daze on the road

The Wake

2009-10-20T18:27:00.000-07:00

I went to Shartlesville PA for an Airstream Rally. It was the first time I’ve left the pine grove, and it felt really good to get some wind under my tail, and see new things. It was even better to see my old friends from the Washington DC unit, who are a group of originals, devoted to their Airstreams, mostly vintage, and also devoted to “just camping”.

It was the installation rally, where new officers are sworn in. This is supposed to be a fairly solemn ceremony, but with this group, it involved pink feather boas and a good dosage of hilarity. The principle entertainment is Happy Hour. Most RV get-togethers have an hour of snacks and socializing over adult beverages. For the WDCU, it goes on all night, with folks leaving to find dinner sometimes, or just living on the extensive spread of finger food. We talk and talk, about our trailers and life in general, catching up with each others lives. These folks are definitely family, so it looks more like a reunion, and a reunion where you like nearly all of the people!

We went to Cabelas for something to do, and wandered around looking at mystifying products. It is hunting season soon, so the place was a camouflaged world of everything you need to hit the woods. One person chairs with a tent of camo, and two person ones, clothing of every description in patterns to match the kind of setting you need to be invisible in. There were some products to mask your scent, which is what most of our prey really use to see us coming. I wonder if they work or if the creatures laugh behind their paws at what they smell like. I don’t get the camo stuff. In the woods, if you sit absolutely still for say 20 minutes, pretty soon the creatures ignore you.

Cabelas also has a slightly weird collection of stuffed animals. These are arranged in life-like tableaux, frozen in moments, three lions chasing impala at full gallop, or two bears arguing over a fallen moose (old age probably), two lynx after a rabbit on the side of a cliff. The strangest is the deer room. I expected a lot of heads with antlers, some is good more is better, but here they have trophy heads of “non-typical” deer. These are all very strange mutations of the usual antlers, with many extra points, some pointing down, some thickened almost like moose or elk antlers. Not enough just to shoot down a big rack, but big and weird is trophy too. I was a little dismayed by the sheer number of the non typical mutants, with their little plaques and stories. It had a sort of side show element that was a little tawdry. I am happy to eat venison, might even shoot a deer if I got hungry enough, but the trophy part, I don’t get, except as a possible decorating element in an enormous castle.

On Saturday, after the installation ceremony, and a huge spread for dinner (pot luck heaven), we came back to the campfire to continue to visit and tell stories. I brought and gave away all the wine and beer from the 5th wheel, but saved Don’s big bottle of Johnny Walker Black for this moment. I quietly poured a sip for everyone, told them it was to remember him and wish him good travels. We didn’t break up the party with a toast, everyone just quietly sipped away while the campfire visiting went on its happy, aimless way. Don loved get-togethers like this, the social heart of RVing. He would not want a fuss of stopping the fun. He has never actually met any of these folks, except for John and Harley who came for a visit one day, but we are all campers, part of a grand community of folks all over this country. So it was a fitting wake for him, and a fitting end to his scotch. Well, not quite the end, I have saved about an inch for certain people I have to go see.

The complications of his estate continue to be discouraging. Not greedy family squabbles, but financial and legal oddities. The Power of Attorney his daughter had, a standard one from the law office where she works, does not cover changing beneficiaries according to the folks who hold a life insurance annuity. Don wanted it to come to me, to pay off the loan on the 5th wheel, so I could sell it. As it stands now, it goes to one daughter, not three ways as he intended before he met me. We are lawyering up on this. In addition, the bulk of his funds were in an IRA, which goes directly to his daughters, and is not considered part of his estate. This means the truck, trailer and contents, my piece of the pie, are the entire “estate” and out of this must come any outstanding bills. So I must sell it all quickly, in the Fall, in a down economy, and hope that the medical bills are covered by Medicare and his supplemental. I won’t be out of pocket, but my little fantasy of having some extra to make just traveling more possible may not come true. And the bank demands either full payment or refinancing by November 28 or they will repossess the trailer. Fortunately, the will is registered in SD, and since the estate is worth less than $50,000, no probate is necessary. Advice: you might want to be sure your estate is headed where you intend it to go. Now, today.

Going through his belongings and disposing of them is hard, discouraging work. Most of it was good and useful and treasured by him, but little of it is of monetary value. My Airstream is stuffed to the gills with things I can’t leave go of, especially all the food we bought to survive at the remote North Rim. I have never gone hungry in my life, so I have no idea why hoarding food is so hard to stop. Obviously, my primitive brain knows winter is coming.

I have no idea when I will leave here, or where I will go. Much depends on some luck with the estate, and also I have to switch from what “we” are going to do, to what “I” am going to do, what I want to do, and where.

Funny little things get to me: seeing his phone number on the dog’s ID tag. Clearing out his emergency box in the truck, relics of his 4wheeling days. Going through all his tools, which he loved to have just in case he could save the day. And suddenly, driving down the road, I realize no matter how far I go, I won’t find him.

O Death

2009-10-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

Death, oh where is thy sting ?

My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord

Hospice has a booklet called “Gone from my sight”, that I was handed as some point, but I put it aside, assuming it was about grieving and how to deal with it. I was grieving, so I didn’t think I needed to be told how, not right them anyway.

After it was over, I picked it up, and it is about what happens to people as they approach their death. Some of the information I knew from watching animals die, and my grandfather’s death, but there was much that I saw happening with Don that it appears was normal for folks facing death.

When someone is about to give birth, everyone knows what to look for: the baby is dropping, twinges of false labor, contractions and how far apart, the water breaks. Perfect strangers will come up to you and tell you you’re having a boy or girl because (insert folk “wisdom” here), they will ask you when you are due (only a guess), and even later the infant is the object of much interest. At any rate, a public event in the “village”.

Death, on the other hand we hide from, hoping it can happen out of sight, hoping it’s quick, or perhaps seeking extraordinary means to keep it from happening at all. We got a lot of suggestions about Don’s approaching death, from seeking out the big guns of medical establishment to dietary suggestions but no one really knows how it happens.

Do we need to know this? Do we want to know this? I asked the nurse later how she decided when to give out the booklet, she said it is a pretty delicate matter of timing, because of our cultural avoidance of the subject, and also individual reactions to approaching death. I wished I had read it long before, for I learned that many things that worried me about him in those last weeks were normal, expected signs of approaching death.

Don slept a lot, napping in bed most of the day or in his big chair, and seemed lost in his mind, not interested in even a Dodger’s game, or listening to me read to him. It looked to me like depression, but this withdrawing from the real world is part of the preparation. What was he doing in there? Getting ready to die, to say good bye to this world, his body, and me. Setting aside these earthly coils, getting ready for the moment reported by those who have “died” when they float above their bodies looking down. Letting go of the busy things we do to fill our days. I confess I felt a little distanced, we mostly held each other, touch instead of words. We had a litany of things we said over and over to each other for comfort. But I missed our amiable squabbling and sorting of the day’s events, and most of all planning for the future.

The worst sign of approaching death for me was he gradually stopped eating much of anything. I love to cook, he loved to eat, I found myself weeping when he took a bite or two and wasn’t hungry, as though it was a personal failure on my part. His body knew he would soon need no food or drink and turned away from it, but also from me again. The cupboards are still full of food I bought to tempt him. I did remember my grandfather eating only half a blueberry muffin now and then.

Other odd things, like picking at the bedclothes while he slept, and tiny tremors are to be expected, although I assumed much of this was from the strokes. He would suddenly be sweaty hot, and then chilly, often needing a blanket or a towel to mop the sweat. All the systems in his body began to slacken, and work fitfully. His ability to navigate fell apart, not really disoriented but a little confused.( My Grandfather was found down stairs in his 3 piece suit, calling a cab in the middle of the night to take him to North Station in Boston. He knew he could take his usual train home and be OK, but otherwise was lost.)

As his time got really close, his fingers and toes began to cool, his legs mottled as if cold, and his breathing rate and heart rate would race or slow way down, he would suddenly be sweaty hot, and then chilly. The nurses assured me that he could still hear me, so I sang and prayed and told stories. It took along time for the heat to leave his body, I held my hand under him to feel it, the last of him, although he was actually dead, as long as the warmth of him was there, I couldn’t leave him. His color was like old ivory, like a netusuke carving of an old wise man.

I hope this doesn’t upset you, gentle reader, it makes me weep to read it, it seems important to record his death, for me, and also if it can guide someone through a sad time, it would be good to understand these transitions, expect them.

I’m listening to Brahms’ German Requiem, which is making me cry, but also it feels like a release.

Bon Secours

2009-10-20T18:09:00.000-07:00

Just Quickly.[Sept 4]

We are at the hospital. Don had a massive stroke early Friday morning, more than the Hospice team could handle out in the pine trees, so we are in the hospital in Richmond. He and I have been made comfortable and given all the support we could ask for and more. His wish would not have been to make work and trouble for these wonderful folks. He is at peace, sleeping now

His vital signs, are much weaker this morning, so it will likely be soon that he gets to go on his last walk.

His Dad, who died at 99, said to his nurse one night that he was going for a walk in the woods, and died that night. He was a forestry professor at UWA.

In 1824, the streets of Paris were littered with the misery, illness and death that followed the French Revolution, and subsequent upheavals. A group of 12 nuns began to serve the needs of the sick and dying not within their safe cloister, nor in the dreadful death traps that passed for hospitals, but out in the street and hovels. They treated everyone, regardless of religious or political leanings, and survived several anti Catholic pogroms.

In 1881, three sisters came to Baltimore MD, opened the first day care ever, continued their mission of home care, and in 1916 opened Bon Secours hospital. I was born at this hospital. (In the steamy heat of June, my laboring mother was admonished to cover herself with the bedclothes. When she, typically, would not, the sister said, “But Mrs. Pickman, what if the Doctor should see you?”)

Good Help was exactly what we received from Bon Secours, not just at the hospital, but with the Hospice Program. Mostly lay people now, working for peanuts, visiting and comforting people dying in their homes. Not a peep of Catholic doctrine, no Hail Marys, only a small crucifix high on the wall of each room in the hospital. I found myself staring at this, saying the prayers of my Catholic youth, and weeping while I watched at Don’s bedside. At the end, though, I said to him the whole Lord’s Prayer, power and glory forever, which I learned from my Quaker mother. A Scots Presbyterian would want that.

The folks who came to the RV in those last days were wonderful, and when at the end we were not able to manage the seizures and panic that last mortal stroke caused, we got the same gentle care from the nurses at the hospital. They made time to sit with me and talk, and let me cry on what was happening, and were always monitoring his comfort. And when he breathed his last, we all sat for a long while as the color of his skin faded to an old ivory, like an old Japanese carving, and the heat of his body slowly left. A nice young man came in to just be with us, to listen and affirm, and let us know we could stay as long as we needed.

As a child, going to catechism class, I remember discovering that the answer to nearly every question in the “quiz” was Sanctifying Grace. This seemed to me a commodity that one earned, a little like indulgences, the bartering of lengthy prayers or good deeds for less time in purgatory, but principally by going to Mass , Confession, receiving Communion and obeying the rules. This tally sheet of my sins ( teasing my brother, disobeying my parents, chattering in class) could be fixed, it seemed, just by doing what I was going to do anyway, enforced by my family. It seemed a little too easy, and I went right on teasing my poor brother and chattering in class, since it could all be fixed.

I think I found Sanctifying Grace, in the mission of Bon Secours. We were listened to with full attention, our fears were met with reassurance, our needs attended to, never once did our “immoral” unwed relationship meet with anything but acceptance. And it never occurred to me to think that all this care and love was done to balance out their sins, or to get me back to Mass.

There is another extraordinary power that sustains me, and that is you, gentle reader, and all those others who have worried and prayed and sent me courage and condolences. In the village times of human history, we would all be physically together, doing much the same thing. We move around today, in search of work or dreams or better weather, leaving our physical village, but it seems to me that the internet has filled the need for contact with those we know well, that are family, blood or chosen, old friends, or even those we know only through the air. Those of us who live on the road are even more in need of community, and behold there you all are. Better than a thousand nosey neighbors with casseroles feeding off my sadness, better than sitting at visiting hours, miserable with my loss, having to be a part of the huge party that is a funeral and wake. At moments when my sadness overtakes me, I look up at the sky and your thoughts come to comfort me like a soft shawl. Thank you. If I have the power to do so, bless you.

