Manifest Destiny

Safe in Their Beds...

2005-12-01T21:29:00.000-08:00

John is nestled in the down comforter, sleeping soundly in the basement cocoon of the house. I'm upstairs, sleepless, with my favorite blanket wrapped around my shoulders and the computer giving off a dull glow in the dark. And here we are: home.

We arrived a few days ago, just in time for a belated Thanksgiving with my family. We spent Thanksgiving proper with John's family in a rented house on the ocean in the Outer Banks. It was blustery, cold, and salty -- perfect for looking out the window and thinking fondly of the beach. We have spent the last few days hiding out, digging down, trying to staunch the vertigo from sudden inertia. The moment we arrived here, we were both hit with a tidal wave of exhaustion that I think we weren't expecting. After all, the final two weeks of the trip were practically motionless; quiet and relaxed. A pre-hibernation to foreshadow the little dent we make in the earth now.

We left the hustle-bustle of Nashville and headed to Asheville, where some friends of a friend of a friend graciously took us into their home just as the temperature in the mountains plummeted to "unbearable in a three-season tent." We met them at a Blackalicious show at the Orange Peel, the liveliest venue in the country as far as we can tell. Can the hippies ever dance. Alisha and Nicki, the aforementioned friends, led us back to their house and as quickly as that we had nearly moved in. We stayed four days, and were not easily convinced to leave. They are raising an amazing kid by the name of Elliot. He had the croup, so we got to play hookey with him. Mostly, this meant playing the Harry Potter board game, Slapjack, War, and Go Fish, and watching cartoons with the cats -- Lover and Gooey. We made chicken soup and drank tea all day. Wintery perfection. Our major excitement was finally snagging Chaco, who appeared in trap (empty of any treats, the poor curious creature) on day two. We walked him down to the creek with Elliot and set him free to become part of the food chain. Elliot was pretty impressed that he had come all the way from New Mexico. And come to think of it, so were we.

Asheville gave way to Duck. The hibernation deepened. John's family is tender, quiet, and introspective. The major excitements at the beach are the daily trip to the grocery store and making dinner, and neither shake you very deeply from your deserved recline. Occassionally Sunny Boy, the family motivator and a yellow lab, would demand a trip to the shore to chase birds and strut about with horseshoe crabs dangling from his lips. We ate salmon and clams and shrimp for Thanksgiving, and gave our thanks for each other and the safe harbor of family.

Driving into DC for the first time in five months brought about the frame shift that happens to all travellers -- the sudden sense that you were just here, perhaps even yesterday, and everything is as it was. And in the next instant, you are suddenly just as sure that a lifetime has passed, and you can't summon the feat of imagination that will label this place home. There's no way to sum up the trip without pretending it was simpler than it was for both of us. I think we both found a kind of happiness we hadn't previously had, and we're eager to hold on to it. Certainly, we can offer our thanks to everyone for following along, encouraging us, sharing your homes and beds, and perhaps also for allowing yourselves to be a little inspired.

We'll be in DC through January. After that ... we'll keep you posted.

Sunny and Stephen (John's brother), breaking a sweat

The Mayer Clan (from left: Dad Gerry, Mom Nan, Brother Stephen, and Man I Love)

"If I love Chaco, can I keep him?"

That good ol' mountain dew

2005-11-15T09:33:00.000-08:00

As you might imagine, it's difficult to find the internet in Arkansas. In fact, it's difficult to find a gas station that will take a credit card. Apologies, then, for being remiss in updating.

After leaving Albuquerque, we headed north to Santa Fe -- a lovely, if very touristy, town. It made it to the list of possible places to move after this is all over with, mostly because of excellent food and incredible mountains (a feature we weren't really expecting in New Mexico, but the state turns out to be full of surprises). We headed to Taos and the Sangre de Christos mountains, north of Santa Fe after two days in the nation's highest capitol city. In Taos, we found a beautiful antique map of North America from 1877, which we picked up as a souvenier of the trip. We did some hiking up in the mountains (where the altitude really whipped us). It had already snowed up there, and at night was getting down to about 10-15 degrees -- we had to sleep huddled under our two sleeping bags and the down comforter, and were still freezing most of the night. We had to be in our tent by dark (around 5 pm), otherwise it got too cold to function. But it was cozy and wintry, and we upped our nightly sleep allotment to about 14 hours.

From there, we headed west to Chaco Canyon -- an area where one of the major civilizations of the southwest was rooted. There we visted Pueblo Bonito, the largest building in the U.S. before the advent of structural steel -- 600 rooms, 4 or 5 floors high, elaborate masonry -- and built between 850 and 1150 A.D. It was *amazing* -- even more so because you can walk through all the rooms and sort of pretend like you're discovering it for the first time. A friendly ranger, obsessed with the astro-archeological events that the Chacoans constructed in the canyon (they think, anyway -- things like shafts of light that shine in patterns around the equinoxes), took us up to watch one of these events at sunrise. We were standing on 1000 year old walls, on the third floor of the ancient building ... it was pretty amazing.

Here we also met a new friend, whom we picked up in the desert. Strangely enough, his name is Chaco. He's been with us for over a week now, and eats insufferable amounts of our food, though he hasn't figured out the food box yet. The third morning with us, we woke to find that he had stockpiled our "fancy nut" mix in John's left shoe. After that we bought the mouse traps. We caught him yesterday for the first time, and he's got the cutest little mexican mustache that points straight out to the sides. But it was raining, and we let him go right next to the car, and we woke up this morning to find that he must have run straight back in -- the Doritos had been raided.

So, with Chaco in tow, we headed north and east into the mountains of Southern Colorado. There, we visited the Great Sand Dunes -- the highest dunes in North America. We climbed a 650 foot dune (which was probably the most difficult hike we've done). It was worth it for the 360 degree views of the dune field, the 14,000 foot mountains next to us, and the endless valley stretching south into New Mexico. We ran down the slipfaces of the dunes, which were incredibly steep and incredibly fun to descend -- the sand makes a sucking noise as your legs slip in up to your calves, and avalanches of sand run down the face from each footprint -- and each step carries you five or six feet down the slope.

Then began our rapid trip across the Texas panhandle (the worst smelling state so far -- cow shit and gas pumps, echgr) and Okalahoma (where we went to our first WalMart ever in Carrie Underwood's hometown). We angled for the Ozarks. In some of the more rural drives we've done (*seriously* Deliverance country), we passed huge encampments of hunters (it's elk and deer season) in the mountains there. We passed a local restaurant actually advertising Fried Catfish and Froglegs for lunch. And they have the crookedest roads you've ever seen -- there's not a straight road in the whole state. Our second night in the backwoods, we found the Ozark Folk Center, which happened to be hosting the final festival of the season -- bluegrass. It turned out to be an excellent show of five groups from all over the south, but one of the strangest experiences of the trip. The audience was uniformly ancient. And -- totally surprising for a bluegrass show -- unequivocally silent. There had been a lot of pre-show requests for gospel (every band mentioned this and played at least half their set as gospel), and the only enthusiam the crowd showed was for the men to reach up and pull off their hats for the gospel songs. Polite clapping and the removal of hats. It was either the most discriminating crowd I've ever been a part of, or the most repressed. I thought it was pretty good bluegrass, but maybe my standards are too loose...

Anyway, here we are in Music City. Nashville. Tennessee. The weather is shit -- that good old east coast November rain. Our trip ends in less than a week. We're in denial about that, but beginning to look forward to what's next -- turkey, mostly. And even thinking a little more seriously about where we'll be moving, and how to move, and when to move, and ... There's a lot of unanswereds. One thing we're pretty sure about is that we'll miss this way of life -- sleeping out, sleeping long, never seeing the same thing twice in a day. We've come up with some easy coping mechanisms -- making pancakes on the propane stove, camping in the back yard, sitting in the car on Sunday afternoons to listen to This American Life.

Quick warning for those on the east coast: we plan on having a party when we get back. Not sure where or when, exactly. We're looking forward to seeing everyone -- we're having a lot of pangs of missing folks. Oh, and we'll be back in DC the day after Thanksgiving (although that weekend will mostly be family time). Best, J and H.

Born again

2005-11-02T18:38:00.000-08:00

After leaving Sedona, we camped for the night in a ponderosa pine forest by the name of Tonto. Ponderosa forests smell spicy like any other pine groves, but if you sidle up close and breathe in deeply, the bark smells sweetly of vanilla.
The next day, we crossed into the state where I was born. New Mexico surprised us from the outset. We entered from the west into the vast expanses of Gila National Forest, as seen below.

We quickly reaped further rewards after spotting signs for the San Francisco Hot Springs. We pulled off onto a dirt road and found, instead of the hot springs we expected, a trailhead. A quick calculation indicated that the 1.5 mile hike to the springs was possible before the sun set (around 5pm now), and off we went. We followed a rudimentary map through cactus-filled hills, down into a river canyon. After some misadventure and directions from a local, we found three small shallow resevoirs created by rock dams. The springs were sitting just alongside the river, each progressively warmer. We were alone in the late afternoon, and we able to take baths in the river after a good soak. Here's John lounging in one of the pools, the river just beyond the rocks.

We camped at the trailhead that night and were treated to the most incredible show of stars yet. We even left the rain fly off to better appreciate the view, although the temperature dipped near freezing that night (the fly holds in a lot of heat and makes camping in the cold a lot more manageable). We met a crazy lady from Colorado, who was so lonely she couldn't bear not to speak for about two hours straight. But she fed us homemade banana bread and yummy Colorado apples, so we liked her just fine. Next day, we headed south and east, stopping at a state park called City of Rocks. Here, in the middle of the desert, an outcropping of rocks rises up smoothed into alien shapes that resemble some impossible ancient city. John scrambled up some of them.

Later that afternoon -- an uncelebrated Halloween -- we arrived in south central New Mexico at one of our most anticiapted destinations, the White Sands desert. The desert sits in the middle of the White Sands Missile Range, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and adjacent to an Air Force base and numerous other places where scary things happen. We were treated to a viewing of the Stealth fighter jet, and the next morning we received an 8 AM wake-up call from one of the missiles they were exploding on the range (from 30 miles away it sounded like it was happening under the tent). To say the least, it was a strange place, no less so because of what we were there to see -- the snow white dunes of the gypsum desert.

It looks exactly like snow, and like snow drifts, the dunes here can move remarkably fast -- up to 30 feet in a year. They move so fast that most life can't survive. We went for a ranger-guided walk at sunset and learned a lot about the unique ways that life forms have adapted -- including, incredibly, some cottonwood trees (which are normally found along rivers with abundant and constant water sources). They don't know for sure how the trees stay alive, but hypothesize that the trees are able to collect fresh rainwater in pools just above the alkaline watertable, which the roots can draw from in dry spells. The desert gets 8 inches of rain a year.

Another unique life form is this plant, which collects water from the sand (the sand acts as a sort of sponge for water) around it's roots, which then hardens and crystalizes the gypsum. It's able to create pedestals, which hold the sand in place even as the dunes move around them. Inside the pedestals, the temperature is a constant 77 degrees, through the 110+ degree summers and winters that cool to below freezing temperatures. The desert's animals--including mice, owls, and foxes--mostly live in these monoliths.

It's hard to resist taking a few glamour shots in a place like this.

It's also hard to resist having a little fun. We grabbed a tarp from the truck for a little sledding.

The next day we decided to drive to Albuquerque, where I was born, to meet my godparents before they left for a trip to Europe. I hadn't seen them since I was a toddler, when they and my parents were very close friends. John, my godfather, did his residency with my father, and Mary Ann and my mom were constant companions. They were there for both mine and my brother's births. We an excellent, if hurried, visit and got to learn a bit about how my young parents lived their lives.

We spent some time today driving along the old Rt. 66, which stretches through the southern part of the city as Central Avenue. It's lined with old motels possessing decadent vintage neon signs. We also sported through old town, the original settlement of Albuquerque, founded in 1706 (celebrating it's tricentennial next year!). It's full of tourist shops now, including some high-end galleries that have incredible Native artifacts -- pottery, rugs, baskets, etc. Since we'll be visiting some of the pueblos later this week, we refrained from spending any money. In the afternoon, we met up with Matt, and old friend of Johns' from DC, who took us on an incredible hike at Tent Rocks, about 1/2 hour north of town.

We had to almost run to the top in order to get out of the park by closing time at 5, so we did the 1.3 mile ascent in about 20 mintues. We hiked through the weird formations you see in the pictures, to this view at the top.

This is looking out over the Jemez mountains from the top. You'd almost never know that both Albuquerque and Santa Fe are both within about 30 miles of here.

Back to the Present

2005-10-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

So while Hanna whiled her days in San Diego, I was visiting with these two characters, my dad and nephew in Charlottesville. Valdemar is 4 and visiting my parents from Copenhagen where he lives. The whole family was in town, brother, sis-in-law, nephew, other brother, mom, dad, dog and cat. The whole clan in one place never happens so we celebrated Thanksgiving a little early and Valdemar helped my dad carve the turkey. Intrigued, but not quite sure we should be doing that to a bird.

Upon my return we said goodbye to Pete, Toni, and San Diego and headed for Las Vegas where absurdity reaches its zenith. This is the view from our hotel room at the Monte Carlo where we stayed two nights, gambled away a bunch of money reserved for entertainment, and saw a psychedelic topless light show ... thing. We learned the Vegas way that expecting to win money in Vegas is like expecting to sleep with the stripper at the strip club. Generally, not going to happen, although there are the lucky few.

It's terribly unfortunate that we saw this sign on our way out of town, since we always like our cold beer with dirty girls. After two days in the hazy reality of Money Town, we were ready to skip the bikini bull ride. Our misfortune.

Can you sum up two days in Vegas better than this face?

After leaving Vegas, we stopped for the night outside of Laughlin, NV, a strange little town on the flaccid Colorado (below both the Hoover and Davis dams, it sort of peters to a limp). Mohave County Campground: perhaps the most American campground we've found, and the starting point for possible future road trips if we can convince some grant panel to give us money to study the oddities of the semi-permanent itinerant campgroung movement. These places generally rent by the day, week and month--and there's tons of them in the southwest where people set out for when the weather in the rest of the country turns sour. Next to us on one side was the skullmobile, which you see pictured. A decorously tatooed native couple and their racoon-chasing cat lived here. On the other side of us was a woman who looked like a textbook small town stripper, with her two-year-old, Meredith. They pulled up after dark, in a dust storm of cursing, mostly about lost love and misspent money. They seemed to have just moved there from another similar facility nearby, and were living in two house-sized tents. Further on down were seven Mexican guys, who drank a lot of beer, slept in the same tent, played what sounded like circus music at top volume, and were gone at the crack of dawn -- we think migrant workers saving a buck on housing. We were the only folks there for just the night. Compounding the oddity on our first night back in "nature", sometime in the middle of the night a giant casino boat steamed past our tent with lights blaring and the bingo caller's voice ringing off the rocks.

Yesterday, in the middle of our continued journey east through NV and AZ, we decided to detour up to the Grand Canyon, only about an hour north. We were initially met with rain and cold (one of our water jugs burst from the freezing overnight temperatures -- a marked change from the desert climate of the last week), but we woke this morning to watch the sun rise in clear skies. (The sun rose at 6:45, a sure sign of changing seasons, as the last time we woke for the sunrise in Maine, we had to be up and at 'em by 4:30.) A gorgeous sight turned spectacular when we got to see fog pouring over the lip of the south rim, pooling into a cloud just inside the canyon. Probably most of you have been to the Grand Canyon (John had already seen it as a child), but we were both struck (I for the first time, and he anew) by the immensity of it. It almost leaves you feeling flat, as your brain tries and fails to process the depth, width, breadth, color, and infinitely changing aspects of the spectacle. Morning was the best time to see it, though, as the deep shadows reduce everything to large, simple shapes and you can skip the dizzying feeling of being inadequately equipped to appreciate something so incredible.

