— Barboncito, Navajo leader, to General Sherman at Fort Sumner, May 28, 1868

On June 1, 1868, Lieutenant General William T. Sherman signed an agreement with the Navajo Indian nation that allowed them to return to their native lands. Sherman and his fellow peace commissioner Samuel Tappan, a former Army colonel, had arrived at Fort Sumner in New Mexico in late May and found the conditions of the Navajo people on the nearby Bosque Redondo reservation appalling. Hunger, disease, lack of potable water, all contributed to the deplorable conditions. The general who had sent them there, James Carleton, had already been relieved of his New Mexico command amid mounting criticism, and Sherman began discussions with the Navajo leaders over how to resolve the situation.

The Navajo had been moved to Bosque Redondo by Carleton in the early 1860’s following years of territorial disputes, raiding and general ill tempers. Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson had carried out a scorched earth campaign against the tribe – crop destruction, burning of their homes, destruction of livestock and food stores – all the things that Sherman himself had done to force the Confederacy to its knees. More than 10,000 Navajo were forced there on what became known as the “Long Walk” from the Four Corners Region (The meeting of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah) some 300 miles or more to Fort Sumner – Hwéeldi to the Navajo – on the other side of New Mexico, through harsh winter conditions. Perhaps that parallel weighed on Sherman – a general who understood scorched-earth tactics better than most, now facing the consequences of carrying them out against civilians. By late May 1868, he was looking at Bosque Redondo and seeing not victory, but failure.

Sherman originally wanted to move the tribes further east to join the resettled tribes in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, but the Navajo refused…they wanted to return to their ancestral homeland. When the Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed, they were granted that right. It is one of the few 19^th-century US-Native American treaties in which a removed tribe successfully negotiated a return to its homeland.

In the center of the Navajo homeland are Shiprock and Monument Valley, the site of hundreds of westerns, many of them the iconic films of director John Ford, and the unforgettable scene in “Forrest Gump,” where he comes to a halt in his transcontinental running and utters the famous line: “I think I’ll go home now.” That was our first destination today as we continued our own homeward trek back east.

Our journey would take us out of Utah, across the northern tier of Arizona, to Monument Valley, and then on to New Mexico, passing Shiprock on the way to our final stop in Farmington, New Mexico. But first, we would be reunited with the First Powell Expedition at the mouth of the lake that now bears his name, at the Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona.

Glen Canyon Dam is a massive concrete arch-gravity dam that began construction in 1956 during the Eisenhower administration and was topped out in 1963. It began generating power in 1964 and was dedicated in 1966 by Lady Bird Johnson, but Lake Powell did not reach full pool until June 1980 under the Carter administration. Glen Canyon was the compromise to the dam that was going to be built inside Dinosaur National Monument, which we covered in Part 9 of this travelogue. It has been a rallying cry for the Sierra Club whose members have demanded the dam be torn down. Edward Abbey fantasized about destroying the dam in his otherwise excellent book, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975). Proponents of the dam cite the dam’s role in water supply reliability, power generation and recreation. Sadly, due to a continued drought in the west, Lake Powell has been chronically low, though weather events over the last month have added 14 feet to its surface elevation.

Around noon, we crossed over what was once the tallest arch bridge in the world when it opened in 1959. The imposing dam was visible to my left and beyond I could see the sun hitting the surface of the lake, reflecting late June heat into the air. A couple of miles later we entered Page, Arizona – a clean, pleasant town with a touristy, almost beach feel to it. Looking back towards the dam, I wondered whether the Major would have approved, but if you are going to try to live in a desert, there may be no other way.

We drove on, out onto the vermilion plain of high desert.

Heading east on Rt. 98, we passed several rock outcroppings reminiscent of the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon which we toured last year. Many of them have names, like “Finger Rock,” but most just stand as reminders of the power of wind, water and time. We had left the Powell expedition and were headed into Navajo Nation. Rt 98 dead ends into Rt 160 where we turned right and headed northeast towards the town of Kayenta, just outside of Monument Valley.

Back in the 1920’s, a Colorado sheep herder, Harry Goulding, ran a small trading post on the edge of what is now Monument Valley. He did well for a number of years, but like everyone, the Great Depression in the 1930’s hit hard. Desperate, he and his wife drove to Hollywood, with photographs of the valley. Once there, he talked his way into John Ford’s office and convinced the famous director to give him a shot. In 1939, Ford used Monument Valley as the backdrop for his movie, “Stagecoach,” starring a young John Wayne. The image of what the West was like was imprinted on the world’s imagination – ironically, it was a West that wagons never touched. I could not help but reflect on the other impressions created by artists we had seen along the way – Dellenbaugh was told his canyon could not be real, William Henry Jackson photographing from Scotts Bluff to Yellowstone, all the actors that had depicted the west near Kanab. The landscape certainly engages the imagination!

On a personal note, I have always liked the original “Stagecoach,” but have been very partial to my great uncle’s version of the film that came out in 1966. Van Heflin played Marshal Curley Wilcox, George Bancroft’s part in the original, and Alex Cord played the Ringo Kid, the part John Wayne had played. When the movie came out, we were living in Tokyo, Japan. Westerns in the 1960’s were huge in Japan and the production folks behind the remake decided to bring the whole act to Tokyo. I got to ride shotgun on top of the stagecoach, sitting next to Slim Pickens.

Though westerns have been the backbone of the productions in Monument Valley, including scenes in the 2018 Coen brothers film, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” other movies have used the setting to tremendous effect. In 1969, the counterculture hit movie, “Easy Rider” was filmed here – “cut your hair hippie!” Everyone remembers the turn around point for Forrest Gump in 1994 – they even have a “Forrest Gump Point” near mile marker 13, just north of the main valley. In 1968, “2001: A Space Odyssey” used aerial footage of the landscape in the Stargate sequence to depict the surface of an alien planet.

We drove along the main road, passed Goulding’s motel and roadside knick knack shop and out to Forrest Gump Point. As a retired marathon runner, I wanted to catch a shot of myself at the turnaround point. Unfortunately, our arrival coincided with the first rain we had had since the first two days of our trip! The buttes faded in and out of the squalls giving an ethereal quality to them, as if they were floating above the sea.

We headed over to the main entry point for the drive through the valley, but sadly, the rain made the red clay road visibly treacherous. We tried for about a mile, descending from the visitor center, but when the car that was coming back up started spinning in the clay, I decided we would rely on the tourist photos. I did not feel like having to spend the night stuck in a rainy ditch out on a butte.

We retreated to a paved road and headed back towards Kayenta. We rejoined Rt 160 and continued east towards Shiprock and our ultimate destination for the day, Farmington, New Mexico. The light was muted by the scudding clouds but gave a ghostly quality to the surrounding red and brown buttes.

Shiprock is one of the most distinctive landmarks in the Four Corners region. It is a volcanic outcropping that rises nearly 1,600 feet above the high desert plain in northwestern New Mexico. It is a remnant of an ancient volcano that erupted some 30 million years ago and is today considered an exceptionally well-preserved example of a volcanic neck – the eroded remnant of the volcano’s throat. To the Navajo, it holds deep sacred importance. Their name, “Tsé Bitʼaʼí,” means “rock with wings” – pointing to their formational mythology. Their legends say that it was once a great bird that carried the Navajo people from the north to their present homeland in the plains around Shiprock. They say that the bird flew for a day and a night before settling at sunset where the rock stands today.

We passed Shiprock in the distance as we headed towards Farmington and some rest. The grey volcanic formation contrasted with the red and yellow desert floor in the late afternoon sun. I thought about Poseidon turning the Phaeacian ship to stone – curious how mythologies collide trying to explain what we cannot understand.

We arrived in Farmington with just enough daylight to run a couple of errands and prepare for dinner. It had been a long day in the saddle – almost eight hours with all our stops, and we were tired. We opted for a quick take out from another of our road staples: Olive Garden. Bandit seemed to enjoy just having time with us in the hotel room and a nibble from the garlic bread sticks!

The night air was cooled by the rain that had now passed as we headed out for our last walk of the day. I studied the constellations above and spotted Sagittarius, the Archer, the next constellation east along the ecliptic from the Scorpion I had spied back in Death Valley. When you stare into the heart of Sagittarius – some call it the Teapot – you are looking toward the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, our home. How small we are out on this band of that Galaxy, and yet what wonders we are blessed with.

Back in the room for our nightcap, I thumbed through my copy of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and stumbled on this highlighted, marked-up passage:

“This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.”

I said some quiet prayers…. Bandit and Eileen were already asleep. I reached over and turned the light off and smiled at the beauty I had witnessed today, wondering what wonders awaited us tomorrow.

This is the continuation of a series that began here.

“Oh, to live’s to fly, both low and high, so shake the dust off your wings and the sleep out of your eyes.” - Townes Van Zandt, “To Live is to Fly”

The motel’s neon hums on the old highway,
The borrowed car cooling at the door.
Somewhere a semi gears down for the grade;
Night wind carries it west.

She sleeps, the map open beside her,
The dog curled tight against her knees.
I stand the mid-watch,
Awake on habit and love.

One winter, in tents here,
Powell’s men inked the last blank country.
The canyons took the lines they gave them;
Those lines became roads that would not stay.

This morning the car that carried us out
Went back across a Las Vegas counter.
A clerk handed me a different key.
Now the cliffs go red, then gray, then nothing.

The road runs on whether I go or not.
Let it call. I hear the wind
And still decide which way to lean.

When she wakes, I will be beside her,
Coffee poured, leash in hand.

– Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, “A New Valley of Wonders,” Scribner’s Magazine, January 1904

I woke on the second day of our journey homeward thinking about Homer’s Odyssey. There is a story in there about the Phaeacians and their role in bringing Odysseus finally home to Ithaca. Odysseus had not given into Calypso’s charms to become immortal; he longed to return to Penelope after all his time away in the Trojan War. When Calypso at last relents and releases Odysseus, he builds a raft and is once again tossed about on the sea till he lands on Scheria, the Phaeacian Island. The gracious, but isolated, people take him in and during a feast, Odysseus regales them with the stories of his travels and travails. They load him with gifts and as he sleeps, one of their magical ships carries him home. Their ships needed no pilots nor rudders, they “understand what it is that we are thinking about and want; they know all the cities and countries in the whole world,” and they travel with incredible speed and reliability.

My magical ship, the Mazda CX-50, that had brought us almost 4,000 miles through twelve states, stood in the parking lot outside our hotel room door, cursed by the gods…being a Navy man, perhaps it was Poseidon. After all, in a little hissy fit after discovering what the Phaeacians had done, he turned their ship to stone. We had to make it to Harry Reid International in Las Vegas, some 160-miles away, with that vexing “Engine Malfunction” light on the whole way. I loaded in extra water and after final pack out, I called Hertz to let them know we were getting underway. We strapped Bandit in place, Eileen made her last check of the room, and as I put the car in drive, I turned to her and said, “Underway, shift colors.” Those thrilling lines we say in the Navy when we set to sea.

The drive out of Death Valley had a fairly steep climb for the first 35-miles and there was no civilization in sight and no cell service. We leveled out on a high desert plateau, surrounded by shades of brown and white as far as the eye could see. For two and a half hours we drove just below the speed limit, with my eye carefully monitoring the temperature and oil gauges.

Just before lunch, we arrived at the Las Vegas Airport’s rental car center, an off-site facility with shuttle buses to and fro for the actual airport. We parked outside and I went in to check with the Hertz folks. When I presented my I.D., the attendant said, “Oh, you are the one.” I felt like Odysseus when he washed up on Scheria! He gave me the keys to a Kia Sportage and showed me where it was parked. I exited, parked next to our crippled ship and we transferred everything over to our new ride that would take us home.

I am not a big fan of the new keyless cars, and here is one reason. As we loaded everyone back in and started to back out, I asked Eileen where the key was – I thought I had put it in the little box below the radio and climate console. She said I had had it all along. I checked my pockets, no key…we stopped got out and searched everywhere…no key. I was worried that it might have fallen into the Mazda I had just taken back in…I didn’t know what the range was on those fobs, though I would later learn. Before returning to the terminal, I made one last scour of the back seat and found the key being kept nice and warm under Bandit’s bed. That fiend, no wonder we named her Bandit! It had to be her fault! Well, reload and “underway, shift colors!”

We picked up a Jimmy John’s on the way out of Vegas and headed back up the Virgin River Gorge on I-15. Our destination was Zion National Park, some 160-miles away. We drove through Zion a couple of years ago and loved it, though that year we also headed further north to Kolob Canyon, which is a detached part of the Zion NP, but worth the stop. This year, given the time, we were headed straight through.

Zion Canyon was shaped by the Virgin River, the same river where Powell and his men had terminated their first “Journey into the Unknown,” as I mentioned in Part 11. Its walls are mostly reddish Navajo sandstone from the same Jurassic dune field that we had seen in our transit through the Valley of Fire State Park. Though we continue to retrace our steps, the journey is never the same.

