IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Apparently there is only one possible photo you can take at Ruby Falls at Chattanooga, Tennessee. This is it. You will notice that it was taken in 2003 and that it doesn’t bear my name. But it’s the exact same photo I took at Ruby Falls, except mine had a couple of water spray dots on the lens.

When we started on the trip we’d no plans of going to Ruby Falls, but when we hit Chattanooga it suddenly seemed the thing to do. Well, driving up the mountain seemed first the thing to do, which was cool (comparatively) and piney. Roll down the windows and breathe in deep. Ah it suddenly felt like a vacation and when we saw the sign for Ruby Falls we dutifully followed. We weren’t fully committed to the notion of spelunking as we were waved by a friendly man into a parking lot that was two-third’s empty. But he was friendly and friendliness can convince of a number of things when you’re giddy with two weeks of travel time ahead of you, and his broad circular waving motion I knew was branding us with dedication when we accepted direction and pulled into the lot.

Still, there was the question of time. It was Thursday afternoon and by Friday evening we had to be in Hiawatha, Kansas.

I entered the large stone wannabe-castle building that serves as a gateway to Ruby Falls, went to the desk, asked the price, gulped and got over it, found the tour lasted an hour and a half and though we needed to make it to St. Louis that night I said “OK.” Shortly, we were among a group of people softly exchanging whatevers in accents more southern than to what I’m accustomed and were on a glass elevator whisking us 260 feet deep into the earth.

Which is when I forgot about how H.o.p. had been saying for a year he wanted to visit a cave, forgot how this was going to be a great educational opportunity for H.o.p., realized that with last years kitchen science experiments I’d cut cave up in my mind to be a matter of calcium formations, stalagmites and stalactites, and remembered Marvel Caverns.

The last time I was in a cave was at Marvel Caverns in Silver Dollar City. That was over twenty years ago. I’d previously visited Marvel Caverns when I was ten years of age, and I realized as an adult that caves are a good bit more friendly when you’re child-sized. I hadn’t thought about this and the mild claustrophobia I’d experienced at Marvel Caverns in my twenties. For some reason I had this idea of Ruby Falls being a peculiar place to which you were introduced through a little wooden fairy door in the side of a mountain, the Falls poured in through a hole at the top and you’d politely stand in that hollowed out cone of a mountain and smile upon the falls and then out you’d go. I realize this sounds damn simple-minded of me, but that, in truth, is the half-baked image that three decades worth of tin roofs yelling “See Ruby Falls” had conjured in my brain. Somewhere along the way, over the years, I’d seen pics of plaster elves and colored lights. “Cave” had ceased to mean cave and become “assorted rocks with garden gnomes” and Ruby Falls a waist-level water spigot dribbling rainbow-dyed H2O. A restaurant fountain.

I watched the rock whizzing by through the wall of that elevator with its glass door. At the bottom, the doors opened and I stepped into the bowels of Overlook Mountain, a small carved out holding area for tourists with dollars for underworlds. The ceiling was low. The sky was far away. Would I make its acquaintance again? I used to have terrifying nightmares about being in an earthquake in an underground parking deck, running to try to escape, being felled by concrete, then coming to and and lying and listening to the moans of the dying in the hot, dusty dark as I waited for my lungs to waste the last few breaths of precious air pocket oxygen allotted me. I would say I don’t like parking decks because of those dreams but I can remember being a young child and staring at above ground parking deck rails and wondering if I’d have time to reach the rail in event of an earthquake. I stay away from parking decks as best I can. For a number of years I wouldn’t go near one.

And here I was in a cave. And there was no reassuring daylight within sprinting distance.

“Educational opportunity for H.o.p.,” I reminded myself and plastered a smile on my face because I didn’t want him to sense my fear and adopt my own phobia as his own. Thousands of people have gone through this cave, I reminded myself. I reminded myself how much I’d paid to put myself in this position and tried to reassure myself that those dollars were a safety net of regular safety inspections.

