Roadshow: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle by Peart Neil

Author:Peart, Neil [Peart, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2011-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Exciting, especially, as usual, when it’s over. At the time it’s often just scary.

I thought of the phrase “my favorite day,” and it may have been.

One of them, anyway.

Pretty magical. And adventurous. And . . . successful.

And what a view—though I’ve hardly had time to look at it.

I gave Michael the crew knock, and we followed the asphalt walkway along the edge of the Canyon. I showed him the cabin right on the Rim where I had stayed for four days in December 2003, finishing the first draft of Traveling Music, and we passed the rooms in the Bright Angel Lodge where Michael and I had stayed during Vapor Trails. We laughed at a redundant sign beside a faucet on the lawn, “NON POTABLE WATER NOT FOR DRINKING.”

The waitress wore a name tag saying she was Maria from Brazil, but when Michael asked her where in Brazil she was from, she said she was actually Eva from Greece. She laughed, “I guess they had this name tag left over!”

After dinner, we had a leisurely walk back along the Rim in the moonless night, the canyon still visible by the light of the brilliant stars. A bright dot of manmade light gleamed from the North Rim, ten miles away and 1000 feet higher (215 miles away by road), where all had been dark the previous December, the North Rim lodge closed for the winter. After such a long, hard day, 576 kilometers, 360 miles, we soon said good night and went back to our little cabins.

In bed by ten, I caught up on several hours of missed sleep and was still awake by seven, walking back up to El Tovar for breakfast. I was delighted by the cool morning air and the light-filled canyon under a translucent sky. On the way back, I bought a Coke from a vending machine and delivered it to Michael’s cabin with a loud crew knock and a call, “room service!”

We were on the road again by nine, following the park road east along the South Rim, through the shadows of pines and junipers. We paused at the Desert View area to admire architect Mary Colter’s final masterpiece, the Indian Lookout Tower. It was a tall, tapering cylinder of natural stone, a fantasy of the Native West like her Hopi House beside El Tovar, and the small stone lookouts along the Rim—Lookout Studio (which I had looked out on as a snow-frosted vision from my desk during that December writing retreat) and Hermit’s Rest. We continued east to Cameron, then turned south toward Flagstaff. For some reason, Doofus and Dingus sent us around in circles there (operator error, I suspect), and as we finally headed south on the little road I had chosen, a thin gray line unnamed on the map, a line of rainclouds was clearly headed our way.

July 16 was another one of those significant days for me, Jackie’s birthday (it would have been her forty-ninth). In recent years, I had been trying to

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