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(c) Courtney B. Duncan 1997, 2002

Chapter 5.

The Week Before, The Drive Out

The last week before a trip never seems to go as smoothly as it could. The item "plan the final countdown" on my master list was still three or four from the top. We were just going to have to plan as we went, improvise, that is. The final training item "walk to church" on June 8 had been marked out for a couple of months, canceled. Notions of not overloading preparation days, resting up, paying attention to final diet towards the end, all were gone. There was only time to just "go for it."

The Saturday and Sunday Before, Not Laid Back

Saturday was spent trying to catch up with bills and correspondence. We weren't going to be gone for long, but you can't start out behind. This and chauffeuring and a tiny bit of pre-packing and some shopping seemed to take up most of the day.

A faucet in the master bathroom had been dripping for several weeks. I had a note to myself to turn this faucet off at the wall underneath the cabinet while we were gone. I had also made a note to make sure the commode wasn't left running, remembering the day that we'd returned from being picked up from a hike and the septic system was spilling into the street because the tank valve had not reset correctly. This was critical because the commode couldn't be turned completely off at the wall without doing a major service on the shutoff valve. A preliminary inspection under the cabinet showed that this was the case for the sink too. A leaky shutoff faucet protected the leaky sink faucet. I decided to go to the store to price sink faucet sets and returned within the hour with a $70, wood handle, no-washers outfit complete with drain and stop. This was put aside in the hopes that there would be time tomorrow to put it in. 'Is this really the most important thing to be doing this weekend?' I thought. 'Well, we don't want to waste copious amounts of water while we're gone,' I thought.

Sunday was supposed to be a down day, as Sundays were always supposed to be. At least the after-church part of Sunday was supposed to be down time. This was especially important because this was the last Sunday of rest before the Big Adventure. It was also the last weekend of the school year and therefore near the end of both the church and school spring schedules. Next week was to be the last two-service Sunday until September and Roland Tabell, the music director, had planned big blowout productions of the final services. I had known for some time that I would have to miss that final Sunday next week and that made this week all the more important, at least to me. And, as sometimes happens, it didn't go well.

The sound system had been altered by a big end-of-year Korean Church musical the evening before in ways that we couldn't decipher in time to have it working correctly in the early service. I had to give an announcement about the church Beach Party that wouldn't be until the end of August. In beach costume. During the first service, I walked out on cue, hit my mark, and realized that my notes on what to say were not with me. At least I had studied, so I improvised. Second service, the announcement segment just prior to me was a full-blown production in itself. The congregation joined in a rap version of what was being said. I had my notes, but it didn't make this easy to follow. Or smooth. Or effective. I didn't play synthesizer well either, either service. Things went wrong one after another. The sermon was about the pervasiveness of sin. No kidding.

Straight from church, I took John to an end-of-school-year swimming party. The parents looked like they expected me to stay. Plenty of other parents were there. I didn't stay. Viann and Viannah had promised to go to a friend's dance recital at 3:30. I had to pick up John at 3:00 from the party. Viann, Viannah, and Katherine were out shopping. We coordinated on the radio. I went to get John. Katherine was left at home by herself for twenty minutes for the first time in her life, a groundbreaking event. John and I went by to pick up a friend of his to bring home and play. We arrived at 3:30. After locking the attic to make sure the boys would stay out, I went to work on the sink.

Getting at the fittings to a sink faucet with adequate tools is notoriously difficult. In this case it was also seriously uncomfortable. I stuck a towel up under the drain to act as a "pillow." Although I cranked as hard as I dared on the shutoff, the first crack in the cold-water connection rewarded me with a fine, powerful spray in the face. While the floor of the cabinet filled, I ran outside to shut off the entire house.

So much for a dry plumbing job.

Getting the new fixture connected in the tight space was nearly as difficult. No single dimension below the sink was large enough to accommodate my head and forearm from elbow to wrist in the proper arrangement to get any leverage on the fittings. No single dimension up immediately below the sink was large enough to get a hand or a tool in with the fitting itself excepting one angle that allowed progress to be made with a channel-lock 1/8 of a turn at a time.

