Trails and Fires

Lately, there's a lot more going on at the photo blog than here, and the dominant subject has been fire. This shot, for instance, appeared there. But tumblr's not the place to get into too much depth, and it ends up with a bunch of pretty pictures, scrolled through too fast to tell a story.

Like in the shot above. The dark line up the middle? It's a single rut, a foot or two wide and stretching across the meadow, where a controlled burn consumed an obscuring mantle of grass. Tomorrow, I head back to the office, where I'll see whether this rut matches up with a trail mapped in the 19th Century, which pretty much matches up with the route that Wenatchi people have always followed. Of course, the rut might be more modern, or just used by elk, or a meltwater channel. None of which, it should be noted, is mutually exclusive of a horse trail, and before that, horseless human trail; culture and nature meander and mingle.

At some point, I'll post about the (f)utility of post-fire archaeological survey in terms of finding artifacts, but for now just let me say that fire sure lights up larger features like trails. The above tree is obviously odd, growing gnarlier than a Ponderosa pine should. But in a lot of situations, foliage obscures the the blazed bark or modified trunks that mark historic and ancient trails. After a fire, the unusual trees stick out a much greater distances, and survey becomes easier. If you're really on a trail, you can often see the next marker. If you're really on a trail, you should not be seeing a bunch of similar tree-forms off to the sides. Last week, I followed what seemed to be a trail marked by a series of big stumps that survived the fire.

Many stumps do survive wildfires, and one of the most eye-opening things about doing survey in fire's wake is that the intensity can vary so much. Entire trees up in ash here, forests reduced to black spars there, but somewhere else the fire skipped along lightly. Like in this shot, where a grassy slope has islets of burnt bushes and spot fires, but the game trails where vegetation is tramped down failed to burn. Or the next shot, which shows vehicle tracks running through another controlled burn area.

Archaeologically, these glimpses snatched from the flames inspire and depress. We can see so much, but it will be hidden again in months, dragged back into obscurity in a few growing seasons. Though the weather will wash away down hill some of the traces, though creatures will stir things up, yet still will traces of trails remain sandwiched in soil. Today, I can discern cowpaths among a lace of deer trails. Today, I can tell where the engine trucks were deployed, where the pick-ups parked, and where the ATVs ranged during a controlled prairie burn. Tomorrow (in archaeological time), it will be impossible or insanely expensive to dig up that kind of information.

Meanwhile, I'll scope out what I can of fires both intentional and wild, looking for trails and the places they went to. Probaby the most common sights are bottles, cans, and campfire rings, all of which prefer to hide under plants and leaf litter. Sure, a lot of these sit right next to roads still travelled, but keep in mind that some of those roads follow older trails. The empty beer bottles in the fire pit along a road long abandoned can give you a good idea of when the road was in use. The obvious glint of glass might also lead to less visible but highly informative artifacts, objects that pinpoint the period or tell tale of activity beyond drinking and hunting. There is almost never anything that a non-archaeologist would value in any way, but camp-trash can help trace trails, especially when fire intervenes to lift the veil.

When under that veil lies a trail, I feel like I've found something worthwhile. Archaeology, learning about how people have lived on the land (rather than the treasures they accumulated that may be more interesting on a photo blog or National Geographic), benefits from mapping where they traveled. And fire helps archaeologists salvage from the devastation more than they normally could.

F150 at Work

On the Columbia

For my job, I drive a state-issued Ford F150. When I find myself moonlighting, it's in my own F150. Eerie coincidence?

No. The F150 pickup truck is the most common work-horse in the US of A, so this F150-ization of my driving experience (and the attending pain in my gas-pedal leg and hip), is unique not at all.

On the Palouse

The regular work truck--a "rig" in state agency parlance--is more photogenic, being a red spot, standing out on landscapes basaltic and vegetative, in flower and winter-dead. I have a fair number of photos of the rig in its natural habitat, on two-rut roads through pastures, pulled off logging roads, and so on. Some are close, but more are far, one truck quietly punctuating immensity.

Before I wrote this, I searched various searches to find images of F150 trucks (or rigs) at work.

On the internet

And I was sorely disappointed. The F150 is the most popular working pickup in the country that invented them, and I've heard that the internet is also widely used, but the search for images of this truck at work turned up a bunch of shots of new trucks (lounging around, not working), and for some inexplicable reason: baby seats in the back seat of Ford trucks.

I don't get it, and I intend to fix it. So here and on anthrowback, I'll start posting photos of the most common American work truck at work.

Obliterative Persistence

Yon shot shows the floodzone of Scottsville, Virginia, on the River James. Once, it was called by King James' subjects the River of Powhatan, the name they used for the local leader Wahunsenacawh (father of the one they called Pocahontas), but this is upstream of his territory, where Monacan people no doubt had their own name. 

The photo is dominated by the most recent development along the north bank of the river, the massive dike clad in grass; it protects a town where people travel by pick-up and, increasingly, crossover SUVs and hybrids, none of which appreciate being flooded. Just to the right is the penultimate development, black rails on a bed of gravel where grass nor weeds nor even the most beautiful shrubbery are tolerated. Under that, and perhaps in the trees to the right, lies the canal that was obsolesced by the railroad; old timey as it may seem, the canal was no less a scheme to make money off of development and the transit of goods to markets. The red brick building handled the trade, but now it's cut off by dike and a pair of rails.

Further right, the brownwater of the James peeks between tree trunks. Once, people and their stuff moved on the river itself. Canoes, then batteaux. Way before that, there was a low spot in the terrain that water sought in it's quest to become saline. Now, cities pump out of the flow so the masses may drink, and a warming globe sucks it dryer and dryer every summer. 

Even when I canoed this part of the river in the early 1980's and had to hop out and tow it (downstream, no less) through massive algae blooms in tepid water, the James seemed like a hard place to move even a lightly loaded boat. The canal meant to bypass seasonal shallows and permanent outcrops was first damaged by federal troops before succumbing to rail-borne manifest destiny. Railroads still run, but mostly for the most massive of commodities such as Appalachian coal headed seaward, while diesel trucks carry the bulk of consumer goods. The town of Scottsville feels safe behind it's dike, but this too is momentary, as it was not planned for the climate changes facing the good townspeople and everyone else. 

