November 17, 2006 Colorado City, Texas 8:30AM

Pushed hard Wednesday (Olathe, Kansas) and Thursday (Colorado City, Texas), over 1400 miles.

Heard about a winter tune-up in Dallas at a Toyota dealer: "Bring your car in now. Cooling system tune-up." Hmmm.

Ate breakfast in Kansas, lunch in Oklahoma, and what passed for dinner in Texas. Today I will make it to Imperial, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

Pace a little hard to feel like vacation, though today that should change.

Finished the Ancient Greek Civilization course. Start on a McMurty cd today.

Stayed in Microtel and a Day’s Inn. Basic lodging under $50 bucks a night. Not bad. Gas cheaper than home, 2.09 most places.

This is Bush land and it feels weird to be here.

November 17, 2006 8:30PM Marfa, Texas Hotel Paisano

Now for the comic relief. Feel like I’ve stumbled onto the Carl Hiaasen Florida equivalent, west Texas.

The Collier’s deeded over to Mark, Mary, and me a plot of land that Tony bought on E-Bay. A scam that Sharon, at the Ft. Stockton Pioneer, has exposed in several articles over the last few years. It seems many, many people have come to Pecos County to look at their land, all of which came from the Betty Hargis Ranch. Betty was a friend of Sharon’s who sold off her small holdings—ten sections!—to a company who then parceled them out in 40 acre lots—16 to a section for a total of 160 parcels.

These two shots, though not of the land, may as well be.  It's like this.

The water is salty, the soil alkaline, and in the summers the land is full of jack rabbits and rattlesnakes.

The land is ours. Why? I have no idea. All the Colliers signed the deed granting it to us. The transaction putting us on the deed happened in August, 2005, after Tony died.

This also means that we have two parcels of land somewhere in Texas and Oklahoma, but we don’t know where. Quite a drive for such a strange tale.

There are a lot of good people here. Debbie Brayton at the Pecos County Tax Assessor office located in the Buena Vista school building made phone calls and located stuff I needed. She also told me to talk to Bart Reid, who owns the Shrimp Store where I ate lunch.

Bart went over to his house and got out his ownership map and located our parcel, maybe. If he’s right, we own a forty that abuts his shrimp ranch. Shrimp ranch in the middle of west Texas, on the alkaline bed of the Permian sea? Yes. Turns out he’s a marine biologist who pumps salt water up from shallow wells, collects in holding ponds, and grows shrimp. Right there outside Imperial. He also cooks them and sells them along with his wife. He came down here because he wanted to own something, had little cash, and "…needed to go where land was cheap."

The woman at the Tax Assessor office looked up our section and copied, at no charge three pages showing others who own land in it.

When I went to the county clerk’s office, the woman said, this is an e-bay property. It began to fall into place. Tony Collier loved schemes. He would have bought land on the internet.

She mentioned Sharon, whom I visited.

This made for interesting Friday, driving through Midland (home of George and Laura Bush) and Odessa, then taking Texas 1053 through land covered with mesquite and sand. There were hills, then flat surfaces, but it all had an uninhabited look and feel.

The human sign took the form of pump jacks, signs for various petroleum and energy companies. Tanker trucks came and went. Odd sized holding tanks popped up now and then.

Windmills cranked in some places. A few cattle wandered among the mesquite.

The Pecos River distinguishes itself here by having water. It is the only surface water in the county.

Water comes to Imperial from wells somewhere around Ft. Stockton.

This is a land untouched by winter as I know it, though the evenings are cool, pleasant.

Tonight I’m in Marfa, where Donald Judd, a minimalist artist bought an airstrip and set up a plein-air museum.

Sharon used to live in Marfa, but, "It’s become an artist’s colony. You know how Santa Fe was in the 50’s and 60’s? That’s Marfa right now." This was damning commentary for her, but it underlined my desire to see this place. I got in at twilight, so I haven’t seen much.

Except the Hotel Paisano and the county courthouse. Both have an over-the-top feeling in a pleasant sort of way. The Paisano, designed by Henry Trost, "…combines Chicago and Prairie School architecture with the Southwestern idiom." Well, sort of.

The room has comfortable furniture, electricity, and a TV connected to the sci-fi channel and cbs which let me watch Battlestar Galactica and Numbers, the only TV I’ve watched so far.

