Archaeologizing

So much time, so few posts. Readers rejoice at the respite, or maybe instead the memory of Mojourner just dry rots and deflates until they are surprised when they hear the name again.

Yet here I stay. Just been busy learning new places, new people..., and new beurocracies as well. No, not new anything to be truthful, except for me. Peopled and un-peopled places have been around forever, and I'm well-advised to shut up and listen like the newcomer that I am. Ergo few posts.

In the causal category as well: the stepped-on computer, enabler of bombast, booster of ego, egg of amok flocks flying who knows where. Without it, I am taciturn.

So I go to the field, and come back and write about it if there's anything to say. ("And often if you don't," remarks the knowing relative reading this post.) Some of it is even fun, but none of you will ever see these documents. So few people will ever see them that you could probably take them out without even being Bruce Lee. Yeah, even you.

but what was I saying? Oh yeah

[18-minute pause]

Oh yeah, archaeologizing.

So Li and me be re-sponsible for covering a few million acres, so we tend to be in the field often, or swooping in via GIS to peer in the nooks and crannies of our state's diverse geography. I offer as evidence the following photo of Li:

As you can see, Li is a goong-foo master, leaping upon a site and capturing observations in a flash. A few strokes of the brush and the site's very essence plays out on the scroll. Or sometimes on a clipboard, called such because he can fling it with such force that many a villan's cranium has been clipped off just above eyebrows arched by fear.

No, nobody messes with Li, which is why I am so fortunate to travel with the master. He shows me places, he knows the people, and they are glad to see him.

Some day, these experiences may resurface in posts. Many will just dry rot and deflate. Others will surely burst into flames on my cauliflowery cranium walls, as is wont for the unshared reminisce. Too bad.

At least there are some photos: mountain wildflowers and sea creatures, landscapes, and the unpredictable miscellany that accretes to the archaeologist surveying from -12 to 6,200 feet below and above sea level. Because man, do I love digital cameras. As a technological tool for recording, studying, interpreting, and monitoring sites, it's hard to beat. It's a notebook full of thousand-word pages.

Almost as good as pencil and paper. (He poked into his keyboard.)

Good night.

Animals -5 to 5000+ Feet

Just time for a quick note--must ready myself for "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson." The story of an animal.

And so here are some of the animals I've seen at work. None of them write like Hunter, and only the starfish can handle their liquor with equal aplomb.

Why No Mo?

From February until a little more than a month ago, I was living on the contents of a U-Haul trailer. I'd found a house, and filled it with a chair, a bed, a drafting table, a computer, a skillet, and a ton of books. And some rocks and pieces of wood that have gained talismanic power over the years of wandering. No thermous.

You know, the essentials.

So I dwelt in one room, slept in another. Navigated the empty spaces in between. Compared to the cubicle labyrinth and rainforests where I spent my working days, the inside of this house was a prairie, open and unimpeded. Tiny bison roaming the carpet.

On the penultimate day of this existence, just before a big truck would deliver a household full of furniture and gear, I miscalculated one of the trans-carpet navigations. Stepped on one tiny spot where the computer lay. ("Why'd you put the computer on the floor, you frickin' idiot?!" you ask. Well, I was living the shelfless life. Spartan, sparse, spare, and smug.)

So it turns out that even a split second of large biped weight on a computer's hard drive messes it up. Badly.

Lost and not fixable, at least not without spending more money than a new computer.

And so lost, most of what I wrote over the past few months (and believe me, it was all pretty much brilliant). Thousands of photos. Tax spreadsheet. Other stuff I cannot even think of. And the means to easily post to the blog.

Many cool travles of late, and I'll try to post photos and tales soon.

Basalt of the Earth

I live on the Ring of Fire. Huge volcanoes rising where Pacific and continental plates hit, rending the surface and allowing earths innards to barf forth.

Ahhh...plate tectonics. When my dad was a kid, they didn't have this theory. When I was a kid, an excerpt about plate tectonics was part of just about every standardized test I ever took. Whoever wrote these tests--unless they were a stealth agent of the American Geophysical Society--had no interest in me learning plate tectonics. But being of a rambling mindset, I took time out during the Standard Achievement Test, the PSAT and SAT, and probably even the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Test, required in Virginia in those days) to ponder the grandeur of Gondwana, the puzzle pieces of South America and Africa, the violent Ring of Fire.

Never did finish those tests, but usually did well, and always felt a gratitude toward plate tectonics.
And now I live on the Ring of Fire. Excuse me while I go away for a few minutes and download the song of that name, preferably the Wall of Voodoo version.

So what does this have to do with the photos? Basalt, baby, basalt. I lived on basalt volcanoes in the middle of the Pacific for many years. Makes sense, because the ocean floor is basalt. None of that granite, afraid to wet its feet.

And here in Washington, basalt again. (Maybe that's what made me leave Virginia again. No basalt. Not even any volcanoes. Sand, clay, and quartz. Ho-hum.)



Here the basalt laps up onto a continent. And here there is cold, so we have basalt that cools into cool columns. Hexagons of stone, sheared off now and then to wow the geologically enthralled.

Another Procession Photo

Yellow Slime Mold was one of the coolest processioneers. Laying on a skateboard the whole way? Truly a fine Species.

Multifloral children and their mothers traveled with this endearing slime.

In then upper left is Mr. Herman and the two ladies from the other shot. You'd think I pasted them in, the way they're in the exact same poses, but this is bona fide.

Mayday Mayhem

I hightailed it out of Seattle on the afternoon of May 1, just as a big downtown march threatened to slow traffic.

And maybe also raise awareness
about immigration and the war.

Since early that morning, the Longshoremen had been on, um, not a strike, but whatever you call it when people stop working for political reasons. Most west coast ports were shut down because the union wanted to protest the war. This was reported on Seattle radio stations, but I'd be interested to know whether any of you heard about this. And if you did, was the story about people who gave up a day of pay and risked worse, or was it about the economic impact of an illegal maneuver by radicals? [NOTE: A week after this post, nobody has indicated that they've heard about this.]
I'd like to think that it was a persistent strain of American freedom-loving waterfront action, a la Boston Tea Party.

Here in Olympia, our protest ended in rocks thrown through bank windows and arrests, as you can see here:
http://seattle.craigslist.org/oly/rnr/664897280.html
This uncivil disobedience included anarchist graffiti in the capitol. Ironically, one of the banks hit was Bank of America, which drew much conservative flack last year for allowing non-citizen immigrants to open accounts.

So what did this accomplish?
A half-dozen activists now get to feel the chill of felony charges (none shipped to Gitmo yet, I believe).
Several dozen people took note of anti-war protesters unwilling to just pace about with placards.
Several hundred people took note of the arrest of vandals.

Banks paid rush-job rates to replace windows, and may face higher insurance rates. (Clever anarchist ploy #27: Make the Capitalist machine turn on itself.)

And this result as well. One blogger suggests that despite what you hear in the news media about the importance of the economy, the fact that people are now sacrificing their freedom and their pay to protest the war suggests that It's The War, Stupid. We are distracted by the diarrheal bursts of "economic numbers" without context, encouraged to worry about our household economies, and not the deathly quagmire overseas. The most amazing thing is the audacity of the propagandists, who blame high oil prices on everything from China and India to hedge-fund-hogs and Nigerian 'terrorists.' Everything except the horrendous instability of the Persian Gulf region wrought by our Iraq misadventure.

A poster In Olympia last Saturday

Onlooker Photo

In this shot, it seems like everyone is really looking at something, but not all at the same thing. The Procession is that kind of parade: species varied in pace and style, a myriad of enjoyment, not marched to the specifications of network coverage. One woman looking up while her friend looks down, another peeking out from behind, a big guy glaring at me...Oh crap. I think he's coming over here. I hope he doesn't go rhino on me.

And who is that man with the hair I had in 1986? With the Hawaiian shirt. I have a sneaking suspicion that he may be Paul Reuben, or whatever Peewee Herman's real name is. His Big Adventure film is showing at the Olympia Film Society this month, and everyone knows that Peewee is so fiendishly professional that he would have to do some audience research, the type of guy who would think nothing of putting on some weight and dying his hair just to walk among the fans who would return his masterpiece to the big screen after all these years.

And do you think that's George Carlin behind him?

Procession of Sea Species

Due to popular demand, here is another posting with photos from Olympia's Precession of the Species. Olympia lies at the southernmost end of Puget Sound, and so it should come as no surprise that aquatic species were well represented. Lots of jellyfish floated through, a life-sized blue whale spouted and fluked amid a school of dolphins, and a bigger-than-life-sized salmon swam upstream.

Here is a honu worthy of a Hawaiian parade, and an exquisitely crafted angler fish.

Sturgeon Story

Once, long ago, a fish entered the Chesapeake. A sturgeon, sticking to the bottom most of the time as was the way of his people. Nose swiveled to the mud, he swam from cape to cape and up every bight and river, past eelgrass and
oyster-bed, into every creek and gut. For sturgeons are long-lived, curious, and methodical. And they know the best grounds underwater like a hog knows truffles on land, sniffing and snorfing to beat an uptown wine tasting, snout-plowing into the aqueous soil in the better spots to see what comes up.