The town exists because there a road crosses a river. One transportation system lays itself over the last. The stay the same even as they change. What we are used to will change, and what we build will fall, but the river still flows to the sea.

Is This What We Want?

A dispute rolled into the Northwest a few years ago, and the rumblings grow louder. On one side, mining and railroad interests with some union support, advocating for ports where coal from the Powder River basin can be put onto boats headed to China. On the other, environmentalists and local residents who don't want the pollution and headaches that would come from a major coal port. 

Several locations from Oregon to British Columbia are vying to get the port. There will be jobs as it is constructed, and a smaller number of jobs to operate it once it is built. Industry never tires of pointing to these jobs, and unions have been hit hard enough that they chime in with support, but there is little evidence that ports--which are increasingly mechanized--will make much of a dent in long term unemployment. Advocates of any one location prey on citizens' fear that the jobs will go elsewhere if locals do not welcome this development; the NIMBY urge lives in tension with "Well, if it's gonna happen somewhere anyway..."

The question is whether the trade-off is worth it. Jobs and perhaps some revenue (if the local governments don't dangle too much tax relief as a lure) balanced against traffic delays, noise, and the local environmental effects of the development and operation. Coal dust and blaring horns will fill the local air, locals will spend more time idling as mile-long trains pass through, trees will be cleared and archaeological sites obliterated. A leading candidate, Cherry Point in Washington, has long been a herring fishery important to the Lummi and other tribes, including the salmon people who need forage fish; nobody expects the underwater residents to fare well with a massive increase in development, dust, and boat traffic. 

I've never lived by a coal port, and Olympia is too small to be in the race. But I do drive Route 14 up the Columbia from time to time, I have tried to sleep in Stevenson as the plains rumble through, horns blasting, and it's hard to imagine how a massive increase in traffic would be tolerable. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where trainloads of Appalachian coal would pass by on their way to the port of Norfolk (location of these photos). The last time I saw that port was a decade ago, mountains of coal feet away from Chesapeake Bay, grime everywhere. 

And not just the immediate everywhere, because this issue reaches beyond the effects in Bellingham. All along the coal train tracks, localities will experience the dust, noise, and traffic. At the source, miles of earth ripped apart never to be the same. Carbon now in the ground, stable, not contributing to global warming, will be torn out and put on the market. Once in China, it will be burnt without even the weakened environmental controls that exist here. The smoke and pollution will move downwind to visit the US again, and the global atmosphere will get tauntingly dirtier, warmer. These consequences will visit the people who welcomed the port, yes, but they will hurt everyone else as well. If and when the Chinese plants burn all the US coal, they will fall back on their own reserves, and keep on burning.

If a coal port happens--and the relentlessness of North American capital suggests it will--the lucky winner will likely learn some hard lessons. Many of the construction jobs will go to outsiders, and operations won't generate the employment or revenue expected. At Cherry Point, we've already learned that the proponents' initial statements about the volume were a fraction of what they really plan, that there will be twice as much traffic and pollution. Friendly promises will be reneged. Coal, being a global commodity, may become more profitable (leading to increased shipping), or the bottom may drop out (causing jobs to disappear from time to time). Even if you support coal power, does it make sense to sell our reserves to China, whose import policy is partly to protect their own for the future?

That Portsmouth Project

 

Since I needed to write a conference paper this week, I spent some time procrastinating, eventually searching out the one place I did any real archaeology in Virginia. A couple of weeks digging shovel probes in 100-degrees, poison ivy and snakes all around, an employer jerking us around and housing us in a crackhead hotel was enough to send me as far away as possible. 

The location was what must have been the last agricultural remnant north of Portsmouth, and subsequent development has insured that there are no animals or plants surviving. In their place is the largest privately funded marine container terminal in the US, capable of handling 1.44 million containers. Archaeologists in the private sector know that they are often the last to see a place before it is developed, but I had no idea that this would end up being hundreds of acres of barrenscape.

Besides the wildlife that had clung to this refuge, all of the archaeology there was obliterated. My job was to run a crew that would dig a hole, walk 25 feet, and dig another, looking for artifacts. With 300 acres to cover in a couple of weeks, that meant giving up at the outset on some areas, so there are parts of the project that were never tested. I concentrated on the shoreline, and although there was more recent stuff mixed in often as not, we found prehistoric artifacts. There was a concentration of quartz cobbles that tribes had used forever as a raw material for tools--this is a rarity in tidewater Virginia.

My memory of what exactly we found a decade ago is fuzzy, but it seems like it was more than the report ever mentioned. The company that hired me forgot their promise to have me to some writing, and I never saw the report. They cashed in on data recovery excavation at the two sites they acknowledge to the tune of $300,000, and brag about it to this day on their website (it sounds like a lot, but the terminal cost $509,000,000). I got $15 an hour and poison ivy; the crew got less money, but about as much poison ivy. Maersk got a terminal that can bring in ships carrying 9,000 standard containers and transfer them to rail or trucks.

 

 It's an amazing facility. Cranes on rails move back and forth offloading containers, and smaller machines grab them and take them to the right place, eventually loading them onto trains or trucks. And off they go to walmart or wherever all that stuff is needed. It's immense, and a high achievement of efficient logistics. But it's also inhuman. When everything is in containers moved by machines (I think there are human operators for the time being, but would not count on that for toomuch longer), there are not many jobs. Row after 200-foot row of containers stacked high is not a landscape for soul-endowed primates. I don't long for bugs and snakes and poison ivy, but it still looks like a net loss to me, and strengthens my resolve to buy as few shipped goods as possible.

My Little Pony

Like most little girls, I believe in the magic of ponies.

A few months back, I heard an elder explain to a room of non-tribal folks that he had an uncle who said his truck was his pony, that uncle and truck had a relationship like their forefathers did with their most cherished war ponies. This needed to be said, because the non-tribal people were drifting off into the peculiar fantasy that maybe the native people should be more old fashioned. As in, if you want to exercise your treaty rights and gather plants in the woods, walk or ride a horse, but don't expect a key to the gate so you can drive in. And so we got a lesson on the fact that native people may adapt, but that beneath adopted trappings lies a resilient culture. 

