Tag Archives: Flagstaff

05.20.25
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What Happened Here?

Last week in this space, Dear Reader, I mentioned my trip to the Grand Canyon. A pilgrimage, I called it. But in truth, I just wanted to visit a landmark, to cross an item off my bucket list.

Like everyone else, Your New Favorite Writer knew Grand Canyon from Disney films, National Geographic specials, and the like. But that is not the same as being there. I figured it was about time I joined the park’s visitor list.

I signed up for a week-long Road Scholar tour of the canyon’s North and South Rims. Road Scholar, formerly known as Elderhostel, is an organization that provides educational travel programs for older adults. I’ve taken five of their tours and always found them interesting and enjoyable. This sixth was no exception.

Twenty-four of us, first-timers at the canyon, gathered in Flagstaff, Arizona. Our guides would be Joel Kane and Rocky Sullivan. Joel, a geologist, previously worked seven years as an interpretive park ranger in Grand Canyon National Park. Rocky is a writer and cowboy poet who has also been a hot air balloon pilot and cabinet maker. Their kindness and expertise, and the uniformly warm spirit of the group members, made the trip work.

We spent one day exploring the red rock country of Sedona. The next day, we drove north from Flagstaff past the San Francisco Peaks, through a forest of ponderosa pine, ascending from 6,800 feet elevation at Flagstaff to 7,000 at the South Rim, arriving at mid-morning in a state of high anticipation. 

What would we make of it? Would our reactions echo those of many who have gone before, or is each person’s experience of the place unique?

We stepped off our van at the South Rim Visitors’ Center and walked to the nearby Mather Point overlook. Joel suggested we keep our eyes on the path in front of us and raise them only after arrival at the viewing point. I followed his suggestion.

“All right,” he said. “We’re there. Look up.”

I looked up. 

It was staggering. 

The visual scale was overwhelming. 

This was nothing you could prepare for, nothing I can describe. 

I-Max, eat your heart out.

Charlotte Stone, one of our Road Scholars, views Grand Canyon and visitors from the top of Mather Point.

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For thousands of years, proto-Americans and historic tribes have lived and worked in the depths of the canyon and on its rims. Today’s Hopi, Zuni, Hualapai and Havasupai peoples are thought to descend from earlier peoples who left abundant evidence of their sojourns. National Park Service archeologists have explored less than five percent of the region’s area, yet have found more than two thousand separate sites for study.

The winding green patch in the center of the photo is Havasupai Gardens, a cottonwood oasis once home to Havasupai people until the National Park Service evicted them in 1928. It is now a public campground for Grand Canyon hikers, and belated efforts are underway to pay respect to the Havasupai for past wrongs endured.
John Wesley Powell. Public Domain.

White, European people touched the canyon as early as 1540, when Captain García López de Cárdenas led a small group of Spanish soldiers to the South Rim. But it wasn’t until John Wesley Powell descended the Colorado River in 1869, with ten men in four wooden boats, that the words “Grand Canyon” came into the American vernacular. Until then, the region was unexplored. Powell, a Union officer who had given an arm for his country at Shiloh, put Grand Canyon on the map. Powell led another expedition two years later. 

Fred Harvey. Public Domain.

Then, true to America’s genius for exploiting resources, others began to arrive: explorers, adventurers, fortune-seekers, builders. Many sought gold or other precious minerals. Ralph Cameron built a toll road to the South Rim and filed many mining claims, not so much to extract metal as to snap up choice real estate.

There came developers like the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, which built a spur line from Williams, Arizona, to the South Rim; and entrepreneurs like Fred Harvey the railroad restaurateur, who established a grand hotel, El Tovar, on the canyon rim.

El Tovar Hotel.
Vista from Hermit’s Rest, one of Mary Colter’s buildings.

There were artist/explorers like photographers Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, who opened a studio and made the earliest still and motion pictures of the canyon. There were artist/builders like architect Mary Colter, whose structures, often of native Kaibab limestone, defined a new Southwestern aesthetic style.

The lives of these pioneers overflow with remarkable incidents and exploits, enough to fill books and museums in plenty. And the feats of more recent Grand Canyoneers—such as the pipeline across the chasm, which supplies the South Rim’s five million tourists a year with fresh spring water from the less-visited North Rim—are just as remarkable.

