Jessica was soon settled into the cockpit passenger side of the helicopter. She'd learned to fly small planes and she loved flying, but she had never flown a chopper. It looked like great fun, and she talked to the pilot the entire time, even while he went through his preflight check, telling him of her love for flying.
The young pilot beamed. He shared her love of the air.
The inky sky was giving way to light the way a water-color painting gave way from one color to another, bleeding into one another, and on their way to the Grand Canyon, the sun was meeting them. Within the hour, Jessica and J. T. were treated to an aerial view of the colossal Hoover Dam, one of America's seven modern civil engineering wonders, on beautiful Lake Mead, the dam's reservoir, which equated to the largest man-made lake in America.
Even from this height, Jessica saw that the dam dwarfed everything around it, even the mountainsides into which it nestled. Cars and trucks drove across its razorback highway, which capped the Great Pyramid scale of the dam.
The pilot obviously spent more time flying tourists than marshals of the law, and he automatically explained what they were looking at. "Construction of the dam began in 1931, and the last concrete was poured two years ahead of schedule, in '35. Power plant wings were completed in '36, and the first generator began operating in October the same year. The seventeenth and final generator went into commercial operation in 1961."
Jessica and J. T. took it all in; the place inspired awe.
Young Joseph Duncan, the pilot, continued to fill them in on the facts, as he'd long since memorized them. "Hoover Dam represents a godsend for Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and California for electricity, domestic water needs, irrigation, generation of low-cost hydroelectric power. It was named one of America's seven modern civil engineering wonders in 1994 by the American Society of Civil Engineers."
All Jessica knew was that it shone in the morning sun like some majestic giant's stone palace. She watched a lone bald eagle soar above the dam. The combined sight was breathtaking.
The pilot spoiled the moment, informing them of the army of men and machines, and the years of toil, required to build the dam, finishing with a story about ' 'those poor unfortunates who gave their lives in the mammoth undertaking, some having literally done so, as they are still entombed in the dam, having fallen in with the tons of concrete as it was poured… on various occasions."
J. T., through his headset, replied, ''I heard that was all a lot of nonsense, that no one died in that fashion, and no bodies are inside that colossal accumulation of rock and mortar."
The pilot shrugged before replying, "Ahhh, who's to say? But it's what we tell the tourists."
From there they flew over the fantastic beauty of the East Rim of the Grand Canyon, a wonderland of carved rock formations, light and shadow, depth and distance through which trickled the dwarfed Colorado River. Jessica couldn't take her eyes from the sheer size of this magnificent geologic formation, doing so only when J. T. pointed out two enormous birds of prey flying low over the canyon below them.
"Buzzards?" she asked.
"California condors," replied Duncan. "They released about nine or ten in the canyon last year; trying to make a comeback from extinction. Nobody's seen a sight like this in seventy years here at the canyon. Let's go in for a closer look, shall we?"
Ignoring a new law that outlawed air traffic below the rim of the canyon, Joseph Duncan recklessly dove toward the condors, trying to mimic their natural flight, trying to keep up with them and at the same time keep from getting too near canyon outcroppings, walls, and floor. Once the condors disappeared from sight, he began to meander with the Colorado River instead.
Jessica found the flight the most exhilarating experience of her life, while J. T. began to clutch at the sides of the seat he was in and to moan fearfully. The flight reminded her of a similar one, years and years before, through the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in Wyoming, where she'd performed her first duty as a medical examiner in the field. It had been during the trip to the national park to get away from the stresses of her new job as assistant M.E. at Baltimore Memorial Hospital in Maryland. She was still very much the student of medicine in those days. Park authorities alerted to a death at one of the thousands of hot springs in Yellowstone, and learning of her presence, asked her to come out and have a look at the body, which was in a remote area of the park. They'd had to helicopter to the location. It had proved also to be Jessica's first encounter with a murderer.
But there was no time to tarry on memories or the beauty and grandeur of the Grand Canyon here in Arizona, and so they were soon raised again above the canyon rim, and in minutes the chopper whirred away from the beautiful sight of the great and enormous mother of all canyons.
Warren had been right about the scenery. It was a religious experience. Utterly and magnificently wild, as Yellowstone had been. Since her visit to Yellowstone, Jessica had been a member of the National Parks and Conservation Association, the organization that published National Parks magazine and fought to keep wilderness areas wild. It was the lone voice fighting not only to keep the national parks for the people but also to keep them wild, because there was ever a hue and cry to develop park areas or to sell off mining or lumber rights to the highest bidder. Others wanted every possible hazard of the parks eliminated by boardwalks, guardrails, fences, signs, and signposts every few feet, despite the fact that every known and unknown hazard could never be completely eliminated by structures or regulations any more than traffic hazards could be eliminated from the L.A. superhighways.
Now they were flying away from the Grand Canyon and straight over the famous Painted Desert of Arizona, where Navajo Indian hogans and circular patches of land marked the circle of the Navajo family unit, easily visible from the sky, where each isolated house stood. To Jessica's surprise, they weren't finished with the Grand Canyon just yet, for on the other side of the Painted Desert awaited the great and magnificent North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
"This here's the northernmost section of the canyon," Duncan explained, and from the air, this strange and beautiful place looked the part of a scarred alien landscape, another planet, its rainbow of hues like so many elusive patinas, each layer of the "mountains growing into the earth," as Native Americans said of the canyon walls, painted by light and shadow, ever changing with each passing moment, each passing cloud.
The sunrise here became a trumpet sound, a tolling bell, telling everyone on the ground to rush to the rim for sights that would never come again, for tomorrow's sights here would be different. In a sense, the Grand Canyon equaled visible time. Looking across at the bands of sediment, one stood staring into the earth's history of aeons ago. It was no different from what astronomers said about looking back through time via their most powerful telescopes, but here the human eye had no need of any mechanical device to see into the shadowy beginnings of Earth's turbulent creation.
Helicoptering was nothing like jetting about, Jessica felt. In a chopper, you floated, feeling like you were sitting on a moving platform or flying carpet, and in fact you were at the center of a big glass bubble from which you could view everything. The cockpit of an airplane had an entirely different feel. You could hardly see in all directions in a small plane; hell, you couldn't see over the dash in front of you in many models, and in a plane you glided down to earth, but not so in a bobbing helicopter. In a chopper you floated down to earth.
While Jessica worked the radio to call ahead to local law enforcement people, the chopper now quickly descended. Decreasing altitude, the pilot deftly maneuvered the joystick, and they gently helicoptered down at Page, Arizona, the brilliant orange and yellow earth and the azure waters around Glen Canyon Dam winking up at them in the morning sun. The waters all around the hills and mountains here created a cerulean blue against the desert reds, a spectacular sight. In fact, spectacular sights abounded here. In the distance, as they'd approached, Duncan had pointed to the towering pinnacles of Monument Valley, a backdrop to seemingly every John Wayne Western.