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By Root 508 0

over his fear, but he would actively charge forward against it. He had to do it that way, charging forward. He couldn’t stand here waiting to go up. I didn’t think we’d be getting all that high up, but the height wasn’t the main factor. The layout of the tower was. You’d go up a narrow staircase along the curved edge, windows conveniently placed to let you know that you weren’t just high up inside the building, but exceedingly high above the Colorado’s millennia of carvings. The lack of floors/ceilings in the upper rooms, where you climbed in an outer ring from one staircase to another, gave you nowhere to look to pretend you were back on level ground. Once you began going up, you committed yourself to the vertical reality of the situation. So we went in haste, Benjamin promising we’d decide about correcting the sign after we’d played tourists for a spell. The windows proved to be the worst part, but Benjamin made it up level by level to the top floor, a small cage of thick plastic windows. Heavy binocular machines blocked an otherwise appealing view through those full-length windows, offering (for a mere quarter) whole seconds of in-depth scouting. I didn’t want to see small bits of it clearer. I wanted to see the whole breadth better. These infernal devices stirred me into a defenestrating mood, but alas the windows were too thick and the machines too heavy even if they hadn’t been bolted down. Also, I didn’t want to pollute the Grand Canyon with large hunks of metal. We headed back down rapidly and decided we’d best experience the Canyon back outdoors—where it actually existed and where we belonged.

As we transitioned back from the gimcrack/knickknack mind-set to appreciating the magnificence of the Canyon, I started snapping pictures, including the obligatory fake-angled shot of Benjamin clinging for life to a shrub at cliff’s edge. We followed a well-worn path leading past the railing that delimited the standard tourist area, into narrowing territory. The Canyon asserted its presence now on either side of us, but Benjamin gritted his teeth and forged on. We descended an outcropping of rock and rose again onto a ledge jutting out into the abyss. Here we again paused for pictures, and my fellow Leaguer snapped a portrait destined for fame, or at least for court documentation, depicting me with nothing but red chasm around me, wearing the camera strap around my chest like a sash, the Typo Correction Kit dangling benevolently at my side.

We discovered that our cell phones didn’t get any reception, and I thought it for the best. The last thing the place needed was a bunch of people shouting, “Can you hear me now?” and attempting—and failing—to describe what they saw before them.

After some navel-of-the-world-gazing, we adventured back to the watchtower. Benjamin had succumbed to the lure of the merchandising machine. He wanted to see if they had any postcards featuring gorgeous shots of the Canyon, which of course they did. Seeing as we were back inside the tower, we decided to return to the second level and its error-tainted sign. The floor was more crowded this time with other gawkers coming and going. I withdrew the yellow chalk that would put this sign to rights. Benjamin inconspicuously leaned forward and touched a finger to the apostrophe in “womens’”. The foul mark didn’t wipe off. We looked at each other. “It’s not a chalkboard,” he said, shocked.

Here we made a fatal mistake in our reevaluation. The apostrophe’s permanence was the biggest hint that this was no mere prop announcing a restaurant’s specials du jour. Though it had that appearance, we should have guessed then that this sign was an inextricable feature of the place, more permanent than its resemblance to a held-back elementary school kid’s social studies project would imply. But we didn’t reexamine the big picture, as we were focused so much on the typo. Call it the Forest-for-the-Trees Fallacy, the very typo-hunting trap that I had warned myself against! Perhaps it was inevitable in a place like the Grand Canyon, which itself denies full vision of