But the last thing we need is more of a white guy interpreting native stories. What I really wanna talk about is my pony, the steel steed that carried me across the continent, that pulled my wagon along the Oregon Trail all the way to Olympia. 

For several years, it sat mostly idle, gathering moss, but recently it's my main ride...other than the bus, or my legs...and I'm enjoying being back in the saddle. I spent alot of my adolescence and adult life rebelling against the redneck, confederate rebelry revering culture surrounding me, and so it comes as a surprise that I'm so attached to a pick-up truck. 

Much less the F150, iconic old school Red State chariot. I never figured I'd ever participate in the sort of vehicular manslander that leads to bumper stickers like "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Chevys," and heated debates of the merits of a Dodge hemi, whatever that is. Maybe I'd poke ironic fun, but that kind of thing has a way of slipping into iconic seriousness. And so I drive a Ford and consider all the other ponies malformed and weak. I've come to learn from my daughters that they too would chafe at a Chevy and disdain a Dodge, more or less out of loyalty to me and their belief that I seriously am a Ford Man. 

And maybe I am. Or maybe it's just the only truck I've owned. Or maybe I just like the stripped down-ness of it. No extended cab, no electric windows, no cruise control (OK, maybe I'm not thrilled about that part), no working CD (much less an i-whatever or satellite radio), no all sorts of shit. Yes, eight-foot bed. Yes, 4-wheel drive. Yes, that little slidy window in  back to let air flow through. Yes, heavy-ass 20th Century steel, built in my home state. 

Oh, and yes, paid for. Running for almost 15 years with just a little over 100,000 miles, so plenty more years left if I treat it right. Not the most efficient beast on the road, but then again I don't drive a lot and there's much to be said for squeezing the most out of a car already there and avoiding the new car(bon footprint). And in case I have not already said so, it's paid for. 

It may not be my war pony (a peace mule, maybe), but I do have to admit I like that truck.

Two Ferries

Apropos of nothing, i drag forth from the archive a couple of photos from ferry rides. One of a San Juan run so sunny and clear that I felt like I was on the boat to heaven. Another on a greyer, more ambiguous day when the destination was shrouded until we were nearly there. These were both fun rides, one not really better than the other, each merely a means of transport to the observer, but each also an adventure and miraculous journey in my mind. The ferries of Washington, white and green, filled with cars, thrummed forward and back by diesels, seem so same, but each route is unique, each passage a new experience. Commuters may dull to the beauty, but I love each ride.

Footstep Echoes

Not Nisqually, or even near Olympia, but you get the idea.

The girls and I have been enjoying Olympia on foot lately. We covered 4 miles on the Nisqually delta board walk, cold and windy, but rewarded with wildlife and a hot meal afterward. We ambled downtown (yes, humans can get places without cars), exploring neighborhoods and urban wildlife along the way to the farmers market, followed by a bus ride back (no, humans don't have to let the feet carry the load all the time). Forays through the neighborhood (sometimes with feet pushing pedals instead of pounding pavement) with no particular goal in mind. Motor-free missions to scope out firework viewing spots, or just to pick up a few things at the grocery. Walking down to the port to greet canoe-loads of tribal paddlers (ready to set foot on land after crossing Salish seas), and then trudging back uphill. Yesterday, we walked out on a beach as far as a very low tide would allow, our feet in water that does not hit new land til Asia.

We're exploring, finding where the cute puppies live and where the sweet fruit grows. We're getting places or going nowhere in particular. We're experiencing city grit and natural beauty. We're finding short cuts and long vistas. We're discovering secret gardens and re-discovering public places that exist only as blurs to the car-bound.

We're spending lots of time together with no screens, with no walls. Feet keep moving, and conversation flows. I was never a hiker, but this is familiar to me; it's in my blood. I remember walking through university woods with my family in search of blueberries and a Greek theater. I recall walking what seemed like a long way through the little town where my grandparents lived, visiting neighbors, the firehouse, and ending up at a soda fountain where we would watch our milkshakes take form. These things happened with lifelong teachers who appreciated the value of leaving classrooms and letting places teach at the pace of foot-falls.

As we walk, the earth is pressing memories into our feet. The kids may not remember any one sight, or a particular conversation that passed between us, but the ground was walked on by us, together, our feet shared places and soaked them up. (I enjoy walking solo, too, but moving as a small pack adds something.) Memories are being implanted in our soles, imprinted on our souls, nevermind whether our brains take note yet.

Backroads: Habitat

Mmmm. Shoulder verdure.

Roadless wilderness is a sublime thing...I've been told. Like most of you, I've never been that far from some sort of road. Maybe I have a pretty loose definition (re-arranged lines of 'a'a lava that would kill any car, 'Opihi Road on Moloka'i, Grays Harbor County ruts sporting alder just small enough to barrel through, tire tracks through pastures,...the list goes on), but still, I've rarely been more than a couple of miles from a motor vehicle trail of some kind. Old rail grades, rotten remnants of corduroy, routes traveled once by horses iron or meaty--maybe little more than a scar on the land now, but evidence of prior human traffic nonetheless. Sometimes these routes are harder to walk, much less drive, than the non-road nearby, but the point is that these are not pristine, wild places.

And yet, nature always reclaims them. Weeds sprout (rudely or restoratively so? depends on your perspective, or maybe your human hubris score) into the most heavily traveled roads in the nation. Even if the DOT crews manage to spray them, still the undersides and crevices and shoulders support spores and seeds and all manner of microbial life ready to start the reclamation process again.

Until there is a verdure. I've driven enough places poorly traveled to recognize the progression: forbs climbed by vines pierced by seedlings topped by a relentless future that tunnelizes the road before erasing it entirely. As long as the road is still maintained, the progression stops somewhere along that line, but on the back roads I spend so much time driving, it has begun, and stands poised to pounce. The day after construction, the artery begins to narrow. Some growth happens between tire tracks, but the real action is at the boundaries of this incursion, flanks subject to constant attack as nature abhors the biological vacuum of exposed subsoil or fresh gravel. Grading, mowing, chainsaw work all sweep it open to one degree or another, but in fact all back roads are terminal patients, and the further out they are, the more reliant they are on extensive life support.

