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A Grand Adventure
by Karin Beuerlein

Excerpts:

     My boyfriend and I recently traveled from Tennessee to Las Vegas for a conference, and we decided to take a side trip to the Grand Canyon. We assumed it would be no problem to whiz down there and back in a day, even though our atlas didn’t show a clear path from Vegas to the edge of the park.
     In fact, the atlas didn’t show any roads at all within a staggering radius of the park, but I wasn’t worried. See, I happen to date one of those fun, fruity men who will ask for directions. I get tingles at every gas station we visit, knowing Steve and I can go inside to buy Cokes, pay for fuel and ask where the hell we are.
     On this particular day, however, we managed to stump a convenience store owner, a Nevada state trooper and an entire Kinko’s staff from the bottom up . . .

     We wandered into tiny Dolan Springs, Arizona, sticky and ready to see a canyon, damn it. A grizzly bear of a man at a gas station – where we stopped! and asked for directions! – told us to go to mile marker 28, turn right and just get on that dirt road and keep going. A blonde woman in pigtails nodded in agreement. To me, these seemed the most specious of all the instructions we had received – the world’s most exciting ditch is at the end of a dirt road in Deliverance, Arizona? But these locals were much more local than the Vegas locals, and the man’s very grizzliness gave him an authenticity unmatched by the blonde Kinko’s cashier with the perfectly filed nails.
     We followed his instructions and found ourselves in the middle of the Joshua Tree National Forest. Frankly, this place surprised me. Big, dumb Easterner that I am, I had always thought Joshua trees were loners. Rebels. I figured they just stood around in the open desert, smoking cigarettes, striking the occasional arty pose for nature photographers. But no, it turns out they’re quite social. There’s an entire commune of these short, twisted plants, which looks less like a forest than a big, awkward pincushion. The trees hunch over as if they’re embarrassed, providing a thin and contorted shade for coyotes and jackrabbits. It’s beautiful, in a crooked way . . .
    


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