Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Scenic Route
There’s nothing like a road trip to stir the imagination. The Adventure Buddy crew’s most recent 5000-mile detour through the western United States gave plenty of time and space to contemplate the bigness of life and a finer appreciation of taking the longer routes—the broad horizons of long country highways like the 722 Farm-to-Market in the Texas Panhandle, the traversals up rutted dirt paths in forests and meadows like the road to the Pine Creek Ski Area in Wyoming, and the winding mountain roads like the 139 in western Colorado from Dinosaur to Grand Junction. What follows is an attempt to depict the bigness of what we experienced—the sights and smells, the characters we came across, the music we listened to that stirred our senses, and the books we read to further stimulate our ruminations.
Leaving Western Washington
We left the dull skies and dreary confines of Western Washington when we took a washboard dirt forest service road up to Suntop Lookout overlooking Mount Rainier. There, looking west, you can see clouds and out to the east, on the other side of the Cascades, you can see clear skies. The division could not be clearer. And it was here that we knew we were leaving Western Washington.
"Lo que quieren es perder tiempo." Sunnyside, Washington
After our run up to view Mt. Rainier, we took a spin through the appropriately named Sunnyside, Washington in search of a taco truck. I just knew that in this part of this very agricultural part of the world, we could find some tacos. After taking a few spins through town, we found Super Tacos, a truck by a liquor store and a little bit of shade from the hot sun beating down on our poor skin made so white by living in Bellingham. We sat down and I ordered a torta de adobada, one of my standards for this sort of an affair. As we were eating, an enormous pick-up pulled up and two Mexicans, who looked like they had been working all day, sauntered out in their alligator skin cowboy boots. The driver looked at what I was eating and said to the lady taking orders that he wanted what I was eating because it was making his mouth water. Not realizing that I understand Spanish, he looked surprised when I laughed at his cavalier order. They sat down with us and we started talking about we did for a living and how we could understand Spanish. He began telling his life story of how some 15 years ago, he left his native Veracruz, a state on the Caribbean, more tropical part of Mexico to go work on a salmon and crab boat in Alaska. When the season ended, he found work with a Russian fishing fleet and did his time on the boats as a self-taught electrician. He did this for a number of years claimed also to have worked on the electronics on Microsoft henchman Paul Allen’s yacht. In Sunnyside, he and his compadre were taking care of cattle and both were complaining about how the calves don’t take holidays, that the calves need their attention even on Sundays. Then one of them asks what we were doing in Sunnyside and we say that we were going to Texas and then Kansas. We explained that we don’t usually take the Interstate, that we were going to make it to Texas without being on the Interstate for more than 50 miles. The first Mexican cowboy says to the other, “Isn’t that just a waste of time? Doesn’t it take longer to go on the smaller roads?” And the other Mexican cowboy looks at the first as if the first didn’t understand us and says, “Pero no entiendes. Lo que quieren es perder tiempo.” And the second cowboy understood us, because that was precisely our goal. To waste time. Or to make good time, which for us, is measured with emphasis on ‘good’ rather than ‘time,’ and this indeed changes our whole approach to things.
Tommy Three Reds in Wallowa National Forest
This is the first road trip that all 4 of us did in Tommy Three Reds and Tommy did brilliantly in his Adventure Buddy road trip debut, taking us on washboard roads with massive ruts that we never would have dreamed of driving with Rocinante.
Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs
Driving 5000 miles across really barren country gives one a lot of time to listen to music. We devoured a historical book on Custer and listened to a number of This American Life podcasts, but the music we listened gave us some fuel for the fire. The title of Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs perfectly describes the Adventure Buddy crew’s adventures. Not that we’re gunfighters (although Lu has her moments), but there’s something about our desperado aesthetic that shouts “gunfighter”—don’t you think?—and it’s always good to have trail songs for all the trails we do. I grew up listening to the Grateful Dead’s version of “El Paso,” but it’s nice to have Marty Robbins’ original, an epic tale of romance with a Mexican maiden and a gun duel. Throughout these entries, I will intersperse commentaries on the tunes that entertained us on our way through the West.