Or from another angle, they return to life support. The early succession plants feed critters from mice to moose. Tribes used to burn their trails and other clearings in the forest for exactly this reason, to provide forage. Where can the four-leggeds find something to eat? Not in the dark understory of decades-old trees, but there's plenty along the road shoulder mowed last fall. Eventually, salal and salmonberry establish themselves, setting out a berry buffet. Roads tend to track in weeds, it is true, but this includes blackberry and other species that despite their alien-ness (and maybe egged on by their invasiveness) quickly establish themselves as abundant food source for native animals. On each shoulder lies a line of edge habitat, between the flat barren road and the forest or field or sage beyond is a strip of ecotone, often with resources not available outside it. There may be a ditch in a dry land, a berm raised above swamp, some anomaly that creatures will recognize and exploit.

These back roads, the more remote of which only see the occasional vehicle, have been adopted by some of the wildlife for travel as well. In a park where they know they are protected, you can see deer and elk making use of the open paths, pausing sometimes until cars come to a standstill, but in wilder places the animals generally yield the right of way, bounding off in that moment when they can hear your truck, but before you see them. Bears make heavy use of the roads, much easier traveling than having to haul those big bodies through the woods (not to mention the berry buffet, always a sure lure for the ursine).

I'm not an advocate for more roads. There are too many already, and it bums me out to see the number of newer roads failing to make use of older road beds, adding insult to injury, braiding ever broader impacts. Something about sitting up on a D-9 makes a guy want to cut new ground, not dress up something pioneered long ago. Pressure from environmentalists and the First People mean that a new road now may be less likely to be an ecological disaster than a new one 50 years ago, but they still become scars. Culverts clog and become landslides sometimes, ripping far larger gashes in the landscape. Sadly, some of these are built for a single use, from the wagon roads built by the army and abandoned all in a few 19th Century years to the ones still built for a timber harvest that won't be needed for another 80 years or so (at which time the dozer operator will scoff at the design and rip open a new one).

But it is also a mistake to plan as if this will stop. Or to believe that we humans are so powerful that we've permanently ruined a placed by driving into it. We drive back to our homes, and the plants grow, the animals traipse and browse. Nature cushions the blow, eventually makes the road something only an archaeologist would recognize. She shrugs it off, beginning with the shoulders.

Backroads: The Kelp Highway

On the Kelp Way in Clallam County, looking over at Vancouver Island.

How about instead of a backroad, I follow the first road this time? The stream so main that it was traveled by the first people to head east into the Western Hemisphere. For most of my life, this was presumed to have been the Bering Land Bridge, the rim of Beringia, a tectonic plate where some dry land peeked up when glaciers borrowed the ocean's topmost fathoms. People followed game across the arc of dry land, and ended up in the New World, where they made big fluted spearpoints for the convenience of archaeologists, who would name them after the town of Clovis, named after the first King of the Franks, who never conquered anything within a few kilomiles of New Mexico. What these people called themselves, nobody knows, but it was probably the same as nearly every other culture that has had the sense to avoid citification: "People."


It does not much matter, since Clovis people came along after others. Earlier sites have emerged over the years, and though plenty of people argue against the 40,000 year old dates in Monte Verde, hardly anybody disputes that 15,000 or so (feel free to give or take on the order of a millenium or two) is OK. In the old days, this was a problem because the period when the land Beridge was exposed was later. But now we know that people lived here before they could walk here. It already looks ridiculous and bigoted to espouse such an utterly baseless theory as "People could not get here except on foot. The land route was not available until 11,000 years ago. Ergo the hemisphere was settled after 11,000 years ago. Oh, and aren't these spearpoints cool?"


Sure, Clovis points are cool, but you know what's cooler? This:

This is an older type of point that has been found along the Pacific Coast. In the California islands, it was found along with a lot of bird bones, and is presumed to have been used for hunting them. The most common name for these is "crescent points," because they have that shape, sorta. What they look even more like is half of the bottom of a cowry shell, but the point is that they are every bit as beautiful as a Clovis point, and from a functional standpoint may be even more elegant (there are a bunch of Clovis points that would be useless for hunting, they are so big). 


The photo comes from an article here: Link

I don't know a lot more about this than you (maybe less), but the idea in that article and elsewhere, that the people who made these artifacts settled the New World by boat, is hard to resist. Kelp grows continuously enough along the shores of the North Pacific that long open-water voyages are not necessary (also: not precluded) to get all the way to California. Kelp forests are incredibly rich in food, and their wave-dampening fronds offer canoe people the respite of smoother water. They offer access to shellfish clinging to rocks that would be extremely difficult and risky to get at on foot. They take People alongshore until they find a nice place to stop for a while. Or even stop forever, set up a village and stay. Even those People, however reluctant they may be to set out on a thousand mile trip, venture back into kelpy waters regularly for everything from the kelp itself to fish, birds, molluscs, pinnipeds, crustaceans, and all the other orders of life stacked in the deep larder of a kelp forest. 

Kelp Highway Off-Ramp.

Glaciers plan to return still more of the water they borrowed during the Pleistocene, and we can look forward to more drowned land. By the time we run out of petrochemicals, we may have difficulty walking between hills that have become islands. Kelp and kin will still be there, topography will become bathymetry, and the seaweeds will cling to it. Even if (OK, when) the big one hits, the Subduction Zone quake that drops pieces of crust deep below sea level, then kelp thallus will respond with prodigious growth; the kelp forest will just get taller, more fecund. If we adapt to reality, and don't insist on living by some back-asswards theory, we'll be alright too.

Ode to Backroads

Maybe the last road you'll ever take

In this blog, you may have noticed an obsession with backroads.

