The Shock of Death

On the 15th of April 1984 I watched Tommy Cooper die on live television. The sixty-three year old comic, whose health had been deteriorating after decades of heavy drinking, suffered a heart attack and collapsed on stage in the middle of a performance. The audience, already splitting their sides, were sent into hysterics at what they supposed to be a prat-fall, so that his last seconds of life were carried away on a roaring wave of laughter.

At the time I thought that was a fantastic and appropriate send off for a such a beloved comic, although the truth, of course, is more ragged and less satisfying. In the darkness, behind the curtain, frantic efforts were made by friends and crew to revive him whilst, on stage, Les Dennis and Dustin Gee were forced to try and carry on the show until the next ad break. The incident was covered on the evening news but, although pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, confirmation of his death wasn't released until the next morning.

It's still the only death I have ever seen. I'm not acquainted with the shock of death, barely cognisant of grief at all. The people I've known who have died have all been elderly and ill. I've held tight to the certainty that it has been right and good that they have died, and to the hope that medical science has been able to make their passing as comfortable as possible.

Elisabeth Sladen died yesterday. I saw the news on Twitter and instantly rejected it. Some fool had got it wrong and would be utterly humiliated for saying it out loud. I unfollowed, disgusted. But then it came up again, from a more reputable account. Still I refused to accept it, remembering what had happened with Gabrielle Giffords: pronounced shot dead online and now walking and talking in a Houston hospital. I checked the BBC, who had nothing. Googled her. Still no corroboration. I spent thirty minutes hitting refresh on five different websites, willing the incomprehensible news to be untrue. But gradually reality hardened, hypothesis solidified into irrevocable certainty.

I'm sure some of you won't know it, but Lis Sladen was an actor. I never met her, but she had been marvelling me, making me laugh and, above all, scaring me my entire waking life. She played the character Sarah Jane Smith in the television show Doctor Who, originally from 1974 to 76 and then returning frequently thereafter, until she got her own spin-off show in 2007. To say that she was universally loved and admired would be an understatement. The press have resorted to the cliché that she was 'the best Dr Who girl', but it's such a belittling description of her contribution to the show. Sarah Jane was never a screaming bimbo. In an age of bubble-wrap aliens and cardboard sets she sold the reality of the drama. More than any other actor, Sladen was always utterly convincing; threats that should have been laughable became terrifying. At a time when being a Doctor Who fan meant ridicule, she earned the eternal gratitude and devotion of a generation by taking it seriously.

The awful shock is that nobody knew she was ill. Her new show, The Sarah Jane Adventures, is still in production, part way through the fifth season. Coincidentally, like Cooper, she was also sixty-three, but you don't need me to tell you that it is not the age it was in 1984. Her character had always possessed an indomitable youthfulness that hadn't diminished as she got older and it seemed impossible that she wouldn't go on making TV for years yet.

By all accounts Lis Sladen was a delightful person, very private, modest, with a wicked Scouse sense of humour and a profound yet unpretentious dedication to her acting. Left only with what she achieved on screen I can only say that I am utterly bereft that she has gone. Her death comes just as fans around the world were excitedly awaiting the new series of Doctor Who on Saturday. Just like the Doctor himself, the show continues, endlessly regenerating whilst its mere human contributors grow old and die. It is a miserable loss.

For nearly forty years Sarah Jane has been a powerful and positive female character for what was primarily an audience of young boys. How wonderful that my own sons have been able to watch her in action, that they should get to watch such brilliant television - an adventure series where the alien-fighting hero is a single mother in her sixties. Not for nothing is Doctor Who the best television in the world and a great deal of that is because of Elisabeth Sladen.

Backwards

Thanks to the magic of technology, I am writing this on the road. Literally, somewhere along the I-40, eastbound, just shy of Albuquerque and heading for Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

It's roughly ten at night. On either side, the desert is a flat black slick despite the light of the full moon high above us. It sits behind a veil of diaphanous cloud that stretches almost to the horizon. The boys are asleep behind us. Laura is driving. We are coasting along on the ceaseless thrum of our wheels on the road, over which we can just hear Flanders & Swan dropping another hat. The cabin is lit by orange dials and passing cars.

I love this bit. Even as a passenger I still relish the sense that we are making progress, chewing up miles and states and gradually, forcibly, bringing our destination closer.

Satisfying though this is, it can't and doesn't detract from the fun we have when we stop and look about. We managed to do a lot of this today as well.

We sauntered around a thousand year old lava flow at Sunset Crater, AZ. It looked freshly ploughed, an avenue of great chunks of clinker and black sand from which these beautiful Ponderosa Pines had sprouted.

