Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [35]
“People are just different,” Dana used to observe serenely, whenever we’d tease her about it. And my mom never let my sister’s lateness bother her. As she explained it to us, “She just needs a little more time to get ready.”
“Why?” Micah or I would ask.
“Because she’s a girl.”
Oh.
Still, Dana had the occasional wild impulse. On our one and only cross-country vacation in the summer of 1976, the family loaded into our Volkswagen van—the only car we had from 1974 to 1982—and spent a few weeks traveling around the west. We visited the Painted Desert and Taos, New Mexico, before finally arriving at the Grand Canyon. It was, of course, one of the greatest sights in the world, but as children we didn’t much appreciate it. Instead, on my sister’s suggestion, we decided it would be much more fun to slip behind the viewing ropes and approach the unstable, cordoned-off edge of the canyon while our parents were buying us lunch. There, we discovered a small ledge, maybe three feet down.
“Let’s go down there,” my sister suggested.
Micah and I looked at each other, glanced at the ledge, and shrugged. “Okay,” we replied. I mean, why not? How dangerous could it be? It didn’t look too unstable.
Anyway, we climbed down and sat on the ledge for a few minutes, three little kids with their legs dangling free. Far beneath us, we could see the Colorado River snaking through the canyon and hawks circling below. The differing strata of rock resembled a soft-hued, vertical rainbow. After a while, however, we got bored.
“Hey,” my sister said, “I have an idea. Let’s pretend we slipped off the edge of the canyon and scare people.”
Micah and I looked at each other again, impressed. This would normally have been one of our ideas. “Okay,” we answered in unison.
Now, squatting on the ledge, we raised ourselves slowly and poked our heads and arms over the top of the canyon. No one noticed us at first. Beyond the ropes about thirty feet away, we could see a group of people taking pictures and staring off in different directions, marveling at the natural beauty. When my sister nodded, we suddenly began screaming for help at the top of our lungs.
Heads immediately whipped in our direction, and people saw what seemed to be three little children clawing for their lives in an attempt to hold on. An older woman swooned, another grabbed at her heart, another clutched at her husband’s arms. No one seemed to know what to do. They continued staring at us with wide, fearful eyes, frozen by shock and horror.
Finally, one man broke free from the spell he was under, and was stepping over the rope when we saw my mom come rushing toward us.
You can probably guess what happened next.
“Stay there while I take a picture, kids!” my mom yelled.
As fun as it was, sadly we couldn’t stay at the Grand Canyon. A few minutes later, our family was told that we had to leave.
“Now,” as the ranger on duty so kindly put it.
Six months later, my brother and I had our BB guns confiscated by the sheriff. Not because of the BB gun wars, but because my brother went a little too far. Basically, what happened was this: There was no one to play war with one afternoon, so my brother recruited a couple of first-graders for a different kind of game. He told them to bend over and hold the cuffs of their pant legs out, so he could shoot through the material.
“Don’t move, or I might accidentally shoot your leg,” Micah explained patiently. “I just want to practice my aim.”
Anyway, as I said, the sheriff came and took away his gun.
A week later, they came again and took my gun, too. My brother had used it to shoot holes in a couple of neighbors’ windows.
And just like that, our days playing war were over.
CHAPTER 7
Lima, Peru
Sunday, January 26
When it was time to bid farewell to Guatemala, we boarded our plane and headed to our next stop, Lima, Peru, a city of eight million and home to nearly a third of Peru’s population. Once the capital of a Spanish empire encompassing Ecuador,