American Idyll 5: Zion’s Towers, 72 Murders, a Massacre & Great Basin’s Bristlecones

Beware great expectations, Jan often cautions. But given all I have read about Zion National Park keeping expectations trimmed wasn’t easy. Suffice to say Zion exceeds expectations however great they might be. Sheer three-thousand-foot sandstone cliffs of many colours, canyons so narrow and deep sunlight is scarce seen at the bottom. We climbed 1,500’ along a razor ridge to astonishing views of Zion Canyon. Brave Jan defied her fear of heights and revelled. Look at our Flickr photos and you’ll see why.

From Zion’s geographic glory we headed west, seeking out the site of an 1857 massacre of 120 emigrant men, women and children by Mormon militia acting on orders from church leaders. Thence, drawn by more small red print in the Wal-Mart mapbook, we landed at a Nevada state park tantalizingly named Cathedral Gorge. The unique and remarkable geography we found there was equal to the name. We stopped at the nearby town of Pioche, which experienced a bonanza of silver and lawlessness in the early 1870s. It is claimed 72 men died by gunshot and stabbings before Pioche’s Boot Hill cemetery accommodated its first interment from natural causes.

Twenty years ago I traveled in May to Mount Wheeler in Great Basin National Park to see some of Earth’s oldest living things, bristlecone pines growing above 11,000’. Alas, May is not a good time: I was foiled by armpit-deep snow. October proved superior. The snow and ice were navigable and we communed with the ancient pines, some of them three thousand years old.

Think of Nevada as a great washboard inclined more or less north-south. Long jagged mountain ranges alternate with high desert valleys. We drove Highway 50, billed the ‘Loneliest Road in America’, across the middle of the state. Only a few communities dot the landscape of mountains and vast expanses of sagebrush. Driving west into the afternoon sun, we crossed thirteen mountain ranges before losing count. Cross the summit of one range and you see three more against the horizon, the first dark smoky blue, the others progressively paler in the distance. When I first drove Highway 50 two decades ago Tom Waits seemed my appropriate musical companion. This time Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen and David Francey provided the counterpoint.

Having a long way to go before our Saturday rendezvous with cousin Terri and Ed in southern Oregon, we drove well past nightfall. With little light contamination along most of its length Highway 50 provides a fine dark night sky. Venus blazed low over yet another mountain range, Jupiter higher behind it, only slightly less resplendent.

--Alan

American Idyll 4: Ornithopods, Cinder-cones, D.H.Lawrence, and John Wayne too

Before seeing Oklahoma with my own eyes I imagined featureless rangeland proceeding as far as sight allows. Certainly we found some of that, especially in the western half of the Panhandle, which left me wondering afresh what the original Great Plains must have looked like before they were fenced, ploughed and converted to cattle mills. But Oklahoma delivered surprises too. The Black Mesa area at the far west end of the panhandle is very dramatic and evokes the wild west as well as anything you see in New Mexico or Arizona. While there we chanced upon our first-ever tarantula and gawked at the fossilized footsteps of an ornithopod dinosaur.

We crossed the Oklahoma-New Mexico state line and – without really intending to – found ourselves on a beautiful quiet byway, NM 456, in the far northeast corner of the state. NM 456 is lined with multi-hued mesas, one of which gave a cattle operation an apt name, the Weddingcake Ranch. We had the road pretty much to ourselves; Jan even collected a ‘lifer’ bird here, pinyon jay.

No doubt some of my friends will frown at me giving Wal-Mart a plug but, what the heck, I’ll do it anyway. The Wal-Mart Rand-McNally map book is a terrific buy at six bucks. I am especially grateful for the small red print you can find on every sheet, if you look for it. I had never heard of Capulin National Monument until the map disclosed its existence. We went there. We were astounded. Capulin is an extinct cinder-cone volcano prized for its perfect symmetry. We walked down into the heart of the crater then around the entire rim, which sits at about 8,200 feet above sea level. We learned lots about cinder-cone volcanoes and marvelled at the big views we had in every direction.