Long ago I took the off ramp from the freeway, began avoiding the arterial routes. I hate being in traffic's mainstream, locked into someone else's pace, breathing their exhaust. The primary road lacks soul and scenery except when the desire to move large volumes of vehicles from point A to point B cannot avoid traversing beautiful country (I-90 through Snoqualmie Pass, for instance), and even then there is always some better alternative (two lanes of Route 20 to the north, or of Route 12 to the south). Freeways aim to streamline and thus shed everything interesting, force everyone into the same rhythmless rate of travel, offer quirkless repetition of the same few gas stations and fast food places. Urban thoroughfares consist of a series of stoplights between which strips of stores and other concrete castings mark what was once a landscape as corporate occupied territory. Where mindless masses heed the realtors' idiotic mantra of "Location, location, location," pioneers with all their memory are pushed out, humans with their individuality are hidden somewhere behind facades, and even businesses grow less diverse and interesting. Top dollar rent, bottom feeder culture.


Maybe my penchant for backroads stems from something simpler, though, and all of the above (and more, believe me, there's much more to that rant) is just rantionalization of a more basic desire to avoid traffic. 

Over the years, many of my best friends have been the same, people who will take longer to reach a destination if it means avoiding highways and main streets. Humans who crave green roadsides. Apes with an appreciation for the offbeat and historic. 


Back when I'd only driven for a few short years, I read Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. Already a lover of backroads, I cannot say it influenced me as much as the book and my internal narrative enjoyed a happy feedback, a harmony. It reinforced my belief that the road less traveled holds more promise of adventure and discovery, of meditation and discovery.


Over more years, backroads driving has become more than just a personal preference. Curving roads cannot be driven too fast, and in slowness there is more opportunity to see the lay of the land: terrain, vegetation, and old human haunts emerge in a way speed will not allow. As a student of cultural landscapes, there is no replacement for this kind of recon. The capillary network of small and semi-forgotten transportation penetrates most of the country and its history. What seem to most of my contemporaries to be roads to nowhere often go to a place that once was somewhere, to the old timer with a trove of memory or the ruins of where that memory settled into the earth.


So I take the lesser tine at the fork in the road, and follow. Sometimes this is history thrown into reverse: the old game trail that became and Indian Trail that became a road, then was bypassed and became less useful, less used, and abandoned. Shoulders shrug away to nothing, two lanes become one, pavement grows leprotic and patchy, and eventually fades to gravel, to mud-ruts. Trees arch over, salmonberry and blackberry crowds the lane, scratching the sides of the rare truck that enters with all the fervor and skill of a beginning violin student. Eventually, you come to the point where the plants just grown in the road, or maybe to the washed out bridge or dug up road where further travel must be on foot.

On lucky days, this means a 3-point turn (maybe 5 or 7), but other times the road ends with no wide spot, just dropping into a ditch or swamp. Then comes the slow back-up, trying to see the road behind through dusty windows and cockeyed mirrors. Either way can scrape the nerves like the brush scrapes the truck. Slipping off a narrow logging road leaves you in one of several predicaments: praying that enough wheels have traction to drive out, high-centered and figuring out if the winch can save you, a long walk out musing over ways to avoid ignominy among peers, or a quick and accelerating tumble down the mountain. None is pretty, but most are not deadly. It may take hours to walk out to find help, and this never happens in areas where your cell phone will work.


A different danger is getting stuck because someone blocks you in, parking in front of a gate you'd locked behind you. Sometimes, in quest of something, I've driven through an open gate, risking being locked in. Passing such portals carries some risk, maybe some thrill. The ones I tend to avoid either have evidence of heavy ongoing use (running into a gravel or logging truck barreling down and not expecting to see me is not something I want), or that have no trespassing signs, especially the home made ones, complete with promises of shooting.


There is a dark side to some back roads. Residents may be friendly, or they may live there because they do not want to be found--fugitives and recluses eye the passerby with suspicion, with one hand resting on a gun. The lone lost traveler may get help, or may disappear after a short exchange has established that nobody else knows where they are. Last week I drove a road that set my skin to crawling, my mind wandered to a Puna road that looked like this but for the lack of red cinders, a road where a girl was raped and killed because she thought a lone bike ride would be fun, but happened through the turf of meth-smoking animals who thought it would be fun to run her down. 


Nothing bad happened to me, and it rarely does on backroads. The isolation of back roads just lends itself to musings that can turn dark and paranoid under the wrong circumstances. Just as easily, though, you may come around a bend and see epiphany, or at least some interesting wildlife. Lots of times, I've seen a bear helping himself to salmonberries colonizing old logging roads, or come out of the woods and into a vista, or found a road on no map that leads to exactly where I want to go.


Meanwhile, some schmuck is tied up in traffic. There are people who never venture of the beaten, paved, and strip-malled path. I feel sorry for them, but not enough to want them out on the fine web of rural roads that I mostly enjoy alone. Too many people, and I'd have to give up some of the traveling habits that make backroads so much fun. No slowing down in the middle of the road to snap a photo, or outright parking there to poke around, knowing that nobody's coming. No peeing in privacy right out in the open. No foraging without giving away secrets. No, I am very happy that the main stream is where it is, and that poetry aside, almost nobody takes the road less traveled.

Road Warrior? C'mon.

When I travel, staying overnight in a hotel somewhere, there is always the chance that I am exposed to TV. Nearly every time that happens, I find that one of the tiredest tropes of commercials lives on, the ad aimed at sometone ostensibly like me, the working traveler, salaried sojourner. Although the guy in the ad is almost always indistinguishable from the yutzy dork, the white father in most sitcoms, in this milieu he is the Road Warrior.

The first recollection I have of this mythical creature is OJ Simpson, running through airports, hurdling white yutzes, heroically meeting destiny, by which it is understood: getting a rental car. The genre elevates the mundanity of corporate travel (those public sector stooges are kept off planes for the most part, and make their way round the country in elderly motor pool rides), presents it as an ordeal, a test of manhood and acumen. Whatever product is being presented appears as the choice of the genius, the reward for a job well done. Depending on how you look at it, a tiny bit of swag due the corporate cog, or maybe the screct nirvana of the zen traveler. (But please, you don't really believe that the mothership doesn't know you got that free hotel night courtesy of nights they paid for, do you? They're laughing every time you think you're putting one over on them, happy to let you collect the odd freebie while they make you do the work of two people.)

