EDITOR'S LETTER

One thing led to another. That's how I ended up on an empty beach in Point Reyes. It started with a suggestion. When you have a half-million readers around the world, you get a lot of those. Our readers are like informants. This tip came from Susan Plets, a longtime subscriber who lives in Central Arizona.

"Because of the 100th anniversary of Grand Canyon National Park," she wrote, "I thought you might be interested in this: I'm an RN who takes care of a woman in Payson. Her name is Pansy. She and her husband, Slim, moved to the Canyon in the 1930s. He helped build some of the trails there, she worked as a telephone operator, and their son, Kenneth Patrick, was a ranger for the National Park Service. He's buried in the cemetery on the South Rim."

I immediately recognized the name. I've hiked the Ken Patrick Trail many times. It surprised me, though, that his mother might still be around. I did the math, but it didn't add up. Then I read the next paragraph of Susan's note. "Pansy will be 102 in July. She's very healthy and has a sharp mind. I just thought her story might be of interest to you. By the way, I've promised to drive her up to the Canyon sometime soon. For one last look."

Whenever people ask me about the Grand Canyon, I tell them it's different every time you see it. The weather, the time of year, the time of day... the forces of nature are continuously rearranging things up there, as if to say, "I dare you to blink or look away." But seeing the Canyon through Pansy's eyes... that would be especially different. It was a road trip I wanted to be on. So I called Susan, who talked to Pansy, who agreed to let a complete stranger take her to a place she moved to more than eight decades ago. I guess when you're almost 102, it's a little easier to throw caution to the wind. The date was set: June 27-28.

If you've ever tried to get a room on the South Rim in the middle of the summer, you know the odds. It's like trying to find a copy of Tamerlane and Other Poems. You have to hope for divine intervention. And I think that's what got us the two rooms we needed. Susan would be staying with Pansy. I'd be down the hall.

Setting up a tour of Kolb Studio was a little easier. My buddy Mike Buchheit, who runs the field institute for the Grand Canyon Conservancy, took care of everything. All I had to do was get Pansy to the back door. Turns out, she'd been there many times. "I did house cleaning for Mrs. Kolb," Pansy says with a Southern drawl that hasn't faded in the century since she left the holler in Smokey Valley, Kentucky. "She was a sweet little old gal, but he was a bear dog."

Bear dog, I figured, wasn't a compliment.

I knew Pansy would like seeing Kolb Studio, but the reason for the road trip was to pay our respects at Pioneer Cemetery, where Ken is buried. The plan was to be at his gravesite around sunset. One last goodbye to the son who was murdered in 1973. Almost 50 years ago. I kept trying to picture the scene in my head. Would she cry? Would she talk about what happened? Would the memories overwhelm her? Some part of me expected that she'd end up consoling Susan and me. Instead of the other way around. Time would tell.

Meanwhile, her homecoming was getting a lot of attention. There were acts of kindness, too, including the red carpet at El Tovar, where Sheila Mattox, an administrator for Xanterra, not only took care of our dinner reservations, but also got us a table in front of one of the big windows. I was on the phone with her a couple weeks before the trip. She'd called to double-check on Pansy's age.

"Yes, she'll be 102," I explained. "Woodrow Wilson was president when she was born.

"That's incredible," Sheila said. "We're planning on making her a birthday cake, and we want to get the number right."

A few minutes after we hung up — literally, about 180 seconds later — I got an email from Susan: "Pansy had an 'episode' today, and she's in the E.R. I'll let you know how she's doing. She's so excited about the Canyon trip. Hopefully, this will pass soon. She's had them before, but with all of the excitement ..."

The "episode" was angina. And the trip was canceled.

Fortunately, Pansy was discharged quickly and is doing much better now. I went to see her in late September. We had breakfast together — she had one fried egg, a piece of wheat toast and no meat. Then we walked to her apartment, where she lives on her own, as if she were much younger. Like in her 80s or 90s. I introduced her to Kringle, a Danish pastry that comes from Wisconsin, and then we started looking through her photo albums. They're meticulous. Like the cultivated grounds at Wimpole.

"I used to go to the South Rim and just sit and watch the people," she told me. "I'd get an ice cream cone ... we loved to watch the people, and see their faces when they first looked at the Canyon. Now they just zip down in helicopters. It's very, very different. I'm glad I have memories of years ago."

A few pages into the album, we got to Ken. There were baby photos. Photos of him on a mule train, in front of his squad car, playing guitar. There were a few newspaper clippings, too. About the murder. The funeral. The trail being named in his honor. When I got home that night, I searched the Arizona Highways archive to see if we'd ever done anything about Ken. There were a few references to the hiking trail, but nothing about the man for whom it's named. I figured it was about time.

I was working on the piece in October, while spending a few days in Monterey with my brother Adam. We'd already been up and down the coast, and had hiked in Big Sur, when he suggested we go to Point Reyes National Seashore, the national park where Ken was shot and killed. We were planning to drive up the road to Mount Vision, where the crime occurred, but it was closed because of a landslide.

We did, however, make it to the Kenneth C. Patrick Visitor Center, which sits on the edge of a beautiful beach that overlooks Drakes Bay. Even on a perfect autumn day — a Saturday — there were only a few cars in the parking lot. The ranger on duty, whose parents were probably only kids themselves in 1973, spoke of Ken Patrick with reverence. The way Millennial tree-huggers talk about John Muir. She told me that she'd been to the Canyon a few months earlier for some training. While there, she made a visit to the Pioneer Cemetery. As she was reading the inscription on Ken's headstone, she looked down at her phone and noticed it was August 5, the anniversary of his death.

Divine intervention? I don't know, but if that's what it takes to get Pansy back to the Canyon, I'll keep hoping for some. For one last look.