The Grand Canyon

About a fortnight ago, I was joined in San Francisco by an English friend who had never been West. He's at a time of life which in Edwardian times would have been called 'old age' or by the prevailing essayists then, 'the twilight of life'.

Today, being 50, he's in early middle age but even such a whippersnapper begins to hear the ticking of the clock, though he wears, of course, a digital watch – to me, one of the absurdities of the age. And he has to do mental arithmetic to find out how long he has left to catch a train or make a date. On second thoughts, it occurs to me that perhaps to a digital watch wearer, time is even more ominously fleeting since the little figure is changing visually every second, the way a grandfather clock taps away as relentlessly as a woodpecker. 

At any rate, when I suggested to him that we were only 650 miles away from one of the great American spectacles – one of the world's great spectacles – he said, 'Let's do it! I may never have the chance again.' This is rather like saying to a visitor to London, 'Since you're so close, don't you think you ought to take in the canals of Venice?' But to an Englishman, the West is the West. It's all there and available. And he, who has made such fun of Americans who go up to Oxford and take in the Cotswolds all in one day, he thought nothing of a thirteen-hundred mile round trip which started at 8.20 in the morning from San Francisco airport and had us back there at 7 p.m. in time to dine at a splendid Yugoslav restaurant. 

The trip required two planes. We landed at ten o'clock at Las Vegas and, having an hour between planes, we hopped a cab and drove along the main drag, the so-called 'Strip' and back again. This was, of course, in the morning and it is then the tattiest town on earth. By night, its vast, electric signs, the hotels, the motels, the nightclubs, blazing away against the purple sky of the desert with enough candle power to maintain London for a month, by night it reminds me of what G. K. Chesterton said he first saw Broadway at night, 'To a man who cannot read, this must look like heaven!' But Las Vegas by day is a child's nightmare deposited in scrub desert. 

So we had no regrets as we trundled down the next runway and took off for our spectacle. An hour later, we landed at an airport carved out of an endless pine forest on a plateau. There was nothing there but the surrounding pines, a vault of bottomless sky and clear, dry light that gave everybody 20/20 vision. There was also a bus standing there to meet the plane and in the bus sat a tall driver with a slightly gnarled, handsome face and a willingness to answer foolish questions in an amiable way, and to wait for Godot, whenever Godot cared to appear. 

My friend was rattled with impatience. We were supposed to have about four hours at 'the' spectacle but the tolerance of our driver, strolling around saying every few minutes we'd be leaving in a few minutes, was reducing our stay to about three hours. I suggested that the driver was a typical, easy-going, Lee Marvin, Charles Bickford sort of Westerner and my friend said, 'Isn't he, though! He's so patient and so good natured and such a pain in the neck!' 

Well, we took off eventually and ten minutes later came to high groves of trees and rising ground, going up to an old, timbered lodge. We walked through the lodge where substantial grandmothers and small children were, incredibly, watching bad television and we walked out on to a terrace and there it was. The biggest hole on earth, 13 miles from rim to rim and two miles deep, down a hellish immensity to a trickling river. And a silence, more absolute than death. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona. 

Travel writers usually announce that something is indescribable and then proceed to describe it. I won't be caught in this trap. No matter how many postcards you've seen of it, or coloured centrefolds or movies, the thing itself is beyond human experience. And so one is struck dumb. Eons and eons ago, it must have taken the Colorado River a century or so to carve a measurable canyon out of red clay soil. It took about another two million years to approach its present scale, so that if we'd been there the morning Christ was born, it would have looked much the same as it does today. 

We mooched a mile or two around the rim and watched the sun go over and the mile-long shadows shifting across layer after layer of mazes the size of cities and we looked at the emptiness and spotted hawks and vultures gliding down there as tiny as flies. But no other movement. In the end it becomes unbearably beautiful or preposterous or unreal and you have to turn away and seek the company of your own kind in an enclosed space, in the restaurant, for instance, because otherwise you doubt that human beings had yet been created. Maybe the Grand Canyon was God's main purpose and once that was done it was a piddling afterthought to make Adam and Eve and the billions of scuttering ants we call the human family. 