Now, I plan to meander a bit more. I want to make sure I get to Breckenridge on Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. The only worklike thing I have is the U-Haul stuff in Phoenix.

November 18, 2006 Hotel Paisano 8:30AM 32 degrees, Sunny

Bit better rested. In earlier last night, a full night’s sleep. Must be some sleep deprivation since I’ve not had a nap since I left home. Planned to visit Chinanti foundation museum today, but, it is a Saturday on a gallery weekend in Alpine, so I’m pretty sure the tours (limited) will be full.

Going to go eat breakfast, wander through town a bit, then head out toward Tucson. That will put me in Phoenix mid-morning or so on Sunday. I’ll be able to pack and go. Head out toward Utah, then Colorado and Thanksgiving. The notion of Thanksgiving has a somewhat surreal quality in this dry country. No stubbled fields of corn, no gray, snow laden clouds crawling down from the north. Southwestern architecture and Thanksgiving don’t fit for me.

Breakfast at the Austin Street Café. Yogurt and berries. Tasty. Book for Ruth, jelly and dip mix for Joe, a t-shirt: There are no borders, where there is love, for Kate.

Ready to hit the road.

Sharon’s comments about Marfa made me reflect on the way change rustles folks, and not so underneath. Here, a culture of maybe a hundred years, cowboy/ranch culture, finds itself displaced by "trust-funders and artists." That is, folks who do not labor for their daily bread. An interesting manifestation of Classical Greek attitudes, inverted. There, slaves did the labor and the farming, while the citizens focused on civic affairs and culture.

It is evident from a walk around town that the two cultures have begun a kind of dance, a slow dance, where each partner gets to the know the other, bit by bit. Old adobe commercial buildings have become architects studios, art galleries, Marfa Books, and Marfa Public Radio. A new adobe structure, gray, with a metal roof sits across from the ginger bread courthouse. It is has careful plantings of a feathered grass, set off by one yucca, and three oaks. The effect quotes from the local design, but adapts it to a different, more austere aesthetic.

I will return here with Kate. Take some time, go on down to Big Bend, finally see that mysterious place of my childhood fantasies.

November 18, 2006 Tucson, Az. 6pm MST

Took about 8 hours to drive here from Marfa. The drive along Tx 90 went through a desert like environment with low mountains in the far distance until the road neared US 10. Then, the mountains came into range of each other. At that end the name Antelope Valley showed up. In Antelope Valley there was some irrigation, a pecan plantation and what appeared to be alfalfa fields.

Before Antelope Valley the land stretched out on either side of the two lane black top, sage brush and a low grass dotted with a few yucca plants. No cattle save for a couple of spots. A strange thing appeared in the sky, a blimp, white against the blue sky. It had antenna hanging down from its front. It floated 1000/1500 feet above a USAF installation. It had an antenna on the ground that looked like a kitchen implement meant for straining soup. The sign read, USAF tethered ? weather station.

Odd. I have pictures.

Once on the highway I drove through yet more of Texas. It is big. Ate lunch in El Paso, then on toward Phoenix. Got stopped at a Border Patrol Station along with every west bound vehicle. Got waved on through but a german sheperd sniffed excitedly, tail wagging, at the trunk of a new black Mustang. The young driver leaned spread eagled on the hood.

This stretch of highway runs very close to the Mexican border.

November 19, 2006 7AM Tucson, AZ sunrise over the mountains

Slept a solid 8 hours. Spent some of the nighttime creating TV channels. One was an all OJ, all the time. Football games, trial coverage, movies. Another which seemed really good, I can’t recall. Must be the companionship of the television on a long journey.

Last night I felt exhausted and dispirited. The La Quinta said Visa would not honor my card. The desk clerk was snippy, I was tired. Left and went right next door to the Best Western. Where the card worked, as it should.

The effect of the uncertainty when I felt worn out sent my spirits down. Not gonna do this anymore. Long trips where a lot of driving keeps me going 8/9 hours a day. Stupid. Too old.

Better rested this AM and glad I’m in Tucson watching the sun come over the mountains.

This kind of traveling has its merits. I see a lot of country in a compact amount of time and for an economical budget.

