12JThe Tar HeelThursday, July 13, 1978
Westbound and down. . .
. .continued from page 1
of buffalo, dusty cattle trails where cow
punchers drove their steers to round-up. I
saw the nude beaches of California. I sat
down and had a drink.
Little did I then realize that an innocent
two-week trip to New Mexico and on to
California and covering but 6000 miles
would fatten itself on Texas steaks and
pinto beans until it doubled in length and
girth and would take us to every state
west of the Mississippi, excepting the
small ommissions of North Dakota and
Minnesota.
We prepared carefully for a week, then
threw away half our gear and still had too
much stuff. Under the hatchback of our
brave mule we finally packed absolute
necessities like cowboy hats, a case of
beer in a styrofoam cooler prone to
leakage and mildew a pair of dismal
sleeping bags, and lots of beans.
We were also armed to the teeth with
an original, mailorder vintage .22 pistol of
the variety known to the irreverent as a
"Saturday Night Special."- It was
lightweight and looked real; its one fault
was that you could not hit anything with
it.
Our goal was to see as much as possible
in as little time on the least money, and to
continue so long as we, the West, our
money and our mule held out. My father
agreed to provide the mule, an ill-shod
1976 Capri with a dubious clutch, a tape
deck, a CB radio, and the all important air
conditioning. I agreed, in turn, to provide
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Ranger guide at Mesa Verde
half the money, half the driving, and some
music he could understand.
With tired eyes 1 greeted my first and
to this day, my last Tennessee morning.
Memphis was less impressive in the
daylight than at night. Likewise, the
Mississippi proved to be more impressive
in my expectations than in its actuality.
There was not a single paddle-wheeler to
be seen, though I craned my neck for a
view all the way across the mile-long
bridge.
Eastern Arkansas is poor country.
Shanties line the frontage roads along the
interstate. Surrounded by junked cars and
trash, they attest to the plight of those
that farm the swampy fields that sweep
from horizon to horizon, punctuated by
clusters of trees, and rows of more
shanties.
In the foothills of the Ozarks, near the
town of Coal Hill, we stopped for gas at a
small station that boasted a zoo. The zoo
consisted of a bear and her cub, a baboon
and her infant, the saddest assortment of
peacocks imaginable and the world's
largest collection of goat dung per unit
area of parking lot.
The operator, sitting on a Pepsi crate,
picked a banjo and spit tobacco juice in the
general direction of a coffee can that
masqueraded as a spitoon, while a
younger employee pumped our gas. Both
their situations I found superior to the
bear's, who had no spitoon, and was
forced to spit her tobacco juice on the
ground.
My father was most patient with my
driving and my choices of gas stations and
restaurants. 1 also had the deep sagacity to
respect his. He left the CB to me, as I was
more experienced with the particular
dialect of that medium. Talking to "18
wheelers" and dodging "smokies" gave us
some amusement for a while, but like a
new toy it soon lost its novelty and fell
into disuse somewhere around
Oklahoma.
Many things seem to have fallen into
disuse somewhere around Oklahoma. I
refer specifically to trees and hills. As we
crossed the Arkansas River into
Oklahoma, we made our first
acquaintance with a phenomenon
peculiar to the Great Plains. Known to
cowboys and truckers as "Oklahoma rain"
the dust storm was perhaps the Sooner
state's most distinctive geographical
feature.
From the Ozarks to the Rocky
Mountains, the land sprouted a windmill
or an oil well more often than it nourished
a tree. The land was as interesting as a
psychology class, and true to form, I dozed
off.
When 1 awoke, somewhere east of
Oklahoma City, I noticed a beautiful
blonde woman following us in a spanking
brand new blue Cougar. Dad informed me
that she had been following us for a
hundred or so miles. I asked if he had
spoken to her on the CB, and he said yes,
but every time she said something the
truckers gave her such a hard time that
she had to be quiet or else be embarrassed
off the air.
After negotiating a traffic jam through
Okie City, as it is affectionately known
to Oklahomans Dad picked up the CB
mike and began talking in his own original
style.
"This is the Green Capri to the lady in
the blue Cougar. We are low on petrol and
are going to stop at the next gas station,
over?"
'Ten-four, I'm right with you," came
the reply.
The truckers went wild, and the CB
crackled with things unfit for the printed
page. Ignoring them, we wheeled off at
the next exit, and truly, she did follow us.
We gassed up, and shared with her a six
pack of "Colorado Kool-Aid" known to
the more pretentious as Coors beer.