In 1863, a Mormon settler, Isaac Behunin, built a cabin on the canyon floor and called the place Zion, the biblical place of rest. In the canyon, surrounded by the towering red sandstone cliffs, Behunin is said to have declared “A man can worship God among these great cathedrals as well as he can in any man-made church; this is Zion!” He and his sons cleared land, dug irrigations ditches and raised crops including corn, sugar cane, fruit trees and melons, along with tobacco. Legend has it that when Brigham Young visited the area some years later, he was not happy about the presence of the tobacco and declared the area to be “Not Zion.” This would not be the last naming controversy for this canyon.

Behunin sold the farm on the canyon floor in 1872. His age at 70, made life there difficult and he moved to nearby Mt. Carmel, where he died in 1881.

We arrived at the visitor’s center for the park around 4:00, an ideal time to make the drive through the canyon as the late sun enflames the canyon walls in brilliant hues of vermillion, purple and red. I got Bandit out to stretch her legs a bit, and she quickly befriended a small group of high school students from Belgium. One of the boys was homesick for his dog and relished the opportunity to pet Bandit and rub her velvety ears. Eileen and I took turns running to the restroom and inside to the visitor’s center, so she had not seen the first “foreign exchange,” but was surprised when she was outside with Bandit waiting for me and a young man walked by and said, “Good to see you again, Bandit!” Dogs have a way of bringing us all together. For the record, I am extremely skeptical of cultures that view dogs as anything less than man’s faithful companion.

For most of the year, a large part of Zion is only accessible by shuttle bus, so we have yet to see a large part of this wonder. Private vehicles that drive up into the park must exit to the right onto the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway. Built between 1927 and 1930 by the Nevada Construction Company for the National Park Service and the Bureau of Public Roads, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Civil Engineering Landmark. The full highway is about 25-miles, but the part inside the park is about 14-miles of stunning switchbacks and one incredible windowed tunnel, 5,613 feet long – a little over a mile.

The same year Isaac Behunin sold his stake in Zion Canyon, John Wesley Powell was making his second expedition down the Colorado River. Powell had his field headquarters set up in nearby Kanab, Utah, where we would spend the evening at the end of the day. But as he passed through the canyon, he referred to it by what he thought was the original Paiute Indian name, “Mukuntuweap,” said to mean “straight canyon.” When the area was first designated a National Monument in 1909, it was named “Mukuntuweap National Monument.” It received its current name in 1918 as “Zion National Monument,” and then “Zion National Park” in 1919. The settlers’ naming rights won out on that round.

We talked about artists and their impact on the American consciousness back at Scott’s Bluff in Part 7, when we met William Henry Jackson. Powell’s second expedition was graced with the artist, Frederick Dellenbaugh, who hired aboard as artist and assistant topographer. Thirty years later, Dellenbaugh returned to Zion and spent the summer of 1903 painting Zion Canyon. He showed the paintings at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis the following year. It was reported that the viewers of the paintings believed he was making the scenes up and that the red canyon walls were invented. But his paintings, along with an article he had published in Scribner’s that January, months before the Fair opened, helped bring recognition to the area and ultimately landed it “national monument” status. As we drove through the Canyon in the late afternoon sun with the walls on fire, we are grateful for men like Dellenbaugh, who moved public opinion to do the right thing. Behunin was right also. We drove slowly through, largely in silence and awe at the splendor– one does not need a pastor to tell you that you are in the presence of something sacred. We exited through the East Entrance, picked up Route 89 at Mount Carmel Junction, and headed towards our night’s rest in Kanab.

On the recommendation of the BringFido! App, we stayed at the Quail Park Lodge, a restored mid-century drive-up motel. The place was fun and kitschy. Retro furniture and retro-looking appliances, the old pool out on the highway, and dog friendly. Bandit approved.

Using BringFido! again, we found a lovely, dog friendly restaurant a short walk away, the “Rocking V Café.” The plug from their website was enough:

“We want our place to be a spot where you can come and have a wonderful time after a fantastic day of hiking, a long day of driving, or a lazy, waste-lots-of-time-doing-nothin’ day & find an oasis of enjoyment for your senses. There’s a reason we don’t have WiFi. Chill. Exhale. Sit. Listen. Look around. Power down. Kill the phone. Stow the tablet. Talk to the people you’re dining with. Talk to the people sitting next to you. Enjoy your meal. Don’t rush. (Unless you’ve been at the table for three hours, then you need to: eat it & beat it!. And no, we don’t mean eat the table, that would take a long time and the splinters are hard to digest). Smile.”

They also had this jewel in the Kid’s Menu section:

“The small people have to eat too, so we’ve added some classics to keep you from coming in with your own Happy Meal. Wild offspring of poorly behaving parents will be given a triple espresso, 6 scoops of ice cream, a whistle, 2 loaded squirt guns, a bullhorn & a set of cymbals, upon ejection.”

It was terrific, and the food was pretty good too.

We sat out on the sidewalk and watched as tourists walked up and down the street. Kanab is a big stopping off point for people doing the Zion/Bryce and Grand Canyon loop. We stopped here two years ago before heading to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon the following day.

The name “Kanab” comes from the Paiute word for willow. It is known as “Little Hollywood,” for all the Westerns that were filmed here starting with Deadwood Coach in 1924; by 1949 Kanab was the most popular filming location outside California. In 1976, the ultimate anti-hero classic, The Outlaw Josey Wales with Clint Eastwood was filmed nearby. On the small screen side, a number of shows were filmed here including Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, Have Gun – Will Travel and Wagon Train. The streets of Kanab are lined with small monuments to the shows and their stars which make for a pleasant and educational stroll.

After supper, we strolled about the town and then headed back toward the Quail Park Lodge. On our route back we met an elderly couple that lived in Kanab, that were big dog lovers and quite flattering to Bandit. We learned of a special place nearby where they volunteered, the Best Friends Sanctuary. Best Friends is the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States and houses some 1,600 animals, primarily dogs and cats but also horses, pigs, rabbits, parrots, goats and rehabilitating wildlife. It spans thousands of acres in and around Angel Canyon, which had been a popular spot for filming Westerns in the day. Their eyes shone as they described the joy they experienced in helping in a place like that. Maybe that is something I will do if I ever retire!

We walked through Levi Stewart Memorial Park on our way back. This was the site of the original settlement of Fort Kanab, built by Jacob Hamblin. John Wesley Powell’s first visit to Kanab was in September 1870. He accompanied Brigham Young’s party that had come south from Salt Lake City to consecrate the new settlement, Hamblin had built. In June 1870, Levi Stewart, at Young’s direction, had brought a larger party from nearby Pipe Spring and took charge of the fort at Kanab that Hamblin had built. That September, Young appointed Stewart the town’s bishop. Tragedy struck a few months later in December, when a fire broke out on the night of December 14. The fire destroyed a section of the fort and killed Stewart’s wife Margery and five of their sons. The frontier took more than most men could bear. But Stewart continued to lead the settlement through epidemics, a plague of grasshoppers and struggle. But he developed excellent relations with the local tribes and Kanab thrived.

Jacob Hamblin and Powell collaborated on a number of projects in the region through the 1870’s. It was Hamblin who arranged the resupply points and logistics for Powell’s second expedition (1871-1872). For years afterwards, Hamblin was instrumental in Powell’s studies in the greater region around Kanab, including ethnographic work with Paiute groups to learn their language, stories and customs. Hamblin had spent a lot of time mapping the region on behalf of the Mormon settlements and was well versed in the ways of the local tribes. Hamblin’s efforts are honored in the park, but it is the strength of Levi Stewart that gives it its name.

We retired to our retro 1960’s roadside inn, sipped some “Utah Straight Bourbon Whiskey” – and you thought the Mormons were teetotalers! This is a wheated bourbon advertised as “grain to glass,” made by Alpine Distillery up in Park City, Utah. It’s worth a try if you find one in your local liquor store! I read Seamus Heaney’s “Ministry of Fear” out loud – the bourbon helping with my poor Irish accent. A poem written about the sectarian tension in Northern Ireland while I sat deep in Mormon country, where mercifully, we have all learned to get along for the greater good.

Last walk with Bandit under the stunning, clear night sky. Out there I thought of another Heaney poem, “Lightenings viii,” from Seeing Things. The monks of Clonmacnoise, at prayer, look up to see a ship sailing in the air above them. Its anchor snags on the altar rail, and a crewman climbs down the rope and struggles in an element not his own, until the monks free the anchor and let him go on his way. That morning our own magical ship had been taken from us, and all day long strangers had been helping us along – a Hertz man who knew who we were, a homesick Belgian boy, two volunteers who loved our dog. Zion had been the marvel. The motel parking lot, under all those stars, was ours. As I settled down, Heaney’s words echoed our day:

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.

‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvelous as he had known it.

I turned the light off and we slept.

This is a continuation of a travelogue that began here.

“I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.”
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

We pulled away from her house at noon,
Bandit in back with her nose to the glass,
Watching the street where her sister stood
Until the street became a freeway.

North of the mountains the signal died.
No map that talked. I steered by eye,
The destroyerman’s old trick, reading 
The set of stone instead of swell.

At Badwater the salt pan ran for miles.
High on a cliff the sign read Sea Level,
And for once the ocean I loved
Lay far above me.

The winter this valley earned its name,
Two young men walked out of here for help,
And then walked the same ground back
For the ones they had left behind.

That night the quarter moon went down
And the Milky Way rose over Stovepipe Wells.
The Scorpion slunk low along the south.
The dog and I stood out in the heat.

Twenty miles from anyone, Abbey wrote,
And instead of loneliness, loveliness.
A day’s drive from the ones I love,
Under those stars and felt them both.

Mining my sketches from my journal on this trip along with by dog-eared copy of “Desert Solitaire.” I hope you enjoy!

— Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903)

In late December of 1849, a party of prospective gold miners traveling from the Midwest believed they had found a shortcut to the gold seams of California. A larger party had been following the Old Spanish Trail out of Salt Lake City working their way around the Sierra Nevada, but most of its wagons split off to follow a dubious (but hopeful) map. Many soon turned back. Among the twenty or so wagons that pressed on were two families, the Bennett and Arcan clans.

They were following a route that would become today’s Highway 190, a route we were headed for as we left Los Angeles. The Bennett-Arcan party entered a long valley with an extensive salt flat and reached the area of Furnace Creek in late December. Ahead of them, the Panamint Range rose as a continuous high barrier, topped off by Telescope Peak at 11,000 feet. From the valley floor, it looked impassable and nearly was. Trapped, the party attempted another route through Warm Springs Canyon but found that route too steep for the oxen and wagons. Water and food were scarce, and the situation seemed increasingly desperate. The party sent two young men, William Manly and John Rogers, ahead on foot to find help. The two men walked some 250 miles to the Spanish settlements near present-day Los Angeles. They obtained supplies and fresh animals and returned through the route they had traversed to rescue the Bennett-Arcan party…the round trip had taken almost a month. The shortcut as a whole had cost them some four months. It is reported that as the reunited party climbed out of the valley, they said “Goodbye, Death Valley.” For our first leg heading back east, our landing spot was going to be Death Valley National Park, where we would stay at Stovepipe Wells, one of the lowest lodges in North America.

We hated leaving our West Coast family in the rear-view mirror – Bandit was particularly heartbroken to leave her sister behind. The two of them grew very close during the Covid shutdown, but though Bandit has gotten used to the coming and going of her big sister, the parting is always difficult. We packed out and about noon drove out onto the 110 towards Pasadena. Two hours later, we turned off I-15 onto US 395 towards Edwards Air Force Base and China Lake. For the better part of two hours, we had no cell service, and I was steering by “Seaman’s Eye” and the occasional sign to Death Valley National Park. Off to our right we could see Telescope Peak.

We intersected Highway 190 up by Panamint Springs, tracking the route some of the ’49ers had followed to escape the hellscape of Death Valley. I find deserts achingly beautiful, and Death Valley did not disappoint in its quiet desolation. The park encompasses almost 5,400 square miles, making it the largest national park in the lower 48. About 93% of it is designated wilderness, the largest wilderness area outside of Alaska. It is a topography of extremes. Badwater Basin, which got its name when a surveyor’s mule refused to drink the salty water in the sparse spring, is the lowest point in North America, 282 feet below sea level. Its highest point is Telescope Peak at 11,049 feet. The spot to visit is Dante’s View where you can see both the lowest point (Badwater Basin) and the highest point in the contiguous United States, Mt. Whitney at 14,505 feet.

We arrived at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center a little after 4PM. The temperature was 118 degrees. After getting briefed on park precautions and getting our Passport stamped, we headed to Badwater Basin.

