My phone alarm goes off. I fumble for it, and briefly flirt with the idea of pretending I didn't hear it, and then going back to sleep. Ed won't wake up unless I make him, and this 530 a.m. shit that seemed so doable yesterday now feels like sadomasochism.
Strangely, I was able to get up at 510 a.m. without a problem for 4 years in high school. I had to be out the door at 630 a.m., which is when my grandpa, who lived in our basement, went to work. My options were: (1) leave at 630 a.m. with him and get a ride to school, arriving at 645 a.m., with 15 minutes to do homework before the rec room (with 33 pool tables!) in the basement of SLU High opened, or (2) leave at 645 a.m. and walk 4 blocks, take two buses, and then walk 3 more blocks, arriving barely in time for homeroom. Obviously, I took option (1), primarily so that I could play pool. I typically played for an hour before school, 30-45 min during lunch, depending on how much homework was due in the afternoon classes, and an hour after school. By the time I graduated, I was pretty good.
But given that our little household had 4 men and 2 women, all of whom had to be out the door by 7, and exactly 1 bathroom, I had the option of a 5 minute cold shower at 610 a.m., or a 20 minute hot shower at 510 a.m. There aren't a lot of things that would make me choose waking up at 510 a.m. over 610 a.m., especially after going to bed at 1 a.m., which was my usual bedtime, but the early bird gets the hot water. BTW, with 1 bathroom, there was no concept of bathroom privacy in our household. People would wander in and out while you were showering, to go to the bathroom or use the sink or whatever, the whole time. I had to go to college and endure some early awkward moments before I realized that our household did not follow customary bathroom mores.
But once in college, I was a lot more likely to be going to bed at 530 a.m. than getting up at that time, and ever since, getting up before 8 a.m. is painful. And 530 a.m. is like death. So we almost don't make it.
But after sulking for a few minutes, I get up, and begin the hateful task of rousting Ed out of bed. This from Ed:
"We wake up at 530 a.m. That's not the asscrack of dawn; that's before dawn. There is no dawn yet. We get out of bed by 550, get our shit together, and head to Zion Adventure Company to catch the shuttle. We wait in the parking lot for the shuttle to arrive, and it's fucking cold. The sun is still not up."
(You can probably tell from the tenor of this what hanging out with Ed is like at 6 a.m.)
Eventually a beat-up white van driven by what Ed describes as "a hilarious fat dude" shows up to pick us up. It's nearly two hours' drive to the put-in point for our hike, a substantial portion of which is on what the driver calls "caca road". Ah yes, caca road. Thankfully, neither Ed nor I are the type to get car-sick. We both have lots of experience with caca road- Ed in South America, and me in Egypt, Kenya, India, and any non-interstate road in Texas.
When we finally do get to the top, it's still pretty early in the morning, so it's kinda cold, but we put on our gear and head out.
All dressed up and 16 miles to go...
We start off along the river in the background of this picture of Ed. Soon the rising sun is high enough in the sky for us to be hiking in sunshine, and at that point it gets much hotter. Along the way, we find some neat stuff...
Wouldja lookitthat, I caught me a frawg!
Water break. I'm not the most photogenic person in the world, but this is the most retarded picture taken of me since the 4th grade.Each year we had to have our pictures taken individually, for a "class composite" photo sheet. That year, my mom decided it would be "cute" to make me wear the most retarded shirt ever conceived- it was a light blue shirt that had a little pattern of dark blue cowboys on bucking broncos. What I tried - and failed - to impress upon my mother was that I wasn't 5 anymore, and that at my current age, and size relative to the other boys, "cute" was roughly equivalent to "deadly". But she wrestled it onto me, and then had to drag me, quite literally, kicking and screaming to the car. Once there, I splayed my arms and legs as wide as possible and grabbed onto anything I could to try and prevent my mom from being able to get me into the car. But eventually she was able to pry my hands off the edge of the car and stuff me inside. Once we got to school, she again had to fight me, as I did everything I could to stay in the car. She ended up pulling me out by the ankle and dumping me out on the sidewalk, then jumped back into the car and drove off before I could get back in. By that point, I had been spotted by the nuns, so I had no chance to make a break for home on foot, which I was entirely ready to do, even though it was a solid mile through not a great neighborhood.
