National

Travel: Hualapai heritage resonates at Skywalk

Monday, June 11, 2007

"Sometime before 6 a.m., on the arid plateau that is home to the steel and glass platform known as the Skywalk , a stage show for vertigo that projects tourists into empty air above the 4,000-foot drop of the Grand Canyon, the sun crests an eastern mesa and cuts through cloudless sky. Sun rays miss the canyon at first, hitting instead the western rim, where bulbous bees buzz and long-eared jack rabbits bound in starts and stops between huddles of yucca, agave, and prickly pear cacti . Immediately, unseen birds in bushes sing. Then the canyon yawns, striations of black and gray stretching into sunlit shades of gold and green, red and white.

So it is an uncertain thing, only two hours after such a sunrise, to step aboard an air-conditioned bus with a small group of khaki-clad tourists for a short ride to Eagle Point and the suspended Skywalk, a horseshoe-shaped balcony in which two 6-foot-thick steel beams support a glass floor 2 1/2 inches thick.

After leaving cameras with a clerk (electronics and other personal items are not allowed on the Skywalk) and passing through a metal detector, visitors slip on cloth booties and stagger or stride, depending on confidence, past the cliff face. Some stop in the center of the walkway and stare through the glass floor to red earth directly below. Many more stay above the comforting opacity of the side beams, one hand clenched to the railing, eyes locked on the horizon.

An intimate dynamic quickly emerges as each person adapts to this terra incognita -- somewhere between the calm of walking across a bridge and the chaos of leaping from a plane -- in ways visible and not. A few minutes after finding his footing, Doug Duncan, a Canadian with a gentle manner and floppy hat, strikes a whistling-while-the-bridge-burns mood, strolling from railing to railing with whimsical cheer. A silver-haired woman with flexible hamstrings sprawls facedown on the glass, then stretches into a yoga pose for a $21 souvenir photo. Duncan, who happens to teach meditation in Japan six months of each year, points out that humans typically overcome anxiety produced by adrenaline in 15 minutes. We get used to an unknown situation and adjust. Something that overwhelms, in other words, becomes normal.

So it is, apparently, with the Grand Canyon."

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Grand perspective (The Boston Globe 6/10)