John takes in the sunrise.

So, we left the Grand Canyon this morning, and find ourselves now in Sedona, AZ. It's a bit of a loopy town, but it's one of the most beautifully appointed. It sits in the bottom of a deep canyon, with the alien red rock formations of the southwest for neighbors. We're moving east and south, heading for the White Sands Desert in New Mexico. We chose to skip Utah, for reasons of time, but may make it all the way north through New Mexico and into Colorado before continuing east. We're full tilt again after kind of a lazy, meandering month among family and friends. We hope to make the most of the rest of the trip, and avoid the automatic shut-off we had begun to feel in San Diego. Voila. We're finally caught up.

We're almost caught up...

2005-10-29T13:35:00.000-07:00

Here's some photos from the last two weeks -- San Francisco, Monterey, none from LA unfortunately, and San Diego. Next post: the sun sets behind us.

Here we are in San Francisco (the Golden Gate bridge is actually behind us, but since no one was around to take our picture we had to do that annoying couple thing where we hold the camera ourselves -- forgive us)

This is a photograph of a Hanspree "lifestyle television" at their U.S. flagship store, which just opened in San Francisco. Although addicited to TV, I secretly hate it. This company is fast becoming my nemesis, as it makes me want desperately to own one of everything it makes -- included stuffed animal TVs. The woman at the store was quick to point out that their TVs are NOT marketed to kids, but instead to adults who want an "emotional connection" with their electronics. That would explain the Cinderella TV on a foot-high pedestal that only infants can see standing up.

At the world famous Monterey Aquarium -- jellyfish

Hanna tries to call up one from the deep in the Shark Myths exhibit at the aquarium

Foggy sunset, Big Sur

Route 1 makes you sick

Elephant seals! (They look dead, but they're actually tanning.)

Sunset at the Coronado Hotel's beach, where we celebrated our 4 month anniversary of the trip with pricey scotch

Hanna chatting with a statue at the San Diego museum of something or other

Playing Bacci at sunset (Hanna, brother Pete, and Pete's gal Toni). We went camping--our first time with other people!--on the beach just up the coast from San Diego.

Pete goes surfing in the morning. We watch from the cliffs.

Backtrack part deux... Up the coast from the other side.

2005-10-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

It is true, I am in Charlottesville, VA now in the comfort of my home with my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, and my nephew Valdemar (my eldest brother Paul is coming in a few minutes from Copenhagen where he lives with my sister-in-law and Valdemar). I guess this trip is not just about our life as it happens in the company of each other, but what happens in our individual lives as well. This visit from the Danish part of my family is a once-in-a-never occurance, and something that I couldn't miss being a part of (heightened by the announcement of another niece or nephew on the way). So this is why I have parted ways with my love and companion for a few days and here I am oddly transported back to the East Coast by way of an 8 hour flight (rather than the four months it has taken us to drive there). Wierd.

Anyhow, I wanted to tell anybody still reading about an experience of LA that was at once completely unexpected and gratifying in a way that made me wonder: "Why dont more cities have something like this?"

We arrived in LA in the afternoon and spent much of the day between Malibu and Downtown, back to Malibu and back to downtown. For those who haven't been there Malibu is one of the nearest beach communities to downtown LA and it takes about an hour on the 12-lane freeway to get there when traffic is moving. It takes about two hours when it is not moving as we experienced coming back from the beach. The 12 lanes of pavement (large enough for a gigantic parade to walk down one side) was packed with brakelights taking the place of the sunset. We pulled off and decided to wait it out in a parking lot, rather than the defacto parking lot of the freeway. This happens daily and is the result of the fact that according to our host, Chuck: "Everybody in LA works someplace else".

When we got home from the beach, it was completely dark. It happened sometime while we looked at pumpkins in the parking lot and now we were ready for our next adventure. We were invited and enthusiastic to join "The Midnight Riders" with Chuck and friends. At ten thirty that night 8 of us set out on 8 bikes to seek out a monthly gathering of cyclists whose goal is to: 1) ride cycles 2) get together with as many other cyclists as possible 3) apolitically take over some streets of LA for a few hours 4) have a hell of a good time. We ride bikes and were happy to see others who do it too. We got a late start so had some catching up to do. Our first ten miles were spent with the 8 friends following Chuck towards the route. Eventually we found a couple of elderly stragglers who made our crew number 10. We knew we were getting close to the peleton when we saw a couple of flat tire repairs on the side of the road. And then it happened. Like a dream come true, we rode up a hill and the decible level increased exponentially and we were greeted by the backs of approximately 450 cyclists of all shapes, sizes, ages, experience, riding every sort of bike imaginable down the middle of the street amidst celebratory car horns and cheers of enthusiasm from the crowd. We rode ten more miles with the crew at a much slower pace as we finished out the ride at a "Dead Theater" in downtown. (Each ride has a theme, this one was "Dead Theater" so we rode 20 miles to 18 theaters around the area.)

This experience was a joy. It would have been such no matter where it occured, but in the midst of the car-culture-craziness that leads to 12 lane highways being clogged beyond capacity for hours each day, it felt like winning a battle with humor in the middle of the belly of the beast. LA is not known for its cyclists, perhaps it should be. Or, perhaps we should all take a page from their book organize every cyclist we know and do the same thing in whatever city we live. The key to this seemed to be laughter and good manners, as we all laughed at those who showed anger (rather than hitting their cars with our fists as I have been known to do) and thanked those who stopped with smile.

Midnight Riders. Midnight riders.

Backtrack

2005-10-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

For the first time in four months I recognize a vaguely remembered feeling: boredom. Insidious beast. John and I celebrated the four-month anniversary of the trip with a glass of expensive scotch at the Coronado Hotel here in San Diego two days ago. Today, he left for Charlottesville, and here I am, alone in my brother’s apartment, clocking in 10 hours on the computer looking at job listings, hotel listings (Vegas, baby), blog listings, and finally, The OC episode guide. It’s a cheap throwback to working in a cube eight endless hours of the day. Being stationary for so long (six days now, and five more to go until John flies back here to me) has created a drag effect. Which isn’t to say we haven’t had a wonderful time in SD, but … well, being in one place for a week is reminding me that we’ll soon be back in DC, for an unknown number of weeks. The trip is officially only 4/5 over, but in our mental landscape of America, it’s a lot closer to the finish. Perhaps you see more than you’re capable of taking in, so you stop taking things in. Perhaps I’m just a bit melancholy. Or perhaps, realistically, we’re just shifting back into the necessary headspace to end this thing. In any case, some combination of factors (nasty hangovers included) left me without the energy and curiosity that have been the hallmarks of daily existence on our journey. Time to give myself a kick in the pants. We begin with some overdue photos, if our dallying hasn’t lost us all our readers altogether.

Here’s s my mom picking grapes in Grandpa Dixon’s garden in Spokane – soon to be jelly

Here we are making apple cider on the antique cider press with Aunt Heidi and Uncle Stacey’s grapes and apples

Between Spokane and Portland, we drove west along the Columbia River (it more or less forms a border between Washington and Oregon), stopping in Columbia Hills State Park on the WA side to camp one windy night. This photo gives a good sense of the high desert climate of eastern and central WA (betcha didn’t know it looked like this in the Pacific NW). It’s sweepingly gorgeous, and a little daunting.

After Portland (where we stupidly didn’t take any pictures), we made our way to the coast and began our descent along the Pacific. Here are the Oregon dunes, some of which reach up to 400 feet high, grabbing at the ocean.

After hiking through subtropical rainforest and climbing over the expansive dunes, we came to this beach (see below). It was littered with disembodies jellyfish, like little gooey eyeballs.

The beach is so flat here that the water creeps up the sand for hundreds of feet beyond where thes wave break.

Lumberjack John in the redwoods (under Paul Bunyan’s left foot). Now we're in California.

This is a very big tree (over 20 ft. in diameter and formerly 368 ft. high – the top fell off a few years ago and now it’s something like 250 ft.)

These trees are about 300 ft. tall

Spotlight on Brinkman

Sexy Beast #2

Here I am trying to relive the successes of my youth. This is the beach just past where Route 1 first meets the ocean, and where we met Dusty Miles. John’s a pretty ace shot, eh?

Here are John and his aunt Pat, extended family member #1!

John and Pat on the cliffs over the ocean

Next up: San Francisco, LA, and San Diego.

Grr Technology

2005-10-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

So it appears that somewhere into the ether we have lost the post about hanging out with the extended Neuschwander family throughout Washshington and Oregon so as we are now in San Francisco, I will try to backtrack for a moment and recreate our list of family fun...

1. Visited "Aunt Debbie" just outside of Seattle and had a great visit to the city as well as to her kindergarten class where we got to show the kids on a big map-rug all of the places we have been admist calls of, "my grandma lives in Michigan!"

2. Went to Debbie's cottage on the river near Leavenworth, WA where we relaxed, ate good food and undertook the drive and hike to Hart's Pass. This was immensly emotional and important as it is where Hanna's Father was celebrated and remembered following his death when Hanna was five. Neither she nor Debbie had been to this service or spot, so Randy's good friend Bill Arthur regailed us with wonderful and humorous stories of the hijinx he shared with Randy while he led the way up the ridge line.

3. Continued east to Spokane where family really runs deep. We stayed for the long side of a week with Hanna's grandparents on her father's side (Dixon and Bonnie) who showed us a great time and kept us well fed with produce from Dixon's amazing garden where he grows 11 types of grapes, 7 tomato varieties, and 6 garlics. They shared stories and jokes and lots of laughs for a while.

4. Used the tools of the family to make apple cider, grape jelly, and salsa which we canned and are enjoying still.

5. Hanna's uncle Stacey gave some sweet lovin to Brinkman and he is running well for the help.

6. Were surprised by a visit from Hanna's mom, Jan, who flew out from DC to stay for a few days making it a real family experience.

7. Went north to Chewelah, a small town north of Spokane where Hanna lived for a couple of years. I went rock hunting and am taking care of a magnum eye cut still. (know what that is?)

8. Went to "Nannie's Farm" (a farm owned by Hanna's great grandmother, where Hanna's father's generation really grew up). The current residence where all out elk hunting, so we camped on their lawn.

9. Visited a wedding palace (really it was a palace where weddings happen) owned and run by Hanna's uncle Rob and aunt Becky. Great for all of us as we got our fill of fireside chats, catching up with long lost cousins, and god.

10. Fell in love with Portland.

11. Visited great aunt Lurlyn and uncle Jack in Salem, OR and compiled even more Neuschwander family history.

12. Left family and went to the Oregon coast (wild, undeveloped and beautiful) and then Northern California.

13. Had a great visit with John's aunt Pat in Bodega Bay (more on another post).

14. Are now leaving San Fran after a few days touring the bay area and staying with John's friend Eleiza and are headed to Big Sur and the Monterey Aquarium.

still no computer so no pictures but more soon.

California California California (sung to the tune of the OC theme song)

2005-10-06T19:24:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me well will not be surprised to learn that I left my laptop on a counter in a Kinko's in Salem, OR. Happily, FedEx and Kinko's are now one, so they are mailing the cursed thing to my brother in San Diego, where we plan to arrive a week or so from now. Until then, no photos. Which is a crying shame, because we have some good ones from the Oregon coast, including sundry sequois sempervirens (the coastal redwood behemoths), as well as northern California. Sans photographs, here is a picture in words of our most recent adventures:

We left Salem and headed for Albany where my great-grandmother's farm is (though it now belongs to one of my father's cousins). My father and his various siblings and cousins more or less grew up on the farm, spending every summer of their young and adolescent lives there. I had also been there many times when Nanny was still alive, and recall that it's most prominent feature was the spider-ravaged fruit cellar where you were locked if you misbehaved. My father bought the farm from Nanny before he died and intended, I think, to live out his days there. Being as such the place where I could possibly have spent my own young and adolescent summers (and winters and the rest of many years), it's an interesting excercise in the many worlds theory to return and see what my possible life would have looked like. My grandmother's sister June lives down the gravel way, and we camped on her lawn (the gang was out elk hunting, so we had the place to ourselves) and listned to the owls cry dusk and watched the sun set over the stalwart row of redwoods that break the wind off the fields. All in all, a possible childhood to relish.

We decamped from Albany on Sunday and aimed for the coast of Oregon, 60 miles to the west. You may have heard it from other, more reliable, sources but the Oregon coast is the most beautiful in America. Foresight left the vast majority of it in state hands, and the rest--due to strict zoning and building laws--is hardly developed (a far cry from the misery of the Atlantic coastline). It's misty, foggy, craggy, and fearsome. We stopped for a hike out to the Oregon Dunes, which reach heights of up to 400 feet and feature the complex and delicate growth of hardly coastal grasses. We ran from "sneaker waves" -- one in every few hundred that race past the tide line and steal inattentive creatures out to sea. Just inland of the dunes is a strip of subtropical rainforest, in which John spotted lots of slithery things. The hike was beautiful, emerging as you do from one of the rarest microclimates in the world--where the thick canopy of the forest chokes out the sun--into the bright, open world of sprawling sand beasts and gnarly ocean.

We started the working week off with our arrival in the redwoods. The story of the preservation of the redwoods forests is unique, and easily discovered by a trip to see the giants, which we encourage. Loads of very good writers have described being among the redwoods and feeling a religiousity descend on them, and indeed being among them was like being a cathedral. But we felt that the most apt approximation of their character and stature was captured by Peter Jackson in the Lord of the Rings movie (I'm not a Tolkein geek, so I don't remember the names of the giant tree guys who come to the rescue of the wizard, but you know who I mean). Some of the trees are more than a thousand years old (some almost two thousand), and are the tallest living things on earth (taller than the Statue of Liberty, though not living is a good marker of the height of these behemoths). The oldest came to exist around the time Christ was born, before Shakespere, before Columbus, before Napoleon, and long before us, and they have stood through earthquake, flood, fire, and gale. Walking through the forest and looking up, it feels like the sky has receded many miles higher than it was the last time you checked. They are beings that extinguish human egotism and embellish the goodly human insticts--like reverence and wonder--at the same time. We set up our camp just next to a stream in Elk Prarie State Park, back in a dark, damp corner of the forest that never sees enough sunlight to dry out.

The next day we thought we'd take a four-mile hike through the forest to the ocean and the "gold bluffs" that sheer up out of the water. At the beach we saw a herd of elk, a magnificent male among them, his antlers in relief against the ocean, feeding on the coastal grasses. Our hike then turned epic as we opted for a longer route home, and fourteen miles later we were back at camp, tired and sore and sorry indeed, but ready to enjoy a fire and a jug of good Oregon beer we picked up in Hood River at the Horsefeathers Brewhouse.

We slept through the dampness only to find that it had gotten to Brinkman in a bad way. When we piled in to leave, we found that his poor engine was flooding every time we turned the key. We spent an hour or more, with input from various passersby, tinkering and trying to figure out what was wrong. Just as we were about to give up and call AAA, John gave him an abusive crank and he sparked to life. We surmise that the condensation from the damp forest (and no sunlight to evaporate the moisture) just soaked the engine through. In any case, we were off.

We followed the coast down to California passing through more redwood territory until we came to Highway 1, the infamous deathtrap that people with sportscars like to call "scenic." In fact it's both scenic and dastardly, with tight endless switchbacks tailored more to German engineering than Japanese. Brinkman--a brutish rather than a fancy creature--set himself to the challenge heroically and didn't once carry us over a cliff. The first 25 miles of the road takes you over the Coastal Range to the ocean, and passes through what people have variously described to us as "straight hillbilly country," "Mexican mafia bandejo land, man," and "where they grow all the marijuana." Intensely wooded, with little more than KEEP OUT signs to indicate a human presence, it didn't feel like a place you'd want to contract engine troubles. Perhaps the most forebidding of all were the few broke-down shacks we did see--replete with decaying, moss-covered roofs and collapsing foundations--in which people were actually living. Eventually, though, the road shoots you straight out of Deliverance hell and onto the ocean cliffs, which it follows on a knife edge down to San Francisco, 150 miles to the south.

