Soft Suburbanites in the Wild

The Boston Herald

"Look out the window. Look at that view. Don't you love all the open space and the huge sky and the mountains in the distance?”

"We've been looking at open space and mountains for hours. Aren't we almost there?" comes the wail from two of the three teenagers in the back seat.

"Almost there" is Page, Arizona.  Almost there is a seven-hour drive from Phoenix, which is, counting stops but not delays, a seven-hour flight from Boston. Three teenagers (one borrowed for the week) one I I-year-old and two adults have schlepped six duffel bags, two gigantic radios, one battery-operated television set, 'Pictionary,' a briefcase, three tour bags, plus dozens of books, magazines and tapes from home to car to airport to van to hotel to rental car in which we are all now stoically squished.

I tum on the radio. In Phoenix, all the stations worked. About 15 miles north all we get is static or country-western tunes, which, to the kids, is one and the same.

The mountains grow close - bare, chiseled hills the color of rusted iron. Outside, the temperature is IO1. Cars shine like mirrors in the sun and the dirt by the road is as dry as sawdust. But the vastness of the land is impressive, so wide that you can see it arcing, making me think that Indians must have known long before Columbus, the true shape of the Earth.

"Isn't it beautiful?" I say. "Isn't it so different from home?" The kids look out the window at all the space, at all the empty land and they simultaneously panic. "Where are the restaurants? Where are we gonna have lunch? It doesn't look like there's anyplace to eat around here!”

In fact, there isn't. The closest McDonald's, we figure looking at a map, is in Flagstaff,  still more than two hours away. We take a short detour to drive through a small, rustic town built in the shadow of the mountains, a town full of old mines and little stores. "This is Sedona," we tell them." Look at the way the shadows change the colors of the mountains.

The kids smile and nod. "It looks like a postcard, says one and they all agree. "Look over there," I continue, delighted because they're delighted. I read from the guidebook. I point out interesting rock formations. But only minutes into, "See that?" and "Look over there!" one of the teenagers, who happens to think Henry Thoreau was a jerk because he endorsed the simple life but hung around at Ralph Waldo Emerson's mansion, philosophically deduces that once you've seen one mountain, you've seen them all.

The huge red rocks around Sedona are temples and guardians of this place. The lofty spires inspire. I tum, sharp words on my tongue. But then I see the kids with their magazines and their music and remember vividly, instantly, New Hampshire, 1958, the year my mother got ecstatic over The Old Man in the Mountains, pointing wildly at this boulder sitting 5,000 feet in the air, waxing on about how it was really a man and wasn't it just amazing? While I, thoroughly bored, buried my face in a comic book trying to ignore her.

Finally, in Flagstaff, we stop not just at McDonald's but at Taco Bell, Wendy's, Baskin Robbins and Dunkin Donuts. We feast on a variety of junk in celebration of having endured hours of no food. We feel like survivors. The temperature has dropped to 72 degrees and continues down to 56, then soars to 97 as we make our way over the mountains to Page and Lake Powell, this country's biggest man-made lake, the lake upon which we will live for seven days in a houseboat, miles away from civilization and McDonald's and all those conveniences on which we depend.

We arrive at Wahweap Lodge late in the afternoon opening the car door and walking out into a sauna. The afternoon sun makes the earth quiver like molten iron. "It's a good thing we have air conditioning, one of the group says. "I wouldn't want to hang around here long without it. 

"The houseboat doesn't have air conditioning. The houseboat doesn't have electricity, I gently remind them.

They gape at me. 

The adventure has only begun.