Before my trip began, I had made reservations at the DuBeau Hostel which was literally across the street from the FS Store. I had even neurotically called to confirm my spot a few days before flying out. When I arrived, there was a sign on the office door stating that they decided to close early for the season and they were moving bookings to their sister hostel, Grand Canyon Hostel, three blocks away. After Havasu dropped off, Bob kindly drove me to GC Hostel because of my luggage. We said our goodbyes and I went in only to be informed they had overbooked and were moving people to DuBeau. I must have looked positively wild when the clerk broke the news—not having showered in four days, having hiked ten miles that morning, having spent four days and a long three hour drive with America’s finest. He quickly offered to drive me back and grabbed the fire extinguisher to douse out the flames coming from my head. Such are the joys of a hostel. I guess that’s what you get for $19.

I’ve been to a few hostels in my day. True, they were all European hostels so perhaps there is a difference, but I’ve stayed at a few with that same laidback, transient, backpacker vibe like the one at Grand Canyon Hostel. However, this one was the most chaotic and in dire need of a reno hostel I’ve ever stayed at. They were really friendly but disorganized. The only thing they were anal about was that you had to gather your linens upon check out and take it to the front desk. One of the clerks, a blond youth with a receding hair line, delivered answers to my very practical questions in the spacy-est manner and yet, he must have repeated the linen rule seven times. It was a bizarre place with bizarre people.

The rooms at GC Hostel were tiny and could barely fit the two bunks and sink it contained. There were two bathrooms on each floor, both of which had a shower and toilet but no sink, which meant you had to wash your hands in either the kitchen or your room, a lovely way to spread germs. The bathroom on the left was spacious, with a large area where you could dress, and a bench and hooks to put stuff on. A large psychedelic portrait of an Indian was painted on the wall. The shower was huge. The bathroom next to it on the right was the size of an outhouse, so tiny you were practically showering over the toilet. There was nowhere you could put things except for a single hook. The shower also didn’t drain properly so one minute into your shower you were ankle deep in water.

The total of two nights I did stay at GC I was always exhausted, coming from the airport or coming off trip, and that made being social a chore. I tried my best to be pleasant. People wanted to talk all the time, especially the girl prancing around the hall wearing large fairy wings.
DuBeau was like a ghost town compared to the hub of activity that was GC. With outdoor entrances to each room, it was likely a converted motel. The rooms were much bigger and contained three bunks (six beds), a private bath and a space heater. Only one other bed in my room looked occupied but she wasn’t there when I arrived or when I returned after dinner. It was noticeably drafty and chilly in the room in spite the space heater.

After a very hot shower, I walked through downtown Flagstaff in the fading light and within four blocks I came upon the residential area which I much preferred. Don’t get me wrong, I love Flagstaff. It has nice stores, warm and inviting unpretentious restaurants, pubs where you can have a beer and watch the game. It has enough Western in it to make you think a few cowboys might mosey on out of the bar at any moment but not too much that you think you’re in Walt Disney’s wild west wet dream. The houses were ordinary and peaceful and reminded me that people lived here; it wasn’t simply a necessary stop to get to the Grand Canyon so people could snap some photos, scratch their ass and get a t-shirt from the gift shop. I walked down the rows of houses for a while in the crisp night air before being unable to ignore my stomach. It has been very demanding ever since the hike, unable to understand why it’s not receiving a snack every half hour. Now at work I walk to the photocopier and have a craving for fruit gums or corn nuts. Grazing has been the hardest habit from the trip to break. The second habit is to expect direction from Bob (“Oh no, what am I supposed to be doing now? Should I be drinking water?) That’s when I sat down at a restaurant and started writing about Havasu Falls.

I returned to the hostel and crashed. I don’t know how long I was down for before I was awakened by a knock at the door that I tried to ignore. The knock became louder. Then pounding. Finally after five minutes of door breaking pounding I hauled myself out of the warm bed into the cold air and threw open the door.
“Hi, I work for the hostel and something seems to be shorting the breaker. The other rooms don’t have electricity. (And this affects me how?) So I’m going to check the wattage of your space heater.”
I rubbed my squinty eyes and without answering waved him through.
“I’m going to have to close this heater because the wattage is too high. That should do it. By the way, there are flames coming out of your head.” (The heater part is true.)