After a half hour on a damp towel with a board in my back staring up into darkness with flecks of old caulk and paint dropping onto the contact lenses in my eyes, I felt the installation was ready to test. I re-opened the shutoffs at the wall and waded back out to re-open the house valve. When I did so, the inrush seemed to take longer than it should have. In fact, it didn't stop and I could hear a loud hiss from the bathroom. Maybe it was the commode refilling.

No, a jet spray from under the sink was re-flooding the cabinet and floor. All the towels that weren't already soaked were now. Damn! I waded back into the mud by the front door to turn it back off.

The next few dozen minutes were spent trying to contain half an inch of water covering the floor, drying it all back to "just damp."

Just because the faucet itself was a washerless model didn't mean that the installation itself didn't need them. Since it had been dripping, I had tried to cram one of the old washers back into the hot side. Washerless on the cold side, a nice full pressure spray was cleaning out under the sink for us. It was time to rearrange storage under there anyway.

A home maintenance job never involves less than two trips to the store. Selecting appropriate pieces for fit, I headed back to Orchard Supply Hardware (affectionately known as "OSH") and puzzled for fifteen minutes in front of the washer display trying to figure out exactly which ones were needed, knowing that missing by half a size was to make the job either impossible or ineffective resulting, in either case, in a third trip to the store. A helper came and looked at what I had versus what he had. His guess was the same as mine, but with less confidence than I would have hoped. I took our guess, checked out for under a dollar, and returned to the swamp.

Two sessions of one-eighth turn, knuckle bruising struggle later and I was ready to try again. This time the inrush lasted a second and the connections held. We had new faucets! This minor and non-essential item could now be struck from the countdown list and it was time to consider whether or not to do the drain.

We hadn't had a working stopper in this drain since we had bought the house, to swap it now for the new one that I had been forced to buy with the new faucet set anyway would be a real upgrade. It wasn't even a pressure fitting; surely it would be easy.

Surely, that is, if the old one could be removed without cracking the porcelain. Surely, that is, if I could make sense of the not-quite-code drain arrangements and not disturb them in the process. It looked possible. The room was already a damp, muddy mess.

Another hour and three attempts later to drip-tight fit the drain, I was to the last step, working the three dimensional puzzle that is the stopper control lever. The arrangement seemed to be an improvement on old systems, but between inspection and the diagrams in the directions, there weren't many hints as to how it was supposed to work. "Push in until it clicks," well, I thought I'd done that but still, through full travel, there seemed to be only a choice of always open or always closed, set at installation time. Then I discovered that I had the clicked-on part upside down. At least it wasn't glued.

By the time the bathroom was ready to be opened for users again dusk was nearing. John's friend was picked up and taken home. Viann and Viannah returned after three hours rather than the expected one. We were in punt mode for food. Dominos Pizza was called. Everyone but me watched a cable Disney movie late into the evening. I went off to write in my journal, to strive with the ongoing concepts of family overload. I wanted Viann to be home mostly while we had teenagers, that is, from June 3, 1998 to August 7, 2010. But then how would we finance college?

So much for detailed, relaxed or training preparations in the last free days before driving away.

The Workweek Bends Too

The last work days before any respectable length of time out of the office aren't a breeze either. Projects have to be finished up or brought to a state of temporary stasis. It is particularly problematic with some project that has been behind schedule for a long time. Wouldn't it be nice to just be done with it now and not have it to worry about after the return from trip?

The "DSN Calibrator" was such a project. We had proposed it in 1994 and gotten funding in 1995 and were supposed to have been done by September 1996 and here it was summer of 1997 and the final details of the last shipments weren't getting handled.

Then there was the GPS receiver for Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. This project was now gearing up and there were adapters to order and software to write. For much of the week, I just ditched all the pending emergencies and urgent phone calls and worked on the initial software for this. There was much ahead and very little was happening thanks to the leading edge of bureaucratic influx which meant that most of the people who needed to be working were sitting in meetings.

