ALONG THE WAY

Grand Canyon mules are celebrity mules. Visitors come from around the world to ride these half-horse, half-donkey, long-eared taxies into Arizona's most golly-gee-whiz attraction. Before rider and mule have trotted more than a hundred yards down the trail, a warm relationship starts, a one-way one since the mule couldn't care less who is on its back. That is, unless it is someone the size of Luciano Pavarotti. When what is often the biggest adventure of their lives has culminated, riders never forget the names of the fourlegged pals who carried them into and out of the Grand Canyon uncomplaining, except for an occasional testimonial to aerophagia. Love letters follow: "Enclosed are a few dollars. Please buy my mule, Billie, some extra oats." Or, they come back years later sometimes decades later - asking for Major and could they ride him again? They even send snapshots of themselves and their mules to their mules.

Few in their euphoria ever think about how a mule got its name. Or even care. But due to its unique temperament, no other animal on this planet matches the mule as a focal point for the application of appellations. Ask any mule trainer anywhere, and he'll tell you that.

Sometimes mule names are a salient and prime property of the namer's unconsciousness, something he relates to, but you never could. For example, you've climbed aboard your assigned steed at the loading corral at the head of Bright Angel Trail. The skinner-guide passes up the reins and says, "This is Whitey."

"But he is brown," you say.

"Of course. That's why we call him Whitey."

Baldy got its name because it never stops chomping at the bit. Baldy, chomping? Not even a Zen master could make the connection. Don't try. Skinners introduce you to your mule and give you these far-out explanations, if you should ask, without a muscle twitching in their leathery faces. They'll tell you Calendar earned its name because nobody knows when it was born. And Claude, because they had an extra saddle with that name stamped on it. Are they putting you on? Maybe. Just say, "Oh, really."

At the Grand Canyon, the sharp angles of the topography, the vast differences in altitudes and subsequent air densities, the narrowness of the trails, the National Park Service's propensity for mixing neophyte mule skinners with old hands, and the Fred Harvey packer's fear of endangering his reputation by arriving at Phantom Ranch, the mule motel in the bottom of the Canyon, with a cracked egg, creates a unique atmosphere in which mule naming is often touched with genius.

For example, legend says that many years ago there was a "wreck" on the Kaibab Trail in which six pack mules went out into space for their oneand-only lesson in skydiving. The story goes, the packer reported all missing except the egg mule, "Fallopian." Back on top, he did a little bookwork, transferring that name to a similarly marked mule, and then secretly replacing the eggs out of his own pocket.

A chronic, unpredictable bucker was named "Mucilage" because, like most unreliable mules, it wound up at the glue factory. "SOP," the acronym pronounced as spelled, got its name for constantly trying to pitch off its load; the letters stand for "Son of a Pitch." Another that was said to have gone off the Kaibab Trail was "Bananas;" but with a name like that to describe its personality, it was unlikely to make the saddle string any-way. On Saturday nights at Old Tusayan, the neighborhood bar just south of Grand Canyon Village, the skinner would say, "So I told the foreman, 'Yes, we have no Bananas," and everyone mostly dude motorists would laugh and pound the table and buy the skinner another beer.

The most original - perhaps "specific" is a better word - mule names are generated when the packers are not in contact with mules at all, rather four feet above the saddle, or in the hospital having a femur set. But those names were often spur-of-the-moment epithets composed of colorful some would say coarse-language and usually did not stick.

Even I got a crack at mule naming, or maybe mule renaming. Short of help and desperate, the National Park Service hired me to work with the Kaibab Trail crew, mostly filling in ruts caused by erosion. We carried fill (fractured Supai sandstone, really, 285 million years in the making) in boxes on either side of what we called a "dirt mule." One day near Buckey O'Neill Butte, as I was leading the mule, it stumbled and the corner of the left dirt box hit me in the chest. I went backward off the trail and slid down to the knot at the end of the lead rope. Below me was the Redwall limestone, 550 feet of unadulterated straight-down.

My boss, Roy, and our Supai Indian helper, Elmer, yelled for me to hang on. The dirt mule was on its knees, its head pulled over the lip of the trail by my weight. In a strange mule calmness, it watched me as I came up the rope faster than an Olympic monkey.

"Well, Roy," I said, "I think we should change that little critter's name to "Surefoot."

"Like hell," Roy said. "I'll tell you what we should call it." And Roy started stacking names on that dirt mule, none of which, at the time, would have been acceptable in mixed company.

I said, "Roy, how about Acne?" I saw it as an acronym for "the mule who had an accident and fell to its knees": Accident, knees. Acne. It was a fine-sounding four-letter word.

I'm not sure Roy knew what I meant, but as you might suspect, the name never made it back to the Rim of the Canyon.

As a matter of fact, thousands of mule names never make it back to the Rim.

Of course, this is but a tiny sample of what goes on in the mule-naming world. After three decades of living with and hanging around mules and mule skinners, I don't see anyone starting to acknowledge mule naming as an art form. On the contrary, I see mules naming themselves.