The drive down Badwater Road towards the Basin is raw. Heat rises off the salt flats in shimmering waves of blue and white light. We arrived at the parking lot to walk out on a boardwalk onto the salt flat. The temperature was 124 degrees. We kept the car running and took turns running out to experience the instant sauna effect of scorching dry heat. Behind the lot, a sheer cliff rose up. Halfway up the face of that rock there was a small white rectangle. While it was difficult to read the print on the sign, a quick photo and a zoom revealed it: “Sea Level.” We could see Telescope Peak in the distance, but with the shimmering heated air, we could not see Mt. Whitney.

We headed up to the Artist’s Palette, a vividly colored hillside in the Park located along a 9-mile one-way road. The hills produce a striking rainbow of colors – reds, pinks, oranges, yellows and a wild variety of blues and greens. The colors come from oxidized and weathered volcanic deposits that were rich in iron oxides and other minerals. Late in the afternoon, the colors were brilliant – the human eye appreciates it far more than the camera lens can depict.

Pulling back out on Badwater Road, we headed up to Dante’s View. From that low point, we began a non-stop climb up to the point appropriately named for the poet who gave our Western Civilization the most dramatic depiction of Hell in “The Inferno.” We passed Twenty Mule Team Canyon. The canyon takes its name from the twenty mule teams that used to haul borax from the Harmony Borax Works in Death Valley to the railhead up at Mojave in the 1880s. Warnings about low clearance kept me from turning off to go see it, so we continued up the mountain.

About four miles short of Dante’s View, the car surged and slowed suddenly. I quickly glanced at the temperature gauge, and we were in good shape. I pushed the accelerator a bit and the car shuddered a second time. I glanced back down at the gauges and a message popped up that read “Engine Malfunction: Have the Vehicle Inspected.”

I did not want to get any further away from the safety of our night’s stay and with no cell service, I deferred to safety and flipped a U-turn. Thanks to the long downgrade, my foot almost never touched the accelerator all the way to Furnace Creek, and I kept my eye on the oil and temperature gauges for the last twenty-odd flat miles to Stovepipe Wells. With a little grace from St. Christopher, we made it back.

A quick check on the Interwebs told me to check the oil level…it was about a quart low. Fortunately, the general store across the street from the lodge had oil, so I was able to bring the oil level back to normal. I drove it a couple of miles hoping the Malfunction light would come off, but no luck. I checked in with the Manager of the lodge and learned that the nearest mechanic was 200 miles away…not a good option.

I must give a big shout out to Hertz, our rental car company. I called their support line to apprise them of the situation. They told me to bring the car to Las Vegas Airport in the morning and they would swap vehicles. They told me to check in before I left, and they would have a tow truck on call to come for the rescue. With that assurance, we headed off to supper at the Toll Road Restaurant, the Village’s restaurant.

In our past travels, we have joked that it is a family tradition to close the restaurant at night. When we entered and sat down, we were one of four parties there. A couple from Italy sat to our right, two middle-aged men sat at the bar, and a couple from Germany sat behind us. In the small world category, the two gents at the bar were both southerners. One from Kentucky was shepherding his family back east in a borrowed RV. The other gentleman was from Louisiana with a deep love of country music and Nashville. What’s not to love!

Returning to our room, it was still north of 100 degrees outside, and the pavement was very hot, so we waited a bit before getting Bandit out for her last constitutional of the day. When we did, the stars over the heart of the desert were breathtaking. As the quarter moon set, the Milky Way blazed across the sky, the Scorpion rode low in the south, and the air was cooling rapidly.

We walked back to the room, admired the sign in the bathroom that cold tap water would come out hot since we are in one of the hottest places on earth. We toasted our day’s adventure, and I planned out the route to the Vegas Airport, thinking through the logistics of a potentially hazardous stall in the middle of the desert.

As I settled down to bed, I drifted back to Saint-Exupéry: “I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams…” The land outside gleamed in the last of the moonlight and it was deathly silent. The car had cooled and we readied for the next day as we turned off the lights.

This is the continuation of a series that began here.

"To come to what you do not know, you must go by a way you do not know."
-St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mt. Carmel

The lake rose and walked the road with me.
I could not see the field
or the far shore—
only a few warm lights
and the fence posts going on ahead
into nothing.

In the trees a lamp I had passed
a hundred times
was falling in long beams
across the wet leaves.
It had always shone that way.
I  only needed the fog
to rest it on.

I stood.
My shadow ran back
toward everything I had already understood.
I let it go.

I faced the light
I could not see the source of,
only the shape of its coming.
Something in my chest burned
quietly, the way a lamp burns
on a night no one is out walking
except the one
it was lit for.

Back from a few days up at Dale Hollow Lake. Got inspired for this one on a foggy walk a few nights ago.

Suffice to say, we made it to our granddaughter’s recital… photo proof here:

And we had a lovely visit with our West Coast family for a few days before saddling up and heading east.

Every year about this time, typically a week or two before I go back into the classroom, we retreat up to the edge of Kentucky on Dale Hollow Lake. Until several years ago, it was an Internet desert. I used to have to climb the hill behind the house to get enough of a signal to download voice mails and e-mails. When you run a small development shop, you can never completely get away. But now we have smokin’ 5G blasting across the water, so the retreat takes more discipline.

I have been using the electronics to work through a pile of long-form articles and essays I had set aside in a “READ” file, a practice I enjoy far more than the grind of doom-scrolling through X and Facebook. Every year I also bring up a couple of my old journals. I am not a packrat, but I do preserve my journals, and they go back to the mid-1980s. This year’s random selections were 2017 and 2022: an interesting contrast between documents from the “PRE-C ERA” and the “POST-C ERA” (pre- and post-Covid). I will dip into them as we go, starting with 2017 at the end of this piece. But first, I want to talk about 1984, the novel, not the year.

I read two excellent essays on Orwell’s masterpiece over the last couple of days, and they have stirred up some additional thoughts. That I read them over Columbus Day weekend was fitting. Few holidays have been more thoroughly worked over by the Ministry of Truth’s rewrite desk, and Columbus’s statues have come down in more than a few American cities.

The first was by a Substack author who goes by the handle “Dissident Teacher,” and it is titled “The Forever War.” I am not positive, but I sense that DT works in a public school system somewhere and dare not let his identity be known… how very 1984 the American educational system has become! DT starts where most readers’ memory of the book ends, with Winston emerging from the Ministry of Love: “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

I remember reading those lines the summer before I started 8th grade at Mater Dei in Potomac, Maryland. 1984 was on the summer reading list and would be discussed in depth in our English class that fall. I was disgusted, and my contempt for totalitarianism grew stronger, as it has continued to do through the years. DT had the same reaction: as a teenager, he wanted to burn the book. He reread it several times as an adult and came away demoralized every time, until he started teaching it this year and discovered that he had never actually read the whole thing.

The person who showed him that was Thomas Pynchon, of all people, in his introduction to the Plume Centennial Edition of 1984. Pynchon’s essay is the inspiration for DT’s. Pynchon delves deep into the doublethink of dystopian Oceania and its Party koans: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.”

The interesting contrast is that the two essays come at Orwell from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Pynchon stresses that Orwell was a democratic socialist (sound familiar?), “to the left of left.” DT reads the novel as a cautionary tale about the decline into socialism. Yet both hold up doublethink as the novel’s lasting achievement and a warning for our own time. Pynchon traces the idea to Orwell’s disgust with English leftists who excused Stalin’s atrocities because the truth didn’t fit the narrative. He also finds doublethink hiding in plain sight in our own government: a war-making apparatus called the “Department of Defense.” By that measure, the recent renaming of the department back to the Department of War might be a step in the right direction. At least it calls the thing what it is. Pynchon’s deeper insight is that Orwell saw the will to power had not died with the Axis, and that surveillance technology would only make it more dangerous. He wrote that in 2003, long before Flock cameras were the rage.

DT applies the novel more directly to the present. His modern “Party” believes that by controlling the narrative, the schools and the books, it controls the truth. He calls on parents and teachers to arm children with what is objectively good and true, something our public schools fail at miserably. His remedy is not a policy program but a way of life, and I will come back to it.

The big reveal for me, as it was for DT, was the hidden hopeful ending. At the back of the book is an appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak,” which a footnote in the very first chapter invites the reader to consult. Most of us never did. It is written in the past tense, in plain standard English, by someone looking back on the Party from the outside. Both Pynchon and DT read that as Orwell’s quiet signal that the regime did not last, and that the English of Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens outlived the people who tried to translate it out of existence. DT quotes Albert Jay Nock: “All history attests to the fact that devolution—the decline into socialism—is, with few exceptions, followed by evolution, with progress inching ahead over the millennia.” DT’s brother calls this the Divine Sine. History does not necessarily repeat or rhyme; perhaps it is a giant sine wave.

There is a popular saying on the Web: “1984 is not a guidebook.” And yet, as I scan the cultural horizon, I cannot help but think that a large part of our electorate is comfortable making it one. The rabid urge to tear down statues, to rewrite history, or, more importantly, to frame the story of the American Republic as one of “oppression” of, well, everybody, is producing a generation (now two) of citizens who have been taught to despise their country. Such a republic cannot long stand.

Orwell saw how such a system controls. Whatever the merits of any single cause, the machinery of constant outrage built around them, from “Me Too” to the “Cornell 7,” climate change to “from the river to the sea”…it all keeps people activated and engaged while accomplishing very little. People have been conditioned to react and be enraged, and social media compounds the problem. Things that have no effect on our everyday lives cause people to react rather than investigate, or exercise any kind of personal agency beyond coming up with the next zinger tweet to drive up their “engagement.”

1984’s constant engagement of the populace, from the Two Minutes Hate to “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia,” drives home the point that people possess only so much emotional bandwidth. Capture that bandwidth with a succession of scandals, riots, accusations and existential emergencies, and you have a populace that is worn out and easy to control. Another essay in my READ file drew the distinction between information and activation. The modern press is not about informing people; it is about activating them to do something: protest, yell and scream, take their two minutes of hate. It’s all so tiresome.

I don’t spend much time on Facebook, but I have learned the power of the algorithm. I post pictures of pretty places I have been, some of my Substack material, maybe a football score or two when Vanderbilt pulls off the occasional miracle. The interaction I get is typically in the low single digits. If I post a piece from someone that is even mildly positive about the current administration, all hell breaks loose. My usual suspects descend to discredit the author or to yell at me for posting it. They never try to refute the material; they just denigrate me and the piece. Yes, it is tiresome.

I submit that the largest part of the problem is that our brains have not evolved anywhere near as fast as our technology… and don’t even get me started on AI! Our brains are still out riding horses and sauntering through the woods, while the technology is headed to Mars at hyperspeed. Our efforts to catch up create anxiety, distrust and paranoia, and who better to pin that on than your nearest politician, CEO or small businessman?

But, like Orwell, despite it all I remain optimistic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave an inspiring speech in front of the Parthenon in Athens last week. I highly recommend you listen to it. It is not political; it is a defense of Western Civilization, and boy, do we need that! Rubio reminded his audience that it was Greece that gave us the concept of “thumos”: a spirited, passionate drive in a person that generates courage, anger, pride, honor and the desire for recognition. Outside of football locker rooms, these qualities have been beaten down in the modern Western world. I suspect they are making a comeback, and that is where I derive my hope.

DT’s way-of-life remedy is worth quoting at length:

“Humans suffer. Some accept their suffering. History is replete with slavery, conquest, misery, and tyranny. Fighters emerge, people who can’t accept that their lives are meant to be lived in continual fear. They reject the idea that a human life should be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’

So they fight.

They fight by building families they hold tight and keep rooted in the laughter and disagreements of the kitchen table and the long car ride. They fight by taking special care with the children of others, to teach them what is objectively good and objectively true in classrooms and on sports fields. They fight by attending church and shaking hands with new parishioners after a Sunday sermon. They fight by looking out for their neighbor’s children when they play on the street outside. They fight by building businesses that outmaneuver bureaucracy. They fight by going to the range with their friends not only because it’s fun, but because that action specifically makes tyranny less likely.

They grow gardens. They raise chickens. They read books. They look out for their neighbors. They love their families.”

It is the common people, Orwell’s “proles,” who give me hope. Pynchon called the scene in which Winston and Julia watch the prole woman singing in the courtyard the “most beautiful moment” in the novel. She goes about her everyday “laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering.” She is the very symbol of resistance to those who would make us less human and deprive us of our freedom. And that resistance, DT says, is love.

This is where DT’s piece hit me hardest. Winston fails, he writes, for a reason almost all of his students could see: Winston hated the Party, and his hatred was much greater than his love. So when the Party turned hatred against him, he had no defense. That is the outrage machine in a sentence. The Two Minutes Hate does not need you to love Big Brother; it only needs you to hate someone, and every cycle of activation draws down the same account of emotional bandwidth. The prole woman never makes that withdrawal. She is too busy loving her family to be enraged by anybody. I suppose that is why I come up to the lake every year: to close the account for a few days, read something longer than a tweet, and remember what I am for rather than what I am against.

