Easter, Kurt Cobain, and the Grand Canyon

Two lives changed in the spring of 1994

In the spring of 1994 my life was kind of falling apart. Not all of it, but parts of it. The end of my third year of college was rapidly approaching and multiple professors had made it abundantly clear to me that I was not going to pass their classes. I couldn’t keep up with my homework because I was working full-time at a restaurant to pay for the classes I was about to fail and was barely attending. The only reason I was still attending school at all was because I wanted to be a writer. Along with writing and editing stories for the school’s newspaper, my biggest responsibility was acting as the editor of our school’s yearbook. Although I was paying my bills by serving fish at Long John Silver’s each night, my position as the editor — which didn’t pay anything — felt like my “real” job.

And then one day I walked into class and was told to empty out my editor’s desk. I had been fired from a job I was doing for free. My journalism professor confessed to me my late-night editing sessions and last-minute article submissions — despite never missing a single deadline — was causing her to have a nervous breakdown. In retrospect, I get it. Here I was, this 20-year-old kid with a mullet and a smirk rolling into class wearing wrinkled Metallica t-shirts, ratty cargo shorts and Converse shoes. If I had been in her shoes I wouldn’t have put me in charge of anything important, either.

So she asked me to remove my things from the editor’s desk and then we could talk about what I would be doing next for the newspaper and the yearbook. I quietly packed the contents of my desk into a box, took it out to my car, and then went home and never went back to that school ever again. Ever. If life were a sitcom, my professor, the new yearbook editor, and all my classmates would still be standing there waitng for me to come back from the parking lot, 32 years later.

If there was anything good that came from this it was that there was no reason for me to keep working at Long John Silver’s to pay for a school I just walked out on. I didn’t call LJS and tell them I was quitting. I just decided I wouldn’t go back there, either.

The only thing in my life I had left was my then girlfriend, Susan. The two of us were living together in a mobile home her mother had purchased. Susan’s grades weren’t much better than mine that semester. We’d had a lot of adventures that semester, few of which involved attending class.

I think everybody has at least one story about a moment where their life changed. I’ve had many, and here’s one. That night I told Susan I was going to flip a coin and if it landed on heads we should do our best to salvage what we could of the semester and then figure out what our next plans would be.

“And what if it’s tails?” she asked.

I didn’t have an answer, but one came to me. “I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

And so, as the story goes, we packed some clothes into the only suitcase either of us owned and the following morning we climbed into her car and began driving west. No cellphones, no GPS, and no laptops; just a Rand Mcnally atlas and my wife’s debit card which was connected to a bank account full of cash to be used in case of an emergency. Somehow we justified it to ourselves that seeing the Grand Canyon was an emergency, and off we went.

There was a lot of money in that bank account. Not only did we go to the Grand Canyon but we also went to Carlsbad Caverns. And Cadillac Ranch. And Meteor Crater. We drove to Area 51 to see if we could get on the base. (A guard in a white truck scared us away.) We stayed at a campground with a Flintstone theme. We visited Tucson, Arizona, because my great aunt who I had only met once lived there.

Having a vacation on someone else’s debit card is a blast. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

It all came to an end just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. After a lovely dinner at Little Anita’s (which is still in business), we discovered the debit card had been turned off. A call from a payphone back to Susan’s mother confirmed the jig was up. Fortunately between the two of us to get one last hotel room before hitting the rode and making the 12-hour drive back home the following day.

That evening, while driving around Albuquerque looking for a cheap hotel, we heard on the radio that Kurt Cobain had died. Details were still rolling in, but it appeared to be true.

It’s easy to forget that in 1994, grunge was essentially three years old. Don’t get me wrong, it had been an explosing three years, but it was in 1991 that we got Nevermind by Nirvana, Ten by Pearl Jam, amd Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden, among others. The biggest selling artists in 1990 were Madonna, the New Kids on the Block, Prince, Sinead O’Connor. and MC Hammer. Intentional or not, grunge was two middle fingers to the music that came before it — one for polished pop music and the other for hair metal. Leather jackets and eye liner (at least for guys) was out; flannel shirts, cargo shorts and combat boots were in.

Of course it was more than that. It wasn’t just anti-fashion; it was anti-corporate. Overnight we learned it was cooler to pay $5 for a pair of shorts from the thrift store than to spend $50 on a pair from the mall.

It took me a long time — years, in fact — to figure out that all of those bands who didn’t care about money were making a lot of money selling that idea to kids.

When we got back from our road trip we packed up and moved back home. I don’t mean we moved out of the mobile home; I mean we literally had a company put wheels back on the mobile home and move it 60 miles back to our hometown. If any of our classmates or coworkers had come looking for us the two weeks we were on our road trip, they would have found a dark, empty trailer. If they had come back after that, they would have found d ark, empty lot where our trailer had been.

In fact, I didn’t talk to any of my old classmates for nearly 20 years. One of them tracked me down on Facebook. I guess someone from my old journalism had stared a rumor that we had died and they all believed it, which doesn’t say much for their journalism skills.

While half the people I knew went back to school that fall and the other half kept selling fish and hushpuppies, my life went on. Susan and I got real jobs. The following year, we got married. Our son was borning in 2001; our daughter, 2005.

In 2025, Susan and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary on a trip not unlike that first one we took together back in 1994. Well, it was a little different. We have our own debit cards now, so instead of the Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, and Meteor Crator we spent two weeks visiting London, Paris, Barcelona, Malaga, Cadiz, the Azores Islands, and Bermuda.

While I wasn’t alive then, most people point to the Manson murders as the end of the hippy movement and the Summer of Love. For me, grunge ended when Cobain died.

The irony within is that this year — the 32nd anniversary of Cobain’s death — fell on Easter. I’m not super religious but I understand the story and associate the holiday with rebirths and restarts. On Easter weekend back in 1994, my life started over in the best way imaginable.

PS: I published my first book in 2006 and earned a Master of Professional Writing degree in 2018. It sure beat a life of frying fish.