Taos, New Mexico, has been in my sights for decades. Once upon a time, long ago, I read a lot of D H Lawrence. He lived at Taos in the 1920s and liked it a lot. We arrived in Taos around midday on Saturday and quickly concluded that a city ordinance must require that every building be constructed in neo-adobe mode. Most of the businesses in the downtown area seem to be galleries and artisan studio-shops. Everyone we saw looked trim and well-heeled. We enjoyed a very good lunch at a trendy-looking restaurant and eventually asked the couple sitting next to us for directions to Lawrence’s Taos abode. They could. We went. His old cabin is in the mountains about 17 miles north of Taos. It looks much as it did 80 years ago; it was easy to imagine him writing under the big pine in front of the cabin porch. I am glad we went. The birding was good too: we added several upper-elevation birds to our trip list: Steller’s jay, scrub jay, Clark’s nutcracker, pink-sided junco.

We camped high in the Carson National Forest, at Hopewell Lake. Mountain chickadees sang in the conifers beside the camper. Otherwise, apart from a few elk hunters, we had the place to ourselves. Snow dotted the ground here and there. The hand of man showed only a little. But there was this: a small sign adorned with two American flags that read: 9-11-01, Never Forgive, Never Forget. Our overnight stay at Hopewell was perfectly quiet. Not even an owl broke the stillness.

Another US national monument crossed our path: Aztec Ruins in northwestern New Mexico. Here long-ago ancestors of local native Americans built a complex city and went about their lives for two centuries, then about 1200 AD they disappeared. We walked among the ruins and contemplated the ephemeral nature of life.

A great American filmmaker, John Ford, made a classic ‘duster’, Stagecoach, in the early 1940s. It starred John Wayne. Even today the movie is beautiful to look at. Ford made it in Monument Valley, straddling the Utah-Arizona state line. We went there late in the afternoon. The light was fabulous. Jan called the place ‘stupendous’. She is not given to exaggeration.

--Alan

American Idyll 3: Visions of Ivory

At Brinkley on Interstate 40 in east Arkansas a big billboard boasts that the little town is ‘home to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’. You have a much better chance of seeing Bill and Hilary Clinton riding naked on a tandem bicycle at Brinkley than you do of spotting an ivorybill there, but never mind, there’s a good story here anyway. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was thought extinct for the past seven decades but in 2004 reputable observers reported seeing one or two in the vicinity of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge south of Brinkley. This was so astonishing that numbers of experts who think they know better simply don’t believe it. I’m inclined to accept the claims and feel heartened by the notion that a big beautiful woodpecker – North America’s largest – could be hanging on by a toenail or two in the wilds of southeastern Arkansas despite the best collective efforts of 300 million Americans to wipe out their habitat. Jan and I of course did not get to see one; the closest we got to an encounter was seeing a lovely illustration on the cover of an Arkansas birding brochure but what fun it was to imagine that we might have been within a hundred miles of a healthy mated pair going about their carefree business in the same fashion their ancestors did throughout the eons.

Jan and I like American national wildlife refuges. Typically they are beautiful out-of-the-way oases often as devoid of people as they are chock-a-block with birds. Two refuges entertained us in the past few days: Holla Bend in Arkansas and Salt Plains in Oklahoma. Neither provided spectacles as grand as some we have seen in other NWRs but we always feel rewarded by the time we spend in these marvellous places.

NWRs are there for wildlife, not people; normally there are no camping facilities so we look for nearby public campgrounds boasting unique or attractive natural features. State parks have been very good to us on this trip: lately we’ve had fascinating geology at Petit Jean, mountain vistas at Mount Nebo (both in Arkansas), salt flats and selenite crystals at Salt Plains, expansive sand dunes at Beaver Dunes (both in Oklahoma).

At this time of year crowding is not a problem – we can usually find a corner off by ourselves. We camped at Great Salt Plains State Park adjacent to the NWR, went to sleep with a horned owl calling from a tree beside us, then awoke to find a huge flotilla -- hundreds of white pelicans and double-crested cormorants -- rafting down the Arkansas River Salt Fork right behind our camper. Try matching that at your typical KOA campground.

On these transcontinental migrations all we can ever do is a trace a long thin line, trying to ensure the current line is sufficiently different from the ones we’ve traced before. Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma were ‘lifers’ for us this time so we headed out into that new territory. Following Oklahoma 64 along the Oklahoma Panhandle, squeezed between Kansas to the north, Texas to the south, we know we’re now well and truly in the west: prairie-dog towns, loggerhead shrikes, singing western meadowlarks, rusting ranch windmills. New Mexico is next on our horizon.

