We hit a spot of turbulence and I glance out the window. My eyes grow wide at row upon row of the sight of jagged fins and fissures staring back at me from 35,000 feet below, like the endless maw of an enormous beast. A spark of precognition glows in my mind. I somehow know, This is important to me! I don’t even know what I’m looking at so I ask my flight attendant. She doesn’t know either. She returns a few minutes later and tells me, “The captain says we are now passing over Bryce Canyon.”
This is how my bucket list begins
The year is 1986 and I am flying home from Nevada to Michigan for Christmas with my mother and sisters.
It has been only four months since I drove a U-Haul across the country for my first big-boy job with the Forest Service; only two months since I met Gail in an old lodge on the shore of Lake Tahoe. It was Halloween and she punked out so bad her own friends didn’t recognize her. I went for the classic, bloody-fanged Dracula. It was love at first bite. We danced. We sat on bales of hay beside a roaring fire. We talked like we had known each other forever. She too loved hiking, backpacking, and almost any way a person could spend time in nature.
Meanwhile, the dramatic landscape below gives way to high plateau.
Two years later we are married and living in the rainforest of Southeast Alaska, about as far from the desert as a person can get. I tell Gail about Bryce and she shares my enthusiasm, “Just not in the summer,” she says.
We raise two kids, move several times for work, and suddenly 33 years have got behind us. The kids grow up and move out. The moment we retire, the dream knows it, speaks louder, demands its due.
We buy a funky little tent-on-wheels and outfit it with solar panels, bike rack, and three-inch memory-foam pads.
It is time. We clear the calendar for two months in southern Utah.
This is the story of that trip.