Thanks for reading. Next week: The boy who stole my mixtape in 10th grade.
I can’t describe it right. That’s the amateur part of this blog. I’m not a poet. But imagine if someone took all the colors of a bonfire—gold, rust, deep purple—and poured them into a crack in the earth a mile wide. There was no guardrail. No gift shop. No plaque. Just us, and the silence, and the feeling that we’d found something that wasn’t supposed to exist.
Not literally. But Dad’s printed directions ended at a place called “Scenic Overlook 7.” The road after it wasn’t on the page. It was just a beige slit in the red earth, disappearing into a haze of heat. blog amateur
So we went. The four of us: Dad, Mom, Sam (12, obsessed with pterodactyls), and me, sulking in the passenger seat with a copy of On the Road that I’d only read three pages of.
For the first six days, everything went exactly to script. We saw the Petrified Forest (Dad took 200 photos of rocks). We ate at a diner where the waitress called us “hon.” We sang “Sweet Caroline” so many times that Sam threatened to jump out of the moving vehicle. Thanks for reading
“It’s a dirt road,” Dad argued. “We have a sedan.”
“We go back,” Dad said. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. That’s the amateur part of this blog
That was the whole point of the trip. My father, a man who still prints MapQuest directions and keeps a Thomas Guide in his glove compartment “just in case the satellites go dark,” had planned every mile of our two-week journey from Seattle to the Grand Canyon and back.
That last part was bratty. I admit it.