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Grand Canyon Love Story chapter four
IVColor It Blond To achieve any exciting goal is a thrilling experience. For two kids from rural Michigan, used to swimming in quiet, cattail-fringed lakes, to step out into the Pacific Ocean, which stretches all the way to China almost without interruption — that is far more than exciting. For us, it was magic. It […]
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Grand Canyon Love Story chapter three
IIIGoals Three and Four California is not a state; it is a state of mind. As we discovered during nearly three months — and well over 3000 miles — of travel, up and down and back and forth across Californialand, it is a state of mind so expansive and feverish that even its never-ending Pacific […]
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Grand Canyon Love Story chapter two
IITwo Goals Accomplished 1922 Having graduated from high school in a sleepy Michigan town surrounded by cow pastures and lakes, we figured that college could wait. With our parents’ blessing — so we recounted to the Eberlys — we set out to hike America’s 48 states1 and work our way as we went. Some of […]
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Grand Canyon Love Story chapter one
IHoneymoon Chariot 1920s The rutted dirt road which years later would be known as America’s “Main Street” — Highway 66 — did not even widen as it skirted the wind-bitten service station and general store that made up the business section of Peach Springs, Arizona. On our map the place stood out boldly, the only […]
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A Lot of Changes in 80-Odd Years
September 20, 1987 In preparing a talk to be given at my upcoming 65th high school reunion in Howell, Mich., I am beginning to realize the enormity of the changes that all the members of that Class of 1922 have seen in their 80-year lifetimes. When we were young, for a nickel we could buy […]
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029 Epilogue
On a rainy night outside the high school of Webster Groves, Missouri, a woman was passing the auditorium entrance where a large bulletin board announced the program being given inside: “SHEEP, STARS, AND SOLITUDE.” She stopped to read the words. Then, for some reason which she herself could not explain, she slipped inside and took […]
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027 Symphonies and a Psalm
On June 5, as we were crossing a stream in a cienega, Rosalio said to me: “This is it.” At my questioning, he elaborated: “We here. The home ranch. She begins here.” We continued on, as though nothing had happened. To me, I had visioned entering the home ranch as a major climax; in fact, […]
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026 Rosalio’s “Children”
On Ranger Johnson’s map in Heber I had seen how the sheep trail crossed the Sitgreaves National Forest, swung out over private land past Dry Lake, circled the tiny town of Snowflake, then entered Sitgreaves Forest again before crossing the boundary into Fort Apache Indian Reservation. What the ranger pointed out to me in two […]
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025 Left-handed Trees
We are in the high forests — at last. Like the horny-skinned, dust colored, earth-bound caterpillar that emerges from its cocoon as a soaring butterfly, this sheep trail has changed from the tortures of Ramer Canyon and the Rim Country into a palace of pineclad wonders. It is Sunday, dawn, and the world is at […]
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024 Cream Puffs and Branding Irons
Heber is a quiet Mormon settlement with a few stores lining the main street. As Ranger Johnson dropped me in front of the town cafe, the last remnants of activities were being clothed in the deepening darkness. A boy and a girl raced their bikes along the road, stirring up and arousing both dust and […]