[On Sunday, Sept. 6, at 12:30, Don breathed his last, in my arms, in no pain, with two of his three daughters nearby. His harsh breathing stopped, started again and then stopped, and his brave heart rested at last.]

I have moved back into the Airstream, after the first two nights, I found there were too many stories in that bed in the 5th wheel. It has taken me 10 days to get my things out, the 5th wheel is a sad place, too many of Don’s molecules are there, I keep turning around expecting to see him, or reliving some of the really bad parts of the very end. His clothes are gone to Good Will, but his toys, the Ham radio set up, his TV, and all his tools are still there looking reproachful still that he was uninterested in them as he slowly turned inward to prepare for death. The inside of the Airstream is a disaster. I accumulated way too much stuff while living in the enormous space of the 5th wheel, and a lot of it reminds me powerfully of him so it’s hard to part with it. But distill I must, and only save the best bits, and remember the best times.

New Country

2009-10-20T18:07:00.000-07:00

The natural world here looks pretty much like what I grew up with in Massachusetts, not the same plants, but the same general lush high summer look. The area we are in, known as the East End, of the Richmond area, is very rural, even over by the Richmond airport, there are still fields and woods. There are some big homes hidden away, but it is mostly just empty, kind of the way the Boston 128 corridor was back in the 1950’s, still farmland and forest.

Don, after his stroke, or more probably one big one and several tiny ones, is the new country. A lot of the original data and equipment is still there, and he can still tell you three different ways to drive around Chicago, and telephone numbers from his youth. He still has his dry Scots sense of humor, and sees the absurdities and ironies of the world.

His left hand, well really the fingers, is not much use, and some part of the sorting process for visual input is not working very well. There are also some short term memory glitches. He can’t type, or read, or use his beloved laptop or Blackberry, and worst of all, he isn’t able to do the grounds work here to help work off our campsite. There are no signs of cancer symptoms, which will probably involve the liver first, only a sort of half life, waiting. He has gained more control over his hand and fingers, but the processing of what he is seeing is variable and sometimes faulty, depth perception is a problem

I confess to having moments of wishing a big blood clot would carry him off, instead of him lingering in this sad, missing the fun parts state. But we are, as he says, chugging along.

At this stage, my delicate job is to help when needed but not too much.

Pulp paper production, it turns out, is the reason there are vast forests here, in fact VA is 65% forests, and I think forest products may be the state’s biggest industry. (Working for the gumment doesn’t count).

We drove up to West Point VA to find an old fashioned barber shop for Don, and right there, on a peninsula between two rivers, is a huge paper mill. Back in 1918, Elis Olsson came from Canada and built a paper mill in West Point, making Kraft paper ( brown paper bag stock). The mill has pretty well run uninterrupted since then, through ownership changes and different types of paper products, and the vast tracts of loblolly pine are still being harvested and reforested along this stretch of VA, as well as in other areas. Our “home”, the New Kent Forestry Center, runs a breeding program to improve the loblolly pine, a fast growing giant that tolerates occasional wet feet.

The Chesapeake Paper company owned vast tracts of timberland in VA, including this area, and in 1999 sold it to the John Hancock Insurance CO for very little, and John Hancock has been selling it off for upscale development. This gives new meaning to the term paper pushers. So that’s why it has stayed so empty of urban sprawl. We are 18 miles from downtown Richmond and there are way more deer per acre here than people.

The dog and I continue our evening walks, last night there must have been 30 deer in one field of young pines, and one evening they crossed in front of the truck and there was a white fawn.

Smoke in the Woods

2009-10-20T18:04:00.000-07:00

Last night,Monday, when I drove home from the hospital in the dark, I smelled smoke and one stand of the pine trees has been given a therapeutic burn. I was amazed to see flames and coals glowing and no one around watching. In this humid green country, I guess it wasn’t going anywhere.

Out in the west, folks have their eyes peeled for smoke, and sniff the wind for that dangerous smell. A summers’ grazing could go up, or a stack of hay for the winter. And out in California, the dry hills roar with fires again, destroying houses and ruining dreams. I still think of fire that way, even though I know the forests need controlled burns.

On last Sunday, on our way home from a scouting trip to the big clinic in Richmond, Don suddenly had chest pains, so he ended up, via ambulance in the hospital again. Although a heart attack was suspected, it turns out that pain was a pulmonary embolism which kills a lot of people, but not Don. Monday, lots of waiting, some tests, more waiting, some Doctors came and said things, medications were administered, more tests, more waiting.

The sticky blood that cancer causes is the problem, so they want to get that under control, but the Coumadin didn’t work. They were concerned with some swelling at the site of the stroke, so more medications, and insulin because one of the drugs made his diabetes go nuts.

This morning, I came in to find Don confused and worried, the oncologist had told him (wrongly) that he had a few small cancer cells in the brain and wanted to do radiation. I comforted him and realized that his short term memory wasn’t what it was yesterday. A nurse came in to ask him questions for the MRI, and some of them he answered incorrectly, she was unaware that he wasn’t up to this. Then aides appeared to take him to radiation. He apparently said OK to that. Red Flag.

Shortly after that the radiologist came to say she didn’t do the radiation, that she didn’t think by his records that it was a good idea, and said the neurologist had advised against it. We talked about what the point of radiation was for the head, when the liver tumors are what are going to get him, and it suddenly became clear that it was time to go home, get in the hospice people and let him die in his RV as he wishes. An hour later she said that the MRI showed no cancer, only some small clots. Not good, but not needing radiation.

I said some strong things to the oncologist and the supervisor Dr about the radiation. When I asked the oncologist if he had read the neurologists report, he said he couldn’t read it! I gather that some butt will be kicked here over this. I also pointed out that Don hadn’t been given his breakfast and had a headache that wasn’t attended to.

So, they will bring the Hospice folks around tomorrow, get that organized and I will take him home to the pine forest.

I don’t think this is a bad hospital, we were generally well taken care of, but if I wasn’t a dragon, much could have gone badly, and they are bound to treat him here with anything they can think of.

I’m sleeping here in the hospital tonight, like a good dragon. I went home earlier to comfort the dog, get some stuff, tell the neighbor, and there were the remains of the fire still glowing and smoking, with no one watching it. That still doesn’t seem right, like cancer, fires need to be under vigilant care.

Next day, Wednesday:
All is resolved, we know how hospice works, tomorrow we go to one last doctor, the necessary attending physician for the hospice program, and then he will have peace. A nurse will come once a week or so, the eyes and ears of the doctor, and other help can be summoned if I need it.

Tonight, there is a light rain on the roof, and the pine trees are dripping, but that is the only sound. He is sleeping in his own bed, and no one will come to take his vitals in the night, nor exhaust him with questions.

The Green Tunnel

2009-10-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

Ever since we left New Mexico, the trees have crowded the sides of the highway, getting taller and bushier, until what is on the other side is nearly all hidden. The grass grows like mad, people are always mowing, and when I do get a glimpse of what lies beyond, I mostly see more woods, or fields going back to woods.

When we drive on the secondary roads, there are the remains of small farms, a corral, a tumbling barn, a rusting tractor, and often an abandoned house. When we are near a city of any size, the old fields are filled with developments, but out here in the countryside, the green summer growth seems to be slowly reclaiming everything. It won’t be until we drop into the wide flat Mississippi flood plain that anyone is growing things at this southern latitude.

In East Texas, the lumber industry is big, we pass huge saw mills, and are passed by log trucks taking the pine logs, mostly for particle board I suspect. There are tree farms in Arkansas too, at least at first, but by the time we pass Little Rock, the green wall seems to be just growing.

We spend a layover day at a State Park in Forrest City. Aptly named, the woods here are thick and dark, even in the day time. The dog and I like to walk in the evening, when the worst of the heat is over. I like to explore the informal trails that most state parks get from kids taking short cuts, but here, either the kids are staying out of the woods, or the brush grows so fast the trails disappear. At dusk, this thick, dark understory is a little scary. The dog is a little blind, and shies at the occasional stick or branch, which spooks me a little too. It’s an odd contrast with the grassy areas and there are acres and acres of these, huge open fields that are just mowed for our viewing pleasure by gangs of mowers. Perhaps the thick forest, dark and entangling, is the enemy of civilization, and the endless mowing the only way to save ourselves or at least to feel we have some control.

I am no fan of lawns, they are a drain of money, time, and water, a design conceit to prove we have money to waste on a perfect pasture that nothing feeds on. Lawns in the desert are particularly sinful, and indeed a bad idea anywhere they have to be watered. Here, the lawn needs no water, just the dew keeps it shoe wetting in the middle of the day. Another campground with concrete roads and pads had thick manicured grass, trimmed and edged like a perfect carpet laid into the areas between the pads. This grass is so lush that one sort of needs to keep an eye on it, as though in the night it might grow out over the concrete and envelope the trailer.

And then of course there is kudzu, the vine that ate the south. Imported as a possible cattle food, this aggressive vine that looks vaguely like grape vines, covers everything in its path, murdering any other plant in its way. Trees are covered, and bushes, like some alien topiary garden, and also the ground, and then it moves on to cover more and more. It has no local pests, and would take over the whole world given a chance. This is a good reason to mow, or it might take your house!

Oddly, there are few wildflowers by the side of the road. The only ones I see are tiny yellow chamomiles and a big white blowzy mallow with a purple eye. In the high desert, the flowers are still going nuts, along the sides of the road. Perhaps the endless mowing has discouraged them here, the woods themselves are too dark. And the flowers here have most of the year to do their business, there is no arid summer or frozen winter, so they can flower when they please, no need to squeeze it all into a couple of months.

We are now in Caruthersville, Missouri on the banks of the Mississippi River, staying in a Casino Campground. The actual casino is on a boat on the river, actually two, a barge with a building on it, and an old ferry or excursion boat tied up outside of the barge. They have fake smokestacks with the iconic metal crown and a cut out of paddle wheels amidships, but mostly they are a stage set. The insides are the usual glitzy, tawdry décor with slot machines and vaguely hopeful folks pouring their quarters into them, and too much cigarette smoke in the air.

We can go out on the rail of the outside boat, and sit watching the Big Muddy go by, roiling and seething at a pretty good clip. A barge with its tow boat pushing it heads very slowly up river. This is a dangerous river, fast and full of logs, and inclined to build up sandbars in the night, or roll old snags up. At the casino there is a 10 foot cement flood wall with slots for panels where the road goes through it. Right now, the river is way below us, but the floodwalls make me think of the horrors of New Orleans, and other floods I’ve seen on TV.

The main entertainment this morning is that they have torn up and re-cemented two of the three roads in this small campground. Many RVers are unable to back their rigs at all, especially those who have chosen the pull through sites that we are in. Getting out may turn out to be interesting. They also started this noisy work at 6:45 AM, understandable in the heat, but not nice for those who were up all night partying in the Casino. It’s going to be like one of those puzzles with sliding plastic numbers and only one empty space to move to while you get them in order.

Fireflies

2009-10-20T17:58:00.000-07:00

Last night, at a campground in Crossville TN, the dog and I went for a walk as it was getting dark. It was raining very lightly, and all around in the edge of the woods, fireflies flew up through the branches, or lingered in the tall grass, flashing their love songs in the twilight. I never grow tired of this buggy miracle, it seems like a special present on a summer evening.

I needed a long walk, as the last few days have been pretty bad.

On Friday night, Don had a stroke while he slept, and when he woke up, his left hand would not obey his brain. He could not get his shirt on nor do up his pants and belt, and tying his shoes was impossible. This dear man, who loves to fix things and be generally handy with all sorts of things, is crushed by the frustration and embarrassment of dropping anything he picks up with his left hand.

It was apparent to me that his left hand was not the only damage, subtle cognitive and visual things are wrong too. And this meant that there was no way he could drive.

This was always something waiting in the wings, no one ever knows how this ending dance will go exactly. The thickening of the blood that cancer brings caused a clot in his brain, and the nearby cells died. The people in the hospital in Clarksville TN emergency and then a neurologist in Nashville, did all the tests. There was no other reason for the clot, and they found he had serious clots in his legs, and he is now on Coumadin to thin his blood out.

