Category: Road trips

Rock Springs, Wyo., to Elko, Nev.

We made a detour to Red Canyon, part of Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. For an hour and a half, we walked through Ponderosa pine woods, stopping now and again at one of the overlooks set up to offer perfect picture postcard views of the sheer red sandstone walls of the canyon dropping a thousand feet down to the perfect emerald water of the reservoir. It is almost impossible to take a bad photograph of Red Canyon.

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Above: Red Canyon, Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area in Utah

We drove back to the interstate, across broad sagebrush-covered plains, down steep, twisting roads, emerging every once in a while into valleys that were bright green with irrigated agricultural fields.

Sagebrush and mountains dominated the landscape. The interstate plunged down into Echo Canyon, historic route of the Hastings Cutoff on the California Trail. Somewhere in Echo Canyon there are the remains of stone breastworks erected by early Mormons as an act of defiance, as they prepared for an invasion by the U.S. Army; the army had spent months moving its troops westward and was camped out for the winter near Fort Bridger, Wyoming, prepared to forcibly extend the territorial rule of the United States over the Mormon theocracy. Open war was averted, barely. Eventually the coming of the railroad changed the political landscape, by making it far more difficult for the Mormon hierarchy to remain so isolated — and by making it obvious to all concerned that the U.S. Army could mobilize forces, not in a matter of months, but in a matter of days.

We stopped at a rest area in Echo Canyon, and climbed a fifty-foot high hill that was covered in sagebrush bushes ranging in height from two feet to the extraordinary height of seven feet. I looked at one of the seven-foot-high sagebrush bushes. Mark Twain was right; squinting my eyes and using my imagination, the sagebrush turned from a small bush into a huge old tree towering over me:

“If the reader can imagine a gnarled and venerable live oak-tree reduced to a little shrub two feet-high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete, he can picture the ‘sage-brush’ exactly. Often, on lazy afternoons in the mountains, I have lain on the ground with my face under a sage-bush, and entertained myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were liliputian birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about its base were liliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from Brobdignag waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him.”

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Above: Seven-foot high sagebrush in Echo Canyon, Utah

As we drove along, I compared our route on a map of the California Trail published by the National Park Service; I also looked at the official highway map of the state of Utah, which shows the historic route of the Hastings Cutoff of the California Trail, in greater detail and with more accuracy than the Park Service map. After Echo Canyon, the Hastings Cutoff went north of present-day Interstate 80. Leaving Salt Lake City, the interstate crosses a part of Great Salt Lake that is often dry, while the Hastings Cutoff followed higher ground along the base of Oquirrh Mountain, then in along the Tooele Valley, and up over Hastings Pass. The old trail passed by some fresh water springs, crossed over the present route of Interstate 80, then across great slat flats.

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It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to cross the utterly flat and utterly white salt flats in the days of the California Trail — neither fresh water nor forage for the oxen or humans, blinding sun above reflected by pure white salt underfoot — it seems impossible; yet people did it.

We drove at 75 miles per hour along a perfectly straight and level highway, watching the sun slowly sink towards the mountains on the Nevada side of the salt flats. We got to the rest area on the western edge of the slat flats just before sunset, and took innumerable photos of the subtly changing light in the sky, on the distant mountains, on the salt flats themselves. The beauty of the scene was tamed by the knowledge that we could get back into our automobile, and within minutes be sitting in an air conditioned restaurant in Wendover, drinking fresh water; without that sense of physical safety, the beauty would better be described as sublime and awe-inspiring.

We watched the shifting color, but we also watched the dozens of people who pulled their car or truck or RV into the rest area, and leaped out, camera or smartphone in hand, to take as many photos as we were taking. A family group came out of two rental RVs speaking Polish, children running across the slat flats, adults staring and taking photo after photo. A trucker walked swiftly to the edge of the slat flats, holding up his smartphone to take photos. And off to one side, half a dozen people took part in some kind of photo shoot: a woman in a long red dress, a girl holding a bright pink helium balloon, a photographer with a backpack and cameras slung around the neck.

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Kearney, Neb., to Rock Springs, Wyo.