The week went fairly well nonetheless, I had a task for each morning and each afternoon and stayed closer to schedule than usual. By Thursday, I was composing lists of instructions for people to execute while I was gone. Order this, call so-and-so if you need help on such-and-such, I'll be back in on the 23rd. I had newly discovered the "delay" feature of the e-mail program I used where I could send these things off but not have them arrive and be read until after I was gone. This allowed me some peace and quiet during the composition. This activity continued into Friday, and there was a plan to clear e-mail, paper mail and bulletin lists, back up the computer, change the voice-mail greeting, make an appropriate note on the secretary's out-board, do some actual work, and get out of the office early to help pack.

There are outside errands that can only be done during the work day. An oil change for the van had to be worked in Wednesday morning too.

The Last Day of School

Thursday was the last day of school for all the kids. This was the long dreaded last day that our carpooling arrangements would ever be simple again. For two years, they had all been in Palm Crest Elementary. For two years, they had all gone out the door at about 8 in the morning and been taken up with Mrs. Smith and her Viannah-aged daughter Alison across the street. Viann would pick them up when they got out in the afternoon and there was only need to pay for one hour of day care for John in the afternoon, about $50 a month. This worked except on Viann's late day, Wednesday, usually until after 9 p.m., when other arrangements had to be made. We had managed year to year with this too. Next year, Viannah would go to seventh grade at another campus, Alison was going to a different carpool that didn't have room for Viannah, and it didn't look like anybody in the neighborhood but me was going to be taking little kids to Palm Crest where Katherine and John would remain.

The very last day of easy carpooling for the rest of our lives and it was messed up too. Katherine had a swimming party with her friends in Girl Scouts after school. People were going every which way. Viann was coming home early; she was going to take off Friday to do last minute running around and to pack. The plan was to get entirely ready then leave at dawn Saturday.

Meanwhile my annual performance review, known at JPL as "ECAP" (no one knows what these acronyms stand for), had been delayed until today, my boss Larry Young and I being too busy to get together until now. But, he didn't want this to drag on another couple of weeks, so there we were in his office talking about how things were going and where I'd like to head next. At a complete loss for any aspiration or organized thought about career development in this environment, I stalled, "Let's get SRTM done and then talk again." That would be more than a year in the future. Meanwhile, there had been an unexpected raise the past Friday. That made six in three years, a period when most other people at JPL were getting only two increases. Thursday evening, I got into my old employee status records and spent time I didn't have making a graph of my salary history from my first job through these first ten years at JPL.

Packing Day

Too much was packed into packing day. My phase-out at work went well enough and I did leave slightly early, but not as early as I would have liked. It was more like four rather than three in the afternoon when I finally got away. The usual released feeling that goes with leaving work for the last time before a big break wasn't there. Too much was ahead. There was always too much ahead when one was about to leave on vacation, or any trip for that matter, and I was conscious of it this time. That's the job of being a parent in this situation. Much to do and nobody to just make it happen for you.

The car-top carrier had been mounted the night before. We filled it 3/4 full with wood for the camp fire then overfilled it to 150% capacity with camping gear. The chairs would have to be bungeed on top this time, which turned out to be easier than expected. Everything else had to go in somewhere too. When the nominal "Reading of the List" was scheduled for 7 p.m., Viann just laughed. We tried anyway and, over a quick supper, tried at going through the venerated, three page camping list (see Appendix B.). The way I always wanted it to work was that we would be done loading except for putting in the people and shutting the doors, then we would go over the list and people would go off and get the forgotten items right as we checked them off. This had worked well for many camping trips in the past, and then items were added to the list as they were missed at the destination later. The list was long; containing everything we had ever wanted or even thought of on any trip. This was overkill, really, for any one trip. Today, though nowhere near ready, we were reading the list anyway. Viann would say, "Oh, I'll get that" a few times, but the effect wasn't the same. Half of those "oh, I'll get that" items ended up being forgotten in the rush to get done because they weren't dealt with at the time of reading the list. It wasn't expected to be so bad in this case; we would be camped near stores catering to people in just our predicament. Money could solve all these problems; still, my treasured procedure was broken.

At nearly midnight, we just gave up and quit working on it, nearly ready but still some distance from being fully loaded.

On The Road

At 4:40 a.m., we were up and at it again. Hastily finishing up packing due to the long driving day ahead, we were in the van and driving away at 5:58 a.m. Then at 6:05, we were back at the house. Someone had forgotten the bag of apples and pears. We again drove off to adventure. At 6:14, we returned to get "Return of the Vampires" the book that Viannah was currently reading. At this point, everybody made a potty stop and we were off once more.

