Pele’s Fire: At the Edge of Apocalypse and Regeneration

Place of Refuge (Pu'uhonua o Hōnaunau), on the Big Island

Paradise

I’d been scrubbing the deck, and all at once a chap said to me: “Why, there it is.” And I looked up and I saw the outline of the island. I knew right away that there was the place I’d been looking for all my life. Then we came near, and I seemed to recognise it. Sometimes when I walk about it all seems familiar. I could swear I’ve lived here before. 

(Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence)

The Alibates Flint Quarries in the Texas Panhandle

The Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument is a place where many peoples, the first Americans, gathered and crossed paths for some 10 or 11 thousand years to acquire flint for making arrowheads. 

Arrowheads made from the Alibates quarries were found as far away as California and Minnesota, so this spot represents a significant trading outpost for the original Americans who brought abalone from California and furs from Minnesota to the many tribes that occupied the space around the quarries. Tribes from the Clovis period up until the reign of the Comanches in the Southwest sought the flint and some of these tribes served as resident tribes protecting the area. Standing on a bluff overlooking the quarries, it was easy to imagine how a resident tribe with a permanent settlement would have a difficult time defending their treasured flint from marauding tribes like the Apaches and Comanches. 

Tiny arrows were used for buffalo because a smaller arrow could more easily get between the ribs for a lung shot. The Comanches, in particular, were outstanding horsemen and would ride up close and shoot the arrow down into the ribs of the buffalo. Larger arrows were used in warfare to intimidate and maim and injure rather than kill instantly. Comanche warriors were so skilled that they could shoot an arrow into the sky and then reload and fire 20 more arrows before the first arrow came to the ground. 

Our experience at the Alibates Flint Quarries was made richer by Ranger Marty and Volunter Jimmy who both dropped a lot of wisdom about the people and landscape surrounding the area. 

Jimmy is a retired maintenance supervisor from Amarillo College who learned to become a master knapper. Knapping is the process of shaping flint using stones. It comes from the German onomatopoeic sound that is made when stones hit the flint. Watching Jimmy work, you could see that he truly respected the craft of knapping and those who perfected the art before him. “A lot of the original cuss words were invented by knappers,” he told us as one of what was looking to be a perfect specimen upon which he’d been working for a couple of hours cracked awkwardly in a final detailing stroke of his knapping stone. 

Ranger Marty put us in the minds of the original people who thousands of years ago saw bowling ball sized pieces of flint as far away as Tulsa and followed the Cimarron River, a sandy superhighway, up to the source: the mother lode of flint at the Alibates Flint Quarries. He also painted a picture of the landscape at that time, which had more springs. Today, ranching has slowly drained the Ogallala Aquifer and these springs have dried up. The land here has always been barren, arid and hostile, but the abuse of the water by present residents has made it even more so. 

Singing Texas Cowboy Songs in Black Mesa, Oklahoma

"Me and my Uncle went ridin' down
South Colorado, West Texas bound.
We stopped over in Santa Fe,
That bein' the point just about half way,
And you know it was the hottest part of the day"
-John Phillips

"Leaving Texas
Fourth day of July
Sun so hot, clouds so low
The eagles filled the sky
Catch the Detroit Lightning
Out of Santa Fe
Great Northern out of Cheyenne
From sea to shining sea"
-Weir/Hunter

Road Trip Through The State of Washington: The Other Side of Cascadia

The following are photographs from a road trip around the state of Washington, which is poorly named, because the famous American general and president had no idea of the northern part of the Oregon Territory’s existence. Like its highest mountains, Mount Rainier and Mount Baker, early white settlers settled on perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody, and certainly not anyone who had seen the dang things they were naming things after. Captain Vancouver gave Mount Rainier its name for someone who wasn’t with him and never even saw the mountain. As we should be calling Mount Rainier Tacoma, or the big snowy peak, the name Indians called it and all other big, snowy peaks, we should probably be calling the state of Washington something else, because it’s so confusing when people in the rest of the country talk about Washington and instantly think of the capital rather than this state that has nothing to do with the guy on the quarter and the dollar bill. I personally like the name Cascadia, borrowing from the Pacific Northwest Independence Movement’s name for the bioregion that encompasses the entire Columbia River watershed. 