He was taken by ambulance to Nashville, I had to let him go alone, because of the dog waiting at the trailer. What a horrible moment that was, leaving him to go by himself, and then coming home to an empty bed.

The Airstream and Darth Vader are now parked by the house of Ken’s platoon seargent., He’s the combat medic grandson stationed at Fort Campbell that we came to visit. Ken is my hero, he helped out in so many ways. I will have to fly back and pick it up once we are settled in VA.

Oklahoma and Texas

2009-10-20T17:55:00.000-07:00

At this time of year, we would normally avoid these hot places, but here there is family to say good-by to.

Down out of the last of the mountains, we cross the upper corner of NM, stopping at Tucumcari for the night. The name comes either from a romantic and suspiciously Longfellowish story of a love triangle and suicide murder, or (more likely)the name of a mountain which in Comanche means ambush place.

From here, on through Amarillo TX and into OK, it seems way too green and lush to be the old west. Not a cactus or a cow skull in sight, only lush pasture, green fields and increasing amounts of trees. I remember this as drier, maybe it rained a lot, maybe my recollection has been bleached out by too much time in the desert.

The closer we get to OK, the hotter it gets, and the humidity goes up and up. We were sad enough to leave the North Rim, and we really miss that cool dry place now.

In Oklahoma City, we visit the Cowboy Museum. Don’s legs and feet have developed a tendency to swell, making the walking hard, but we go on through, stopping at the Russells and Remingtons and ambling through the exhibits about the world of the working cowboy. A good half of the museum is art, western, realistic, and romantic art. No abstracts allowed here, “we don’t know much about art but we know what we like”. Wisely, the museum makes much of the art part, so as to attract the wealthy donors and patrons that they have to have.

I am a fool for cowboys and all things to do with them. I love the horses, the places and the smells and the people. Here, though, it seems to be a closely held identity, in spite of the fact that few of these people ever actually got close enough to a cow to smell it. It was a romantic idea, and the outfits are good. And it sells almost anything, including religion.

Beside the road we see a black metal silhouette of a cross with a cowboy kneeling beside it while his horse waits. Some of the stories of what the cow towns were like when a cattle drive up from TX came into town remind me that these cowboys were pretty wild and wooley, like the miners, and not perhaps the John Wayne, Roy Rogers version.

First stop, in Pauls Valley OK to visit one grandson, wife, great granddaughter and to their enormous credit, the sister and brother of his wife who have no useful parents. We are staying at one of my favorite types of campground, the city park which is on a lake, lots of visiting and fishing going on, just camping and not pretending we are at a resort. I was dreading tearful good byes, as they will not see Don again, but since he doesn’t look like he is sick, much less dying, perhaps that kept it heartfelt, but not weepy.

Don’s swelling foot and calf worried us enough to go the local emergency room. There, various blood tests and an ultrasound suggested he might have a small clot in his lower leg or foot. Apparently, the cancer makes his blood more likely to clot, and this is exacerbated by sitting in the truck and driving all day. We were advised to get out and walk more often and his aspirin intake is upped. Scary, but the Dr, said to carry on, watching for pain higher up which would indicate a clot that could go to lungs, heart or even brain.

In Pittsburg, TX we stayed again at Lake Bob Sandlin State park. Here the jungle that is hot southern summer growth crowds in, and it rains and drips, and the cicadas rattle and rasp in the trees. There are vines, and in the trees it is dark even when the sun shines. The heat is breathtaking, the humidity is thick, a blue haze where you can see any distance.

This visit, with Don’s daughter was jolly and good too, although she and I puddled up a couple of times, and she made me promise to keep her in my life and close in the months ahead. She has a new husband and a nice new house, and her life is looking up except for facing the loss of her Daddy. She has a difficult relationship with her mother, so the loss is doubly hard. We ate out for dinner, they came here for breakfast, and then she followed us and ambushed us to wave madly in her truck as we drove off.

Next we head further south to Huntsville TX for the other grandson and wife. Hotter and wetter, I don’t see how people can chose to live here, unless their jobs demand it. Another dinner out and another breakfast here, and another fond, but not weepy, farewell, I suppose these people have only seen Don sporadically, and since he appears healthy it may be hard to believe the worst.

Now we are working our way to Clarksville, TN where the combat medic grandson in the Army is stationed. Today, at a beautiful state park in Forrest City AR, we are camped beside a lake, acres of mowed lawns, lots of space between sites, and commercial worthy views out of all windows. We are taking a break from the road today. Driving on Interstates makes me nearly crazy with boredom, especially these southern roads that are made of slabs of concrete. Maybe they are OK when new, but with time the slabs move and they are just the right distance apart to set my truck and trailer into a thump thump thump that is exhausting. I think my boobs have dropped another inch.

We have settled into our on the road pattern, which we both love, on the move, always adjusting our route, and pondering the different things we see. I wish we could do a little more sightseeing, but although Don’s swelling is much better, we still need to keep moving in case it gets worse. We also are looking forward to the less steamy weather in VA, at least we hope it will be less steamy. Right now, I think we are in the Amazon.

Live Steam

2009-10-20T17:38:00.000-07:00

We hustled down to Antonito and scored two tickets on the train, riding in splendor in the fancy parlor car, brand new and spiffy, we were plied with drinks and pastries the whole time. But the whole point of this is the steam engine!

When we got there, one of the engines, a 1925 Baldwin Mikado type, was just getting steamed up, and sitting on the ashpit. We were like girls seeing Elvis. We watched it go around and move some cars, and then it was time to get on the bus for Chama. There are a number of different ways to ride the Cumbres and Toltec, with busses to take you back to where you started. The route is a remainder of the narrow gauge rail route that went from Antonito to Durango, this is the only part left . It runs up over the Toltec gorge, at times over a 4% grade! 2 ½ % is all a regular line can do.

The cars to ride in include our nice parlor car with plush seats and a tin ceiling, circa 1870.the other cars are 1880-1930 vintage, and there is an old box car redone as a café/curio car, and a gondola car where you can stand and see everything, narrated by a docent with microphone. The docent was informative but didn’t feel he had to talk all the time.

Black, hissing and the compressor clunking, the engine sits. Grey steam and smoke come out of the stack, and steam leaks lazily from other places. The lordly beings that control this great black creature strut a little, they are dirty and it is very hard work, especially shoveling the huge chunks of coal, but they know that in our eyes they are near gods. The engineer sports a black bowler instead of the usual peaked striped rr cap, a very dirty face and flashing eyes. He has little time for us, tired of railfans I think, but he loves this engine.

We board and the engine gives a great blast on the earsplitting whistle, no other sound in the world quite like it, almost an animal scream. The stack blows dark, black smoke as the engine begins to move, and the shuddering ch ch ch goes faster and faster, the joints on the rails hit the wheels clickety clack, and the coaches sway. Out the windows on a curve we can see the engine pulling, smoking steaming. There are counterweights on the drive wheels which put the drive arms further out and they are very visible, working like the endons on a pulling horse. Some of the passengers are just admiring the view, others have a grin on their faces, a grin that gets bigger every time the engine whistles for a grade crossing. The engineer clearly loves the whistle too, and plays it like some giant musical instrument. The steam leaps into the air, escaping through the whistle to freedom. On a good grade, they blow the bottom dump, a way to get rid of any crud on the bottom of the boiler, and release a cloud of steam, hissing and obscuring everything for a moment.

When I was learning about the steam engine that is a static display in the museum in Campo, I thought the great hulk was pretty nifty, and knowing how it all worked was great. I remember effusing about it to the head of the steam department, and he sighed, and said it was just a dead thing when it wasn’t running. I think I understand how he feels a little better. It is “only” a machine, but starting it up and running it while controlling what is basically a giant explosion on the edge of happening, makes it seem very alive. It breathes and snorts and thumps while still like an impatient race horse, and then when sent forward, clouds of steam and smoke and whistling are more like an unleashed dragon. Most machinery that pulls things have all the action hidden inside, pistons and gears are secrets, but on a steam engine the driving rods are right there, all bones and tendons and stringy muscles working like mad, and covered with black soot and gleaming with oil.

This mountaineering rail line was built in 9 months, mostly by hand, there are two tunnels and plenty of track laid on a rock shelf. Not quite as spectacular as Carrizo Gorge, but pretty grand all the same, we pass through aspen groves where the sound of the engine seems to rattle through the leaves, and then peer over the edge to the bright green valley below, where cattle graze.

At every grade crossing there are rail fans with their cameras, some follow the train the whole way, nearly jumping up and down with excitement. At a huge rock, called Kodak Rock by the train people, there are 3-4 intrepid climbers on top waiting for the perfect shot. I would rather ride it than shoot it, but you can see that we have plenty of company in our fascination with trains!

(This is a picture by a fellow train nut, Marty Bernard who visited here too )

Back at Antonito, we detrain, do a little shopping but keep turning to watch the engine switch cars around ready for tomorrow’s ride. Even the next day, driving on by, we slowed and looked wistfully at the engine getting ready, smoking quietly.

If you have never ridden behind a steam engine, better go do it, it’s a vanishing breed.

Adios San Juan

2009-10-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

The San Juan Mountains are beautiful for all the visual reasons, high, jagged, bits of snow, visible for miles around. Don spent 4 summers here, workamping where we are now, driving the tour Jeeps all over the terrifying mining roads, and acting as Alpine Host up in a basin called Yankee Boy. So the first thing we wanted to do was rent a Jeep and go up into Yankee Boy. The road up goes by the campsites I ran, and then gets gnarly. We have driven Darth up there, but chose not to, he really is just too long for this mountain goat driving.

The road has been much improved, they even did some blasting on the narrow shelf road that scares me the most, and then we were up in the glorious basin, stuffed with wildflowers of all colors and sizes. There are still pockets of snow, melting and sending moisture down the steep slopes, and the peaks all around protect the basin from the worst of the winds.

This is the third time I have seen this glorious display and it never fails to amaze and delight. Tall cow parsnips waving like giant Queen Anne’s lace, blue larkspur, peach and pink Indian Paint Brushes, blue bells, wall flowers, purple asters, fleabane, showy alpine daisies, sunflowers, tiny sedums and bistort which is a white tuft of flowers on the end of a long stem.

If you sit down, you are in a forest of flowers, and you can see the tinier ones that are a little out-shouted by the showier ones. Cameras run amok, people stand stupefied by the sheer number of flowers, or perhaps the altitude, we are up above 10,000 feet.

I keep puddling up, especially on the way down, for it is here that Don wants part of his ashes spread, a little on the flowers, a little on the stream that rushes through. It is all too beautiful, and I realize with a pang that I will never see it again with him, at least in his real self. To comfort both of us, I say his spirit will be just at my shoulder, and we can see it all again or new and wonderful places.

The campground he worked at is under new management and repairs, we are allowed in as old friends of the lady that runs the office, a lot of his old buddies are down the road in a newer RV place, so we go for happy hour, and have a jolly visit.

Next day, we rent another Jeep, this time a Rubicon which has lockers and been lifted 2 ½” and sway bar release, and 33” Kevlar tires. We almost need a mounting block to get in, and it is RED. Up the precipitous and rather scary Million Dollar highway above Ouray we go and into the mountains. This time we go up Corkscrew Gulch.

This is between the two Red Mountains that have sweeps of iron laden gravel running down their sides, an impossible collection of wild colors, bright orange, rust, maroon, kakhi, ochres, very pale yellow and blinding white when the sun shines on it. The road begins with a stretch of rolling bumpy dirt in the pines, and then we arrive at the foot of the corkscrew, a series of steep, tight switchbacks carved out of a massive, white and peach colored rock slide. As we climb and inch our way around the corners, the view of the Red Mountains gets bigger and wilder, until it is a vivid panorama. Off to both sides, the more sedate gray rocks of the San Juans rear up higher and more rugged, but the sweep of those colors down the slope is magnificent.

Up at the top of Hurricane Pass, we stop for photos, overlooking the tropical blue of Lake Como, then climb up to California Pass where we can see for miles in every direction, mountains and green lush valleys and lakes down below.