My only revenge, in my 10 year old mind at least, was to sabotage the picture. So, the 4th grade class composite for Notre Dame Elementary in 1982 is a sheet of a bunch of good little Catholic boys and girls, in their pious little poses... and then there's me, hair messed up as much as possible (which was a lot- although this may be hard for you to picture, back then I had thick, wavy, bushy Asian hair), and literally snarling at the camera.
So I had my vengeance. Mom flipped out. And ever since then she has had hers- she happily shows that picture whenever friends come over. That one, and the one of when I was a baby and shat on myself so bad, she just dumped me in a bucket. "Look, here's one of naked, shitty, Gus-in-a-bucket." My mom is one of the funniest people you'll ever meet, in her own special way.
Anyway, back to the hike, where it is continuing to heat up, and we are continuing to find cool shit...
Lookit! Lookit! Now I caught me a lizzard...Not long after this, as we are walking, I hear a weird shrieking noise coming from some rocks to the side of us. I eventually pinpoint the noise as coming from underneath a small pile of rocks...
A bat! Although you probably can't see it, he's shrieking because a bee is trying to land on his nose.
Yes folks, today is a Grand Day. For today, Ed and I have at last discovered, The Bat Cave.
This is the Best MutherFucking Road Trip _Ever_.
From this point, the river started seriously carving Zion Canyon:
So many nifty side canyons to explore...
Waterfalls to have to find a way down...
It's getting pretty hot in here, and Ed is taking off a distressing amount of clothes...
From this point on, we're hiking pretty much entirely in the river...
It eventually gets waist deep...
Nearing the end of our journey...
This from Ed: "As we go on, the river is flowing down into the canyon that it has carved out over millions of years, so the canyon walls around us are getting taller and narrower. plus, there is less river bank, so eventually we are just walking in the river, with water up to our waists in some places, trying our damndest not to fall because it's almost entirely rocs- wet rocks. Needless to say, we learned that the walking sticks were indeed, as we were told they would be, our most important pieces of equipment. There is no way to navigate some parts of that river without holding yourself up with that stick. Those sticks certainly saved our asses a couple of times.
The hike is long- 16 miles that took us 10.5 hours- and exhausting, but unlike anything I'd ever done before and well worth it. Along the way, BTW, we ran into 3 dudes who were also from New York. Small world. Not only that, one of the guys lives just a few blocks from me in Manhattan, and another of the guys went to college with me, graduated the year after I did, and lived in my dorm. I still had no idea who he was. Still, what are the chances of meeting those guys in the middle of a fucking canyon in Utah?"
The first time I ever came to Zion National Park, I was a freshman at Pomona. It was the first road trip my girlfriend Tasha and I took together. In college I tended to, as they say, burn the candle at both ends. I regularly went to bed around 4 a.m. and got up at 730. I was stretched pretty thin, and by the time spring break came around, all I wanted was to get far away from Pomona. So I found Zion on a map, figured we could go there and camp, and do some backcountry hiking. I'd be hundreds of miles away and totally able to put my hectic Pomona life out of my mind.
Upon arriving, the first hike we did was the Hidden Canyon hike, which winds along a cliff several hundred feet above the canyon floor, at points literally going around the edge of the cliff face on a ledge barely wider than your feet, hanging on by a chain drilled into the side of the cliff. After you get around that, there a steep climb, and then it lets you into a canyon carved up in the cliff that is, in fact, completely hidden from the canyon floor.
You can probably guess where this story is heading- so after driving for several hours, across hundreds of miles, and hanging from the side of the cliff, and climbing up to the top, to finally at last stand in the Hidden Canyon, and revel in staggering beauty and sheer Pomonalessness of the place, what do find up there? Our dorm RA's. I was incensed, and about to shout "IS THERE NO PLACE ON THIS GOD'S EARTH I CAN GO TO GET AWAY FROM THIS DAMNED SCHOOL????" but Tasha, who was perceptive in many ways and probably saw that coming, shoved me aside and expressed our great surprise and joy at seeing them there. So I just stayed quiet and sullen until they left.
Point being, it didn't surprise me quite as much to run into these guys. It's a small world after all.
We did, after many hours, eventually reach the end of the hike, and straggled out of the river to catch the park shuttle back to town.
We live!
So, after a fine dinner of local pizza, local beer (Ed) and local fruit juice (Me), we headed back to the hotel and passed out. Ed didn't even watch SportsCenter. That's how tired we were...
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