In my 2017 journal I rediscovered two quotes that I think capture the essence of our condition. Saint-Exupéry wrote that “a rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” There are a LOT of people in this wonderful land who look at rock piles and imagine cathedrals, and they are building the businesses, arts and culture of the future.

Then there is this from Teilhard de Chardin: “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” My sense is that a cultural awakening is taking place. Perhaps history is not a sine wave with a smooth, unchanging oscillation after all, but a sine wave riding a rising line, just as Nock described it. The troughs are real, and painful, but each crest rises a little higher than the last. Perhaps we are about to climb to a new height.

Or perhaps the lesson is found in baseball. As Terence Mann (played by James Earl Jones) intones in Field of Dreams: “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

"Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with."
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator

All morning the desert kept its distance,
Three towers burning on a dry white lake,
Mountains that never came any closer,
Miles that only counted down.

Every road out here was aimed at one gap.
The traders, the trappers, the wagons in pieces,
All of them squeezed through Cajon,
Chasing whatever waited below.

We came down the long grade with the trucks,
The brakes humming, the dog asleep in the back,
And the basin opened green beneath us,
A city whose streets I knew by heart.

To know a place is not to arrive.
I know its freeways the way you know a song,
Every merge point, every exit, every sign,
But we had not come all this way for the city.

Distance is what you give your children
When you teach them to choose for themselves.
She chose the mountains’ other side,
And now and then, we choose to follow.

Then a door, a porch light, her voice on the stair
Asking what took us so long,
As if two thousand miles were an errand,
As if we had only gone out for bread.

Tomorrow a stage, and a girl in the light,
And all of us in one row in the dark.
Every road I took was aimed at her.
I just didn't know it when we left.

J.R.R. Tolkien famously said “Not all who wander are lost.” After almost two weeks on the road we arrived in Los Angeles in time for our granddaughter’s recital. I had scribbled a good chunk of the above in my journal the night we arrived. I hope you enjoy.

Two hundred years ago this fall, in 1826, Jedediah Smith led a party of trappers out from the Great Salt Lake, down the Colorado basin, headed for California. They crossed the Mojave Desert in November with two Mojave guides and after passing through the Cajon Pass, they arrived in Mission San Gabriel, just north and east of modern Los Angeles, ragged and half-starved. The Franciscan Friars took them in, fed them and clothed them. They were the first Americans to cross the Mojave Desert and reach California by land. The Mexican Governor was none too pleased to learn of their arrival and promptly ushered them out.

We were headed that exact same route today as we left Henderson, Nevada and set course for number three daughter’s apartment in Los Angeles. In a small way, we had been paralleling Jedediah Smith’s exploits for a large part of this journey. Smith was a partner in the fur company that Hiram Scott (remember Scott’s Bluff?) had worked for. And it was Jedediah Smith who rediscovered the South Pass in Southwest Wyoming. The South Pass was the gentlest passage through the Rockies, and it facilitated the opening of the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails. The very same trails we had followed for most of our trek west.

Smith’s crossing of the Mojave took weeks and nearly killed him and his team. We made it across with the air conditioning blasting and Bandit sound asleep in the back seat.

We have made this drive several times now but are always awestruck at the sight of what many drivers call the “Eye of Sauron,” the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. Just past Primm, Nevada and crossing into California, the pale floor of Ivanpah Dry Lake runs across from I-15 to the foothills in the distance. Three towers burn bright white at the top from some 170,000 mirrors aimed at three boilers atop the towers. When it opened in 2014, it was the largest solar-thermal plant in the world, but now it is uneconomical to operate and is in the process of being shut down. That is good news for the local bird population. The workers had a name for what happened when a bird flew into the path of the concentrated sun beam: “streamers,” for the puff of smoke they left as they fell from the sky. The poor creatures were cooked in mid-flight. It is a sad testimony to the circle of life: the insects are drawn to the light, the birds are drawn to the insect, poof, barbecue. It is estimated that 6,000 to 10,000 birds per year met this hellish fate.

Across the floor of the desert, the colors are dark red, brown and black. The land in the low Mojave is creosote country. As far as the eye can see there are patches of creosote bushes, bursage and saltbushes. Mary Austin in her book “The Land of Little Rain” put it plainly: “If you have any doubt about it, know that the desert begins with the creosote.” King Clone: we did not have time for it this year but have it on a future list – King Clone is a creosote ring (a single bush reproducing as a clonal colony) and one of the Earth’s oldest living organisms. It is believed to be 11,700 years old and it continues to grow, albeit imperceptibly: less than one inch over 40 years. The King is just east of Victorville, on the western edge of the desert. Unfortunately, we were on a deadline and we were facing heavy, slow-moving traffic.

Something has happened in the trucking industry over the last twenty years. Back in my youth, when CB radios were a thing, there were road manners that the truckers observed. If a faster moving car was coming up behind them and they were approaching a long climb, they would move over and let you pass. These days, it is almost as if they want to impede your progress. They see you approaching from the rear, long climb up ahead, and they saunter into the fast lane and drive side by side with another truck for the next 5 miles. Maybe that is just a reflection of society in general. We could all use a refresher for the manners our parents taught us!

We passed through Victorville and began the long climb up to the Cajon Pass where Smith and his men had come through 200 years ago. As you come through the pass, one sees the first green out in the fields since Salt Lake City. Cajon Pass sits between the San Gabriels and the San Bernardino Mountain ranges and for a long time it was the only gap a wagon could get through. The Old Spanish Trail that led from Santa Fe to LA had been blazed in 1829, the Mormon Road connecting Salt Lake to San Bernardino came through in 1849. In 1916, the trail through was paved for the first time and in 1969, Eisenhower’s Interstate program blasted and paved I-15 through the pass. William Least Heat-Moon in his epic “Blue Highways” noted that “life doesn’t happen along interstates. It’s against the law.” This is why one must dig beneath the asphalt to find the stories on the land.

The one thing that the earlier trails had in common was that they were essentially a connection route of springs through the desert and it was a hit or miss transaction. If a spring (or river) was dry, you became a man of prayer as you headed for the next one.

The confluence of trails at the Cajon Pass has several fascinating directions from the past.

San Bernardino, which lies south of the pass, was settled by the Mormons in 1851. The settlement was in part due to the transit of the Mormon Battalion that was attached to the Army of the West, General Stephen Kearny’s outfit that came west from Santa Fe with Kit Carson as his guide. Kearny came into California farther south near San Diego and the Mormons arrived too late to assist in the battle to claim California for the United States. After the fighting was over, the Battalion was discharged, and in 1848 a party of the veterans headed home to Salt Lake. Their transit took them through the Cajon Pass, and they proved that wagons could make it through. One of the veterans, Jefferson Hunt, described the route and the region’s potential to Brigham Young and the church devised a plan to create the “Mormon Corridor,” linking Salt Lake to the Pacific in a series of towns along the Mormon Road. A few land deals later and Rancho San Bernardino became the foundation of the modern city of San Bernardino. The Mormons were recalled to Salt Lake in 1857 to bolster Mormon forces in a standoff with the Federal Government over who would govern Utah, with polygamy hanging over all of it.

To call it a “war” is a misnomer. It was more like a game of chase through the wilds of Utah, with the Mormons refusing to fight a pitched battle and choosing a raid and retreat strategy instead. The Federal Army commanded by Albert Sidney Johnston, who would later die under Confederate colors at Shiloh (there’s always a Tennessee connection), eventually marched through an abandoned Salt Lake City in 1858. A peace deal was brokered; a non-Mormon was installed as Governor of Utah and everyone returned home.

The practice of “plural marriage” continued apace until Utah sought statehood. In 1890, Church president Wilford Woodruff announced that the Mormon church would stop sanctioning plural marriage and that cleared the last hurdle for statehood. In 1896, Utah became the 45^th state. The Mormon Corridor’s dream of a Pacific outlet never materialized.

As we descended into San Bernardino, with snow-capped Mt. San Antonio in the distance, I was humming the old folk song, “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” It’s one of my childhood memories and I was always stirred by the vision and persistence of Betsy and Ike who ventured from Pike County, Missouri to head to California, “with two yoke of oxen and one spotted hog, a tall Shanghai rooster and an old yeller dog.” Betsy passed into California further north, but the verse that was hitting me was this:

“They passed the Sierras through mountains of snow

‘Til old California was sighted below

Sweet Betsy she hollered and Ike gave a cheer

Saying, ‘Betsy, my darlin’ I’m a made millionaire.’”

I learned later that the New Christy Minstrels, from whom I learned the song, had cleaned up what was otherwise a rather bawdy tale about a “Sweet Betsy” who was known to like a good dance (and more it was implied) from the other miners traveling with her and Ike. It included a line about how she “showed her bare arse to the whole wagon train.” Well, I’ll keep my childhood memories clean on this one, let the good little angel on my shoulder win out.

Down I-15 till we hit the 210 and headed due west across the “roof” of Los Angeles. Through the Inland Empire and past Rancho Cucamonga, listening to the Grateful Dead’s “Pride of Cucamonga,” and into the thick traffic that is the essence of living in LA. As the crow flies, my daughter’s apartment is about 6 miles to the Los Angeles Airport…LAX. It is about 12 miles by the odometer on a car. Two years ago, I had to replace our rental car due to some electrical malfunction. On a Saturday morning, it took me two hours to get to LAX and two and a half to get back.

We arrived. The first half of our voyage complete and we were on schedule for our granddaughter’s recital the next day. Reunions are always such happy occasions. Some of my fondest memories of my time in the Navy were pulling into port and watching the joyful reunions of our sailors with their families…and finding the one I loved there too. Those are hugs that you carry with you a lifetime.

We unsaddled our ponies…well, unpacked the car and readied ourselves to spend a few days off the road, just visiting. Sometimes that is enough. “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer, is the searing story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who took his adventurous spirit into the wilderness of Alaska but sadly was unable to return. In a letter to a friend, McCandless wrote:

“The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

McCandless captured that wild spirit of adventure and held it too close. I understood that hunger well enough – I had seen the horizon change over thousands of miles. But McCandless died alone in the Alaskan wilderness, and here I sat with my wife and daughter talking about tomorrow’s dance recital. We must learn that true happiness is found with others, and there is no more perfect place than the embrace of a family.

As we dined that night, and I watched the two girls get caught up, I was swirling my Tempranillo when one of my favorite lines from Dante burbled up inside me:

“And so we climbed with no thought or rest...until we reached ground where I could see through a rounded opening the night sky with the beautiful things it carries and we came out and looked at the stars.” -Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXXIV, lines 133–139

Tomorrow we would see another star emerge, but tonight, we would rest.

This is the continuation of a series that began here.

"What makes the desert beautiful," said the little prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well."  The Little Prince, St. Exubery

On his last night in the canyon,
The walls fell back and the sky came down.
Bounded, he wrote, only by the horizon,
And he counted the constellations like rations.

Three months of a narrow strip of stars,
A piece of heaven the width of a river,
And now the whole of it at once,
The way water spreads when it finally leaves the rock.

He carried one thing out of there
And spent the rest of his life trying to say it:
The land will hold as many people
As the water allows, and not one more.

Settle by the streams, he told them.
Draw the lines where the rivers draw them.
Let the watershed be the county.
Let the valley decide what its arms can hold.

Congress thanked him, listened but didn’t hear;
They built the dam, they drowned the landing.
They lit a city in the dry heart of the basin,
Bright enough to be seen from space.

That night in Henderson we walked the dog,
The pavement warm from the day.
To the north, the glow of it, a false dawn
That never quite becomes a morning.

No Summer Triangle, no Milky Way,
Only the moon, bright enough to argue with the neon.
And to the east, over the lake,
A darkness the size of what is missing.

At sea you learn to find yourself by the stars:
Three bodies at twilight, three lines on the chart.
Where they cross is where you are.
There was nothing here to shoot.

The stars are still up there, patient,
The way the river was with him.
And wherever people have settled small, and near the water,
Someone can still step outside and know their place.

People who travel in the west are affected deeply by the experience. The contrast of canyon and peak, of desert and river. The colors and raw, almost dangerous beauty of it all. I think Major Powell would be disappointed with what we have done with large parts of it.

In early March 1983, I was aboard the USS Stump (DD-978) transiting the Atlantic Ocean, returning from an extended deployment in the Middle East. We were steaming with an aging Belknap class cruiser, the USS Fox (CG-33) which we had been paired with for a large part of this mission. I had been Officer of the Deck for the 1^st Watch (8-12pm) and had retired to my stateroom for some rest. As Combat Information Center Officer and Navigator, sleep was a valued commodity. About two o’clock in the morning, the Messenger of the Watch woke me up and said the Captain wanted me on the bridge ASAP.

I quickly dressed and rushed up the ladder, through the Combat Information Center where I could see a number of extra bodies had gathered and came out onto the bridge. A young sailor on the Fox had a burst appendix and once again, Fox was having some engine trouble. Our job was to pull alongside her, highline transfer the injured man and then figure out the fastest way to get him to proper medical help.

