Heinz Trucking

How does this work again? I type here and words appear on the internet?

Okay. Now all I have to do is remember how to construct a narrative.

First, let me explain about the shaved head. It's not nearly as big a deal as people made it out to be. It is not true that I shaved off my eyebrows - I only thinned them. Second, the deed was done for a good cause. They needed a guy to play Joseph, of the technicolor dream coat, for a VBS group of kids. This meant they needed someone who could play, on various days, a spoiled rich kid, a slave, and an Egyptian official. So they asked the only guy they knew with his own grease paint and a demonstrable willingness to dress up as the Count of Monte Cristo on one day and as a Tutankahmun wanna-be the next.

And, as we all know, the ancient Egyptians were big into head-shaving. Yes, even the women. Yes, even the men who lack all sense of dignity.

This actually went astonishingly well and on the last night when Joseph, aka Zaphnath-Paaneah, aka "Zappy Penny" did a prat fall while dancing for joy, the children spontaneously dog-piled onto him and tickled him quite extensively while their moms clucked and tried to pull them off. It was a good reminder of why Porkchop D. Clown exists.

The morning after VBS ended, we flew into Phoenix to begin our vacation. Things began badly when I got trolled by the car rental guy who convinced me that, since we were driving from Phoenix to Flagstaff, I needed to upgrade my reservation from a smallish sedan to an SUV - and I didn't realize this effectively tripled the cost of the rental until later that day. I'd be much more upset about this, but it turned out the SUV was a life saver, as you will see later.

The drive to Flagstaff was amazingly pleasant. First we stopped at the Phoenix Hard Rock for lunch because (a) it was right in frickin' front of us and (b) we weren't in any special hurry. Later during the drive we stopped at the Heard Museum which was both interesting and, frankly a little alien. It was our first real exposure to Native American culture (excuse me, "Indian" - I'll explain why later) and it was quite... trippy. Did you know Inuit art is all about transformations of the Kafka sort? It certainly seems that way, what with wasp/wolf hybrids and someone who looked like a Japanese Oni transforming into a butterfly, I wasn't sure if I was in an art museum or a Yu-gi-oh! tournament.

Even the guys you think you know all about - like the Navajo - seemed to be more interested in oddly sculpted bronze death masks than, you know, weaving blankets and stuff. (Although there were certainly lots of blankets and rugs available for sale in the gift shop. Sheesh! And here I thought the Amish liked to overcharge for bedding!)

Anyway, you'd think a 3.5 hour drive would have left the passengers bored and annoyed, but the fact that we were driving from the "low desert" to the "high country" meant that the terrain was constantly changing form as we drove did keep everyone entertained and fascinated till we got to Flagstaff and let the long day come to a close.

On Sunday we decided to check out Walnut Canyon, which was a few miles or so from our time-share. This turned out to be the first reason not to be utterly furious about the SUV because following the GPS we quickly found ourselves on a deeply rutted unpaved road which, at the end, had a sign saying people with GPS's should be careful about ending up on deeply rutted unpaved roads. Not the handiest place to put such a sign, I thought, but there you go.

Besides getting a first-hand look at Arizona's methods of road engineering, the main reason to go to Walnut Canyon is because the Native Americans (excuse me, "Indians") had built a pueblo half way up a butte that rises in the middle of the canyon. This is a spectacular piece of work and would probably be the biggest tourist draw in Pennsylvania if someone could figure out how to move it here but, of course, in Arizona this is considered a minor stop for tourists who are too lazy to go to the "real" ruins. We then saw Meteor Crater which was pretty cool although, in the end, not nearly as cool as Walnut Canyon. After dinner, we also got an orientation in mis-conceptions about the local people from Billy "I am NOT a Native American" Benali who explained that that term was simply a divisive way of creating barriers between the Navajo/Diné/Indians and whites and, anyway, he still enjoyed playing "cowboys and indians" by hanging around the tour bus drivers (who all dress like Wyatt Earp) and watching tourists do spit-takes.

Among the many things I learned from Mr. Benali was that the reason Navajo loved to wear silver and brass was because they didn't smith their own metal - having it was proof of how many whites and/or Spaniards you had killed in battle, or at least how much of their furniture and coins you stole when they weren't looking. Needless to say, Mr. Benali was covered from head to toe in silver bracelets, belt buckles, necklaces and bags made with lots of brass tacks presumably taken from someone's sofa.

