High Winds White Sky

28 January, 2013                                                                                                                                                                Russellsville, Arkansas

Leaving Texas

The fourth day of July

Sun so hot

The clouds so low,

The eagles filled the sky, 

                                             

-Weir, Hunter

We left Amarillo under clear morning skies, sunburned from a tailgate in the pool area, somewhat culturally deprived from not seeking out the heart of the city. After having had tailgates in the Arizona and New Mexico deserts in clear weather, we had missed the opportunity in Thursday’s and Sunday’s rain.

The traffic had been relatively light, and all we faced was the insane manifesto to cross Oklahoma without stopping. We stopped three or four times, and ratified the agreement to mean not spending the night.

Central Oklahoma

Is my land, it’s my country

Eastern Oklahoma is a beautiful sight.

Northern Oklahoma might as well be Kansas,

Never go to Southern Oklahoma at night.

-John Fullbright

The land went back to flat, as far as the eye could see in every direction. It began to be relieved by silhouettes of treelines at the perimeter of fields, a sense of scale moderating the emptiness. Then it began to drop away into canyons, and rise, and undulate.

As Oklahoma plays a pivotal role in both sides of my family, I felt a certain compulsion to stop and do research. As it maintains a reputation for roadside shakedowns, searches and seizures, and draconian marijuana sentencing guidelines, I declined the first urge.

The border of Arkansas came nary a minute too soon, and we strangely found ourselves in a dry county. I’d heard of such things, but never had to contend with one firsthand. Somewhere in the highway netherworlds of traffic stations and cheap motels, we found ourselves checking into a motel, and having the dry zone described as twenty miles in every direction.

I couldn’t help but wonder if the proprietor wasn’t the source of such a mandate, being the epicenter and all.

We’re attempting to make Louisville tomorrow, after which we hope to attain our smokehouse climes the following day, or if the weather’s good….maybe enjoy the penultimate day of the journey at Seneca Rocks.

We had stopped for lunch east of Hydro, west of OK City by some 40 miles, at a Sonic drive-through. I noticed that most of the guys who were waiting for their orders were wearing green coveralls with a graphic that looked like a smokestack holding a pistol. Closer examination revealed the brand, FracTech, and I knew we were in deep, dark fracking enthusiast country.

The earthly violence of fracking has been politically tied to jobs in a move to decrease the apparent dangers to the land, water supply and seismic stability. As of this juncture, the earthquake that had its epicenter near Mineral Virginia August 23, 2012 has been connected to fracking activity roughly 100 miles away. It’s not far removed from a jobs program to destroy the Earth.

Cadillac Ranch

28 January, 2013                                                                                                                                                            Amarillo, Texas

We left Albuquerque in the rain, riding up the Sandia Crest. By the time we went through Edgewood and Moriarty we were back in high altitudes, with snow on the ground.

The crested buttes and distant mountains settled into more gentle topography, then flatness. We crossed any number of dry washes under bridges, and I reflected on crossing the Mojave River in California, which looked to have never seen water. We had stopped on a wash road for midday respite in Arizona, Black Canyon Wash Road.

After a good Southwestern meal in Santa Rosa, we headed for Tucumcari. I was reflecting on Lowell George’s song Willing, and the line, And I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonapah, and had decided he included the reference after concluding nobody would ever write a song about Tucumcari.  There wasn’t much there, but what was, was listed on a highway sign, 30 modern Stations, 24 Motels, etc.

As we crossed into Texas, the horizons moved further away, and we began to get into the stockyards, and their ambient implications. In the middle of Nowhere, thinking how it takes two days to cross Texas in most directions, we saw a group of cars parked off the road and I recognized Cadillac Ranch.

Apparently an acceptable graffiti destination in Texas, Cadillac Ranch has become a symbol of Americana, like Route 66 still winding back and forth. It was created as a public art destination in 1974 by Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez and Doug Michels, in conjunction with Ant Farm. It features several cadillacs, an evolution of  designs from the late Twentieth Century, all nose down in the desert.

Curiously, it is an accepted destination for those who would otherwise apply graffiti to unacceptable venues.

We arrived in Amarillo in time to realize it was still summer here, and our unwritten objective of maintaining the Endless Summer was going to be extended for a weekend.