With my Navigation team, we quickly determined that the closest hospital would be at Lajes Air Force Base back on the island of Terceira in the Azores, about 400 miles astern. We got the Comms team fired up to start talking with Lajes and I started plotting the fastest course to put us into helicopter range of the Air Base.

Fortunately, the seas were not especially rough, but we had to get all hands on deck for the highline transfer. At roughly 3AM, we came alongside the Fox and made the transfer. We broke off and headed back east towards the Azores. The Fox flashed “Godspeed” as we accelerated. The Spruance class destroyers were built for speed with four LM-2500 gas turbine engines, we could move. The Captain received authorization from the Chief of Naval Operations to go to Flank 5, our top end speed which was highly classified…the Spruance class were the prime submarine hunters in our engagement with the Soviet Union, and we didn’t want them to know how fast we really could go. Hours later we were within helicopter range, and we launched our helicopter with the sick sailor aboard. We then turned around and headed for home. The young man lived. We even received a lovely letter from his family that was framed and hung in our Wardroom. As unhappy as our crew was about turning around…we all wanted to get home, to a man we were extremely proud of saving a life. Every one of us on board knew in our hearts that this great country would do that to save our lives too if it was necessary. John Wesley Powell expressed it so eloquently in his dedication to “Canyons of the Colorado:” “I was a maimed man; my right arm was gone; and these brave men, these good men, never forgot it. In every danger my safety was their first care.” We are Americans, it is what we do.

I tell this story, because this next day of travel was about steering an intercept course with Powell’s expedition as we headed south out of Provo. Our destination was the Valley of Fire State Park, not far from where Powell’s expedition pulled themselves off the Colorado River, having completed that magnificent run from Green River, Wyoming.

As we pulled out of Provo onto I-15 headed south and west, everything to our left, just over the horizon, was Powell country. In our past two trips out west, we have covered them, now we were racing parallel to some of the most stunning geography in the world. This section of the country is formed like a giant staircase with each layer disclosing a different color of rock, representative of a geologic era. Farthest upstream is Canyonlands National Park, an enormous spread that is four parks (districts) in one. Last year, we toured the Island in the Sky portion, a high mesa in the north between the Green and the Colorado Rivers. The Rivers District follows the Green and the Colorado to their confluence and into Cataract Canyon below. The Maze district is to the west, it is the most remote and rugged of the four, passable only by four-wheel drive vehicles. The Needles, to the southeast, is known for its banded sandstone spires and numerous trails.

Descending from there, the traveler will encounter Capitol Reef National Park. This geologic formation, some 100-miles long, earned its name because it blocked travel across the land the way a reef stops a sailing ship. “Capitol” comes from the white Navajo sandstone domes that look like the U.S. Capitol. Almon Thompson, Powell’s brother-in-law named the formation “Waterpocket Fold” after the potholes in the rock that catch rainwater. We spent a day here last year and greatly appreciated its raw beauty. There is even a feature called “Cassidy Arch,” named for Butch Cassidy, whom we discussed last week. Legend has it, that the outlaw used the area as a hideout.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument sprawls across the high country east of Zion and north of the Grand Canyon, the next two parks down the staircase. On the 1872 Expedition, Thompson named the Escalante River. It was the last river in the contiguous United States to be identified – unknown no more.

In an earlier chapter of this travelogue, I discussed how Stephen Long had looked at these arid plains and identified them as “desert.” He was wrong. Powell looked at the plateau and, in his 1878 “Report on the Lands of the Arid Region,” acknowledged that the land was dry. His solution was that people should settle it around the watersheds that are actually there. He was right but he was ignored and today, the Colorado rarely makes it to the Gulf of California. It dies out short of the sea in a dry, salt-encrusted landscape.

On August 30, 1869, a Mormon settler, Joseph Asay and two of his sons, were fishing in the flatwater at the confluence of the Colorado and Virgin Rivers. About midday, two badly battered boats appeared around the bend coming out of the Grand Canyon. They were manned by what at first appeared to be scarecrows. It was the surviving men of the Powell Expedition. The crew had not been heard from in three months and had been presumed dead. Asay and his family brought the men in and fed them fish, squash and corn – not unlike some of the early Pilgrim meals on these shores. A messenger rode to the nearby town of St. Thomas and word went out – they had made it. The three men who had walked out at Separation Rapid two days earlier never made it.

Our course down I-15 was headed straight to an intercept with that point. We wove through the stunning Virgin River Gorge, closing on the same water from the north, 157-years late and in air conditioning. We would not be able to reach the exact spot because Powell’s landing at the mouth of the Virgin, is underneath Lake Mead, formed by the incredible Hoover Dam. The town of St. Thomas, where word had gone out about Powell’s survival, was submerged by the dam, but has re-emerged several times due to drought. It has been out of the water for most of this century. We passed a gate to the Lake Mead Recreation Area, gave a hat tip to the one-armed Major and headed on to Valley of Fire State Park.

Valley of Fire gets its name from red Aztec sandstone, the same formation that makes the cliffs of Zion. The sandstone was laid down as wind-blown dunes some 150 million years ago, in the Jurassic, then carved by wind and water into waves and pillars. Intertwined in the red sandstone are layers of iron and manganese oxidized into different shades of red and pink with bands bleached by water.

The park has an odd layout. If you enter from the east, as we did, there is a gate where they collect your fee and give you a tag for your dash. The Visitor Center is almost to the other edge of the park, about 8-miles across the 10-mile spine road. We headed there to gather more information before beginning our exploring. After being briefed by the Park Ranger, we doubled back and headed up the White Domes Road to one of the more stunning wonders in the park, the Fire Wave, a massive formation of rock that appears to be a red wave headed towards crashing on a distant shore. We made numerous stops along the way to see petrified log formations, various domes and curious pillar formations like the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon National Park.

On our way back towards the West Entrance, we stopped at Atlatl Rock. These are a series of petroglyphs by the Basketmaker and later Ancestral Puebloan peoples from around 2500 years ago. It is estimated that humans have been in this area for over 11,000 years, but for the first 8,000 years or so, they left no marks in the dark desert varnish that have survived. The rock gets its name from the depiction of a spear throwing tool used by the Puebloan tribes called an “atlatl.” It resembles the tennis ball throwing devices that so many dog lovers own.

Like several other stops on this voyage, even though it was late in the afternoon, the heat was stifling and non-conducive for a healthy hike. Fortunately, the road network in the park, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s allowed us to explore large sections of the park from the comfort of our air-conditioned vehicle.

As we were leaving the Park and headed to Las Vegas, I realized I had made my first unforced error of the trip. In all the discussions we had had about Powell and the wonders of the Valley of Fire, I had not checked the gas. We were on fumes and the nearest station was 12-miles away. That was the bad news. The good news is that the nearest gas station, in Crystal, Nevada, was several hundred feet below us, and it was downhill all the way. We were able to make the run with my foot barely ever touching the accelerator. While it is a slim comparison, I sensed the same relief Powell must have felt when he saw Asay and his boys at the mouth of the Virgin River.

We continued down to Las Vegas; the lights were just starting to fire up. I can’t help but wonder how long that can last. The “megadrought” the region is enduring right now dates to 2000. The combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell is at its lowest point since Lake Powell began filling in 1963. In my academic life I have done a great deal of research on city sustainability and resilience. Let’s just say, Las Vegas is not on the list of model cities. Perhaps Powell said it best: “Years of drought and famine come, and years of flood and famine come, and the climate is not changed with dance, libation or prayer.”

We got through the town and arrived in Henderson, Nevada, our stop for the night. The town was built in 1941 to house workers for Basic Magnesium’s plant that was making magnesium for aircraft and incendiary bombs. By 1943, the plant, a key component of the “Arsenal of Democracy,” was the world’s largest magnesium producer. The town has been swallowed up by the ever-expanding behemoth of Vegas, baby!

After checking into our room, I spied a Japanese ramen place across the street, Soru Ramen. It wasn’t much for eating in, so we decided on take out. Ramen has a very special place in my culinary history. Having spent eight years of my childhood in various parts of Japan, I love the stuff. Some of my fondest memories of living in Sapporo, in the Snow Country of northern Japan, were the short family walks from our Consular housing to the soba and ramen parlors down the street on Saturday afternoons. To enter those places out of the snow and cold and see the steam and be blanketed by the sound of good people slurping noodles is heavenly to me. (It’s a cultural thing – you are showing the chef you are enjoying the meal – do not let your Victorian sensibilities be disturbed!)

We placed our order and a few minutes later I ventured across the street. As I was waiting, I got in a conversation with one of the owners of the restaurant only to learn that he was from Sapporo, the very town I was just talking about! Travel has a wonderful way of connecting dots you just don’t see coming!

Later that night, after the pavement had cooled from molten to passable – especially for puppy paws – we ventured out for a nice evening stroll. To the north, the garish lights of Vegas drowned out the heavens, to the east the dark skies foreboding over Lake Mead. For us, the satisfaction of a day well-traveled and mishaps avoided.

We returned to our room, fixed our tea and night caps and settled into some reading, journaling and planning for the run into Los Angeles that we would make the next day. I was scribbling some notes about explorers and their character and reflecting on how Americans have never ceased to be so restless. The historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, a student of the American frontier said it best: “He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact.” He wrote that in 1893. One hundred thirty-three years later, we are still on the move.

This is the continuation of a series that began here.

“We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown.”
— Powell’s journal, August 13, 1869

I raised my arm to give the signal.
The ball came before the order landed.
Two days later a surgeon took
What the war had already broken.

The surgeons had no name for it yet—
A nerve that argued long after the argument.
I never wrote a word of the pain.
I wrote instead about a river.

Emma nursed the wound at Shiloh,
Then followed the guns to Vicksburg’s siege.
Her name went on the smallest boat,
Four inches of pine holding back a river.

Ten men, four boats, ten months of rations,
A strap where my hand had been.
The rails that nailed the country shut
Carried us west to cut it open.

Ninety-nine days down the Green and Colorado.
Soaked and baked beneath
Red stone walls eight hundred feet high,
We stared at what God had wrought, half in awe, half in fear.
Flour gone to paste, the bacon spoiled, clothes rotted away.
Three men climbed out and did not live,
Mistaken for brigands and gone.
Six of us rode the current home.

The river carved its own course,
Unmoved by our prayers or pain.
We floated over stones older than nations—
Indifferent, unyielding, eternal.

The pain came with me into the canyon
And it came back out again, unhealed.
A country always asks what you will carry.
I carried what was left and went.

There are no photos from the original 1869 Expedition. The photographic equipment was waterlogged early in their drive down the Colorado. The boat pictured above “Powell’s armchair” is from the second expedition in 1871-1872. Nevertheless, I believe it gives the feeling of what he was riding into the “great unknown.”

A little over two hours from my home in Nashville, to the south and west of here, is the Shiloh National Military Park. On April 6 and 7, 1862, a ferocious battle between U.S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee clashed with Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of Mississippi. At the time it was fought, early in the war, it was the bloodiest battle with almost 3,500 men dead including General Johnston. In total, the casualties would be over 23,000. Among those was a 28-year-old Captain commanding the Union’s Battery F, Second Illinois Light Artillery.

Around 3:00PM on the first day of battle, Battery F had shifted positions to try to hold the line at the Peach Orchard. The Confederates were advancing and pushing the Union forces back against Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. Their commander raised his right arm to signal the guns to fire, and a Minie ball smashed his right forearm. The Captain did not notice at first until he tried to remount his horse. He rode back several miles to the rear under heavy fire. There, he was taken to a Union field hospital. Two days later, on April 8, a surgeon amputated the arm below the elbow. He would spend a year doing recruiting for the Army, then returned to duty in 1863 as a Major – a title he would use for the rest of his life. Towards the end of the war, the Major was in an artillery position directing fire on a Confederate position not far from where I write this.

His right arm stump caused chronic pain, and while he never wrote about it, in his scientific work, he described the relief of emerging from the “great unknown” of the Grand Canyon in 1869 as comparable to emerging from a Civil War hospital tent. His name was John Wesley Powell.

We were headed to Green River, Wyoming, where Powell had shoved off into the great unknown on May 24, 1869. On that day, the boats of the first great expedition into the Grand Canyon, Kitty Clyde’s Sister, No Name, Maid of the Canyon and the Emma Dean (named after Powell’s wife). There were ten men, mostly Civil War veterans and trappers, none of whom had run rapids before. They carried about ten months’ worth of standard rations, donated by the Army. And though the journey ended up lasting about 99 days, they were down to biscuits made with spoiled, resifted flour and unleavened bread after losing their baking soda in the river when they emerged from the Canyon on August 30, 1869.

The Union Pacific had brought the boats west from Chicago on the transcontinental line that had only been completed at Promontory Point two weeks earlier. The boats were built to Powell’s specifications – 21-foot oak rowers that served as their freight boats and the smaller, 16-foot Emma Dean, which was Powell’s command craft, rigged with a strap he could brace his partial right arm.

