Grand Canyon, Disney-style

Standing on a corner in Winslow, AZ (Apparently, “Take It Easy” was written in Flagstaff, but the name didn’t have as nice a ring as Winslow.)

Finding out what all the hype is about on The Strip.

Petrified wood in the Painted Desert

Hoover Dam

I have a reputation in my family as a Disney hater. I know, I know. For the moment, I’ll skip my philosophical misgivings and just complain about the Packaged Trip, which is guilty by association. Ignore the one gargantuan price-tag and gaze upon all the savings and ease of the all-inclusive. It’s just not my style. I’m always sure I can come up with a cheaper option, for one thing, and I don’t like to be told what to do, for another.

However, the loss of my secure little RV home-on-the-road did a number on my confidence. I signed up for the Grand Canyon Railroad Experience, Rails to Rim Plus. The salesperson assured me I had scored a significant AAA discount. Here’s hoping.

Hotel rooms, buffet meals, train rides, gift shop vouchers, live-action entertainment. It was great fun. I just sat back and enjoyed myself.

When we said we were from Lubbock, our troubadour led some Buddy Holly songs.

Also, there was a conga line.

And gambling.

And a train robbery.

The consequence of the Packaged Trip was having to listen to the kids describe both the California condor and Cut-throat Kitchen (Food Network was playing on hotel room TV) as “uh-mazing” all in the same breath. Ditto for Grand Canyon vistas and seconds (or thirds, BECAUSE I CAN!) in the buffet line. With that stirring review, I’ll just post the pics and give this recommendation: Visit in bad weather, if you get the chance. The play of light and fog that we enjoyed on our stormy-day visit was much more dramatic than on the clear, sunny day.

What has always bothered me about Walt Disney’s philosophy was his desire to whitewash the ugly realities of life. For instance, when making The Jungle Book movie, Disney told the screenwriters not to read the actual Kipling book because he considered it too dark. It’s an impulse I struggle against in myself, I must confess.

Real life keeps butting in on my idyllic vacation. As we drove through one gorgeous mountain, canyon, or desert region after another, we listened to several historic novels that record the behavior of the men and women and children who took up residence in these places over the years. It marred the view to hear some of the accounts. And that’s just history. As horror stories from Beirut and Paris flooded my news feed, I wondered, “Can I just pretend it isn’t happening for a few more days? Do the kids really have to bear this right now?”

Out of the car speaker came an answer from Walk Across the Sea, an audiobook that was concluding. The narrator is a young girl who’s witnessed the expulsion of Chinese immigrants from her California seaside town in the late 1800s. She’s still sorting through the experience as she addresses her newborn baby brother:

“There are astonishing things in this world, Andrew John, and beyond what we can see are things more astonishing still. In the magnifying glass there is a whole secret world. Snowflakes like tatted doilies. Fantastical creatures in a drop of pond water. Jungles in a patch of moss. We are living in a place where there is mystery all around. Mystery inside, in the cells of our blood, mystery outside, in the stars. Mystery before we are born, mystery after we die. Mystery so deep it busts clean out of the charts we try to pin it in.

Terrible things can happen in this world, things you can’t explain away. It’s not safe here. I can’t promise you’ll be safe.

But there are miracles, too. Like you. And love. And glories, well beyond our knowing.”