Sandia

26 January, 2013

Albuquerque, New Mexico

I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah

-Lowell George

Waking in the city of my birth, it was cool and cloudy.  The Sandia Mountains rose beyond the valley with snow on the upper reaches. We decided to take a day’s respite from the road, after 1300 miles in 4 days, and went into the adobe district of Old Town for a walking tour.

Starting at Fellow Traveler Antoine Predock’s Albuquerque Museum, we crossed around the South and East exposures, making photos and sniffing bushes. Kaya seemed particularly eager to go exploring and left little uninspected.

We checked out the Museum of Natural History, with its two domes, meandering about Tiguex Park, towards the Explora Children’s Museum. Explora has a playful quality to its layout, a multi-colored geodesic dome and kinetic machines, some driven by wind. As the building curves back to the Northeast, Old Town Street splits to the Southeast, and the architecture is all adobe, with its freeform tendencies, poles framing the roof extending beyond the walls.

I noticed that the adobe was actually simulated adobe, or cement stucco stained the color of mud.

The smells of pinon pine drifting through the courtyards and alleyways gave me a sense of déjà vu, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it went back to my childhood. I distinctly remember that soothing smell from camping trips into the Sierra Nevada Mountains as a youth.

Albuquerque is a city with a vibrant passion for the arts, and the overpasses and streetscape furniture reflects not only artistic decoration, but regional motifs like the art rock figures from the Anasazi Indians, iguanas, scorpions and snakes. Phoenix was similarly decorated, seemingly awakened to the arts by the presence of Taliesin.

My father told me that he used to ski at a slope operated by Ben Abruzzo who went on to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. The Anderson-Abruzzo Hot Air Balloon Museum is built adjacent to Balloon Festival Park, which when the festival is not happening, is several hundred acres of open space.  I had been considering that the scale of travel profoundly affects the architecture of our ports and portals, train stations, airports, seaports, like the Embarcadero, in San Francisco.

The scale of the Balloon Museum is apparent in its openness, being a unique, perhaps bizarre building, solitary in its setting, the scale is not decidedly human or urban, but that of the sky.

We walked around our fringe neighborhood at twilight, finding a vacant lot in which to play ball. Kaya got quite excited and bossy about the whole affair. It’s good to see her showing so much spirit.

She took a little demonstration on rooftop doggery during our sojourn through the adobe district:

Above and below the grade: Into The Cold

 25 January, 2013

 Albuquerque, New Mexico

Well, I'm a standing on a corner 
in Winslow, Arizona 
and such a fine sight to see

Songwriters: BROWNE, JACKSON / FREY, GLENN

We came up route 17 from North Phoenix, deciding against going South through Tucson into Las Cruces, and veered East on 260, into the Coconino National Forest. I had just had a conversation with my friend, Palmer, asking how something with no trees qualifies as a forest, when we went over the opening crest, and ran into the first snow since the Cascades, last October.

There was an immediate foot of snow, plowed from the road a couple of days ago, signs warning about ice, and the air got cold. We were also in tall conifers, pines, firs, cedars and junipers, and understood the forest designation. We crested somewhere around 9000 feet, seeing a sign for 7500 on the way down. At the top the snow was two feet deep.

Thinking of our dry, warm (83 degrees) respite from the road South of Kingston the day before, sitting in the desert sun, near an old stock ramp and a massive sehuaro cactus, I began to reconsider the Northern route to Albuquerque.

Taking route 87 toward Winslow, remaining in the National forest briefly, the landscape changed from the coniferous forest to blond grasslands, sun-bleached beyond the gold of my memories. The powdery green of the desert sage gave it a faded, familiar sort of worn blue jeans look. Table mesas began to emerge, and ultimately form a gateway into Windsor.

Windsor’s Southern approach is overburdened with ever-decreasing speed-limit signs, accompanied by signs demanding their respect, and after passing the State Prison on the left, I paid close attention. We have rolled over 8000 miles in the overall journey, and 1300 since the North Bay today, and it was not lost on me….well let me not jinx myself.