On the sides of most slopes, sometimes way high up, are the mines, holes dug mostly by hand, gray tailings spilling down the slope. How did they get up there ? How did they get ore down? A lot of times, if there was ore to make it worth the trouble, by cable cars. On some places we see ruined structures, sluices, loading docks, but mostly just holes. A few folks got rich, but most just got tired.

We stop for lunch by a small lake, there has been good rain and old snow cover, so the lakes are all full, and eat our sandwiches while the dog forages for rodents under the pines.

Then we grind our way back down the corkscrew, meeting folks on the way up in various stages of glee or terror.

Don was put on oxygen after the biopsy probe collapsed his lung, but even up there at 12,000 feet, he didn’t really need it that much. Once back down to 6,000 feet, he has decided to monitor his heart rate and etc, and not be bothered with it. Besides being a serious nuisance, it keeps him from moving around and makes him feel old and useless. Medically, maybe a good safety thing, but psychologically, a weight he doesn’t need. We’ll keep the equipment until VA.

Next day we head south, meaning to be on our way, but while eating ice cream in a park, I pointed out that we were close to the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railway, a big star in the rail fan world because they run steam !! We jumped on this, went to Antonito CO found a campground and next morning, with a rainbow in the sky, went to see if we could get tickets.

Exeunt Omnes

2009-10-20T17:05:00.000-07:00

Leaving the North Rim was very hard. Packing up, especially after spreading out in expectation of a 6 month stay is hard work. Training our replacements and worrying about them and feeling like we let the place down was hard work. Saying goodbye to people was hard work. Actually, that was the hardest of all.

Cancer might be lying in wait for any one of us, at any moment, but like the even more likely fatal wreck on the highway, we put that fear aside and carry on. Then when it comes close, the fear grabs us, and a tiny voice says that could be me. So it’s not surprising that our leaving made a lot of people sad. Many shared stories about their own cancer survival, or of others close to them, and urged positive thinking, prayer, and sometimes alternative cures. It was as though we had nicked a vein of need and fear. Cancer feels like the wrath of God, and we mortals can only cower together and hope it passes us, like an aimless tornado in the body.

An isolated, ephemeral community like the North Rim produces a quick intimacy, so that we become a sort of instant group of clans, divided by our daily work area, but still together in isolation and with the difficulties of dealing with the general public. So, on many levels, it was hard for us to go and hard for others to see us go. And besides, it is ravishingly beautiful there.

We had dinner in the Lodge the last night, and were treated like royalty, the best table right by the window, watching the last sun on the canyon pick out rocks and pinnacles and then the sky faded peach to gold to green. The new cook has upped the quality of the food, and it was superb. I wore my heavy silver dollar necklace, and felt like a queen for that hour.

So down off the mountain for the last time, the tall ponderosas left behind for junipers and then just sage brush, the grand staircase of red, tan and white cliffs ahead of us. The night we drove into St. George, the sunset was magnificent, and as we drove west, the light lingered on the red rocks, and glowed in the sky. Today, though, it is hot, the Vermillion Cliffs shimmer, and then a series of thunderstorms roll through, lighting zagging in the distance, and then a downpour, so we stopped for lunch at a small place tucked under the cliffs where friends work, and bought lunch for a pair of young men with car trouble.

We drove by Tsege, where sandstone is swirled and piled up like whipped pumpkin pie filling, and turned at Kenyata, red bluffs all around, and into Monument Valley for the night.

We love this wild architecture of erosion, the great buttes and fingers of red sandstone loom in the sky, full of portent, ageless and even their iconic role in so many cowboy movies doesn’t change their power. They are as aloof from the tourists bumping around on the dirt roads as they are from the Navaho homes scattered at their feet.

In the morningI drive Darth Vader out into Monument Valley so Don can get his fill, and on the way out, the sun breaks through and highlights certain towers, we are soaking up this wild western magic for the bad times ahead in the dense, humid, over grown and crowded east.

Then we are headed out of the red rocks for the high country of CO. The red cliffs are swirled with grey, like someone’s fimo clay project, and Mexican Hat where the red cliffs have ruffles. We climb and climb and the ground becomes tan and grey, the air smells like Montana, a kind of dusty floury smell. We stop in Cortez for the night, at the casino campground, but not for the gambling. Neither of us has any suspension of disbelief about the odds, and besides the tobacco smoke is horrible. I find it hard to watch people smoke these days, although Don quit 25 years ago and we don’t know the cause anyway, but it looks a lot like playing stickball on the freeway.

In the distance, we can see the San Juan Mountains, that’s where we are headed, to Yankee Boy Basin where we met. We stop at the Anasazi Heritage Museum in Dolores, and find an extraordinary collection of the artifacts of the Old Ones. I wondered at Mesa Verde where the stuff they found was hiding, and I think it’s all here. Archeology and archeologists is the theme, with lots of hands on stuff to do, and probably a good film although we didn’t stay for it.

I climbed up to the ruins of the Escalante Pueblo at the top of the hill, over looking the McPhee Lake. There is a kiva and the knee knocker doorways I first saw at Chaco Canyon. The impetus for this museum was the archeological survey done before they put the dam in and drowned the valley, but it has grown to include other areas of the region too. A great place if you love the ruins as we do, but not for those who are on a bus tour, counting coups of the places they visit as quickly at possible.

As we move along, Don calls more and more people to let them know, hard for him to say it, and hard for them to hear it. I lean against him for support, and worry about what lies ahead.

Today we are at the campground in Montrose CO where Don spent many summers as workamper, and drove the tour jeeps up on the terrifying old mine roads, and where he stopped to give a ride up to the high up campground to the lady who was supposed to clean it. We are going to rent a Jeep and go up there and play.

Heavy Heart

2009-10-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

I've been too sad and too busy to post these stories, until now.

About two weeks ago, Don decided that his cough and some shortness of breath needed to be taken to a doctor. At the hospital in Kanab UT, and X-ray showed a mass in his lung, and a CAT scan showed it more clearly.

So he went off to St. George to see a lung Dr, and had a biopsy done.

During the procedure, his lung collapsed. Not really a huge deal, happens fairly often when you poke at lungs, since they are a spongy collapsible sac that is pretty much held in place by air pressure, and sort of mildly stuck to the chest wall. A tube was put in to get the air rearranged, and the lung is back to position. After some monitoring, Don was sent home with oxygen to await the test results, for a week.

The oxygen system consists of a gray sort of R2D2 machine that purrs along, extracting pure oxygen from the air. He wears the standard double pronged nose tube ( canula) and has enough tubing to go anywhere in the RV. There is another concentrator in the Lodge office for work time, and cylinders on a trolley for in between.

Getting this all lined up was a little nerve wracking as someone dropped the ball and the second load wasn’t delivered on time, but the young man who delivered it reassured me that if we need anything just call and he will be on his way. It turns out he is related to the guy who brings the mail down from Fredonia Az every day, so although the physical distances out here are huge, it felt strangely like Wales. The small (2,000) town in MA where I raised my kids, where everyone knows everyone and most are related.

Don is, as you might imagine, both scared of what the future holds, and angry that his body has failed him, especially the very visible badge of infirmity, the oxygen. There are a lot of things we want to do and see, sort of imaginary pictures on the wall, and they have dimmed. It is always possible that this will be repaired and we can carry on, but the odds have shortened.

We got a phone call saying that the mass is indeed malignant. At first it made me want to run and hide, just sort of go in some closet until it is all over. But the fact is, that there are many types of cancers of the lung, and this is not the worst, because inoperable, small cell cancer. ( Yes, I did go on line and scare myself a bit)

So today is Sat, July 11, and we have to wait until next Friday to learn more. We will go into St. George that Thurs night, hit the Super 8, and be ready for the doctors and their machines in the morning.

Plan A would be to get whatever done and return to the North Rim, where I can still work while he recuperates. But since he will likely need ongoing procedures, and bad lungs at 8,800 feet is a bad idea, more likely there will be a move.

Plan B, thin at best, is Don taking the 5th wheel to civilization for treatment, leaving me to work.

Plan C, we both leave for somewhere near medical attention, preferably where I can work off our site fees at least.

So many people here have been so wonderful to us. The Front Desk team, having lost several desk clerks is still pulling together and doing a great job, as if to show Don that he trained them well, and that although they would like him back, he is not to fret. Don has pretty well chosen his crown prince and the assistants to be, so they should be OK if we have to leave.

A wonderful man who has been driving the employee shuttle van idly asked me a few weeks ago if he could train as my substitute just in case. It didn’t seem that urgent then, and it would require changing the way we handle funds, so I let it slide. He has now had three mornings of training, and since he is both better at numbers than I am, and worked at a Post Office in a former life, he is pretty well up to speed. This particular Post Office has a lot of idiosyncrasies, some due to lack of standard PO machines (like no postage meter or cash register) and some due to its role as banking office for the operation. It was a daunting learning curve for me, as you may recall, and still has very hectic days where it’s all I can do to get through it all. He “soloed” today in the Post Office, so he’s ready to fly it now.

An amazing number of people here have shared their cancer survival stories, and Don reminds himself that his aunt, who as a young woman lost a lung to TB and was given 6 months to live, lived a long life to age 80.

Me, I am of two minds. I like challenges and emergencies. But I also fear being a long term caretaker again, and am not happy about the idea of being planted in one place.

Today, Friday July 17, we learned that Don has stage IV lung cancer which has now spread to his liver. We stood at the oncologist’s office and looked at the PET scan files. Since cancer cells live at a high rate of metabolism, the isotope that was injected gets collected faster there, and the tumors light up like miniature supernovas. We could see the one in the lung, but also more and bigger blobs of light in the liver. Since the cancer is now on the road in there, operating is useless, and so is radiation. Chemo may well lengthen his life, and we haven’t ruled that out.

It seems best to head for VA where two of his daughters live. So, on Monday we will very sadly leave the North Rim, and head out on the last great road trip while he can still drive. We will revisit some favorite places, stop and see family and friends along the way, and end up somewhere in the Richmond area. There we will see another oncologist, and ponder treatments. We will continue to make short trips as long as it is still fun. The doctors remind us that there is no way to predict how this will go, nor how long it will take for sure. 6 months seems to be the average for what he has.

So gentle reader, the tone of this story has taken a sad turn, but an interesting one. Many questions, some never will be answered. Tears, regrets that he will never see these magnificent rock formations again, that we won’t go to Alaska together, that he won’t get to ride a mule down into the canyon. I will lose a darling companion.

Planet North Rim II

2009-08-06T06:29:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure why, but the workers are still restless.

One of the problems seems to be that we had no HR manager for the winter hiring season. The general manager’s husband, normally head barkeep, filled in. This couple has been running the North Rim for a while. She started as a server here 11 years ago, and worked her way up to manager. They are both 30 ish, and certainly have the experience. But.

They hired one guy to be both head of Accounting and head of all the Tech stuff, including the complex computer network that interfaces with the food service, the stores and the master reservation system down in Flagstaff AZ. It was two jobs, they hired one guy to do both, already a problem. The guy they hired either has no hustle or is exhausted by the altitude, plus he really doesn’t know the accounting side very well. He has been running on empty, and then he got demoted to hourly tech stuff, and that moved him out of his private cabin into the dorms. After returning from a trip to town to see the Dr., he went to the new room and found only a mattress there. He spent the night lying under his jacket and left this AM. Sure doesn’t seem like a good way to treat a grown-up.

As I ponder and question people about this, I’m learning that many decisions about running this place are made by an all powerful and rather cranky entity known as Corporate. As in” Corporate” decided to combine the IT and Accounting job to save money. Or the budget for people to work the Front Desk was cut by Corporate, and so on. I’m guessing that although the North Rim is still full of paying customers, the resort industry as a whole is taking a pretty big hit, and belts are getting new holes in them.

Talking to folks who have been here for several season, I learn that the high turnover is actually pretty normal among the younger workers, and that few are surprised that people leave or are moved around. It is only for the summer, so few of us have much to lose or gain by sticking it out when it gets too tough.

I have finally recovered from a nasty sinus infection, my excuse for not writing. We stayed put on the weekends and didn’t do much worth noting.