Her handle was "Tumbleweed," and she
would follow us to Amarillo, Texas, which
was near her hometown of Canadian. We
carried on a lively conversation for the
next 250 miles, including a stop at a very
convenient Texas rest area. We said our
good-byes at when Dad and I peeled off
the interstate to grab an Amarillo steak
and find a place to rest.
Five-and-one-half hours out of
Amarillo we came to Santa Fe. I felt like I
had taken a wrong turn at Tucumcari and
ended up in Mexico.
In Santa Fe the houses were all adobe.
In fact, everything in Santa Fe was adobe;
the gas stations, the hamburger stands,
even the shopping centers and the Ford
showroom were constructed of that
unique material.
The heart of Santa Fe is a large tree
shaded square, the plaza. It is surrounded
on all sides by a square street. The street
has several lanes, and pretends to be a
freeway in the afternoons when it is
choked with tourists, shirtless Mexican
boys on motorcycles, and barrel-chested
Indians with long black hair who have
come to town in their pick-up trucks.
We lost our brakes in Santa Fe, and
found a new master cylinder at the Ford
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dealership for $101.86. I was ready by
then to leave Santa Fe, and depositing Dad
at his school, I headed west. I promised to
come back and get him a week later, after
his school was over.
The first day on my own took me to the
Indian dwellings at Chaco Canyon, New
Mexico. The Anasaii Indians occupied
Chaco Canyon about 1,300 years ago, and
by the year 1,000, they had constructed
the adobe apartments whose ruins I drove
over two hundred miles to see. ,
Those who frequent the Indian ruins in
the "Four Corners" country where the
corners of New Mexico, Utah, Colorado,
and Arizona meet learn quickly of the
Anasaii. Anasaii is Navajo for "the ancient
ones," the mysterious folk who built
apartments out of masonry and wooden
poles, then disappeared, and left them for
the white man to wonder about.
After 39 miles on a dusty, deep-rutted
cattle trail that the state of New Mexico
flatters with the title State Road 57, I
expected to see something spectacular. I
was not disappointed. A ranger informed
me that I was viewing the finest Indian
architecture in the Southwest. He could
have been right. For example, Chaco
Canyon's largest ruin, the Pueblo Bonito,
once housed 1,000 people in 800 rooms,
and stood four to five stories high.
In the center of the Pueblo Bonito was a
large, circular, semisubterranean room
whose purpose no one seemed to know,
but about which everyone speculated.
These rooms, called kivas, are common to
Indian ruins throughout the Southwest.
Some of the more profane tourists
suggested that the Indians built the rooms
solely to confuse future archeaologists.
At Mesa Verde National Park in the
southwest Colorado, I found ruins similar
to those of Chaco Canyon. A narrow road
winds up the face of the Mesa to pueblo
apartments which have nestled on steep
cliffsides for a thousand years. The road
also runs to a motel, a gas station, a
restaurant and a gift shop, all
conveniently located atop the Mesa.
The Mesa Verde apartments have been
abandoned for 600 or 700 years, and I
don't wonder why. All across the
Southwest, the fate of the Anasazi
dominates both tourist literature and
Park Service museums. Disease, drought,
warfare, and just plain strife have been
offered as answers. I think they just killed
themselves off by falling down the cliffs.
After adventures that included a strip
poker game in Canyon de Chelly,
Arizona, a snow storm in Telluride,
Colorado, and playing hide-and-seek with
a Colorado state trooper, I returned to
Santa Fe in time to help Dad celebrate his
graduation.
Heading west and nursing our heads,
we struck out on a route that in three days
would take us to Las Vegas, Nev. by way
of The Petrified Forest, The Painted
Desert, Monument Valley, Sunset Crater
and The Grand Canyon.
We had intended to hike into the bowels
of the Grand Canyon by way of the North
Rim, but several rangers assured us that
the trail was impassable due to rockslides.
We believed them innocents that we
were and abandonded our plans for
overnighting in the Canyon. But out of
curiosity we hiked down the trail anyway.
After walking in a good mile-and-a-half,
and down 2,000 feet, we came to the
seditious rockslide guilty of spoiling our
plans. Strangely enough, on the way
down we met two hikers who had come
up the very same trail, the North Kaibab
Trail through Roaring Springs Canyon,
from the South Rim. As we reached the
slide, our direst suspicions were
confirmed.
Thee had indeed been a slide across the
North Kaibab Trail sometime within the
past few years, but by the number of
footprints, it looked like the Army of
Northern Virginia had managed to hike
its way over the treacherous slope.