--Alan

American Idyll 2: Days in Dixie

George Washington National Forest in Virginia provided sanctuary from Interstate 81. We had out-of-the-way Elizabeth Furnace campground almost to ourselves and went to bed with only a chorus of crickets to let us know we weren’t alone in the world. In the morning we ambled through a forest of soaring unfamiliar hardwoods – hickories, ashes, walnuts – and got reacquainted with some of the birds of Dixie: red-bellied woodpecker, Carolina wren, eastern towhee, tufted titmouse to name a few.

Having spent time in the White Mountains, then the Green, we moved on to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Shenandoah National Park. Jan impressed me no end singing every word of John Denver’s ‘Country Roads’. No wonder he so adored Shenandoah. After two vista-filled days there we decided we’d lingered long enough and needed to make up some ground before falling hopelessly behind schedule. Back to Interstate 81 we went. How gratifying it was to find that the Virginia’s segment of 81 is vastly calmer and more scenic than Pennsylvania’s. On the road our favourite music sounds even better. Who better to accompany us through Tennessee than the incomparable Jesse Winchester. Mississippi, You’re on My Mind, Yankee Lady, Biloxi and of course, The Brand New Tennessee Waltz never sounded better.

Jan demonstrated yet again why she is the woman for me. Cruising past another vast field of ripe cotton she commenced to recite Robert Service from memory: Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows...

Tennessee delivered two out-of-the-way state park campgrounds on the US long weekend, Panther Creek and Meeman-Shelby. On our late-in-afternoon walk in the former we found six woodpecker species. A rule of thumb we abide by: if woodpeckers like it, so will we. At Meeman-Shelby at the edge of the Mississippi we camped in a tall forest of oak, cypress and tupelo and, at night, listened to barred owls outshouting each other. In the morning we went down to the high cottonwoods at the edge of the Mississippi and got lost in a reverie of Huck Finn and his pal Jim rafting down the great river.

In Memphis we visited the national war cemetery which dwarfs even the biggest of the Great War cemeteries we saw in Flanders only a month ago. Nearly 14,000 Civil War soldiers are buried here, more than 8,800 of them unknown.

--Alan

American Idyll 1: Mountains of Every Hue

We bade farewell to Nova Scotia after turning the key at Big Bras d’Or and spending four perfectly relaxing days with Jon and Kathleen at Halifax. Before leaving Nova Scotia we detoured to Port Greville on the Parrsboro shore to pay respects to George Perry, an old pal I admired from the get-go who in 40 years has never given me reason to change my opinion of him.

We spent a night with Cousin Carol and Herb, her spouse of 50 years, at Nackawic, New Brunswick. I am known to claim that Carol was the first woman I ever slept with, during a visit with us at Dartmouth long ago. The truth is, she was a teenager, I was only eight and I have no recollection of trying to exploit the situation. Carol is still a babe after all these years – and ever so kind too. Two hours after leaving Nackawic, well into Maine, I realized I’d left my laptop at her place. She and Herb generously drove to the border at Houlton to return it to me. There was a time I thought my father somewhat harsh for calling me ‘Halfwit’. Nowadays I consider him to have been too kind, perhaps by half.

Maine gave me a new sense of itself, not necessarily a flattering one. After eight years of George Bush how could anyone be hot for a four-year date with John McCain? But here’s the rub: we saw 39 McCain campaign signs before our first Obama one hove into view, a life ring to a man drowning in heavy seas.

We rendezvoused with Bob Nagel in New Hampshire and spent an entirely happy day wandering among the White Mountains, eyeballing a galaxy of fall colours, tramping a creekside trail, enjoying one another’s company over beer and Aussie wine. There are wooden ships, Bob likes to say, and iron ones too, but there’s no ship like friendship.

Driving through New York we only waved at the Adirondacks and Catskills. Perhaps if they were called the Pink Mountains, or maybe the Chartreuses we might have lingered awhile longer to supplement our mountain crayon collection.

On our own again At Gifford Woods State Park at the south end of Vermont’s Green Mountains we climbed a thousand feet and gawked at the view from Deer Leap Overlook.

Interstate 81 through Pennsylvania was often hair-raising, evoking a demolition derby. South of Harrisburg, boxed in by 18-wheelers on all fours sides, I thought, this is an accident waiting to happen. Soon afterward traffic ground to a standstill and we quickly learned why: tailgating had claimed two big trucks, one of the trailers snapped in two, gutted of its 20-ton load of turmeric. Or was it 40? Who knew there was so much turmeric in all the world.

By now we were in Civil War territory – or War Between the States if you prefer – passing Gettysburg, Martinsburg, Antietam.

--Alan