Kearney, Neb., is named after Fort Kearny, an army outpost established in 1848 to help protect the emigrants who were using the Oregon Trail in increasing numbers in the middle nineteenth century. As Interstate 80 heads west of Kearney, it roughly follows the old Oregon Trail along the Platte River, crossing and recrossing the Platte on anonymous bridges that you wouldn’t notice except for small signs identifying which channel or branch of the Platte you are driving over at 75 miles per hour. But in his 1847 book The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life, Francis Parkman tells of a very different experience crossing the Platte River:

“The emigrants re-crossed the river, and we prepared to follow. First the heavy ox-wagons plunged down the bank, and dragged slowly over the sand-beds; sometimes the hoofs of the oxen were scarcely wetted by the thin sheet of water; and the next moment the river would be boiling against their sides, and eddying fiercely around the wheels. Inch by inch they receded from the shore, dwindling every moment, until at length they seemed to be floating far in the very middle of the river. A more critical experiment awaited us; for our little mule-cart was but ill-fitted for the passage of so swift a stream. We watched it with anxiety till it seemed to be a little motionless white speck in the midst of the waters; and it WAS motionless, for it had stuck fast in a quicksand. The little mules were losing their footing, the wheels were sinking deeper and deeper, and the water began to rise through the bottom and drench the goods within. All of us who had remained on the hither bank galloped to the rescue; the men jumped into the water, adding their strength to that of the mules, until by much effort the cart was extricated, and conveyed in safety across.”

We stopped at Gothenberg, Neb., to see the Pony Express station. The pleasant woman sitting in the station told us it was relocated from a ranch about thirty miles away, reassembled in the town park, a new roof put on, a brick floor put down, and concrete put between the logs to keep the weather out.

On the way out of town, we stopped at Lisa’s Kitchen for an early lunch. Lisa was outside watering the flowers in front of the restaurant, and she came in to take our order. While she cooked my hamburger, she and I got to talking. I admired the photographs of her grandchildren. There was also a framed photograph of her daughter hanging on one wall, and on the opposite wall a large framed photograph of Lisa, looking quite glamorous and scholarly, from when she lived in Hong Kong. When she heard that Carol and I live in the Bay Area, she said that her daughter lives in the Mission District in San Francisco. She and I agreed that the price of housing in the Bay Area is ridiculously high.

As we were getting in to the car, she waved at us, picked a lily, and came over and gave it to us. The blossom stayed in a large paper cup in the center console of the car for the rest of the day.

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We stopped to have lunch at a rest area in Nebraska. We got out of the car, and it seemed warm and windy, but not oppressively hot — just comfortably warm. When I checked the thermometer, however, it read 99 degrees! We were back in the West, where the dry heat isn’t uncomfortable, it just sucks all the moisture out of your body until you feel faint. Carol had washed a pair of pajamas and we hung them out to dry while we were eating lunch, but they were probably dry before we had even opened the jam jar to make our sandwiches.

Before long, trees started to disappear from the landscape, and we began to see sagebrush growing alongside the highway. This was another sign that we were entering the West. The interstate climbed up the western end of Nebraska, we topped one rise and there, off in the blue distance, were the sharp peaks of the distant mountains. We crossed over the border into Wyoming, and soon saw snow-covered peaks. Mark Twain, in Roughing It, described his delight the first time he saw snow-covered peaks in the West:

“Two miles beyond South Pass City we saw for the first time that mysterious marvel which all Western untraveled boys have heard of and fully believe in, but are sure to be astounded at when they see it with their own eyes, nevertheless–banks of snow in dead summer time. We were now far up toward the sky, and knew all the time that we must presently encounter lofty summits clad in the ‘eternal snow’ which was so common place a matter of mention in books, and yet when I did see it glittering in the sun on stately domes in the distance and knew the month was August and that my coat was hanging up because it was too warm to wear it, I was full as much amazed as if I never had heard of snow in August before.”

He had spent several weary weeks in an overland stage before he saw that delightful sight; we had driven just a few days.