Over successions of forests, generations of turtles and man, and epochs of insects, the fish swam and swam, learning the bay. Out of sight from all but a few creatures, and for most of whom the suddenly gaping mouth of a sturgeon was the last thing they saw.

His survey done, and so too his inclination to head into the ocean again in search of another Chesapeake, the fish made the rounds of his favorite bay-beds, feasting the whole year through. Shooting up or down the deep Susquehannok channel, he would dart up the rivers, passing the falls sometimes. As he grew, only big rains made deep enough water to pull that off, but he was now a big bull fish, and would push his torpedo nose damn well through anything these rivers could send down.

Older and larger, progenious of the Chesapeake sturgeon, so strong now he only flicked his mighty tail once to get from Potomac to Nansemond, the mighty beast began to feel like a dinosaur. He had feasted every feast and nosed every mudflat, every pebbled channel, every sandy bed through the bay and its rivers from mouth to headwater. Nobody else remembered the real good times any more, the pristine waters before the fire-makers had come. A few times he came close enough to watch these beasts, and on two occasions he had been spotted; the first had left a stone chip embedded just below his back fin. He had watched a few generations of these two-leggeds along the banks of the river that they would eventually call Powhatan's.

At one of these villages, the people caused a grove of walnut trees. The rains of late Autumn would wash down the decomposed but still bitter hulls, and though he hated it at first, somehow his taste grew to need it. And more often he found himself leaving the anonymity and safety of the deep to get the walnut scent. The first few times he was seen was by children who screamed and ran. Seeing nothing by the time they arrived, the parents figured the monster was another children's game.

Perhaps because he had grown so old and alone that he had grown bitter, the walnut grove and its astringent black brew drew the fish back again and again. Nothing else in the bay interested him anymore. On starlit nights he would gaze at the grove for hours. And one night he was watching trees heavy with nuts certain to be falling in droves within a half-moon. Suddenly, his tail twitched mightily, vaulting his body ashore. As if crawling through the eelgrass, his fins instinctively rotated, heaving his bulk to the closest tree. Gills burning already, his mouth gaped over the tree and inhaled the nuts, leaves, twigs and all in one gulp. Twisting on the rebound, flopping back, he was more awkward than he had been since the Pleistocene.

But he was also safely back in the river, so that the creatures who poured out of the lodges did not see the fish. They only saw the jagged bole of one of their trees, and quickly decided that the children had been telling truth, not tales. Few slept the rest of the night, but none had a plan to deal with a tree-eater who had created a goodly gully escaping to the water.

The next day the men canoed up and down the river, more of them running along the banks, all armed with bows, clubs, and spears. Kids followed and threw walnuts at every little turtle nose on the water. Nobody of any age bothered to attack the sly ancient boulder down in the mud a half-mile upstream.

That night, there were big fires, and the big fish felt like the darkness was not cover enough to guarantee safety. He laid deep and low, watching their glow and biding his time. For the old sturgeon had watched fire-makers, and knew about them as he did about most any other creature in the watershed a defining paradox. And for these smart monkeys, it was this: They only stick with something for any time if they have already been doing it forever.

Seeing as they had not guarded against giant riverine tree-eating monsters before, it came as no surprise to the sturgeon that the lights flickered out one by one until one night there were none. And on the second night of dark, well before the moon arose, he slipped in close to watch and listen. The fire-makers slept, but he was wary. Then weary, afraid to venture landward, but overcome with the dullness of watching nothing happen.

Again a spasm wrung through his spine so suddenly and strongly that his tail launched him over the bank. And again panic and burning gills could not convince his fins they were not feet, and the piscoid landing craft advanced from the beachhead up to the tree-line. Gills, eyes, and mouth all searing now, he lunged and bit the largest of the walnut trees.

Such a large tree that he bit and bit again to get through the dense, burled grain. Twisting his bulk, the branches finally snapped, but by now the burning was so intense he could not see, could not breathe, could not even tell where the shore was. Voices and bipeds exploded out of the bark lodges, and fires bloomed. A hail of arrows and shower of spears barely pricked his old fish hide, but a few hit gill and eye and the old fish turned out to be neither impervious nor immortal.

The village and its neighbors and relatives and all their dogs feasted on the monster, who the shaman had re-defined as a gift, for days. They brought hickory and smoked strip after strip of sturgeon, but still could not salvage it all. Smoke and noise and hordes of children kept buzzards at bay at first, but they began to circle in such numbers that the sky darkened and the ground became covered with their splat. Besides, the bears had arrived and seemed impatient, and there was no stopping the flies. All the fire-makers left except the shaman and his apprentice, whose noses were plugged against stench and flies with rolled tobacco leaves.

Nobody returned that Winter or through any of the following warm moons because of the smell. But as the winds blew colder and leaves shed their green and then their grip, the lure of walnut grove was too strong. Nobody wanted to face late Winter without a store of nuts. So they returned, and found the grove in need of a good harvest and some fire. The shaman drew a circle around the great skeleton and commanded fire not to enter. He pointed to the bones and the colossal mouthful of walnuts among them, which had already sprouted. Squirrels and every other animal had not eaten any, he said, and explained that his guardians had told him that the fish was not a gift of flesh, or one year's feast. The gift was groves. The leviathan belly-full of nuts, fertilized by his carcass, had spit out thousands of baby trees, and now all of the people were to take these seedlings and plant more groves. The ones that remained growing from this great fish, their roots making wood from his bones, could never be harvested for eating, though anyone would be welcome to take nuts for the planting.

Fire-makers brought walnuts from this tree far and wide. In time, nuts from the sturgeon grove became trees throughout the Chesapeake region. People don't depend on them the way they used to, but the civilized ones know that a winter without walnuts gathered and cracked within the family is a bleak one indeed.

***

Like the old sturgeon, no tree lasts forever. Before steel, walnut trees in particular had what it took to persist: offerings of food and wood considerably harder to cut and hew than the human attention span will abide in construction material. Not too long after Powhatan's river was re-named the James, fire-belching creatures dealt with walnut trees by girdling and burning them, knowing that walnuts liked the same rich loamy soils that they wished to transform into tobacco and corn. Eventually, though, the descendants of these folks took to turning the wood of the walnut tree into furniture. Cutting and polishing, the woodwrights would often find themselves looking at a grain that echoed the burly old sturgeon.

One tree, cut in the 1960s or 1970s, and maybe growing back when Virginians felt compelled to throw off British rule, became a plank and sat in a barn until my dad and his double-first cousin bought the wood to use. Other planks became furniture and frames and shelves. But the projects failed to consume the wood before he died, and I inherited some pieces. (By inherit, I mean that I refused to thrown them away.)

A year or so ago, I spotted a sturgeon lurking in one plank. I cut out the shape, but being human, was distracted and did not complete it. This past Autumn, when I should have been cracking walnuts, I got a job at the other end of the country. You may have been subjected to the saga in the critically acclaimed series of emails. In any case, the move forced me to jettison some things. Like most of the walnut boards.

But not the sturgeon. I snuck that into the little U-haul trailer along with some Hawaiian kamani and koa wood and some rocks that mean a lot to me, and high-tailed it down the road before my wife could object. Despite my human attention span, I could not give up on completing the sturgeon. The impracticality of moving a 30--pound hunk of wood, abetting an overland migration of a replica fish, well I have to admit that that aspect also appealed to me. Besides, sturgeons live in the northwest as well as the Chesapeake, so it made sense.

I worked on it some, and then one day it came to me that the migration was not quite done. I had always figured that it would eventually find its way to someone else, because most things I carve end up being gifts of one type or another, and I almost never know to whom when I start cutting. The occasion arose, I spotted it, and offered it as a gift from my employer to a tribe that was helping us out. Just common courtesy, and something for the high mukamukas to exchange.

Only it ended up being me, and not the boss many levels above me, who handed this fish to the leader of a tribe. Too nervous to speak, but pretty happy to see a journey started so long ago
and so far away end up with a recipient whose smile said the fish was home.

Did I say Spring?

A year and 3,000 miles apart, I enjoyed spring cherry blossoms, followed a few days later by blossoms made of snow. In Virginia last year, the cherry blossoms had already fallen down in their own flower snow. In Washington this year, the flowers were still on the tree when petals of snow dropped out of the sky.

A few hours later, the snow was gone, the sun was shining, and I was out playing in the garden again. When we told people we would be moving to Olympia, many of them reacted with something along the lines of "The weather there sucks." Snow in late April may not be what people want, but at least it's interesting here. Not so much the months of endless rain, but a meteorological kaleidoscope.

Fabricated Rhino Trouble

"Ohh, twas a gruuesome spectacle in doowntoon Oolympia tooday," said one witness to this Year's Procession of the species. Another woman, ipso facto spokesperson for "the Lord," pitched in the opinion that "He hath spoken his wrath. The Lord shall not abide Evolutionists and Abortionists!" imputing a Darwinian slant to the Olympia tradition, and pointing at the Planned Parenthood office near the scene. Numerous onlookers looked on her outburst with everything from amusement to agog-ity, clearly not sharing her view.