Filling with gas, at $3.92 per gallon, we regained Highway 40 for Albuquerque, and became fascinated with the scenery.  The grasslands gave way to red and beige cliffs, jutting above and below the grade. As we drew due South of the Four Corners cross between the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, we saw stone formations resembling the Utah slickrock, liquid amorphous expressions lending themselves to pachyderm and anthropomorphic abstractions.

Through Holbrook, Sanders and chambers, we came into Navajo County and the country began to be littered with abandoned dwelling constructs, tractor-trailers without the tractors, mobile homes, desperate immobile winnebagos, and small frame houses, sometimes in a perfect grid, all placed in the dirt.

Gallup is rimmed in slums of the aforementioned character. Lacking the razor-wire fenced scrapyards that introduce Ogden, Utah, it still begins with scrapyards and outposts of abandoned dwellings and businesses. Inside the perimeter I could see some appeal, adobe hilltown meets americana, but I also thought of why guitarist J.J. Cale chooses to live in trailer parks. It looked like a place where everybody might know everybody, and thus constitute a defensible neighborhood, despite its poverty.

We came into Albuquerque at 6:30, as twilight settled into dark, and if I had thought Phoenix looked like Dallas at night, Albuquerque looks like Los Angeles, a truly moving spray of lights, filling the valley floor with articulated axes of illumination, spreading into infinity.

Taliesen West

24 January, 2013

Carefree, Arizona

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Matthew 5:6

We spent an hour checking out Kingman before leaving, already an hour behind our normal takeoff time, which seems to be reverting to Virginia standards. Photographing a couple of old motels, juxtaposed against the mountains, we headed East on 40 to 93, South and East, towards Scottsdale, a northern extension of Phoenix.

As soon as we came down 93 from highway 40 toward Wickenburg, we began to see cactus, the tall ones. The turn onto 60 East brought warnings of roadwork.

The desert sage and palmettos began to part further, the sandy soils to become stony, then boulders laying on the ground plane, to mountains of boulders, with cholla and sehuaro cactus, standing tall, like every western Americana motif captured at one time or another. The cactus proceeded to dominate the terrain, no matter how steep or unforgiving, and we began drawing nearer to Mexico.

We arrived at Golden Hour, sunset, after the tours were long over, but caught a couple of photographs, a few with the filling moon in the indigo sky. It was road chaos on the way in, and we accidentally discovered the town of Carefree, North of Scottsdale, before arriving.

As one approaches Scottsdale, Frank Lloyd Wright references abound in the architecture. Then one rides in on Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard. Carefree has a number of houses sited in the mountains and cliffs, many of which are obvious (design) tips of the hat to Wright. It is an affluent community, economically vivacious to the degree that I thought, Larchmont of the Southwest.

Frank Lloyd Wright built Taliesin West fairly late in his career, and he handled the open Arizona country, cactus desert and mountain backgrounds, as a part of the architecture. And the architecture has a way of shaping the landscape around it, bringing order to chaos, and perhaps gaining the opposite in return.

The low forms, the timeless nature of the desert and the rough masonry walls, the slope of the beamed roofs all cause the senses to open. Too late to consider the tours, and traveling nearly eight thousand miles on a budget, I decided to stay nearby and reconsider the panorama tour in the morning.

Having had the requisite confusion coming into town without my ipad being a map, it had taken a while to find Taliesen, as hot-air balloons appeared in the South, dramatic against the mountains beyond. Leaving at dark, into rush hour caused some unnecessary and egregious turns about Northern Phoenix, before we found a place to stay.

Phoenix looks like the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport after dark. It goes on forever.

We woke to find the rain that had come into Seattle as we left California on Monday had caught up with us.

Route 66

23 January, 2013
                                                                                                                                                      Kingman, Arizona

Now you go through saint looey 
Joplin, missouri, 
And oklahoma city is mighty pretty. 
You see amarillo, 
Gallup, new mexico, 
Flagstaff, arizona. 
Don't forget winona, 
Kingman, barstow, san bernandino. 

Won't you get hip to this timely tip: 
When you make that california trip 
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

Freeman, Russ

Route 66 weaves it way back and forth over the newer route 40 frequently. It is a legend about Americana. The heart of it is here in Kingman, Arizona. As a winter storm is forecast for the mid-atlantic for Friday, and rain is following us closely from the Northwest, we are discussing a more southerly trip home.