Our guide began her tour drill. She had the deepest Southern accent I’ve ever heard and had phenomenal broadcasting ability, and I determinedly focused on this in the hope of it distracting somewhat, while I kept smiling at H.o.p. and occasionally enthused, “We’re in a cave, wow! You’ve always wanted to go in a cave. Isn’t this great?!” I considered that the tour guide had been doing this perhaps for years and she was still alive. I reasoned she wouldn’t be down here if she thought she’d die any moment, and my brain of course countered that she just might considering years of a dismal job market and what kind of job opportunities were available in Chattanooga anyway.

Educational opportunities for a seven-year-old prove to be a great incentive. Also, once we were out of the holding room and in the cavern proper, natural rock formations surrounding, I felt less like I was somewhere I shouldn’t be, felt less a forced intrusion upon nature against which she was fighting, and my fears pretty much dissipated. Again, wondering over the tour guide’s twang helped.

As we began our walk, the tour guide inconspicuously, as if on the sly, bent and picked up a couple of round pebbles from the cave’s floor. I wondered where they came from, why she was picking them up, and instead of worrying about the ceiling falling in I thought about how often she makes the mile trek, how familiar the formations must be to her so that even a couple of stray pebbles would be quickly eyed.

The tour guide led us into what’s called the Map Room. As an adolescent I would have slouched to the rear of any group, but as an adult I tend to be front and center, though I’m a shy sort. Go figure. “Hey, I’m here! I’m involved!” So front and center is where we ended up and because of that positioning we were directly behind the guide through most of the tour.

In the Map Room we were treated to a short film on the cave and its history, for the duration of which our tour guide disappeared somewhere, elsewhere. Which made me feel as though a trusted, new friend had led me by the hand into a bad game of double dare and then split. Being an adult, I tried not to take the abandonment personally.

I noticed a blond woman with a couple young girls, perhaps about 8 and 10 years of age, who I assumed to be her daughters. I took note of the girls because neither one of them ever smiled. They watched the tour guide, expressionless, looking through her. Animated, she several times sought to engage them in an unobtrusive manner, but they didn’t respond.

We were warned of narrow spaces and to watch our heads but no avenues were as narrow as the one at Marvel Cave which had led me to promise myself I’d never enter another cave.

H.o.p. had on his new purple and black banded, felt “wizard” hat. He likes playful hats. He wanted to know where the bats were. I asked him if he remembered the names of the formations that rose from the floor and those that descended from the ceiling. He told me and I realized I didn’t remember which were attached to the floor or ceiling, stalactites or stalagmites, so I couldn’t say, “Hey, you’re right”, but the tour guide had good ears and called out that H.o.p. was correct I pointed out where years of visitors rubbing their hands along the rock had polished sections of it.

The tour was brisk, no dallying, one had to hustle to keep up, no time to loiter for pictures. Human nature’s predilection to look for resemblances, for patterns taken to entertaining extremes, illuminated signs identified formations with absurd names as if the formations themselves wouldn’t be enough to validate the money tourists spent, green cash needing the tale of, “The rocks looked just like bacon”. At every turn we were encouraged to use our imagination and see this and that novel apparition.

But no Madonnas dripping tears.

The most prominent stalagmite caused me to think of the caves of Elephanta, the temple of Shiva and its monolithic Linga. I wondered if beyond the carving, prehistory, was the stalagmite as inspiration.

Seems that mentioning earthquakes is a must on cavern tours. When I was ten years old, at Marvel Cave they had given how many million years it had been since an earthquake struck the area. Our Ruby Falls tour guide said we were in one of the safest places possible, that if there was an earthquake one would never know it, that deep in the earth. That she had been in another cavern the previous weekend and there had been thirteen tremors while she was down in it and they had no idea until surfacing. She said we were safe there from tornadoes, from flood, from hurricanes…

“Don’t bring up hurricanes!” called a man from the rear, half-laughing.

The tour guide was personable and by the time we reached where the Ruby Falls could be not only heard roaring in the dark, but the spray of it felt, I would have trusted her to perform as a doula at H.o.p.’s birth.