There are not many ways to leave the Los Angeles area to the east. For this trip there was only one good possibility, I-10 east to I-15 north and thence to Nevada, Utah, and finally northern Arizona. All such trips start with a drive to Barstow. I fiddled with the ever-present ham radios a bit but talked to no one.

Shortly before eight we noticed that there was no traffic on the other side of the road, no traffic at all. I remarked, "Everybody is leaving today, nobody wants to go to L. A." But it was unusual to have no cars at all.

In a few miles, traffic on our side slowed abruptly. I jammed on the brakes, the bungeed chairs held, the wood held, people in the car woke up to, "Everybody buckle up!" the nominal, oft-repeated command from Viann, particularly at times like this. Some still were. Traffic slowed to single-digit miles per hour. So much for making good time.

In twenty minutes, we reached and passed an auto-semi wreck on the south bound side. A semi-tractor-trailer was jackknifed on its side, blocking all traffic lanes. A mid-sized car was completely crushed and blackened in the median. Police and wreckers were everywhere but the victims were already gone, perhaps already for hours.

This brought to mind a wreck we'd seen in far west Texas on I-10 in 1994. Early one morning as we were just starting out, someone in a hurry who had obviously been driving all night passed us. He was weaving, speeding, acting reckless. Ten miles later, we came upon this car turned over in the road; other drivers there were already stopped directing traffic. Viann didn't want to expose our sleeping children to carnage and help was already there. We went on. I wondered if my radios could have done any good. I wondered about this for years. This time it was much later in the crises. Help had already come and gone. The best thing for anybody to do was to keep going and not block the rest of traffic.

What happens to people that they drive all day and all night? Why do they think they can get away with it time after time? One minute you're driving along, life is as normal as it gets, you're trying not to nod off, anticipating the destination, maybe with dread, maybe with pleasure. Next you're in burning, twisted wreckage, surrounded by glass, pinned by auto parts that were never intended to take this shape, gasping for air in searing pain. Or already gone from this life. That wasn’t the intended destination.

Back on I-15, we shortly reached an exit from the southbound side where all traffic was being diverted to a different highway. The backup there was longer and slower than it had been on our side. After this we could speed back up.

We continued through Barstow and on towards Las Vegas with no more traffic trouble. The temperature was on the way up, the gas gauge on the way down. We entered Nevada at about ten and drove straight through Las Vegas without stopping. I wasn't sure we had enough gas to get all the way to St. George and even if we did, we would be late for lunch. Everybody was wanting out of the car. We stopped near Mesquite to feed the car and ourselves and to buy promotional car tapes from McDonald's and a little foam glider for John to play with. We shoveled the van out a bit, Viann sponged at a mess from spilled ketchup in the supplies. We yelled for the kids to get back in so we could continue.

I-15 passes through the northwest corner of Arizona, a mountain-pass area with no other connection to the state. This goes on for 22 miles, and then comes out in St. George, Utah. This all passed our windows without remarkable event, though we took a little more interest than usual in the roadside geology. I said, "I've been through here several times." Viann retorted, "Two!" We counted up, yes, counting this trip it was three, that anybody could remember, and how could you forget a stretch of road like this? "But never before in this direction," I tried in vain to recover, answered only by silence.

From St. George, we turned right onto Highway 9, then 59, then in Arizona again, 389, and then Alternate 89, a set of two lane roads through very small towns that ultimately enter the back side of the Grand Canyon National Park. A dirt construction zone coincided with an early summer rain shower. Oncoming drivers were using their lights; light beige mud was thrown all over the van. Some of it would stay on all summer.

We pulled into the Chevron Station at Jacob Lake. I wanted Viann to be able to get all the way to the southern pickup point without another fill up. None of us were used to full service but there was no choice here. The helpful, college-kid attendant let air out of my brand new tires to make up for the altitude. "Don't want a blowout up here on these narrow, winding roads," he said. I was skeptical. We didn't take on much gas by the standard of the day’s prices, only $11.95.

