Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Music to My Ears

While filling up our car with gas today in Spokane, I noticed that a fairly battered white pick-up had parked near me. A man dressed in work clothes got out and went into the store, leaving the windows open and the radio on. What a surprise to hear the music of strings and woodwinds floating out that window...obviously a classical-style chamber work of some kind. When he came out I resisted the temptation to congratulate him on his musical taste; how condescending that would have sounded!

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Family Business

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Family Business

I keep trying to think of something to write about Glacier National Park that may not have been said already by someone, somewhere.  But I am sure the picture I posted on Facebook a couple of days ago and the many other pictures I took before and after it would be the best commentary I could offer.  I guess I will simply take note of what seems like a side issue, but is important to all of our visits to parks and monuments preserved for us and shared with us by the Federal government.

I think Ken Burns called our national parks our government's best idea, and while I can't say that for sure, I am sure they are a darned good idea by our government. From this consumer's experience they are well-run and appropriately shared with us and will hundreds of thousands of visitors from overseas. I can't imagine what they would be like if they'd been left to private enterprise and entrepreneurship. They are beautiful, mostly clearly presented, and offer nearly everyone of nearly all physical abilities a chance to experience them.  They employ highly-dedicated staffs, supplemented by equally-dedicated volunteers. I know not everyone is happy with everything they do, but achieving that would be impossible. Their mission is too big to expect perfection.

Our parks even take global warming/climate change seriously, because they see it happening and they see what it is doing. It would be good for a number of the members of congress to spend some time at the national parks for which they are responsible, although I fear what they might try to do to alter their message about our climate if they knew what was being said. Maybe this is one area of public life where we're better off if they stay locked inside the beltway.

We are now in Spokane WA with our daughter and son-in-law and two granddaughters. The older of them celebrated her 5th birthday in a city park with a bunch of her (and her parents') best friends, and for the last half-hour her 2-year-old sister has been engaged in a fairly predictable end-of-a-big-day meltdown.  But it sounds as if a bath and the girls' patient parents have settled them into sleep mood, and soon all will be quiet so we adults can relax with appropriate drinks after hosting a big party in the 95-degree heat of the day.

In a couple of days we turn around and head back east, seeing Yellowstone en route. Can anything top what we've seen already. Maybe not, but I don't think it will matter.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Miles and miles and miles and miles...

North out of Butte MT, driving the little Prius up the steep, steep grade of I-15, we catch a glimpse of the enormous copper mine that skirts Butte's northern edge.  The land flattens into the familiar high prairie ranch land we've see so much of already, then dips into the valley from which little Helena governs this huge state. North of Helena we come to the Gates of the Mountains, named by Lewis OR Clark (I can't remember which). I look for a memorial to the Mann Gulch fire that occurred in the area in1949, taking the lives of about a dozen young smoke jumpers, and subject of Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire, but it and they seem forgotten on this busy Montana highway in 2013.  We visit the Lewis AND Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, but didn't have time to see the falls themselves, great as they surely are.  (It is almost impossible to imagine how the Corps of Discovery made that journey and learned so much from it.) Then we pass through farmland that makes me think of Iowa-without the cornfields though. Then back to grassland as we head west into the foothills of the Rockies.

You cover a lot of ground fast when you can legally drive 75 mph on the Interstates, 70 on many two-lane roads, and when miles of one-lane construction driving only makes you slow to 65. I ask myself why we can't do that back east, and then realize there's almost no traffic out here compared to New Jersey, just to pick a random example.

Tonight we are ensconced in a lodge just south of Glacier. What vistas of these magnificent mountains we had as we approached them from the east! Now looking forward to two days of seeing this majestic park. Even my cold won't keep me from enjoying it...but don't call me Lewis OR Clark. I'm nowhere near that brave or persistent, even in safe adventures like the one we are now on.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Montana Battles

Our visit to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument took longer and was far more informative and moving than I'd anticipated. There was much to see and more to learn, and I sensed being immersed in both the glory and the shame of our national identity. I thought we'd spend an hour or so at most; we were at the monument nearly four hours.