Beasts of the serengeti are as much a part of the Procession as pink flamingoes, but this year the rhinoceri went berserk. The first victim, whose identity had not been released, was a woman also participating in the Procession. She was gored in the stomach, an atrocity caught on camera by visiting Baltimoron Lois Waters, who offered these shots as an exclusive to the Mojourner Truth because, in her own words, "The Moewjourner Trewth is the only paper I would subscribe to, if I were gonna subscribe to a paper, but I ain't gonna dew that, hon."

Just a few moments later, a man described by nearby spectators as "European, or something...he had a refreshing citrus scent" was gored by another rhino. As in the first attack, there was no warning, just a sudden narrowing of the eyes and twitching of the ears a split second before the lightning-fast lunge into the victim's gut. The second bloodthirsty rhinoceroid, perhaps twice the size of the first, sent the man flying a dozen feet in the air before landing in a tree.
One observer was nonplussed. "This is nothing. I work near here, and I see them anti-abortion protesters with their posters. That guy's guts hanging out ain't nothing."

Both Rhinos were taken into custody immediately following the incidents, and consensus among eyewitnesses is that both animals appeared dazed, even docile, not drunl, but maybe on drugs. Olympia police have identified the prisoners as Edwin Meese, 34, of Tumwater and Dick Thornburg, 43, of Olympia. Lieutenant Bruce Babbitt confirmed that blood tests had been ordered on the suspects, and surprised reporters by releasing a photo of a masked man identifying him only as a "a person of interest."


"We have reason to believe that the alleged perpetrators may have been under the influence of the being shown in this photo. We do not believe that he is really a biped with a rhinoceroid cranium, but is in fact a human, or maybe some kind of lizard, impersonating such a chimera. We have learned that the intense mojo beat of his drum may have been a factor in the attacks, and have put our most experienced detective-shaman on the case. We ask community members who may see this person call 911 immediately, and do not attempt to apprehend this individual. He is considered horned and dangerous."

Spring's Slow Unfurling

Photo: Daffodils of Skagit County

Compared to Hawai'i and Virginia, the Puget Spring's emergence happens...very...slowly. I am told this year is cooler than usual, which of course has elders, suspicious of Al Gore to begin with, clucking their tongues at Global Warming.

On this Earth Day, you are bound to find a better blogsplanation of how Global climate ain't the same as Local weather, and point is more that the long, Spring dawns cool and slow here. Which is cool, because whereas cherry blossoms would come and go in a few days in the south, they have hung on for a couple of weeks here. Cool, moist air reigns (and rains), like the refrigerated trailer we used to have at the greenhouse to keep hyacinths from blooming too fully too soon. And this Spring, the lack of more than a day straight of sun has probably suppressed the flowers that normally bloom on the light cycle instead of temperature. As a result, the heather only started looking bad after about 3 months of flowering, and bulb-blooms last to a ripe old age without showing it.
Spring climate may be slow in coming, but the weather often changes from minute to minute. Sure, it rained 6 out of the last 7 days, but most of those six days had patches of sun, sometimes hour upon hour of photons raining unrestrained. In the last week, we've experienced sun, snow, sleet, hail, rain, mist, a smattering of spattering, clouds black blue and white, and weather I could not even begin to name.
If Eskimeaux Sneaux goes by 100 names, I'm thinking that Nisqually must have a hundred shades of gray. Like people are wrong when they say there are no seasons in Hawai`i (you could go with the direction and kind and amount of rain, or just go by the fruit), to call it just "rainy" in the northwest misses the rich drama of precipitation and clouds here.
So, a diversity of momentary diversions, with a slow rollout of process. What could be better for the malihini wanting to learn the rhythms of the place?

Letting Go

The `Opihi, one of Gods most clingy creatures.

When you archaeologize thousands of miles from family, you train yourself to detach, without becoming separated. Walking a Puget mudflat, or Kona pahoehoe, you can be completely in the place. Then at night, talk all you want on the no-limit family cell minutes. Now how you could pull that off a century ago archaeologizing some remote mesa, or cutting cane on Maui, I have no idea.

The family functions fine in my absence, partly because they have each other. I'm solo, though, never really connected to the (current) residents of where I'm working. Paradoxically, it turns out that dealing with this depends on more letting go. Because on your own, after work, the least little thing can get out of hand. The usual addictive threats like TV and beer, for instance. Maybe less obvious: like having a couple issues each of Scientific American and Harpers in various rooms, reading from place to place as the necessities of life occur, interspersed with multi-hour delvings into some novel. Beard cutting, carving, gardening,...any number of things can eat a weekend. You gotta let go.

And when the trip is also a major move, letting go becomes all the more necessary, because you want to throw down roots in the new ground. Probably worth looking into something completely new while you are at it; my dad started snorkeling at 60. I was in a garden community in Honolulu, but maybe in Olympia I will join the film society, or an amateur welding guild, or the League of the Large-headed, or the Rotary. Yeah.

In that regard, it was tragic to have missed the Blintzapalooza recently. But I will for damn sure catch the Procession of the Species parade coming up next week. There are enough strange things here to make for fun. I cannot yet know what the unexpected new thing in life will be, but up here, I hope it isn't snorkeling.

Good night.

Fax you, Mo.

Just the other day I was mouthing off again. This time it was in the midst of closing on a house, and being asked to fax something I could've emailed.

"Fax!? Hell no, I don't have a fax! Why don't I just e-mail
it to you?"

Pause. Maybe conversing beyond phoneshot, or maybe just a pause, and then,
"That would be okay...We could accept that."
The fax was unnecessary, but if I hadn't come on like an angry bear, they would've had me driving to some place and paying through the nose, or poaching on employer machines. It only makes sense if you like crappy image quality.
Or if you happen to be a gatekeeper guarding turf much diminished in the computer age, especially in our sick economy.

Of course the people I'm dealing with are nice, so I just hit send and leave it at that. But fax machines just piss me off, so I stewed until later on when I was talking to my wife, and I made some crack about only old people having faxes. And fascists utterly feckless without faxes, tools of evil. She listened a while, let me vent, and I forgot about faxes.

Until circumstances forced me to recall. The next day it turned out that closing could not happen without an immediate fax. Yep. A signed page just not close enough to a scanner had to get there now. Because sometimes a transaction is so complex it demands the kind of unverifiable electronic simulacric signature that only faxes provide.

Sounds like karma, eh? Act rude, and you get payback.

And sometimes it just keeps on paying. Because remember, I was not only irritating real estate people, I was knocking on oldsters. So who do you think had the fax? Yep. Grandpa (Congratulations on the big 7-0!) has one right in his study.
So I ate crow, which is not so bad fried up nice and crispy in great-Grandma's skillet. Heheee!

But remember how I was ungratefully complaining about fascists, after all they've given us? The next day I bought a lawnmower (an old-school motorless one, because I may hate faxes, but really do love a lot of old technology. I mean, I'm an archaeologist, for fax sake.) Like the autobahn and prompt Italian trains, lawnmowers are fruits of corporate fascism. My getting one that runs without petrol was me flipping a tiny bird at the machine while it made money off me.

So I think it had a lot more to do with revenge than cosmic balance, but payback is payback. ) I started assembling the mower, but confound it if there weren't but half the fasteners needed and no handle at all. The instructions offered a toll-free number for the missing parts to be delivered. And after almost no phone tree (strange) I spoke to a real person (more strange) with a flawless mid-west accent (suspicious), who asked what was wrong, the item number, and said he would ship the parts (obviously some kind of hoax), "As soon as you fax the receipt to 1-904..."

Oh. As in "Boy, if you keep complaining about faxes being corporate BS, and fascists with faxes, you gonna find we don't take too kindly to that. Now you got a chance to toe the line, fax your receipt, and the machine will run just fine, understand? And if you don't, just remember we have vacancies in Gitmo, Mo. He-heh. Fax you, boy."

Yep. Karma and then vengeful corporate fascists both faxed me. Serves me right for getting all worked up and mean about something as trivial, and apparently useful, as a fax

Island Truck Trek

After all the years in Hawai`i, the concept of driving from Island to Island was strange. (I lived there before the Superferry was foisted.) Puget sound's fjording tentacles are bridged, as are some of its island channels. This shot is looking northeast through Deception Pass, so called because Vancouver expected it to be another inlet, but the "peninsulas" on either side turned out to be Fidalgo (left) and Whidbey (right). Fidalgo had gotten there with Quimper a couple of years before Whidbey helped Puget explore while Vancouver attended to paperwork or something. Fifty years later, the American arrived under Wilkes, who tried to rename Fidalgo after Admiral Perry, but it didn't stick.

This shot is from the bridge, where state route 20 crosses at a dizzying height above the pass. Most frightening photo for me in a long time, much sketchier than leaning out of a helicopter over Nu`alolo. You walk out onto this span, cars going by making the deck shake and the railing is below my center of gravity. And then a truck goes by shaking more. I tell myself just to breathe, that if people fell off the bridge that often the access would have been shut off, but the view literally pulls me in, and the wind is at my back, and I walk back carefully.
Because I was too shame to crawl.
Walking back to the truck, a small convoy of semis towing pre-fab homes went by. I would have soiled myself if they had come by when I was on the bridge.

