Return of the Homework Machine (6 page)

March

MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

One of the things we spend a lot of time on in sixth grade is ancient Egypt. They were a fascinating people, and the kids were fascinated by them. I got some videos from the library to show them what life was like in the time of the pharaohs.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI. GRADE 6

What interested me the most were the pyramids. Six million tons of stone. Some of the blocks weigh nine tons. Think about it. The wheel wasn't invented yet. The only tools the Egyptians had to move and carry all that stone were wood and rope. So how did they build the pyramids? I'll tell you how. They didn't. Aliens had to have
built them. Did you know that the Great Pyramid is lined up exactly with the magnetic north pole of the Earth? That can't be coincidence. The compass hadn't been invented yet either.

If you go on the Internet, there's a lot of evidence that people couldn't have built the pyramids. It had to be aliens.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

The coolest thing about the Egyptians was the way they preserved their dead guys. They would pull their organs out and make them into mummies. They would break their nose, and then bust the brain into little pieces so they could pull it out through where the nose used to be. I'm not making this stuff up. And then, get this, they would fill the skull with sawdust! Sounds like some people I know, and they're still alive.

Mr. Murphy told us he went to a museum in Egypt once and they had a special mummy room. You had to pay a separate admission just to see the mummies. So he paid the admission and went in. And you know how when you see mummies in cartoons they're all wrapped
up in tape and stuff? Well, these mummies were unwrapped. Mr. Murphy said it was like looking at meat in a supermarket. Gross! But mummies are cool. The Egyptians mummified cats and crocodiles too. They really loved their mummies.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

The ancient Egyptians worshipped Ra the sun god, Horus the sky god, and Osiris the god of the dead. They believed that every day, Ra sailed across the sky in a boat. And then at night he would disappear into the underworld of the west. There was another Nile River there, they believed. Osiris pulled the boat along this river until morning, when the sun rose again. It was actually very beautiful.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

I liked that the ancient Egyptians were a peaceful people. They created beautiful art, architecture, sculpture, and writing. Mr. Murphy told us that for years and years, nobody was able to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. Then they found this thing called the Rosetta
Stone, which was a tablet that had a passage written in three different languages. After many years they finally translated them, and they were able to figure out what the hieroglyphics meant.

MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

Everything about ancient Egypt interested the kids. But what really made their eyes bug out was when we got to King Tutankhamen. I guess it was because Tut was nine years old when he became pharaoh, and he was only nineteen when he died. Kids can relate to that.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

Mr. Murphy told us that a British archeologist named Howard Carter searched for the tomb of King Tut for fifteen years until he finally found it in the Valley of the Kings in 1922. He reached a sealed doorway to a burial chamber. When he opened it and peered inside with a candle, there was King Tut's tomb, completely intact. It was made of solid gold, and it was surrounded by lots of other golden things, jewels, treasures, and all the boy king's possessions.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

King Tut's tomb had a curse, you know. They all did. There were warnings around the body: “Death shall come on swift wings to him that touches the tomb of the Pharaoh.” I think it was true. Most people don't know that the guy who hired Howard Carter to find King Tut died five months after they opened the tomb. He was bitten by a mosquito and it got infected. I looked it up.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

Kelsey tried to scare us with all that curse baloney. She said that if we found the secret treasure of the Grand Canyon, there might be a curse on it. I wasn't buying that mumbo jumbo. Of course she would fall for that curse stuff. She'll fall for anything. I couldn't wait to leave for our trip.

MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

It was astonishing to me that most of these kids have lived within a mile of the Grand Canyon their whole lives, but none of them had ever hiked all the way down to the Colorado River. When I asked them why not, they just shrugged
and said they never thought about it. Amazing!

Hiking a mile down into the canyon is not like a stroll in the woods. I spent the next few weeks after school preparing for our trip. Being responsible for the safety of four kids, I wanted to make sure nothing went wrong. I got a wilderness permit so we could legally stay overnight in the backcountry. There were maps we would need, and lots of gear.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

I couldn't believe how much junk we had to lug with us for just a long weekend. Flashlights, headlamps, extra batteries, a first-aid kit, walking sticks, Swiss Army knives, cameras, sleeping bags, garbage bags. We had to bring signal mirrors in case we got into trouble and had to get help. Mr. Murphy told us that cell phones usually don't work at the bottom of the canyon.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

…suntan lotion, lip balm, polarizing sunglasses, wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off our faces. Mr. Murphy told us each to bring a handkerchief so we could soak it in the river and cool off.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

…high-sodium snacks like nuts, pretzels, beef jerky, energy bars. Water. Lots of water. They say that if you hike down into the canyon in the summertime, you need to drink a gallon of water a day.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

And, of course, you have to bring your own toilet paper, and a metal shovel…for burying your own waste!