The formation known as Wotan’s Throne.

But a question rises in one’s brain as all this canyonesque lore unfolds: What is it about this great vacuity—this vast rancho of open air bordered by extravagant tons of stratified, water-chiseled rock—that re-organizes the people, and even the space, within its realm? 

Maybe it’s something about the geology. Perhaps that’s why Joel, with his bottomless treasury of igneous and sedimentary arcana, is the person best qualified to guide our little expedition. For the canyon seizes one’s attention not just by its hugeness or its sculptural complexity. Rather, it compels one to think about processes. 

The Grand Canyon, 277 river miles long, ten to eighteen miles wide, and more than a mile deep, is the only place on Earth where such a large area of land came to be shaped in this particular way. 

Road Scholars view the canyon from the North Rim.

As we amiable tripmates view the Grand Canyon from hundreds of angles at two dozen different viewing platforms, as we overfly it in a special sightseeing plane, looks of concentration and reckoning pass across the faces of my fellow Road Scholars. This visage is composed in equal measures of disbelief and recognition. It says: 

Something momentous happened here, on a giant stage, over vast reels of time. What was it? What happened here?

Joel explains as much as he can by dramas of uplift, folding, eruption, erosion—thick layers of different kinds of rock laid over one another, then dislocated by earthquakes, floods, and other cataclysms over geologic time. The simultaneous uplift of a huge tract—the Colorado Plateau—all in one piece. And always the irresistible power of water flowing downward. 

Rocky adds human dimensions—a keen knowledge and respect for the lore and practices of long generations of native Americans who have called this place home.

Questions remain, an unsettled feeling. This landscape was shaped by titanic battles among the forces of nature. Yet without us, it’s incomplete. I don’t mean to imply, Dear Reader, that it was all staged for our benefit. But without our presence, without our testimony—without our need to relate to the world where we have been placed—what could it possibly mean? 

Juniper and piñon pine embrace the canyon’s incipient glow at sunset.

We are a part of that we wonder at. If not, then how could we be so moved?

The canyon’s real presence demands some kind of imagination. And then you find your own imagination too small to encompass it. And you wonder, at least I do, what imagination was big enough to create it?

A visit here is a soul event. Maybe it was a pilgrimage, after all.

I can’t write about it yet, Gracious Reader. It’s too big.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.13.25
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On the Road

Given a longevity that borders on surprising, I resolved to offer up, as a form of thanks, a pilgrimage to the Grand Canyon. Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer had never been there before, in person. 

I decided to ride Amtrak’s Southwest Chief from Chicago to Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s cheaper than flying, if you forgo a sleeping compartment and settle for a 36-hour ride in a coach seat. But railroad car seats are more spacious than those in airplanes.

Taking the train is old-fashioned and romantic—an enjoyable way to go. You travel across space but also across time.

An inter-city bus brings me to Union Station. It’s a grand old pile of marble that weighs down a full block of real estate beween Canal and Clinton Streets in Chicago. (The passenger concourse and tracks occupy another eight blocks, mostly under other buildings.) I used to ride trains to and from Union Station quite a bit . . . but that was sixty years ago.  

The concourse at Chicago’s Union Station in 1956. Chicago Tribune photo. Fair use.

In those days there was a concourse with a high roof girded by steel columns. It was a dim cavern, crisscrossed at all hours by bustling businessmen, students, soldiers, and starry-eyed kids, their needs met by ticket agents, shops, restaurants, news stands, and kiosks whose lights deflected the gloom up toward a ceiling so distant you had to imagine it. Dozens of dark porters in red caps threaded through the throng, guiding carts piled with leather and Samsonite bags, while in the basement other black men toiled at the Sisyphean task of keeping the men’s room clean—and by the way, you’d better have a dime in your pocket if your needs required opening a stall door.

Travelers besiege Union Station ticket windows on July 8, 1966, after a strike against four airlines operating from O’Hare disrupted flights for thousands of people. Your New Favorite Author, then an airman third class, was somewhere in this throng, not photographed, striving to return to duty in California after a brief home leave. Chicago Tribune photo. Fair use.