And then we clambered around some similarly aged cliff-dwellings, hewn from the wall of the (modestly sized) Walnut Canyon by ancestors of the Hopi tribe of Native People. It was a strenuously peaceful walk: the cool stone weaves between the sunlight and the shadows of trailing trees. The only sounds, the wind and the caws of ravens.

But before all that we had to tear ourselves from a grander canyon. Long ago, in the dark, we got up, wrapped ourselves in all our clothes and set out to watch the sun rise over the rim. Funnily enough, in the dark the abyss isn't anywhere nearly as scary and I was able to perch happily on the low wall above the drop to wait for the sun to peep. The sky faded to grey and below us the rippling folds of rock gradually materialised from the murk, like leviathans swimming up from the depths. And then finally a needle of orange light pierced the gloom and the canyons burst into colour.

Down

I've never been good with heights, particularly, but I'm often okay. Good enough anyway to cope with the Empire State Building and castle turrets.

I can't cope with this. The thought of the spectacular drop off the side of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon is enough to turn my vital organs to jelly. Even here, at a relatively safe distance of a mile or so from the edge, I'm not comfortable. I may never be comfortable. Maybe just knowing it is there, behind me somewhere in the desert, will be enough to interrupt my sleep from time to time for the rest of my life.

My sense of scale, having already been tested by the journeys and vistas I have experienced around America, has now been tortured too. The canyon is ten miles across and more than a mile down. A mile down. A beautiful, magical, breath-taking mile down. But you wouldn't want to take the short cut.

Apparently people only fall very rarely, but you'd never believe it from the way people skip and prance around the paths, or swing their legs out over the precipice, just to have their photo taken. The wilful ignorance or denial of their own mortality is taken as a personal affront, obviously. It's bad enough that I have my children with me ("Dad, puhleese, I DO know what I'm doing"), but every step or pose struck by my fellow visitors is like a knitting needle jabbed straight into my jangling nerves.

I can't help it. People may only fall very rarely, but when they do, they always fall to their deaths. The potential is what terrifies me, the sudden irrevocable moment where a holiday turns to a tragedy. I am a big scaredy cat according to my kids, but I can't help but think that the Grand Canyon would be even more beautiful and amazing experienced from the bottom. The only way to find out is to come back here and walk down the cliffs of course, but I can't help but be convinced I would become happier with every step.

The Painted Desert

Part of the Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona.

Deserts and Forests

I'm losing my ability to think coherently. The desert is dazzling and endless; it fills my mind as much as my vision and as a consequence, words and thoughts I previously relied upon are leaking away.

This morning we took in the Petrified Forest National Park here in Arizona. It's a bit special. The desert is literally littered with semi-precious stones, like agate and jasper, quartz and amethyst. Most remarkably, these minerals lie about the place shaped like fallen tree trunks. The trees were part of a swampy tropical forest two hundred and twenty-five million years ago. They fell and became submerged in a mineral-rich sludge ejected from volcanoes. The trees sucked the silicate inside themselves where it crystalised. Eventually the tree trunk's living tissue became replaced by stone and slowly the landmass rose and became eroded, revealing the petrified trees. You really couldn't make this stuff up.

Eventually, when we have sufficient Internet, I'll post pictures. But for now you'll just have to believe me: it is hauntingly and gobsmackingly beautiful.

Then there were the views across 'The Painted Desert' -sweeping vistas of pink rock and dry green grass, as bright and colourful as any spring meadow. The air is the purest in America apparently and allowed us to see the tops of the San Francisco Peaks, a mere one hundred and twenty miles away.

Several hours later, having ignored the first signs for Los Angeles, we were climbing the shoulders of those mountains, driving up out of Flagstaff and into a living forest of silver birch and Ponderosa pine. At eight thousand feet (three thousand higher than the Petrified Forest) there was snow on the ground. The simplicity of green pine needles and white snow was restful after the colours of the desert, but we were soon heading back down again.

There was just time to arrive at the Grand Canyon itself and have a shufty at the rim before bed.

First impression? I'm terrified.

The Beyond

I must be tired: I have written up a lovely day in a sneery, grumpy way and this will not do. So we shall start again and I will say that the road was good and that the landscape was amazing; that Santa Fe was charming; that even the scary truck stop and the kitsch nostalgia of 'historic' route 66 were pleasant distractions along our way. Yes, even the novelty motel cones of Holbrook, AZ, in which I am writing this, are perfectly lovely.

We started in Tucumcari, NM. In the night, the panhandle prairies had turned to a kind of desert. The morning was bright and chill, the sun shining on a dry landscape of yellow grass and pink rock, dotted with thousands of scrubby green bushes.

We set off, the sun behind us, and the road climbed amongst the mountains of New Mexico, red or black, sometimes even flecked with snow.