If you'd asked me before today the difference between the Battle of Little Bighorn and Custer's Last Stand, I'd have had no idea. I always pretty much thought they were the same thing, but now I know the Last Stand was only a part of a larger and longer battle. But the Last Stand became the determinative factor in the outcome. Although the Native Americans won, their victory and our nation's political and economic pressures pushed the federal government to "solve the Indian problem" once and for all. Within a few years of 1876 all tribes were on reservations.  History is always far more complex than our memories make it seem to have been.

Long stretches of semi-arid grassland, then spectacular mountains surrounding green fields, with relatively small (by Eastern standards) cities built upon industrial and agricultural might widely spaced along the way. Montana feels vast in every way. Big Sky and big everything else. But people live and breathe the little things, as the headline in the Livingston MT paper reminded me: "Dog Recovering from Rattlesnake Bite."  The fight for life never ends.

Quick Thoughts from a Road Trip West: Is it Real? Is it True?

Deadwood SD is a wild and wicked Old West Town that thrives on keeping its reputation alive in the 21st century. We went into Mustang Sally's and come out with two iced teas...unsweetened, if you please. It was, after all, 11:00 am, but that didn't seem to matter to some of the other folks wandering Deadwood's Main Street this morning.

Drove up the long hill to Lead (pronounced "Leed" the AAA book says), which seems to be a much quieter sort of place, you could say rising morally above its sister city (they share a high school). But there George Hearst, father of famed publisher William Randolph Hearst, made his fortune through his initial investment in the Homestead Mining Co, setting his son up to become an forerunner of the likes of Rupert Murdock. What is truth? Truth is what sells papers.

Wonderful surprise of the day: on a whim we decided to exit Black Hills via Spearfish Canyon. It's one of the most beautiful scenic drives I've ever driven, and I've driven many, about half of them in the Black Hills in the last two days. I know now why so many people vacation there regularly. I didn't want to leave, and Spearfish Canyon told me that every mile of the way.

Looped north and west toward Devils Tower. Stopped on the way at the one-and-only store in Aladdin WY, pop. 15. Restrooms "out back," marked Cowboys and Cowgirls respectively. Sign tacked to wall near door says owners would like to sell. If you are interested in an investment, I'll send you a picture of the property. It's a sure thing, I'd say...but Maxine says if I go into to it, I will do so alone. Another missed opportunity.

Man to companion at Devils Tower: "Wow, how did they build this thing!" Companion: "No one built it; it's natural." Man: "You don't say." That's a true, overheard exchange, at the base of the 800 foot plus monolith jutting into the Wyoming sky.

Of course, the big question in my mind about Devils Tower is this: Where's the apostrophe? So I asked the ranger in the Visitors' Center and she said it was a clerical error no one ever fixed. Later I saw evidence that seems to support that understanding.

But here's the truth of the matter that came to my mind as we hiked around it: "tower" in the phrase is a verb, not a noun, and "Devils Tower" is short-hand for "The devils tower over us." Don't you think?

Seriously, it should not be called what we call it at all, apostrophe or no, but Native Americans' protests to that effect go unnoticed (natch). They prefer something like "Bear's Den," and tell a story to support that name. We, of course, go our own way, because, you see, devils tower over us, whether we know it or not.

Quick Thoughts from a Road Trip West: Icons on the Mind

As I hinted yesterday, we spent Sunday, July 14, touring South Dakota's Bandlands. It was a cool and damp day, which didn't fit the geography of that place well. But we were able to see most of what we wanted to see, and to take some short hikes into the eerie landscape created by eons of erosion's power.

Late in the day we headed due north to South Dakota's best-known town: Wall. We had to go there, having heard of the siren call of Wall Drug for most of our lives. Something eerie about that place, too...room after room of stuff for sale. How can there be so much stuff in the world, much less in one tiny SD town? I examined $450 cowboy boots and $3 refrigerator magnets and left the place with an ice cream cone. Didn't sit in the Traveler's Chapel (emptiest place there) or wait for the T-Rex to roar at me (which it does every 11 minutes, I believe).

