When most people think of my old friend Colonel Carstairs, they think of his paranoia, his naked lust for promotion, and his violent hatred of Captain John Yossarian.  This is because they are confusing him with Colonel Cathcart, a fictional character in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22.  Colonel Carstairs is a real person, and while he shares with Cathcart a paranoid tendency and a virulent dislike of Armenians, he is in other ways very different -- and in some ways, much more interesting.

Colonel Carstairs, indeed, has led a life more adventurous than those of most fictional characters, although I have no way of mathematically certifying this claim.  He is the youngest man ever to be named an honorary colonel in the Indiana National Guard; he was an amateur boxer for over fifteen years after discovering he was ill suited for professional boxing; his grand-uncle invented canned pudding; and he was the first man with a hook for a hand to ever win the Indy 100, a driving competition for people with artificial limbs.  Beatryz, his wife of twenty-two years (that is to say, she is 22 years old; they have only been married since last November), was voted Indianapolis' third-favorite nude weather girl in a poll of public access cable subscribers, and he once ran for mayor of the suburb of Plainfield on an anti-al-Q'aeda platform, in 1992.  But perhaps his best-known characteristic, apart from incipient senile dementia, is his love of, and fascination with, canyons.  Although he has never actually visited a canyon, having lived his entire life in central Indiana, he has studied the ways of canyons, reveled in their history and geology, learned their habits, picked up their language, and mastered their culture.  He recently granted himself the title of World's Greatest Grampa/Canyon Expert, which he has had engraved on a coffee mug and a beer stein in a stunning rebuke to critics who claim he is a rank amateur and also has no grandchildren.

He was kind enough to speak with me recently on the subject of canyons.

Colonel Carstairs, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.

No problem.  Who are you again?

I'm...I'm Leonard Pierce.  Of the Ludic Log.  We've known each other for over 25 years, actually.

Oh, right, Mabel's boy.  So did you come to talk to me about what it's like to be the world's greatest grandpa?

No, actually, Colonel, I wanted...

Because it's no picnic, I'll tell you that much.  Every time I step out the door there's some kid wanting me to take him on his first bowling expedition, or get him a battery trike, or buy him those hard candies that look like root beer barrels.  I guess they taste like root beer barrels, too, I've never tried one.  The kids just snatch them right out of my hand, along with any money that's there. 

I actually wanted to talk to you about canyons.

Ah!  Canyons!  Majestic snaking ribbons of rough-hewn earth, magnificent scars on the pock-marked earth, rocky gashes of death awaiting those brave and stupid enough to enter.  I have devoted at least three-fifths of my life to learning their ways, probing their mysteries, and discovering why they go one way and not the next.  Someday I hope to visit one. 

Some have called you the world's greatest canyon expert.  Others have called you the world's worst canyon expert.  Others have said that in order to be the worst canyon expert in the world, you'd have to at least be some kind of canyon expert, and you're not.  Still others have suggested that you don't, in fact, know what a canyon is, and often seem to confuse them with mountains, or, at other times, Chinamen.  Who's right?

I know a lot more about canyons than William Shakespeare.

Really?

Probably.  And he was the smartest man who ever lived.  Don't let all this rough talk from geologist hoodlums trick you, Mabel's boy.  Those university big-shots just don't like being beat out at their own game by an old man with a hook for a hand.  But who was it who showed up at their annual shindig to collect the prize for using satellite photography to discover the terminus of the Hidden Falls of Tsangpo Gorge?

You?

You're goddamn right it was me.  And even then they wouldn't let on.  Like clockwork their so-called official journals said that the photographs of the Falls were actually taken by me, with a digital camera, and were of the Slippery Noodle Inn.  They also say that the awards ceremony I showed up at was for the Elks Lodge.  All I say to that is, I know when I'm being kicked out of an Elks Lodge -- it's happened plenty.  And that was no Elks Lodge.  It might have been a Knights of Columbus hall, though.

What are some of your favorite canyons?

Oh, there's just so many.  There's the Copper Canyon of Mexico, where the Raramuri people live and hand-craft their children out of discarded ties from the Chepe railroad; there's the Kali Gandanki Gorge, with its massive hydroelectric plant and ability to transform into a wish-granting toad; and the beautiful, remote Blyde River Canyon in South Africa, which I believe was the first canyon to major in French literature at Harvard, and which defeated President Theodore Roosevelt at fencing in 1912.  If I had to pick just one canyon of all the ones I've seen, I don't know what I'd do, because I've only ever seen the one canyon, and that is -- actually, I've never seen a canyon.  So let's say, I don't know, Red River Gorge.  In Kentucky.

Why that one?

It's easy to spell.

What do you think of the Grand Canyon?

Which one is that?  I've never heard of it.

It's in Arizona.  It's the largest canyon in the world.

Look, kid, don't be fooled by these tourist-trap canyon-come-latelys.  Most of them get built as tourist attractions in some podunk town where the local candy factory has just boarded up, and you get out there hearing stories about donkey ride this and visible from space that and longest river on the continent the other, and like as not it just turns out to be a small municipal golf course.  Don't believe all this chamber of commerce bunk; the best canyons always show up in the places you least expect them.  The Wairere Boulders in New Zealand are actually in the storeroom of an Italian restaurant in Marion, but if you tip the headwaiter a twenty, he'll send you a printout of a photo.  It's completely worth it.

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"Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities." (David Hume)