North Rim Lodge Lost to Wildfire
How odd, I think for a moment, for someone to post
in elegy of the lodge a picture of the view of the canyon
from the window of the lodge rather than, say,
a picture of the lodge itself, but actually
it’s not odd at all because of course it’s not
the building we’ll miss the most but the memory
of ourselves in it: all we did in and regarded from it,
like how I stayed there once with my mother
while my father and sister hiked rim-to-rim,
and my mother and I were invited only
to drop them off on one side and then on the other
pick them up again. While they moved through
places with otherworldly names like Bright Angel
and Phantom Canyon and transformed together
into little lithe beings that drowsed by day
in the scorching interior and then trekked
with their lean packs during night’s reprieve,
I lumbered around the rim in the parking lot
detained from leaving the lodge at checkout time
by my mother’s missing nightgown,
which my mother realized was absent only after
we’d packed and hefted all the luggage into the back
of the jeep. I inquired with housekeeping,
retrieved the room key we’d already turned in,
hunted in the under-bed darkness and through
the room’s jumbled towels and linens, for the first time
taking over for my flustered mother. Eventually
we found the nightgown back in the jeep
inside a paper bag full of overripe apples, and then
my mother could recall stashing it there
for some good reason but could not recall
exactly what that reason was. I was wondering
what new territory we’d just entered.
How to unfold, smooth out the wrinkles
in that map. Also, I was feeling a little smug
as I slid into the driver’s seat. Also,
some of the lodge’s lobby furniture
was upholstered like our couches back home,
which was not a let-down but rather reframed
our old couches as suddenly worthy
of a second look. Reader, look at me leaving
all of the real beauty out. How that night
the gown was apple-scented when my mother
slipped it on again. How the moonlight held her
dress rehearsal for starring ghost, but
for the moment she still had substance
in this world. How the figures moving
across the canyon in the darkness surely
loved us even from that far. Look at me
mourning the wrong thing again. Bats
bumbling softly against night’s face. I can’t
even describe how the canyon stunned us
from the window view, but you’ve seen
the postcards. Or those photos they run
in the paper after the tourist, for a better shot, takes
one step too far back, and then the perfectly
framed landscape is itself again without us.
Bethany Schultz Hurst is the author of Blueprint and Ruin (Southern Indiana Review Press), winner of the 2021 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and Miss Lost Nation (Anhinga Press), finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and Verse Daily, and in journals such as Ploughshares, Narrative, and The Gettysburg Review. She lives in Pocatello, Idaho, where she is a professor at Idaho State University.
Read Bethany Schultz Hurst’s first Letter to America poem, “The Birds are Always in the Corn.”
Read more Letters to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy, published by Trinity University Press in collaboration with Terrain.org.
Header photo of the Grand Canyon as viewed from the Grand Canyon Lodge, which inspired this poem and burned down in July 2025, by Simmons Buntin.