We stopped for dinner at a rest area in the Wagonhound region of Wyoming. A sign proclaimed that Indians had used the same spot for a rest area:

“The stone circles or ‘TIPI RINGS’ at this site mark the location of a prehistoric Native American campsite. The stones were probably used to anchor the skins of conical tents, known by the Sioux word ‘TIPI’…. It has been estimated that there are over 1 million tipi rings in the western United States. As such, they are one of the most common archaeological features to be found in this part of the country.”

Certainly, those prehistoric Native people picked a beautiful spot to set up their tipi.

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Above: The Wagonhound region of Wyoming

Sagebrush, snow-covered mountains, Indians — one more thing was needed for us to know that we were truly in the West: evidence of major resource extraction. But soon we saw a huge refinery alongside the interstate, out in the middle of nowhere:

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Above: Refinery near Sinclair, Wyo.

Then we passed an open pit mine that stretched for over two miles: huge piles of dirt with huge earthmoving equipment crawling over them; the top of a crane emerging from a some deep hole not far from the highway. Now we were truly in the West.

Joliet, Ill., to Kearney, Neb.

We started driving at nine in the morning, quickly leaving behind the crowded roads of Chicagoland.

Water towers are prominent features of the midwestern landscape, and traditionally the municipality that owns the water tower will paint its name on the side. Stuart, Iowa, has updated this tradition: a large white wind turbine had “STUART” painted in large letters down the tall tower.

We stopped at a rest area west of Des Moines, and as I looked out at a large field of corn I couldn’t help comparing the ecological characteristics of corn fields with lawns. Both crops cover large areas of North America (one source says that lawns cover more land area than any other single crop). Both crops are raised as monocultures that require huge amounts of chemical fertilizer and chemical controls for weeds and pests. Considered from the point of view of ecological science, both lawns and corn fields support a low density of species; and the “insurance hypothesis” predicts that lawns and corn fields will be relatively vulnerable to changes such as drought, invasive species, pest infestations, etc.

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Above: Corn field near a rest stop west of Des Moines

As we drove by the Adair wind farm on Interstate 80, we could see a highway rest area with a tall white monument in front of it. As we passed it, we realized it wasn’t a monument at all: it was a wind turbine blade standing upright.

We decided to stop in Omaha for dinner. Carol found what sounded like a good restaurant, McFoster’s Natural Restaurant, using her smartphone. When we got there, we realized we had been at that restaurant some years earlier. At that time, the restroom walls had been covered with stickers, so Carol stuck one of her own stickers on the wall: a yellow spiral with the words “Urine Charge, Take Life Full Circle.” Alas, the restrooms had been renovated, and all the stickers were gone.

As we sat eating dinner, a couple in their early twenties walked in. The woman was saying to the man, “Yeah, I don’t know if you’ll like this place, but it’s my favorite restaurant. If you don’t like it, we can go somewhere else.” When they were out of earshot, Carol said aloud what I had been thinking: unless they were brother and sister, the man had better at least pretend that he liked that restaurant. As we were walking to our car, we saw them coming out of the restaurant; they both seemed to be in a good mood.

We had a long way to go, so we got in the car and kept driving west, into the setting sun….

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Above: Wind turbine on Interstate 80 in Nebraska

 

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Above: Sun setting over a Nebraska soybean field

Macedonia, Ohio, to Joliet, Ill.

I got up at 6:30 and went to the gas station across the street from our motel to buy a newspaper. They stocked three, and I got a copy of each — the Akron Beacon Journal, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and USA Today — and went to the Bob Evans restaurant to spend an hour eating breakfast and reading newspapers.

The lead paragraph of one of the front page articles in the Beacon Journal declared: “Amid sirens and cheers, the 77th Annual All-American Soap Box Derby kicked off its weeklong festivities with the opening ceremony Monday.” I remembered seeing a small black trailer hitched to a car in the parking lot outside our motel, with a sign that Kara’s something-or-other soapbox derby team. Sure enough, just as I was coming out from the restaurant, the car and trailer drove past me. Someone had taken white chalk and written on the side of the trailer: Honk for Luck!” I was walking so I couldn’t honk, but I silently wished Kara (whoever she may be) the best of luck in the world championships.