We arrived at Expedition Island late morning. While I think they could play up the Powell expedition(s) more than they do, there is a lovely park that we walked around that had numerous historic markers and a lovely vista of the Green River. After dipping my feet in the Green, we loaded back up and continued west.

Our next stop was Promontory Summit, the Golden Spike National Historical Park. On May 10, 1869, two weeks before Powell shoved off, Leland Stanford and Thomas Durant pulled back silver mauls to drive the last spike that connected the Central Pacific Railroad to the Union Pacific…they both missed.

The ceremony was supposed to happen on May 8 but was delayed due to bad weather and some rambunctious Union Pacific workers that held up Durant’s train until they received over three months of back wages they were owed. The trains that were used, Union Pacific’s No. 119 and Central Pacific’s No. 60, the “Jupiter” were understudies. Central Pacific had chosen No. 29, the “Antelope,” but it ran afoul of some logging work coming through the Sierra Nevada. The Union Pacific’s original choice is not known, but that train ran into a washed-out bridge on the way, so they pulled No. 119 out of Ogden instead.

There were actually four spikes, not one. Three commemorative spikes for some directors of the Central Pacific that could not make it were placed into pre-drilled holes on a laurel tie, most ties were hewn from cottonwood or a soft pine. One of the “golden” spikes was silver, a gift from the State of Nevada. The golden spike was 17.6-karat gold, weighing about .96 pounds, with “May God continue the unity of our Country, as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the World.”

The golden spike’s job was symbolic from the start. The swinging of the mauls by Stanford and Durant were meant to hit the tie, not the soft gold spike. Best we can tell, Stanford hit the tie, but Durant, who was likely recovering from a hangover from the previous night’s party in Ogden, missed the tie entirely. As soon as that part of the ceremony was done, the ceremonial spikes and the laurel tie were pulled and replaced with iron spikes and a cottonwood tie. The iron spike, struck by an actual rail worker, was driven home at 12:47; the word “Done” was sent by telegraph across the country.

Then came the real photo op. First Jupiter backed off so No. 119 could cross over, then they switched spots. The Jupiter crossing is the famous photo that was in all our history books. The actual golden spike went to the museum at the university Leland Stanford had founded, donated by David Hewes, a friend and contractor for the Central Pacific in 1898. The laurel tie was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Fortuitously, our arrival at the Park coincided with the thrice daily recreation of the two locomotives crossing over. Bandit was enjoying stretching her legs as we walked around the engines before the demonstration began. Her hound ears, however, did not like the sound of the engines coming to life and the steam whistle.

After wandering through the museum, we packed up and headed down to Salt Lake City. We had planned to go to Antelope Island State Park, but after reading about the “biting-midges” (we call them no-see-ums), mosquitos and deer flies topped with a big helping of bad traffic on the causeway, we changed our mind.

We found the state capitol and then the Mormon Tabernacle, which was covered in scaffolding for renovation. I checked the map and it would take us about twenty-five minutes to get to the Great Salt Lake, so we headed west to check that box.

On schedule, we arrived at Salt Lake State Park. We paid our $10 entry fee and headed out on what looked like a large pier structure. Numerous boats were stranded on land on either side, their mooring lines still running up to the pier. Brigham Young and his Mormon migrants arrived here on July 24, 1847. It is reported he said “It is enough. This is the right place.”

The “right Place” is a remnant of a vast Pleistocene inland sea called Lake Bonneville. Bonneville was nearly the size of modern Lake Michigan. It covered a huge swath of Utah, Nevada and lapped up into Wyoming. Sadly though, the lake is dying. It is a terminal lake: the Bear, Weber and Jordan Rivers feed it, but nothing flows out except evaporation. What is left is an extremely briny water that is not potable. Almost nothing that is vertebrate lives in the lake, though it is still an enormous migrating rest stop for several species of birds who fatten on the brine shrimp and bugs.

A rock causeway, the Lucin Cutoff, was built in 1959, splitting the lake in two. The south arm of the lake still has rivers flowing directly in. The northern arm was cut off and turned pink from salt-loving bacteria and algae. From its historic average elevation of 4,200 feet above sea level, the lake is around 4,100 feet today and is continuing to shrink. “It is enough” reads as an accidental warning nobody heeded.

As we approached the parking area, we first observed people jogging to their cars swatting themselves and the air around them. Then I took a closer look at the windshield. We were in the middle of a cloud of mosquitos that would have turned our walk into a Red Cross Blood Drive if we had dared to exit the car. So, we enjoyed the vista of the steaming lake and started to roll towards our resting place for the day in Provo, about an hour and a half away.

On our way back to the Interstate, we passed an intriguing structure that reminded me a bit of a northeast coast beach town venue complete with gold onion domes, but it was fenced off. We had discovered the Great Saltair Pavilion, once known as the “Coney Island of the West.” In 1893 the original Saltair was built to attract residents from Salt Lake City out to the lake for music and entertainment. Through the years, it has burned and been rebuilt multiple times and at present it appears to be in some kind of bankruptcy mess. If the mosquitos were anything like what we had seen on the pier, I could see why it would be a difficult marketing task to attract a crowd. It once was on the water of the lake, but the lake’s recession has left it 25-30 yards away. I later found out from my musically gifted neighbor that he had played the Saltair with Ben Folds back in the day – there is always a Nashville connection!

We arrived at our hotel as the light began to fade. We had come a long way and opted for the Olive Garden carry-out for dinner. After dinner, we ventured out for our walk and found a very well-maintained paved greenway trail. The evening air was lovely, the night sky cloudless, and we walked for several miles reviewing our day and our trip so far. Bandit was in one of her “bouncy” modes where she almost prances as she walks, tail flipping like a metronome.

Returning to our hotel and our evening routine, I highlighted this passage from Wallace Stegner’s “The American West as Living Space:” “It should not be denied that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.”

It is in the American character to explore and to go beyond. Lewis and Clark had it as did Powell. As did the thousands of emigrants who risked everything just to see what was out here. John Steinbeck said, “We do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” Crossing over so many lanes today from trails, to rivers and rails, this trip has taken me and that is all one could ask.

This is a continuation of a series. The first installment is here.

-Willa Cather, “O Pioneers!”

In 1913, Josie Bassett Morris, then 39-years old, moved from her family homestead in the Brown’s Park region along the Colorado/Utah line to her own homestead along Cub Creek on the Utah side. She had moved West from Arkansas with her family in 1877, when she was 3-years old. Josie was a modern woman before her time. She was married five times, divorcing four of her husbands and she would single-handedly homestead at Cub Creek till 1963, when she fell on ice and broke her hip.

In her youth, her Brown’s Park family had hosted Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch and at the age of 15, she developed a crush on Butch, calling him her “Brown’s Park beau.” Late into her life, Josie swore that Butch Cassidy had visited her around 1930, asserting that he had survived the shootout in Bolivia in 1908, though most historians discount that assertion.

The Brown’s Park Place was part of the Outlaw Trail, a loose north-south network of remote valleys, canyons and ranch “safe houses” that rustlers and later bank and train robbers used from the 1870’s into the early 1900’s. The three main stations were Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming in the Big Horn Mountains, Brown’s Park on the Green River where Utah, Colorado and Wyoming meet, and Robbers Roost in southeastern Utah. The Trail worked like a crude Pony Express – outlaws would stash fresh horses, food and sometimes weapons every 15-20 miles, but the terrain itself was the main defense.

We were leaving Craig, Colorado, and headed to Josie’s place which is now inside Dinosaur National Monument. We had been on a part of the Lewis and Clark Trail, the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails. We were headed to the Outlaw Trail but would also be going deep into the route that John Wesley Powell would follow down the Green River in his quest to map the “great unknown.”

One of our “must haves” when we get on the road in the morning is a strong cup of black coffee and a big ice-cold bottle of water. Our usual fare is Starbucks’ dark roast, but a town of 9,000 is not going to attract the Seattle giant’s green sign. After a little research, we settled on Maple Blues Coffee, in downtown Craig, and we were not disappointed.

Putting Craig in the rear-view mirror, we headed west onto the high plain of northwestern Colorado. The road stretched into a shimmering blur straight ahead as the cell phone signal dropped completely. We arrived at the Colorado side of the National Monument a little past noon.

Dinosaur National Monument straddles Colorado and Utah. Roughly two-thirds of the land is on the Colorado side, but the famous quarry which gives the Monument its name is on the Utah side. Dinosaur fossils were discovered here in 1909 by paleontologist Earl Douglass, who was in the employ of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum. What wonders we have discovered through the philanthropy of our Robber Barons in the late 19^th Century!

Douglass found eight articulated Apatosaurus tail vertebrae and that launched a major excavation that would last into the 1920’s. Some 350-tons of Late Jurassic fossils including Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Camarasaurus and the Apatosaurus were pieced together from this find.

Some 150 million years ago, North America sat farther south than it does now. Carbon dioxide was very high, and the climate was a greenhouse world. This area was a broad, low floodplain in a basin east of the rising mountains. Over time, the wetlands began to shrink and many of these animals probably died in concentrated areas caused by drought shrunken water reserves. When the rain returned, floods swept the loose bones downstream where they were stranded on sandbars. The sand buried them quickly enough that bacteria and minerals in the water could preserve the skeletons before they fully decayed. Down through the centuries, sediment piled on top. Mountains tilted up and lifted the whole region to its current location. Then erosion stripped the cover and Earl Douglass found them.

Woodrow Wilson proclaimed an 80-acre monument around the quarry in 1915. Then in 1938, FDR expanded it by roughly 200,000 acres to protect the canyons of the Green and Yampa rivers and their view shed. That portion of the monument is reached by river or by a 30-mile road into the heart of a high plateau above the river canyons. All that scenery is on the Colorado side. We drove up into the highlands, climbing some 3,000 feet from the Canyon Visitor Center just east of Dinosaur, Colorado.

The vistas are breathtaking, but sadly, the majority of that land is not accessible by vehicle, and I did not have my kayak on the roof for a water adventure. Nevertheless, it was well worth the drive, and we stopped numerous times to take in the view shed.

We headed to the main road and resumed our westerly push. A few miles up the road, we pulled into Dinosaur. We took advantage of the lone gas station to top the car off on Brontosaurus Boulevard and stumbled upon a lovely sandwich and gift shop, the Bedrock Depot. I couldn’t get the theme music from “The Flintstones” out of my head, but the turkey Rueben was exceptionally good. The owner of the Depot was a lovely lady in her late 60’s who shared with us the story of the Echo Park Dam fight, an early win for the conservation movement in the 1950’s. The Bureau of Reclamation wanted to build a dam at the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers in the heart of the National Monument. It would have flooded Echo Park and numerous Fremont culture rock art would have been lost. The fight that stopped the dam became an early precedent: a park already on the books was not automatically available for a reservoir. Wilderness Society members voted to sacrifice another canyon upstream to save Echo Park—a hard bargain that haunted many of them for years.

Continuing into Utah, we crossed over the Green River, which Powell would have been floating down on his expeditions, and entered the Quarry Visitor Center. After getting our stickers and Passport stamps, we headed over to the Quarry Exhibit Hall and were dazzled again.

The Quarry Exhibit Hall wraps around the face of the Carnegie Quarry – the “Wall of Bones.” Earl Douglass wanted part of the quarry left in place as a public classroom and this does not disappoint. The first building was built in 1958, but the civil engineers did not anticipate the Bentonite clay foundation would shrink and swell with moisture. That building was deemed unsafe in 2006. The hall was rebuilt with deep micropiles down to bedrock and reopened in October 2011. The hall covers a tilted sandstone slab that is about 150-feet long and more than 40-feet high. There are over 1,500 dinosaur bones set in the same position that the river left them 150-million years ago. A two-story observing platform faces the wall and provides an airy viewing position to pick out the various allosaurus, diplodocus, stegosaurus and numerous other fossils.

Leaving the Hall, we drove further into the monument. There were a couple of hiking trails that I had looked at the night before that were along the Green River, and they were dog friendly. They led to some petroglyph walls which were of interest. However, the trails were not human friendly – between the 95-degree heat, 100% humidity on the Rivershore and a wall of thirsty mosquitos, we quickly abandoned our hike and returned to the car.

We left the National Monument and turned north towards Wyoming. We had about two and a half hours to go till we reached our hotel in Rock Springs and it was getting late. The drive took us through the Ashley National Forest, a lovely alpine drive and then along the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. John Wesley Powell named this area Flaming Gorge in his 1869 trip down the river because the red canyon walls looked as if they were on fire. The Flaming Gorge dam was built on the Green River which created the 91-mile reservoir and about 360-miles of shoreline straddling Utah and Wyoming.

We drove over the dam as the sun was setting and the canyon walls lit into flame. Our timing was perfect. A few miles on we hit our first Interstate in several days. I-80 crosses across southern Wyoming and heads towards Salt Lake if you head west. We were heading slightly east to our destination in Rock Springs. We were staying there because I got a great deal on a pet-friendly hotel with a highly rated restaurant attached. I did not know about the troubled history of this town till later.