Bejowled but young, the hero gets frontsies in every line, is greeted by models approved by focus groups, finds himself with the ocean view (never mind that he only sees it in the dark, and is more likely sitting inside watching commercials about himself). He does business...in a convertible Mustang.

The ad strokes his ego--You, Mr. Corporate Traveler Man, are a Hero--while the product slips him a little bit of something, seemingly under the table. And the Hertz hottie is smiling just at him. Yeah.

Does the Road Warrior believe this? Is his world so lame that skipping a couple minutes of waiting, or getting some points (which he will eventually redeem for a subscription to Maxim sent to the office) represents Victory? Could be. People are stupid.

I don't think I am a road warrior, except in certain instances: righting truck and trailer from a precipitous skid on the ice sheet that passes for a highway on Elk Mountain, Wyoming, steering into the wind on a blustery Columbia crossing, finding my way out of dark and rainy north Cascades logging road labyrinths.

These pasty out of shape guys in ties? Nah. Not warrior material.

Backroads: 14 Fog on the Columbia

Route 14 follows the Columbia along its north bank from near the mouth on up to the first big bend. How is a road following the Columbia River, one of the major arteries of North America, a back road? A road about a century old in its current path, laid down aside major rail lines even older, paving trails used by tribes since, as they say, "time immemorial," and before then by all manner of megafauna for whom time ended.

How? The interstate across the river in Oregon. I-84 is the choice of people who want to think that they are getting upriver fast, who feel slowed down when denied a choice of lanes, who want their travel tableau to be blurred and interdicted by semi trailers. More than once, people have looked at me with concern or pity when I say I'm taking Route 14 instead, asking if I know about the real highway across the river.

Last week I headed upriver on 14 from Vancouver, not at the mouth of the river, but in the tide's grip. On that day, nearly strangled in a fog. Up through Camas and Washougal, its white blanket interwoven with tendrils of pulp mill stink. But soon enough, winding through oak, gnarling dendritic silhouettes grasping handfuls of a cleaner fog, holding it to the earth.

My feelings on this are fuzzy. The fog can be cold and dreary, obscurationist curtailer of vistas, curtain shutting out the sun. Or it can be a coccoon, silken pod in which to meditate, swallower of clatter. I wrote about this then.

So popping up out of this into the sun could go either way. Freed from the drabness, exposed to the glare. Whatever. Nature carries on, regardless of whatever metaphor little humans want to paint onto it.

Beacon Rock and its trail (1777 steps to the top, last time I checked), wrapped in fog, is beautiful. From I-84 you can look across the river and see the rock, unless it's foggy and then all you see is guardrail.

Further up the river and into the day, the fog began to burn off. I got to see the end of it, lifting off the river, pushed down from the sun on top, thinning to a tongue, lick receding back down river, not wetting the sere plateau.

River James

I started this blog a couple of years ago starting upstream against the James, and there is always part of me that will live there, or at least in the Tuckahoe swamp feeding its flow. The headwaters, frigid eddies and snow-rafts heading downstream under dim-winter grey, were the last I’ve seen of that river where I once canoed, swam, waded, and kept a wary eye out for snakes.

Lately, though, as I followed a blog (http://300songs.com/2010/09/28/55-james-river-cracker-and-camper-van-beethoven-richmond-virginia/) by the songwriter and adoptive Richmonder David Lowery, the river has flooded back into my consciousness. That blog started as a way to explain his 300 songs, give them some context spin and stories, but it has spawned some interesting essays on cultural geography, on the natural and man-made material underpinnings of music and lifeways. “James River” is one of those songs.

James as in Jamestown, as in centuries of arterial flow (rum and sickle cells upstream, moonshine and tobacco downstream), as in a city’s flusher, as in a swath of wild through so-called civilization. Lowery recognizes in its neglected banks and muddy water the “elegant decay” of a defeated Southern capital. For all the talk of rednecks and junkies and that, you can tell he loves the place. Sometimes, at least.

Richmond is where it is because of the Falls; it lies on the toe of the Piedmont foot, or if you want to look at it another way, the promontory above Tidewater’s swampy expanse. Just like Alexandria (DC being a modern invention by Virginia standards) and Fredericksburg. All these Falls cities had their ports, and it’s tempting to thing that’s the end of it, cities just automatically spring up at the point where merchant ships had to stop and unload.

That probably explains why the settlement lasted, but not why it appeared. The English set up near the falls because that’s where Wahunsenacawh held court. The Spaniards who didn’t stay too long called him Carlos, I think, and the new batch of Europeans took to calling him Powhatan. His homeland was to the north on a smaller river, but once he’d fought, married, and politicked his way to the apex of a large confederation, he headed to the James. What he called it, I have no idea, but the first English just called it Powhatan’s River before they came up with the original idea of naming it for their bible-revising king.

Wahunsenacawh wasn’t there because he had deep draft merchant ships, although the logic of stopping at the falls holds true for canoes. Maybe he didn’t want to be too far from the Chickahominy just downstream, a tribe who stood out in the region for their democratic system of government and widely feared warriors—double threat to a guy like W. Probably he wanted to control the flow of trade between coast and interior. Definitely he did not want to live way downriver at some hellhole like Jamestown Island, with its bad water and malarial swamps.

Oh, and the precondition to all that commerce and politics: a river spawning huge runs of fish. I won’t quote the 16^thcentury shamster bit about walking across the river on their backs. That’s frickin’ ridiculous, and it saddens me to see so-called historians repeat false claims intended to trick people into putting money or themselves into the Virginia venture. But there were unimaginably more fish than now, and of course a bunch of them would run into the falls, creating a major harvest locus.

Anadromous fish excel in excess capacity, and so large annual harvests are possible without killing them off. The humans coming to get the fish would have swelled the population during certain months, and would have had some impact on water quality, especially if a downpour came after they’d done a big burn eroded gullies and caused a pulse of ash and mud. So was the river in its pristine pre-human state when English colonists set foot on the river their progeny would one day dump kepone into? No, but it was likely in an evolutionary, ecological balance.