We camped at the first place we came to, the cheapest state beach in California (at $10 a night), according to a fellow we judged to be knowledgeable since he lived in his van. It was perhaps also the friendliest. We parked about 25 feet from the edge of a cliff, looking out over uncountable billions of gallons of ocean, and set up our tent as close as we could to the chasm (that turned out to be about four feet). Within minutes, an older couple from San Jose had befriended me (John was fetching firewood). They were two months on the road and sweet as pie. When John didn't return soon, I left them and went to fetch him and his load. Enroute back, we were flagged down by the man who lived in his van, who needed a jump start because his car battery was an egg (to hear him tell it, but it seems more likely to us that it kept dying because he was running a heater, radio, and DVD player off of it, and hadn't moved the car in a few days). He offered us a beer for the help ("Don't run off now"), and we sat with him and his dog and watched the stars light up, and then the moon set, and then Mars. "Dusty Miles" is how he introduced himself, and his dog was Roscoe Resin. He moved between the coast and the desert, selling jewelry he had taught himself to make, and seemed pleased with his current state of affairs. He told us he used to "dream about doing bad things to people who'd hurt me and shit, but now I dream about jewelry, man." And concluded, "This stuff heals your soul." Despite the fact (or perhaps because of it?) that he'd clearly spent a lifetime smoking pot, he was intesely friendly and we greatly enjoyed his company. By the time we got back to the camp, the old folks from San Jose had worked themselves into a worry over where we'd dissapeared to for so long ("Jumping Joseph and Mary, you kids nearly drove us to drink!"). We visited for a long time the next morning, and offered them a can of our salsa to smooth things out.

After playing on the beach for a half hour, only to be disturbed away by the corpse of a dead sea lion, we headed back to Rt. 1 for a few hours drive to Bodega Bay to visit John's Aunt Pat. And after a few pit stops to let our churning stomachs settle and take in the equally amazing scenery, we made it to Pat's bungalow on the beech where we now rest and relax. We have enjoyed lots of talk of animals and the universe's harmony that we are indeed feeling everyday and John is relishing the opportunity to really get to know more of his family . You might notice that this is the first that we have seen of John's family and that has nothing to do with not loving those that are out there but rather from the fact that he comes from a family quite the opposite as Hanna. John has one aunt and one uncle, a close nit immediate family and no cousins or grandparents. Inspired by Hanna's love and closeness with her family has inspired John to seek out more fully those of the clan that are still around. We are enjoying day two of our visit to Bodega Bay and will head on Saturday for the Bay Area and then onto points south. Pictures will follow when technology to do so arrives.

We promised and we deliver.

2005-09-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

This little rock caused us a big headache after it lodged into our tire and then road on top of our car for 1500 miles until Sears could give us a new one. All is well now.

Back on the road, we were happy, though a bit dirty. It took us a bit more than a week to find a shower again and Hanna's daily hairstyle kept us well entertained.

Thankfully, we made it to Prince Rupert where we got on this ferry that took us on a 15 hour cruise of the fjords around the Queen Charlotte Islands.

This was our first Pacific sunset as we came out of the cover of the islands just as the sun met the horizon.

15 hours on a ferry, gives you some time to look into each other's eyes...

After a few ferries, we made it to Washington and went right to the coast. Here we are walking through the woods for a few miles before we come to this view...

Seals kept us entertained, and awake, with their barking all around the islands out there.

And the sunset was amazing as we had a camp under this giant pine, lighted with a fire from the driftwood on the beach.

Where to this morning? The rainforest or the hot springs?

2005-09-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

I write now from Seattle, as it is the first place of internet and cell phones (as well as traffic, mass transit, and expansive population) that we have seen in a while. It has been a bit of culture shock to get used to. As we drove off our last ferry from Bainbridge Island into Downtown Seattle, Hanna had to reassure me that the tunnels were just like mountains and the traffic was just like a river. It helped stave off a nervous tick that was coming on in the midst of it all and alas, all is well. We are now staying with Hanna's Aunt Debbie and cousin NIcole (Uncle Brad and other cousin Nathan are out of town) in a lovely house complete with all of the amenities of a house like drinking water, showers, a soft warm bed, and laundry that we have otherwise learned to deal with while out of its immidiate reach. The comforts are welcome, as well as the lovely hospitality and company. Now, where have we been you might ask?

We spent a night at one of the prettiest beaches that we had seen on Vancouver Island when we found a Provincial Park (Rathtrevor Beach) where we watched the sunset while dining on pork chops and applesauce that tasted so so good. But (un)fortunately we were pushing ourselves to get off the island and back to the homeland in Washington and didn't get to enjoy the island more (guess we'll just have to come back). We then took a ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles and immediately headed west to Olympic National Park. As we pushed on we drove along the Strait of Jaun de Fuca that seperates the Olympic Penninsula from Canada and delivered some spectacular views on a motorcyclist's dream of a road with deep bends cresting over bluffs and the sun setting in front us as evening settled in.

We made it that night after a couple of hours of beautiful, if slow, driving to Lake Ozette, which would give us access to the beach the next day. We got in at dark and quickly made a dinner at a friendly, small campground and tried to get to bed a bit early to prepare for next day's adventure. Lake Ozette serves as the trailhead for two beaches that are only accessable by a three mile hike. Hanna remembered this area as a formidable and wonderful childhood vacation with her family and wanted to return to this park's coastline and share it with moi. And lucky I am.

Hiking the trail from the lake to the beach (Cape Alava) was a unique three miles on a well maintained boardwalk that the park service has built to protect as much vegetation as possible while maintaining access to the beaches. You hike through what vaguely feels like a rainforest with shoulder-high ferns and old-growth pines shooting above. This landscape lends itself to unique light shining through, barely illuminating the details of what lies beyond the trail, leaving much to the imagination. At the end of the trail the woods end at the beach's border as a hill steeply drops to the ocean. We stopped, as if we had seen a bear, and both broke into a smile as we gazed out at the amazing vista of ocean giving way to rocks poking through the water like forgotten bottles standing on an abandoned shelf. After we got over our initial amazement, we hiked down and scouted out a campsite just off the sand under a giant pinetree (great for climbing) with exposed roots big enough to serve as benches and tables.

Here we called home for the next three days as we adventured north and south along the shoreline, sat in the sand, found "smoothies" (rocks worn smooth by the sea), hopped along the rocks exposed in low tides, and explored the tidal pools. It is again hard to give words to this beauty but imagine if you can a beach that is part of a 40 mile stretch of protected shoreline that native people's have called home for centuries and have practiced whalehunting from longboats (and continue the practice), where fresh water streams run out of rainforested hills, where a colony of seals never leaves you lonely (even though there are a dozen campsites in the area) as they bark throughout the day from a nearby island, where deer wandered through our campsite while we made meals without a worry or care, where petroglyphs are the only graffiti one will see and the sun sets deeply out in the pacific and leaves its light for an hour after it is gone.

After our two nights' of reservation ran out, we had to peel ourselves away and got excited about moving back towards civilization. We decided to make the trip to Seattle last two days, thus the title of this post. As our backs turned on the beach, we began to figure out our direction of the day and we had to stave off stress as we had to decide: should we go into the rainforest proper of the Olympic National Park? or should we head on the northside of the park to Sol Duc Hot Springs? Oh decisions can be so stressful, don't you agree? We decided to give into the idea of showers and relaxation and headed for the sulpher warm waters of Sol Duc. Great decision. We soaked for nearly two hours in a series of pools where the waters were kept at 101-104 degrees and a lap pool that served as the cooldown pool at 78 degrees. While we felt the soreness of the hiking leave our muscles and sink into the waters, we had a lovely conversation with three other parties of people doing similar trips with us. The sharing and swapping of tales from our seperate but collective adventures was affirming and probably helped to break us into civilization again.

The next day when we could finally tear ourselves out of our tent after 12 or 13 hours of rest, we continued on to Seattle and here we are. Updates in Brief: we are happy and healthy. The truck is doing much better as we have given Brinkman an oil change and some much needed love. Our tire with a rock lodged in it has been replaced by Sears. We got to hang out in the city yesterday and meet up with my brother's father in-law who took us out to lunch at the Marina before we went to Pike's Place Market to watch the fish be thrown. Hanna's family is great and we leave Seattle today to go out to a cabin they own near Leavenworth Washington and then we are more or less on our way to Spokane for more of the Hanna's family tour. Pictures will come soon. We promise we are working on it.

Waterborne

2005-09-09T11:01:00.000-07:00

If we kept you at all on the edge of your seat there, we apologize. We made it with no problem, both onto and off of the ferry yesterday, albeit with bated breath every time the key slid into the ignition. We think it might be a new fuel filter that we need (fingers crossed that it's not a pump we need instead), along with an overdue oil change.

The ferry was incredible. An entirely different way of travelling that rocked us out of our driving lull. We had gotten so used to perceiving the landscape around us in a certain way--contingent on roads and steering wheels and especially on land--that it was almost difficult to get used to being on the water, walking about, playing dominoes, drinking tea, all at the same time.

The highlights included seeing the sun set over the Pacific. We exited the Queen Charlotte Sound at almost exactly the time the sun descended and got to see it set over the Pacific horizon. Pretty amazing. We also got a particularly special treat when an orca breached just off the starboard side of the back of the boat (aft?), probably about 100 feet from us (this was somtime in the afternoon, when we were still well inside the Sound). We heard him before we saw him, and turned just in time to see his flirty little turn in the air and fatty splash back into the channel. He gave a wave of his dorsal fin and another of his tail and then submerged hautily and was gone. Other fun parts of the trip? We spent a fair amount of time standing around in mock amazement as all the rich old folk engaged in polite machismo about the lengths of their sailboats. We met a older man, who would only hint that he was older than 87 but didn't tell us his actual age,who has been retired 25 years and spends his time travelling around the world by himself, meeting people. We watched a nerdy German dude with a mustache and really big headphones try to pick up a young Swedish nymphette (so awkward, so touching!). More, of course, but we have to run...

More from Port Angeles or Seattle (and pictures, as soon as I can get the iBook running).

Out of Alaska

2005-09-07T18:33:00.000-07:00

Here we are, just barely, in coastal British Columbia. With our fingers crossed, we anticipate being on a ferry by 6 AM tomorrow morning, which will deliver us further south, to Vancouver Island, where we will ferry hop again into Washington State -- our final crossing of the U.S.-Canada border.

We had a little trouble getting down here. We set out Friday from Anchorage, and went to the Wrangel St.Elias National Park -- the largest and least managed in the U.S. You can hunt there, fish, ride your RV, and camp anywhere you want -- all in the shadow of massive mountains (on the order of 16,000 ft--nearly the height of Mt. McKinley). Our second night out, we opted for a river bed just off the road. That proved to be unfortunate. When we woke up, the rear passenger tire was flat. It turns out a rock had become lodged in the tire (photos forthcoming). We changed it out for our spare (actually the one rear tire that didn't explode on the Jersey Turnpike back in June), and headed to Tok. The tire's under warranty with Sears, but the nearest Sears was 200 miles away in Fairbanks--the opposite direction from where we were headed. We decided to pick up an extra spare for $50 and take our chances on the old tire for the 1,000+ mile journey to Price Rupert. The tire held up remarkably well, and hopefully we'll be able to get the busted one replaced at a Sears in Seattle.

But yesterday troubles of a different kind emerged. The truck stalled twice as we slowed to a stop--once while making a U-turn in the middle of the Cassiar Highway (very scary, as truckers blow through pretty fast), and again on a forest service road we had hoped to camp on, about a mile up. Luckily, we got him started both times and camped near the road. This morning, though, nothing doing. We flagged down a truck who rode on into Kitwanga, the nearest town, and notified the tow guy. He loaded us up and dropped us off at "Eric's" -- the local mechanic. After an hour and a half, the most we had come up with was that the throttle was badly clogged with carbon deposits, which was stopping the air intake valve (?) from pulling air into the engine. This meant that there was no air to be sucked out, which drops the air pressure and pulls fuel into the engine. End result: no fuel in the engine and your car won't start. Using a screwdriver, Eric scraped off most of what he could. He walked and talked John through it all once he figured out what the problem was, which is hardly normal for a mechanic, and was quick to admit that he had been stumped at first. So, $200 and a spare tire later, we're in Price Rupert. Problems never cease, though, and we were having a lot of trouble with the engine on our way here -- jumping, starting to stall, and being generally unruly. But he's starting up and otherwise driving fine.

We're hoping he starts up in the morning, as we have to be at the ferry at dawn before any service stations are open. We're really looking forward to a different mode of transport, and a ferry at that. Hopefully a bit of fog will burn off and we'll have a good view of the Queen Charlotte Islands on our way down -- it's supposed to be some of the most beautiful seacoast in North America.

Again, we've been listening about Katrina on our satellite radio. Amazing the difference between the NPR and FOX stations in coverage. The question ringing in our ears: How can you rebuild the city as it was, or "restore people to their former lives" with any sense of decency, and place 30% of the city's population back into poverty?

An intensely felt fear of fish guts

2005-09-02T13:43:00.000-07:00

After leaving Anchorage, we headed south toward the Kenai Peninsula and camped at Skilak Lake. We were the only people in the campground, and our site was right on the large lake that was lapping the shore almost violently in wind. That night, the fish were jumping. They were so big that their contortions sounded like bears splashing around in the water, and more than once I made John sit up so we could yell at the beasts to move along. I felt a bit foolish in the morning when we realized it was just monsterous fish (which, to be fair, are a little scary in their own right). I've been having more night fears lately, since we started reading Into the Wild by John Krakhauer about starving to death in Alaska (in Denali, actually).

The next day we went down to Homer, a quaint drinking town with a fishing problem (or so advertises the bumber sticker at the bar we parked at). It's the most ... cosmopolitan (I think that's the word I want) place we've been so far -- bookstores, art galleries (mostly full of chunks of wood with native-inspired titles and dreamy paintings of Wind, and Sky, and Fire--know what I mean?). We camped on the Homer Spit -- a four mile stretch of land that sticks out into Ketchemak Bay, full of charter fishing outfits, campgrounds situated to overlook outrageous sunsets, some toursist spots, and local industry--and a dude who lived out of a giant, aged boat that looked like Captain Hook's ship, with strange unmatched elements glommed on--tires on the deck, shabby curtains, pieces of other boats. We drank at the Salty Dawg saloon, where the walls are festooned with thousands of dollar bills (inscribed by visitors with sayings like "In Homer the odds are good, but the goods are odd"). There we met Matt, a guy about our age from Kodiak Island (native), who works on the "slope" (the oil fields). He was teaching himself to fly fish on his two weeks off, and offered to give us a salmon filet from a salmon he'd caught on the Anchor River. He drew a map on a napkin to his house and said he would leave it in a cooler for us the next morning when he went out fishing. Then he went off to deal with a "complicated" situation involving two blondes.

The fish was huge -- a two pount filet at least. For dinner, we breaded it and fried it (no way to bake it). We ate an early supper after driving back toward Skilak Lake and the Kenai River, a turquoise ribbon that bursting with the deep pinks and reds of some of the biggest salmon I've ever seen. We could see scores of them resting in calm spots on the river, feeding in the eddies. When they crested, they were like prehistoric monsters. Not being much of a fisherman, I found the sight actually unsettling more than thrilling. After supper, we loaded on our packs and hiked three miles in the evening out to a spot on the Kenai to camp for the night.

The trail had some great views of the river early on but turned into bushwhacking as it passed through an old forest fire site. Once we approached the river again, we came upon a pretty ripe stink. John stopped short in front of me and uttered, "Holy shit." I immediately thought it was a bear or a moose, and seeing the shadow of fear, he quickly moved to reassure me that it was only mutilated, rotting fish that had been dragged up to the trail by a bear. I felt much better, of course. Now in a total panic and unable to look at the fish, John guided me down the trail with my eyes closed, where we promptly came upon some more of the offending creatures. I was already a bit afraid of them when they were in the water, alive and well. When they were dead and rotting, I was unnerved in the utmost.

