Chapter 3: Pollywogs

In the weeks after I sent that letter, something changed between me and Charlotte. We still chatted on the web. But she felt less like something on the screen and more like someone who simply became part of my life. The strange thing was how ordinary it all began to feel.

Mornings meant coffee on the porch and the quiet clank of tools in the shop. Some afternoons she practiced welding. Or she worked on her idea for the therapy center, scribbling notes in a yellow pad. At night I would cook, or we would drive into town for Italian or Tex-Mex.

I began to study her. I noticed she sometimes went very still – her face taking on a faraway look, thinking more deeply than I could imagine. She liked to see everything going on around her, so in restaurants she sat with her back to the wall. One thing was most striking of all: she didn’t like closed doors. I got a little tired of opening to circulate air, like in the shop, but mostly I let it go.

By the time I suggested a trip to the Grand Canyon, it felt like a perfectly natural thing to do. It was March; the air held the sweet scent of Texas mountain laurel, and blue bonnets filled roadside ditches. It was also warm enough that we could sit on the patio after dinner and share a glass of wine.

Why the Grand Canyon? I had a story about that.

Ten years ago, my climbing friend Lyn got a permit for a backcountry canyon trip: Grandview Point to South Kaibab. We flew down to Phoenix, rented a car, checked into a cheap motel, and in the morning took a cab to the trailhead at Grandview Point. After I had hiked maybe two hundred yards down the trail, I stopped. Sat on a rock. And looked around, breathing in the dry air. I saw rocks burnt red by the sun. Wind-carved towers rising from broken cliffs. Deep gorges falling away into shadow. Broad green plateaus. All under a sky so blue it seemed unnatural.

But what really got me was the silence. The kind that doesn’t just muffle noise but absorbs it. Swallows it. It made me realize how much noise I carried in my head all the time.

Lyn kept hiking. I sat there for maybe ten minutes.

Finally, I stood back up, settling the forty-pound pack on my shoulders and hips. I hiked for maybe a half mile down the steep trail, carefully balancing on boulders when needed, kicking dry dust in other spots. Once I glanced back at my tracks, saw where the boot tread made patterns like waffles. Then I spotted Lyn ahead of me, standing in the shade of Gambel oak. When I got close, he gave me a look and asked, “What do you think?”

I stopped, poked some rocks with my trekking pole, and watched a side-blotch lizard scamper along the branch of a juniper. “Lyn,” I said at last. “I think I’m home.”

That’s when the Grand Canyon became my happy place. Not because it was comfortable – it often was not. It was the utterly alien nature of the place that tugged at me. A half dozen mountains in a half dozen parts of the world look just like Everest, aside from the scale. No place, anywhere, looks like the Grand Canyon.

I have gone back every year since. Sometimes twice a year. So, of course I took Charlotte there. Of course, I wanted her to see it the way I first did. Of course, I thought this was going to bring us closer.

And of course, that did not happen.

At first, all seemed well. We spent two days on the road, cruising at fifty-five, listening to the tires hum as we crossed the vast flatness of West Texas, then drove north into New Mexico. Under clear skies and a warm sun, we stopped at a roadside stand in Pie Town. I bought two slices – apple for her, pumpkin for me. We ate them with plastic forks while standing in the parking lot.

Charlotte navigated with Waze on her phone while I drove. We listened to Emmylou Harris and Neko Case and Sarah Bareilles and talked about nothing important. We overnighted on BLM land in Red Rocks Park, the truck and trailer a few yards off the road, not another vehicle in sight. We burned pine firewood until late into the night, then drank our morning coffee watching the sun hit the crimson rocks.

By late afternoon of the second day, we were there – the South Rim’s Mather Campground, with its preposterously big camp sites, its cinnamon-barked Ponderosa pine, and the constant attention of ravens. They were little black dinosaurs, and you could see it in the way they walked – no, strutted. Head forward, eyes alert, opportunistic as hell. They could disassemble a campsite in five minutes.