We pulled out before four. It did not appear that we would have to call ahead to preserve our reservation, even though the camping office was to close at five.

Arrival in the Park

The last 44 miles of the trip is on a road that goes only one place, to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Viann had checked out tapes of stories from the old Greek Heroes from the library for the trip. We listened to the Works of Heracles and Stories of Perseus while aspen meadows rolled by out the windows, gagged at the Slaughter of the Minatoar while wiping the windshield in more light rain showers. I had planned for a 13 hour drive, it should have been 7-8 p.m. at the earliest, but it was only now 4 p.m., we had only been on the road eleven hours, counting lunch. We were going to be setting up camp in the daylight, before 5 p.m.!

The Kaibab Lodge passed on the right. We had eaten there on our first visit in 1989, the trip that had been far too rushed. That was the time we had tried to drive from Flagstaff to St. George in one day, stopping at south and north rims on the way. The north was 88 miles out of the direct route, a hundred and twelve if you counted the round trip to Royal Point. The slower pace of this trip would benefit from that experience, finally.

The park boundary checkpoint came into view. A few cars were passing in and out. We looked for our Eagle Pass, good until August since we had bought it on vacation last year. I tried both of the wallets, the ham bag, the book bag, and finally found it on the clipboard that contained the "things we were certain to need." Too much organization had led to consternation once again.

The ranger on duty was a feisty redhead with a pointed nose and a no-nonsense attitude. She looked at the card and said, "Courtney, that's your wife here," indicating the front passenger seat where Viann was seated. This person was not used to being wrong.

"No, that's me," I replied. This sort of confusion seemed to happen five times a week these days.

"Oh sorry sir, there was no way I could know," a telephone solicitor would say.

"That's OK," I would reply, but hang up on them anyway because I didn't want to buy or donate to anything, no matter how wonderful or deserving.

But not this ranger.

"Well," there was a slight hint of cockiness, "I'll (just) have to see some ID." I fumbled with my wallet again for the three pieces of nearly illegible paper that now constituted my California driver's license. Why would I lie about ownership of a card when enough people to make believe anything we wanted were sitting right here in the car? "My best friend's daughter is Courtney, I can't imagine a man having that name." This woman was not one to trifle with, I tried to hide my resignation, still, I out-aged her by about twenty years, and as a taxpaying American, I had the same rights of access to this park that she or her friend’s daughter or anybody else did. Viann chuckled supportively.

I said, "It happens all the time," trying to take a non-threatening but light 'why don't you learn something from this experience' tone.

"Have a nice day." We were in, not without mild harassment.

First Night in a Tent

And so we did arrive at the campground before the office closed. The attendant located our reservation and we had our copy too. There was no trouble with anyone's name here. "We have one rule here, you must always STOP at this STOP sign," she indicated the Stop Sign at the check in window, one leaving, one entering. We took our placard for site #22; coasted forward one foot to stop at the stop sign then proceeded at the posted 15 miles per hour limit.

We were unloading the van and setting up the tent well before dark, quite unusual for us. It was chilly. It was damp everywhere. It was base camp! We moved the table to a more convenient place, we argued about where to put the tents, I climbed up on top of the van, threw down all the gear, the chairs, and half of the wood. "All this wood stays here, we'll use the other half on the other side."

Viann replied, "Why don't we use more here, won't it be warmer on the other side, what if we don't want to start a fire there at all?"

'We don't carry wood home,' had been the spoken and unspoken policy for many trips now.

The constant struggle between long term planning-thinking and living-in-the-moment was always played out in our relationship this way. "We'll burn what we need and if we run out, I'll throw down some more." I would usually close the contest with some such unsatisfactory maxim.

We walked to the store to get the first $7 of things we'd forgotten. The weather at Phantom Ranch was marked on the bulletin board as 93/70 (high/low). That was great! No worries about heat stroke if that held! We ate a camp dinner heated on the camp stove. Everybody was exhausted; Katherine and I were the most cranky. I was glad we'd had an afterthought early this morning to bring our heavy jackets, The List and early summer notwithstanding. It was about 40 already tonight and would be colder. Everybody was turned in by nine, the girls last. They were up religiously keeping their detailed trip journals though the important details were still over a day ahead.

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