We did have visitors, our friends who live in Fairplay CO came for 4 days, staying in the Airstream and geocaching and jeeping around in the woods while we worked, then we went touring around with them and ate in the Lodge. They then went off to Vegas, he plays in poker tournaments.

The weather was very chilly until just last week (last in June) which discouraged us from going out and doing stuff too, but now it’s great.

Last Sunday, my birthday, we drove out to Point Sublime, a 20 mile trip on dirt roads that challenged Darth’s 4x4 skills. There are endless points and ridges that stick out into the canyon. The South Rim has developed these, but up here it is usually a long dirt road drive. Point Sublime is breathtaking,

you can see a bit of the river in one place, and at another viewpoint, the top limestone layer is dramatically eroded.

Excellent wildflowers, blue lupines so thick in the woods it looked like blue smoke,

magenta cactus blooming right on the edge of the canyon, and an enormous agave on the verge of blooming.

We had our lunch, and drove home by yet another dirt road, and then I got taken to the fancy Lodge dining room for dinner as the sun set over the canyon ! He will, apparently, still feed me.

This Sunday, we did a geocaching tour, exploring more of the back roads in the Kaibab National Forest, and then drove back towards Page, along our route in. There were so many places I wished I had photos of, the Vermillion Cliffs, a tall red Rampart with a wide green valley at its feet,

the distant folds of the canyon, and the dark pine covered Kaibab plateau that is our home at the North Rim.

We went for one short hike through the multicolored badlands at the base of the cliffs, dramatic colors, heavily eroded, and each height crowned with petrified wood, in chunks, but lying as the ancient tree fell.

It was pretty hot work, but a great taste of what this low valley is like on the ground, not wistfully from the window of the truck.

Several weeks ago, we went into St. George, the closest (150 miles) town with a lot of stores. We needed a new regulator for the propane system, and so took the excuse to go shopping. Walmart is Walmart.

On the way, we went to Pipe Spring National Monument. This is a restored ranch house/fort that was owned by the Mormons and run as a tithing ranch, where work was done for the church in lieu of cash. Cattle, and milk cows and sheep ran here, as on all the Arizona Strip, the wide valley north of the Grand Canyon. When the Mormons came here, the grass was lush and belly high to a cow, a rancher’s paradise, but overgrazing and drought have ruined the topsoil, and little can grow here, but weeds, and sagebrush. The Pipe Spring, a gusher of water is surrounded by the thick stone walls, and channeled through the building as a spring house, and then out to an improbable pair of ponds. Water in this part of the world is gold.

Planet North Rim

2009-08-06T06:22:00.001-07:00

The North Rim is still lovely and isolated, the Canyon majestic and moody, and the news always a little “other”. Some who are drawn to this place, either to visit or work, are slightly off center.

The week we got here, three young male hikers decided to ignore the signs warning of the danger of swimming in the Colorado River at the bottom of the canyon, and were swept away to their deaths. First of all, the water comes out of the bottom of the dam at Lake Powell at a frigid 45-52 degrees, allowing only minutes before you are incapacitated by the cold. Secondly, the water rushes by hard and fast ( 4 mph- 3.5 knots) in a great hurry to deepen the canyon some more, and will knock the legs out from under you. It’s hot down there, and I guess the temptation after a day of hiking is just too much.

We have had three hikers come up out of the canyon and go off in the ambulance, exhaustion and heat prostration, and a father and son got into a fist fight over pizza at the deli and had to be escorted back to the campground by the NP Rangers. Our rustic paving and unlit stairs have caused two older folks to go off in the ambulance from falls.

The deli manager quit because he was wrongly promised he could cook, the head chef quit because the ordering dept didn’t buy enough food, and about a dozen of the folks hired to wash dishes and make the beds are gone, some because it is very hard work, and some because this just wasn’t their windmill to tilt at. One young man used the office computers illegally for surfing and now two are dead of a virus, and another was so drunk he nearly fell into the canyon in front of guests. And, most incomprehensible to me, another young man got drunk and defecated all over two of the sitting areas in the employee housing.

The public is here in droves, no slackening due to the weak economy here. Our cabins, and the campground are full every night and we continue to turn away people who have driven 150-300 miles without checking for availability. I have gone through 500 US postcard stamps, and 350 overseas stamps, and had to ink up my North Rim hand cancel stamp twice. I would guess that we have slightly more guests from Germany, some of them so glad to see a post office that they buy 45 or 50 stamps at a pop at 98 cents each. We have many guests on one end or the other of hiking from Rim to Rim, and many others who dress as though they are, but can hardly get up the hill to the parking lot at 8,800 feet.

Don’s post as the Front Desk Manager is proving very hard work for long hours. He has two assistants who are young and not very reliable, and a crew of 12 hardworking ladies who do a great job. This last week he has put in several 12 hour days trying to cope with loosing two computer stations and the ire of guests whose cabins are not cleaned by the promised 4:00PM. Nothing he can do about either, but staying and calming is important, especially for his “guest agents” who are mostly new to this.

The housekeeping staff problem is such a microcosm of the work world in the US. The job is an 8 hour day at $7.50 an hour. Room and board at $12 are deducted, and transportation to work and to town for shopping is provided. It is hard work, the cabins are supposed to be cleaned, beds changed, and supplies refilled in 12 minutes, which requires a lot of hustle. At the beginning of the season, folks from other departments were dragged in, and they were exhausted after a day of it. I know that Human Resources ( do humans come from a mine ?) is out trolling for more workers, but a voice in my head keeps suggesting that a good busload of illegal and grateful immigrants would be a solution.

My day is full of filling out forms, computing postage on packages and helping to tape them, and selling tons of stamps. It doesn’t sound like hard work, and a lot of people wish they had my job, but the truth is I am standing up and busy busy busy for most of the day, and often doing serious number work which does not come easily to me. I have no cash register and making change is sometimes a struggle when people try to help by putting in some change to “make it easier”. It is embarrassing. Most people have at one time in their lives had to deal with money, but not me. I do like the people meeting part, retired post office workers marvel at my tiny closet of a Post Office, people take my picture through the grating over the window, and I get to watch the endless parade outside as folks arrive, explore and leave. I get to practice my foreign languages, and joke and answer questions and generally be jolly and helpful which I enjoy.

Assualt on Walmart

2009-05-24T21:52:00.000-07:00

We head up to Page, AZ to stock up on food and necessities. I didn’t know what to expect, more high desert, maybe some pine highlands, but this drive up the east end of the Grand Canyon goes through some astonishing country.

This is the great Navajo reservation, a dry red dirt land that in its better areas will support sheep and cattle, but up this edge of the earthly pile up of two tectonic plates, there is one huge wall of toothy red rock after another, and in the valleys, drifts and piles of dangerously colored sands.

I described these colors in TX in terms of cooking, and these look like the piles of dry ingredients, flours, sugars, and spices that you put together in a bowl before mixing in the liquids. Or maybe the different powders in earth tones that are the raw ingredients of pottery glazes. It is other worldly, so barren of life that it makes me wonder if it is all mine tailings, but I know it is just the results of time and weather on the piles of rock and ash left by the volcanoes that vented here where the edges ran over the top of each other.

There are rickety open shelters in every turn out by the road where the Navajo sell to the passersby. Some of them lean as if into the wind, and most of them are empty this early in the year. The times I have stopped, most of the wares are strung beads, some rough pottery, and only very little of the silver work that I adore. The really outstanding new work and older pieces that I like don’t appeal to passersby, I guess. I sort of wish I could support them, life out here is pretty grim to my eyes, although the scenery is amazing.

We are driving up a valley that must have been cut by a stream that went elsewhere long ago, it isn’t the deep cut that practically every creek makes. We follow the impressive canyon of the Little Colorado for a ways, which doesn’t have the depth or colors of the big hole, but here the land is flat flat flat and then suddenly the canyon is there as if a knife was cutting a wobbly line into a sheet cake.

Further north, the ramparts of red get bigger and begin to have the same colored layers as the Grand Canyon, this section was just pushed up higher, and we come out into the Marble Canyon area, where the Colorado River first carved a great wide valley and then plunged the rest of the way down. As we climb up a wall of red rocks this great wide valley opens up, we can see the infant Grand Canyon and beyond, the Vermillion Cliffs that tower over to the north, another step in the kicked up sandstones of the Colorado Plateau.

Page is up on the top of this plateau, but has its own brand of wind whipped red rocks, here they are old , compacted sand dunes that still hold the ripples of ancient winds, and voluptuous rounded shapes. Our campground has a cliff behind it that swells up almost smooth to a crusty top, and around the corner the rocks look like giant red petrified cow flops. In the distance, the wild rocks of Lake Powell poke out of the water, a riot of colors and shapes that were a canyon and now are a boater’s paradise.

We pass boat dealers that have rows of enormous house boats for sale, some of them are 50-60 feet long and three decks tall! I had no idea that Lake Powell was so huge. I guess it has miles of rocky, spectacular inlets and coves to explore and stay in, fishing, swimming, driving small fast boats, big fast boats, and these stately house boats. I’ve seen pictures of this desert water fun. Maybe someday we can go see for ourselves.

Our job here is to buy enough food to last us all summer. Two hours in a Super Walmart. And $500 dollars later we have stuffed both fridges, and the small freezer with food, and the floor of the Airstream resembles a warehouse of canned goods, toilet paper, and paper towels. It is true that they run a van into St. George for shopping from the North Rim, but it is a 3 hour drive and another 3 hours back, so that’s 6 hours in a bumpy van with people that I don’t really want to spend that much time with. Seems like a terrible thing to do to a day off when you only get two every week. Besides, it’s kind of a stunt to see if you can survive that long without shopping. We do have meal privileges in the Employee Dining Room, but the food is pretty poor, and there are all sorts of temptations like cookies, brownies and worst of all, ice cream.

So now the last leg: we have to drive back over the sharp red ridge and down to the one bridge, Navajo Bridge. There isn’t another bridge for 250 miles south at Hoover Dam, and none for 100 miles north up in Utah at Cataract Canyon. The canyon is pretty much an infant here, we sort of hop over it on the bridge and then skirt the edge of the Vermillion Cliffs. These are less chewed on and eroded, more like a solid steep wall with the red and pale bands. They stretch for 100 miles as we work up a wide grassy valley, with the cliffs on our right. Over to the left rises the high forested plateau of the North Rim. The bridge was at 3752’, and we climbed slowly as the valley narrowed, then we headed for the Kaibab Plateau . Suddenly the rocks are covered, and there are ponderosa pines and grass , and we climb very steeply, diesels thundering, up to 7935’ at Jacob’s Lake. For everyone else, the road south into the park is still closed, and we meet one of our bosses there at the gate. The park itself is not open either, and we go through the locked gate and on through the wide parks still holding snow and big vernal ponds of snow melt, and finally to the North Rim, at 8325’. (Don’s GPS is on all the time telling us the altitude)

Feels good to be back here, a number of others have returned, but there is much to be done until the curtain goes up on May 15. [so much to be done, gently reader that this is kind of late…]

Grand Canyon-South Rim

2009-05-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

The canyon is the canyon, a vast sculptured reverse mountain of colors and crags, the South Rim is a different view of it, and the best part of this side is that it is madly developed, the great old lodge, El Tovar, all dark shingles,

the rustic Bright Angel Lodge and cabins,

and several other more modern accommodations. Many more people working here, maybe even 10 times as many, more snack bars, and more parking and way more people even on this early spring day. This is a theme park, well done but still a theme park.

The things I really came to see are the oldest buildings, especially those by Mary Colter. The Santa Fe RR and Mr. Fred Harvey were the big movers in developing the South Rim, and you can still take the train from Williams, today a vintage stainless Budd car train with a big silver diesel. We pass on what appears to be a featureless train ride from a scenery point of view, the only thing fun would be to see the interiors of the cars, big bucks for even a cheap ticket.

El Tovar predates the national park rustic, it is shingle style, but Bright Angel Lodges and the train station are all of logs. Mary Coulter’s four buildings are all of stone, meticulous copies of the Sinagua walls of local stone, unfinished rough and often with small elements that mimic ruins or even petroglyphs. She took seriously the directive that the buildings look as though they predated the white man.

