A note about truth

About 35 minutes from my home town, there is a small canyon, lined with eroded walls, deep red sandstone, and such a generally Martian aspect that it has substituted for the Red Planet in a number of bad Hollywood movies. Its name is Red Rock Canyon.

The canyon is picturesque and somewhat out of the way. As a result, when western travel magazines run out of donkey festivals, chili cookoffs, and second-rate rodeos to write about, they send their reporters out to Red Rock Canyon. The reporters, quite sensibly, don't bother to go.

How do I know this? Because somewhere in every article they write, there is an passage that goes something like the following:

"Next to my boot, about a foot away, coiled and ready to strike, was a small sidewinder rattlesnake. Should I have been worried? Cautiously, I stepped back and said to myself that I'd have to be more careful. This was the Mojave Desert after all."

First point. If you ever find yourself within one foot of a small sidewinder rattlesnake, you should be worried. The bites are horrifically painful. The idea that so many reporters could have come away unharmed from so many close encounters with these snakes is a stretch. An article in that case would have sounded like this.

"Next to my boot, about a foot away, coiled and ready to strike, was a small sidewinder rattlesnake. It struck. My foot turned black and swelled up like a basketball. I nearly passed out from the pain and began to hallucinate. Luckily a ranger found me convulsed on the ground and foaming at the mouth. He administered some antivenom. I lived, but I now have no feeling in my ankle and I walk with a cane. I should have been more careful. This was the Mojave Desert after all."

Second point. I have been to Red Rock Canyon 40 times, hiked around plenty, and have never seen a rattlesnake. There are plenty of places to see them; that particular park is not one of them. It's too public, and they're too shy.

So what really happened? The reporters, on their way north, presumably noticed that if you take a right instead of a left at Kramer Junction, they could go to Las Vegas instead of Red Rock Canyon. Once there, while closely watching their investment in a certain horse in the sixth race, they may have popped on the Internet and downloaded a few stories about the canyon. Those stories all contain a fictional account of an encounter with a snake, and all for the same reason.

It's not their fault. Trips are actually long monotonous things interspersed with a few sights. Nothing ever happens on them. To make a story about one any good, the teller must depart from the truth considerably. So, as this trip progresses, if I happen to mention in passing that we took a shower under Old Faithful or fought off a rabid raccoon with a cast iron frying pan, don't take offense.