We found a spot to camp nonetheless, which smelled clean and woodsy. John had to read to me for about two hours to get me calm enough to stop seeing the fish dance around in my head (it helped also to picture pygmy goats jumping over a fence). By morning, I was calm and realized how gorgeous the river was, and how incredible the fish. We hiked out, had a cup of coffee, and headed back to Anchorage.

Watching the news last night was the first we heard about Hurricane Katrina. We met a firefighter up here who is being sent down to help with disaster relief -- I was amazed that they're pulling people all the way from Alaska, but I guess it's necessary. Also, McGill has announced that it will take Tulane students in for as long as they need--good for Canada. We shudder to think about gas prices, but it's a small thing to swallow until the city's back on its feet.

Alaska, Part !!!! (Denali)

2005-08-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

The Park:
Like the experienced travelers to state and national parks that we are by now, we came to Denali National Park ready to spend a day seeing what this place had to offer, but not willing to ford our way across the crowds and crane our necks to see the wildlife from the road. We did all of that in Yellowstone and elsewhere. Now we found ourselves wanting Alaska to be what the license plates promise: “The Last Frontier.” As we drove toward the park we assumed that the overdevelopment that seems to happen in and around National Parks would not be the place to find frontierland. It would be an understatement to say that our assumptions were misplaced with this park.

Denali is the home to a piece of the Alaska Range, a set of mountains that doesn’t get its due if you ask me, as snow peaked mountains surround hundreds of miles of valleys with rivers and gorges and streams snaking and cutting their way from glaciers to the Arctic Ocean (we crossed the northern continental divide on our way up here and at one point sat at the triple divide between where water flows to three oceans from the same water source). The spruce forests give way to tundra at the tree line of about 3,000 feet (significantly lower than the 7,000-8,000-foot tree line we found in much of the Canadian Rockies), which gives one the sense of stepping on alien land—the summer-melted tundra squishes underfoot like jello. One quickly realizes in coming to Denali that this is the park of the wild and untamed, not the Mecca of RVs that we have seen in other parts of the Parks system.

There is one 80-mile road into and out of the park from the highway and cars are not allowed past milepost 23 where the road turns to dirt. If you want to go beyond, you ride one of the park’s busses in and out. Most visitors stay on the bus for up to eight hours and feel their day worth it for seeing such magnanimous mountains, and especially so if they have glimpsed a bear from the window. We decided quickly upon coming to the visitor’s center that we were not interested in this route but began to think that this might be the place in which we could have a go at backpacking; something that both Hanna and I have done but never together.

Backpacking in Denali turns out to be unlike anywhere else either of us have experienced. Most specifically because there are no trails on which to hike, no recommended routes to take, and one rule of the backcountry is that you must not stay where others have camped before. The idea is conservation and necessitates that the hiker not only forge their own route but be continually on the lookout for modifications, easier ways around, as well as on the lookout for bears that far outnumber people in the park. We chose the section of the park we would like to occupy on the basis of availability (they only allow 4-12 people a day in any given area) as well as recommendation (glaciers cover the mountains at the end of the valley and the Toklat river flows the length of the valley that constitutes Unit 9). We signed up for 3 days in the area starting the next morning and set to packing up everything we might need to undertake such an experience and did our best to fall asleep early (even though the sky doesn’t get totally dark until well after midnight).

Day 1:
Sunday. We woke up early, called our parents to let them know of our plan, and boarded a camper bus that took us through the fog and spitting rain to mile 53 where it stopped and let us off on the border of the area we signed up for. We were given the recommendation on how to hike down the riverbed carefully (a popular spot for bears), and were wished luck as we stepped into the 40-degree rain that awaited us. Well waterproofed and excited, we felt ready to tackle the challenge and began pushing our way through the willows that make up “I Scream Gulch” (an icy dogsled route in the winter). Upon emerging from the gulch we saw the braided river in front of us and decided that we should stop for lunch before crossing the river that would allow us through the valley toward the glaciers at the other side. After a brief stop for lunch we were ready for our first attempt at fording a river (no trails means no bridges).

After scoping out our best visible route we took our boots off and put on our tennis shoes and stepped gingerly into the glacier fed water. At about 10 miles from the melting glacier, needless to say the water was cold. We crossed one braid at a time hoping it would mean that the water would stay shallow all the way across. As we pushed toward the middle of the riverbed, from gravel bar to gravel bar the water in each braid was getting faster, deeper ,and colder. We made one last push to get across. I stood behind Hanna to brace her against the current but when the water lapped up to her knees, she balked and we jumped back to shore. I felt the end of my rope coming quickly. Needing to get to the other side quickly we jumped a few frantic times to warm our toes and plunged back in. We got to the other side, with glacial water locking our muscles, and pulled our shoes off as quickly as possible. I couldn’t move or feel the front half of my foot and seeing how blue it was, Hanna quickly handed me a plastic bag to wrap my foot in while she got her boots back on. Hanna—worried for the future of my toes—did all that she could to bring pain and movement back into them (this included the extreme of putting them into her mouth and blowing pain back into them). Finally able to move again we pushed through the rain and within an hour or so were too exhausted to do anything more than find a place to set up a tent. We hiked part way up a hill to a bluff and found what appeared to be our best shot at a soft spot on the tundra (it turned out to be quite lumpy, but livable).

During the process of setting up our tent and making dinner 100 yards away from it (to protect us from interested bears), I looked across the riverbed to the opposite shore and saw movement. We watched for a while and determined that what we were seeing was a gigantic male grizzly plodding along the riverbed and eating berries along the way. We were thankfully a good 300 yards away and were happy to watch him as he wandered the other direction. Exhausted, we dove into our bed and did our best to warm ourselves and fall asleep with the rain steadily falling all around us.

Two views of the valley in which we hiked. These were taken on our last day, hence the sun, but this is essentially what we were looking at when we got off the bus...

Day 2:
We awoke to a blue-skied day. After having talked of heading out of the park after our first day of some of the hardest hiking we had done, we were happy to take advantage of the weather and go at it for another day. We left our packs and tent and went out for a hike toward the glaciers.

Loungin in the gulch...

One of three glaciers whose melt gave us water and whose existence brought us as close as we could manage.

As we went deeper into the valley the winds picked up to the point where we were ducking into gulches for breaks, but we were enthused to be out in this unique, unaltered nature. Five or six miles into the hike, after getting to a spot with a great view of the converging mountain s, we decided to head back to camp for fear of the weather that appeared to be blowing our way. Thankfully we turned around when we did because by the time we got back to our tent the winds had become strong enough to blow our tent nearly flat to the ground. Needless to say, we needed to move our tent if the winds were going to keep up as they appeared to be and to the river flats we went.

We carried all of our gear a few hundred yards down the hill and found some brush to guard us against the wrath of wind. Luckily we caught a break in the weather and quickly managed to set up our tent and got ourselves some dinner. Happy with our day we went on another quick hike to scout possibilities for our next day, where we were expected to cross a mountain pass into the next unit. After this two-mile jaunt up the side of a mountain we were ready for bed and climbed into our now shaking tent as it did its best to stand up in the wind. We nervously watched our tent quake and read to each other from the book we brought with us, trying desperately to fall asleep. The winds were getting worse as we began making guesses as to its strength “Do you think it’s 30 mph? I don’t know, maybe even 40?” “No, couldn’t be 40 I don’t think.” Our fly stakes began to pull themselves out of the ground one at a time and every 15 minutes for an hour or so, so we were continually crawling out of the tent to tie them down to what proved to be the heartiest bushes we could imagine. They helped us stay attached to the ground despite the creeping feeling that we were going to be blown through the valley as if riding a flying carpet. To put it in our friend Ian’s words (he had a similar experience with the wind) it felt all night like “We owed the wind money and it was coming to collect.”

Tying the tent down. Over and over again. These bushes you see are some of the strongest bushes that I can imagine and we thank them for holding onto our tent.

Day 3
We made it to morning tired after one or two hours of sleep. We were now determined to make it out to the road and sacrifice our last day for the sake of a good night’s worth of sleep, which had eluded us the previous two nights. We even forwent breakfast as the winds were not letting up with the coming of day. They even seemed to be getting stronger. We walked about an hour into the wind, trying to find a place to cross the river. Every two steps forward we would be blown to the side and stumble to regain our balance. Twice Hanna was blown off her feet when the wind caught her pack just right and pushed her to the ground but we were determined to make it back to the road so on we pressed. We estimate it took us about an hour to travel 100 yards this way. When we finally found a place to cross the river perpendicular to the wind we needed to do it fast again and both of us were a little afraid given our first experience two days earlier. Hanna, exhausted and frustrated by the difficulty of simply standing upright in the gusts, fell into my lap crying and (literally) screaming at the wind to give us a break while we crossed the river so we wouldn’t end up sitting in it. After regaining our composure and strength, we pushed our way to the other side and were surprised by the ease with which we accomplished it. In order to avoid more water, we hiked up a bank and ended up in a thicket of willows that lasted for a couple of miles. For those of you who haven’t experienced a willow thicket, it is like the ivy of the tree world. It grows strong and tangled and walking through it means looking for the least tangled part and pushing your way through until you are out of breath twenty yards later. And then doing it again. After a couple of hours of this (all the while yelling, “Hey bear. Hey bear!” at the tops of our lungs to avoid any surprises) we finally made it to the road, about three or four miles from where we started, and exhaustedly fell onto our packs. We spotted a group of caribou wander through the gulch that had just given our gateway to the road again.

Hanna barely standing in the wind

Tired. Collapse.

This may sound horrible. In certain real ways, it was horrible. But throughout each hardship, we were surrounded by some of the most beautiful and wild terrain we have seen and continually thanked each other for being out there. It is another understatement to say that it is an experience that we will not soon forget but on a trip that has given us so many incredible experiences lapped on top of one another and concentrated into such a short amount of time, that is definitely saying a lot. Sometimes we look back at our pictures and remember something else that we did but this is an experience that pictures will never do complete justice to and will stick in both of our memories as we press further on.

Curiosity. On our last day out, after the wind and rain had taken all of the smoke haze away, we looked up at the sun and saw this...

It appears to be a nearly complete halo, the outer-most pert of which was a rainbow. Does anybody have any idea what it was and why we could see it so clearly?: The park rangers couldn't figure it out, can you help us out?

Alaska, Part !!!

2005-08-29T15:11:00.001-07:00

From Chicken we made our way south and west to the Denali Highway, another curious name for a road made of dirt but it was an extremely pleasant way to traverse the east/west expanse of a state with a limited highway system. We followed the road as it snaked through berry patches, where we spent three hours one day collecting as many wild blueberries as possible, which served to make yummy pancakes and a great lemon-blueberry bread once down to Anchorage. Parallel to this road is a good chunk of the TransAlaskan Pipeline that brings oil from the Arctic North down to Valdez on the southern tip of the state. This was an eerie mix of futuristic, apocalyptic piping making its own home in the nature that it uses to bring oil out and down. At one point we even inadvertantly were driving on one of the buried parts of the pipeline, only to figure out why that gravel road was so well taken care of later. Oops.

It also served as our home for two nights as we pulled off and found free camping in the BLM land, once on Fielding Lake where a nice fellow abandoned his fire for us before we listened to the stream all night long. The second night we found a hidden road that led down a steep embankment to Fifty Mile Lake, so named for its placement at Mile Post 50 of the highway, where we were hidden from the road, took baths in the lake and shared our space only with a pair of swans who lazily moved about for hours.

This is Fifty Mile Lake at sunset where the reflections somehow doubled giving three orbs of sun next to the mountains in the background, that's our tent down in the lower left.

Wonderful Lemon-Blueberry bread cooked with wild, hand-picked Alaskan berries and baked at my friend Kate's house in Anchorage. Thanks Kate for the visit and the cake and the fun.

Alaksa, Part !!

2005-08-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

Update: The battery on my computer has expired, so we golden as long as we can plug in. A new one is being shipped to Spokane for me, but until then, no pre-writing on the road. Posts may thus become a bit shorter in the short term. Apologies, and god love waranties. And now...

Part !!

Should such a thing exist, an epic limerick would be Chicken’s anthem. Beautiful, downtown Chicken, Alaska, consists of a bar, a liquor store (just a window out the bar), a gift shop, the Chicken Café, the chicken coop, and the Chicken Poop (a wheelchair accessible triumvirate of outhouses). But much like the Cassiar Highway was not entirely a highway, “downtown” Chicken doesn’t much resemble any sort of downtown—in part because there’s no “town” for it to be down of. The only other thing in Chicken is an RV park, a gas station, and an airstrip where the mail is flown in and out twice a week. About 20 or 30 people live there in the summer, running these various businesses. The population drops to about zero (give or take) in the winter, when the highways into town are closed and you’re sealed in for eight months.

Downtown is owned and run by Sue, at some point from Pennsylvania. She’s a loud, obnoxious, talkative, braggart of a woman, who is in the process of getting a messy divorce from Gary the Pilot, but is dating Steve the Rich Guy. She shot a huge “boo” (caribou) from 1,000 feet, right between the eyes. Her son was badly burned at the age of 12, or maybe it was 14, and airlifted to Seattle. Her bartender is named Randy, and was in Fairbanks when we arrived, so she was parked behind the counter covered in graffiti etchings—this is how we know so much about Sue, although she’d probably tell you all of it within any hourlong conversation. Especially the part about the caribou. She wakes up at 5 AM and makes trays of cookies, pies, and muffins to feed the tour busses full of people that stop in during the summer. That’s why the Chicken Poop is wheelchair accessible—to appease the tour companies who bring in a huge chunk of revenue to Sue’s business, which only runs four months of the year.

Also living in Chicken were Gary and Matt. Matt is our age, and decided to hop on a plane to Alaska in May, never having been there before. He ended up working for Sue—the day we were there, he was line cook, bartender, kitchen hand, and dishwasher and worked from 7 AM to at least 11 PM when we went to bed. Gary was a Marine for 40 years, and is now something of a hippy. He lives in a school bus that he rigged up with a sauna, and has long grey hair and a thick beard. He was shot in the head in Vietnam and is trying to convince the government that he’s crazy (which, objectively, he kind of is). Apparently they keep telling him that loss of memory, insomnia (he sleeps two hours a night), and a change in his personality don’t have anything to do with being shot in the head. He says he’s almost got them convinced, though. Gary’s been in Alaska for five years, and loves it. He also works for Sue, doing almost the same things as Matt does, in addition to operating “the canon.” He’s sweet like a child is, but a little mischievous. His experience in the Marines taught him to love artillery fire in general, and gunpowder in particular. Once we’d been parked in the bar for about two hours, Gary mentioned a novel way to get a free drink. Take off your panties and pack them into the canon with about 7 packs of gunpowder. Aim, fire, and booze. The remnants of one of my favorite pairs of Betty-Boop polka-dotted undies are now stapled above the bar, along with about 400 other scraps, numerous men’s ballcaps, and thousands of notes, business cards, and dollar bills with people’s names and home places scrawled on them. Mine say: Hanna (D.C.) in thick black permanent marker.