The river in those days could be a boundary, but nowhere near as much as when Europeans came along. The great chief’s influence didn’t go north of the Potomac, and of course there have always been beefs between left and right bankers on any river, but all it takes is a look at the names of Tribes to know that they saw rivers as centers more than as edges: Chickahominy, Mattaponi, Pamunkey,…

Now, rivers divide counties, states, nations. The James separates Henrico (no Spanish pronunciation in this honorific for Henry, you either say hen-RYE-co, or if you are old and local enough, Hen-RUKkah) and Chesterfield. The line it wrought on maps and in minds of Euro-Americans was frought with various worries and prejudices. Although the City of Richmond annexed part of the south long ago, the power and money generally stick to the north. Long before there were railroads and wrong sides of tracks, ‘South Side’ was a slur.

Maybe this stemmed from racism, the south bank of the James near Richmond being one of the few places where free blacks could live. Or maybe it’s geography, south of the river being the ever-broader coastal plain, lots of creeks and swamps (culminating in the great Dismal Swamp) but not enough rivers to connect with the wide world. In time, Southside sprouted manufacturing and chemical plants, refineries, and neighborhoods for the workers. The owners of these concerns settled in a way that reflected US history: labor and resources extracted from the south fed opulence in the north, which kept expanding westward. Just as Southside brings forth visions of smoke and white trash, a Richmonder understands that West End means wealth (and pretensnobbery).

I grew up in that westward expansion. I knew that as a recently fatherless girl, during the Depression, my grandmother had helped run a boarding house in Richmond, but the truth is that neither of my parents grew up there; they arrived in the late-1960s and decided that the West End had better schools, so I ended up growing up in suburbia. I remember no other place before.

Yet, still in reach of the river. We’d hear the trains on the James, played there from time to time. My dad’s work was not far from one of the bridges. On rare but indelible days, winds from the southeast would waft the warm sweet spice of curing tobacco from Shockoe Slip right up to my nose.

A nose that knew the stink of swamp and the danks of copses. Across the street from our house, there was another row if identical houses, and then Tuckahoe, the James trib separating Henrico from Goochland Counties. The placename refers to an aquatic plant whose tubers formed a crucial foundation in whatever Food Pyramid was promulgated by Wahusenacawh’s Department of Health. One of those taro-like plants that occurs in every tributary of the James, in sloughs and swamps everywhere through that country. And before a succession of tobacco, corn, coal mining, and real estate development took over, I imagine some patches were cultivated, others were half-wild reserves, and a few went feral. Our swamplands were once breadbaskets.

But all those things did happen, and the woods I walked were thick with greenbriar and honeysuckle vines, mostly under thick hardwood canopy. Step in the wrong place, and the mud would suck off your shoe, poison ivy would baste you with time-delayed blistery misery, cottonmouth or copperhead would strike, or worse. A few times it froze hard enough to venture off the trails and onto the ice, but always with the fear of falling through. When it finally did happen, someone got a boot-full of water and muck, but nothing worse, and we grew out of some fear.

One time me and my friend were walking through these woods when we came upon something worse: 4 boys coming the other way. At their head was a guy who was fairly big and thought of himself as a strong guy, being just bright enough to know he’d never be the smart guy. We’d met at a log crossing The Ditch, a mucky gash dumping the neighborhood storm drains into Tuckahoe swamp. I stepped on and so did he, and in the middle he grabbed my walking stick and tried to twist it from my grip or me from the log. Neither succeeded, and I don’t even remember who got to cross first. Just the rush of adrenalin, a stalemate, and then cracking up when he solemnly uttered, “You’re strong. I admire that.” Like in some old melodrama about days of chivalry or some such crap delivered in a fake English accent.

Meanwhile, I was thinking, “You’re a fatass.”

Turns out the guy’s family were Southsiders.

And so this entry ends with no summary, no pith. Just me taking a break.

What to Write

No idea.

I have this photo I like from this past week, with Salish girls dancing, their hats shaped like Tahoma, but about 50 miles closer.

But maybe, I like this one better. Is it the composition? The perfect dapple of sun on her hat, the face not shown? Maybe. But really it's the documentary aspect, the less-cropped shot revealing the field of vehicles, the inescapable petroleum footprint. I took a shot short of Art (but also of artifice), glimpsed some meta, was rewarded by an obliging sun.

That's the photos, but what to write?

One thing I could write is why these girls are dancing, where, and so on. But no, I know too little. They are Nisqually Tribe members, and they are dancing for a crowd before a dinner and potlatch. I could go all anthro here, or worse yet writerly, but the fact is this was only the third tribal event I've been to, and who the hell am I to hold forth when I am but a freakin' infant in the world of which I would write? Same exact conclusion as I came to in 1991, having been in Hawai'i a year and realized that my dream of a year prior, of becoming a freelance writer, of doing articles on Hawaiian culture, that was a bullshit dream. No better really than Dan's plan of moving to Jamaica and editing one of their newspapers for them because he liked to smoke pot and was an offpring of Jewish NYC intelligencia (his dad wrote the screenplay for "Star 80" and grew up in Brooklyn, whereas Dan grew up in a rural NJ farmhouse).

So no. I won't give you some bogus insight on the culture of the People of the Grass (which is what Nisqually or Squally-absch people translate to in English), a factoid I include for those of you uninclined to surf off to their website where I found it.

So yeah. No good idea of what to write. Good night.

Great Wednesday Part II: Cracker Plays Glacier

So I get to the venue, which is half bar and restaurant, and half general store to the last town on the road. Again the bad news good news oscillation set in, somehow ending up higher on the good side. I was about to order a porter when the bartendress said something about it being really foamy, so I asked for a Guiness, since it has a high nutritional value, and my reserves were depleted from all the climbing. But having a Guiness tap handle is different from having the drink itself, so I had to choose something else. Giving in to the hop-mad NW default, I asked for an IPA, only to learn that that keg had just poured its last. Unwilling to go Belgian (I continue to boycott Leopold's domain long after that devil got his due), I looped back round to the porter, and when they tried, it worked just fine.