We left Macedonia and drove along Interstate 80 until we reached Illinois Route 53 — also known as Historic Route 66 — and headed south a dozen miles to the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. Midewin was established eighteen years ago on what used to be the old Joliet Arsenal. The prairie is still being restored by the National Forest Service, which maintains huge seed beds of native prairie plants, protected from deer by nine foot high fences. I stopped to look at a bed of Wild Bergamot (Monardo fistulosa) in full bloom.

Seed beds, Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

Above: Seed beds with Wild Bergamot (Beebalm) at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

We walked along an access road lined with trees to get to the trailhead; stopping to eat some perfectly ripe mulberries. It was hot and humid, too hot to walk in the sun. We headed down Prairie Creek Trail, one of the few shaded trails at Midewin. When we emerged from the woods an hour later, the sun was partly blocked by clouds, but it was still too hot. I walked slowly, paying attention to the birds — that was my excuse for walking slowly. Carol pointed to a Ring-necked Pheasant walking along the trail behind us. A Sedge Wren called from the top of a shrub. A bright blue Indigo Bunting landed on a fence, not fifty feet from me.

Carol walked faster than I. She disappeared out of sight into the shaded access road. I stopped and turned to look out over the prairie and the woodlands. Even though I could hear the constant rumble of trucks along nearby Interstate 55, I felt as though I were far from that world.

Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

Above: Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

After we checked in to our motel in Joliet, we went out to eat at a little Chinese restaurant in a half-abandoned mall. That big empty mall parking lot resembled the tallgrass prairie in an eerie, slightly sinister way — the way the Fetch of Irish folklore resembles a living human being.

Mall in Joliet, Ill.

Above: Mall in Joliet, Ill.

Fredonia, N.Y., to Macedonia, Ohio

We had a short drive today because we are visiting relatives this afternoon and evening. We got an early start, and as we were driving along we realized that it was a perfect beach day: hot, but not too hot, sunny, a light breeze. So we decided to go to the beach in western Pennsylvania.

Presque Isle, Penna.

Above: Presque Isle, Penna.

There are miles of beaches on Presque Isle, just north of Erie, with sand, seagulls, the occasional seashell, and reasonably warm water. If you’re willing to walk five minutes, you can get away from the crowded swimming beaches and have long stretches of sand pretty much to yourself.

Carol stood at the end of a low concrete wall, presumably there to control erosion, and looked across Lake Erie. If you looked carefully, you could just see a few big buildings on the opposite shore shimmering through the humidity.

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Above: Presque Isle, Penna.

We walked for over an hour on the beach. There were lots of small flat stones that were perfect for skipping, and I managed to skip one stone seven times before it sank into the water. We saw lots of interesting driftwood, too, and someone had built a couple of lean-to structures out of big pieces of driftwood, sort of like the forts kids build in the woods.

Preque Isle, Penna.

Above: Presque Isle, Penna.

It was pretty idyllic.

Stow, Mass., to Fredonia, N.Y.

We left Stow, Massachusetts, at nine o’clock this morning. Stow lies on the edge of the coastal plain of southeastern New England, and we drove west through the hills of central New England, into the Berkshire Mountains, through the Taconic Mountains of New York, up the Mohawk River valley through the dramatic gap between the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains to the north and the Catskills to the south. I said goodbye to the last little foothills along the freeway.

Mohawk River valley

Above: The Mohawk River along Interstate 90, looking north towards the last of the Adirondack foothills.

We will see no more mountains — nothing but plains and rolling land — until we reach Wyoming, some 1,500 miles from here. We stopped at a rest area near Waterloo, New York, and already the landscape began to look like the Midwest or the Great Plains: a big field of legumes, a line of trees in the distance, some farm buildings, and a big outlet mall on the other side of the interstate.

Nine Foot Road, Waterloo, N.Y.

Above: Farm off Nine Foot Road, near Waterloo, N.Y.

When we got to Fredonia, N.Y., where we will spend the night, we took a long walk from our hotel to the campus of SUNY Fredonia. Although the university was founded in 1829, it obviously saw a big building boom beginning in the 1960s, when lots of big bland institutional brick buildings got built. I imagine it can look pretty bleak in the long gray winters, but everything was beautifully green today.

