In conversation class I describe how a rainstorm in the Grand Canyon opened up a series of new waterfalls from the canyon walls one time when I was backpacking there with my dad. Juan, our teacher, asks me about how dangerous it is in the Grand Canyon and I tell him that people die there every year.
"What do they die of?" he asks me. "Dehydration?"
"Yes," I say, "but mostly from small airplane accidents."
He and Antonio refuse to believe this, so I tell them I will bring the research to our next class. Then I tell them that I think that there was this guy in the eighties who killed four people by pushing them off the edge of the Grand Canyon. Antonio gets more excited about this topic of a serial killer/pusher than he has about anything we have discussed the entire week. "How was he caught?" he wants to know. "How do we know he did it on purpose?" "How many years was he sentenced to?"
The next day I bring in the research and cite it in carefully practiced phrases. I was right about the small planes. According to Michael Ghiglieri's book about deaths in the Grand Canyon, 379 of the 683 total recorded Grand Canyon deaths were due to small plane accidents.
But I was wrong about the serial pusher. He did kill four people, but he only pushed one person off the edge of the Grand Canyon. His third wife. After the authorities nailed him for that, they reopened the case of his first wife's death. As it turns out, the pusher had killed his first wife and two kids and then staged the scene so it looked like his wife had commited the suicide/murder.
I also tell Juan and Antonio about the guy who committed suicide in the Grand Canyon by jumping out of a helicopter mid-tour. He fell 4,000 feet and it took fifteen park officials to recover his body parts.
And then I tell them about the dad who pretended to fall off the edge of the Grand Canyon to make his eleven-year-old daughter laugh. This all backfired and he actually fell to his death.
"What do you think of Arizona now?" I want to ask.
But that would be a bad idea...unless I could use the usual ploy. The nice thing about Arizona is that whenever someone in Arizona does something idiotic, you can usually point out that this person is not originally from Arizona. This is because, although there are some people like me who were born here, the majority of the adults are people who moved here from some Minnesota or Michigan in the 70s and 80s... or California in the 90s.
I tell Antonio and Juan, "The last guy who just fell off the edge of the Grand Canyon and died in March 2014--He was from Texas."
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