We left Mojave for points East, passing through California city and past Edwards Air Force Base. The San Gabriel, Sierra Nevada and Sacramento Mountains were more visible in a clearer sky. As the landscape began to feature scrub palmetto trees and cactus, with the ever-present desert sage, the mountains rose higher and became jagged and geometric. Past Boron, the home of borax, Barstow and south of the National Mojave Preserve, we stopped in Newberry Flats to compare gas prices.

As we crossed over the 7500 mile mark since Virginia, and saw a sign reading, Wilmington, North Carolina, 2500 miles, I reflected how the entire trip has been a game of gas futures.  Having passed a station west of Barstow advertising $3.47 per gallon, I ultimately paid $4.39 in Needles for a small ration. Crossing out of California and into Arizona, the price dropped to $2.99, in Lake Havasu City, and I filled to the brim.

We saw a tribute to the Space sector in the form of a geodesic dome with a spiraling stair, all clad in titanium.

Stopping by the Needles BLM headquarters, I picked up some maps, and literature on lava formations and rattlesnakes. The ranger wasn’t familiar with Taliesen West.

After Needles, the highway takes a big dip around Goose Lake, on the Colorado River, and one begins to see strange formations in the landscape. These are lava tubes, formed 7.5 million years ago. Coming through Golden Valley the ridges form a crust and buttes jut above the scree, not unlike much of Utah.

Yesterday’s clouds gave way to clarity today, as I lament not making many photos. Today we embark for Scottsdale, taking 93 South and East out of Kingman, Arizona.

Head East

22 January, 2013                                                                                                                                           Mojave, California

'Cause the free wind is blowin' through your hair 
And the days surround your daylight there 
Seasons crying no despair 
Alligator lizards in the air, in the air 

Bunnell, Dewey

I thought of the Loma Prietas earthquake of 1989, as we got onto the Richmond Bridge. The quake had taken out the double-decker bridge, though Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center had survived with minimal damage. I thought bridges were no longer designed in two levels.

We had left the good graces of the woman I call Saint Jean in Petaluma, just a day late this time. When I was still returning a library book at one in the afternoon, and realized the San Francisco – Atlanta game was airing, I decided to defect to the Lagunitas Taproom. Lagunitas is perhaps the first of six microbreweries in Petaluma, and spawned a couple others, as well as number of interesting legends. They produced a series with Frank Zappa labels, and my friendly neighborhood features a fledgling Zappa museum, so it was a natural.

After the excitement of the bridge, we were spared the normal thick traffic due to the twin holidays, Martin Luther King Jr. and the presidential Inauguration. It was still thick to me, and I just caught drive-by glimpses of Berkeley and Oakland. Oakland looked like Mexico at first glance, a precursor on our way to Bakersfield.

Somehow, where 580 connected to the 5, I got on the 5 North, and had to get off and turn around. Lathrop provided this service and was distinctive in that it motivated us to keep traveling.

Down through the valley, almond and pistachio tree farms gradually yielding to livestock operations and cactus, I was reminded of my childhood. I hadn’t seen southern California in 44 years, and the arid plains and Westerly winds caused me to reflect on the innocence of a youth out chasing lizards.

The haze was too thick to see the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the East, and the foothills on our right grew into minor mountains as the sign read, Los Angeles 138.

Bakersfield, home of Merle Haggard and Roy Buchanan, brief home to Danny Gatton, probably has a guitar museum. As our lunch in Coalinga was failing to keep the engines turning, we stopped at a grocery store before heading East on route 58, toward Arizona. Bakersfield is rimmed in shack slums and portions of the city have been developed into tank farms, electric substations and oil fields. It is not a recommended travel destination.

It felt good when the density of traffic thinned as we motored towards Techahapi. I had hoped to make Barstow, but we decided after an hour of driving after dark that we would stay in Mojave. Today, if we’re lucky, we will go through Barstow and head for Scottsdale, near Phoenix to see some architecture.

It’s good to be back in the desert. It feels honest, inviolate and immobile. Being in the paradise of the North Bay area spoiled us both, I believe, and we are looking forward to some desert therapy. Kaya, during California’s coldest winter in 20 years, has begun shedding, as though it were spring in Virginia.  It’s almost as if she knew it was 80 degrees in Phoenix.