The United States is difficult to grasp as a whole without taking lots of roads in many different parts of the country. Going from Andover to Marfa, Texas in three days drops over 14 degrees of latitude. The weather changed. Fall slipped away, shading over gradually into late summer. Green began to show up in southern Kansas and by the time I got to Imperial what trees there were had leaves, the mesquite was green.

Now, in Arizona, the temp will hit 85 today. Not my kinda November, but interesting to experience anyhow.

November 19, 2006 Cameron, Arizona

Cameron Trading Post & Motel & Restaurant & Filling Station

Got into Phoenix around 9:15 AM MST. Had breakfast at a Waffle House.

Drove past Sky Harbor and the barrel cactus football field, turned left on Bell Blvd in Peoria.

U-Haul storage went along fine except for the 90 degree! weather. Stuff all fit into the truck, I got back on the 101 headed north. Picked up US 17 and made it as far as Cameron. Stopped at 4PM.

Will see northern Arizona and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the Capitol Reef National Park tomorrow. Then, into Breckenridge Tuesday.

November 20, 2006 8AM Cameron, etc. clear, chilly morning

My room here overlooks la petite canyon. It has a beautiful suspension bridge. An oil company bought and closed the bridge in order to run a pipeline across it. Too bad.

The Cameron Trading Post has a bit of everything. The native crafts it has in the trading post range from laughable through terrible to quite stunning. The nicest items are Dine (Navajo) blankets and turquoise and silver jewelry.

I ate a passable lunch/dinner here yesterday and plan to try to give it a try for breakfast.

Learned one thing last night. It gets cold here after the sun goes down. The folks living in the hogans, trailers, and scattered homes need to have a good source of heat and plenty of blankets. This is a Dine reservation, the one Tony Hillerman uses in his books. Tuba City lies a few miles away.

This land has a starkness, a spiritual poverty of plant life. Kate Tucker, UU minister at First Universalist, comes here for retreats and I can see why. Jesus could have wandered here for forty days and forty nights.

Yesterday I drove from 90 degree heat to 58 degrees in a bit over an hour and a half.

This land is special enough for a 60^th birthday trip in an RV. Kate and I could see it over the course of three weeks or so. With plenty left over.

Read material I’ve written for the liberal ge-ology. It is strong and needs, deserves expansion.

This trip has extended the notion of an American Shinto into new locales, new sacred ground. The southwest desert before irrigation, the poor pasture but great desert in west Texas, and the high desert here in northern Arizona speak.

They say, listen.

The story we have to tell and the spirit in which it is told is your story. Our mother has borne both of us, put us together as partners on a journey eons long, of which this portion is only the blink of an eye, the time it takes a rain drop to fall to earth.

Instead of the fight, the struggle we have in trying to adapt to each others ferocity, why can we not call a truce? Learn how and where we can exist to mutual benefit.

Yes, this is a constant process of awareness, but we both have plenty of time. Let’s get started.

November 20, 2006 Prospector Inn Escalante, Utah 7:56PM

Ate a delicious salmon salad and bumbleberry pie at Cowboy Blues, the only restaurant open in this small town on the border of the Escalante/Grand Staircase National Monument. As I walked the two and a blocks up Scenic Highway 12, a horse whinnied and I smelled a wood-burning stove. On my way back the black sky had stars I could see even with my glasses off and the silence was complete.

After I left visitor center for the Glen Canyon dam, a recurring thought surfaced. I find happiness among wild and ruined and beautiful things: Angkor, the high desert, the Boundary Waters, Conwy Castle, Castle Dinas Brun, Pompeii, Ephesus, Delos, Delphi. The corridor from Tucson to Phoenix sets my teeth on edge, makes me want to be somewhere else, almost anywhere else.

As I began the descent this morning toward Page, Arizona and the Colorado River, a dirty olive stain hung like a shroud on the Utah horizon. Three smoke stacks belched a white gas into the air and it polluted this scene which only half a century or so ago, had neither dam nor smog. On the hand this seems hopelessly neo-Luddite, on the other naively green, but in its first force the feeling is disgust and despair. These emotions serve no agenda, rather they signal a blasphemy so obvious that any faith tradition on earth would immediately banish its creators. Instead, we send them hundreds of millions of dollars and put their photographs in newspapers.