Driving south along Whidbey: cool forested heights, sun-drenched fields, tourist communities, military suburb, farms, RVs. Just seeing the Route 20 strip, with Cypress Island fresh in my head, focusing more on getting to the ferry, I don't do the place justice. Just passing through.
Getting back to the mainland on the Kitsap Peninsula (because no, not all the place names refer to interlopers of European descent), you hop off Whidbey about halfway down at Keystone. I was four cars too late to fit on the 3:00 trip, and so inherited an hour and a half to walk the little beach next to the landing, looking at pretty pebbles. I'm easily entertained that way. This outpost would be a good place for some eats, but a couple of vending machines were all there was to be had. So good thing there were colorful rocks.
The F150 nosed into the front row for the cold, clear passage to Port Townsend. Squeezing out of the driver's side door next to a vanpool of workers headed back to Kitsap, I went to the top deck to look around. Of course I'd forgotten the map, so I really had no idea what I was looking at geographically, but there was an eagle and other birds aflight and afloat. Wind-wriffled water whipped up a haze that rendered my snapshots nothing more than that. Sweet air was reward aplenty, and olfactory memory may yet outlast digital bits.

Pro Crastination

[Here it is 5 days later Egad! Blogspot posted this as April 15, which was Tuesday, and I did not really post this until Saturday], and I am almost embarrassed to post this one. It seems like a gimmick to post this after tax day, but that's really how it turned out. And my blog has no deadlines, so I am not late.]


It's the last gasp of weekend before Tuesday's tax deadline.

How many other losers are blogging about taxes? (However many there were a second ago, plus one).
What to say, to avoid lumbering along with the same tired tropes?

Best to say nothing, I guess, but then I might have to get back at the taxes, and I am nothing if not a master procrastinator. Partly because it's easy to slip into. But procrastination is also freedom, slipping the yoke and ranging where you like. And then swooping back in and getting the job done. That's why the cringeful tension between the task at hand and the flight of fancy is the essential element of procrastinatory art. Putting off work on an ironclad deadline, where failure to deliver could have dire consequences, now that is some sweet sweet stuff.

And then, just when people are worried, some panicked, most ready with their "Can you be-lieve he has a drawer full of Leggos?" Then, you show up at the last minute with the goods. Because when you play, become a renowned lag-about, and still get the job done, you are sticking it to the Man. You become legend faster than the spieser down the hall who works 60 hours in the week before a deadline and some up with prompt mediocrity.

Sometimes I like my procrastination to have some direction. Maybe I think if I can use my stolen freedom to accomplish something, then I'm not a bad boy. Maybe it's because the carving, or gardening, or writing done on the procrastination clock is pure joy. And when you do something with a tangible result, you can re-enter the bliss every time you see said object. Most of the things I've carved of stone and bone and wood have emerged slowly, through a series of stolen intervals. In the subtractive arts, where one hasty move can ruin a piece, this is a good pace, and when the piece is done it contains all those days when you had the wisdom to put aside some chore and make art.

Procrastination is also a good thing for someone who travels to work, and is away from family for long periods. I put off really thinking about a trip until the night before, and escape most all of the anticipatory dread. Experience makes this a lot easier, for every good procrastinator develops a sort of peripheral vision, a background awareness of things to be dealt with. Short of an acknowledgment, but enough to cover essential duties. You learn to see where a slight nudge a few days out--nobody even has to see you put forth the effort--can keep things on track for the endgame.

When you procrastinate, you are
potentate of Penultimacy, my favorite place. You take the wee hours before dawn and dance them away, you escape Pinch Time.
The lead-up to deadline is that time when Bosses feel their most powerful, and when you flaunt urgency and fritter away your hours, you are a god.

As long as you get the job done in the end.

Found Office Poetry

Sent: Monday, April 07, 2008 11:41 AM
To: REDACTED, BUT LET'S JUST SAY IT WAS TO A BUILDING-LOAD O' STAFF
Subject: Mannequins Needed Back

Product Development staff was surplussing two mannequins last week. They were promised to Northeast Region to use.

If anyone has removed the mannequins, will you please put them in the staging area outside Room 372? No questions asked.

Thanks,

Puget Sounds Tasty

So yeah, I'm the aquatics archaeologist. So I'll be looking at a lot of fishbone, shell middens, and old fishing camps.
None of which taste good.
And I'm no fisherman. The closest I ever got was that field season in Maui, when I would blast Primus' "I Want to Be A Fisherman" while gathering seaweed, and the time when I was about 10 and caught a good-sized bass from an Ohio farm pond. I tried my luck with the 3-prong during the Hawai`i years, but never was much more than a tourist on and in the water.
Then the Virginia years. Seafood highlight was when my girl and her cousins netted a few dozen blue crabs. Mmmm... Otherwise, though, I returned to the old, "Who wants to eat seafood out of Mid-Atlantic water?"

But now, back near the Pacific, I hear the blurbling call of the wild denizens of the deep. And they say, "Eat me."
In a nice way.

Aquatic archaeology is not a license to eat, but it is important to observe and ask questions from Those Who Know what kind of yummy stuff comes from the local water. Up at the top of this post, you see the boat, and behind it the floating home, of a salmon farmer. Atlantic salmon, penned and grown like slippery cattle. Why? Because 1 pound of food yields 1.3 pounds of fish. That never happens with cattle, top producers of loose, half-digested, corn-filled stool.
Now this next picture, all of you Hawai`i people will recognize. Locals here focus on oysters, little clams, and the obscene gooeyduck (spelled geoduck, for some reason). But man, you can walk a cobble beach and pick up opihi without risking your life on the cliffs.


This is making me hungry. Aloha.

The Life Aquatic

A big (2.5million acres worth) of my job is to deal with cultural resources on State Aquatic Lands. Some places, like this, are only submerged when the tide is up, and my work is possible with the aid of rubber boots if I time it right. One thing that made it easy to take this job is that the people I work with understand earth's rythms--tides and snowfall and all--and act accordingly. Like when they planned the big statewide cultural resource training, they looked at the tide charts first, because they wanted to take people to sites like this one. Which consists of the remains of a fish trap (see the two lines in the mud, converging on the channel?) Originally, the lines were palisades that let water pass through, but not fish, which would converge on a little gate, where people would scoop them up. So when people tell you the Northwest tribes were "hunter-gatherers," keep in mind that sometimes the gathering involved development of infrastructure and resolution of territorial claims.

Of course, I work for a bureaucracy, and I don't get to just run around in tidewater mudflats looking for fishtraps. Sometimes I get to run around mudflats looking at pilings. There is a big project to remove creosote pilings from Puget Sound, but it happens that some are old enough to be historic, and I need to find out which, and document them before they get pulled from the mud (creating the "giant sucking noise Ross Perot talked of). The pilings here, by the way, are basically a corral for logs,, where they would be dumped off a train, awaiting a water voyage to a mill. And it ain't all as easy and fun as it sounds; I will have to go deal with Pile-preservationists, who think that these creosoted voices of the past must be preserved.

And then there are the days when I spend little time on actual water. The first happened on April 2, which dawned cloudless and calm. I drove 3 hours through Seattle and on north, and boarded a state launch at Anacortes. A short run brought us to Secret Harbor (really), on one of the few San Juan Islands that has not been developed. Or not much, anyway. Looking back out of secret harbor, you are treated to a view of Mount Baker, if you are so lucky as to arrive on a clear day, which I was. The photo is lame, but maybe you can sorta see what I mean. Beatific day, by any account. We saw seals, eagles, herons, starfish, kelp, and tolerably few bipeds. Fortunately, the Department plans to restore the ecosystems around Secret Harbor in the wake of logging and some development. Even More Fortunately, they won't just jump into restoration without considering cultural resources, and I will be forced to do further archaeology there in the meantime. Even More More, in walking around with the eco-guys, we figured that the digging I'd like to do to see what the archaeology is will be useful to them in determining what it is they want to restore.

So while I do not live the Life Aquatic like Steve Zisou, I'm doing okay.

Idaholy Cow!

This is that dogtooth mountain in Idaho. From far away. Maybe I'll edit in the haiku about it, but not right now.

On the cross-country trek, the day I entered Idaho was the most visually stunning. Crappy weather robbed Appalachia's beauty, and of course the Wyoming wind was embitter cold.

For one thing, the moment I spotted pahoehoe, elation fluttered around inside me and burst out in a laugh. And when the roads were clear and acceleration beyond 65 seemed less suicidal, having dozens of sections between you and the next vertical relief allows you to enjoy the view.

Winds were screaming down to Utah from the Northwest that day, but more so up high than at road level. There were immense, high level rollers and squalls blowing through underneath. But I-84 just follows the plains between mountains, low enough to have been too warm for the snow, and there was not much precipitation of any sort.

So you drive along and look at pahoehoe flows or potato fields, covering ground fast, and now and then you approach another range of mountains, easy passes even with snow. I'd really anticipated the Owhyhee mountains, but they were in cloud-shroud city. Instead there was that glowing white mountain southeast of Boise. No timber, so just pure white snow catching sun. Huge black storm behind, and scudding little light clouds just above. Mahalo akua for showing me that, even if Owhyhee mountains stay huna.