There are 2 distinct Washingtons, and these photographs attempt to depict the other side of the state not commonly shown because most people think of Seattle and its world fair Space Needle, and industry behemoths such as Microsoft, Starbuck’s, Boeing, and Amazon. Just as non-Americans associate New York and Hollywood with everything American and those of us who live here know that the rest of this country is really the heart and soul of America, I feel like the Washington outside of Seattle is where you’ll find what is really going on in this part of the world, which to me is more defined by its land and resources more than internet retailers and overpriced mediocre chain coffee. 

Washington’s economy has been based on the extraction of natural resources for a long time, and it’s something the state and region has had to come to grips with. William Dietrich, retired professor at Western Washington University, recalls a logger deploring the clamoring of Seattle environmentalists about clear cuts, noting that Seattle is the biggest clearcut in the state. This struggle over resource extraction as the basis of the the state’s economy and the people who want to preserve the territory’s rugged beauty, continues today in many forms and continues to divide the state socially and politically.

Washington and Oregon and British Columbia together might better be known as Cascadia, a land divided, geographically and culturally, by the Cascade Mountains, which have come to be known as the Cascade Curtain. 

These pictures look at the other side of the Cascade Curtain and the Adventure Buddies’ tour through a wild Washington, rich in agriculture, silviculture, and great beauty. 

We started in Portland and took the less-traveled north side of the Columbia River gorge through country that produces some of the best wine on the planet to  arrive in Walla Walla, a town that has reaped the benefits of wine and food tourism, using the rich land it has been blessed with.

We then headed north through big clouds and enormous wheat fields and cow pastures, the Palouse region, to the Palouse Falls. We stayed in Ritzville, a town that depends on wheat and struggles to find its identity in the changing times. Then we toured north through Omak feasting on the local bounties at the Corner Bistro, a café that serves local produce and meats, and then camped deep in the Okanogan wilderness. Then we made our way to the Twisp Valley, one of the prettiest pieces of paradise on this planet. And then we headed back across the Cascade Curtain, on one of the prettiest drives known to man, to the wet side and Bellingham.

Columbia River Valley

Somewhere outside of Lyle, Washington, we made our first stop after leaving Portland. The landscape was like that of another planet, especially after coming from the west side of the Cascades with moss growing underneath our armpits for the past 10 months or so. Off the old highway on the north side of the Columbia River, we found the type of place you would expect to be ambushed by Indians if you were living in a western. Otherworldly rocks, deceptive dips in the landscape, and Ponderosa pines sprawled out as far as the eye could see with the Columbia River behind us. Across the river, Mount Hood stuck out, a huge pyramidical column, a gigantic mountain cone of snow standing over 11,000 feet. 

There are 2 sides of Cascadia, one on the left and one on the right, and whenever I’m out on the east side of the Cascades, I feel like I’m on the right side, at least for me. Finally, at this little stop along the Columbia River, I felt secure and sound, knowing that I was in the type of geography in which I feel at home. 

It’s true. There are 2 kinds of people. Those with claustrophobia and those with agoraphobia. I feel claustrophobic on the west side of the Cascades, and this little stop was the perfect anecdote to my sense of feeling like I am in a Sno Globe made of drizzle. Of course the agoraphobics would have been terrified with so much sun and wide-open country.

The Columbia River Valley and its surroundings is like a whole ecosystem in itself, a perfect place for farming and making perfect wines. The Columbia River basin and its strange rock formations and buttes that dominate its landscape are the result of the breaking of the ice dam that blocked ancient Lake Missoula at the end of the last ice age. We see the results of the resulting vast floods that carved the landscape making it defined, beautiful, and with a true sense of self.

Saffron. Walla Walla

Across this country, a lot of small farm towns are becoming ghost towns. Farm work that required so much manpower is now being replaced by mechanization, leaving these towns empty without any way to lure the young people that grew up there back to their streets. 