The sacrilege, what else can I call it, hit with great strength because the blessed emptiness of the high desert and the vast expanse of the Chihuahuan desert in west Texas had blotted up the ugliness of the "golden corridor." Since I’d never traveled this road before, the smog and the dam were both surprises to me, surprises at a moment of meditation and immersion in the vastness the deserts offered.

It was like finding money changers at the temple.

Later, as I drove Cottonwood Road through the Escalante/Grand Staircase National Monument the peace of that time returned. At one point a flock of blue birds flew in and out of the grass, giving splashes of color to a scene of brown grasses and tan rock. At another an old cowboy herded a group of 12 cows, both he and his horse ambling at the same speed as the unconcerned stock. Further on I came to trees typical of the krummholz boundary, though this seemed too low for that.

The krummholz boundary, boundary of the crooked trees, occurs at that altitude just below the line where trees can no longer grow. Those trees that occupy the krummholz boundary are hardy specimens, but they pay in price in the contortions of their limbs necessary to achieve optimal advantage in a hostile climate.

I first saw krummholz trees after I had learned of the boundary at the Yellowstone eco-system museum in Cody, Wyoming. These trees, in the Beartooth mountain shout survivor. Like the Saguaro cactus I photographed outside of black canyon, Arizona these trees have become a natural expression of the beauty of age. They are wabi-sabi.

A while back I thought of tree portraits, careful works of art that reveal the spiritual strength of these great plants. I will put some of my drawing practice to that purpose.

I wonder if I have a krummholz soul, twisted with the contortions necessary to adapt in a hostile environment, yet far from dead. Not able to move up and unwilling to move down.

This adventure has one more night to run since I wandered so much today. Tomorrow Capitol Reef National Park and points east.

November 21, 2006 8:00AM Esclanate, Utah

Another sunny, clear day thanks to a southerly jet stream that holds the winter weather further north.

This trip is, as most trips are, a journey through time. It started with an investigation into our father’s family and land they may have owned. The Imperial, Texas question became a facet of another young man’s story, Tony Collier, now deceased. As the green truck went west, we moved into Johnson family time, the decision of Rebecca and Merton to move to Arizona. They died there, and in true George Carlin style, I went to collect some of their stuff.

When the U-Haul storage center was behind me, the time framed shifted into the near time past of our country and the movements of the Dine people through the West until they settled in the desert north of what is now Flagstaff. On their land, dotted with hogans, physical representations of the Dine creation story, they live a sparse life guided by the Beauty way.

While on the Dine reservation, the time frame shifted again. Now to geological time, a deep time, one whose physical memory lies bared in the rock faces of the Grand Canyon, the Grand Staircase, and the other formations of the National Parks in Utah.

This deep time, the time frame of mother earth and her own journey from young planet to mature world, rests embedded in an even deeper well of time. As I walked back last night from Cowboy Blues, the darkness of the heavens fell around my shoulders, and chronos itself, too, for it is in the particularity of this cosmos that even mother earth is young.

All the time frames of this trip occur in the context of the universe, folded in on one another like a delicate omelet or filo dough. Last night I saw the bony structure of the ancient universe, still speaking to us through points of light. Our yesterdays and our tomorrows have both happened and are not yet since nothing is lost and all remains available.

November 21, 2006 5pm Fruita, Co. Clear day. Comfort Inn

Forgot to mention here last night the Milford Fire Rescue volunteer who went back of the house at Cowboy Blues and fixed a non-responding beer tap. "A multi-talented team you must have at Milford."

He asked me if I wanted a beer, but since 1979 I’ve said no.

Went to a place in Escalante called Native Drums. Talked to Lane, a drum-maker. Lane had on a Timber Line Logging jacket, sported a multiply broken nose, and had the leather face of a smoker and outdoorsman.

He took me through the drum making process. Saw. Then dove and biscuit joints on "an angle we choose." Then gluing. Drying. Taking one of the hides purchased from Fox Tannery in Salt Lake City after putting in water. Drum head and laces get put on wet. When they dry, a tight drum.

Lane said the hide is so strong than once in a while the hide breaks the drum body. He showed me a round drum bent out of shape by the drying rawhide. They use buffalo, elk, and cowhide. They have a website.