Leaving Idaho, same thing all over again. Up until Oregon got steep, it was easy driving, other than my mishandling chains. Beautiful country again, and nice weather until, as I say, Oregon inclined to snowy heights.


So anyway, Idaho is grand, and maybe photos shot from a pick-up don't do it justice, but now they're posted. And the view from an F150 is certainly an authentic American (made in Norfolk Virginia by-God) perch.
And 4WD with a few hundred pounds of cast iron and hardwood cider press (more authentic American hardware) sure makes it less worrisome driving up them icy mountains.

Holy Bull

Fear and loathing rains on Moloka`i. Ranch shut down, 120 people losing jobs. Just like wiser people told me, that land trust ain't gonna happen. so neither is the subdivision. Read into that what you wish, for I'm only half-smart, a haole, and not even living Hawai`i nei anymore. I suppose you could count this as a victory for conservation, except that we have no guarantee that the next thing won't be far worse than 200 houses.

Far from there, this week I journeyed back east of the mountains for the first time since my Columbian descent in January. And when I got there, a guy who goes by my middle name took me site-seeing and surveying through a landscape that was Hawaiian-ish. Think Kaluako`i, Moloka`i, but sagebrush instead of kiawe and lantana, and sometimes the red silt is sand. But the same outcrops.

The first photo is also the first site I found in Washington. One of the 10 guys helping us survey cameup with the name "Lone Juniper," and you can see 1/3 from the left, halfway up, the lone juniper. The site is just to the right, and consisted of a couple hammerstones and some lithic debris.

And it's not just the basaltic landscape and lithic scatters that seem familiar. Ahu happen here as well. One like a cupboard re-done to make a fowl-sniping blind, with old branches on top adding a height and cover. Another, closer to the river, has an amazing overview of what may have been the richest salmon river; it also has a nice split boulder, just like them Moloka`i shrines. Maybe us humans is all alike.

Anyhow, perched on one of the ahu was a basalt core (pictured). Fresh, as if some Hawaiian were still worshipping the adze god there. There is a certain clue to this un-altered photo that should tell you whether this is me in the frame.

The day before, we checked out some old farm sites on either side of a road through the plain. Then went up a soil-mantled talus to a little pali with four tiny c-shapes. Each big enough for a sniper, but nothing to stop the enemy from going around behind. not tall enough to be visible from far, or massive enough to support anything. each using outcrop for foundation, on brow above slope. Seen them on moloka`i, too.

So far from Moloka`i, but still doing Molokine archaeology.

Ford Fuel

Another fuel post. Mostly because it is a pain to put more than one photo in a post.

Anyway, here we have it. The fuel of the present. I saw windmills from Missouri to Oregon, but not too many, and less than half were moving.
In WV or KY, I saw a prominently located alternative energy center where there was a much smaller windmill twirling furiously. The plants around the place were decidedly stationary, and it would seem that the wind was not making the windmill turn, but a motor. Brilliant! Somewhere in the basement of the place, a strapping scots-irish lad shoveled coal into the power plant. Someone should tell him his indenture is up.

And grain ethanol? It won't disappear anytime soon, but nor will it supplant oil. Corn barely creates more fuel than it uses, and is in-bred to a degree that would make even the Mountbattens blanche and evolution smack its grinning, bloodthirsty chops. One hand of the market pushes farmers into increasingly unwise efforts to grow corn above all else, while the other stirs up a new bowl of dust.

Wheat Power

Last post began corny and then got a bit wind-baggy.

After leaving corn country, I entered the Wheat Republic. Corn waits in a crib, while wheat rides the elevator into a row of skyscrapers visible from a dozen miles away, places where trains drive up and load up. A place like this. You cannot tell exactly, but those silos are miles away and 3,000 feet tall.

Maybe I exaggerate, but the point is that these kind of things don't just sprout up on every farm. As far west as the Mo-state, I would see farmhouses not so far apart, each with its corn crib, lots with some animals. Late 20th Century farming certainly didn't condone it, but you could imagine making a farm like that into something self-sufficient.

In the vast flat of Kansas, though, they pool the crop. My uncle lived in eastern Colorado wheat country, and like everybody else there, put his grain in the co-op. Farms there are rarely self-sufficient, and maybe it doesn't make sense to be. You and a few other people are out there all winter exposed to arctic winds slowed only by a couple of barbed-wire fences, coyotes making off with your farm cats now and then. And in the summer everybody's crop may fall to drought (or a bad global market), or an unlucky few may get hit by hail; either way, pulling together works better than every man for himself. Same for marketing wheat. Nobody really wants to drive to Kansas to buy just a ton, so everybody congregates grain by the train. And buyers get product from the co-op. Farmers hold or sell their share according to their needs and nerves, but the market is so big and the costs so persistent that nobody really can hold on indefinitely until the prices skyrocket, and most everybody ends up in a similar boat.

The other side of the pooled grain game is that there is social pressure on the supply side. You don't make sure you have combines at harvest time, or you pull up to the elevator with grain that's not dry enough, or you otherwise do something out of line and harm the product, and you don't last. You try to go it alone in the plains, and you will die miserably. People have known that for millenia.

Fuel. Corn and Wind

Driving coast to coast with a 6-cylinder F150 towing a trailer-load o books and other heavy necessities consumed a fearsome sum of fuel. Not that I've looked at the satchel o receipts yet, but it had to be around a kilobuck, and that was back before the geniuses who brought us mortgage-derived securities re-directed their clients' money into $100/barrel oil and ran it up further.

And sure enough, it seemed like I was seeing
corn-stubbled fields further west than customary, not to mention in Virginia and Kentucky, and the two level fields in West Virginia. For my mountain cousins to be growing corn that doesn't turn into ham or hooch, why it's a shame.
I took a picture of some giant corn cribs somewhere in the multi-state run of corn on Day 3, but it was blurry.
I did get this shot of some alternative energy in Missouri, where most corn cribs are hidden behind giant billboards, all of which advertise websites, all of which have "mo" somewhere in them. Great state.

where i work

Here is my workplace.
Or at least the view from work, over the cubicle of a Hawai`i-loving guy. somehow right after I got there, he brought out a stone and put it on top of a cubi-wall. Then another guy next to him pulled one from his drawer. I let them accumulate for a while before bringing any pohaku. Today I brought the bowl that tapers down to a tiny pedestal, and it went over well.
Hawai`i-loving guy recognized pahoehoe when he saw it, and inquired whether I was right with the madame who made it. So I revealed my secret to choosing stone: go for road-kill. Taking a bulldozed outcrop frag and working it into something is ok.


But I digress. Here is another workplace photo. A place where my beard is no longer an anomaly. I am but a greenhorn with spikeless boots in these groves, but it's pretty damn fun.

The tree is a Doug-Fir. Nobody says Douglas Fir here. This one's even older and more girth-some than myself--I only have 43 rings.

So anyway, the forays have begun. We were at this place recording big cedars that had been stripped for bark to make everything from diapers to fishing nets. The fishnet-diaper itself was a short-lived phase.

Aloha.

Punctuated Travelibrium

A sojourner is someone who stops for a night, and moves on.

I wish I'd though about that a little more before naming the blog, because my movement seems to be big jumps, followed by years of root growth. This works for any fan of "punctuated equilibrium," the theory that evolution moves in sudden spurts, followed by millenia of relative stasis.

So I met my wife in college in DC, and we stayed in that city for 7 years. I majored in disequilibrium and it took 6 to finish 4 years of college. We worked low-paying jobs in a crack-maddened city, taxed but not represented in Congress, unwilling to spend another years inside the beltway. The colonies ain't pretty if you're not one of the gentlemen running them, and the American people had inexplicably re-elected the demonstrably criminal enterprise known as the Reagan administration. When in the wake of a raft of Iran-Contra convictions Bush I came to power, we moved about as far as we could without a passport.

Not completely to escape, because there's no getting away from something as grand as a New World Order. We had a kind friend in Hawai`i who would let us stay for a while, my wife could definitely get a job teaching. I had a BA in anthropology, and it's as easy to work off-topic in Polynesia as anywhere else. Turned out that we both got jobs on the same day, less than a week before we would have had to turn around and go home.

What happened after that will appear in later posts. But we stayed not the one or two years planned, but 11. Managed to ease ourselves into some semblance of comfortable equilibrium, had a baby and friends and parks and gardens.

Then my dad got terminally ill, and we suddenly knew we had to move back home. He died in less than 2 years, and we tried to make a go of it in Virginia. Had another baby. Bought a house. Planted more gardens.

But we found ourselves having lived in Virginia for 7 years, increasingly poverty stricken for life there, much less attempting a move back to Hawai`i. For most of the period, I had been what amounted to a well-paid migrant worker: fieldwork in Hawai`i for a month or two at a time, sometimes 6 months. Too much separation.

And suddenly, a series of doors opened one after another, and now I sit in the South Puget Sound watershed, 3,000 miles from the Chesapeake. From thinking about moving to getting a job to being here it took about 3 months. I'm guessing I could continue this blog from this room for years to come.