Hopi house is a pueblo from the outside, complete with upper layers and ladders, and a few small windows. Inside it is full of gifts, but of a really high caliber including a lot of pawn silver that I long for.

Next, going west is the stone Fred Harvey gift shop, hanging over the edge of the rim, with two porches that let me feel safe enough to look over, except for a rock chimney; it could be an ancient dwelling.

All the way out west where you have to take a bus, is Hermit’s Rest. A small rustic stone guest house set into the hillside.

The center room has a fireplace that is a great 7’ arch, like Soleri’s naves, and two side rooms that were bedrooms. This quiet intimate little building is a treat, nice to imagine coming out here by van and being left in solitude for a few days.

The best of Mary’s buildings and really the best of the whole South Rim is her Desert Watchtower, all the way on the eastern end of the park part of the rim.

This stone tower and smaller rooms clustered at its base are on a height that gives you a view down the river and the canyon as well as toward the east where the Painted Desert and the canyon of the Little Colorado spread out.

The view from the base is wonderful, and the tower is a series of rooms, with small windows, and the inside walls are smooth cement that have been painted with all sorts of Hopi images, by Hopi artists.

It doesn’t duplicate any one ancient structure but is a sort of visual poem about Hopi art, with the canyon as art set in the walls too. I really liked it here, I love her tower, and I much prefer to see the canyon from inside a building. The invisible tentacles of the depths that reach up to pull me over the edge can’t get me in the tower.

Another aspect of the South Rim that is good is the length of roadway and the many stops along it. At the North Rim, there are only three or four views of the canyon that you can drive to, and they are not sequential. At the South Rim you can get a wonderful, ever shifting panorama of the differences in the canyon at the different view points.

We had a rather grand lunch at El Tovar, and snooped around the gift shops, but I didn’t feel that another day would have gained us anything. I certainly would neither walk nor ride a mule down the side of the precipice. I guess with money we would like a helicopter ride, I think I might have been OK with that, or maybe a raft ride.

We were given a list of books to read about the Grand Canyon so we can be helpful to the guests, one of them is called Death in the Grand Canyon. This is a compendium of every death from any cause in the canyon, the point being to analyze the whys and perhaps improve safety. It seems that most deaths are people being colossally stupid: hiking with no water, showing off by dancing on the very edge of the rim, taking short cuts, not wearing a life vest on the river. Being youngish and male is very dangerous. The book also has some interesting history, and I enjoyed that part, but really, reading about people dying in the depths didn’t help my feelings about the big hole one bit.

Arcosanti

2009-05-24T18:36:00.000-07:00

Due north of Phoenix, where the desert is still dry, but has begun to roll and tip and actually have creeks with water in them, a visionary Italian architect called Paolo Soleri bought a huge tract of land in 1970, and preceded to begin building a city.

There is a picture of my brother at my parent’s house, lean and bearded, leaning on a shovel in only cut off shorts and work boots. Behind him is an arch, and the whole picture is sort of bleached out, suggesting blinding sun and heat. My brother went to Arcosanti for a workshop with Paolo Soleri which was part seminars on his theories of city planning, and part working on the city.

In the visitor center there is a model of this city, some 5-6 buildings now complete are in grey, small on the edge of an arroyo, and behind them in white are huge curved shell like apartment complexes and open spaces and green houses and fields and, well a whole city, yet unbuilt.

The dream is a sort of compacted city that needs no cars, everything you need, work, play home, shop, is within walking distance. The vast waste of suburban yards and parking lots and roads and streets and highways is rendered obselete. It was an intriguing idea in the 70’s, and seems fresher today, at least in theory. Soleri makes no attempt to dictate behavior, only wants to provide the structure for a more ecologically thrifty way of living. He calls it Arcology, Architecture + ecology. He is still a successful practicing architect, modern, quirky, organic concrete shapes, and also supervises the making of ceramic and cast metal wind bells. The income from the bells, his work, and seminar fees was to pay the way for construction. Architecture students (including my brother), and seekers and hiders still come, 6,000 of them since 1970.

The tour takes us from the 4 story visitor center, hung over the edge of the arroyo, up stairs and down, past the naves, band shell like, that house the ceramics and casting operations,

the big double vault of the concert hall,

and the amphitheatre.

These all face the south, and behind them are living quarters, all fairly small.

There are lots of nice planting and Italian cypress, mature and a nice vertical accent to the naves.

We are instructed in the rudiments of Arcology, and the offerings of the workshops.

Paolo Soleri was born in 1919. He studied at Taliesin with Frank Lloyd Wright. Great ideas, a great style, and years of admirable work here, and at Cosanti the smaller Phoenix center.

And now ? The road in is rough dirt, the concrete of the buildings is showing it’s age. There is a sort of dreamy hopefulness about the place, but not a great fire of zeal and ambition. Unfinished projects are everywhere, steps half done. The bells are arty and sound good in the AZ wind, but how many bells will the market bear? Arcosanti was to be a laboratory for Arcology, testing, tweaking and demonstrating. I’m by no means in the mainstream or even a backwater of architecture or city planning, but Soleri’s ideas seem to be lost in the desert, a side bar in alternative living ideas. Maybe there aren’t enough hippies left. Well, we are all still here, but we are too old to take our sleeping bags off into the desert and work with cement, or cast bells. I did have a moment of wondering if I could do that, more out of curiosity about what it would be like, not a burning desire to change the face of urban society. The spaces that are here are well thought out, at least the part that we get to see, lots of different levels and nooks relieved by the big open public spaces. I really wish I could have seen a living space.

The ones designed for the resident architects and other important folks look very open and full of desert light, I suspect the others may be a little cramped. The site has a good view over fields and the rolling desert.

I wonder how such changes could ever be made, to get us to give up our cars and our yards and our possessions and the setting to display them. For one thing, our financial world depends on the selling of all this to us, and to the example of public display of wealth. We have a serious mess on our hands right now because of this insidious system. The homes in the suburbs that have choked our roads with cars are now emptying, the cars and their makers are in trouble. The tangles of roads are getting old and weak, the fumes are killing our protection from the blasting sun.

So much of what Soleri identified as dangerous is coming true, but can we live in a rabbit warren of small apartments ? Can we be content with just a few stores ? How will we know if we have succeeded in life ? And can we do this out in the Arizona desert ?
Alas, it seems faded, naïve. But I am really glad I finally got to see what my brother was up to out in the Arizona desert.

Sedona and Sinaguas

2009-05-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

We stopped into another ruin, Tuzigoot. This is high on top of a hill in the valley, a whole series of rooms spread over the high ground, with the highest giving a great view. Back in the 1930’s, when the bottom dropped out of copper, the WPA decided to excavate and stabilize this ruin to give the miner’s something to do, and it is pretty nifty to be inside one that has been much more restored than is considered proper today. There is a roof top and stairs up to it, and lots of cement work on the stones.

This is the upper end of the Verde Valley, where most of the Sinagua ruins lie, and although the Spanish name, without water, seems to indicate dry farming, they seemed to be near a pretty lush valley compared to the rest of AZ. They also raised and wove cotton in beautiful and intricate patterns.

The Grand Canyon where we are headed, and Zion and Bryce canyons are all holes cut into the vivid rocks that rose up as the Colorado plateau. As we drive north, there are hints of the colors to come in the road cuts, but at Sedona the wild west of rocks jumps up with a war whoop.

The towers and canyons are like another movement in the tone poems of Bryce and Zion, the same sequence of white tops, then bands of pink and orange and rust and wine. In Sedona, we can drive and built vastly expensive homes in the midst of this grandeur, one exotic tower and bluff follows another. Downtown is full of expensive shops and bistros, all built since the 80’s. I’m guessing the foreclosure rate here is pretty high.

The road heads north up spectacular Oak Creek Canyon and climbs 2000 feet through the layers until we are back on the top dusting of black volcanic rock at 6200 feet in Flagstaff’s back yard. The walls are dark, and the canyon narrow, with lots of places to tent camp or play in the creek. Although the views in Sedona seem to be a little better from the south, I think the canyon might be more spectacular going down in stead of up. That way you would be able to see the descent into the red rocks better. Steep windy roads seem to be the motif for this section of our trip, these would all be great sports car roads, but that doesn’t stop Don and the truck from pretending and roaring up the hills and blasting around the curves. He has a straight sort of widened tail pipe on his truck that makes a mighty roar that I would know anywhere.

The next day we learn that Don’s fridge needs only a new fan in behind. Because it is contained in a slide and can’t vent out the top, the heat exchange process needs extra help. We probably have been under achieving for a while, but didn’t notice until we were in 90+ heat. A new part will be sent to us, and we will have to deal with it later. In the meantime, it is cool enough that we are OK.

Now we are off to Williams AZ, to investigate how the folks on the South Rim handle the touristas.

Desert to Red Rocks

2009-05-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

Leaving Salome (pronounced without accent on the final e by the locals) we went off through the desert, flat with the slightly purple mountains scattered around. In Aguila, one of the huge canals turns this flatness into fields smelling wet and green. It’s a smell that non desert folk think of as normal rural smell, but after a winter in the high desert, it is nice déjà vu, if you can have that in a smell. Aguila is the world center of Cantaloupes.
Soon, our view is back to the sort of hopeless, raggedy rubbish filled house lots that are common out in the desert where there is no town to work at. Dead campgrounds, motels, shops, and gas stations, with one or two brave palm trees, all sort of shriveled by the summer’s heat.

Wickenburg is a much more prosperous place, a big town, and close enough to Phoenix to be civilized by folks with jobs and money. Up the road, in Congress, an Escapees park called North Ranch is home for three days. Escapees is a huge operation that runs a dozen or so parks all over the country, and also acts as a sort of support group for RVers, especially full timers and snowbirds. This park has a number of graveled sites for the travelers, and the rest is a sort of hybrid. You actually buy a lot outright, and some are large enough for a real house, others only just a trailer, or a more permanent park model or a modular home. Most of the lots are pretty spiffed up, a lot of serious desert gardening, cacti and succulents, and desert trees, and some are just paved. Nice place, and friendly people, but again, what would I do all winter if I stayed here ?

We do a little more geocaching, including a huge frog like rock painted up in green. Frogs in the desert ? I don’t get it. Prescott is our next stop, pretty much the gateway to the south side of the Colorado Plateau with its outrageous rock formations and canyons. We take a drive up and over a larger mountain range, not a road to take the RV;s over, and very spectacular as we rise up with the desert floor below us. We gain 1500 feet in altitude, and above this first range of mountains, it is cooler and must rain more, as there is grass, and wide open park like areas This is called Peeples Valley and appears to be entirely owned by one outfit called Maughan Ranches. There are a lot of horses, and some cattle, and lush grass, and miles and miles of expensive white welded metal pipe fencing. Clearly big bucks, and a really lovely valley.

I investigate Maughan, and discover that Rex Maughan, who made his stake money producing and selling aloe vera products, branched out into the resort business, and now is enormously rich, is the owner of Forever Resorts, the company that I will be working for at the North Rim ! His signature is on my pay checks. He supported Mitt Romney as a good Morman should, and was a buddy of James Watts, the not very eco-bambi friendly Secretary of the Interior. Rex sees no reason why folks touring the National Parks shouldn’t have good accommodations and good food, and believes the private sector is best to provide that. He also promoted smowmobiles in Yellowstone in the winter, not popular with us tree huggers, but since I think Yellowstone is mostly a theme park anyway, not a problem. Nice Ironic coincidence anyway.

The next mountain grade, a pretty scary road, takes us up to 6000 feet, and into the Ponderosa pines of the high mountains. We drop into the higher end of Prescott where the houses are perched on steep slopes, and come down into town. Prescott is kind of homey and self consciously western. It was established to be the capital of AZ, just a site chosen as near the bigger mining centers, although it lost that crown to Tucson and then to Phoenix. At the north end of town are piles of soft granite, pinkish enough to look like the classic western red rocks, and our CG is in the middle of these rocks that just might be a giant movie set.

The next day we pack up and take the RVs to Prescott, but not over the big grade, this time we go west, following the RR up a more gradual climb. Once we are parked, we discover that Don’s fridge is not cooling. Oh gloom. We transfer everything to the Airstream and to the small freezer in my truck, and hot wire it around the thermostat to see if it will cool. We are getting grumpy waiting and measuring, so we take off to see Montezuma’s Castle and Arcosanti.