Show time! The lights went on. Music played, symphonic, dramatic. Ruby Falls. If you’re the least bit unguarded you’re going to gasp and give a cry. Now I know what Ruby Falls looks like, it’s no longer a potential. But when I saw it I realized I’d had no conception at all, and the waterfall was stunning. Really, it was beautiful. Advertising is so full of false promises and no pay off that I emotionally expected no Ruby Falls at all, a flim-flam puddle, and it was going to be all right with me, as I was there because of the tin roofs and had wanted H.o.p. to see some stalagtites and stalactites, had wanted H.o.p. to see a cave because he’d been talking about it for a year.

Ruby Falls was spectacular.

We walked around the back of it. Were given time to take photos.

H.o.p. liked the music as much as the Falls. His was the choreographed experience. The one for the tourists. Tonight when I brought up a picture of the Falls he came over and said, “Ruby Falls! Can I hear the music too? Where’s the music?”

The walk back was anticlimactic. The cave was no longer the featured entertainer. Instead a man had taken that position, the one who had remarked on the mention of the hurricane. Whereas he’d been to the rear before, now he was in front. He insinuated several times, loudly, he might be an evacuee from New Orleans. Then said he was. Said he didn’t like buses and he’d had to ride a bus all the way to Houston. He seemed to be with a woman who made no remark on any of this. Though they appeared intimate, she was apparently not from New Orleans, and seemed to distance herself when he remarked on the hurricane, making no comment on what he was saying, not even a, “That’s terrible.” She made no comment except for when he took out a cigarette and made as if he was going to light it and asked her if she wanted one, then she excused herself, saying something about not everyone liking smoke, and he said he would do what he wanted to do. He said he figured the hurricane had made him impatient. He was loud, brash, jocular, increasingly aggressive. I wondered how the tour guide was going to handle the situation if he lit up as smoking is forbidden in the cavern. He was looking for an incident. He put the cigarette in his mouth. The tour guide kept smiling and said nothing. The man decided against lighting up.

He had already taken out a cigarette before the other and slipping it above his ear he had dropped it, glanced back but then decided to leave it on the cavern floor, seeming to not want to give up his position at the lead of the group, or not wanting anyone to notice he’d dropped it. Then he’d taken out a second.

No one asked the man any questions. Neither did the tour guide though he kept demanding her attention.

Or at least I didn’t hear anyone converse with the man on it.

The man’s harping on how he didn’t like buses and had to ride one to Houston, that bit of information was about as specific as he became and it just seemed peculiar that his complaint would be about having to tolerate a bus ride. You listen to what someone says, you hear it, but it doesn’t connect.

The tour guide gave H.o.p. a pebble, called it a cave seed, and said it was for good luck. I realized it was one of the pebbles she’d picked up off the cavern floor at the beginning of the tour.

Outside, the man went on a little more about being an evacuee, nothing specific, just as he’d been inspecific in the cave. He sat and lit his cigarette. There was no beer but my mind’s eye was persistent in seeing a beer can on the table he had sat at and in my mind that nonexistent beer can belonged to him, he had left it at the table before going on the tour, and it was waiting there for him to pick up and continue drinking. Yet there was no beer, it was something which wasn’t that my mind said was there and which I had to tell my mind was not. I thought of asking him what part of New Orleans he was from, then decided against it. The mother of the blond girls, the ones I’d wondered about as their expressions were so dulled, unresponsive, stood by for a moment staring at him and then said to him she was from New Orleans, that they’d evacuated before the hurricane. The man looked out at the scenery, smoking, and didn’t reply much, mumbled something. But that explained the expressions on the girls. Why they had persisted in being so disconnected. Of course. Shell shock. And the woman seemed a bit as well. I don’t know how long she stood gazing at the man, it could have been a few seconds, but it felt longer. I wondered if I should and then went ahead and mentioned to the woman how my husband had relatives in Washington Parish. The woman said they had evacuated to Washington Parish initially. I was still wondering about the man, who was now silent, and couldn’t think of much to say to the woman except to tell her our relations ended up faring all right and wishing her well, which I found embarrassing. I couldn’t tell by the man’s actions if he was a survivor or not, something didn’t seem right, but I thought that not seeming right could be part of post traumatic stress syndrome.