What's the Mojourner Truth?

Well, it sounds like "Sojourner Truth," don't it?

For more on her, because she's a hell of a lot more interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourner_Truth

I'm no Sojourner Truth. But I admire someone who would speak up when they're supposed to just shut up. Better yet, she was someone who walked off less than a year before a new law would have made her free; flippin' off the man in the penultimacy of servitude.

I got nothing to compare to that, but people call me Mo, and I journey. And I strive truthward, even if I don't always make it there.

Ergo, Mojourner Truth

From the James to the Puget

To begin, here is the entire cross-country journey as it appeared in the wildly popular email series, "Mo-trek." It's the story of me, a Ford, and an orange trailer heading on the modern Oregon trail.


On the 22nd of January 8th year of the third Christian millenium, a non-descript expedition set out from the low ridge south of Plum Branch of Deep Run, tributary of the james River by way of Tuckahoe Creek, in the Commonwealth of Virginia. One white pick-up followed closely by a U-haul trailer. Listed on the trailer manifest were some hundreds of books, the Mo-bile headquarters of Cultural Landscapes, a bedstead of fine quality, three chairs, several hefty bags o clothing, wood that would be carved some day, a WWI ammo chest of prized rocks, maps rolled in maps rolled in maps, and various forgetables and unmentionables. In the bed lay a couple dozen linear feet of fine cherry and walnut purchased from an Ohio barn in 1976, various Hawaiian woods in various stages of kalai, a jug of windshield wiper fluid mom had left the day before, shovels, stone, tow chains, and so on. In the cab was a small bag with medicine and clothes, CDs, snacks, more books and files, primitive navigational aids, cell phone, my dad's ashes, an alidade, this computer, various machetes, survival gear, and of course more forgetable and unmentionable crap. And then me an a merrily-glowing misindicator (I hoped) of a "Check Engine" light.

In other words, your typical covered wagon-full of modern redneck nomad. Minus the Bud cans and chainsaw.

Westward up I-64, the James of the modern traveler, past Mr. Jefferson's University in the first hour. Upward over the Blue Ridge, and cutting south through the Shenandoah Valley on I-81, where trucker traffic picked up markedly. Divers semis, carrying everything from frozen chicken to speedboats, with Wal-mart and Fed-ex well represented. I began to suspect that historians will understand late American capitalism as an age of hyphenated abbrevinemes.

Grayness gave way to misty noenoe, then to splattery rain, sleet, and snowy bits. The valiant Ford kept above 60 even on the increasingly frequent uphills as I veered west back onto 64. Thankful that I had skipped the moonshine stands of southwest Virginny, I gripped the wheel and pushed on, stopping only to fill up the truck's tank and empty my own.

Far in the west of what was still just plain Virginia, I rounded a bend to see Waits Mountain, which appears in numerous Chinese and Japanese inkworks:

Ripple of whiteness
Fringed with black bristles of trees.
Diachrome beauty.

And on into West Virginia, that mountainous region torn asunder from the motherland during the 1860s, quite contrary to the Constitution, whose writers' progeny complained not. And the wind it whipped, and the gray it deepened, and the ice it pelted. Wending up and whipping down, I steadily passed the bigger trucks. At some point in the afternoon, consultation of the navigational notes showed that I had 500 miles to go that day, and not the 350 or so that I'd somehow taken into my head. Regrets about a 10:30 departure would not help, and I passed through Charleston (Capitol #2, if you count Richmond) right when All Things Considered came on. There are a plethora of public stations in that state due to the terrain, and although keeping track of their frequencies was impossible while also paying attention to the road, just tuning in to 88.9 worked for most of the way.

Night fell, but I pushed into Kentucky. The I-64 entrance to that state crosses a river with a prominent view of some huge stinking smoky industrial complex. After which, it gets better, as far as I could see. By 7 or 8 PM, I slid to a protracted halt in the entry drive of a hotel in Frankfort (Capitol #3). Watched most of "Smokin' Aces," featuring perhaps the best quick-change-artist gang of nazi punk assassins ever to appear on screen, and then went to Applebees, where Kentucky was on screen holding its own against the higher-ranked Tenessee, which is pretty much the opposite viewing experience.

I walked to the restaurant, although this was clearly not the intent of the planners of this sprawlplex. Outer suburban interchanges are a boon to those who travel with trailers: big parking lots son that backing up can be avoided, fuel stations sating vehicles and people unconcerned by sodium, and a predictable melange of eateries and stores. I walked only because I craved outside air, but lack of crosswalks and presence of roads built to freeway specs made it risky. I crawled up an icy, recently sodded hillside before skating back across to the hotel.

And then sleep. 498 miles down,


Day, the Second.

Awoke, scarfed coffee and pastries in the lobby, checked email again, grabbed more coffee, and took off for St Louis (which is not Capitol #4, although I could bluff most fellow citizens by claiming so). Beautiful blue skies, even the road-cuts resplendent with limestone earthtone.

As hotel brochures had promised, there was a route called the "Kentucky Bourbon Trail." Late the previous night, I had dismissed this as a cruel hoax. What government would sponsor a network of roads whose sole purpose was to get people from one whiskey distillery to another? Kentucky, that's who. They atone, or at least achieve a semblance of balance, by also featuring religious attractions in tourist and hotel-room literature.

So, since I really did have a shorter day in store, I took the exit that said "Wild Turkey." Besides, the coffee had me in a mood to pee, anyway. More truly American than the eagle, I would have been a miserable citizen not to pay homage. (And besides, as some of you know, I had a run-in with a wild turkey at Reedy Creek one time, and it was time to exact my due.) At the foot of the off-ramp, indicators of the much-vaunted whiskey trail disappeared. I went left as is my wont, but after a few miles took advantage of a wide spot in a narrowing trace to turn around. Back north of the highway, a few more miles took me to an intersection where another official-brown sign directed me rightward toward a wildlife center and Buffalo Trace distillery. I like bison almost as much as turkey, so I lit out. And in a few miles skidded to a halt just past a sign indicating a wildlife exhibit and distillery. Looping back, I wound a Kentucky Fish and Wildlife complex, replete with Wildlife Education center (Closed for the Winter), but no distillery. Fed up with Kentuckian trickery, I peed behind the closed restroom, just behind the Live Bait vending machine, and fled the state.



Rolling hills gave way to the Ohio River Valley and then flatness in southern Indiana and Illinois (where I was not about to diverge just to hit more capital cities). In the latter, I stopped at Wayne City, Wayne County, in dad's honor. Found a place to eat, but no place to pee, so skipped it and got back on the road, because my atlas made it seem realistic to visit the vast native city of Cahokia before coasting in to my cousin's house west of St. Louis. Peed at a couple of rest stops along the way.

Nearing St. Louis, I stopped at the last rest area in Illinois to pee again and check a map (and pledge not to drink so much coffee the next morning), only to learn that Cahokia by the bypass south of 64 was not Cahokia the Mississipian city. Unwilling to detour north for an unsatisfactorily short visit to that site, especially since it would put me in rush hour traffic, I just headed cousin-ward.

He and I fought like steroid-dosed wolverines when we were younger, and although I had looked forward to a cage-match to unlimber my driver's shoulders, he had a bad back. So we sat in a hot-tub and downed a couple of beers while the sun set. Later, I unloaded a couple of family heirlooms, we shot much breeze, but not each other.

Eight-hundred and something miles down, and maybe only 2200 to go.


Day the third.

Since he had the courtesy and forethough to buy a house on a cul-de-sac, setting out that morning should have been easy, but of course I got confused by the sameness of neighborhood housing, and wandered a while before reaching the right road. The onto a tributary of a tributary of I-70, which now replaced O-64 os the westward artery. Exiting to gas up again, I explored another exurb when signage again failed me. Then onto the highway again.

The weather was clear and cold. 9 degrees with a wind chill of -10. The Ford shuddered, but started alright, and ran fine unless I idled. So I worked through rolling country into flat again. Crossed the Missouri, down which a thousand giant ice lilly pads were floating (wish I could have stopped, but no doubt would have stood mesmerized for hours).

Through Kansas City (not even in the eponymous state, so not the capital as some may believe), and into surprisingly hilly Kansas State. Stopping more to get a highway map than to pee, and picking up speed as the climbing sections became less frequent and far less inclined. Cruising through Topeka (Capital #4), where the worst of the Kansas traffic slowed me not. Stopping again at a road cut in the Flint Hills to grab a few nodules--my host in Washington is a knapper. And then into the great flatness.



Stopped one town short of Hays, out of fear that gas would run out and leave me hotel-less. Then cruised into another exit ramp hotel. It had never topped freezing that day, and the skies were still crystal clear. Even though I turned off the heat in my room, though, the ambient temp of the hotel kept it warm all night.

Had a bit easier time crossing the street due to sheer lack of traffic, only to learn that food at a Mexican restaurant called "Carlos O'Kelly's" is as disappointing as you would expect. Really nice all-white staff, though. They were just as nice when I went back the next morning to reclaim the credit card I left there. So I hit 70 again at nearly 11 AM.

1355 miles down, and nearing half way.