We set up camp – unfolding camping chairs, placing the cooler with ice and beer in a convenient spot, laying out the solar panels and the Starlink dish. It got cold at night, and any water left in a saucepan or dishwashing tub froze. But the propane furnace held the interior of the Airstream at sixty degrees, and we didn’t mind anyway. By 10 in the morning the sun was bright, soft, and warm and our down sweaters came off.

We spent a day walking around the South Rim village, doing some tourist shopping, grabbing an afternoon beer in the bar at the stately Yavapai Lodge. At Hopi House I saw Charlotte admiring a small silver brooch set with turquoise. When she walked away to look at something else, I bought it for her, then produced it that evening. “That’s too much,” she said. I told her it would remind her of Arizona. And, maybe, of me.

At the bookstore she purchased a copy of my favorite book, Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon. I had met one of the co-authors, a doctor who worked in the canyon and had seen it all: heat stroke, falls, drowning, the clockwork mortality of fifty-five-year-old men trying to accomplish something and forgetting the elevation and the heat and their dodgy arteries. It was the elevation, mostly. These people often came from near sea level and suddenly had twenty-five percent less oxygen in their lungs. That hurt.

Charlotte read the first few chapters that night in a pool of light at the dinette, increasingly horrified. One incident described two hikers from Pennsylvania – a man and woman in their twenties – who tried to speed-hike from one trailhead to the other. But they misread the map; it was a thirty-two-mile hike, not twenty. It was a hot June day. And they had half the water they needed.

By noon the next day the man collapsed. The woman pressed on in a desperate effort to reach Phantom Ranch – at the bottom of the Canyon – and summon help. But she took what looked to her like a shortcut, cliffed out, and was trapped. Later, in the cool of the night, the man recovered and encountered a ranger, who walked him to the top. He was confident his companion had found her way to Phantom Ranch and safety, so he drove home and went to bed.

In the morning, he called the backcountry office to ask where his friend was, so he could pick her up in his car and take her somewhere for huevos rancheros and then a cool shower. “What friend?” was the reply. A search was launched. By the time rangers found her, huddled in a fetal position, the coroner estimated she had been dead for twelve hours. Her heart had stopped beating at about the time he had gone to bed.

What Charlotte couldn’t get over was that early on that second day they had found a pool of water.

The man refused to drink it.

There were pollywogs in it.

Pollywogs.

“So…people die here?” she asked. “Pretty often,” I had to admit. “It’s not a forgiving place.” I had almost died here once. A stumble, a head laceration and concussion, a flight out in a Park Service helicopter. I decided not to bring this up.

Charlotte frowned. “And you brought me here…like a date?”

“Well, yeah.”

She turned a page and kept reading. “You’re weird,” I heard her mutter.

The second afternoon we hiked the Bright Angel Trail. Not far – just a mile or so, enough to get well below the rim. I was in my element, talking nonstop about how the canyon formed, the rock layers, the Powell expedition. Charlotte asked questions – “Why is the Redwall red? – and seemed interested. But she also wore an amused smile.

I had deliberately timed the hike so we would come out in the dark. Once benighted, we donned headlamps that pooled yellow light on the trail. The Milky Way arched overhead like a garden hose spraying stars. “Oh my God,” she said, looking up. “I’ve never seen so many stars.” I felt like I had given her a gift.

That evening, I grilled tenderloin steaks directly on the glowing red coals of the campfire. Meat on embers. Charlotte watched, skeptical. “Won’t that ruin them?”

“Nope,” I said. “Watch.” I pulled the steaks off after four minutes per side, brushed off the ash, sliced one open, added sea salt and freshly ground pepper, “Oh my gosh,” she said, taking a bite.

After we ate, we sat for a long time near the campfire, watching the way the flames held both infinite variety and a single image. Later, we could hear the wind in the Ponderosa pine trees and the wail of a lone coyote.