The woman and I said good-bye. She left with her girls. H.o.p. ran up to play on the children’s playground. The man smoked and stared out over the scenic view Lookout Mountain offered of Chattanooga. When I finished watching H.o.p. play he had gone.

So, we were tourists and perfectly ready to be flim-flammed. We were begging to be flim-flammed. But at least do it with a smile.

200 million year old Lookout Mountain, where once was sea and is now limestone, had been rewarding. I figured a jaunt to the center of the earth and a few million years worth of calcite formations was a good week’s worth of education for a seven-year-old and anything afterwards was cake. For H.o.p. Ruby Falls’ gift shop, which sold goods that could be purchased at any tourist attraction in America, was almost as interesting as the Falls but we managed to escape with a couple magnets and unspectacular post cards, not too hard hit, then booked it for St. Louis via Nashville (sorry no time for the fake Parthenon) and Kentucky and the smelly southern tip of Illinois which stunk just as bad as it did when we traveled through several years ago. For nostalgia’s sake, on the other side of St. Louis, in Wentzville (who can resist staying in Wentzville, almost as good as a Gonesville) we located the motel we stayed in on our way back from South Dakota four years ago (not a vacation) where we’d had corn dogs served from the motel’s office after driving nonstop from Rosebud. We drove in late and saw a bunch of East Indian men standing around. Yep, same proprietors. Good. There are a few things in life which don’t change in the space of a walk to block’s end. The motel is nothing fancy but it’s cheap, like most motels we’ve ever stayed in, and has the additional benefit of being clean. We didn’t eat corn dogs this time around as we weren’t starving and still moderately lucid.

If ever you’re making a marathon drive , and you’re starved, the holy grail is finding corn dogs served from the motel office that you take to your room, pop in the microwave, heat and devour. Especially if you haven’t had a corn dog since you were a child. We purchased and consumed frozen corn dogs for a year afterwards because H.o.p. had decided they were wonderful.

The second day, from Saint Louis to Hiawatha, Kansas, was dedicated to driving as we wanted to be in by early evening. But I also wanted to take a bit of time for H.o.p. to see something fun along the way and when I saw a sign for Weston’s Red Barn Farm in Kansas it gave an appearance of promise. “How about seeing a farm?” I asked H.o.p.

The sign said barn. The sign said farm.

I still remember the train trip to Chicago, when I was about three years of age, to see my mother’s parents. I was certain there was a red barn in the immediate future. The picture books all said grandparents lived on farms with red barns. I pressed my curious nose against glass and watched miles and miles of passing countryside, eager for the red barn that would say we were there, which I was certain would be the first and only red barn we saw. I must have made my expectations known as I recollect at one point a white barn being pointed out to me. But the picture books were all red barns and so a white barn was a distant, disdained, hoax of a cousin. A barn wasn’t a barn unless it was red. A farm wasn’t a farm without a red barn. Grandparents weren’t real grandparents unless they lived on a farm with a red barn.

My grandparents didn’t live on a farm. The point of rehearsing Old McDonald began to be lost on me. And I’ve wondered about this over the years, the efforts of children’s picture books and American educational institutions selling the story of their agrarian grandparents, no tales of grandparents as industrial workers in cotton mills, machine shops, mining coal. Grandad was never a white-collared banker or banker’s secretary and grandmom was always in the country baking country kitchen pies. There were no American serfs. All of us, every single one, were land-owning toilers of the soil and all the non land-owning farmhands were single young men who were good as family. The Cold War bomb shelter and generations of bottled water and canned goods blended neatly in with the tornado root cellar stocked with grandma’s canned green beans. If they could, so could you, and emerge, like Noah, righteously self-reliant and confirmed in the faith that every man was an island.

We drove off the interstate and through the little town of Weston, Kansas. If there were signs that it was a historic riverport community, we missed those. We didn’t know that “Kansas City’s only Alpine ski area” was but five miles north. A ski area in Kansas? As Kansas and Alpine don’t exactly make a natural pairing, can you possibly ski there all year long?