Day the Fourth.

I had trouble getting out of that Hays haze that morning. Cable direct weather interspersed awe at the depth of midwestern freezing with dire warnings of three storms stacked up to smack shut all the northwest passes. No beating the storms, so no need hurry into the cold, right? There followed more weather watching, gear checking and so on until the sun was high up over those Kansas mountains to venture out and pack the cab.

Cell? Wallet? Keys? Yep, got 'em all, so pay up and leave that hotel behind, never having gotten in the hot tub. What a waste.

Trailer hook-up still tight? Yep, but the wire's just hanging there unplugged. How many hundred miles did I drive without trailer lights? At least the Check Engine light worked the whole way, I'm sure of that.

So plug it in and get going, and all that's left is to feed 70 bucks worth of petrofeed to the beast of burden.

And my wallet comes out for maybe the 10th time already, but the credit card is gone. Has to be at Carlos O'Kelleys, whose blandness would actually work better for breakfast, but I eventually bang on a service door enough to roust a kid more on the O'Kelly side. He led me through the kitchen (still no Carlos's in sight, big surprise), and upon explanation, Manager O'Kelly opened the safe and handed me my card, and I skated back to the truck and took off.

Kansas flattened mile by mile, and what with the clear roads I left interstate behind and made my pilgrimage. Uncle Maurice lived just over the Colorado line, and though I didn't want to haul a traler all the way dow to a farm now occupied by a stranger, I did visit St. Francis, Kansas, where his wheat and specie were banked. Burger and fries and drink for under 5 bucks, and the manager-cook-waitress' brother was the guy who ran cattle on some of elder Maurice's land.

I left, unable to learn whether the new owner or anyone else had capitalized on Uncle's scheme to open a wild-boar hunting preserve. Fair hunting, because patrons could only use spears. If anything, odds slightly in favor of the swine, since he planned to limb up all the trees and prevent primate escape.

And after a twighlit mis-tour of Denver (Capitol #5) sprawl, made it to the next cousin, also a son of Maurice the Elder. Some Mexcellent food that more than made up for the O'Kelly fiasco, and much good kitchen talk after. As at his brother's, there were invitations to stay, but needed to hit Salt Lake the next day, and felt nothing but urgenter as Cascade snow totals mounted. Before me lay the choice of steepness and more snow, or less steep and more wind.

1722 miles down, and over halfway there. Or so I thought.


The Fifth Day

Smooth sails call for a teller of tales to pass the time, and a free and easy passage appears only in teller's tales as a foil for something more interesting.

My choice--steep icy climbs over I-70, or braving mid-winter Wyoming wind--seemed clear enough upon waking. The trailer was heavily loaded and (according to Carlos O’U-haul) “Aerodynamic,” and I’ve never tried driving uphill in Rocky Mountain snow. Just to help keep the truck from blowing away, we deposited a couple hundred pounds of cast iron and hardwood in the form of a dismantled cider press. A gift from Maurice’s kids to a cousin headed toward Washington orchard-land.

So north on the plain east of the Rockies. Blue skies and clear road to Fort Collins, where there's a rest area with hundreds of brochures and cool displays and real people. Nice people mantled in grey-haired experience, one of whom grew up in Wyoming. And they smiled nicely and didn’t second-guess my freedom to choose, but figured that sticking to the interstate would be less troublesome than trying the scenic Route 287 short-cut to Salt Lake. Then the guy got online and told me about the advisory for 62+ mph winds on I-80, but reassured me that the road was not closed. Yet.

And the Wyoming grandmother related to me how the interstate planners said they’d plotted the shortest way from point A to B, but locals told them better to give Elk Mountain some distance, and just follow old Route 30. Heedless, the feds just shot their line across the flanks of Elk Mountain. And it appeared that on this day, I thought, Elk would be shrieking mad. But they fortified me with Colorado and Wyoming maps, reminders that it’s a long way between gas stations, general encouragement, and a cup of coffee that I took. Because peeing be damned, I had a long and windy road ahead.

So I visited my last Colorado urinarium, and hit I-25 north.

Mid-day brought passage into Wyoming, and increasing winds. Every once and a while, truck and cider press and books and leaf springs worked themselves into harmonic sways, but all it took was a slowing drift to stop it. Ice would show up now and then, and it got difficult to tell if a road was just wet or frozen. To my right, soon into Wyoming, there was a giant bison statue on a hill. To my left, the jutting mountains petered out, but outcrops appeared. Big bold boulders that would look at home in labor union posters of the ‘30s.



Struck a glancing blow on Cheyenne (Capitol #6), and was past it before I knew it, flying west on I-80, which turned out to be almost entirely populated by semi-trailers. More with the “England” name than anything else, and of course fed-ex and wal-mart, and the flat-beds loaded with farm implements on previous days now carried giant mineral and gas extracting machinery.

Lunch in a Laramie Applebees. Snow and white folks as far as the eye could see.

After that, lots of exits were just to ranches, and even those “with services” were caked with ice. The Ford has 4WD, which worked, allowing me to eliminate that from the list of things that would make the Check Engine light so persistent. I filled up at a snowy, blustery hilltop, stopped to pee at a rest area on the most exposed knob for miles and miles in every direction, and gritted teeth on the downhill run, where I went into a real skid for the first time. Came out of it, and before long, we were in a “valley,” which is the local word for “vast plain, reputedly edged by mountains.”

Levelness does not translate to smooth sailing unless you are going where the wind wants you to, and it wanted me to turn almost 180 degrees. And the trailer it swayed, and the snow it blew (true, what they said about all it takes is a half inch of snow to hide the road when the wind whips up in Wyoming). And I just fell in with the train of semis in the right lane, and we all crawled when we had to.

Getting near Elk Mountain took a long time. And as we rose on the flanks so did the wind, powerful currents on either side of a ridge and buffeting turbulence on top. But, as we all should have learned in high school:
4WD x (25 mph + cider press + ton o’ books) = Traction

So be patient, listen to Miles play “So What,” and try to let loose the death-grip on the wheel now and then. It also helps to have one of those air-activated heating pads for your back.

But again, the downhill run had some bad ice, and every once in a while some other-trucker would come flying past everyone. Charmed vets of the 70’s glory days choosing just the line that gets you past 50 vehicles in a spray of slush, or just some guy with no brakes or sense? You never know until you pass the rig jack-knifed in the median.

I saw one whose back door had been ripped open and its cargo strewn through the snow. If I’d had a CB, I would have heard this exchange:
“I heard it was Injuns. They was looking for rifles, but ended up hitting a truck load of maternity clothes.”
“Dumbass. That wasn’t no Indians. They know a government mule from a clothes horse. It’s Mormons, dipshat, they dress up like Indians to fool dumshoots like you. Who the hell else would steal maternity clothes? Geez! You freaken kids get your CDL and you think you’re a trucker. You don’t know sh…”

But I didn’t hear that. In the side open spaces, all it took was a cell tower every hour or so to get reception, and I talked with family and friends. Meanwhile, I just stared at the truck in front of me, and the next wrecked semi, and told myself it was okay because I was nearing a town where I’d be able to get gas and news. And sure enough my little orange and white rig pulled into a station. Filled up and got cola caffeine, and found out that while I would not be totally through the wind and ice zone for about 40 miles, the road behind me was worse that the one in front.

I was about another mile down the road when I figured she was ignorant or malicious toward coasterners like myself, because the patches merged and we were all slogging across a sheet of ice. And no turning back. Despite snow barriers, the wind whipped snow across the road in ten thousand little snakes, making it hard to see tracks of the truck a length or so in front of my hood. The snow-blow whited out everything, but only up to about a foot off the ground. Above that, the wind blew away everything, and the sun shone clearly in our faces as this truck-train drove west. Fifteen miles at least, we were on solid ice, rarely topping 25MPH. Intermittent clearings showed up around dark, but I staid a right lane conservative until hitting Rock Spring well after dark, abandoning any plan to reach Salt Lake that night.

Ate Mexican food prepared by Mexicans, but that tasted what I ate 30 years ago, before suburban Gringos discovered that there was more than one kind of chili powder or tortilla. Then found what proved to be the most expensive hotel of the entire trip, but was too tired for the hot tub. Daily Show news and out.

Somewhere past 2,000 miles, but who keeps exact figures at times like that.

Day, The Sixeth

Up early and moving, because WWW and TV both say snow’s a coming into Utah. But I’m nearly through with Wyoming (to be sure, it’s about done with me also), And so I tank up the truck, but not myself. Because who needs caffeine when there’s pseudophedrine?

Last night, the Mormon leader died, by far the biggest news in these parts. He was ancient and revered, and now the church of Latter Day Saints has it’s first succession in the full-blown Media Age. But the relevant point here is ethnobotanical. Did you know that the real deal, the not-pseudo Ephedrine is a plant commonly called “Mormon Tea”? Hmm.
[Editor – Since moving, have been as isolated from news as was saturated in a wi-fi-cableTV hotel cell, and so consequently unaware of Mormon succession except that Romney fizzled as badly as Giuliani. Interesting too that Polynesians denied the Mormon church the right to taboo their kava drink. That is all.]