Despite the truly magnificent joys of the hostel, I woke up feeling refreshed and wonderfully excited about the promising day ahead—a whole day to myself to wander, to see what I wanted to see, to explore. I was vaguely aware that my dorm mate had come in while I was asleep and when I flipped over in bed I was slightly alarmed to see her sitting cross-legged on her bed, eyes closed. That woke me up fast. Was she meditating or had she slept like that? I rose. She opened her eyes.
“Good morning,” she said serenely.
She was a middle aged woman with light brown skin and brown hair tied back in a braid. She was dressed in a white tank top and yoga pants. Judging by her slender physique, I pegged her as a vegetarian or vegan. Coincidentally she was from Brampton, a city just west of Toronto, but had spent the last three years working as a midwife in Northern Manitoba in a town called Thompson.

Those who know me know I have little tolerance for weird places. I can’t define what I mean by a weird place for you but the common denominator is that there is no good reason why you should be living there; there is somewhere infinitely better you could be. A weird place could be a town like Bradford, Ontario, the type of place Torontonians suspect folks marry their cousins or have sex with sheep, or it could be an obvious place like Las Vegas. Why oh why would you live in Las Vegas. It doesn’t have to be a city or town, just as long as it gives you a chill down your spine, an involuntary reflex of wrinkling your nose and a furrowed brow, like you’ve just got a whiff of the staffroom fridge. It’s a place you would avoid going to. Walmart Superstore and Radioshack fall into this category. I fully acknowledge that it’s subjective and insulting to people who are content with the choice of where they live but that’s just me.

Thompson, Manitoba is one of those places. Its tourism website calls it "Hub of the North" which really does not make me want to go there. The city is located 830 kilometers north of the international border, and 739 kilometers north of the provincial capital of Winnipeg, nicknamed ‘Winterpeg’.
“Thompson boasts an excellent transportation system of scheduled daily air service, overnight truck delivery, paved roads (gee whiz! Paved roads!), and a railway system that connects Thompson with other communities throughout the province and ends at the arctic port of Churchill.” Churchill, by the way, is the polar bear capital of the world, and yes, there are some people who live there and live with being swiped at by polar bears on the daily but that’s a whole other story for another day kids.
July and August see balmy highs of 68 F before temperatures drop off the cliff again. You may also find it interesting to know that the population of Thompson is 13,256. If that is the case, that means there are more polar bears in Canada than people in Thompson. And if at a population of 13,256 people that makes it Manitoba’s third largest city, you can add the province of Manitoba to the weird list.

After three years in Thompson, she went back to Toronto to tie up some loose ends before hitting the road to crisscross America. She loved Arizona so far because of all the “earth energy” and was very interested in studying herbs (I bet she was). She had just signed up for a Grand Canyon trip through park service. She didn’t have to pay anything but would work ten days removing those pesky Tamarisk trees. I was able to really help her prepare for her trip, giving her advice on what to bring, what to expect. She showed me the second hand backpack she had just picked up and it was the exact same kind I had used. I explained how to pack it, what water capacity she needed, the best place to store bagels, the buoyant, resilient nature of bagels and the importance of naming her backpack. I eyed the various herbs and stack of lemons she had on her bedside table but didn’t feel the need to warn her that all plants in canyon were hallucinogenic and highly poisonous. I’m sure her guide would educate her on that fact, and if not, well…being in the canyon is about self-discovery right?
In retrospect, ten days is a long time to spend in the canyon without the opportunity to shampoo one’s hair or get a good wash in. The weather was only getting cooler and I assume it would be increasingly difficult to convince oneself to rinse in a creek. But I wished her the best and was on my merry way.

I walked ten minutes to Budget to get my car (an Impala, surprisingly powerful and fast), picked up my luggage and drove to GC Hostel to check out. (“Did you remove your linens???”) There were people talking in the lobby about doing the hostel’s canyon tour to the South Rim which included hiking the rim trails for a few hours. I felt sorry for them, sorry they weren’t going in and would probably never see what we saw, never experience its amazing qualities. It was almost painful to hear and made me feel antsy. I got out of there as quickly as possible, before the guy at the front desk had a chance to ask me again if I completed my linen duty.
The first stop on my day of freedom was up San Francisco street to Flagstaff Hospital. Bob had mentioned he did a stained glass piece for its chapel and I was curious to see it. The hospital sat perched on the hill and was small, bright and clean. I wandered the halls until I found the chapel room behind an inconspicuous door. The piece was really lovely to see. There were no windows so a backlight illuminated the pretty mountain scene. Stained glass is an interesting art because of the way you have to think in terms of connected lines and shapes, sort of like a mosaic but technically more difficult. It is nice to see an artwork of someone you know. In a way, it felt like I was visiting an old friend at the hospital.