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

Ugh! Disgusting!

RONNIE TEOTWAWKI. GRADE 6

Milner and I met at the visitor center one day after school. I opened up my GPS and took out the chip that was in there. I carefully replaced it with the superchip and turned it on. Neither of us was expecting it to work.

Well, I plugged in some information from the
Phoenix Gazette
article and the GPS started humming. It felt alive in my hand. Like, magnetic, you know? It was like one of those divining rods that finds water. No, it was more like a dog that's so anxious to go for a walk that it pulls you to the door.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

We have spring break the second week in April. So there's no school for a few days and the weather is usually perfect. It would be a good time to go.

RICHARD MILNER. PERSONAL DIARY

March 27: Met with Ronnie. Agreed to search for treasure on or around April 15, when he is off from school.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

I know it's easy to say now, but from the beginning I really felt the trip was a mistake. I didn't tell anybody at the time. But I just had an intuition that something was going to go wrong. Finding a treasure didn't mean anything to me. Who cares about that stuff? I was filled with a sense of foreboding.

April

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

You need to know
all
the details of what happened that weekend? Okay. It's a long story. Where do I start?

I remember we had to get up super early because Mr. Murphy said it wasn't safe to be hiking in the middle of the day when the sun is high in the sky. So we all met at the Bright Angel Lodge at six a.m. That wasn't fun. I like to sleep late when I'm on vacation.

I'd hiked below the rim before, of course. But not very far. I'd usually go an hour or so and come back up. I'd never been all the way down to the river. That's a
long
hike.

They've got these signs all over the trail warning you to turn back if you're not in good shape,
if you have a heart condition, if you didn't bring enough water, stuff like that. They say that nobody should try to hike all the way down to the river and back in one day. There's this one sign that always cracks me up—it's a stick figure of a hiker down on his hands and knees, and he's puking his guts out. Hey, if you get in trouble, you can't say nobody warned you.

MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

There are a number of trails that lead from the South Rim of the canyon down to the Colorado River. I chose the Bright Angel Trail because it's the easiest and most gradual. These kids were not experienced hikers, and I didn't want anyone to get hurt. Even so, it's almost eight miles to the river with all the switchbacks, a 4,380-foot descent.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

I didn't tell the others, but I had never hiked in my life. I'm sure they'd make fun of me. It's a little embarrassing. I grew up less than a mile from the Grand Canyon, but I never even set foot below the rim until that day we went looking for the blinking red light.

It was scary when we started out. I'm not afraid of heights or anything, but as soon as we went below the rim, it looks like you're about to drop off a cliff. If you took a couple of steps in the wrong direction, you could fall off a rock and die.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

Everybody was in good spirits when we started out. Snik was cracking jokes and making fun of everybody. The trail is smooth and wide. It's easy walking downhill, of course. Climbing back up is a lot harder. They say it takes twice as long to hike out as it does to hike in. We were anxious to get down to the river, but we went slowly. Mr. Murphy said we had to take a ten-minute break every hour. Even if we weren't tired.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

It was dirty and dusty. They actually let mules carry people and supplies on the trail. Mules! We all had to move aside to let a bunch of mules go by. So I had another thing to worry about—stepping in mule manure. I really don't like hiking.

MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

A lot of chipmunks and squirrels were scampering around. I hoped that the kids might get the chance to see some bobcats, mountain lions, and bighorn sheep too. There are actually something like fifteen hundred plant and four hundred animal species living in the Grand Canyon today. Some of them have been here since the Ice Age.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

Mr. Murphy was being all teacherlike. He'd say, “Look, kids, there's a whiptail lizard!” and tell us some random fact about it. Or, “Ooh, check out that peregrine falcon! He can fly two hundred and fifty miles an hour!” I think that in teacher school they must tell all the teachers in training that they have to always be teaching, whether or not there's anything worth learning. I was making fun of him, but in a nice way. He's a good guy.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI. GRADE 6

We came upon a little carving on the wall. It was a stick figure of a person running. Everybody thought it was graffiti, but Mr. Murphy told us
it was a pictograph, sort of a prehistoric doodle. Some ancient cartoonist was trying to talk to us, but we didn't know what he was saying. Snik wanted to make a rubbing of it, but Mr. Murphy told him not to because that would damage it. You're not even supposed to touch them. We took some pictures instead. You know what they say—take only pictures, leave only footprints.

My mom once told me that when she was young, they taught kids in school that Columbus “discovered” America. They made a big deal about celebrating Columbus Day. Then they found out that people lived in America more than three thousand years before Columbus was even born. Oops! That must have been embarrassing.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

We took a break at the Mile-and-a-Half Resthouse. Funny name. It's nothing fancy, but they have toilets, picnic tables, and an emergency telephone. We could get out of the sun for a while. It was already getting hot. Mr. Murphy kept telling us we should eat before we get hungry and drink before we get thirsty. He said plenty of hikers get heat exhaustion.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

Mr. Murphy told us that over seven hundred people have died at the Grand Canyon. Seven hundred! It happens all the time. People get struck by lightning, or they drown in the rapids of the Colorado River. There are flash floods, snake bites, rock falls. And of course, lots of people run out of water, become dehydrated, and drop dead.

People can be just dumb, too. In 1993, he told us, these two guys from California jumped into the canyon with parachutes. Their chutes opened, but they got tangled on the way down, and that was it for them.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

Mr. Murphy said that lots of guys think it's fun to pee off really high places. Like a cliff. Judy and I thought that was totally repulsive, but the boys said it sounded cool. The only problem is that some of these guys lose their balance while they're peeing and fall into the canyon. Boys can be so stupid. I started looking up to make sure nobody was going to pee on us…or fall on us.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

Mr. Murphy told us that a lot of people even died while they were just posing for pictures. Can you imagine? Somebody would be taking a picture of their friend or something, and they'd say back up a little to get a good view, and their friend would back up and fall off a cliff. Snik laughed; I told him that it wasn't funny. What a horrible way to die. You shouldn't laugh at other people's misfortunes.

MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

I probably shouldn't have told them about the tragedies at the Grand Canyon, but it did help pass the time while we were hiking. I didn't tell them about the people who came to the canyon to commit suicide. Or the nuts who drove their cars over the edge on purpose. Or the murders that took place there.

In 1956, a plane was flying from Los Angeles to Kansas City with seventy people onboard. Another plane was flying in the same direction toward Chicago with fifty-eight people. The two pilots decided it would be interesting to fly over the Grand Canyon to give the passengers a view. The only problem was that they crashed into
each other, and everybody died. It was one of the worst air tragedies ever at the time. I didn't want to scare the kids.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

There was another rest house at the three-mile mark. My legs were already hurting from walking downhill. Mr. Murphy was making fun of us. He said we were out of shape because we spend too much time watching TV and surfing the Internet.

I took my boots off and he told me to be careful when I put them back on. When I asked him why, he said a scorpion might have crawled into them. Great! Now I had to worry about stepping in mule manure, guys peeing on my head or falling off cliffs, and scorpions crawling into my boots. I was ready to go home.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

I picked up a nice walking stick. I wanted to kill a snake with it. You can spot a rattlesnake because they have a diamond-shaped pattern on their back. They usually hide from the sun, so they're hard to find. Unless, of course, you sit in some shady spot where one of them decides to
take a nap. Mr. Murphy told us that if we saw a rattler we should just leave it alone and it would leave us alone. But I wanted to kill one. It would make a good souvenir.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI. GRADE 6

As you wend your way down the switchbacks on the trail, you can see the texture and the colors change on the sides of the canyon. It goes from cream to pinkish white. So you're actually walking from one geological time period into the previous one. It occurred to me that hiking down the canyon is about the closest any of us will ever come to traveling through time. It took millions of years for the river to slice its way through that rock, but we walked past it in a few hours. Even though it seemed like we had been hiking a long time, it sort of put things into perspective.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