In the Chicken Saloon, which was recommended to us by a friend who’d passed by two years prior, we parked ourselves at about 5pm, Alaska time (they have their own time zone up here). For a while, we were ignored as Sue and some folks from Wasilla (near Anchorage) chatted about divorce, hunting, and Captain Morgan. Drinking the local brew from the tap marked us as passers-through, “bourgie” tourists, east coasters out on a whim. Once we opened a tab though, and started in with the MGD, the locals opened up a bit. We made friends with another Gary and his wife (name unremembered)—two of the hardest drinking people I’ve ever met. Gary works construction on bridges and docks, and had worked winters in Prudoe Bay (the Alaska Pipeline’s northern terminus in the Arctic Circle), where it can get down to more than 100 degrees below zero. After a few rounds he brought out the best salmon dip I’d ever had (which he made from Alaskan red salmon he’d caught this summer), and a smoked terryaki salmon that tasted like an orgy of sweetness. They complained about the Lower 48ers, who brought their laws with them to the wilderness—primarily, seatbelt and gun laws. He and wifey were in Chicken hunting caribou before the season closed. He indicated he had many guns, she indicated that handguns were her personal favorite. He was incredulous when we told him that Washington, D.C. doesn’t have bears. “No? You gotta have some bears, somewhere. Can’t have no bears,” he said. It was hard to convince him that the nearest bears were in the zoo, and the second nearest were in Wyoming. The conversation degenerated as we continued drinking, mostly to talk of looooove. They were really in loooove. He used to “hate women and everything about em, until I met this firecracker here.” They (she especially) were really happy we were in loooove too. She loooooved our looooove. We danced a drunk dance to the jukebox (the numbers don’t correspond to the songs they say they do, it just plays whatever it wants – I think 237 got us Janis Joplin), and stumbled out.

The Chicken staff, enamoured of us now that our tab was good and deep, wouldn’t hear talk of pitching a tent in the parking lot or sleeping in the truck. Nope, they had a little cabin, empty for the night, and we would stay there. A little single bed, but Gary thought the two of us were skinny enough to fit comfortably on it. The other cabin, with a wood stove, was airing out from a previous drinker’s expurgations.

We slept like babies, our first night in a bed since Hamilton, Montana. Sue woke us up at dawn, yelling at Gary for forgetting to cap the generator, and was yelling at him again at breakfast for burning the cookies (“I won’t catch that hell again,” he said when she left the room). I think there might be something to memory loss and a gunshot to the back of the head, but hey, I’m not the VA.

Hanna in the Chicken Saloon. You can see I'm not the only one to dismember her panties. We have action shots of the canon firing, but they're a bit dark and a bit personal. By request only.

Next up: the Denali Highway; and then: Denali National Park; and then: Anchorage!

Oh, Misery

2005-08-29T12:17:00.000-07:00

You should be reading Alaska, Part !! right now, but due to an unfortunate incidenct with a dog's tail and a glass of water, my Mac isn't turning on. We're taking the little dear to be fixed (although with turnaround times at 7 days, and our plan to be on a ferry 7 days from now, we're not sure how well it will work out). In the meantime, we'll try to post from other computers. Unfortunately, there were two posts pre-written that we were going to put up this morning -- about our experiences in Chicken and Denali National Park. We'll just have to stick em up when we get the computer running again. Sorry, guys. We continue to be lame.

In travel news: we're leaving Anchorage today, I think, and heading to the Kenai Peninsula. Then we'll sweep back through Anchor Town for a climb with a friend of ours (on balet!), and then head east toward the Wrangell St. Elias National Park (the largest in Alaska, supposedly even wilder than Denali). Then back down to BC via the Cassiar, to get on a ferry from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy (on Vancouver Island). From there, we're heading to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, to camp on the Pacific Coast (September 11-13). Then, hopefully, to Seattle for a few days, and finally to Spokane to visit with my family (hopefully, my mom will be flying out for a week of visiting as well) on or around September 17. That's the general schedule. Let us know if you're in any of these areas over the next few weeks.

Alaska, Part !

2005-08-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

We know it’s been a long while since the last post, but Alaska has found us both bereft of much internet access and quite exhausted when we’ve found it. Apologies, apologies. Here’s the story, or what we can muster of it.

We left Jasper, Alberta, and headed for the Cassiar Highway. It’s a narrow road crowded with trees (and remnants of trees from 50 years of forest fires that have been allowed to burn themselves out), without benefit of painted lines or pavement for many of its 750 kilometres. In the two days we spent driving on the road, we estimate we saw only 50 cars. There are no towns to speak of, just gas stations every few hundred kilometers where you might find a Dove Ice Cream Bar and cap guns, but little or nothing practical such as canned foods or soap. The emptiness, the trees, the practicalities, the ill-fitting designation of “highway”—these all contributed to make it our favorite road so far. Our first night camping, we located a spot on the Dease River that local fisherman had rigged to camping perfection: a picnic table, an outhouse (which was a little too ripe to use), a view of the sun setting over a wide bend in the icy blue river.

Despite being 20 yards from the highway, there was no traffic to disarm our sleep.

On the second day, as we noticed the sun becoming more obscure, we drove for 12 hours continuing up the Cassiar into Whitehorse and the Yukon. I expected some sort of urban, wood-cabin oasis (with 20,000 people, Whitehorse is a metropolis by local standards) , but we found an entire city built around the concept of prefabulousness. Nearly every building we saw looked as if a truck had carried it in, one or two pieces at a time, from the highway. We provisioned, anticipating nearly two weeks without grocery stores before arriving in Anchorage, and then decided to move right along and skip the beers we’d been planning on having. We headed up the Klondike Highway, which would take us north of the Alcan (the major route into Alaska) and drop us into Alaska near Chicken. That night, we drove until dusk (nearly 10pm this far north) and found a gravel turnabout in which to camp. As we came around the bend, we saw that our empty site was in fact inhabited by seven people resembling gypsies—clothes strewn about on willow branches, a huddled group around a stove and a fire, three tents draped with more clothes … John and I looked at each other, shrugging simultaneously. He jumped out of the truck and asked if they’d mind if we pitched a tent in their camp, which was greeted with warm assent. Upon closer examination we found that the clothes were of the REI variety, and the tents, though worn, tended for with care. The stove turned out to be a pressure cooker in which they were making chocolate cake. And the metal dinosaurs poking out from under piles of drying clothes? Bicycles! Our gypsies turned out to be a motley group of mostly Canadian cyclists, who were just about to complete a trek from Patagonia (the tip of South America) to Inuvik (the most northern point accessible by road in Canada). The most veteran among them had been riding for 18 months, making a documentary along the way, which they hoped to turn into a curriculum for middle and high schoolers. We stayed up talking for a few hours, as twilight slowly dimmed into darkness, eating chocolate cake and drinking rosehip and alfalfa tea. What they were doing put our own minor complaints about sore muscles, tent pitching, and homesickness on permanent hold . A few hours drive north (or three-days ride) they would split off our route, taking the Dempster Highway to Inuvik, while we would take the Top of the World Highway across the northernmost U.S. border crossing into Alaska. The next day when we reached this crossroads, we stopped and poured off half of our bottle of scotch into a small plastic container and hid it in a cairn with a note we hoped they would see. We thought they deserved it a touch more than we did - celebratory drink at the capstone of a months-long endeavor more hardcore than anything we could imagine. We're hopeful they found it.

As we passed onto the Top of the World Highway, we began to see the reason that the sky had been increasingly hazy in the prior week. The smoke was so thick in places that we couldn’t see more than 50 feet in front of us. A man at a gas station assured us that the fires were well off the road—indeed, the two biggest were burning a few hundred miles north. Here, you can see what the smoke did to an otherwise beautiful summer day (see especially the lower left corner).

And here I am, very happy to have passed without incident back into the United States (our 8th border crossing). We’re at—essentially—the northernmost point of the trip. The Highway is incredible here as well, cut out of the flanks of low mountains of endless tundra. (no photos of it, though—the smoke was too thick)

Within a few miles, we entered the town of Jack Wade, which had eroded to this:

That was the entire town. In reality, it’s just an old gold dredge, abandoned and left for the tour buses that clambor over the pass from Dawson City. I think the local maps leave the dot there for a chuckle, but maybe Alaskans have a kind of memororial instinct I don’t credit them for.

In any case, within two hours we were in Chicken, which at least has a semi-permanent population of about 12, twice-weekly mail service, and a bar.

To be continued…

Rock, Rock On in the Rockies

2005-08-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

So here we are in the Canadian Rockies. It’s relatively difficult to describe either the scale or the magnificence of things here. Some facts help, but only a little. We’ve been staying in two national parks that follow the Continental Divide. They include some the biggest mountains in North America, and they’re packed together like Easter eggs in a basket. We camped the first two nights on Mosquito Creek, setting up our tent about two feet from where the glacier-fed water touched the bank. It made a damp roar that effectively isolated us from our neighbors—no doors slamming or dogs barking. It was as near to a perfect campsite as we’ve had.

It was also cold. Cold and rainy, actually. The day we arrived, we opted for a quick hike up one of the main tourist paths, from Lake Louise (a milky green lake, ladled into a tight valley between massive glaciated peaks) to Lake Agnes, where a teahouse has stood for about 100 years. By the time we reached the top, it was hailing and the wind was chirping at us get off its mountain. We popped into the chilly teahouse and drank a small pot of yerba mate and were served an ungenerous bowl of tomato soup. Still sopping and shivering, we took the chance during a break in the rain to hop down the mountain. We there rediscovered what most five-year-olds know: that “The Ants Go Marching” is an excellent song to pass the time on a cold hike (and that nothing rhymes with “seven” but “heaven”). We stopped at a Laundromat to dry our pants and long underwear and then cuddled into bed, bellies full of split pea soup and baked beans. (Our bed, for those curious to know, is a masterpiece of comfort: two air-filled ground pads, covered with a thick warm lambskin rug, covered with a soft linen sheet; we nestle between this and an unzipped sleeping bag [it reflects body heat] with a down comforter over everything, and two fluffy pillows make cherries on top. It takes about half an hour to set up the tent and bed, and the same to pack up in the morning, but clearly worth the effort.)

Day two we went on a spectacular hike to the Bow Glacier Falls. (Another aside: the use of adjectives like “magnificent” and “spectacular” may seem gratuitous, but try to keep in mind the full weight of their meaning. Things here are indeed worthy of such incredible appendations.)

John’s turn:

As you can see from the photos that are being posted with this post, Hanna is not exaggerating. I have never been to this part of the continent and over the past 5 days or so I don’t think that I’ve stopped grabbing Hanna’s attention away from reading or otherwise passing time in the passenger seat, worried that only I would see that magnificent view. It wouldn’t quite be real if she didn’t see it either. Each turn of a corner or pass down a hill reveals a new awe-striking wonder of the world. I will mostly let the pictures tell the story for now, but imagine that over the last four days we have: hiked and camped along countless glacier-fed bodies of water, summitted a 7,000-foot peak to overlook Jasper’s largest lake on one side and a valley with snow-capped mountains emerging from the depths on the other; washed our faces in a lake being fed by the melts of three glaciers (all within sight); watched snow and ice fall from a massive hanging glacier and thunderously fall down the mountain; seen bears, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, coyotes, an eagle, and today we caught a rare glimpse of a woodland caribou (there are only 100 in Jasper National Park). This is the quick and dirty rundown, mostly because I can think of no descriptors that would adequately capture the world that we are seeing up here. I am enthused with each moment and exhausted by my own enthusiasm all at the same time.

Hanna again:

I sort of pooped out with describing Bow Glacier up there, but it’s getting late we still have to go grocery shopping and drive back to camp to make dinner and watch the sun set over the icy blue of the North Saskatchewan River (our current campground is 20m from there). We head out tomorrow for the Yukon and hope to be in Alaska within a week. Not sure how the internet access will fare up there, but we’ll do our best. For real this time: let’s all go to the Canadian Rockies.

Photos:

Hiking in a hail storm at Lake Louise.

Hanna is amazed by wildlife in Glacier National Park.

John poses for his action shot: hiking over a boulder bridge on the way to Bow Glacier Falls.

This is the view from the waterfall coming off of Bow Glacier. We hiked through this canyon, following the river, all the way from the lake you see in the background (Bow Lake). We scrambled about halfway up the 800-ft. falls for this photo.

Hanna in front of Cavell Pond, at the base of Edith Cavell Mountain in Jasper. Just out of view, on the left rim of the pond, is a glacier that provides the icebergs you see floating in the background. Above Hanna is the Angel Glacier (a "hanging" glacier)--this is where we saw (and heard) ice cracking off the glacier and tumbling down the mountainside (it sounds a bit like a canon being shot).

John on the summit of Bald Mountain, with Maligne Lake behind and below us (we hiked from a parking lot at the left tip of the lake). We call the summit "Little Europe" because there were about 12 different groups of mixed-bag Europeans up there. Mountain tops are friendly places, too: some girl from California gave us her phone number in case we need a place to stay in Santa Rosa.

“Your answer to this question will determine the future of your trip.”

2005-08-13T17:04:00.000-07:00

Although we fully anticipated that we’d be stopped at customs on at least one of our forays across the Canada/US border (there have been seven now), neither of us really expected to be so thoroughly harassed. At an early venture—crossing in small-town Maine—the border guard took one look at us, declared that our truck was a customs officer’s nightmare, and waived us through with a smile and a nod. Not so two days ago. We were crossing through the northeast tip of Glacier National Park into Alberta, and the young guy in the customs booth was not amused with our very out of state plates, unkempt hair (four days since last shower), and impenetrable conveyance. He passed us along to two ladies, who took over searching the car and were determined to find—as they put it—“it.” “It” was “dope,” as they eventually let us know, and they indicated (again and again) that they’d tear apart the car until “it” had been found. (Funny, because none of them could have been much older than we are, and whom of our generation calls it dope?) After over an hour, they pretty well had torn the car apart—looking in every pocket of every bag, through every pill container in our first aid kit, and even climbing up on top of the car to rip apart the cargo bag. We remained—per their mandate—at the front of the car, shivering. They finally conceded that, as we had persisted in telling them, we did not have any “dope”—and passed us along to the immigration guy. He didn’t seem to be taken with the idea that we were jobless and traveling for six months, and he didn’t hesitate to make this clear. John and I both reached a low point, I think, and began to feel causeless guilt about being young and free and jobless and all of the other things these customs officers were not. This severe, dark haired man asked us about everything we’d been labouring not to think about—our most recent jobs and incomes, our bank accounts, and how much cash we had on us (and then made us go get it to prove we weren’t lying). He verified everything (including our nonexistent criminal records), then brought us in for the culmination of the interview. Here he delivered the titular question, in as weighty a tone as the best of western lawman: “Your answer to this question will determine the future of your trip.”[Pause for effect; look piercingly into our lying, thieving, whore-mongering faces.] “Do you have any dope in that truck?” Well, no sir. Like we’ve been saying. Shucks and goddamn, no. Then he paused, just to be a real jerk, and drummed his fingers on the desk, and tapped his pen, and generally tried to heighten the effect, and finally, after a very long 30 seconds, he put pen to paper and wrote: Accepted.

Thus, we’re in Alberta. And thank god for that, because this must be the most beautiful place in the world.