Wyoming
On the map, Kirsten saw a scenic detour, possibly unpaved, that we approached around sundown in our traversal across Wyoming. The Pine Creek Ski Area was marked with a tent sign indicating a campground and we thought it a possible route through mountains to get to the Flaming Gorge in Utah. We took the turn and the pavement soon ended while our path made a quick ascent over a wild range, surely populated with unsavory creatures such as grizzly, wolves and ornery moose. We kept on as the road got worse and worse. The dirt red brown mud sprayed all over Tommy Three Reds, covering even his high roof. We stopped to let Lu and Mar visit some bushes, a task distracted by a high-speed chase along a tall ridge. Fortunately, it was just a deer and not one of the aforementioned creatures. We came to a fork in the road. A sign indicated potentially long and grueling paths over old snowmobile paths. We turned around not seeing any indication of the highway that we sought after. We made our way back to the flats, where a large camper was parked, a sign indicating that it belonged to John. Evidently, John was expecting company and a small town of four-wheelers and huge Wyoming trucks with the ubiquitous bucking bronco decal on the license plate so attached to the spirit of all Wyomingans and their big rigs. We parked our tent in a gulch, ripe with willow trees and mosquitoes and an ileum of a massive animal, most likely an elk or moose. As she banned from the truck, her odor made too offensive by rubbing in another dead critter’s remains, Lupe slept in the dirt. The near full moon split through the tent like a floodlight illuminating an escape at a prison compound, waking us up and causing Lu to panic.
Frank and the Busy B in Kemmerer, Wyoming
The next morning at dawn, I walked straight up a mountain with the dogs to a view of more mountains, sage brush and willows. This rugged wilderness just seemed to go on forever and ever. We doubled back, abandoning our scenic route and rolled into Kemmerer, Wyoming, the fossil capital of the world and new age mining town with massive gas plants, where modern day prospectors scrape the earth in an effort to keep this country powered—computers on, cell phones charged and homes heated. There, we went into the Busy B café and met Frank, self-professed “Jack of All Trades and Master of None,” who told us about his life working construction, the gas plants and coal mines during the summer and cooking in Dalhart, Texas, a profession he ran into happenstance. We had some stiff coffee together and he gave us some recipes for a real gravy and chili.
National Belle Mine, Colorado
You can see Tommy way down below as we left him to hike to over 11,000 feet in the thin Colorado air.
Horse Feathers and the Conformer
Lindsey, owner of Horse Feathers western store in Taos, New Mexico, knows hats. The device he holds in his hands is a conformer from 1840s Paris. He slapped it on my head to get a sense of its shape, making a map of it that Don holds in his hand. What did we learn from this experience? That I have a “blockhead,” that I can’t wear hats with brims too long or too short. Armed with this information, I picked up a new hat in Taos that is just about perfect.
Farm-to-Market
Texas Farm-to-Market roads 767 and 722 leading from Channing to Dumas pass through some of the prettiest places on earth. Impossible to photograph because they are just too big to fit into a camera lens, these roads wind and dip over the vast expanses of the historic XIT ranches that helped fund the building of the state capitol in Austin. Wide-open, you can survey 20-25 miles off to the horizon and not see a single soul. This vast expanse of territory, desolate yet beautiful, acquires a strange sense of power as the sun nears its setting point after a long summer day. A passing train impeded our progress in Channing.
Mamo and the Fruit Cocktail Incident
Kirsten’s grandmother, Mamo, has survived her whole life on a diet of burgers and coffee. She doesn’t touch vegetables or fruit. One incident that might help explain this aversion is the story of the fruit cocktail incident. During some floods in the Northern Texas area some years ago, a railroad bridge washed out and a box car full of cans of fruit cocktail emptied into the river. For years, cowboys ranging the land would come to pick up some fruit cocktail. But they all got sick of it. And so did Mamo.
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