Most of the drums, Lane said, end up as furniture. I asked him if he cared, since he created musical instruments. "As long the inventory moves, I don’t care."

I left Escalante planning to eat breakfast at the next open restaurant. Worked out, but I didn’t realize it would be 60 miles away in Torre, near the turn to Capitol Reef National Park.

The ride between Escalante and Torre was on a scenic byway that lived up to its name. At one point the road ran along the narrow crest of a ridge with nothing on either side but a steep slope of gravel and boulders. The views give a clear sense of the difference between the Upper Midwest and the West. At one point I could see distance Apache Mtn. over 60 miles away. You can’t see that far even on the unobstructed great plains.

Utah and northern Arizona are place defined by empty spaces, empty that is, of much civilization, filled however, with grand escarpments, rapid rivers, rocks of many colors and a plethora of shapes and forms.

In Escalante I performed a modern magical act. I told my sister in Singapore, and my brother, visiting Paske, Laos about land that had mysteriously appeared in our lives. Land in Texas that I had visited only two days prior; land purchased on E-Bay as it turned out. They both communicated back with me and I picked up their messages before I left Escalante in the morning.

Tomorrow the Thanksgiving pressure cooker begins. Many unrelated people, unfamiliar with each other, will spend four days together at a location none of them have seen. I plan to get a good rest tonight and to reorganize the truck in the morning so Kate can ride home with me.

9:30PM Fruita Comfort Inn

Yesterday I drove on a bed of oyster shells laid down when the land now in Utah was underwater, a salty sea. Today I saw petroglyphs punched into living sandstone over a thousand years ago by members of the Fremont Culture. I also walked up to a former uranium mine and took a hike down a wash where the sandstone cliffs towered hundreds of feet over my head.

William Murry (in this months issue of the UU World) in his religious humanistic naturalism declares nature neither moral nor immoral. We need, he believes, a human context for morality to emerge. Ethics is the more appropriate category I believe, but in any case I think he’s wrong.

While it may be true that morality is a human construct, it does not mean that the universe is either lawless or within purpose. Evolution, which as a secular humanist, Murry must embrace, has its own logic. Adaptation provides an ethical law; change or die.

Let me see if I can say this. The uranium and the oysters and the Fremont culture represent the same dynamic, creative force that pulses throughout the universe. This totality of creativity is something to which we humans belong, and over which we have little or no control.

Yes, we may, for absurdly short periods of time measured even against the relative youth of mother earth, gain a mechanistic advantage over the waters of the Colorado River at the Glen Canyon Dam. We may dig up, transport, and transform metals from the Minnesota Iron Range. We may grow more and more food, inhabit larger and larger cities, but the cyclical, regenerative transformations of matter to energy and back again assure us that we will never lose the need to adapt. Never.

So, it is hubristic in the extreme to measure ethics and morality with solely anthropic referents. Morality and ethics are important for human community, no doubt, but to place human choices as more than temporary, exigent factors in the long stretch of cosmic creation and destruction, the Shiva dance of the universe, is to radically misunderstand the context in which we find ourselves.

November 22, 2006 7:18AM Fruita, Co. Comfort Inn

I can see the famous Colorado National Monument from my third floor window, only I can’t find it.

This is the last morning before Breckenridge. I’m looking forward to seeing everybody and to end the traveling on my own. I enjoy the journey but it’s also good to have companions.

The lone automobile trip, whether in rush hour (why do they call it rush hour when everyone creeps?) or on the road, is an accurate metaphor for life. We live alone, contained in our own vehicle. We pass others by, look in the window at them as we pass. Based on slim evidence like color and make of car, any bumper stickers or articles in the car, we try to figure out what the other traveler is like. Most of the time we give each other room, look for their safety and our own as a matter of course, though, sometimes the rage gets us, or inattention and we bring injury to both of us.

We meet each other at refueling stops, or when the car needs repair, but then we pick up and go on about our business.

November 23, 2006 Breckenridge, Colorado 9:37 AM 43 LoneHand Dr

Got into Breckenridge about 1 yesterday. Joseph was off so we had a chance to catch up. He has job angst, not unusual at his age. But, he got the go ahead to ski, so that helps. And, the local air force recruiter has decided to put his name in again this December. Both of those mitigate the bad work juju.