I stopped at Target where I looked for Corn Nuts (drat! no Corn Nuts), bought a coffee from Starbucks (yes, Starbucks in Target) which I drank two sips of before recalling for the 65th time I hate Starbucks coffee. There has to be some drug in their coffee that makes people forget how much they hate the taste of overpriced roasted tar. The coffee would spend the rest of the day fermenting in the car before being disposed of 143 miles away in Phoenix, which is the best a cup of Starbucks purchased by Cindy can hope for. I said goodbye to Flagstaff, or Flag as I felt I could call it like a local, and hopped onto 89A.

89A, from Sedona to Flag, runs through Oak Creek Canyon and is the corridor for many trailheads. It is also a “Fodor’s Choice” which put me on edge. Guide book picks are usually reliable—they are recommended for a reason—but the recommendation itself is an undeniable curse as well. It becomes overrun and people trample carelessly over the very thing they’ve come to see. You have to contend with fat sun burnt people in ugly shirts making inane comments like, ‘Isn’t it EXQUISITE!” like I remember a woman had screeched when I was in Capri. Or even better, men with their nose in the guidebook simpering to their wives, “Well, it’s nothing like what I thought it’d be.” For the first time in…well, ever, I had no desire to go over the speed limit. Actually, for the first time ever I drove under the limit, which wasn’t a problem because all the traffic was coming in the opposite direction from Sedona; there was no one in front or behind. From Flag, I glided over the smooth hills through the forest in its autumnal glory, morning sunshine filtering through the trees. The foliage was not a dramatic firework display of red, orange and yellow like in Canada, but it was a golden yellow, the precise shade to compliment the Arizona blue skies, the red rock, the grey bark. In other words, it was perfect. In spite of the cool mountain air I drew down the windows, played Etta James’ At Last and soaked it all in.

I stopped at Oak Creek vista, the gateway to the corridor and took a quick look at the forested canyon. I didn’t walk the entire length of the lookout because it was already packed with tourists and people selling souvenirs. I went into the small shack known as the visitor’s centre looking for ideas on what to do. The information man must have been 89 years old, but he was helpful which is always good for a visitor’s centre. He explained that if I wanted to stop and park at any trailhead or lookout I needed a Red Rock Pass. It was $5 and I would get an information newsletter that had a map. Suddenly I had the crazy urge to go for a hike. I had been hiking for the last eight days, was I really going to do another one? I wanted to do it more than ever. The thought of spending the day shopping or “sightseeing” in Sedona made me cringe.
I asked the man if there were any trails near “Indian Gardens”, a sandwich shop Bob had recommended.
“Sterling Pass, just past Manzanita campground, but its strenuous.”
From the Vista I drove south (trying to hit as many tourists wearing Bermuda shirts in the parking lot as possible). The road began to wind down through the canyon and everywhere I turned I saw incredible rock formations, goliaths towering in the sky. Cars kept wavering into the oncoming lane or shoulder as drivers craned their neck every which way. It was also a slow drive. There were about fifteen cars accordioned behind one doing 20 miles per hour, a possible escapee from a retirement home. I couldn’t tell how slow they were going because my speedometer didn’t show kilometers.
Q: What does 20 mph convert to kilometers?
A: Fucking slow.
It was annoying because I couldn’t look at the scenery without the risk of causing a pile up. I was finally able to pull out of the pack at Indian Gardens. It was a picnic stop and convenience store with a gourmet sandwich counter. I hadn’t planned on hiking so I bought a packet of Corn Nuts (the snack of champions) and ordered a Turkey sandwich with avocado to go. As I waited I studied the hiking map. Sterling Pass was W (in the wilderness), S (strenuous), 2.4 miles one way, with an elevation gain of 1,120. I had inadvertently picked one of the hardest hikes there. My wonderful idea didn’t seem so wonderful anymore but I wasn’t worried. I did Rim to Rim! That will be my response to everything for a long while. This Sunday: “I can pedal up this hill without resting. I did Rim to Rim!” “I can eat this slab of cake without getting fat. I did Rim to Rim!” “I don’t need to wash the dishes. I did Rim to Rim!”