Those parts of the station were demolished in 1969 and remodeled into catacombs that may be more utilitarian but are less exciting.

Today’s Great Hall. Photo by Velvet, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Today, Union Station’s Grand Hall—the anteroom, you might say, to the business at hand—is airily majestic, blessed by natural light which filters down from vast skylights. It has benches and waiting areas, an information desk, and miles of clear marble floor that today’s train-riding public is not numerous enough to crowd. It’s a serene, august space. But they still run a lot of trains from there, shooing passengers efficiently through a corridor that leads to the same old shed full of tracks. It’s all grand and functional for the postmodern age, but I do miss the buzz and hustle of the old place and the delicious cheesecake at the Fred Harvey café. 

On this occasion I make do with a quickly gulped BLT club sandwich, french fries, and coleslaw at Lou Mitchell’s, a typical old Chicago diner just down Jackson Street from the station. Then I burrow through the underground tunnel and board the Southwest Chief, Amtrak’s main long-distance train between Chicago and L.A. 

It is an amalgamation of the Santa Fe’s iconic Chief, Super Chief, and El Capitan trains of yesteryear. It follows the old Burlington Route from Chicago into Iowa and Missouri but switches to the Santa Fe main line for the rest of the trip. All these tracks are now owned by the giant BNSF Railway, but back then they were separate companies—the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe—in competition with each other. 

A 1938 postcard view of the Santa Fe streamliner Super Chief. Public Domain.

Famous old Route 66 paralleled the Santa Fe main line through much of the Southweast. Thus, many of our station stops will sound like Bobby Troup’s old song honoring the highway—“Gallup, New Mexico . . . Flagstaff, Arizona . . . Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino . . . .” I’ll be getting off at Flagstaff. 

As the train leaves Chicago, my seatmate is a young man named Max. He’s been in the Windy City on business and is headed home to Fort Madison, Iowa. 

“Fort Madison,” I say. “My mother used to work there, back in the War—the Second World War, that is. She worked at the Sheaffer Pen Company.”

“Yeah,” says Max. “My dad worked for Sheaffer Pen.” I suppose he means his dad worked his whole career at Sheaffer and is now retired. That would make him about my age or maybe as much as a generation younger. Looking at Max, a nice young man in early middle age, I figure the latter is more likely.

“Mom was part of the steno pool there,” I tell Max. 

“Steno pool—what’s that?”

Oops.

I laugh, caught in my ignorance of the passage of time. 

Employees at work in Seattle Municipal engineering department steno pool, 1959. Seattle archives, fair use.

“In those days,” I explain, “companies like Sheaffer—or any big company—hired lots of young women as stenographers, hired them right out of high school. When an executive needed to send a letter, he would call in a girl from the steno pool and speak the letter out loud. She would take it down in shorthand on a notepad. Then she went back and typed it up at sixty-five words a minute, errorless, and brought it back so he could sign at the bottom with his Sheaffer White Dot fountain pen. All the typing was done on a clunky manual typewriter. The job took strong fingers.

“My mother went to Sheaffer’s in 1940, right after graduation, and shared an apartment with three other girls her age. They were in their first jobs and excited to be on their own in the big city.”

“Yes,” Max said. “Fort Madison was bigger back then. But the W. A. Sheaffer Pen Corporation closed a few years back. You can still see their building just as the train crosses the river. It sits empty—nobody’s done anything with it yet.”

A World War II era Sheaffer fountain pen. Image by M Dreibelbis, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

The Southwest Chief rattles down the rails toward familiar Prairie State stops—Naperville, Mendota, Princeton, Galesburg. I feel rattled also by the mere speed of change: how soon a svelte writing instrument lined with a rubber ink bladder becomes a museum piece, how fast the wheels clack over the rail joints, how swiftly Lou Mitchell’s diner and yesterday’s Chicago slip away behind us where the rails come together and vanish. 

On we rush, after dropping Max off in Fort Madison—on toward the high plains of Colorado, the brown sands of New Mexico, and Arizona’s eternal canyon. If the train runs me right, I’ll be in Flagstaff tomorrow night.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer