“Remind me why we’re doing this?” I asked yet again, staring out the car window at the wasteland of sand and shriveled bushes through which we’d been driving for the past two hours.
Carla rolled her eyes and gave me an exasperated little grin. I knew I shouldn’t be wheedling her like this, because she was going out of her way to escape a tangled web of wedding preparations so she could spend some time with me before I had to leave. We’d been planning on making a Grand Canyon trip all along, but she decided to make it an exclusively two-person excursion after seeing how awkward things had been for me all week while being forced to spend time with her rather hyperactive circle of bridesmaids. I had taken it all in stride and put up with it for her sake and for the sake of James, her fiancé, but after last night’s particularly rowdy bachelorette party, I’d had about enough, and so had she.

All the same, I wasn’t feeling particularly gracious today, not after she had insisted on taking the “scenic route” up from Sedona and through Flagstaff to get here. Carla had always been a little bit on the reckless side, having grown up climbing all over the red rocks of Arizona with her four brothers, so she did not see any problem driving over steep cliffs and dizzying ravines in a little, beat-up sedan. She had just laughed at my hyperventilation and my whispered chant of “We’re-gonna-die, we’re-gonna-die, we’re-gonna-die,” zipping with unsettling speed around the hairpin turns and across the narrow roads that sat precariously close to the edges of bare rock cliffs. I had to admit that the view itself was breathtaking, and in this drive alone I had seen everything from dusty, canyon-like rock faces to flat, hot desert plains to the highest mountains I had ever seen in my life all covered in huge aspen trees that looked like they belonged in Switzerland. But the effect that all this had had on me had been severely dampened by the fact that I spent a great deal of the ride with my eyes closed, trying not to vomit.

And now, we were traveling over one of the driest, flattest stretches of land I had ever seen, with the exception of the desert that I’d passed through on the trip from the airport in Phoenix to the hotel in Sedona.  There was nothing to break up the deadness of it all except the occasional billboard advertising some RV park or gas station, a few hardy bushes that had somehow forced their way through the cracked brown earth, lengths of barbed-wire fence that stood by either side of the road, and some scattered, run-down trailer park communities built on the Navajo reservation we were crossing.  The car windows were rolled down, as the car, which we borrowed from James’ parents, had an extremely faulty air conditioner. My shirt was sticking to my back and my hand hung lazily out the window.

Normally Carla and I would be chatting animatedly about anything and everything on a car trip such as this, but our surroundings seemed to have a numbing effect on both of us, so we allowed silence to ensue.  I gazed up at the sky. As boring as the landscape appeared to be, I had to admit that, before I came to Arizona four days ago, I’d never known that the sky could be so big.  Unlike the walled-in, forested stretches of I-95 and I-85 along the east coast, upon which most of the road trips I’d ever been on in my life had taken place, this was truly open land. Here, the horizon seemed to melt into the sky, which, in August, was now nearly always cloudless.  As striking as it was, I had to admit that it was somewhat unsettling: the absence of anything to obstruct this horizon left me feeling small and inexplicably vulnerable.

Gradually, the terrain began to change. The land became rockier, hills began to appear and I could see a few lone mountains far in the distance. After a few minutes, the change became even more drastic as canyons—actual canyons, with walls of red and yellow rock where the earth had been worn away by rivers that were dried up this late in the year—started to appear by the side of the road.  Carla looked over at my expression—I’m pretty sure my mouth was hanging open—and laughed.

“Is any of this part of the Grand Canyon?” I asked, not sure whether I was excited that I was seeing canyons for the first time or disappointed because I’d expected them to be larger.

“Nah,” she said. “This is kind of like the very beginning of it. 

“A lot of these are from the Little Colorado River, which flows into the bigger Colorado River, which carved out the Grand Canyon.”  She smiled. 

“These are cool, but I’m telling you that they don’t even compare…” 

She got the far-off look in her eye that indicated that I was about to get one of her world-famous history lessons. Carla taught American History at a middle school outside of DC, and she loved it with a passion. Her lectures, which James and I had been forced to sit through quite often, could get a bit long-winded, but she spoke with such fervor about some things that I often couldn’t help but become completely engrossed in whatever it was that she was talking about. I could tell that the Grand Canyon was one of those “passionate” subjects: she had lived so close to it for most of her life that I was sure she knew everything there was to know about it in regard to history.

“So do you know which explorer was the first European to have discovered the Grand Canyon?” she asked in a tone that could only be called excited.

“Um…”

I struggled to remember the names of explorers from the World Civilzations course I’d taken a few semesters back.  I was an intern in advertising, so I had not studied much in the way of history aside from the minimum requirement to fulfill my credit distribution, and most of what I remembered had to do with ancient and medieval history. 

“Was it…It was someone Spanish, right? Uh…Cortez?”

She shook her head. “Nope, but you’re close. It was Coronado.”

I frowned a bit, aware that she’d just responded to me in the same tone she would use on one of her students.  Normally I’d find it funny, but I was too bored and the day was too hot for me to have much of a sense of humor.

“Well actually, that’s not true,” she amended.  “It was technically Coronado’s men who found it, not Coronado himself…  But anyway, Coronado led an expedition into what we would call the Old West–as in, all of this.”  She gestured at the road before her with one hand. “Y’know what he was looking for?”

“No.” She sighed at my obvious lack of enthusiasm.  I cleared my throat, mentally chastising myself and trying to remember that she was making this trip for my sake.  “No,” I repeated in a lighter, mildly interested tone.  “What was he looking for?”
Carla’s eyes lit up. “A city of gold,” she whispered.

