The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [45]
His repeated calumnies revealed his allegiance once and for all: this guide served a dark idol. No powers of mine could stand against the unholy agency of Juan’s denial. I don’t remember leaving the cathedral, but the next thing I knew I was standing on the terrace out front. “You okay?” Benjamin asked me.
I nodded, though I still felt dizzy.
He smirked at me. “Still want to give up your mission?”
I shook my head firmly. The questions and doubts plaguing my mind when I’d entered that building had been scrubbed away by the vinegary solution of St. Frances of Assissi. Ask, and ye shall receive—but be careful what you ask for. I squinted in the sunlight, still feeling unsteady. I decided I’d had enough for one day, and we retired to our dwelling among the donkeys.
“Frances,” it turned out, had been our ninetieth typo found. Benjamin suggested we press for an unprecedented ten typos the next day. “If we hit one hundred tomorrow with a big day like that,” he argued, “we could take the day off at the Grand Canyon, since there won’t exactly be a lot of text scrawled on the canyon walls anyway. You could use a day off, Deck. It’d be good for you.” I agreed. One day off for actual tourism wouldn’t be bad. We’d be seeing the Grand Goldang Canyon, after all. Benjamin wasn’t telling me something, but I let that pass, too.
We stared up for a while at the clear night skies, which allowed for extraordinary stargazing, and then headed back inside the cabin. I admired my new cowboy hat one last time in the bathroom’s streaked mirror. Let this be a symbol, I thought, of the inarguable importance of the mission, a continual reminder to me of my realizations in Santa Fe. Henceforth, when I put the hat on, I would assume my League identity—the righteous marker-slinger.
“No smoking for donkeys allowed,” Benjamin muttered as he drifted to sleep in the lower bunk. I relaxed in my own bed, relieved and grateful that this day had ended, but also drawing a renewed sense of purpose over myself like a Pueblo blanket. The next day, everything would change.
As we crossed the Arizona border the next morning, Benjamin literally cried out. I’d occasionally exaggerated our reactions when scribing the blog, but in this case it was absolutely true. Mid-sentence, Benjamin interrupted himself with a Charlie Brown–like “Argghug-ghhhh!” The first thing we saw in Arizona was an errant apostrophe the size of my companion’s head.
A massive billboard beckoned us to a local tourist trap with BRING YOUR CAMERA’S.
Bring my camera’s what? My camera’s lens cap? We got off at the exit and circled back, parked close, and walked toward the billboard. A low barbed-wire fence stood between us and the field from which this monstrosity taunted us. We found where the ground rose the highest, and hopped over the fence. Then we crossed the brush, dodging cacti and tromping through stubby, thirsty grass, a sign that it hadn’t rained here in a while. That was agreeable for my purposes, since the only way I could figure to correct this was to cover the black paint with yellow chalk. It’d disappear once the rains came, but for now it would look swell. As I applied the chalk, the apostrophe began to flake away, so I could at least shrink the readability of the gigantic blotch that greeted travelers to Arizona. Satisfied that we’d done some good, we pressed on, and more than a mile up, to Flagstaff.
Including the grandiose start back on the border, we’d manage to go six for nine for the day, breaking a personal best for typo finds (topping the eight we’d caught in New Orleans). As I moved through Flagstaff’s intimate, frontier-town-like streets, I began to reexamine my ideas from the day before. Here again a town thrived with independent businesses and approachable people who for the most part appreciated our efforts.
We hit an obstacle or two along the way, of course, like when we caught a typo in neon and I didn’t have any spare glass tubing handy for