Hig and His Companions Reach Burned-Out Grand Junction

Hig and his companions reach Grand Junction expecting to find the city that had served Cima and Pops as a nearby center for supplies and ordinary recreation. Instead, from the air they see a town extensively scarred by fire, with ruined neighborhoods and the remains of the dead visible below. The approach turns a familiar place on the map into evidence of the scale of the collapse, and makes its destruction immediate for Cima, who left before she saw the city’s end.

Approach from the Grand Mesa

Ten miles east of Grand Junction, Hig makes his first call as the aircraft passes the far cliffs of the Grand Mesa. He recalls the mesa as a long, flat-topped landform rising against the sky, with purple cliffs, aspen forests, ferns, lakes, and beaver ponds. The route skirts beneath its rim, and the aircraft stays low to conserve fuel before reaching the city, which lies between two rivers and spreads across desert hills toward the Book Cliffs.

The view is set against Hig’s memories of camping there with Melissa. Their trips included a week in a tent beside a lake, far from roads, where trout were plentiful. That remembered landscape is more than a scenic contrast: it belongs to a world in which the region’s lakes and parks could be destinations for leisure. As Hig and his companions leave the mesa behind, the familiar terrain leads not to a functioning town but to a place whose ordinary structures have been altered by disaster.

The burned city

From above, Grand Junction retains the recognizable layout of a large town: highways and streets, residential developments and cul-de-sacs, box stores and parking lots. The industrial district follows the Colorado River, with train tracks and warehouses. Cottonwoods still thread the city. Some roadside trees that depended on watering have died, while others, rooted more deeply, remain green along the thoroughfares. The surviving river-park canopies are also unevenly preserved: some old trees are partly dead but still carry leaves on one side.

That persistence of vegetation stands beside extensive destruction. Fire has touched every part of the city. Cars are scorched where they were parked in rows on side streets, in mall lots, and along the highways; elsewhere, vehicles lie in disordered heaps. Some neighborhoods have burned down, while other buildings and areas show the effects of intense fire. The damage appears so pervasive that, from the aircraft, the city seems to have been swept by fire rather than by the flu that helped bring the old society down.

Hig also sees the remains of people who died there, gathered and scattered across the ruined town. Their presence makes the view more than a record of damaged infrastructure: the recognizable streets and commercial districts have become a landscape of mass death. The aircraft’s height allows Hig to survey the city at once, but it cannot make the evidence abstract. The ruins are visible across a place that he and his companions have approached as a real destination.

Cima’s recognition

Cima becomes physically sick at the sight of the city. Her reaction is tied to personal knowledge, not simply to the scale of the destruction. Grand Junction was where she and Pops went for major shopping, including groceries and supplies for vehicles and the farm. They also came for farm equipment and sometimes went to a weekend movie when the showing in Delta did not appeal. The town’s practical and recreational roles made it part of the rhythm of life at their ranch.

Cima and Pops had left the ranch as conditions worsened, before she witnessed the city’s final decline. She remembers the period when television news was still broadcasting: the anchors appeared increasingly exhausted, frightened, and absent as colleagues were lost to hospitals and makeshift flu wards or stopped reporting. Eventually the coverage ended amid disorder. From Hig’s perspective, the broadcasts had continued with a determination that recalled musicians playing on a sinking ship; for Cima, they mark the last stage of events she could follow before leaving the region’s familiar life behind.

The arrival’s significance

The arrival changes the meaning of the journey west. Grand Junction is not merely a settlement to be reached but a familiar hub revealed as devastated. The city’s commercial landmarks remain identifiable from the air, yet their recognizable arrangement cannot restore their former use; roads, parking lots, warehouses, and parks now register the absence of the people who once filled them. The contrast between the city’s surviving green trees and its burned streets makes that absence especially stark.

The scene also brings Hig’s memory and Cima’s recognition into the same view without making them identical. Hig sees Grand Junction through memories of camping with Melissa and through the visible evidence of the city’s destruction. Cima sees the place where she and Pops once shopped and sought recreation, a place she left while its collapse was still unfolding. Their arrival therefore joins landscape, memory, and loss: the aircraft crosses a region still marked by natural beauty, then reveals a town in which the ordinary structures of community have been overtaken by fire and death.