But first, our second adventure of the day. After a beautiful drive through southwestern Alberta, winding through the Kennakasis Valley with giants of mountains kneeling on either side, we arrived in Canmore, Alberta. This is a sleepy-ish mountain town, still relatively untouched by the tourism bug that plagues neighboring Banff. We decided to shack up in Canmore for the night because the entrance fees to Banff are outrageous and all we wanted was to cook dinner and sleep. The very informed girl at the information center guided us to a municipal campground just around the corner. A municipal campground—what a lovely idea. We jumped in the rig and hit the gas and turned the corner and what the hell? We could tell it was a bit strange from the get go. First, it was right off the highway, with traffic roaring by and no privacy. You’d think (or I would) that a municipal campground would be set up to show off the better part of a city or it’s scenery, so we were skeptical from the first. Second, it was split into two parts—overnight camping on an almost treeless grassy area with no specified sites (“just camp anywhere you like”), and “long-term” camping located across the parking lot in completely secluded sites in a mess of a little forest. We thought we would check these sheltered sites out (just in case we could score one), and we found a whole subculture just out of view. One site had a clock and dartboard hung up on a tree outside the tent. Others had motherloads of laundry hanging from criss-crossed lines. There were probably 50 sites and we only saw one empty, and they all looked lived in. There were kids our age everywhere—ranging from the mountain men types to the granola set—but we decided it looked like fun and might be a good opportunity to meet people. Meet people we did—at a group campfire, in the kitchen shelter, in the bathrooms. As we talked to more people the outline of the place began to take shape. About 90% of the long-term campers are from Quebec and were there for most of the summer months. Some of them go west for part of the summer to pick apples or other fruit, earn a ton of bank, and then retire to this little haven just outside the Rockies for the rest of the summer. A few of the guys we met were tradesmen, working construction jobs that paid better out here in the summer (multi-million dollar homes are going up everywhere), and then headed home to Winnipeg or Edmonton or Saskatoon in the fall. No one looked older than 30, and I’m sure some were under 20. Not surprisingly, it was run like a commune. They made money off the overnighters ($15/night vs. $240/month—although I have to say, even the reduced monthly rate seems like a lot for no roof or heat, etc.), and had rules set up to govern the conduct of the residents (e.g., no alcohol at the fire pit, non-registered guests leave by 11, etc.) so it all doesn’t go completely haywire. I think the strangest thing was that the city bankrolled the place, but it was pretty amazing to see that it existed—I can’t imagine a city in the U.S. that would do the same for a bunch of vagabonding kids.

some photos too

2005-08-07T11:38:00.000-07:00

Hanna is happy to be at the Badlands

See Old Faithful erupting in the back?

Hiking by the Saphire Pool, Yellowstone

We made it out! Brinkman's last in line leaving Yellowstone after our race through the park.

Authentically the West

2005-08-07T11:32:00.000-07:00

Authentic museums seem to be a thing of the west; the preservation of the past just the way it was as the town, business, or building met its demise with the coming of progress is not something we see back east where museum spaces are modern with an attempt given to contextualize the past within the constructed space of the museum. Illustrating this point, we had two such encounters as we passed through the beautiful country of Montana.

First Virginia City, a town that sprung up in 1863 and, with its neighbor Nevada City, became the richest and most prolific gold mining towns to date. Miners set their stakes in the mountains and rivers surrounding the area and brought their gold to be weighed and cashed in at Virginia City, doubtlessly much of it then spent at the bars that spot the town and now serve the tourists comfortable and pricy meals in their homely environment. This town has been entirely turned into a museum, in which a small population still exists. There is an old time candy shop, an ice cream maker (who treated us Huckleberry ice cream), and antique clothes dealers for those that have come to spend their money. Otherwise, one can stroll up and down Main Street and poke their head into building after building (all authentically restored or untouched in their original condition of disrepair) and see what a General Store would look like filled with signs like “Regular Malt Extract: Drink Schlitz” and shelves lined with cans of product of the day; or a blacksmith garage; or a barber shop; or a post office. It had it all and not much more and charmed we were: an entire town built for tourists without the glitz and necessity to spend money that so many places seem to rely upon.

The following day, on our way to Hamilton (to visit with Hanna’s second cousin Allen and his family) we made a side trip to the old copper mining town of Butte. Butte turned out to be a eerie place with a feel of a town that had suddenly had the floor dropped out from under it, a town that had built a fortune in copper mines and now is the proud owner of the most toxic stretch of water in all of the country. Wandering around such a ghostly town trying to get back on its feet was interesting but the real fun came at the Dumas Brothel. No, we didn’t stay for the night as the place closed in 1982 after a run of over 100 years (America’s longest running brothel) and now stands as a museum: a monument to an important part of America’s economy that most would like pass over and ignore. We are not those people. We sought it out and are glad that we did. The building stands in the same way it did in 1982 when it was closed after the proprietor was prosecuted for tax evasion. Ownership fell to an antique dealer on the grounds that he keeps it as authentic as he could and tell the story of the 120-year-old structure.

We were treated to a tour by a woman enthused with the history of the West’s whorehouses who responded to the fact that we are from Washington DC with, “Bet there aren’t many whorehouses around there”. I guess that depends on your definition. Anyhow, she began by explaining that as a copper mining town, it was well known that there were many more men than available women and the local police and government officials agreed (or were paid to agree) that it was far better to have women being paid for these services than raped as was otherwise common. There was a section of Butte that for years was kept for the over 18 crowd, cordoned off with fences, in which numerous brothels could operate and the Dumas is the only one left standing. There were 43 known rooms, otherwise known as ‘cribs’, and in its heyday the brothel employed enough women working 8 hour shifts to have all 43 rooms running 24 hours a day. Split into three levels, the costumers could choose their price level (in 1890, the going rate was $.50 for basement girls, $1 for parlor girls, and $1.50 for the high class third floor women, these prices are for a “quickie” or 10 minutes). Over the years as laws changed, so did the brothel. In 1943 the windows to the outside were closed when the US government required that all brothels shut down as part of the war effort; wouldn’t want our boys coming down with VD and staying out of the war. After that, men would buzz in first and then “browse” the windows that lined the internal hallway designed to replicate the feel of an alleyway.

Probably the most interesting part of the tour was in the basement of the building. It was well known that many of the women occupying this level were opium addicts for part/all of their tenure and men would pay the least for their company. The rooms were full of artifacts of the business (including opium vials, anti-VD remedies, etc and were decorated with pin-up pictures from the 30s and 40s (all of it coming directly from the Dumas). At either end of the basement hallway were tunnels. One led directly from a mineshaft, the other went out to underground tunnel systems that could connect to any part of town. Businessmen wouldn’t want their wives and otherwise respectable clients to know what they were doing after work. The scene was somewhat depressing and all the way interesting. I highly recommend supporting such museums as the history held in the Dumas contributed heavily to the history of women and of the area at large.

Q. What’s the best part about farting in Yellowstone?

2005-08-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

A. You can blame it on the geyser!

You can probably infer a few things from this joke we made up. First, Yellowstone smells like rotting eggs. Second, we’ve been together in car and tent enough now that bodily emissions are often at the forefront of our conversations. (I really have my grandfather to thank for this tendency, who nobly taught all the cousins to belch on command, and provided us with the “Vibrato Scale” with which we could reliably rate our flatulence. I don’t know whom John has to thank.) Third, we’ve started making up jokes, which is traditionally the province of truckers and traveling salesmen. I’m not sure what it says about us, exactly, except that we’ve spent a lot of time in the car and that our ability to distinguish between good jokes and farting jokes is on the decline. In case you’re not sure: That joke is hilarious.

Brinkman is doing just fine. We haven’t quite figured why he keeps getting out of balance, but it might have something to do with the fact that he’s 16 years old—an adolescent and an old man at the same time. He was in boyish spirits the other night, however, and managed to save us from being trapped in Yellowstone. The thrilling adventure follows.

The Thrilling Adventure (and scenic details for the adventure-skittish reader):
We set up camp in Shoshone National Forest, about 40 miles east of Yellowstone. The camp sites are quieter, emptier, and more scenic there – we were right on the Shoshone River, across from a sheer break of rock tumbling up out of view. We ate raspberry pancakes the following morning, and set out for the east entrance to the park, which we discover is under construction – hour-long waits up a steep, one-lane, dirt road in the nation’s busiest National Park. We muscle through, and emerge onto the east rim of the caldera. Yellowstone was a vague place in both our minds, full of bears and geysers and not much else. In fact—a fact neither of us realized—the park is an old volcano that simply collapsed. The caldera is formed by the collapsed basin, which was then filled in by immense lava flows, creating rolling hills and meadows in the midst of a huge lodgepole pine forest that burned in fires in 1988. In the middle of it all is the largest alpine lake in the world—stretching 480 feet down toward the heart of the mountain and averaging 40 degrees cold in its depths. In various little geyser basins, however, the volcano retches up its heat in the form of hotsprings, mudpots, fumaroles, and the big daddy geysers, whose microbes oxidize iron and sulfer to create chemical-looking spits of color in the desolate grounds (the heat kills almost everything else alive). It’s one of the most active geothermal areas in the world. The landscape is amazing in it’s variety and extremity.

The flip side is that it feels like one of those safari parks you find outside of struggling tourist towns: BearWorld, or Wild Walks, or I’m So Captive. The difference, in theory, is that wildlife really is wild in Yellowstone, but you almost wouldn’t know it. We thought we saw a bear, but it turned out to be a buffalo swimming across the river and walking into traffic, entirely unconcerned with the herd of metal beasts stopped in its wake (wildlife jams we called them, where the cars pile on top of each other to see the biggest animal they can). There’s something like 200 miles of road in Yellowstone, as well as gas stations, an Auto/RV repair shop, lodges and inns, campgrounds, general stores, souvenir shops, amphitheaters, and just immense numbers of people. We had the constant sensation of moving through it passively, despite the severity of the wilderness just off the road.

Anyway, then we thought we saw a wolf (it was a pronghorn). Then we thought we’d see Old Faithful.

At ten to six, we arrived to get a front row seat for the show on the giant platform built around the little geyser that could. By 6:40—no geothermal expulsion in sight—we realized we had to leave, and fast, to get out of the park by 8:00 when the east road was closing for overnight construction. We were 65 miles away, and at a speed limit of 45 mph, we were not at all assured of making it. To emphasize the real hazard this posed to us, understand that there was absolutely nowhere we could sleep in the park, and the nearest other exit would put us out about 250 miles from our tent and everything that could keep us warm for the night. We had to average almost 60mph up hills that Brinkman could only climb at 35mph, around windy park roads, contending with slower-moving RVs and wildlife jams. John turned to me and said, “Hon, are you prepared not to make it out of the park?” To which I replied, “Hell no. Drive.” And he did. A nail-biting hour and twenty minutes, the whole of it spent on the literal edge of our seats, forming motherload knots in our backs. Brinkman was in perfect form, roaring up the pass, shooting past RVs, gliding down hills well beyond his usual top speed with barely a shimmy. But at 7:58, one mile from the road closure, a police car was turned out in the road and we were crushed. We slowed down to plead with her to let us out anyway, and she said such glorious words we almost kissed her hands: “Hurry up.” We were the last ones out of the park, and missed the gate closure by about 1.5 minutes. We got out of the car and gave each other the hugest, most bringin-it-back high five the 21st century has ever seen.

Postscript: The next day, on a hike back in the park, we finally got to see Old Faithful blow it’s load from on top of a fire-stricken mountain. From four miles over and a half-mile up, it looked like a little kettle screaming. Yellowstone is a furious place, strangely subdued. Despite the fact that it was so trafficked and so packaged, it managed to surprise and delight us every time we caught a glimpse of it’s tantrums and fits of wilderness. Let's all go to Yellowstone.

Technical Cowboys

2005-08-02T15:44:00.000-07:00

For real, that's the name of the service station currently balancing our wheels. The guys all wear patches that say "Technical Cowboy." We're in Cody, WY.

Last night we stayed in the Bighorn National Forest, on a wide-open resevoir at about 9,000 ft, overlooking snow-capped Cloud Mountain, checking in at 13,000 ft. We were the only people there -- an eerie feeling after weeks of RV parks and National Parks, and parking lots.

We kicked the 4WD into high gear to get up the Forest Service roads (for the first time), and climbed through at about 10mph (destroying the wheel balance in the process). It was tons of fun, and we finally felt like we were putting Brinky through a proper workout.

We have to go collect the truck, so this is brief. Hello to all.

How the West Was Won

2005-08-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Buffalo Wyoming. Hanna and I have just endured a trek across vast nothingness with the morning spent driving (and cycling) through America's least populous state and now find ourselves reviving in a coffee shop with free internet staring at the massive Bighorn mountains just ahead. Since we last wrote, we have journeyed through Wisconsin (America's most obese state according to our guidebook) which surprised us with beautiful rolling hills and a couple of wonderful sunsets as we got closer to the Mississippi River. Minnesota was next, where we stayed with Hanna's lanky witty friend and Minneapolis's newest resident, Kevin Wiseman. We enjoyed the pit stop as we drove around at least three of Minnasota's 10,000 lakes and then were off to South Dakota.

The lower of the two Dakotas brought us to the Badlands, a section of the country that former presidents had ceded to Native American Tribes as their desolation must have felt appropriate to these now dead white men for what clearly was seen as a lesser population for the country. Ironically tribes were also given portions of the Black Hills for the same reason but when gold was discovered there years later, it quickly came back under the control of the federal government. Ah history. Both the Badlands and the Black Hills served us with amazing vistas, and relaxing, more nature oriented camping than the east had.

As we arrived in the Badlands National Park and drove from one end of the other in search of the free "primitive" campsite, we were treated to one of the most incredible displays of lightning that I can remember. Over each crest there was an even more impressive view of blackened sky giving way to fingers of light stretching over the eerie and seemingly otherworldly cliffs of the terrain. Passing a herd of Buffalo on our last mile to the campsite sealed the otherworldly feeling that the park was giving us. The next day (yesterday) we were in Custer State Park (a state park inside of the Black Hills National Park system) for the night at a site just off of a lake with jutting boulders that seemed to grow like giant trees from the depths of the lake. We read on the lake and I climbed a few boulders to warm up for a quick late-afternoon swim in the cold South Dakota waters. This was all after a day of headspinning autotourism where we took in sweeping views from the highest terrain Brinkman Rose had faced (he's holding up well). We got our democracy on as we took in the heads of four American Presidents quite impressively carved into Mt Rushmore. All in all a full and appreciated day as we fell into sleep after a great concoction Hanna cooked up and some professional marshmellow roasting on what I can only describe as my most successful and painful fire yet, that is to say that the wood burned nicely only after hitting me in the face as I attempted to break large pieces into smaller peices (major injury was avoided but my nose still hurts).

We are being beckoned back to the highway and will write more when we can.

One request from anybody reading...Even if you don't want to write comments, send us some recipes that you have found successful from any camping (or otherwise primitive cooking experiences). We have found some great ones and always would appreciate more ideas flowing our way!

Chicago to Madison

2005-07-27T08:31:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Chicago on Sunday, July 24. Stayed with the Minshells—my father’s cousin Rich and his wife Marcie, along with their three children Olivia (Ollie, 12), and Jack and Dave (twins, 3)—in a suburb called La Grange Park. Friday afternoon drank beer on the deck in sweltering 100-degree heat and watched the boys fight for each other’s lives on a picnic table pirate ship against an evil squid that lived in the ocean below the deck. On Saturday, we picked up a guide to the USA while waiting out a rainstorm at the train station, then headed into downtown just as it cleared. Union Station lets off just west of the Sears Tower, and the Chicago Board of Trade, which lives in serious-whimsical Art Deco building that you are no longer able to tour (much to our chagrin, as we had planned to watch the commodities trading floor, where over 50% of the world’s grain stock is bought and sold). We sauntered past these landmarks on our way to the meeting site for a walking tour of the “historical skyscrapers” in Chicago, led by the city’s Architectural Foundation. “Historical” turns out to mean “built between 1871 and 1934”. In 1871, “the great fire” wiped out 17,000 buildings downtown and left it a tabla raza for the new architects—who had discovered the wonders of the steel frame building bridges during the Civil War. By the early 30s, the depression had halted new building completely, and it didn’t resume until after WWII, by which time architecture had presumably changed quite a bit. In any case, it was a typically long (and at times long-winded) walk, but we learned all of the above and got to see some real monuments to human industry along the way. Chicago had also just opened a new public space called Millennium Park, which features beautiful gardens (and a strange-ish sort of woodland area), an outdoor pavilion that nestles under the skyline and was designed by Frank Gehry, and an outdoor exhibit of aerial photos of the city. There’s also an incredibly fountain. It’s composed of two facing 20-feet towers made of glass brick. Water flows overtop the brick to the ground below, and while simultaneously giant images of human faces are projected on a screen under the brick (they smile, blink, and sometimes making a kissing face that somehow inspires water to shoot out of their lips). There’s no fountain basin—the water just tumbles onto the marble slabs below, and the children rush to the base of the towers to feel the waterfall over their heads or splash on the ground in the two inches of water that is allowed to collect before it flows over an miniature edifice to be recycled back into the waterfall. The whole public space had an inclusive feel to it.