Las Vegas is a spectacle of lights by
night. By day it is an ordinary ugly city. At
dusk we topped a ridge several miles from
the city, and beheld it like a neon star in
the dark firmament of the surrounding
desert. For $100 we saw the scantily-clad,
Folies Bergere at the Tropicana Hotel, ate
two meals, stayed in a motel, cautiously
played the slots slot machines to the
uninitiated and filled the car up with
gasoline.
Across the Mojave Desert from Las
Vegas lies California. I expected first to
cross a wasteland of shifting sands
littered with .the bones of the
unfortunate, then to climb a jagged
mountain to gaze upon a land of milk,
honey and Gallo wine.
We passed our first night in California
by the shores of the Pacific Ocean Morro
Bay.
The Pacific Coast Highway hugged the
rugged coastline of the Big Sur country
from Morro Bay to Monterey. The coastal
mountains marched straight into the
ocean all along the route. The road
twisted and wound to climb 300 feet
above the waves that wash the
mountains' sheer, western flanks. The
view was magnificent, and the traffic
heavy.
San Francisco was not another dirty
city. Row upon row, neat pastel-colored
townhouses lined the rolling streets.
Golden Gate Park was a green oasis in the
heart of the city. Like nearby Haight
Street, it was infamous as a haven for
pan-handlers, the bravest of whom
constantly plead with you for spare
change. But if the unwary tourist
relinquished a quarter, he was suddenly
beset by a snivelling, wretched-smelling
mass of humanity, all of whom demand
and obviously need their rightful
quarter.
At 4:45 we felt the afternoon rush hour
coming on, and hurried out of the city on
the forward edge of a rushing, honking,
automotive tidal wave.
We crossed the Sacramento Valley,
which looks strangely like a piece of
Oklahoma imported to separate
California's two major mountain ranges.
On the back of our faithful mule, we
climbed the western slopes of the Sierra
Nevada to Lake Tahoe. Mark Twain
described the lake as "a noble sheet of blue
water lifted 6,300 feet above the level of
the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow
clad mountain peaks that towered aloft
full 3,000 feet higher still!"
That was a hundred years ago, and his
description still remained, accurate for
half the lake. Nevada owned the other
half and has turned it into a Las Vegas.
Gleaming chrome-clad hotels rivaled the
splendor of the mountains, and the traffic
was atrocious.
photography
by Allen Jernigan
About 20 miles from Lake Tahoe was
Virginia City, once the queen of Nevada's
mining camps, home of the fabulously
rich Comstock Mine. Nowadays she is less
of a queen, and more of hustler, enriching
herself from the yearly haul of 500,000
tourists. Virginia City indeed housed
many wonderful attractions. We saw the
very desk at which Mark Twain wrote
copy for Virginia City's own Territorial
Enterprise. In fact, we saw his copy desk
twice, and in two different museums.
We drove late into the night, our
headlights dancing off the trunks of trees,
or else spilling futilely into the dark void
of the night sky. Our tired mule groaned
up one hairpin turn after another, until
reaching the mountaintop, where, she
zoomed with squealing tires down the
other side. This went on for an eternity,
and then another. Bright-eyed deer stood
frozen beside the road, all waiting, it
seemed, for the most incovenient
momemt to spring intoourpath and cause
all concerned much discomfort. I
convinced myself that we were traveling
hopelessly in circles, for though darkness
obscured the scenery, I began to recognize
the same deer.
I found sleep impossible, as I
continuously rolled from one side of the
car to the other as we negotiated from
turn to sharper turn at warp speeds. Long
after midnight had come, gone and been
forgotten, we found a Park Service
campground, located between a stream
and the highway.
Every few minutes, a fully-laden
logging truck crawled up the mountain,
its engine moaning, "I think I can, I think I
can." Shortly thereafter, another truck
flew down the mountain, its engine
screaming, "I knew I could; I knew I
could." I believed at the time that a cruel
antagonist had paid the same truck driver
to run up and down that mountain all
night long. The stream proved a haven for
hoards of mosquitos, who invaded the
mouths of our sleeping bag and cruelly
explored our bodies.
By the next day I felt so ragged and
abused that I committed an unpardonable
sin. Up to this time we had engaged in
solemn philosophical debates, lively
political discussions, family gossiping and
the good-natured telling of lies. But
showing a lack of subtlety brought on by
utter exhaustion, I began to complain
about my father's driving.