We stumbled around the mountain roads a bit and located the Thanksgiving place. Then, we wandered around some more, relying on his local knowledge as a guide. We ended up pretty much where I thought we would, near parking lot D. The gondola will take folks from there up to the lifts at the base of the mountains.

Downtown Breck had a lot of tourists, but it did not qualify as busy to Joseph, a local now, and filled with the locals ambivalence to the crowds who came into their town. "I know they make our paychecks, but it’s still a hassle." Yep. Built in. The same sociology as the town versus gown struggles of the middle ages.

Joseph guided me to a Mexican place tucked back in behind an art gallery.

"The worst art in Breckenridge," he said. Yep.

We had a good meal together and I took him home, then drove up to Lonehand Drive on Peak 7. All the Thanksgiving folks had gathered: Barry and Barb from Tennessee, Andy and family from North Carolina, Mike and ? from Rhode Island, Jon and Jen from Denver, and Kate and me from Minnesota.

Slept with marginal results until Ruth woke up. After that up and at the joys of a family holiday.

The drive from Grand Junction to Breckenridge is a tour of mountain building processes. Sandstone mesas and granite peaks. Worth learning more about it.

November 24, 2006 10:14AM Lonehand Drive Breck 27 & clear

"The habit of ignoring Nature is deeply implanted in our times. This attitude reminds me of people who never look you in the eye; I find them disturbing and always have to look away." - Marc Chagall

By coincidence the readings for next week are on American art. Just finished a Cole’s essay on the place of rural nature in American painting. He emphasizes mountains, water: waterfalls, lakes, and rivers, forests, sky, and seasons. He does not mention soil, fauna, or what we would call the variety of biospheres.

Reading Cole after having come through northern Arizona, southern Utah, and western Colorado inspired me. It made me want to work on a novel set during the American Renaissance.

Cole and Emerson especially emphasized the revelation inherent in nature as prior to and superior to written documents. This Romanticism and the panfiedistic (aha) spirituality it engendered are the roots of an American Shinto. It is also the base, along with the nascent higher criticism, of an American existentialist (individualist) anthropology. A communitarian politics will not emerge until the mid-part of the century. (You may say, but what of the revolution?)

The revolution was on behalf of propertied males. An egalitarian communitarian perspective would not arise until the revolutions of 1848, Marx & Engles, and the strange story of the America Civil War and its immediate aftermath.

Thanksgiving yesterday. Barry noted its roots in a false history of the Puritan contact with the Indians. True. But, I believe even more important now is its actual institution by Abraham Lincoln, and its gradual wide acceptance by the American population as a whole. Today it vaults in importance due to its areligious, but ubiquitous observance. In Denver yesterday the interfaith Thanksgiving service was led by an Imam. We held a predominantly Jewish dinner here, with no religious overtones at all.

Thanksgiving can become an American holiday embraced by Latinos, Asians, Anglo-Europeans, Indians, Jews, and secular humanists alike. New Years, Memorial Day, July 4^th, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving are moments in time when all Americans can come together and celebrate both our unity and our diversity. As the religious and ethnic breadth of America continues to accelerate the importance of these civic holidays will grow.

We ate, watched football, had side conversations of an intimate nature, grew restless, then sleepy.

November 24, 2006 3:18 PM Lonehand Drive cloudy, cool

The close in family time has worked its magic on me and I want to go hide, but I’ve not felt up to getting out and about since I have had so much trip time in the last week. So, I went down and took a nap, read a book.

The altitude has affected Kate’s baking, so on to the net for advice. Found some. Without a printer I’ll have to have Kate read it online.

Tomorrow Joe and I will go snowshoeing at a place he knows. It will be my first time on snowshoes in three years, since the two years when it was my major aerobic exercise in winter.

Joe’s life here has abundant rewards and few drawbacks. The rewards are a community of athletes, skiing in the winter, hiking and mountain biking in the summer. All year round there are mountains, rivers, trees, and wild-life. The rec center is a gathering point for athletes, both as employees and clients. This yields friends and connections in a small town where those are important and sometimes hard to come by.

This has given him a contingent of loyal friends who have stood by him when he broke his leg and have him over for dinner, poker, nights out.