We loved Chicago. It felt livable. Bustling, but quite and clean, not buckling at the knees from so much worry and strife.

On Tuesday we left and headed out of town via the University of Chicago, taking “back roads” through South Chicago. It’s a strange thing to be driving under the L tracks with projects on either side, buttressed only by large and empty (but for some reason fenced-in) lots and then to emerge into the campus—tree-lined streets, orderly bustle, and lots of white people. In any case, we where slightly underwhelmed by the campus and the severe gothic buildings, which looked like something out of a children’s horror story. It was a brief stop, and after finding that there is no central graduate studies office or student affairs center, we left. Passing through about four hours worth of suburbs, we began to realize that the uncontrollable shaking that the car was doing might be a problem. We found a Firestone and $500 and three hours later, we had new front tires, alignment, et al. Getting late in the day now, we thought we could get as far as Madison, camp for the night, and do a little tour of the area the following day.

We camped at Lake Kegonda – a beautiful state park, with spacious set-back camp sites and a 360-acre lake, sitting in the middle of a vast expanse of lush green farmland. Only 200 years of human industry have transformed the landscape into a different beast altogether. All that corn, which seems immovable, were trees that we just peeled back like sunburned skin.

Scheduled today: the University of Wisconsin at Madison campus, Devil’s Lake State Park, and Baraboo—home of Circus World.

[Note: We’ve skipped describing Cleveland, where we saw an amazing exhibition of a new mummification technique called plastination. The exhibit is (unfortunately) called BodyWorlds 2. In case we don't get to writing about it, everyone should check out the website. It's madness.

Niagara

2005-07-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

After leaving Toronto last Friday we headed straight to the most American place in Canada—Niagara Falls. Despite the fact that there is an American side to Niagara Falls, the best view is on the Canadian side, so this is where the casinos, the Planet Hollywoods, and the behemoth resort hotels have set up shop, climbing all over each other to get the best view and the most vertical acreage. It looks like they might end up craning themselves right into the vortex of the falls. In spite of the spectacle, the falls managed to be impressive in their own right, most especially if you stood just over the water shooting through the rapids toward the edge where you could really sense how massive and iron-fisted the force of water is. The tourists were a surprising accessory to the afternoon—we expected the Japanese, but the mess of Europeans and the Amish family buying Coke from a vending machine (they use money?) were the sugar on top.

We stopped in at the IMAX theatre, whose sole purpose was to show a movie about the Falls that I saw when I was eight (timeless classic, though) 12 times a day. They advertised a “Daredevil Gallery” as well, which sounded free so we went it. Best spectacle in Niagara Falls, without a doubt. It was an exhibit of the various cobbled-together seacraft that lunatics have used over the years to plummet themselves over the falls. Included was a replica of the first: a modest wooden barrel, lined with a mattress. It was piloted by a destitute 63-year-old woman named Annie Taylor, who was trying to make a buck. Everyone is quick to point out that she failed and died poor anyway, but that didn’t happen until years after she survived the 155-foot fall in what looked like a slightly oversized potato bucket.

We left Niagara after using our $37 tax rebate to buy a bottle of so-so scotch at the Duty Free, and headed toward Lake Erie State Park on the southeastern shore of Lake Erie in New York. The wind off the lake proved not to be mythic, and helped ensure that cooking dinner on the propane stove would be as inefficient as possible. But sausage and green beans (with a healthy dose of Vermont maple syrup) are sturdy foods, and we’re pretty efficient eaters. A storm that morning had turned the shore waters into a grayish sludge, but some trick of science recycled the mess into the most perfectly pastel sunset either of us had ever seen.

(More to come)

Back in the USSSA

2005-07-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

We’re just shy of our departure from Toronto, after three very hot days spent mostly at the mercy of the humidity. I think the conclusion we’re coming to after similar experiences in DC, New York, and Montreal is that big cities are furnaces and we need to find richer friends who can afford air conditioning. That said, our friends are dolls for allowing us to add the heat of two bodies to their homely infernos.

Ian and Liz have regaled us with lots of talk about the apocalypse (food for thought: wouldn’t it be hilarious—in a oh crap kind of way—if we all ended up as refugees in the countries we’d originally migrated from and had to change our names back to the –Evsky and –Osky endings we dropped like hot potatoes when we came through Ellis Island?) and cooked us some incredible meals. Part of the credit there goes to the illustrious Jesse Brown (see the link in our links menu) for making some salt-encrusted, mustard-coated, syrupy-good ribs. As far as activities go, we went out to a funny little island right off the harbour here and sort of biked around and panted for a while. It turns out the island was hotter than the mainland, kind of cooking like corn in the hot lake. We went to the Bata Shoe Museum, which was peopled by the little-girls-love-ponies and Asian sets, but we learned a lot about shoes. They had an exhibit about the First Peoples of the North (Alaska, etc.), which included lots of coats (and surprisingly few shoes) made from fish skin, seal intestine, and birds. Seal intestine! And they looked a lot like the puffy marshmallow man jackets that the cool kids wore a few years back. Inuit-chic!

Before this we spent four extremely relaxing days at our friend Will’s cottage north of Toronto on the best little lake in the world. There were lots of morning swims, an abundance of water skiing (repeated engine failures with the boat made it even more of an adventure—and John made it up on a slalom ski!), and epic games of dominoes.

Pampered, rested, and a little sweaty, we’re ready to get back on the road. We’re heading to Niagara Falls now, and will camp on Lake Erie tonight. Tomorrow we’ll explore (in the best possible drive-by fashion) Cleveland and Detroit—again camping somewhere on the Lakes—and will arrive in Chicago on Sunday afternoon to stay with one of my dad’s cousins.

East is east

2005-07-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

Gone from Montreal since Saturday and we have some catching up to do from our time on the road; apologies for the length of the post, but we do what we can do…

On Saturday we packed up Brinkman Rose and got on the rainy road headed back east hoping to make it somewhere in Maine. We took as many back roads as we could find on the map (and some that weren’t on the map at all) and gave a surprise to the tragically underworked border guard at a crossing in Vermont. When we explained where we were coming from and our destination and raised his eyebrows and his smile exclaiming, “Well how did you ever get here?” I found it somehow affirming that such an official would ask us such a question. We must be doing something right if we are the last people he expects to see crossing at his station.

Once back in the USA, I was struck again by my urge to consume local goods as we spotted signs almost immediately for “Vermont Maple Syrup.” We weren’t on route to stop at some souvenir stand, nor were we drawn to anything thing that would charge us for the package so we continued meandering through small towns in Vermont. As we came into one of the more populated (and well paved) parts of the day’s journey, we found a sign for our desire hanging in the driveway of somebody’s house. It was an elderly couple with whom we ended up spending the better part of a half hour chatting and exchanging addresses with and we walked away with a quart of Vermont’s finest “Fancy Grade” maple syrup and a couple of new friends somewhere in Vermont.

The rest of the afternoon was spent driving over the northern ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, through New Hampshire and into Maine, ending at the friendly Rangley Lake State Park. I pitched our first tent in the rain while Hanna made a delectable dinner for us to share. We slept well as the rain continued through the night, dampening our tent but not slowing our momentum. Up at 6:30 the next morning we walked down to the lake, skipped some stones, and watched the fog lift off the mountains on the other side. Affirmed again by the sun showing through, we were on the road again, headed for Acadia.

[Hanna’s turn…]

We spent the next two nights in Acadia, doing battle with more rain. It was mostly a losing battle—our penance for inattentiveness to proper camping etiquette was a 10pm trip to the Laundromat to dry our soaked comforter and the lambskin rug we sleep on because we’d left the rain fly off during an afternoon thunderstorm. I raced back to camp in Brinky from the other side of Mount Desert Island where we had just started a 10 mile bike ride around a lake. Thinking I’d gotten there just in time to avert a total disaster (the steam was still rising off the road—it had to have only just begun raining, I thought), it turns out the whole storm had already passed over our tip of the island and, specifically, over our tent. Wet lamb smells much like wet dog (a fact that a rowdy 8-year-old “Princess of the Laundromat” was quick to confirm for us once we got into town) and dries about three times slower since it’s no longer alive, so we threw it in the dryer along with the comforter and pillows. Lessons learned: never leave the flap off; no matter what the labels say, you can definitely put pillows, down, and leather in a dryer with few consequences other than the desired warmth and dryness; rain flap or no, we need a new tent.

After sundry other Acadian adventures (frigid ocean swim, playing in the estuary, watching the sun rise over the ocean), we headed up the coast of Maine to New Brunswick, Canada. I had thought Maine was a pretty unique place in the panoply of American states, but New Brunswick really stole our hearts. The air was perfectly clear, perfectly blue (even bluer than Maine’s, which we had thought was pretty clean—cleaner by at least two degrees from grungy Vermont and New Hampshire). Their “scenic routes” on Canadian byways are visibly more scenic. Tourism seems not to exist, except in a very polite way, ensconced in information bureaus located conveniently off beautiful highways where they offer you free internet access, clean bathrooms, and free maps and books and guides to things. I’m used to thinking of the east coast as having charm, wit, and a few good cities, while the west has a monopoly on traumatically beautiful largess. But New Brunswick proved me wrong – it’s both expansive and gorgeous.

St. John, a bizarre town on the St. John river, hosted us for an afternoon walk after closing time (and really, after 5pm, everything was closed), and then we headed to our campsite about 20 miles north on a fork of the river. We had to cross a little provincial ferry across the river to the Kennebacassis Peninsula to get there (free!), and camped right next to the ferry landing on a little inlet that served as a duck marsh, croaking ground for the noisy frogs, and trading post for the beavers (who provided us with our best, driest firewood so far). We ate Kraft Dinner (mac and cheese) and Bush’s Best baked beans, which was probably our favorite meal so far as well (the fresh clams we steamed in Acadia notwithstanding).

It wa s a beautiful, friendly little campground. It’s only problem is one shared by every other place we’ve crossed that advertises “Camping”—they’re basically parking lots. This one was at least spacious and scenic, quiet and friendly. But I’m becoming quickly disillusioned that the word “camping” has any of the meaning I thought it had. The dictionary proves, of course, that the RV parks have just as much right to the word as I do (“A place where tents, huts, or other temporary shelters are set up, as by soldiers, nomads, or travelers”), but it doesn’t make me any happier about it. Both because these places are weird and because it makes it pretty difficult at the end of a long, wearying drive (especially in our bumpy truck) to reliably find a place to pitch our tent that won’t be somewhat deadening. It’s really no fun at all to be the one tent in the midst of the rapacious beasts, hooked up to sewage pumps and electricity – if only because it reminds us that we have no such luxuries.

This was exactly the kind of place we stayed our final night in the Maritimes, in a spot on a little lake in the spit of New Brunswick that peeks between Quebec and Northern Maine. The place’s spirit was revived by the wonderful little lake, which provided excellent swimming and a floating dock on which to read. It’s main detractor (besides the fact that the well had run dry and the conspiratorial atmosphere that this set off in the parks summer residents) were the black flies, which nearly ate us alive. We were rained out for the last time this week at about 5am and decided there was nothing to do but move again. We aimed ourselves for Quebec City, and arrived just in time for a proper breakfast (about 9:30).

[Switch to John again…]

We wandered around this city of age for an hour or so, lay for a nap on the grassy fortifications of the city, and watched the beginnings of an amateur skateboarding competition. It felt odd and comfortable to be in civility again but from here we decided that in order to make the best of our situation, revived by a served breakfast, we would keep moving down the St. Lawrence River to our old friend, Montreal. We stayed one more night with the ever hospitable Mike and Julia and are now on our way—clean, rested and restore—to a lake house north of Toronto. It is a beautiful blue-skied day and we are looking forward to the drive through Algonquin Park and the comforts of the lake house and the friendship of an old pal for the weekend.

Adios sweet city.

2005-07-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

We're leaving Montreal in a few minutes, heading for the woods of Maine. Tomorrow we should reach Acadia National Park, and then we'll travel to the Bay of Fundy. We hope to return through the Alagash region on our way to Toronto and on from there we move west toward Alaska. Montreal has been amazing, and although we don't have time for a full run down of the trip (more later, we hope), we'd like to thank Mike and Julia for making it feel like we were at home here. It was beyond wonderful to see old friends and this old city.

Sitting on the steps at the top of Montreal's Mount Royal. See my no hair?

We're a postcard! This is the view of the city from the top of the mountain.

It's the 21st century, and we it's citizens; from the left, our friend Dave (he and Suzie came up from DC to visit Montreal over the 4th of July weekend), Kat, Mike (who put us up), and Hanna.

Fete du Canada

2005-07-01T17:16:00.000-07:00

Montreal. Here we are in the much anticipated city that seems to be the love of everybody who has ever spent time here. I have spent much of the last year surrounded by McGill alumni, hearing tales of this eclectic, vibrant, and idyllic municipality just north of the border. It had me both excited to see it for myself and naturally a bit skeptical of the possibilities it might hold. So, thanks to Hanna’s enthusiasm and the wonderful hospitality of Mike and Julia, we find ourselves celebrating Canada Day surrounded by the most friendly French speakers I have ever encountered and friends of Hanna’s that seem overjoyed to share their city with the likes of us.

First Impressions…
In case it wasn’t obvious by the first paragraph, I will devote these words to telling you that I have enjoyed all 36 hours that we have been here. Beer, banter, and bicycles abound in ways that make this city seem simultaneously foreign and extremely accessible. We have just returned from wandering through the city’s center for the last couple of hours and I don’t know if I have ever been as relaxed in a city as I am in this one. That is a bit of an intangible impression but you must know what I mean—the people on the street interact with one another differently here, they shoot the shit with strangers and happily switch between the mother tongue of Quebec and the mother tongue of Canada. The stores both invite you in and don’t seem to care if you accept. The bars and restaurants spill into the streets with patrons and music, and artful graffiti covers many of the business storefronts. This is not New York and certainly not DC. This is a city that is genuinely pleasant in all of these intangible and important ways.

The Criticism…
Last night we helped one of Hanna’s old friends, Jesse Brown, say goodbye to his beloved city. I will not attempt to speak for him but the impression that I get from Hanna and others is that there comes a time for many in Montreal to break up with the city that they love. It is, as Hanna said, “Like ending a relationship that you really wish could have worked out.” Why is it necessary? Montreal is full of friendly people but not friendly to those who would like to steadily work and pay all of their bills. It is not a friendly place to move forward. It is a friendly place to struggle, it is a friendly place to get by, it is a friendly place to go to school; but all of those things have limited half-lives. For those who aren’t lucky enough to find something that they love to do here, it seems there comes a time when they have to leave for the cruel but more profitable world outside.

After attending some jazz festival shows and seeing more friends and doing something more than playing bocci in the park, I am sure that we will have more to say about Montreal, but for now, these are my impressions. I love it here. Granted, I am merely a guest visiting at one of the best times to be in this city. But, regardless, I will say it again: I love it here.

From there to here

2005-07-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

It's Canada Day here, much to the chagrin of the Quebecois but much to our enjoyment. We arrived yesterday at about noon after a two-day journey from New York. The lack of air conditioning was sufficiently inspiring to get us to abandon Brooklyn and head for the Adirondacks. We drove out of the city on route 9 (the Henry Hudson Parkway), which takes you through the Bronx as high as 232 Street and through Yonkers. It’s spectacular and amazing—a sort of raised highway that passes over and through monstrous trees and New York bedrock and high rises. We more or less stayed on the same road all the way to the border, driving through Adirondack Park along Lake George and Lake Champlain. A good portion of the region seems to be made up of 1950s resort hotels with names like "The Tiki" and "The Lake Breeze." The accent sounds like a muffled Boston accent with a slight lisp and occasional resort to Brooklynese. The valley area between Lake George and Lake Champlain, centered around a farmy little town called Ticonderoga, was full of green, pillowy farmland that smelled, alternately, like green, pillowy farmland (that is to say, fresh and good) and like a paper mill (that is to say, like slowly rotting chemical decay). It was by far the most enjoyable route between the two metropoli that I’ve traveled.