We had a few hours in Santa Fe. It's a charming place. The narrow streets are jammed with boutiques, galleries and restaurants. We crashed the jolly Catholic cathedral (built in the 19th century although the city is 400 years old) and pointed out all the saints and transubstantiation to the boys before retiring to a nearby crêperie. If that's not japes, I don't know what is.

Then it was back onto the interstate and foot down all the way into the most remarkable landscape I've yet seen in America. Almost a desert, certainly a desolation, it made yesterday's panhandle plains seem like Piccadilly Circus. Utterly empty, just pale white scrub and occasional distant cliffs of dark red stone. The horizon was so impossibly far away that it seemed ridiculous not to see a glint of sun on the ocean beyond it. But there is no end, the land simply continues, forever.

How did people cross this void? I can't imagine making this trip without an iPod, let alone before the inventions of road or rail. We are passing through this abominably vast landscape, hurrying to move on to the next stop. Trying to cross it on foot or by wagon must have been a feat of psychological endurance more than anything else; surely those seemingly infinite spaces would have ground relentlessly away at certainty and perspective, until you went mad?

In Santa Fe there was a gallery of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe and one struck me in particular. A bold composition of horizontal layers of blue and black, it is called 'The Beyond'. She painted it in 1972, when she was in her eighties.

Even before this afternoon's drive, it seemed to me to be a flat landscape: a black foreground with dark bands of turbulent blue cloud above it. In the middle is a very narrow line of almost white light, as if the setting sun were knifing through a low break in heavy clouds. The colours are cold, almost funereal and it is difficult not try and guess which 'beyond' she saw in those dark skies and those vast horizons.

It is a hopeful painting I thought, not about endings and finalities but about moving on, moving through. Beyond this great space, beyond the setting sun, there'll be another, bigger, wider, emptier. It never ends, not with the desert, not even with the ocean.

The Other Edge of Texas

We didn't do much that was new today, but we did break some new ground eventually, once we had peeled ourselves off of the familiar Dallas road and struck west towards the panhandle. Everything changed after that.

Before then, the journey had all been previously seen bits of Texas. Houston glowered under dark skies, the towers of downtown broken and smoking with cloud. As we inched our way out of the city, the morning grew darker and the sky pressed lower, eventually fragmenting into a ferocious storm in which both thunder and lightning were lost above the vicious rain that fell like beads against the windscreen.

Houston weather that we were glad to leave behind - it stayed, tangled in the city, and we broke free of both. The sky lightened, the sun came out. We drove through the trees, a mixture of green leaves and bare limbs, blossom and brown, all the seasons jumbled as usual.

By the time we'd reached the Dallas/Fort Worth conurbation, we'd been driving for five hours. It passes quickly enough. The roads were quiet, as were the boys in the back, and we coasted along.

After lunch we took a new road. Fort Worth, with its own distant towers and thickly applied frontage road stores, dissolved under the sunshine. We headed north-west towards new places, strange yet familiar sounding: Wichita Falls, Amarillo.

The trees were gone too, replaced by a messy rise and fall of grass and pasture. Like the jumbled trees, the grass was also confused, blending between scrubby brown, bright green and faded yellow. It began to feel very different. The fields were oddly ornamented with small nodding donkeys, or rusted brown boxcars.

Suddenly we were way out, somewhere else.

The towns changed as we went, strung out along the road like knots. Some, like Decatur, announced desperately there was more to see if only we'd stop and look. Others, like Memphis or Claude, seemed to have fallen long ago into a dusty despair, tattered and tiny. They all felt isolated, as much from each other as from anywhere else, and some even had their 19th century ribs poking through their modern trappings. With their General Stores and local banks, these were clearly old western towns. One, Clarendon I think, even had a small stone square Sheriff's office, with iron bars across the windows and patrol cars tethered up outside.

And now, around these dusty islands, the grass became a great ocean of pale green. The land and sky stretched and stretched, pulled impossibly far in all directions, skewing perspective so that objects, the odd silo or wind vane, looked either too close and vanishingly small or, like the silhouetted combines, enormous and distant. The sun began to set, sucking colour from the world as it settled before us, bright and menacing and low in the sky. We stopped for dinner in Amarillo, but before we could see anything of it, night fell abruptly, like a dropped curtain.

We had nearly gone far enough. Another hundred miles or so down the road was the border with New Mexico. We ploughed through the darkness. The boys grumpily tumbled into sleep in their seats. Outside the beautiful, ghostly desolation of the plains was lost, replaced with eerie fields of flashing lights.

We crossed the border into Mountain Time and allowed the last few miles to roll away until the jolly lights of Tucumcari rose over the brow of a hill.

I know absolutely nothing about this place other than that we are leaving it first thing in the morning.