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Cheryl Hughes: Navigation

“If countries like Russia or China ever decided to take us over, they wouldn’t have to drop one bomb,” Garey said to me.  We were on our way home from the Nashville airport after having spent a week at the Grand Canyon with our daughter, Nikki, and our son-in-law, Thomas.  I was mulling over pictures of Antelope Canyon, Horseshoe Bend and the Colorado River, so I wondered where he was going with the no-bombs-necessary statement.

“Oh, really,” I said.

“All they’d have to do is take out our GPS satellite systems,” he said, “because this younger generation couldn’t find their way to the bathroom without it.”

He was referring to the way Thomas drove us around the canyon area while Nikki supplied the navigational information from the GPS on her phone.  

“They never pay attention to the land marks along the way,” Garey continued, “That’s how you know if you’re going in the right direction on the way back.”

I understood what he was saying, but Thomas made only one wrong turn during the entire trip, and that was because he didn’t see his exit until he was past it.  I remember the days of landmarks and following Garey’s nose.  All total, we probably spent 120 hours of our forty-three years together turning around.  That’s five days we’ll never get back.  One hundred twenty hours of frustration, thirst, searching for a restroom and assigning blame that the millennials won’t have to suffer through.

All in all, we had a wonderful time at the Grand Canyon.  Besides the Canyon itself, which is spectacular in a way that pictures can never capture, we learned a lot about the culture of the Native American Indians who were the first people to leave their mark on the site.  We visited the ruins of a Hopi Indian pueblo.  The site had five living quarters, each about the size of my bedroom, and two storage areas for food and water.  The site, overlooking the Canyon, was home to approximately twenty-five people, all of whom navigated the area without the help of GPS, Garey would be quick to point out.  They did have some pretty significant rock formations by which to get their bearings, I would be quick to point out; and they had an unobstructed view of the sun’s path from east to west each day, as well as a night sky free from light pollution.  

On the modern day Canyon site, there is trail that follows the rim of the canyon.  The Trail of Time was my favorite part of this hike.  Along the trail, there are large pieces of rock, representing every layer that makes up the natural wonder that is the Canyon.  It begins with Stromatolite, the most current formation, and ends with Elves Chasm Gneiss, marking 1,840 million years old.  These are the sort of landmarks that could point you in the direction of home.

On our last day of sight-seeing, we visited Antelope Canyon.  It is by far the most beautiful rock formation I have ever seen.  It is a slot canyon located on a Navajo Indian reservation near Page Arizona.  (Page is the town that grew out of the construction of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River.  Lake Powell was created as a result.)  To visit Antelope Canyon, you have to be taken there by a Navajo guide.  Visitors to the canyon climb into pickup trucks fitted with canopies and benches.  It is a bumpy, dusty ride, but well worth the trip.  We walked through corridors of swirling rock formations, made by centuries of water wearing away sandstone.  The sun caught the rock at different angles, creating reds, blues and greens that looked as if a projector was displaying the colors there.  It is little wonder the Navajo made this their place to stand, and no wonder that they protect the area like they do.

Both the Hopi and the Navajo mythology tell of coming to the canyon area through a hole in the sky from a world below our present earth.  Navajo tradition speaks of four worlds their people passed through, each one beneath the other, in order to get to this fifth and current world.  Now, that would take a navigational skill set beyond what modern-day GPS could manage and even beyond what Garey Hughes believes himself to have.

A trip to the Grand Canyon is a trip worth taking.  If you don’t have GPS on your phone or in your vehicle, might I suggest you take my husband, Garey, along…for a small fee, of course.  I’d like to recoup some of that gas money we spent when we had to turn around all those times.  

 

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