As the chocolatey goodness coursed its way into my system and I was feeling happy, the other shoe dropped. There would be no ordering dinner and sitting around until the show started, because they were kicking us all out to let the band set up. Come back at 9 for first-come, first-served tickets. I squesked into the general store part just before closing, got the best food on offer (beef jerky, oh well), and decided to make a last-minute run to the end of the road for a view of Mount Baker.

After making it through an are of one-lane road controlled by robot traffic lights, I saw a bunch of cars coming down, and guessed form the fading light that I would not be treated to a sunset show, but I pushed on, blazing up straightaways and ripping the curves as fast as possible. At the end of the road, reflected in lakes, I caught the last red glow of the summit another 5000 or so feet above. Better yet, a big bright moon looking like it was resting on a ridge, carressed by trees.

No time to dally, though, and I looped around to rush down the hill even faster, fearing that hordes had showed up in my absence, maybe denying me entry to a place that looked like it could not hold more than a few dozen people. I skidded into the lot to see more than 50 people outside, and edged by way about midway through the amoebic crowd. Normally I don't cut in, but a large number of these were college kids with no real clue what they were about to see, and there was no sense them getting in while a true crumb was stuck outside.

I talked with a couple people, including Heather a brash hippy chick. There was a time in the '90s when I encountered a series of hippy chicks named Heather, all from Santa Cruz, a place dear to Cracker Van Beethoven. I took it as a good omen. The crowd kept good humor, milling about in the main drag, watching locals on ATVs roll through, and inexplicably smoking a lot of cigarettes but no weed.

9 o-clock came and went, and while some pompadoured doofus talked loudly so we could all confirm his idiocy, the crowd overall began to get antsy. After a while, the band came out to say there were technical difficulties, but they were working on a solution that would make loud music without eletrocuting them. (Based on Lowery's blog, such an accident might well be interpreted as part of the show, like when his DIY pyrotechnics backfired.) Through the windows, we could see cords connected and taped dow, ripped up, gear reconfigured, and finally an anorexic version of the black things from 2001 being erected. Then, music to my ears, a "Mr. Wrong" soundcheck. Pompousdour proclaimed this a country vibe, as if nobody else could hear.

Then they let us in. I got stamped and headed out back in search of a tree instead of a stinking bar toilet, looked at the stars a minute (could not make out the Big Dipper), and headed back in. Where despite a thick crowd I walked easily to the end of the bar, and quickly got a beer. There I found myself standing in a good spot, clear view of the band, close to another drink if I wanted it, and standing by a couple guys more my age than the college kids.

And I had a rare experience. Usually, in that idle conversation starting where you find out what each other do, my being an archaeologist trumps what the other people do, and sometimes they get awkward about it, apologizing for being corporate tools or whatever it is they do that is so boring by comparison. But these guys were in the beer industry, which makes them natural allies of archaeologists. I offered to pick up the next pitcher and share with them instead of getting individual cups, but they just said thanks and told me I should drink their beer. At this point, I realized that the bad-news half of the cycle had given up, that someone had beaten him up and sent him down the road, and it was to be smooth sailing.

The band came in, not complaining about the small venue or antique wiring at all, ensconced themselves in their corner (no stage, all egaltaritry here in Glacier), and I realized that the mob was focused elsewhere, and me and the beer guys would have a pretty much unobstructed view. Soon after they started playing, the obligatory (and for some reason familiar) gyrate-in-front-of-the-lead-guitarist chick appeared, but she was short enough that we could still see the band just fine.

Song after song that I know and love, the improvised sound system sounding very good (even if Sal seemed spooked from time to time by that 2001--or is that 2010?--monolith). If you know a band's songs, and have heard them a year or so apart, during which time they've toured relentlessly, it is easy to hear how much they love the music and have mastered all the fine points. I kept noticing how right on the inflections of guitars and background vocals were. Perfect.

There was a brief while when I wondered about the monolith and the band, especially lead singer David Lowery. He was hidden behind sunglasses even though there were no lights, he maintained a certain distance from the crowd (seeming unaware even when a wasted shaman kept dancing an pointing into the singers face), I began to wonder whether the beard was to cover the faux flesh of an android, a suspicion egged on by his robotically precise strumming. Was he the man who fell to earth?

But nah. Just rock.

The bar was not big, and the band was pent up in a corner. Frank halfway back into an alcove, guarding a hoard of chairs and tables. Sal just inches away from the pool table, stealing occasional wistful glances toward it. David perched in front of the crowd with nowhere to go. Johnny with no amplifiers to stand on or stage to work, face to face with the dancing girl until she was lured away by the shaman to dance in the center. The lights were just wall fixtures like in people's houses, and the windows behind them, looking out onto the porch, completed the illusion of a house party like they have not played in years.  Outside those windows were hippies who could not or would not come in, dancing, peering in, and sometimes talking with friends inside between songs. It was very nice to be by a window and catch this part of the show. And to top it off (both in terms of elevation and imagery) above and behind the band from by vantage point was an old copper still.

And through it all, no diva-ness. No bitching about the people outside betting a free show. Or about the facilities, or the encroachments on the stage, or the parade of people waling right in front of the band to get to the beer. Maybe a little bit if entrapment, when the bans asked how long the delay was, and some guy said "47 minutes" and was immediately accused of being uptight and German, with David proclaiming "I call bullshit on 'Glacier time,'" that being akin to Hawaiian time and other laid-back chronological reckonings. In fact, the guy was probably not from Glacier, and most of the crowd was pretty laid back about the delay.

But then David did acknowledge one guy for uttering the strangest boast he's heard from a crowd ("I have better handwriting than anyone in the room!"). And when some other person made the connection between a monmologue about rednecks and the song "Get Off This," they praised his multi-dimensional intteligence and added it to the encore. Two sets, two-song encore, and hours of rocking.

Long fieldwork the next day kept me from catching the Seattle show the next night, but I may not have gone anyway. A small show, like a house party with better sound, emerging into a cold starlit night instead of urban streets? Yeah, I'll take that.