We did understand Weston is trying to make itself a tourist area. Or is a tourist area. There was a sign for a music festival that weekend and it looked like a nice one.

We followed occasional signs to Weston’s Red Barn Farm.

The signs said barn. The signs said farm. I envisioned a red barn with maybe some goats, some chickens and a couple of cows. Principally, I envisioned a red barn. Hay. Stalls. Musty mildewy odors mingling with scent of cow and horse offal. The sign said barn, said farm, and I would have been happy with a big red old barn and a happy Guernsey ready to be milked. There is such a farm here in Georgia where you can go and see cows milked and chase chickens. We haven’t been to it yet. Now’s the season.

H.o.p.’s a city boy. There are few things more educational for an urban child who (despite frequent zoo trips) thinks of cockroaches as wild life than a barn with chickens. Right?

Sue me for a lack of imagination. But the only other signs of entertainment had been way off our track and museums dedicated to Jesse James.

I wanted to see eggs.

The proprietors could be dressed in J. Crew for all I cared, but some butter churning would be delightful. And maybe even a horse shoe on vulcan’s anvil. Still, it doesn’t take much to please me and I would have been happy with a “Howdy, stranger, welcome to our tourist trap!” and an invitation to pat a horse’s neck.

There were a lot of pumpkins outside the red barn of Weston’s Red Barn Farm which was rural and accompanied by a tidy white house.

Photo of the buildings out back of the Red Barn which is a big red gift shop.

Weston’s Red Barn Farm was a gift store in a barn. There were no good old farm time smells. There were a few farmy animals for marginal show. Left to our own devices, I pulled out the camera and zeroed in on the coop down the hill that had chickens and crowing roosters. I enticed H.o.p. over with promises of those roosters crowing, which they did. A little girl wanted to follow but was called back by a woman who didn’t say hi or bye, I couldn’t tell if she was part of the scenery or another traveler, but at first thought she must be another traveler as she had no use for us, didn’t have a friendly hand extended to accept cash for whatever Red Farm Barn had to offer. She turned out to be part and parcel of the farm which means she was aware we were not. Like that wasn’t obvious.

H.o.p. was skeptical. There were insects. Flies. Lots of hoppy grasshoppers that weren’t accompanied by Pinocchio and didn’t thrill him. “Bugs!” There was no one to tell us about the roosters but there were several that looked like the roosters the woman in the apartment above keeps in back and I believe they’re Rhode Island Reds but could be wrong. The guests were on their own and there were no signs beckoning perusal of the domesticated stock. Weston’s Red Barn Farm wasn’t in the business of entertaining, at least not that day, though I’d have happily forked over dollars for a tour.

There was an old Clydesdale horse in a narrow outside pen.

There was a deceptively passive donkey and a sign that warned that the donkey would bite.

There were two indifferent cows.

There were a few turkeys to rouse thoughts of Thanksgiving and remind that Swanson doesn’t materialize food out of thin air, for if ever there was an animal raised for no other purpose but slaughter it’s the turkey. Chickens lay eggs, cows eat grass, pigs spin webs and talk to dogs, but domestic turkeys have no talent other than food and no one to save their thin gobbler necks.

There was also a walk through a grassy area beyond the small pasture. It was a short walk. The green hills in the distance were lovely. I took the short walk on my own as H.o.p. wanted nothing yet to do with grasshoppers, though by the time the Encampment was over he was used to them.

It turns out there is a web page for Red Barn Farm, which did indeed used to be a farm, was purchased in 1989, refurbished and turned tourist, and it says there is a 40 acre prairie grass maze in which to get lost while learning about native vegetation. I may have walked a 1/2 mile at most down the path before it circled back round to return me to Red Barn Farms Red Barn.

The Red Barn Farm web page says it’s a toss up whether kids or adults have more fun there, away from the jangled nerves of modern life, learning about horses, cows, chickens, pigs, sheep and goats, corn, milo, soybeans, hay. Children can even pluck apples off dwarf apple trees.