The geology of this area is always surprising, north of Prescott, the top layer is dark volcanic and underneath that in the road cuts you can see the pastels of the sand stones, a first hint of the wild colors to come. We cross over into the Verde River Valley, where there is water and fields and the rocks are suddenly pale limestone, white or a little pinkish, and eroded and corroded wherever water has touched it. It reminds me of the Hill country of TX.

Montezuma’s Castle- is not Montezuma’s of course, but a cliff dwelling built by the Sinagua culture, pretty much contemporary with the other great cliff dwelling folks in the southwest. The first white men to see it, abandoned and crumbling, didn’t know their history or geography very well, but the name has stuck. The rooms are plastered up in a niche on the white, cottage cheesy limestone cliffs above Beaver Creek, which even now, in a drought, still runs by busily. They farmed, and made pots and grew cotton and wove that, and then in the 1400’s, for no one knows what reason, they disappeared. The modern Indians claim them, but there is no real proof. The castle is magnificent; we can only stand below, among the poetic white barked sycamores, and look up. Before 1951, visitors could climb ladders up into the rooms, but the safety of the people and the ruins was at risk. We know so little about these folks, I wonder what they feared enough to build this mud fortress up so high.

Down the road is Montezuma’s Well, a huge sink hole in the limestone with a great spring coming up and flowing out a side hole, over a million gallons a day that flows into Beaver Creek. Along its edges, more dwellings, some secure on the cliffsides of the sink hole, and others out on the bluff over the river.

Next day, we drive over the high road to Jerome. This is one of the few mining towns that has not turned into a ghost town, instead the main road winds through the cliff side town like an Italian mountain village. It had a huge copper mine in the early days, and somehow when the price of copper fell in the 1930’s, it managed to stay alive. The streets are lined with the usual tourist attractions, including many references to the good time girls that were often the only women in these rowdy mining towns. In Prescott, one whole side of the town square is known as Whiskey Row, with attendant pictures and risqué signs. It is indeed history, and I would like to know more of these ladies real lives, but buying the Tshirt doesn’t interest me.

Drifting North

2009-05-24T16:51:00.000-07:00

Drifting North

The wind blew hard from the west, driving us down out of the mountains and onto the desert where sand raced us down the highway.

There were folks out on the dunes riding around even in the cold wind. These sand warriors have special camping trailers with mini garages in the back to store their All Terrain Vehicles. They have ramps that fold down, and the back area is a sort of bunkhouse-garage. They park out on the sand with no hookups, and drive around. I never did that, and I must say I don’t see the point, except for the possible thrill of dangerous speed which has never tempted me.

First stop in Yuma a snowbird Mecca, and we are at a huge snowbird parking lot that passes for a campground. Most of the residents are gone, and they are herding up the picnic tables into tight stacks and trimming the palm trees down to a Dr. Seuss tuft on the top. I have no idea what proper palm tree care is, but it seems to be a pretty radical pruning. Maybe they stand the summer heat better ?

Being on the road feels good, although getting ready after sitting for 6 months is a lot of work. There are a myriad of little things that need to be put away and secured, and buttoned up, and my increasingly leaky brain needs a lot of time to remember them all.

The tire on the Airstream that developed a leak last year in Las Vegas was supposedly fixed by a tire place in San Diego, but still leaks slowly. I distrusted the false jollity and hard sell noisiness of the place just on principle. They have read some cheap how to book or attended a cheesy seminar about keeping business rolling, and I felt like they would bully me into new tires in a second. They also told Don they had put the requested 80 lbs in his truck tires, and when he checked they were at 65, so they flat lied about that. The sort of undertone of the place was that these old farts won’t know the difference so why bother ? It is difficult to find reliable repairs and service when we never stay still, and I sometimes think they see our SD plates and perform accordingly.

I spent the next day in bed fighting a cold, and then we headed north again.

Through Quartzsite, which is now a ghost town, a few trailers around, waiting out the snow storms up north, but a lot of the vendors are gone and so are their buildings/tents. They didn’t look like tents while we were there, wandering and poking around, but they must have been, since vast stretches of stalls and businesses are nothing but gravel. I’m glad I got to see it once, but like so many tourist destinations it’s more about shopping than anything else. I will admit that the people watching was pretty good, and the Kofa Mountains are still magnificent and strange.

We are now in Salome, AZ, in a very small park of elderly RV’s and even more elderly people. It’s clean, and the sites would be way too tight if there was anyone left here. A lot of industrious paint work on everything, including the trunks of the few trees. Cheap enough for the social security crowd, no pool, no activities, just miles of desert and the mountains.

The town was named for Salome Pratt, wife of a founder, who danced as the hot sand burned her feet. Also the hideout of Dick Wick Hall, a vintage humorist, who wrote a poem about a frog in the desert, so there are frogs everywhere.

Don took out his golf clubs for their annual exercise, and found some old friends at the spiffy golf resort up the road. They have a lot on the course where they park their big motor home and little red Jeep. Nice, but too tidy, too expensive, and what would I do all day ?

The toy to have here is a Quad, a 4 wheel all terrain vehicle. Everyone who winters here has them, and there are trails everywhere. Since AZ registers them as street vehicles, you can even go on the road, although going off into the great sandy nothing of the desert would be the best park, with the mountains all around.

We went out geocaching yesterday, in Don’s truck, and went down a dirt road and got stuck in the sand. His transmission, not 4 wheel drive, and engine make a powerful pulling machine, but have no low range torque, especially in reverse. We spent a hot hour digging and trying to get out of the hole, while I said a few Hail Marys, and lo, a nice young man in a red Jeep came and towed us out. Once out of the sand we got out in a hurry.

My Darling Daughter ran the Boston Marathon for the charity she works for, Community Servings. I am imagined her back in the huge mob, plugging away. I can’t imagine running for 4 hours, which at her amateur pace is how long it will take her. As a first timer, she just has to finish to be a star, and she is a star to me for even trying.

Desert Flowers Reprise

2009-03-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

I wrote last year about going to the Anza Borrego State Park to see the magic of the desert in spring bloom. We wanted to go again, and this time to take the Airstream off into the desert and stay for a few days. So we did.

The rains in December and January have greened up the whole county. Our campo (field) is lush now that the cows are in another place, and it now makes more sense that the Texas ranchers that settled this area would like the grazing. Even up in the desert there are mists of green on some hillsides, and water flowing in a few of the creeks and washes.

Still, it’s the desert: miles of flat sandy stony land with brushy shrubs, and spiky cactus, agave and ocotillo.

The ocotillo is a bizarre plant, also known as coach whip. Most of the dry times, it is a 7-8 foot high collection of straight up sticks with spines, a pretty brutal coach whip. The minute there is any rain, it gets covered with tiny round bright green leaves, and the tips have a long bunch of bright red tubular flowers that look like a red pennant. The transformation isn’t as dramatic as the juicy annual wildflowers because they appear out of nothing but sand, and run riot. But the ocotillo is a more visible example of what is dried up and dead coming to life.

We parked up a wash, ie dried up stream bed. They only get rain that would make it run every two years or so, and they did in Jan, so the marks of the rushing water are still visible. I would love to see a flash flood in the desert, rushing all brown and violent, hoping to catch something unaware. The weather is fine, so we drive on up to a wide spot. Going in here with a 29’ trailer is a little adventurous. We might get stuck in sand, as the truck, in spite of being 4 wheel drive, doesn’t have big fat tires, or we might never find a place to turn around. Nothing ventured though and we find a good wide spot. Mountains all around, and a silence that makes your ears ring, as though they are trying really hard to find something, anything to listen to.

I love this empty stillness. It is desolate, no man made thing to see or hear, no trees to speak of, and few creatures. Sitting in the morning sun beside the trailer, I see a humming bird, hear other small birds chittering now and then, and grasshoppers fly by once or twice. I just dream of nothing, my mind empty and cleaned. I have wanted to do this for so long, my trailer is designed for just this, and in spite of some new scratches in the shiny skin, it feels as though I have achieved something to be here.

We spent the first day revisiting the more accessible wild flower hot spots, which were a little passed, and the effect was diminished by a lot of green between the flowers. The green obscured the flowers some, but also made it less clear that the flowers came out of nothing, no top soil, nothing.

After lunch at an aging resort, we got in touch with some Airstream friends, Linda and Jack Laughlin, who have lived here in Borrego Springs (at least in the winter) since 1982. They spend much of the summer traveling in their exquisite small, ’56 Airstream that shines like the sun pulled by a terrific yellow 4x4 Chevy truck of the same 50’s vintage. They met us at the last rally, and when we mentioned we were coming for the flowers, they said to look them up. We did and yahoo!

We got the tour of tours of this enormous (600,000 acre) park. Down white sandy washes and along mud stone canyons and finally into the Borrego Badlands where we ended up on Font’s Point. From here you can see the distant mountains, and at our feet the wrinkled and lined eroded soft rocks winding and twisting around the washes. The mud stone is a tan color, the sediments that made it came from the ancient Colorado River when it was more of a sea most of the time.

The layers are a little different in texture, with rocks in it sometimes, but all of a color, and sharply defined by the setting sun. We sit in chairs and have cheese and crackers and wine as the sun sets.

Jack and Linda took us to places where

the sunflowers turned the sands yellow,

where hawks nested in a soft canyon,

where Indians moved stones out of circles to sleep in, where Patton trained his desert troops,

where the usually rare desert lilies were thick on the ground and fat with flowers, impossible plants in this dried up place.

We saw cactus starting to bloom,

and Linda and I ran from flower to flower, finding new ones and hooting with the fun of the hunt. What a day, what a day!

Jack and Linda

I know that this place is dreadful in the summer, daily over 100, often 110 or even 120 degrees, but I would like to feel that, to see the desert in that white heat. I would sort of like to live here for a year, to have citrus fruits in my yard, and feel the warm night wind.

Quartzsite and Slab City

2009-02-26T08:03:00.000-08:00

We took the Airstream off to a rally in Quartzsite AZ. This is a sort of pilgrimage site for RVers, and rock hounds.

In the mountains around here, old volcanic action has brought all sorts of interesting and valuable rocks up to the surface. Blessed with piles of possible riches, the rock hounds began to gather at the intersection of I-10 and Rte 95 in the winter to trade rocks. Surrounded by miles of desert, this small trading get together grew, principally because the combination of free or nearly free boondocking for miles around, and the good winter weather made it a natural for snowbirds. While some RVers prefer a resort with pool, full hookups, and all, there is a sizeable group that put solar panels up, and head off for the empty spaces. As soon as the numbers of customers grew, so did both the rock show followed by every imaginable vendor and flea market endeavor. Once the big RV dealers realized how many of us were there, either for the winter or just for shopping, they began to send fleets of RV’s to Quartzsite to sell.

So that is really it. Rugged mineral rich mountains all around, and a vast desert sprinkled with motor homes, fifth wheels and trailers. From a plane high up, it must look like melting snow bits. In the center, a disorderly tent city selling everything and anything. In the summer, the heat drives all but the leather skinned locals away.

One family of locals has collected bottles for years, cleaning up the desert and arranged them in an acre sized glass parterre garden, with beds of colored rocks.

Other yards have cacti, weathered stumps, and rocks, but nothing as interesting as this, another example of what people do to cope with the endless blank that is the desert.

Another oddity, the grave of Hadji Ali, or Hi Jolly as the locals called him.

In 1856, the Gumment decided that one possible way to cope with The Great American Desert was a fleet of camels. They hired a number of middle easterners, with Hi Jolly as head camel driver, collected 33 camels, and they all made a round trip Texas to California and back. The camels did their job well, but the horses, donkeys and mules of the army were terrified of the camels. I can imagine the pandemonium. The Civil War ended the experiment in 1864, Hi Jolly tried to do hauling with the camels, but eventually released them into the desert at Gila Bend AZ. Ghost camels in the sky.

We had a nice drive and hike in the Kofa Mountains, a wildly scenic pile of flash frozen eruption, it would be good to camp out here, and watch the light on the mountains change. Much more my idea of what to do in the desert.