We pulled off the road just north of Saratoga Springs at a little privately owned campground at about nine o’clock. No one was in the office, so we just found ourselves a spot and set up the back of the truck for slumber. It was our first night camping in the truck, which turns out to be luxuriously comfortable with the sheepskin rug spread out on top of the boxes John built. We opened the tailgate, patted down our pillows and listened to the rain fall on our tin-can roof. Were it not for my cold, I think it might have been the epitome of a perfect way to begin the ranging, roving, unmapped portion of our trip. As it were, I woke up in the damp at four in the morning coughing and sneezing and aching. I wandered down to the river (what river?) and sat sort of uncomfortably, watching the mist creep over the opposite bank. Another fusillade of coughs and I went back to the car to wake John and get moving. We were driving by six, and arrived—exhausted and dirty and sickly—by noon. The city was a welcome sight, populated by the welcome sounds of chirping, summery Quebecois and soft, lovely Canadian English. After my favorite sandwich on the terrase at Santropol, and a game of bocce on McGill’s lawn, we made our way to Mike and Julia’s feeling soulful and calm again

Coney Island Hustle Bustle

2005-06-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

We did everything we set out to do. We ate hot dogs at Nathan's, balancing drinks and cameras and fries and dogs dripping with sauteed onions. We rode the Cyclone, Coney Island's wooden roller coaster, om it's 78th birthday. It was born 54 years before myself, on June 26, 1927. According to the park's website, Emilio Franco, a mute since birth, regained his voice on the Cyclone, uttering his first words ever -- "I feel sick"!, which probably tells you how exciting it is better than I can. We also rode the Wonder Wheel, which is sort of like a ferris wheel, but with a bunch of cabs on swinging tracks that make you feel deliciously like you're going to slide off into the air tumble to your sandy death. We played Skeeball and the ten of us collectively earned enough tickets to get a harmonica that doesn't work. We watched Brooklyn's low-rate farm team ruin the Aberdeen Ironbirds 11 to nothing (and Frankie the hotdog won the condiment race). We got drunk on the beach. Determined to live the birthday to it's full potential, I jumped into the dirtiest section of ocean known to man, and came out the other end sick. Now I'm coughing and dripping and sweating, but it was worth it. Really, really, incredibly, totally 24 times over worth it.

Coney Island and it's teeming thousands from the top of the Wonder Wheel.

The Coney Island Death Tower-- Originally built to train troops for WWII, and converted in a terrifically dangerous civilian amusement in the 40s. Now it's just a landmark for taking lovey photos under.

Goodnight, world.

24

2005-06-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

It's about the 7th time in the last 8 years that I've been away from home on my birthday, and it still has the same sting. It's generally made up for by the fact of being with friends that are as close as family. We're in New York still, with my dear friend Andy, and today we're celebrating at Coney Island. I'm going on a rollercoaster, eating hotdogs, swimming in some kitchen-sink ocean water, and watching a ballgame (the Brooklyn Cyclones--the Mets' single A farm team). It's amateur hour! But what could be more fun? It's my happy birthday!

Photos!

2005-06-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

Jessup House of Corrections Annex. Eugene's Home.

Crap tire

Northward...slowly

2005-06-24T14:44:00.000-07:00

After an incredible, and incredibly necessary, four days with John’s parents—including an afternoon hailstorm up in the Blue Ridge foothills on the summer solstice, and a blind horse who got spooked and ran himself into the fence a few times—we headed back to DC on Wednesday for dinner with Hanna’s mom and a many-hours-long session hemming and grommeting curtains for the rig (my mom doesn’t do anything without hemming it first).

Yesterday, finally, we left the fold—and the universe was quick to remind us of that fact.

It began with a trip to the dentist for Hanna—the reason for our brief return to DC—for the final step in a crown replacement, so she began the day with a fat lip and the inability to swallow her Dr. Pepper without drooling on herself. On our way out the door, packing our final provisions in the truck, we ran into our postman, Eric. Eric wished us well on our trip, then cocked his head and looked at us with drills in his eyes and said, “Remember, don’t let them put those chips in you. They’re everywhere now.”*

*Eric believes that the Beast is coming in the form of implantable computer chips, that “They” will use to control us and keep us from knowing Jesus in our hearts. But he’s honestly the best postman ever.

And with that, we were off to prison. Really. John has a friend, Eugene Colvin-El, who has been in prison for about as long as we’ve been alive—24 years. They became friends when John began working with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and their main cause was to stop Eugene’s upcoming execution. A friendship took root in this 6-month-long campaign, in which John and Eugene exchanged weekly letters and occasional phone calls, and had one meeting at the SuperMax Prison in Baltimore. The group’s efforts helped to convince the Governor to commute his sentence to life without parole. Eugene has been in a maximum-security prison in Jessup, Maryland ever since—five years now. The last visitor he had before yesterday was John—a year and a half ago. They greeted one another with a couple of tears passing over broad smiles and after a quick hug, Eugene was quick to get into talk of his reality. About a month ago there was a murder in the prison (not uncommon, but this one got press attention), to which the prison has responded by locking down the prisoners 23 hours a day since May 26; they eat in their cells, they can’t go to commissary to buy their stamps and paper, they are counted every 3 hours, etc. It’s prison. Much of John and Eugene’s conversation had to do with this fact: It’s prison. Eugene is in it and happy for everybody that isn’t. “No, my family isn’t visiting me anymore, but I don’t want to keep you here too long, you got your lady waiting in your truck. You all have fun on that trip,” Eugene seamlessly allowed. Walking out through the barbed wire fences and toward Brinkman Rose was an exercise in merging incredibly disparate experiences and realities. Eugene was led back to his windowless cell for the 3:00 count, while we were off for New York City, Boston, Montreal, Toronto… After a few deep relaxing breaths, we were back on 95 heading for the Jersey Turnpike on our way to NYC: glad to have been and glad to leave.

The rest of the trip had all of the indications of an uneventful drive up the northeast corridor until somewhere near the middle of New Jersey. At this point our car began shaking violently and sounding like it was either being shot by a machine gun or doing the shooting itself. We got the hack safely to the shoulder where we were met with smoke and the smell of melting rubber. It would be an understatement to say that we had a flat tire. Rather, we had exploded, melted, shredded, and destroyed a tire. Before we could even climb out and come to grips with our crap luck, we were greeted by some guy from New Jersey who pulled over right after us, exclaiming, “Boy, that smells great! You guys need some help?” A bit incredulously, we declined his help assuring him that we had all of the necessary tools and could do this job ourselves. Thankfully, he just ignored us and started pulling tools out of the back of his car. He took one look at the weight in the car and immediately went back to his trunk for a high-powered jack. He and John traded off pushing the load upward, though our anonymous savior did the bulk of the work. Just as his jack was reaching it’s maximum push (which wasn’t quite high enough to get our spare on), another friendly man whose job it is to save stranded innocents from the perils of the Jersey Turnpike pulled up. After assuring him that we have AAA coverage, he took over with an even better jack and finished the job for free. We got our spare on, drove to the nearby service station and got our tires properly inflated before settling down for a nasty dinner at Roy Rodgers before we tackled the last leg of the drive. Thanks, guy.

Lessons learned: We need new rear tires and a load-bearing high jack. We hate the New Jersey Turnpike, but love their friendly drivers. We cannot drive over 60 miles per hour.

After all of this, we did make it safely and somewhat soundly to New York City where we drove up the West Side Highway to Hanna’s friend Anna’s place in Harlem. We locked down the hack, brought in what we needed for a night, and enjoyed a few hours of relaxing with wonderful company. Anna is currently schooling John on places to visit in Alaska and New Orleans, much to our benefit.

Now it’s tomorrow (today), and we’re headed for Brooklyn. We narrowly avoided taking on a hitchhiker in the form of an adorable kitten named Luca, but only because we’re so mature it hurts.

The above was cowritten by Joh(an)n(a)

Departure!

2005-06-20T07:45:00.000-07:00

It has officially begun. Saturday, June 18 marked our triumphant departure from Washington, DC, and the beginning of the first leg of our trip (short and stumpy though this leg be). We arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia a mere two hours after leaving DC, and have been living in cushy luxury with John’s parents ever since. Despite the fact that this may represent elements of anticlimax, rest assured that we were both so dog tired after all the preparations for leaving that we’re pretty happy to be eating steaks and sleeping in beds and gathering our energies for what is coming – New York City and Montreal. Father's Day was relaxed and good and fatherly--thank you to the Dads and sort-of Dads in both our lives. We also want to thank out wonderful friends who sent us out of DC in style--with a fancy brunch and a bottle of champagne to christen the rig. Despite the fact that it felt oddly like an ethnic wedding celebration (circular dancing was involved), we appreciate the well wishing and well wish that we could have brought you all along. (See picture below--skip it if "eeewwwww, that's grosssssss" is still in your vocabulary.)

Eventually—we promise—we’ll get off the East Coast and out of our parents' homes.

To the Wonderful Preschoolers at Bright Horizons

2005-06-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write a note for my favorite kids that I know and so I write to you and hope that you will write back to me too. It was exciting for me to see you this morning at school. I was very glad to get to show you our "wooden truck" with all of our boxes inside. You had some great ideas for things that we should bring with us in the boxes to keep us entertained on our trip and we made a list of all of the games and books and coloring supplies so that we dont get bored while we are driving across miles of highways. Thanks for your help.

Hanna and I will miss a lot of things about Washington DC but for me, the thing that I will miss most is you. You kids were my reason for getting out of bed each day that we had school. You gave me a place to ride my red bicycle and you gave me lots of hugs when I got hurt by those cars. I loved being able to spend my time and energy and life with 30 of the coolest kids that I could imagine.

Now this is important so turn on your ears!

You all are some of the most creative and loving people that I have ever known. Most bigger kids and every adult I know could learns a lot of lessons from you preschoolers. That's right, you can be a teacher to people who are bigger than you! You could teach them how to put away your toys when you are finished, or how to give somebody you love a hug, or how to draw a picture and give it to a friend, or how to take a deep breath when things feel like just too much to deal with. You don't have to do it bossy or mean, but everybody needs reminders sometimes. You are on your way to doing great things and my greatest hope is that as you grow older you will remember some of those lessons and share all of what you do with the people that you love.

You have taught me many lessons that I will not soon forget. You all are important people in my life and I will keep reading your Goodbye Book that you made for me so I can smile everytime that I feel sad. Keep doing what you do best: being a kid. Have fun every day and don't forget to laugh at everything you think is funny in the world.

Love
Mr. John

The Ballad of Brinkman Rose

2005-05-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

Like the excited parents of brand new stuff that we are, we've gone the extra step toward absurdity and given the truck a surname. We are the proud owners of a lumbering vehicle -- too large for his britches, but with a boyish disposition and effervescent rust -- the nerdy and mildly effeminate foundling: Brinkman Rose.

It was an agonizing process, involving massively unproductive hours in my cube, navigating through the online etymology dictionary, and long, rambling discussions about the finer and lesser qualities of words like "hack" and "vag" (rhymes with "bag," and short, in case you have an awful mind, for "vagabond"). "Brinkman" was an early contender and managed to play his realpolitik right, pitting our desire for something "American-sounding" (and therefore rural, slangy, and probably horsey) against the unavoidable fact that nothing is as American as brinkmanship. That was our nod to the America we inherited -- great, aggressive, modern place that it is.

The evolution of the surname is a more interesting case, and probably confirms the suspicions of my college roommate that I am "a big, fat nerd." We begin with the fact that (1) As we have considered our impending departure, and the things we'll find along the way,Democracy in America has been very much on our minds. There is the obvious reason that de Tocqueville was perhaps the most insightful observer of American government and, intrinsically (it follows), American culture ever to exist. The more compelling fact is that he was, to use the old turn of phrase, a stranger in a strange land. And I can't escape the eerie feeling that most Americans are as strange to me now as they were to this intellectual Frenchman two centuries ago. I'm no French diplomate, but I feel a kinship with his purpose. We proceed to the fact that (2) This year marks the 200th anniversary of de Tocqueville's birth. Pull the loose ends together, and we have (3) The beginnings of a namesake. It's quite obvious, however, that you can't name a truck Brinkman de Tocqueville. Or Alexis Brinkman. We had to dig further.

De Tocqueville was hired by the French government to study the U.S. penal system, which is massively funny, in a sad sort of way, given that one hallmark of the "success" of our legal institutions has been to create the largest population of prison inmates in the world -- over 2 million in 2004, or about 1 of every 150 Americans. Funny, sad, and a perfect example of a rather sinister form of American brinkmanship -- escalate to avoid concessions, at all cost. (The cost, if you're interested, is about $45 billion.)

John, as many of you know, has been involved in the anti-death penalty and prison reform movement for many years. So when I brought up the idea of naming the truck after some rickety old country prison or archetypal American supermax, he was reluctant to hang such a heavy albatross around Brinky's neck. Talking me down from my morbid fascination, he proposed that we stick with the same general idea, but give it a good kick in the pants. Thus was born our new fascination: great American prison breaks. After leafing through textbooks and Foucault, and rifling the Internet, we stumbled upon our hero, the architect of one of the greatest prison escapes of the Civil War.

Col. Thomas E. Rose, of the Union Army's 77th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, was captured at the Battle of Chicamunga in September 1863. Rather than endure the conditions in the makeshift Libby Prison (known to inmates as "Rat Hell"), he organized secrecy-sworn fellow prisoners to dig a tunnel that led outside the prison wall. The men rotated night shifts, digging with a chisel, knife, and fingers through a subterranean cavity squirming with rats and the stench of sewage. One unhappy tunneller wrote, "it was almost impossible for us to get pure air enough to sustain life while working in the tunnel. We were often pulled out by our comrades, suffocated and exhausted, nearer dead than alive." After 17 days of exhausting and fearful work, the men broke ground only to realize they were still on the wrong side of the wall. The (apparently) bumbling idiots running the prison failed to notice the hole. After two more days of scraping and clawing, the prisoners had finally tunneled their way to liberty and emerged in a shed just outside of the prison gates. The next evening, under cover of that most American of entertainments -- the prison yard musical variety show* -- 109 Union soldiers crawled to freedom under the improvisatory command of Col. Thomas E. Rose.

*This might not be true. But if you've seen Titicut Follies and appreciate my sense of humor, you'll agree that it must have happened.

And there you have it, a (far too?) detailed accounting of the origins and kinships informing the praenomen and cognomen of our two-ton baby boy, Brinkman Rose.

It is our manifest destiny

2005-04-25T13:10:00.000-07:00

In one of our first real conversations, anticipating our first kiss by about 10 hours, John asked me: If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would it be? My instantaneous answer was: America. I described my desire, rather secretly held, to take a year or so to drive around the country, stopping to freelance or mow lawns when I needed money. Alone, it wasn't likely to happen -- for all sorts of reasons. And I admit I felt a little silly about the romance of it all.

Funny thing, then, that we're deep into the planning stages of our American safari. And rather than be embarrassed by the romance of it, it's turned into something of its own romantic endeavor. It turns out that John shared a similar notion.

We are departing Washington, D.C. in the middle of June. We'll be keeping folks up to date about our travels through this blog, but it's not going to be some long-winded, writerly thing, we cross our hearts and hope to stay alive. As long as we have internet access, we hope to keep track of where we've been, where gas prices punch you in the face hardest, and point out those weird little hellholes no one should ever visit, so you can be sure never to visit.

Let our enemies not begin

"in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

Still unnamed. But this lovely peice of machinery, our 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser, will get the best from us. We'll keep you posted.