Rock Springs had several coal mines mining coal for the Union Pacific Railroad. On September 2, 1885, white coal miners (mostly Welsh, English and Scandinavian immigrants) attacked the town’s Chinese quarter. They blamed the Chinese for low wages and for refusing to join strikes. The fight had started in Mine No. 6 over who got the better “rooms” – seams of coal. Miners were paid by the ton and the white miners said that the Chinese were being awarded the easier, more productive rooms. By the time it was over, 28 Chinese miners were dead and many others were wounded. The Chinese fled up into the hills outside the town. Federal troops were sent in a week later, and the Union Pacific loaded the survivors onto boxcars, telling them they were bound for the safety of San Francisco. When the train stopped, they were back in Rock Springs, marched under armed escort into the very mines where the trouble had started. Sixteen white miners were arrested but the grand jury brought no charges as the miners refused to testify against each other. Man’s ability to be cruel to his fellow man has not changed through the centuries.

Once unloaded and in the room, we studied the menu for “Nell’s.” Our oldest daughter’s name and the name of the restaurant down the hall. We settled on some pizza and salad along with a bottle of Oregon red that was not bad at all.

It had been a good day, though a bit long in the saddle. Tomorrow would be similar in distance, but we had pulled on some interesting strings in our pursuit of trails and expeditions. We walked Bandit for a little longer than usual under the clear night sky. Returned to our room for our tea and bourbon routine and then settled into bed. I was looking over some notes I had made about Wallace Stegner’s involvement in the Echo Park Dam Fight and stumbled on this: “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.” Amen, Wallace, amen…we looked in today. Thank you.

This is the continuation of a series that began here.

There is a particular silence I have been listening to for twenty-five years. I have heard it in four places, and somewhere along the way, in the part of me that keeps things, the four have become one. The noise of that day has been told and retold until any of us can recite it. The silence has not.

I heard it first in the summer of 1983, from the bridge of the USS Stump (DD-978). We were coming off a long deployment to the Middle East — how little the world changes — and had been sent up to New York for yard work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was a political errand dressed up as maintenance; we’d have been better served if we had stayed in Norfolk and crossed the channel to Newport News. But the order put us under the Verrazano Narrows at dawn, with the Statue of Liberty off the port bow and, dead ahead on the tip of Manhattan, the Twin Towers gleaming in the early sun. I had no way of knowing what that picture would come to mean. I only knew it was beautiful. Later, ashore, I rode to the top a couple of times and discovered that the towers swayed — a thousand feet of steel admitting, gently, that it was alive – frightening but a delight.

The New York I met that summer was not the one on the postcards. It was yard birds and cops and firemen: foul-mouthed, hard, and, underneath the hardness, among the most decent people I have ever worked with. On weekend mornings, when we didn’t muster full, I would go up to the bridge and watch the fog lift off the East River, gently handing the bridges and the towers back to the day. It was so quiet it became a kind of cathedral. I took a photograph one grey morning that has sat on my desk ever since. What I was really photographing, I understand now, was the silence.

A year later, the towers saved us — or at least stood in for salvation. We took Stump out for her first sea trials and they went badly. We lost most of our electrical power, our satellite navigation, half our propulsion, and found ourselves a hundred miles out in the Atlantic, wandering. I was the Navigator. This was still the age when a navigator earned the title with a sextant, so I worked us home the old way, on sun lines and morning stars. Nothing heroic in it — head west and you will strike America eventually; we simply prefer to be precise about where. At dawn, pacing the bridge, not certain whether we would raise New York or Delaware, I watched two impossibly bright points of light lift out of the sea to the west. The towers, catching the sun a few minutes before the city did. “Aim for those,” I said, very officially, and we did.

I think about that more than you would guess, because we do not navigate that way anymore. We no longer steer by landmarks or by stars; a chip in your pocket knows where you stand to the foot. Something was gained, and something quiet was lost. But for one morning in 1984, two towers were my way home.

Seventeen years after that — in September 2001 — the towers were how the day found me again. My office then stood across the street from Christ the King School on Belmont, and I had ducked into the organic grocer on the corner for my morning coffee when I heard people talking about a plane hitting one of the towers. Not having seen any picture, I assumed what an old sailor assumes: a small plane, a Piper Cub, clipped the side, the sort of thing that happened up there now and then. Tragic, but not the end of the world. As I was paying, the announcer on the radio behind the register said a second plane had struck the other tower. In my gut, I knew we were at war. I went back to the office, coaxed the old Dell online through all its whirring and chirping, and saw the first images, and understood we were entering something new and very terrible. I sent the staff home. My wife, Eileen, and I watched the rest of it come in, and we watched, in a stunned silence of our own, as first one tower and then the other folded into itself.

And I remembered the two bright lights rising out of the ocean. I remembered the yard birds and the cops and the firemen, and I understood, in my stomach before my head, that it was men exactly like them — and their sons and their brothers — climbing the stairs the wrong way, going up into it while every instinct and every other person came down. That is what heroes and saints do. They run toward. The towers I had once used to find my way home were gone, and so were they. I wept.

We had cross country practice on the calendar that afternoon. I wanted to hold it; I belonged, and still belong, to the school of thought that says you do not let them change the way we live. Alice Valiquette, our principal then, gently and wisely talked me out of it. The rest of that week went by in a smear — anger, grief, fear, and the helplessness that takes you when the event is so much larger than anything your hands can reach. But on Thursday, we practiced.

We were stretching on the field after warmups when one of the smallest runners looked up and said that the sky was quiet. It was. Every airplane in America was on the ground, and the sky over Nashville was that wide, unbroken, cloudless blue. For a moment I was back on the bridge in Brooklyn, inside my cathedral. And then the children went back to being children — the jostling, the terrible jokes, the sheer unkillable noise of them — and I knew we were going to be all right. The silence had told me what we had lost. Their voices told me what we still had.

Twenty-five years. The eighth graders who stretched on that silent field are close to forty now, and some of them have children the age they were that afternoon — children for whom September 11th is a date in a textbook, the way Pearl Harbor was a date to me. That is the strange arithmetic of a quarter century: the morning that rearranged your life becomes, for the people you love most, history. A thing that must be told rather than remembered.

So let me tell them. I want them to know how it felt — not the politics that came after, which we can argue about forever, but the day itself: the fear that had no shape, the flags that went up on every porch, the way strangers were briefly, achingly gentle with one another, as if we had all remembered at once that we were mortal and in it together.

What I did not know that Thursday — what none of us knew — was how briefly that camaraderie would last. For a few weeks we were one country, and I let myself believe it might change us for good. It did not. Somewhere in the years since, we mislaid it. The argument became more valuable than the neighbor. If the towers taught us to run toward one another, we have spent a good part of the years since 9/11 practicing the opposite.

And I want them to know the one thing that has not changed and never will, because it is the only part that finally matters. On the worst morning of our lives, the truest instinct a human being can have is to climb the stairs. I have spent a coaching life trying to teach a much smaller version of that — to run at the hill and not away from it — and if I am honest, I learned it first from men whose names I never caught in a shipyard in 1983.

And yet. I am not built for despair, and I suspect you aren’t either. Lincoln stood at the lip of a far worse fracture than ours and still reached for what he called “the better angels of our nature” — “we are not enemies, but friends… the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, will yet swell the chorus of the Union.” That is the work the dead leave the living: not only to remember them, but to become worth remembering.

Go now to where the towers stood and you will find that they have made the absence into two great pools, water falling into a square of deeper dark, the names of the nearly three thousand cut into bronze around the edge. The water is engineered to be loud enough to hush the whole city. It is silence, built on purpose, in the exact place my landmark used to be — my cathedral, raised again out of grief. Brooklyn’s fog, our stunned living room, the grounded sky over Nashville, and this: one silence, in four places.

I am an amateur astronomer, a habit I picked up standing too many night watches, and so I know that the light from certain stars still reaches us long after the star itself has died. We take our bearings from it anyway. That is not a bad description of what the dead ask of the living: to keep steering by a light that has already left, to aim for it, and to go. Twenty-five years on, I still take mine from two towers rising out of the ocean at dawn, and from the men who went up when it would have been so easy to come down, and from a field full of children whose noise, on a silent Thursday, put the whole broken world back together.

Aim for those.

“And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them—we can love completely without complete understanding."—Norman Maclean

We went quiet without deciding to,
somewhere below the summit, before I knew why —
the water up there still choosing an ocean.

A river is an argument settled slow,
rock answering rock across the count of years.
I don't know this range the way it knows itself —
the frost line, the old fires, what the marmots remember.

I've crossed it more times than I can add:
a boy once, then a father, now just this,
and never once required it to explain
what it was doing to me at every pass.

Down where the road forgets its altitude,
the marsh keeps a different kind of ledger —
not rock and water arguing across an age,
but a debt I signed without meaning to.

We brought the moose to have something to hunt
and left the beaver holding an empty book.
Enough to want it stocked, and not
quite enough to ask what it already had.

I'd have crossed this Divide the same way blind,
and called it knowing and been half right.

Some rivers get quoted. This one only listens,
the way you learn to listen to a thing
you'll never fully read — and love it anyway,
complete, unfinished, and going on without me.

The outline of this came to me in the silent descent to Milner Pass at the Continental Divide. Had to rework it a few times, but I hope you like it.

"I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form:
I would be a stream, winding between great striated rocks in late
     summer;
A leaf, I would love the leaves, delighting in the redolent disorder of
     this mortal life,
This ambush, this silence,
Where shadow can change into flame,
And the dark be forgotten."
     "The Longing,"  Theodore Roethke

On June 25, 1911, a flood in Estes Park, Colorado knocked out the power to the Stanley Hotel. Gas lamps were brought out so the staff could continue the business of cleaning and preparing the hotel for another wave of guests coming to the high country for health and outdoor living. A gas leak slowly seeped into a section of the hotel and as Elizabeth Wilson entered Room 217, she was blown through the floor. She survived the blast though both ankles were broken. The hotel paid her bills, and she remained on the staff.

In late September 1974, Stephen King and his wife checked in on what turned out to be the last night of the season – a blizzard would shut it down. They were the only guests in the hotel, and they were placed in Room 217. As the writer drifted off to sleep, he dreamed that he saw his young son being chased down the hall by a living firehose. He awoke, lit a cigarette…by the time he finished it, the outline of “The Shining” was in his notebook. He finished the novel in 1977 with the Overlook Hotel the Stanley recast. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror masterpiece based on the novel was not shot at the Stanley, though a later mini-series was.

Room 217 is now the Stephen King Suite and sports a long wait list. The hotel leans into the reputation – ghost tours, reports of the children’s laughter in random hallways, the founder of the Stanley hotel, F.O. Stanley (of Stanley Steamer fame) has been seen shooting pool. I don’t generally subscribe to the occult, but I do like a good ghost story, and “The Shining” is one of the greatest of Kubrick’s works, in my opinion. Who can forget Nicholson at the typewriter – “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”?

I read about all this the night before we started the last day of the first week on the road and thought a drive by of the Stanely was in order. We left Longmont around 9AM headed for Estes Park. Our bigger goal for the day was to drive through Rocky Mountain National Park and we had a 12PM entry ticket. We were finishing our first week on the road and I was anxious to get into our first National Park of this trip.

The drive up to Estes Park was unsettling. The roads were crammed and the glowering clouds all around us smattering us with occasional rain squalls did not look promising for a drive through a high mountain park with breathtaking views. The driving in and around Estes Park was equally unnerving. Tourists everywhere, traffic slowed to a crawl. We decided that admiring the Stanley from its website would have to suffice - we needed lunch and a shot at getting to the park on time.

We entered the Park at 12:30 and stopped at the Beaver Meadows Visitor’s Center before proceeding into the park. A couple of miles in, we pulled over to enjoy our sandwiches with the windows rolled down and the cool mountain air flowing through the car. Out our front windshield – Longs Peak.

At 415 square miles, RMNP is in the top twenty of our National Parks by size, but it punches above its weight in visitation, coming in 5^th. It was established in 1915 as our 10^th park. Enos Mills, a Kansas born naturalist who homesteaded below Longs Peak and ran Longs Peak Inn campaigned for the park beginning in 1909. He dreamed of a park that was over 1,000 square miles from the Wyoming line south to Pikes Peak. However, mining, logging, grazing and even the Forest Service were opposed to such a large reservation. The compromise that Woodrow Wilson signed on January 26, 1915, was a park of about 358 miles. It grew to its current size through regular acquisition of adjacent lands. In its first year about 31,000 people visited the park, today over 4 million come here to drive the 11-mile Trail Ridge Road, hike the 355 miles of trails and enjoy the 89,000 acres of alpine tundra and some of the most stunning mountain vistas in the country.