On the way home, we stopped at The Slabs, another desert RV Mecca. Slab City, in Niland CA was a Marine Corps training base, long abandoned, only building slabs left, and now a winter squatter city of Rvers looking for free camping and laissez faire in the sunshine. We came to get an estimate on putting solar on the Airstream ( $$$$$$$!) and stumbled on Salvation Mountain.

This has to be one of the wildest examples of making your mark on the desert.

Leonard Wright was born near Burlington VT in 1931. He was in the army, held various jobs and in 1967 had a religious awakening. No established church was comfortable with his vision of the Lord, and one day a hot air balloon passed over Burlington. Leonard suddenly saw a huge balloon with the words of God on it as a way to reach people. He began to collect material and sew it together, drifting west in his van. Several attempts to inflate the balloon failed, and he eventually ended up at Niland, making one more heartbreaking try on the balloon. He decided to make a sign on the side of a hill, just a weeks worth of work, with cement and paint. That was in 1984, and he is still there. Using adobe and an ocean of donated paint, he has made Salvation Mountain. And next to it, The Hogan, and The Museum. Hay bales and tires and mud and paint, with trees inside, and car windows to let in the light, all in a riot of colors, adobe flowers laid on.

He lives in an old truck, with bible verses painted all over it, there is a car, a vespa, a tractor a school bus and even an Airstream, all painted with verses. He seems to sleep in a swing with a thatch of cloth strips.
I didn’t see Leonard, but the work is arresting, vibrant, primitive and idiosyncratic. It reminds me of the Bread and Puppet group, low tech, high spirited, and utterly outside of the world of “art”. The mountain is not satirical and irreverent like B&P, at least in content, but it is a great and glorious shout in the face of the establishment. The local establishment did in fact try to shut it down with bogus toxic waste tests, hoping to somehow charge money for the use of the free campground. Now Salvation Mountain is a National Folk Art treasure. Bring paint if you can.

Cleaning

2009-01-10T21:05:00.000-08:00

My second most important job on the Christmas trains is cleaning. Not easy anyway, but also fraught with all sorts of issues.

Since the people who come on our Polar Express show trains pay $30 per adult and $20 per non lap child, it is my feeling that they should be seated in cars that are clean. Our passenger cars are all about 1925 vintage, so they show their age. The floors are particularly difficult since they are cement and the ground outside is coarse grit. This literally acts like sandpaper, especially when it rains.

Last year, I tried to clean with brooms and the museum’s vacuum cleaners but the vacs have been mistreated, and always need new filters or bags which can’t be found. There is no nearby electricity in any case. So I went out and bought a sort of compact sized shop vac, and now I drive my truck with generator on the tailgate up and down the “consist” of cars ready for the Xmas train.

One day my visiting daughter ( nice hostess…) swept two of the cars, filling the dustpan. I later was told that they had already been cleaned. I really got disgusted by this. The person who supposedly cleaned must have done what I call zombie cleaning. Mostly practiced by men, this involves moving the cleaning tool in the general vicinity of the dirty area and assigning a random amount to time to continue doing this. Then, in their minds, they have cleaned. Any cursory inspection of the area will reveal plenty of debris, dust and perhaps Leggos that have been left behind. In the case of the RR cars, the debris included 10-15 brightly colored jelly beans, 5 paper wrappers, 4 crumpled napkins, a lost sleigh bell, enough cookie bits to make 2 or 3 whole cookies, and plenty of just plain sand.

And then there is zombie mopping. This entails a big yellow janitor bucket and a disgusting string mop. Since getting a clean bucket of water to the train is a good 50 yard trek, and the attached wheels are useless in sand or on a train, the technique involves getting the first 10 feet fairly clean, then after than the water is as dirty as the floor, soon dirtier, and the string mop spats dirty water over the lower 4” of the cream colored wall. And leaves brown puddles in all corners.

Since the people in charge of this production either literally can’t see the dirt or avert their eyes so they don’t have to deal with it, I should just go along with their standards of clean, and avert my eyes too. In truth, the cars are boarded at dusk, the ride is in the dark, and the cars are dimly lit to conserve their batteries. The passengers are all over excited, get entertained in various ways, and probably don’t even look at the floor. “ They’ll never see it from the second row” is what you say in the theater when someone is fussing over tiny details.

But no. I apparently am still burdened by that scourge of womanhood: you are how you clean. Good Housekeeping seal of approval, Martha Stewart, and legions of (mostly) male run corporations that sell us the tools and chemicals, have ganged up on me, and brainwashed me.

I also get disgusted that a number of people actually put in a lot of time and energy on zombie cleaning, get praised and generally pat themselves on the back. Not that they don’t applaud my work, but it all seems incredibly Sysiphisan and torturous.

I wonder if I am being like the Dutch housewives that go out and scrub down their front steps every day. Do they still do that?

My personal living space is usually not ready for Martha Stewart, a certain amount of clutter from projects not finished, or left out as a reminder. After a full day of work, I’m not about to start cleaning. The small size of even Don’s palatial 5th wheel is pretty easy to keep clean, even though there is no “mud room”, and the Airstream can be spit shined in an hour. But if I know someone is coming, especially if I don’t know them, then I kind of go into a frenzy of cleaning, probably a displacement activity for being a little nervous about what they will think of me.

First impressions, the book’s cover, we do tend to make at least a preliminary judgment on the worth of a person by their clothes, their car, their personal hygiene, and sadly how clean their house is. I guess that is why I really want our funky train museum not to flunk its inspection.

Unto Caesar

2008-12-26T14:59:00.000-08:00

“And Jesus answering said unto them, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they marveled at him. “ Mark 12:17

Apparently, there was a tax rebellion going on at the time, and the inquisitors were hoping to trap Jesus and arrest him for tax evasion. But Jesus, always good at thinking on his feet, gave them an ambiguous answer. His words have been used as an excuse for civil disobedience of all kinds, and as a vague scriptural support for the separation of church and state.

An ad on the TV says one of this season’s “cherished traditions” is getting a good deal on a Hyundai auto. Cherished tradition? I have never known anyone who gave or received a car for Christmas, and would like to believe that it doesn’t happen at all. And for that matter, a great deal of the things we might buy someone for Christmas seem way over the top of what most of us can afford or should spend. I have always felt this way, and this year with greed and grasshopper short sightedness about to bring the economy down on our ears, it seems almost obscene to be enticing us to buy something we surely don’t need nor can we afford. Maybe the bank will give us another loan, or we can just put it on our credit card.

It would be so good if we could put the brakes on. Give a token of love and joy, eat and laugh together. I love the idea of Operation Heifer, and other goodly ways to spend for good. I have come close to just telling people that their present this year is a chicken for someone in Africa, but it sounds sort of sanctimonious, and if they buy you a real present, they probably expect something back, not high mindedness. It is difficult to change the course of traditions, and difficult to ignore the disappointment of those who want loot. Maybe if there was at least a homemade ornament for the tree as a token.

I have run away from my family Christmas back in Massachusetts. I miss the people, but the event itself was an exhausting production: way too many nerves about how presents given would be received, were they enough? And presents received required heartfelt enthusiasm, no matter how thoughtless the gift. The tree took all day to decorate, the meals took all day to cook, even if shared. Ate too much, drank too much, and then that hollow 8 year-old feeling: is that all there is?

In one of the Little House on the Prairie books, Pa goes to town just before Christmas, gets caught in a blizzard, and finally staggers in with, I think, an orange for each of the girls. I remember being astounded that an orange would be a big deal, and that those girls had only the smallest expectations of presents. Having Pa home safe was supposed to be the real present. As a probably 11 year-old, it struck me that it was sad that was all they got, but there was a lingering wistfulness about being content with an orange instead of visions of sugarplums and piles of presents.

Caesar would have us spend, that he might tax us. It was his decree that sent Joseph back to Bethlehem to be registered and taxed. The overcrowded Bethlehem mall had no parking and so Mary was stuck with a stable.

In this rather nerve racking season, I wish you all the peace and quiet you need, as much food and family as you think wise, and the hope that we can avoid rendering too much to Caesar in the coming year.

Trains Redux

2008-12-15T07:54:00.000-08:00

We are back, all hooked up and ready to play with the trains. My job in the Display building has been taken over by a new set of workampers. She runs the museum and he does mechanical work, plus other odd jobs. This means I finally get to do what I really wanted, fixing stuff! I still have to help out in the museum; we took down and stored all the Halloween decorations.

First I cleaned and painted a wall and helped install a new ice machine in the lunchroom, then scraped rust and old paint off a vintage baggage cart. We then put it back together which involved muscles and tools, and I think I have earned my overalls.

The main restoration project is known as the Jim Crow car. This is an old (1885) wooden car with fancy moldings, red velvet seats, pressed, colored glass eyebrow windows. It is technically known as the R&S Combine car, R&S for the Mississippi rail line it served on, and combine because the original all passenger seating was altered to have a baggage section. The really big deal is that the passenger seating is segregated, with an area set aside for black people, and doors in between. Hence Jim Crow. It is a handsome artifact all by itself, and with the added history, it is even more interesting.

It has been the object of hard work for several years, and the outside has new paint. My job is to grind off the old paint and rust from the railings on the front and rear platforms, using a small grinder with a stiff wire brush. Lots of noise and dirt, whoopee !

Don and I are replacing the big rubber weather bumper on one car, well, reattaching it actually, and then there are the new O rings on the solenoids on the smaller diesel engine, “The Goat”.

Last week, we hired an expert to come and put our new wheels back on our fanciest car, known as 1509. This is a vintage Pullman bar and dining car, fully restored with a shiny stainless bar, comfy chairs and sofas, 8 dining tables and an epic kitchen. The centerpiece of the kitchen is a wood burning stove, and lots of stainless counters and cupboards all the way to the roof. Not much floor space, more than two cooks would have to be pretty friendly. I had never seen inside this snazzy car because it was up in the air on jacks awaiting new wheels.

The process sounds simple, until you realize that each wheel/axle set weighs 1500 lbs. Three of these wheel sets had to be removed from and replaced in the trucks ( that contain the brakes, springs etc). The trucks themselves weigh 10,000 lbs. We have a big gantry crane on tracks that picked these up. Now for the car: It is 83 feet long and weighs 85 tons !!!! Too much for the crane, so we use massive compressed air jacks, running the big diesel engine for the air pressure. Clearly, a project not to be undertaken lightly. Our imported expert does this all the time, the RR buffs in attendance were in awe. Now, a few more tests on the brakes and 1509 will ride the rails with Santa.

You can learn more here:

http://www.sdrm.org/roster/passenger/din-1509/index.html

and here for pictures http://www.psrm.org/events/rentals/private-cars/

The main push now is to get all the cars ready for the Polar Express trains. I have decorated and cleaned, the costumes are ready and pretty soon elves and cookies and cocoa will appear along with Santa and Mrs. Claus!

Usually, we go east to a place called Miller’s Creek where a lit up Santa’s Village is placed by the tracks, Santa and the Mrs. waving to the train. We get on board and visit as we ride back with very excited kids and grownups. This year we have to find a new place to put the “North Pole” as a trestle to the east is deemed unsafe.

The whole production takes a lot of time and work, it is our major source of funds.

Alas, the workamper couple has left, they decided the disorganization was not to their liking, plus for the lady, not much to do out here. This means I am back in the Museum all day Saturday and Sunday. Very boring, and I can’t do the fixit projects. I do enjoy showing the train stuff to the visitors, but playing in the car barn is WAY more fun.

Another couple is on their way, will be here right as we start the Polar Express. I hope they like it here.

Out the window, the tan grasses have matching cows grazing. They are supposed to be Charolais, but instead of the normal white they range from caramel to chocolate and blend in perfectly. Four coyotes crossed the field, only visible when they moved. There must have been some rain while we were gone, the sagebrush is tall and healthy and lots of birds are feasting on the seeds. We are still in shorts although the nights get down to the 40’s.

The smell of bruised sage, by wind, by rain, by touch has become a permanent motif. After my first trip west, 50 years ago, I made a little pillow of sage leaves that I crushed and buried my nose in when I felt sad. Now, I only have to step out the door.