And, yeah, Benali really was that self-deprecating - a bit too much for even my own tastes, but there really was a lot of information packed into his short presentation, including the fact that the Navajo and the Apache are the same tribe with different names, or that they didn't actually reach the South West until right around the same time the Spanish did - and in fact just in time to take posession of all the sheep the Spanish were abandoning after the Hopi convinced them (the Spanish) that the entire continent was cut in half by the Grand Canyon. (Benali even asserted that the Navajo word for sheep was "food that just stands there".) I certainly didn't realize this, I had the vague idea that the Indians had been more or less static for thousands of years but apparently that's completely untrue and, in fact, the Navajo made the transition from hunter-gathers to ranchers over just a few generations in the 1500s.

Monday was the first "real" day of our whirlwind tour as we had arranged to ride with one of the cowboys to Sunset Crater (Kind of cool, but disappointing since we didn't actually go in the crater. Still, I've never seen lava tubes and so on before.) then Wupatki which was a considerably larger set of ruins than Walnut Canyon and was described as an "ancient strip mall" by our cowboy tour guide. He actually had a sort of point since, apparently, Wupatki was actually a trading center rather than a town and was a place where the Inca and the Hopi got to hang out together swapping pottery, stories and sports. Very cool place, especially the blow hole. Sitting and feeling the sun on my back, looking at the deep blue sky and feeling the wind rush over my hand and into unexplored caves I was lost in the power this landscape had and still has.

Finally, of course, we hit the Grand Canyon. What can I say about that? It's big. It's deep. It's crowded. In a lot of ways, it's just too large to really appreciate - I enjoyed Wupatki and Walnut Canyon more. What I remember most about it was the strong urge to jump off an edge and soar like the hawks and crows I could see circling a thousand feet below. I actually asked our guide if anyone had flown a hang glider into the canyon and he said that "officially" no one ever had and that, unofficially, rules had tightened up so much since the 1980s to make it a practical impossibility.

Tuesday was supposed to be our unstructured day of hanging around the time-share loafing and swimming in the pool. Except that I wanted to ride a bike, my kids wanted to come along, and that turned out to be a surprisingly fate-fraught decision. We went to rent some mountain bikes but they were all reserved, so we ended up with 3 townies instead. We were enjoying our puttering around Flagstaff on a really extensive set of trails (and with an astonishingly bike-friendly bunch of drivers) when, after about 10 miles, Mary wiped out on a patch of gravel on a slight down grade & turn. I went back to see if the bike was dead (I assumed she had only scraped her knee) when I learned that she had apparently hurt her ankle, and too badly to continue riding. So, I had to dash back to where we parked the SUV, stuff my bike in, get back to where Mary and Mike Jr were waiting, load her and her bike in with mine, showed Mike how to use the GPS and took her to the pharmacy to get an ankle brace and some tylenol. This was the second reason for being glad of the SUV because, even with the front wheels off, there's no way I could have loaded those bikes into the trunk of a sedan. As it was, Mike earned a few respect points from his old man by demonstrating he could find his way back to bike shop despite being in unfamiliar country and having a GPS that turned out to have dead batteries. I guess he really is 18 now.

Anyway, 5 hours of ice packs later, Mary said she was feeling better but she couldn't feel her toes anymore. This worried me more than a bit because this is the kid who had broken her leg twice before while, each time, her parents smugly assumed the accident had been too minor to break a bone. So, still believing that she just had a bad sprain (but secretly hoping she could score some crutches for getting around on) I took her to an urgent care facility - and they determined that she had managed to break her tibia lengthwise over what looks like 4-6 inches from the ankle end upwards.

Since her ankle had swollen up (just like a sprain) they couldn't put a cast on it, so they splinted it and sent her off with crutches and strict instructions to stay there on the couch till after the 4th of July. When I asked the doctor about whether or not we should plan on an emergency flight home he said no, there was no point. When our family doctor agreed with this the next day, we decided to stay for the rest of the week, making Mary stay on the couch for as much as possible, and taking her to one museum each day while one pair of us our another would go to other things at other times. This was the 3rd reason to be happy about the SUV, since it meant Mary could get in and out more easily and I didn't have crutches sticking into the back of my head while I was driving.

Let's see. What else? I know we actually had 3 more days of vacation at that point, but I was so tired it all kind of blurred by, except for the trip Susan and I took to Sedona and then to Lowell Observatory. That was epic enough it deserves a diary entry of its own, so I think you'll just have to wait for it a few days, till I've had a chance to review the literally 1000 photos we took and to pick out the 20 or 30 really good ones.

Yawn. Is it Friday yet?

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