I drove on, saw the sign for Manzanita campground but didn’t see a sign for Sterling Pass. According to the map it should have been right there. Before I knew it I was saw the sign for the next trailhead. I stopped, did a U-turn and headed back. Again, I passed Manzanita and there was no sign. Apparently doing a Rim to Rim gives you permission to eat anything you want but doesn’t increase your navigation or finding skills. Going North now I pulled off into the next stop, Slide Rock State Park, and poked around until I found a ranger.
“Just before you hit Manzanita, pull off to the side and park. There’s no sign. There’s a small plaque on the ground at the trailhead.”
The ranger must have read my frustration (I don’t think there were flames coming from my head, just smoke) because he said, “Sterling Pass leads to Vultee Arch which you can also get to on Vultee Arch trail.” He pulled out a photocopy map and highlighted it for me. “For Vultee Arch you have to drive to down to Sedona then go up this road. This road leads to all these trails.”
I took the fact that I couldn’t find the trailhead as a sign that I shouldn’t do Sterling Pass. I took the fact that there wasn’t even parking and a marker as another bad sign. Vultee Arch was rated Easy-Moderate (a good sign). I didn’t even have to do that trail—looking at the map I saw there were tons of them to choose from—but I decided it would be nice to see an arch. Plus, I learned from our Rim to Rim adventure that trail names that suggest pain or death or anything biblical have been named such because it causes pain or death or prayer. Remember Devil’s Corkscrew and Jacob’s Ladder? They have just as appealing ones in Sedona. Wouldn’t you like to hike Devil’s Bridge and Deadman’s Pass? Vultee Arch sounded just fine to me.

I drove through Sedona, a city in the middle of the desert, surrounded by incredible red sandstone formations, a stunning backdrop to your view everywhere you turned. I had heard so much about it from people before my trip and searching on the internet, I had found a lot of boutique hotels, spas, golf courses—very honeymoonish or couples getaway type of things. It was a nice city. There were no tall buildings. The buildings lay low and were of typical Southwest design: smooth outer walls in a palette of desert pastels—sandstone, ochre, tan, stone—with red roof tiles sun-bleached pink. I drove through the Uptown area, a main street lined with shops and galleries done in a very cutesy Western style. There were a lot of people of the species Homo tourbusian walking along this strip. My original plan was to stop in the centre and walk around for a while but seeing the platoons of people I definitely decided against it and opted to move onto the hike, lest I touch elbows with someone and start baring my teeth and growling in retaliation (my reintegration back into society was still tenuous at the time). I’m sure the stores were lovely despite the kitschy-ness I detected but knew if I window shopped I would impulsively buy a $500 pair of cowboy boots, some new age crystal that fixes an ailing love life and cactus jelly.

The gateway to the trailhead was on a dead end road creatively named Forest Road 152. It ran north off 89A so there was no way I could get lost, right? But I soon found myself wondering where the hell I was. A sign said I was on FR 152C. So close yet so far. I wasn’t the only one lost because I found myself at dead end at a gateway to a private golf course. There was a long line of cars to get to the gatehouse where an old man stood outside. One by one the car would stop and I saw the man giving directions to each car, pointing and gesturing. Then the car would turn around and go on their merry way. I pulled up.
“I guess it’s my turn to say I’m lost?” I said.
“Don’t worry, the signage is terrible. Where do you want to go to?”
“Vultee Arch.”
“Go back down this road, make a left. Soon after the equestrian sign there is a dirt road on the left. Vultee Arch is all the way at the end.”
I thanked him profusely and drove around. Looking in my rear view mirror the next car had pulled in and I could see him pointing and gesturing some directions. Poor man. I hope he got paid for more than being a golf course gatekeeper. He was right too. The signage was terrible. I made the left onto the dirt road and saw a small sign in the ditch half covered by bushes. You would think that if a highlight of Sedona was hiking and tourism they would make better signs. Or maybe it’s cheaper to pay Larry (I’ve decided to call him Larry) to give directions. Larry wasn’t kidding either when he said dirt road. It was pitted and rocky. I saw a pink 4x4 filled with tourists leaving and realized this was one of the off-roading trails the Jeep tours used. I had considered doing one of those tours but considered it too expensive. Now it worked out perfectly because who needs a 4x4 when you have a rental car? I rolled down all the windows, blasted ACDC and flew down the road on a very rough ride. It was so much fun it felt sinful.
On the drive I passed a few Jeep tours and only a couple regular cars. I stopped my car whenever I wanted to take pictures. It took me 30 minutes to reach the end of the road to Vultee Arch trailhead which was deserted except for two parked cars. Everything was very quiet. I had no hesitation in changing into my hiking clothes in the open although it crossed my mind that a Jeep full of tourists could zoom by at any moment. (“Hey Earl, look over there! And I thought it would be just a bunch of rocks.”)