So since the highway was much better, truck and trailer easily slalomed into Utah, which had a rest area to rival Colorado’s. No displays, but a woman at some sort of 360-degree console. Thankfully, Utah is a map-giving state, and with that in hand I inquired about conditions ahead, and she showed me camera views on the computer, which looked a little grim, but not worthy of retreat. Explained that the snow would be in the canyon mostly, while a guy I took for a local leaned against the console and nodded. I stood off a ways, because you never know when somebody might be all hopped up on that M-tea, but the woman was clearly in control, and I worried not.



Spit out of the mountains north of Salt Lake, and heading up I-15 (this side’s I-25) to I-84, the terrestrial Northwest Passage. Running up through Ogden with mountains out the passenger window. Then further out an old building, sides-a-painted with welcomes to Nana and returning missionaries. Sweet people.
Then opening country, and before long, Idaho. Wending up valley plains, occasionally climbing small ranges, now and then buffeted by the wind. Roads often wet and sometimes icy, but so far less than the day before, it was just a drive in the park.

Some mountain shown in the first real sun of the day. Not snow-capped, but snow all the way down. I watched it for miles and miles.

Gleaming dogtooth wedge
Underbiting inky clouds.
They bleed sun-white snow.

Potato fields on either side, with these cool irrigation things that look like really long axles with a dozen wheels. And then I spotted pahoehoe, and immediately called a Hawai`i Island friend to celebrate. Kept crossing the Snake River all day, or so it seemed. Ate pizza at one of those everything-stations on a rural exit. Talked with family. Did not take the exit to see the Japanese internment camp from WWII, or the Owyhee Mountains. Swept past Boise (Capitol #7), and on to its western sprawlburb, Nampa, to a hotel in a field that had sprouted crops a couple of Springs ago. In front was a 21st Century strip-mall. Cabo-taco, cellular outlet, sub shop, and some even more non-descript places. Across a 6-lane road with no crosswalk was a Wal-Mart. So of course I walked over there later to provision for the next day’s mountain crossing.


And on the 7th day, I rested.

8th day, too, for that matter. Stranded so far on the edge of Boise that the cement hadn’t set on the sprawlburb. Snow was not so bad there, but was piling up by the foot in the Blue Mountains ahead, and I was not about to go play tourist with a trailer.

So Weather media confirmed that it would have been just as bad or worse to have struck south to hit the California coast. Besides heavy snow in the Sierras, there were repeated landslides headed up through Oregon, and the possibility of another lengthy shut-down of I-5 (which happened last in December, when I interviewed for this job). The Pacific just kept dumping on the Northwest, which meant snow in the mountains. Rumor had it that on Wednesday, the ninth day of my trek, there would be a lull between systems, and I might manage to squeak through the mountains and into the less frozen Columbia Gorge, which was trending to be no more than moderately windy.

I knew this because Oregon Dept. of Transportation has weather data down to like 10 mile increments. And time was plentiful. And one upside of the sprawlburbs is that the hotels have fast wireless internet, so that for a couple days I could go through the weather data and traffic cameras, getting familiar with I-84. That, and look for places to live.
Then brave forays into wind-driven snow and across the toxic tundra of a Wal-mart lot. And into the latest version of that chain. To get some food. Beer. Underwear and socks. Tire chains.
But mostly, just to escape hotel air. That, and to walk where walking was not intended. Which is either civil (engineering) disobedience, or symptomatic of white trash going feral.

Then each morning, coffee in the lobby to my heart’s skittery delight. (Somehow, this hotel sans restaurant came up with some variation of hot breakfast each morning. First it was scrambled eggs and sausage. The next day it was some sort of rubbery white discoid emblazoned with a yellow bullseye—eggish, but clearly not a yolk and albumen.) But always, decent coffee that I could drink cup after cup of without worrying that I’d have to pee on the roadside during a blizzard.

Then more road and weather watching, and watching yesterday’s comedy news shows, followed by Futurama. Occasionally some CSPAN, and the feeling of solidarity that comes from knowing that only you and a few dozen people are watching.

Then working through a list of apartments and rooms for rent. Arriving in Olympia during the 2-month legislative session and trying to rent a place is like trying to belly up to the bar at the annual Drunkards Convention.



The Ninth Day

For several days, it had been clear that this morning was the chance to get beyond mile 2,567. The last storm had passed late in the 8th day, and the next was not expected until afternoon. And so it was early out of bed, check and re-check the gear. Drinking coffee early, and filling up as much as I could stand of the breakfast.

And then back on I-84, the much-improved Oregon Trail. Leaving Nampa, a gloriously easy stretch of flatland ran to the border. Crossing the Snake River yet again, I set my sights on the Columbia homestretch. The less shiftless, cut straight through the frickin’ Cascades kind of river. Besides, the Snake turned into Hells Canyon if I kept on.

Also, the only open pass was I-84 through the Columbia River Gorge. Which I did not take lightly, but Oregon DOT’s milestone weather web showed mild winds.

No, the hitch would be getting over the Blue Mountains, where I would surely run into snow, and need chains. And risk sliding into or being slid into by the trucks that still dominated traffic outside the cities. And it turned out that I needed chains before then, hitting icy runs disappearing into fog-snow.

So pull off onto the chain-up area so thoughtfully provided, and put on chains. These places are on long straight uphill runs, which is good because the load of cargo careening out of control cannot get far uphill, and alert chainers don’t get crushed. I actually waited until the second or third place before putting on the chains, because my only companion on this trek was the fear that truckers I will never meet would think I was a wuss.

But I aint too stupid, and I put them on when iceless patches got rarer than Giuliani stalwarts. And then just after the next hill was a big melt, and my challenge was to not go over 30-mph with chains on, as per translated Chinese instructions on Wal-mart chains. I now aimed for the ice patches, hoping to conserve chainage.

No dice. Impatience and a warming trend forced another pull-off to remove chains. Next time I pushed it, on the principal that all safety messages are wildly exaggerated by attorneys in the liability department. (Like that Check Engine light, the one with the annoyingly resilient bulb.)

But not so. Even with no experience, this southern boy eventually figured out that the loud whapping was problem, and I removed a less intact set than I’d attached. Noticed gouges in the sidewalls, but no holes or leaks. And in this way made it to LaGrande, gateway to the Blue Mountains. Never have I seen so many trucks. Hundreds of semis lining the road and clogging the truck-stop lot. I filled up with gas, met incredulous Canadians who’d been told by the pump-monkey that “Chain Restriction” meant they’d need chains for their truck and trailer.

Then, walking into the station/store, I was just in time to hear the lady announce “All Westbound travelers: the Chain Restriction has been lifted.”

No coffee, snacks, or urinals. I was out the door and in the truck in a few seconds, yelling the good news to the Canadians on the way. We hit 84 and they passed me before long, but I felt no shame. Never did attach chains again. Worsening weather—“snowing hard and continuously” in Oregon DOT parlance—helped road conditions. A few inches of snow worked over by semis (many still chained) beats black ice any day.

I recognized Meacham, but didn’t see the traffic-cam, and then it was all downhill. Conditions improved rapidly, and soon the Columbia appeared. The road cleared. Truck herds thinned out at the I-82 interchange, and flat, iceless straightaways let me fly along Gorge-ward. Sunbeams and NPR beams lit the land.

The Columbia River Gorge scarps up on the Washington side long before Oregon lifts much above water level. But eventually you descend into the Gorge. Despite the spotty radio reception, increasing rain, and decreasing light, this too was a fun run. Waterfowl and riverboats, islands and dammings, and every once in a while a road slithering up some side canyon.

Downhill and in the dark on the north shoulder of Mount Hood is no place to be when a couple days of pent-up coast-bound truckers race downhill to Portland. After the driving behind me, though it seemed decidedly non-epic, just clench jaws and wheel, and run.

And in the western sprawl of Portland, I made camp for one last night. Ahh…sweet penultimacy.



Finally

Loading up one last time. Checking hitch connections and trailer door one last time. Eyeing tire pressure one last time. Filling up Continental style and snagging road coffee one last time. Peeing and paying one last time.

Veered north before Portland proper, racing into Washington near Fort Vancouver, a Hudson Bay outpost. There and at Kalama (big surprise), Hawaiians settled about as early as any other outsiders. Never met these Northwest Hawaiians yet, but it made me feel more at home already.

Sharing the road with more logging trucks than I’d ever seen, the last miles went easy. Again through mists and lilinoe, punturated by sunbeams now and then.

And then truck and trailer cruised into Olympia and to the U-Haul place. Stowed the contents in Locker 320 (which necessitated the first back-up in a couple thousand miles or so), unhitched, and arrived at Scott and Jama’s in the mid-afternoon. Their aloha since then has been epic, but that tale will come another day.

So that’s it. 3,085 miles and 10 days after starting, from Tuckahoe in the James-Chesapeake Watershed to Watershed Park above Budd’s Inlet of Puget Sound.

Those of you still reading deserve something better. An epiphany or at least an arrival at some pithy summary. Maybe a denouement. I could uminate and culminate, or just culminate. But I’m just a simple guy—not that bright (at least not without some more ruminating and editing), and not that French.