The four and a half hour drive from Salt Lake City to Arches National Park transports us from the familiar to the fantastical: depending on the sun’s angle, the rock formations appear red, purple, and orange, the sky so blue it seems transparent, vistas stretch for miles. Silent. Empty. Desolate. Desert. Magical. The landscape leading us to Arches forces me to reach into my memory bank of adjectives. How many different ways can I say mesmerizing? Altitude plays mind games on us: the La Sal Mountains feel within reach, I can almost touch them, and yet they are over 100 miles away. We lose our ability to calculate distance. We pass Grand River, the melon capital of Utah and the gas station on the edge of town boasts twelve varieties of melons but, alas, no electricity that day. Distances in the Wild West are intimidating; it would be another hour before we’d hit another bathroom break opportunity. We reach the park, stunned. We hike in the 38-degree heat and every arch we see surpasses the last in beauy. I stand next to the 150 million year old rocks bathed in sunset light, and marvel.

“This is the first time I’ve ever met anyone outside Canada who knows what a Bloody Caesar is,” he says happily, “and even at home, they don’t use beef bouillon any more.” He sighs with the wonder of it all.

“Another, Sir?” asks Michael.

But Wayne’s eye is wandering along the tequila bottles. “Is that Reposado?” he says.

If we had been offered a hundred places to spend New Year’s Eve, this is the one we would have chosen, this old adobe house fitted with midwestern elegance, a fountain splashing in the courtyard beside our small table in Little Tableland, luminarios lighting our way in the starlit desert night, a place we’ve stumbled into not by design, not by good planning, but by accident.

“To luck,” Wayne says, raising his pony of golden Spanish liquor.

I raise my glass of sparkling Perrier.

“To our very good luck.”

(excerpt from Breakfast at the Exit Cafe)

The self-possessed tree still stands in Athens on a small patch of tended turf at the corner of Finley and Dearing streets. It is, in fact, not the original tree that owned itself, since that tree was struck by lightning on October 7, 1942, and burned to the ground. This tree, grown from an acorn produced by the old tree, was replanted by the Junior Ladies’ Garden Club the following spring. It is known as the son of the tree that owned itself.

Merilyn and I stand side by side, looking at the tree, our shoulders touching. Protected from traffic, vandalism and dogs by a low, looping, chain fence, it is indeed a fine specimen. White oak is a handsome tree. But I can’t help thinking that, in a state where thousands of black slaves did not legally own their own children, here was a white oak that owned a prime parcel of Georgia real estate. At a time when thousands of human beings were the property of a handful of white masters, here was a tree that owned itself.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say to Merilyn.

(excerpt from Breakfast at the Exit Cafe)

Once we have taken in what is there—the pale earthtones, pinks, greys, and siennas of the various strata; the play of light and shadow on the ledges; the trees gripping sheer rock faces with their gnarled roots; the distant specks that are birds (gulls? peregrines? condors?) riding thermals above the river—we slowly begin to appreciate what isn’t there. There is far more absent from the Grand Canyon than there is present. In fact, the Grand Canyon is one colossal absence, billions of cubic metres of sedimentary rock carved away almost overnight by that thin silvery trickle of water we see enlivening the canyon floor.

Indeed, it is a trickle compared to what it once was. In its heyday, when John Wesley Powell led the Powell Geographic Expedition down it in 1869, the Colorado River flowed through the canyon at the rate of 250,000 cubic feet of water per second. Powell found the rapids so treacherous that half his crew deserted after three months. The water, in Edward Abbey’s words, “flowed unchained and unchannelled in the joyous floods of May and June, swollen with snow melt. Boulders crunching and clacking and grumbling, tumbling along the river’s bedrock bed, the noise like that of grinding molars in a giant jaw.”

From our vantage point on the parapet, it doesn’t look like there’s much grinding and clacking going on. We walk along for a while, hardly taking our eyes off the canyon, watching the pinks turn to purples and the greys to black. Snow is still falling, but gently, as though someone has upended a great scenic snowglobe of the Grand Canyon and then righted it again. Eventually we come to an impressive, four-storey log structure with wings stretching out almost to the canyon’s rim. Through a row of lighted windows in the main building we see white-shirted waiters setting up tables in a huge dining room; through another window, an enormous Christmas tree soars to the top of an atrium. People wearing expensive sweaters sit casually about in the lobby, reading, talking quietly amongst themselves, sipping drinks. We have come to the El Tovar.

(excerpt from Breakfast at the Exit Cafe)

The highway is twelve lanes wide now, and we can hardly see the earth for houses. We certainly can’t see the matchless harborage: skyscrapers block the view. Wayne counts twelve building cranes rising above the downtown highrises. The rain pours down. The traffic is going nowhere. Clouds settle like tired Sasquatches onto office tower roofs.

“Let’s just drive on,” Wayne says. He would rather be moving. Something about sitting behind the wheel of a car sucks the curiosity out of him. He’s not venturing through new territory, he’s locked in a video game, earning points for every car he passes. Sitting still is not sitting well with him.

“How about going into Fremont?”

“What’s that?”

“The Artists’ Republic of Fremont. It’s the old hippie part of Seattle.”

“An artists’ republic?” he says, lighting up. “I thought Plato kicked artists out of the republic.”

We ease off the interstate and down past small, cottage-like houses pressed into the hillsides. I watch for the sign that says, Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, set your watch back five minutes. Or the one that advises, Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, set your watch forward five minutes.

“Maybe somebody stole them,” Wayne suggests. He seems to like the idea. “Or maybe they disappeared into the temporal shift when everyone changed their watches.” He likes that idea even better.

(excerpt from Breakfast at the Exit Cafe)