The gauntlet was thrown, for he could
now comment on my driving, which is
grossly inferior to his, except when he has
consumed, a pint of Chivas Regal and
refi'fes to drive.
In such a state of affairs we reached
Redwoods National Park. As I belittled his
choice of redwood trees to visit he politely
informed me that if I wanted to keep on
being such a horse's rear, I could damn
well ride in the trunk. I should never have
been so unwise to remind him that
hatchback cars don't have trunks.
We drove under a drizzling grey sky
without speaking until we reached the
Lady Bird Johnson Grove. Those trees
loomed aloft nearly 300 feet, and many
were upwards of more than 2,000 years
old. Shafts of sunlight pierced the
shrouding mist and streamed to the floor
of this cathedral of forests. We strolled
spell-bound through aisles of the pink
blossoms of the rosebay rhododendron,
chest-high ferns, and the massive trunks
of trees shaggy heads were hidden in
clouds.
When we left an hour or two later, we
were once again on the best of terms,
though we had not forgotten what we're
fighting about.
Our farthest point from home was on
the Olympic penninsula in the utter
northwest of Washington. The peninsula
is fraught with fanatic clam-diggers,
lunatic logging truck drivers and silent
Indians. The clam-diggers and the Indians
seemed friendly enough, if one is wary
and stays out of their way. The loggers
were another matter, for they felt the
highway to be their personal property.
The Hoh River valley in the Olympic
National Park receives upwards of 150
inches of annual rainfall. The unique
forest in that valley was appropriately
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Snow in the Grand Tetons
called the Hoh River Rain Forest. It was a
magnificently dismal place; it was dark,
silent and amazingly lush. Vegetation was
everywhere, and so dense that wind
cannot penetrate to the interior of the
forest. Hanging plants called epiphytes
grew down from the trees to meet the
growth climbing upward from the thick
vegetable cushion that carpeted the forest
floor. If someone told you the air was
green there, do not doubt him too much.
The next two days and 700 miles to
Glacier National Park were marked by
snow and a speeding ticket.
The Glacier National Park sits astride
The Tar HeelThursday, July 13, 197813
the U.S. -Canadian border, and is best
known for its unspoiled scenery and
varied wildlife. I remember it best for its
inhospitable weather, and for its grizzly
bears, who proved even less
accommodating.
Unscheduled in the ways of bears and
the fine points of the northern Montana
climate, we were not a little surprised to
find both so unsociable.
When it did not rain, it snowed, and
when it did neither, it did both. Yet the
weather was infinitely preferable to the
company of the bear.
We came upon the bear most
unexpectedly. He was large enough to eat
our poor mule for breakfast and have
room left for Dad and me. He was the
color of cured tobacco and had terrible
breath.
Dad spied him as we turned a corner in
the road. It was shortly after sunrise, and
the fellow was feasting by the roadside on
some sort of victim, possibly a very
discolored ranger, though more likely
some unfortunate species of plant.
We pulled up next to him to take his
picture. Even as I snapped the shutter, the
bear lunged at the car, and we beat a hasty
retreat. We tried again moments later,
with as much success.
We departed northern Montana for
northwestern Wyoming and the
Yellowstone country, where we spent our
second straight night in the snow. In the
morning we viewed the Grand Tetons,
who were indeed grand as their name
implies. Their peaks clad in eternal snow,
and their heads wreathed in clouds, they
looked like a group of white-haired men
gathered for a morning smoke.
Due north of the jagged Tetons lies
tourist-infested Yellowstone National
Park. We spent more time there staring at
the tail ends of recreational vehicles than
we did viewing the scenery. And if a
publicity-seeking animal happened to step
within sight of the highway, banish any
foolish notion of further travel until
everyone has brought his Instamatic to
bear.
We ran out of gas in Yellowstone, due
mainly to slow traffic and poor planning.
Friendly people stopped and aided us;
even the insane who blocked the road to
feed the bears were friendly. But if you
visit Yellowstone between May and
September, bring your patience and a
cooler full of brew.
From Yellowstone to Raleigh, our
journey, took three days. Our last tourist
stops were the Custer Battlefield and the
South Dakota Badlands. We took our time
to Kansas City, then it was Katie-bar-the-door,
for we struck out eastwards at what
the truckers call a "rapid rate of hurry." 22
hours out of Kansas City we saw a
Carolina sunrise for the first time in 23
days.
1 -A
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Chaco Canyon's Pueblo Bonito