It used to be that these agricultural towns would ship off all of their best produce to the top restaurants in the cities and the town residents were left to buy the mediocre produce from large agribusinesses from other parts of the country. Some agricultural towns, like Walla Walla, have capitalized on the rich land surrounding them to produce a gastronomical revolution. Bolstered by the outstanding wineries that surround town, Walla Walla restaurants like Saffron are making good on the land. 

At Saffron, we had the rhubarb strawberry salad and pork belly with an absolutely outstanding Kerloo Cellars tempranillo. The strawberry flatbread with ricotta and mint for dessert was life-changing.

Walla Walla has blossomed with the local food movement. Where once its restaurants and supermarkets were supplied by the agribusiness giants, their food is now coming from where it should have coming from for so long: its own backyard. It’s not a novel concept. When you eat food that comes from the area and season in which it was meant to grow, you get real food. Sometimes the whole local organic food movement seems a little blown out of proportion. What they really should have marketed it to us as was just plain food.

The Difficulty of Finding Paradise: Tiger’s Canyon in the Blue Mountains

I remember when I first fancied myself a “Western writer,” I went mountain bike riding with my laptop and my over-sized headphones, and I went looking for inspiration in the Blue Mountains outside of Walla Walla, Washington, where I was attending college at the time. In the open air, I squatted down in the grass in the attempts of writing something profound and life-changing about nature’s wonders. 

Without having written one sentence, the battery in my computer didn’t last long enough for me to ponder the sunset and the blue of the aptly named mountains to write something that could equal the view. The smell of wild onions seeped onto my hands, which were distracted and led me to dig through the earth rather than tap away on the keys. It’s easy for me now to snicker at my naivety of wanting to be a wilderness purist, a Western conservationist, even with a backpack full of technology, but little did I know that I was fulfilling a life of dreams that have always inspired Westerners, one characterized by this balance between nature and comfort. 

Even now, in my brilliant escapes from the daily drivel of the modern world, my hands get itchy and search for my so-called smart phone or twiddle with my digital camera. As much as I enjoy the sounds of the forest and tend to leave my iPod at home, I do remember a fine moment on a camping trip in college when one of my old roommates handed me his Walkman and I listened to his Beatles’ Abbey Road cassette in its entirety without being able to move, paralyzed by the harmonies of “Here Comes the Sun,” as the golden orb split through the clouds floating over Tiger’s Canyon in the Blue Mountains. My Eden. My paradise, at least for forty-five minutes or so. So, in a way, Western technology can fuse with its wilderness, in order to create an Eden. Indeed, that is part of our way of being. 

Paradise, though, is truly elusive. 

We went back to Tiger’s Canyon, one of my favorite places in the world. It is a tiny, little corner just over the border between Oregon and Washington. After being stuck for so long on the west side of the Cascades—a place that’s like a a Sno Globe, except instead of snow, there’s drizzle—it feels good to get out to where the country opens up. It was the first time in a long while that I could finally relax without worrying too much about projects hanging over my head. We sat on a log, still for the first time in what seemed like years, overlooking a beautiful forest of Ponderosa pines. I could hear a woodpecker off in the distance. A junco was flicking to and forth. And just when I thought I had found paradise, I thought I should take a picture. The flies started buzzing us, picking at our skin. Despite the flies and the distractions of technology, we found a corner in this world that we could call ours. 

Nestled some 30 miles from the town so great they named it twice, Walla Walla, the place of many waters, we meandered up a dirt road with the dogs, a tent, and the kitchen sink packed into Tommy 3 Reds, my trusty little truck that just lives for crawling up these kinds of dirt roads that provide access to our refuges from the ills of the world. The ravens called us higher up the canyon, deeper into the Umatilla Forest. We set up camp at a saddle at about 4800 feet in elevation.

A single engine Piper Cub swung low and waved “hi” to us, a friendly gesture in a place where you’re lucky to see anybody for days.

We watched the sunset drinking a Columbia Valley wine, sitting on the poncho I got with a huge sombrero at a Mexican carnicería when I was a gringo Pancho Villa for Halloween during my last year in college.

Palouse Falls