Look at the Grand Canyon long enough and you're in danger of not so much total misanthropy as a fixed, stony indifference to our world and its inhabitants. It simply doesn't matter whether the Arabs or the Russians or the Chinese come out on top. When all the empires are dust, it will be there with the little hawks and the big buzzards wheeling and gliding to the end of time. 

A couple of days later, we were sitting on a little wooden deck on the peninsula of Belvedere that overlooks San Francisco Bay and the gleaming city beyond – another but human spectacle – and some San Franciscans present said to the Englishman, 'Which of the things you've seen in America was the most impressive?' 

They expected him to say the Grand Canyon but hoped he'd say, 'San Francisco, of course!' For there are no chauvinists like San Francisco chauvinists. With great promptness and an ill-concealed note of defiance he said, 'Oh, no doubt about it, New York, the morning I arrived.' Too mannerly to say, 'Oh, come on!' they said, 'Why?' 

'Well,' he said as if spelling out the obvious, 'because New York is so full of the damndest eccentrics and wonderful oddities.' They looked po-faced and he had to go on and explain what he pretends is nothing but simple observation, though in fact it's a theory he sprouted on his first visit and now to prove it, he roams the hot city for endless hours determined to track down examples of it. 

Other, blander types of visitor may say, as they do, that New York is vast, or exciting, or exhilarating or some other vague, boring word – not this man! He is a Dickens lover so he ransacks the haystack of New York for the needle of an eccentric. 'Such as what?' the surly San Franciscans persisted. 'Well,' he said, 'when I first walked through Central Park I thought it was just a park and interesting in a general way because it's a huge, rock garden enclosed by skyscrapers, but then I came on a man playing a harp. It was a black harp, I'd never seen one before. A black harp. And the man was dressed as a gorilla.' Looking the man, the Englishman, in the eye and noticing that he doesn’t seem to have a fever or a brain tumour, you simply have to believe him. And then he says he's seen and heard four youngsters tootling away on Fifth Avenue playing a Mozart quartet. Plainly, you think, a man given to visions. And tomorrow you decide he'll come staggering up the hills of San Francisco and announce that he's seen a man in a tattered tunic and a ragged beard, crying, 'Prepare ye the way of the Lord!'. 

Well, we came back to New York and the first day he announced, with a slightly shifty look, that he was just going to mooch around the town. Off to spot an eccentric, eh ? He ignores this drollery and he came back in the evening and – guess what? – 'I saw the most amazing thing in the park!' he says. 'Do go on!' you press him. 'There was a woman sitting on a bench, a middle-aged, well, 60-ish, glasses, quite nondescript, and she had on her lap a carry-all bag and was fumbling around in it and twisting it as if something had spilled. And then she pulled out... What do you think? A snake! A great five foot snake and stretched it so people could take pictures of it. And then she bundled it back in her bag and went round collecting quarters from the bystanders. Can you believe it?' he says. You've got to believe it, since in every other way this man is a rational and practical being. 

But something occurred to me and I'm pretty sure that, on his last visit, I mentioned it to him. Years ago, maybe 20 or more, there was a cartoon in the New Yorker, a surge of people down on Park Avenue near Grand Central Station and the skyscrapers, and a little crowd on the sidewalk was encircling an Indian swami, cross-legged, piping away on a flute, and rising from a pot was a 10,15 foot snake. On the other sidewalk, two men are walking away. One is plainly a bug-eyed visitor and the other, a native New Yorker. The bored one is saying to his visiting friend, 'Huh, you can get a crowd for anything in New York!' 

Well, either my friend is a mental case or he's a perfect example of the compulsive spotter of oddities but, for him, these strays represent the entire population of New York. It all reminds me of a boy I knew from North Dakota. A new Rhodes scholar, who went straight from the boat train to London to catch the train to Oxford. His first day in England. As he leaned back in the carriage, he heard whistles blowing, he saw cops running and a bullet shot through his carriage window and out on to the platform. 'So', he said, 'this is England!' 

Well, between the Grand Canyon with its eye on the end of time and my friend with his eye out for gorillas playing black harps, it will be an effort to get back to such trivialities as the financial plight of New York or President Carter's new tough line with the Russians. 

We shall try.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.