The trail was 1.7 miles one way. It was a gradual climb but the ground was sandy, giving my legs an extra work out. Just as the road signage had been an issue, the trails were not marked. All I needed was a painted dot on a tree every once in a while to know I was going the right way and there were none. I would be walking and suddenly the trail would end so I had to retrace my steps back to the fork to go the other way. In spite of the confusion and the nagging fear they would find my body one week later way off the trail half eaten by coyotes, I enjoyed the walk. It followed along a dry streambed in complete wilderness and there were many different plants and flowers. The trees were bare, showing the scars of a fire in 1996, but it was still shady. I couldn’t have asked for better weather or bluer skies.
Eventually I made it to a large outcrop of rock. I scrambled through some scratchy bushes and up its base to find a small plaque commemorating Gerard and Sylvia Vultee who died in a plane crash near the site in 1938. I looked up at the pile of rock and didn’t see the arch. I stood there for a moment before climbing around halfway. Perhaps I had to see it at another angle. Still, I didn’t see the arch. I scrambled down and sat in the shade eating my sandwich and munching on corn nuts (good snack for pondering too), thinking of how I was going to explain to people that I didn’t actually see an arch.
It was a metaphorical arch. The shape of the arch represented the inner journey. First a gradual rise in excitement and anticipation in seeing the arch and then utter disappointment since there was no fucking arch.
A couple appeared and did the exact same thing I did. They read the plaque, looked up, scratched their heads, tried to look at it from a different angle.
“I’m as confused as you,” the woman said.
Finally we saw it. The arch was higher up on an adjacent hill and looked quite small and ordinary. The man said he had read you could go up and walk across it so we searched for a trail that lead to it but didn’t find any. Ah well. At least I had seen it.

My day was drawing to a close. A brisk walk back, more off-roading (my white car looked like it had been dive bombed by red dirt), a goodbye to Sedona, an uneventful drive back to Phoenix. I got jittery when I heard radio reports every five minutes in a panicked voice warning of heavy traffic on 17 South to Phoenix, the exact route I was on, but I laughed when I merely had to slow down for a mile or two. You haven’t experience traffic until you’ve been on the 401 (four-oh-one), officially the busiest highway in North America and one of the busiest in the world. Running right through Toronto, it is pretty much the only corridor that runs west-east, connecting Southwest Ontario to almost Montreal, Quebec, so you can imagine the sheer volume of vehicles: cars, buses, transport trucks. Among its other shining distinctions: it is the widest highway in the world (it reaches 18 lanes at one point), it is the busiest truck route in the world and it hosted the deadliest auto pile up in Canadian history, involving 87 vehicles. It is the shittiest, most chaotic road that brings out the most dangerous and aggressive behaviour in drivers. The only alternate route is a privately owned toll highway that people have to get a loan/sell their non essential organs to afford. Yet Ontarians put up with the 401 as a necessary evil and instead of putting pressure on the government, we remain compliant, grip the steering wheel in fear and frustration, and give especially dangerous sections of the 401 cute nicknames like “Carnage Alley.” Yikes. I didn’t have a plan for Phoenix except maybe to go Scottsdale because I read about nice stores and restaurants there. I looked at the map and went bug eyed. The roads in Phoenix didn’t have names—they were numbered. It was insanity. How could a city function like this? 7th Ave., 7th St…all the way to 191st Ave., 195th Ave. Why?? Can you imagine getting directions?
“To get to 64th Street, you gotta go up 32nd…that’s 32nd Street not Avenue…then make a right at Camelback Road and then turn left at 56th. Wait. No, that ain’t right. What street am I on?” This is actually what the gas station attendant said trying to give me directions. It was a bad sign that she didn’t even know what intersection the station was at.
At least “Carnage Alley” is memorable. Any name would do. People can’t remember 168th St. but they would remember “Gonorrhea Blvd” or “Dry Hump Ave.” I gave up. I saw an outdoor shopping mall and impulsively turned in. It was called Biltmore Fashion Park, an upscale shopping promenade and I was pleasantly surprised. The stores lined a pretty central walkway with a garden and live music at the centre. I treated myself to a slice of Dulce de Leche cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory and ate while watching the band perform. Actually, I watched the children dancing at the front, fearlessly spinning around with their arms spread until they dropped sick and dizzy to the ground. It was the perfect way to end a perfect day.

After I return home from the road I always find my mind wandering back to the place where I’ve just come from. Following the trip denouement, the fresh memories take me away from the spreadsheet on the screen, make me smile as I sit on the subway, make me laugh out loud as I sit in traffic on the 401. Then I have to push it aside or else I would feel melancholy all the time, unable to be happy with where I am. Out of all my trips, I’ve thought about our Rim to Rim the most and for the longest time. Nearly one month has past and I still find myself smiling at the memory of making it to last call at Phantom Ranch like champs or our mascots, the Red Vine girl that thought Bob was “awesome” (her words, not mine) and the other that wasn’t so sure. It was a short trip but I left my heart in the canyon.

If only I could live every day of my life like a morning in the canyon. If only I could relive that moment of waking up, blinking like a child, watching the sun illuminate the canyon and enlighten us on our smallness in this great world. If only I could once again look up and be amazed.