The Grand Canyon is so big. Now you’re supposed to say “How big is it?”, but I don’t have a witty punch line, it’s just big, on a scale that’s a bit hard to grasp. The 10 mile view to the other rim, for instance, was so clear and seemed so close, but it was 10 miles away. When I built a deck in the back of my house in San Francisco, I was required to put up a guardrail because the drop was a little more than 3 feet. The balusters had to be no more than 4 inches apart so that a child couldn’t tumble through and fall the 3 or so feet to his or her unsupervised death. There are only a few guardrails around the Grand Canyon, at various points, but the rest of the rim is dizzyingly vertigo-inducingly open. And with a mile drop to the floor. A San Francisco building inspector would make them take it out. Or fill it in.
On the way back to Phoenix, we stopped for dinner in Sedona, just in time to see the city’s backdrop of red sandstone rock formations gloriously illuminated by the setting sun, a spectacular show, like stepping into a hyper-saturated Maxfield Parrish painting of a John Ford vista.
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The next day we visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home and school, Taliesin West. It’s set amidst the Scottsdale lunar landscape, on the “brow” of a hill. Taliesin was a renowned bard who sang at the courts of several Celtic British kings a very long time ago. His name in Middle Welsh translates to “shining brow.”
Wright’s design abstractly incorporates visual references to the surrounding landscape, the hills, even the cacti. The whole venture was meant to function as an experiment of sorts, except, it seems, for water- and weatherproofing, which seem to be the most obvious challenges of the new caretakers. Wright, 5’8″ tall, is quoted as saying something about buildings for people over 6 feet tall being a waste of material, so anyone requiring this extra material has to stoop upon entering any room. I like the feeling of being squeezed through a narrow entry that opens into a larger space, like wiggling back into the womb.