The winding Trail Ridge Road was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, and it climbs up to 12,183 feet before dropping down to the Alpine Visitor Center, the highest visitor center in the National Park system at 11,796 feet. We stopped to stretch our legs and enjoy the crisp – almost needed fleece – air.

We continued our descent and at 10,758 feet, we went through Milner Pass and crossed to the Pacific side of the Continental Divide.

There is a scene in Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” where Norman and his brother Paul are driving to fish the Blackfoot River. As they crossed the Continental Divide at Rogers Pass, Montana, Maclean noted that the brothers rode in respectful silence until they knew the waters were “draining into another ocean.” We were quiet in our car, soaking in the alpine landscape, the snowcapped peaks, the smell of pine, alpine forget-me-nots, and the grassy smell of the tundra that surrounded us. I was feeling a little introspective counting back through my childhood the number of times I had crossed this great range, it was all very peaceful.

The road continued dropping till we eventually arrived at the Kawuneeche Visitor Center at the other end of the park. Here the land was marsh and meadows, though still above 8,000 feet. In the deep South, man tried to change nature with the introduction of kudzu. The law of unintended consequences has played out with that viny beast for over a century. Out here, man introduced moose to this terrain because he wanted to have big game nearby to hunt. The result has been the near disappearance of the beaver that were native to this place. Both mammals eat aspen and cottonwood willows, but the moose are more efficient at it and have depleted the food supply for the beaver. In the park proper, they are down to two. Fortunately, restoration efforts are underway and perhaps our buck toothed friends will have a chance.

We exited the park and drove along some badly depleted lakes. Grand, Shadow, and Lake Granby are all showing signs of distress from the low snow mass of the last few years. I don’t know if this year’s Super El Nino event will have an impact, but if you are a boat owner on one of those lakes, you had better hope so!

We continued west through Steamboat Springs towards Craig, Colorado, our stop for the night. We had gone from Front Range low mountain to high alpine tundra, back down to high meadows and lakes and now we were headed into western Colorado grasslands and desert.

The sun was low as we drove into Craig and found our hotel. Craig is the exact opposite of Estes Park. There is no pristine white hotel, no tourists, and no tundra. It is a dusty, working-class town of about 9,000 souls nestled in the Yampa River Valley. The town was the end of the line for the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific Railroad. David Moffat, the company’s president, had planned to take his railroad all the way to Salt Lake City. Unfortunately, the venture ran out of money and in 1913, it stopped construction at the depot in Craig.

We settled for a take-out Domino’s Pizza and a lovely evening walk in the cool desert air. Back at the hotel we reflected on the day and by a chance of serendipity, Clint Eastwood’s classic “High Plains Drifter,” was on the cable. Movie critics have spilled a good deal of ink contrasting “High Plains” with “Shane,” a movie my great uncle starred in. Shane is from the era of the postcard west films, but with a strong moral statement, that sacrifice can clean a place. High Plains belongs in Craig’s country – the end of the rails, alkali basin, coal and dirt. One film says the rider leaves so you can live. The other says he leaves because you already failed.

Final walk with the Bandit and we sat down with our nightcap as I readied the charts for the next day’s adventure. As we settled into bed, I kept coming back to the flow of water and the Continental Divide. In Maclean’s etherial passage he says:

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”

As I drifted off, I realized that I too, am haunted by the waters.

This story began here: Part 1 Last chapter is here. The story continues here.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
— from “The Peace of Wild Things,” Wendell Berry

Somewhere back around Ash Hollow, I said the westward migration asked one question repeatedly: what will you carry, and what will you leave behind. This week, in the space of seven days, the answer got asked of two people who spent their whole lives answering it the other way; we will remember what they left behind.

Wendell Berry died yesterday at the age of 92, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, on the same land he’d farmed for almost sixty years, having spent a career arguing that a place, tended long enough, tells you more than any road ever could. He was the last living thread back to the Fugitives who once sat in a room at Vanderbilt and decided the machine wasn’t worth what it cost and boldly proclaimed their agrarianism in “I’ll Take My Stand.” Six days before him, Dolly Parton died in Nashville, only 80-years old— no Vanderbilt seminar, no manifesto, just a mountain holler in Sevier County turned into a lifelong chorus about never forgetting where you’re from. Different rooms, same argument: that rootedness is not a failure of ambition but a powerful form of it.

Today’s leg of our journey would be about the opposite motion. At Scotts Bluff, the emigrants on the California, Oregon and Mormon Trails turned northwest, toward Fort Laramie, toward the rest of the road they’d committed to. We were turning the other way – we would end the day in Longmont, Colorado.

I had plotted this route because at some point we had to head towards Los Angeles — remember, the navigator must get there in time for the granddaughter’s performance! One of our nephews lives in Longmont, Colorado, and that was the perfect jumping-off point for going into Rocky Mountain National Park the next day.

The first time we made the out-to-LA-and-back trek three years ago, we took a more southerly arc, and the first stop was Fort Smith, Arkansas. Walking the grounds of the historic site, I came across a map with a remarkable graphic tracing the western journeys of Stephen Long. In 1817, Major Stephen H. Long, of the Army’s nascent topographical engineers, selected the site of the original Fort Smith. Three years later, in the summer of 1820, he led an expedition west across the plains, and the country he crossed — the abundant corn fields and center-pivot circles you now see from a plane window — he famously dubbed “the Great American Desert.” From those plains his party sighted a distant summit the French trappers had called Les deux Oreilles (“the two ears”) — the mountain that now bears his name, Longs Peak, in what is today Rocky Mountain National Park. Our destination for the evening was Longmont, Colorado, the town that also carries his name, in the shadow of his mountain.

But our journey would begin at the last stop for this journey on the spine of the Oregon Trail, Scotts Bluff National Monument.

Scotts Bluff rises eight hundred feet off the plain, the first real interruption in a thousand miles of grass, and the emigrants read it the way sailors read a coastline — proof they had come far enough to matter. The Plains tribes had a name for it long before the wagons came: Me-a-pa-te, the hill that is hard to go around. The emigrants, in their hurry, renamed it for a man who could not get around it at all.

Hiram Scott was a clerk and trapper for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, twenty-three years old in the summer of 1828, when he started back east toward St. Louis and fell sick somewhere on the North Platte. The accounts don’t agree on what came next. His bull boat capsized and took the rifles and the provisions with it; he was too weak to hold the pace; his companions, reckoning him as good as dead, went on without him. Some say he begged them to leave him. Some say they simply left. Either way, when a party came back through the following spring, they found his scattered bones at the foot of the bluff — a long way, it was said, from where he’d been abandoned. A dying man had dragged himself across that distance toward the one landmark on the whole horizon, the great rock that guided everybody west, and died in its shadow. The trail named the place for the man it left behind.

I kept turning that over. The most famous monument on the spine of the Oregon Trail is, at bottom, a marker for someone the migration decided it could not carry. Back on the trail the answer to that question was usually a thing — the bureau, the books, the iron stove the guidebooks begged you to abandon in the grass. Here, once, it was a man.

There is a second young man at Scotts Bluff, and he came through at exactly the age Scott was when he died. In the summer of 1866, a twenty-three-year-old named William Henry Jackson walked west beside an ox team as a bullwhacker, a sketchbook riding in his kit. He had the eye already: his diary for the thirtieth of July describes a wall of thunderheads “lit up with a dull lurid light,” a sky he thought “worthy the pencil of Rembrandt.” Scott went into the ground at twenty-three; Jackson kept going — for another seventy-six years.

And what years. He became the great photographer of the West, hauling a wet-plate camera up mountains for Ferdinand Hayden’s survey through the 1870s; his photographs of the Yellowstone country helped talk a skeptical Congress into inventing the national park in 1872. Then, at the far end of a very long life, the wheel came all the way round. In 1929, in his mid-eighties, Jackson signed on as the “resident pioneer” of the Oregon Trail Memorial Association and began to paint — trail scenes, wagon crossings, the emigrant road as he wanted it kept. A body of that work hangs today in the museum at the foot of Scotts Bluff. The catch, and it is a tender one, is that many of the scenes he painted he never actually witnessed. He was an old man reconstructing a young country from memory and research and longing — painting the West not quite as he had found it, but as he had decided it ought to be remembered.

So the bluff holds both of them: the one the trail left behind, and the one who came home with the pictures. Between them sits the whole of the thing — what a journey costs, and what it carries forward, and how much of what we call history is really just the survivor at his easel, deciding what to keep. It is not lost on me that this is more or less what I am doing here, at a keyboard instead of an easel.

Coming down from the summit at Scotts Bluff, we did the un-pioneer thing. We put the great rock in the mirror, turned our backs on Fort Laramie and the committed road, and pointed south and west — toward Cheyenne, and a different kind of frontier altogether.

The drive down to Cheyenne is the hinge of the whole trip, though nothing about it announces itself. You cross into Wyoming and the trail — the actual emigrant road, the ruts we’d been shadowing since Grand Island — simply lets go. Cheyenne was never a wagon town. It didn’t grow up around a ford or a spring or a landmark; it was conjured, more or less overnight, in 1867, when the Union Pacific drove its line through and planted a division point on the bare plain. They called it the “Magic City of the Plains,” and the magic was the trick worked at every railhead — a town materializing out of a survey stake and a timetable. Back at Bailey Yard and the Golden Spike Tower, I wrote about the iron road succeeding the wagon road. Cheyenne is the town the iron road simply willed into being.

We drove in and made for the Capitol. The thing nobody warns you about downtown Cheyenne is that it is quietly one long open-air gallery. Beginning near the old Union Pacific depot and marching up Capitol Avenue, life-size bronzes line the sidewalks — sixty-some of them now, each one a piece of Wyoming somebody thought was worth casting in metal. We made our way up the street gawking like the tourists we were. There is a cowboy, naturally, and a sheep wagon, and a mountain man who turns out to be John Colter, the Lewis-and-Clark crew member who first walked into the Yellowstone country. There is a pumpjack, because this is an oil state too. And then there are the faces.

Two of them stopped me. Esther Hobart Morris, who in 1870 became the first woman in the country to hold judicial office — a justice of the peace in the gold camp of South Pass City. And Nellie Tayloe Ross, who in 1925 became the first woman ever elected governor of an American state and went on to run the United States Mint. They stand here because Wyoming got there first: in 1869, while still only a territory, it became the first government anywhere on earth to grant women the vote, which is why the plates and the welcome signs still read Equality State. It is a startling thing to hold in your head while standing under a bronze bucking bronco — that the most cowboy place in America was also, on this one enormous question, the most forward.

The Capitol sits at the head of the avenue under a dome of actual gold leaf, and out front rears Wyoming’s other emblem: “The Spirit of Wyoming,” a horse mid-buck with a rider hauling back on the reins — the same silhouette stamped on every Wyoming license plate for a century, the horse they call Steamboat. Equality and the bucking horse, sharing one lawn. The state seems to have contained both from the start and never found it strange.

But the longer toured that gauntlet of bronzes, the more I noticed who was in it and who wasn’t. The honored native leaders are here — Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone, Chief Yellow Calf, the last chief of the Northern Arapaho — the two peoples who share the Wind River Reservation. What you will not find, in the city named Cheyenne, is the Cheyenne. They were driven off — north to Montana, south to Indian Territory — and survive here only in the name over the door. It put me back in mind of old Jackson at his easel. A place, like a man, gets to choose what it keeps. Cheyenne kept the railroad, the vote, the bucking horse, and a careful handful of the people it displaced — and named the whole of it for a nation it did not keep at all.

We had one more line to cross before dark. From here the mountains finally stand up on the southern horizon, and the road bends down out of Wyoming toward Colorado — toward Longmont, and Long’s peak, and the end of the day.

After a day spent among the people a place leaves behind — the ones it couldn’t carry and the ones it wrote out — I was ready for the company of the ones you get to keep. We arrived in Longmont in the late afternoon and found a nearby Catholic church so we could fit our Sunday duty in before meeting up with our nephew and his girlfriend. When you are traveling thousands of miles on the road, I believe it’s a good idea to do everything you can to thank God for the wonders his world is revealing, and it doesn’t hurt to ask for a little protection as well.

We dined at a lovely restaurant (dog friendly!) called The Roost and got caught up with the Colorado branch of the family. Bandit was well behaved, the beer was very good and the food was terrific — a great way to wash the dust of the trail out of your mouth. I find it so refreshing to be with the next generation and hear about their successes as well as their struggles. It helps me keep my perspective on where we are headed as a nation, and if Brendan and Michelle are any indication, we are going to be just fine.

After walking around the historic downtown for a bit, we returned to the hotel and got ready for the next day. I checked the weather and my maps, the timing for getting into and through the park (in the more crowded parks, you now need to purchase a reservation) and got ready for bed. It had been a good, full day, and as I settled under the covers I reflected on the closing lines of “The Peace of Wild Things,” from the great essayist and poet now gone:

And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The last installment is here: Part 6 If you want to start from the beginning: Part 1