In the morning, our last full day, we caught the shuttle bus to the South Kaibab trail. It’s a gem of a trail. But Charlotte began to struggle not long after we cleared the first switchbacks. The altitude was now hitting. After a mile and a half, we stopped at Oo-Ah Point, but the sweeping view was lost on Charlotte. She was breathing hard.

“I need to rest,” she said.

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s the elevation – you’ll adjust.” We kept going.

Somewhere above Cedar Ridge, a football-field sized flat with hitching posts for mules, the sky changed – that fast desert shift from bright to ominous. The wind came first, in sharp gusts that shook the leaves on the Gambel oaks, then the rain. Big cold drops almost the size of marbles. The trail became slick, and Charlotte slowed. I turned and looked back at her.

“You okay?”

“I’m tired.”

I pointed downhill. “We’re almost to Cedar Ridge. You can rest there.” But Cedar Ridge was still half a mile away. Twenty minutes later she stopped.

“Tom, I need to eat something.”

I reached into my pack. A gust of wind blew rain against my face. Then I realized with a start that I had forgotten the snacks. The Goldfish crackers. The Snickers bars. The Liquid IV packets I always carried. The things that bring a person back when they’re fading. “I don’t have anything,” I said. “It’s back in the Ford.” She stared at me. “You’re joking,” she said as she sat on a rock and put her head in her hands.

“Charlotte, we can make it. We’ll head up now. It’s maybe a mile and a half.” A shake of her head. “I don’t think I can,” she said.

“You can. Come on.” I pulled her up. She swayed. “Tom…”

The stretch from Cedar Ridge to Oo-Ah Point cuts back and forth across a sharp ridge. Each time we crossed over its crest, the weather changed – blasting wind and rain on one side, merciful calm on the other. As we neared Oo-Ah again – a place where the trail eases a little – Charlotte bonked. Hard. She was stumbling, lightheaded, and clearly miserable. Her stride shortened. “Just a little further,” I said, trying to sound encouraging.

Here was the rub: I knew better. I had spent a chunk of the previous two summers working as a volunteer in the canyon with PSAR – Preventative Search and Rescue. My job, in large part, was to make sure people didn’t get into the kind of trouble Charlotte was in right now. And I had made one of the most basic mistakes in the book.

The rain worsened – cold and relentless. We had already put on all the clothes we carried, and one more layer would have been nice. Another mistake, I thought. In thirty yards Charlotte stumbled and caught herself. When I reached for her arm, she pulled away. “So, this is your goddamn happy place?” she muttered. Then she tripped and went down on one knee, scraping it raw. A first-aid kit, at least, I had. She let me clean the wound with some Betadine and apply a bandage.

Fortunately, the South Kaibab Trail rarely skirts cliffs. Some canyon trails creep within inches of hundred-foot drop-offs. There the rain can turn the soil into something as slick as ice. Death in the Grand Canyon has stories where a slip proves fatal.

So we plodded uphill. By the time we clawed our way back to the rim, we were drenched, exhausted, and mad as hell at each other. We caught a shuttle back to Mather Campground and the Airstream. Neither of us spoke.

Inside, I heated tomato soup on the stove. The only sound was the burner clicking, then hissing to life. I poured soup into bowls, little curls of steam rising above then. I set them on the dinette table and although we sat across from each other, we ate in silence. `

“I’m sorry,” I said finally.

She looked at me.

“I should have doubled-checked the pack,” I said.

“Yeah. You should have.” Her voice was flat. Not angry. Just… done. With me. She finished her soup and stood. “I’m going to bed,” she said. I nodded, then pulled out the Gaucho bed for her, in the middle of the Airstream. I made up the dinette bed for myself.

In the morning, I woke to the sound of her in the bathroom. I sat up. Stuffed my sleeping bag into its storage sack along with my pillow. She came out dressed, then made coffee without looking at me. “Morning,” I said.

“Morning.”

“How’s your knee?”

“Sore.”

Charlotte sat on the Gaucho bed. I stayed at the dinette. She looked out the window. The sun was bright, but the air was cold.

“I’ll get us packed,” I said. It seemed like a good idea to get moving.

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