Wall Drug is an iconic American success story, the kind people write books about. It's a family business going back to the 1931 when Ted Hustead came up with the idea of offering free ice water to hot and weary travelers. There's still free cold water (sans ice) in the "back yard," but I doubt anyone stops at Wall Drug for that nowadays.

We arrived at our B and B in Hill City, SD, Sunday evening, ready to begin two full days of touring the Black Hills. And icons suddenly struck me from every direction, around every turn. What is the American west if not "iconic?"

The icon that is Mt. Rushmore is awesome, and I use the word as I like it to be used: awe-inspiring. For one thing, how did they do that? Boggles the mind. Then, everything from the parking area to the entrance area to the evening program preceding the lighting of the faces is carefully coordinated to bring the visitor into the presence of the four great persons behind those stone visages. It's all like entering a holy space.

But the best-laid plans oft go astray: the night we went to see the faces light up was so foggy that when the great lights came on all we could see was...fog. As if heaven conspired to block from view four presidents who lived and acted in ways that seem larger than life. Yes, there really was a time when political leaders–Presidents and all–could act like that, and did. Bold vision, courageous decisions, game-changing policies, well-executed political strategies, faith, luck...of, by and for the PEOPLE. But I digress...

Our most moving view of Mt. Rushmore came late today as we were driving west on Iron Mountain Road, and stopped at the observation area at the top of whatever summit it crosses. There, in the distance, was Mt. Rushmore, visible within the context of the surrounding Black Hills, and we saw how it towers majestically over the landscape and how small those faces now seemed. Context allows the greatness inherent in certain people to flourish.

Another icon is the Crazy Horse Monument, some ten or fifteen miles west of Mt. Rushmore as the crow flies.  Its context is a very large complex of buildings devoted to Native American history, arts, and culture. The monument itself, also being carved upon a granite mountain, is barely begun even though the work has been in progress since 1949. Crazy Horses's face is complete, but his hair and his outstretched arm and the horse on which he rides are nothing but rough rock walls that have been exposed by innumerable explosive blasts. When finished–if it's ever finished–it will dwarf almost every other  human-made thing on earth, including Mt. Rushmore's four Presidential faces.   Are "they" trying to tell "us" something?

Clevelanders may be shocked to learn that Chief Wahoo did not seem to be among the many images of Native American leaders displayed in the Crazy Horse Monument's museum. I looked for him, but I was afraid to ask about him. Think his is an icon the first Americans could live without? Then why can't Cleveland's baseball fans?

(By the way, one thing I've wondered about the American Indian as icon is whether we've really come very far from the "noble savage" idea that the early European settlers came up with. How do you get to a real, unvarnished understanding of and appreciation for these people in all their remarkable richness and variety? Can we who are not they, ever?)

The night we went to the lazar light show projected on the unfinished Crazy Horse sculpture was crystal clear, and the show came off without a hitch.  Indians: one; US commanders-in-chief: zero.

Other icons I have seen these two beautiful days in South Dakota's Black Hills included Harley-Davidson motorcycles ridden and nurtured by men and women who dress that part, and the buffalo which I saw almost nose to nose in Custer State Park. Not to mention the sights and smells and sounds of the iconic pine forests that some say give this area its name.

Sadly, vast swaths of those pines are dried up and brown as the result of an infestation of insects. Our hostess expressed disdain for "tree-huggers" who prevented the Forest Service from spraying the trees before it was too late, which now it may be. I don't know the facts of that matter, but my heart is usually with the tree-huggers. Except sometimes what seems right can turn out to be just plain wrong. Icons are such slippery things.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Bad, Very Bad

If you spend a Sunday visiting the Badlands, have you celebrated a Witches' Sabbath?

Risky perhaps, but worth every minute of it. The way such things tend to be...