The pigs, sheep and goats, corn, milo, soybeans and hay weren’t on exhibit that day. No one was available to instruct us on anything. They seemed put out we had bothered to make an appearance. I find another page on Weston Red Farm Barn that says it costs $3 to just be there I guess, but no one asked us for money. I find Weston’s Red Farm Barn website that says 75 minute school tours are available, Monday through Friday, during the fall and your child gets to walk the pumpkin patch, gets his or her very own pumpkin, walks the orchard, plucks 5 apples, and receives a coloring book. And in the Fall there are Family Festival weekends. Obviously, we were there on the wrong day to see Weston Red Farm Barn, but as an urban yokel from Atlanta, attracted by a big sign on the interstate (which would seem to suggest you come and visit), I wouldn’t have minded someone saying, “Hey, you’ve come the wrong day of the week, even though we’re open.” Even better would have been a xeroxed sheet with a bit of history and a take-your-own-tour map of what was available for viewing. Hand over money, get sheets, read and walk.

I returned to the Red Barn where, though stamped with the Weston Red Farm Barn name, they sold jams and jellies that could be found in Maine or Oklahoma or a few miles out of Atlanta for that matter. I opted to pretend innocence. I felt we should pay for the privilege of smelling the grass and looking at the chickens and we placed on the counter overpriced jams and jellies for relatives. The woman, who had resisted taking a friendly interest in us, did ask where we were from and we told her and she said she’d been to Atlanta. She asked where we were going and I said the Ioway Fall Encampment and she looked back at me blankly then said she’d never heard of it which I didn’t think at the time as being odd but now do as the Weston Red Barn Farm website gives a bit of history on the Ioway, Otoe and Missouria Nations having once occupied the area and that it had been purchased from the Sac and Fox and Ioway and Osage as part of the Platte Purchase in 1837 and the Ioway and Sac and Fox moved onto reservations. She was the kind of not friendly where I thought of saying never mind the jams and jellies, the special soap that said it would repell insects naturally (and I hoped it would at the encampment but knew it wouldn’t). She was the kind of not friendly where I thought of saying never mind and leaving but decided to instead keep smiling my ain’t-life-grand-I’m-a-tourist-and-I’ll-be-damned-if-I’m-not-going-to-have-a-good-time tourist smile. I ignored the dishes and pottery and miniature fake rusted not-really-wind-vanes that could be purchased through a thousand gift catalogues and websites, remembered my grandmother dragging me through hundreds of small antique shops in Kansas and Missouri when I was visiting as a child and wondered why they didn’t take advantage of that crowd instead of relying solely on gifty goods. Had there been some antiques I might have picked up a ruby red glass something, and purchased it thinking of my grandmother.

There were apples at the counter. I remembered the best apples I’ve ever had in my life, that were purchased from a roadside stand in Arkansas, and I don’t know what they were and though I knew these weren’t they as these were smooth round red apples rather than sandpapery brown, red and gray, I said I wanted two. She said no they only came by the bucket. I said we were traveling and they’d go to waste. I could have set out the rest at the Fall Encampment for whoever wanted to eat them but it didn’t occur to me at the moment, all I knew is I wanted a couple apples to cut into with my pocket knife that afternoon and nibble juiciness. After a moment’s thought, she pulled out a half bucket and said well how about a half bucket. I wondered why she’d said they only came by the bucket. I said no thanks, though I really wanted an apple and wondered briefly if I was being obstinant and thought again about how she’d said they only came by the bucket and decided no, not when half-buckets were sitting behind the counter. When we were back in the car, before I could say maybe I was being obstinant, my husband remarked on how they would have been friendlier if they’d not spoken to us at all.

I left thinking that I should have dropped being the receptive tourist and played tourist bitch. But when our one stop for the day, before Hiawatha, was Weston Red Barn Farm, I didn’t feel like submitting to disappointment. So I brushed its dandruff off my shoulders and off we went to first St. Joseph, where we should have instead visited Roubidoux Row, then Hiawatha.