Fredonia obviously has a big student population. Lots of the attractive older houses in the center of town have been split up into student apartments, and we saw lots of evidence that this is a university town: a peace sign in a window, a poster proclaiming allegiance to Bob Marley, and a lovely garden with a handpainted sign that read “GROW FOOD NOT LAWNS.”

Garden in Fredonia, N.Y.

Above: Garden in Fredonia, N.Y.

Gosport Harbor

Gosport Harbor is protected by several islands connected by breakwaters: Appledore Island to the north west, then Malaga Island, Smuttynose Island, Cedar Island, and Star Island. The boundary between Maine and New Hampshire goes through the harbor; Star Island is in New Hampshire, and the other islands are in Maine. Here are three photos of Gosport Harbor, taken from Star Island over the past week:

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Above: Sunrise over Smuttynose Island (at left) and Cedar Island, Friday morning at about 5 a.m.

 

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Above: Looking across the harbor towards Appledore Island, Thursday morning at about 5 a.m.

 

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Above: West end of Smuttynose Island, late afternoon on Friday — the brown house (left of center, near the horizon line) is perhaps the oldest still-standing house in Maine.

Oldwick, N.J., to Stow, Mass.

Yesterday evening in Oldwick, we saw a spectacular thundershower go through: sheets and waves of wind-blown rain, spectacular lightning right overhead, and through it all the fireflies rising out of the brilliant green grass.

Oldwick, N.J.

Above: Oldwick, N.J.

There were a few showers this morning before we left New Jersey. By the time we were in Connecticut, the rain was coming down steadily. It was going to be a wet Independence Day in southern New England.

We arrived in Stow, Mass., at about four o’clock, just in time for an indoor picnic lunch with Carol’s dad and stepmom and some of their friends. After dinner, we tried to go for a walk in downtown Maynard, Mass.

Maynard, Mass.

Above: Maynard, Mass.

At first it was pleasant walking. We stopped in at a combined video rental and used book store, called “Movie Signals and Art Signals,” that was open on Independence Day. They had more customers than I would have thought; but then, what else are you going to do on a rainy Fourth of July? — you’re certainly not going to go watch fireworks. We stayed for a while, then tried to keep walking, but the rain was coming down even harder, and my pants were soaked through and my rain coat started to leak — Carol was fine under her umbrella — so we gave up and went home.

Alexandria, Va., to Oldwick, N.J.

Most of the middle of the continent is empty enough that driving can be a pleasure: you can actually look at the scenery without having to worry about looking out for other cars. But today, we drove through the northeastern U.S. megalopolis: one big city after another, the roads always full of cars, I had to concentrate all my attention on driving. But when we pulled in to one rest area along the New Jersey Turnpike, my friend E and I both pulled out our cameras to take a photo of the rest area building painted bright red and vivid green, with a tall greenish water tower behind it, and fluffy white clouds floating in a bright blue sky above.

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Asheville, N.C., to Alexandria, Va.

We left Asheville and drove up over the Appalachian Mountains along Interstate 26, passing through Sam’s Gap at 3,760 feet above sea level. We stopped at a “Scenic Overlook” along the highway, and looked back at the Great Smoky Mountains, mysterious and blue behind us.

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The peaks around us were obscured by low drifting clouds. “They shouldn’t be called the Great Smoky Mountains,” Carol said. “They should call them the Misty Mountains.” I agreed.

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The rest of the drive to Alexandria wasn’t particularly notable: we just drove through Western Virginia, turned east, and watched as the population density crept up and up, until at last we were in Alexandria. We sat up late talking with a college friend of Carol’s who works for Pew Charitable Trust, doing research on American religion. He said that Pew Charitable Trust, which has long been known for its helpful mix of quantitative and qualitative research, will be de-emphasizing qualitative research and focusing almost exclusively on quantitative research. I told him why I thought that was a bad idea, and he wisely did not engage with me. Instead, he and Carol talked about old college friends while his wife and I listened and enjoyed their stories.