We started to see more vegetation—bushes and trees. Some of them had grapes. I was afraid they might be poisonous, but Mr. Murphy said they were okay to eat. I tried one, but it was really tart so I spit it out.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

We came to the Indian Garden Campground. They have a ranger station there, and drinking water. The ranger told us that a long time ago, the Havasupai Indians lived there, and even did farming. He said we had walked almost five miles from the rim. It felt like a hundred. Mr. Murphy only let us rest for a few minutes before we had to gather up our stuff and keep going.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI. GRADE 6

What struck me was how peaceful it becomes as you get closer to the bottom of the canyon. All the noises you hear in the real world—planes, cars honking, the hum of electrical appliances, people talking too loudly into their cell phones—are gone. It was like I never heard real quiet before. Just the rustling of the wind. The only people who make it this far are the serious hikers. Most tourists only hike a few miles and go back up to the rim. Back up to the real world.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

I've seen all these pictures of the Grand Canyon. But as beautiful as the pictures are, it's not the same as seeing it with your own eyes.
Looking up at the sandstone cliffs just blew me away. I had never seen anything so spectacular. It made me want to protect the environment of this wonderful planet even more.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

After we left the Indian Garden Campground, we could see the Colorado River plainly and everybody got excited. We were almost there. We passed through some switchbacks called the Devil's Corkscrew, and then there was a steep drop down to Pipe Creek. There was a waterfall near there, and the River Resthouse. I wanted to jump in the water. But there was no time.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

Two more miles and we finally reached the Silver Suspension Bridge. On the other side of the bridge is the Bright Angel Campground, and that's where we camped out for the night. We were all exhausted.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

We rested up and ate dinner. Mr. Murphy had some freeze-dried chicken. It sounded nauseating.
I remember being really hungry and it tasted so good. Food always tastes good after you've been exercising.

By the time we finished eating, it was dark out. It's really cold at the bottom of the canyon, even in April. We all climbed into our sleeping bags to get warm.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI. GRADE 6

I remember lying there, looking up at the stars, and thinking to myself how lucky I was to be alive. I was in a crack in the earth—one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Most people never get to see the Grand Canyon in their lifetime. And here I was, at the bottom of it.

I could understand why some people would want to believe in Canyonism. I was lying on a rock that could very possibly be two
billion
years old. If you're going to worship something, why
not
the planet that you live on? It's the place that gives you air to breathe, food to eat, water to drink. And after you have those things, what else do you really need? A cell phone? An iPod? Who needs that stuff? I fell asleep almost instantly.

MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

Most folks who raft the Colorado start out at Lee's Ferry. You usually can't get a raft anywhere near the Bright Angel Campground. But I know a fellow over at Phantom Ranch down there. It's the only commercial tourist facility below the rim. He arranged for us to get an eighteen-foot neoprene raft that could seat the five of us comfortably.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

Mr. Murphy woke us up and made us put on life jackets before we could get into the raft. That's when it occurred to me—what if we found all those treasures and gold and stuff that we read about in that article? How would we get the stuff back up to the rim? Mr. Murphy said that if there were any treasures, they belonged to the state of Arizona. Bummer!

We all wanted to find the caverns anyway. I wanted to see for myself.

KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

After we pushed the raft off, the boys were acting all macho, grabbing the paddles and shouting
out silly orders. They totally didn't know what they were doing. It was fun to watch. They are so immature.

JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

The boys were being boys—splashing us with the paddles and so on. Like it was all fun and games. But suddenly, we hit some white water and Snik almost fell out of the raft. That straightened him out quick.

We all had to paddle really hard to avoid the rocks on both sides. The river pulls you along, but you still have to steer. It was fun, but a little scary, too. It was my first time rafting.

SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

The water smoothed out as we got close to Ninety-Four Mile Creek and Trinity Creek. This is the area where there are rock formations with Egyptian names—Tower of Ra, Horus Temple, Osiris Temple, Isis Temple, Cheops Pyramid. We put down our paddles and got out binoculars. I started scanning up and down the north side of the canyon. I was looking for an opening in the canyon walls, or maybe a shadow. The secret
cavern could have been covered up by trees or bushes. We knew it had to be around there, if it existed at all. With five pairs of eyes, we figured that one of us would see it.