I looked around at the barren landscape.  “Out here?”
“Yup!” she said.  “Well, apparently he didn’t give up his search for months.  Can you imagine?  Out here, with the heat, and all the Indian tribes-”
“And the snakes and the scorpions and the tarantulas,” I finished with a shudder.
“Well yeah,” she continued.  “Anyway, the point is that it must’ve sucked.  And obviously there wasn’t a city of gold to be found.  But Coronado didn’t want the expedition to be totally wasted, so he sent out a party of his men under a commander named…um…Cárdenas, I’m pretty sure, along with some Hopi guides to find a river that he’d heard tell of.”
“And that would be the Colorado, right?”
She grinned.  “The Colorado River, which is, of course, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“After about twenty days, they reached the canyon,” she continued, her grin broadening.                         “They saw the river at the bottom, which actually looks really close when you’re standing at the top. And then…”  She looked as though she were suppressing giggles now.  “And then Cárdenas sent a few of the more agile men down into the canyon to find a route to the bottom.  They tried for three days straight to make it down to the bottom, but they couldn’t do it and ended up running out of food, so they returned.”
“Well that must’ve been frustrating,” I muttered.  “All that for nothing…”
Carla just laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
She shook her head.  “Nothing. It’s just…what do you think the Hopi guides must’ve been thinking the whole way down to the canyon?  I mean, they had to have known that the Spanish would have their work cut out for them trying to find a way down.”  She sniggered. “Well, here’s your river!  Good luck to you…” 
At long last, we reached the park.  We paid at a toll booth and listened to the woman in the booth ramble on for a minute or so about buses and park tours and such, and then we entered the park itself.  Our surroundings were radically different than they had been only minutes before.  The road before us was bright but narrow, lined with trees and shrubs.  We were in a fairly large line of cars; it was obviously going to be crowded today.  Carla noticed me grimacing at the bumper of the car in front of us.  “Don’t worry,” she said.  “It’s always crowded, but there’s plenty of Grand Canyon for everyone, believe me.”

I looked out the windows, straining to catch a glimpse of the canyon through gaps in the trees.  I couldn’t see anything.
“Ah, so you are excited,” Carla said with a wry smile.
“Well yeah,” I said, my conscience giving an uncomfortable squirm.  “I’ve been excited since we made it past Flagstaff without tumbling off a cliff.  Thank you for taking me.  I mean, if it’s anything like those rock things in Sedona…”  Sedona, where the wedding was taking place in a few days, was a beautiful town nestled in the middle of a cluster of enormous, dusty red rocks that looked too big to belong on the face of the earth.  They were beautiful in an unruly, titanic sort of way.  For the past few days, whenever I found myself outdoors, I had not been able tear my eyes away from them.
“This is better than Sedona, I promise,” she assured me as we pulled into a huge parking lot full of cars and people, a few buildings behind it.  Beyond that I could see nothing but open air; I knew the canyon must lie on the other side.  Tons of people were in hiking gear, complete with their overstuffed backpacks, expensive sneakers, spandex, visors, and shiny sunglasses.  Mothers were slathering sunscreen on their children.  Many simply meandered towards the sidewalks that led away from the lot, cameras in hand.  The sun, completely unobstructed, beat down hard upon everything.
We took a moment to put our own sunscreen on and grab backpacks and cameras before setting off to join the crowd.  Aside from the idle chatter of the people around us, I realized with a start that I could hear nothing else, nothing that I would expect to hear here- birdcalls, or even the rumble of the cars behind us.  All of that faded away the further down the path we walked.
“There it is,” Carla whispered after a moment or so.  “See it?”
Once we passed the restrooms, I could definitely see it.  I couldn’t make out anything more than a big plain of red and orange beneath the sky, which was blue but somehow hazy at the same time.  There was an observation area up ahead, a stretch of bumpy rock overlooking the canyon with a fence made of slightly rusted metal bars around the edges.
“Come on!” Carla trilled, grabbing my wrist and dragging me toward the edge of the canyon. 
The closer we got, the wider my eyes grew as I finally took in the scene that stretched before me.  There was air, so much air.  It lay like a thin shroud over what I could only describe as a labyrinth of cliffs that I knew extended far beyond what my eyes could see in any direction. The sides of these cliffs were striped, evidence of the river that had carved each one into its wild, beautiful shape.  The river itself was like a sapphire snake that wound itself around the rock bases.  The colors of the rock ranged everywhere from bright yellow to burnt amber to blood-red to dusty orange to hazy purples and browns, and the shadows that each rock cast on another were tinted a soft blue.  I could tell, given the grand expanse of air that lay before me, that a great many of these cliffs were miles and miles away from me, and all of them were probably larger than I could fathom.  These behemoths dwarfed the red rocks of Sedona.
For a long time, I couldn’t speak.  I could hardly breathe.  At some point, Carla began babbling something about Kachinas and the Hopi tribe, but I hardly heard her.  Standing there, gripping those fence bars and looking out over it all, I knew I was flying.
“Oh my God,” I breathed after awhile.
“I know.” I looked over at Carla.  She was smiling wickedly.  “Told you.”  She pointed down over the canyon and to the left.  “See the river?”
I looked down at it.  She was right: from up here, it looked like I could reach out and touch it.  “How far away is it?”
“About thirteen miles.”
I shook my head, looking down over the edge of the canyon, which lay only a few feet from my toes.  All I could see was a sheer drop-off with only a few scant outcrops of rock to obstruct the path to the bottom, hundreds of feet down.  I gulped.
“Yeah,” Carla said, also following my gaze.  “Poor, poor Spaniards.”
“Well, I’d say they found their city of gold,” I said, my eyes now drifting once more out over the canyon.