just in case.

Instinctively, I pat my pockets. They're empty, but it doesn't matter: we're heading north, where the sky is clear blue.

On the map, the road is traced with a dashed green line, which means this is a scenic route. It pa.s.ses through the Dixie National Forest; if we keep going, we'll end up in Salt Lake City, and for a few minutes we consider that option.

"I wouldn't mind seeing the Mormon Tabernacle," I say. "I'd like to hear the choir."

But we've already made the decision to avoid cities, so when we come to the turnoff for Bryce, we take it, heading east on Route 12, advertised as the "Journey through Time Byway." Bryce Canyon itself is several miles down a narrow side road. A road, I notice now, that is highlighted in pink. Closed in Winter.

"We'd only be able to get as far as the park headquarters. The hotels all look closed, too."

"Anything else coming up?"

"The town of Tropic."