Ms. Red Barn Farm may have simply been having a bad day that unfortunately coincided with the afternoon we heeded the Red Barn Farm sign’s call, hundreds of miles from home, and went in search of an inferred farmy education. Not having access to the internet and information on Weston’s Red Barn Farm, and offered no information on it while I was there, I left Weston’s Red Barn Farm thinking, “I have a blog. I can tell the world that Ruby Falls was great. I can also tell the world that Weston’s Red Farm Barn is an unfriendly crock.” Now I read about it and think they probably have nice organized farm tours for Kansas City kids, as promised on the website, and I feel torn at putting down a few bad words. Besides which, the experience at Red Barn Farm was so far behind by the time we reached Arizona that we forgot to bring out the jams and jellies as gifts.

I ask H.o.p. tonight what he remembers about the Weston Red Barn Farm and he says it was great and that he liked the roosters and the chickens.

Hell, go see the beautiful pumpkins at Weston Red Barn Farm. They were big and orange and pretty. They had some nice shaped gourds that I considered purchasing as I make gourd rattles for fun and big gourd bowls but left behind as they weren’t dried and I have no where to dry them and I was worried about not having the room to carry them. And if no one else is around you can wander an isolated half mile or so up the path behind Red Barn Farm, through hoppy singy grasshoppers, through prairie grass that isn’t real original reserve prairie, which my grandparents used to own and once ripped up is done and gone forever, not to be reconstituted. It’s real quiet there. And at a certain point in the path you can see a glimpse of unimpeded view of glacier-scraped hills rolling distant.

(Lots of pics in this post, below the fold.)

From St. Louis, we drove to the Ioway Fall Encampment at White Cloud, Kansas on Friday evening. We would have gotten in a little earlier than we did but we stopped at a Wal-Mart (yes, a Wal-Mart) along the way as it occurred to me a big straw hat would be a good thing to have that weekend. The Wal-Mart we stopped at was in St. Joseph and I confused two clerks in the men’s department no end when I asked if they had men’s straw hats. They found it difficult to parse, apparently, a woman in the men’s department looking for a straw hat and looked at each other, looked at me, looked at each other, had to ask me twice what I was looking for and then asked several times whether I wanted the men’s or women’s department. And all this for me only to be finally told that there were no straw hats. Which I found hard to imagine. That there were no men’s straw hats at a Kansas Wal-Mart. But it was true. So we then looked for a small soft cooler to store drinks in for the encampment as it was supposed to be roasting hot that weekend. The people in the sports department had quicker wits and feet, and even sought out another person who might be able to answer my question, who also could walk and talk at the same time and located the cooler. My husband, meanwhile, stood looking at folding, portable chairs. We’ve been to several Intertribal powwows over the years and lots of people use them rather than sitting on bleachers or the grass. I don’t mind sitting on bleachers or the grass. We didn’t know if there would be bleachers and my husband really really wanted to get a couple of chairs as he doesn’t care for sitting on the grass. I talked him out of it as I didn’t see how we’d have enough room to carry them in the trunk.

We didn’t camp out at the encampment. Though we have a tent and sleeping bags, there wasn’t going to be room for porting them in the small car we’d rented, conserving fuel rather than using our big old musician’s van which wouldn’t have made it out there anyway.

We’d made reservations at the Hiawatha Inn in Hiawatha. We unpacked and asked for directions to the encampment. They weren’t able to tell us where it was but were able to give us directions to the Ioway Reserve, which wass approached by picturesque back roads still lined with green. As it turned dusk, I spied a small sign that read “Powwow” with an arrow pointing that-a-way.

I asked around at the encampment, looking for one of the people I was supposed to meet. I was located and directed to him when he arrived.

Did we want to eat? We were taken to the small building where there was still a huge pot of chili and hot dogs. And hot coffee. In the dark, we ate at a covered picnic table, talking. Mainly, I listened. The food was wonderful. I’d decided to not pack a jacket as the temps were supposed to be hot, but as we talked those temps dropped, and dropped some more. It was cold. People put on jackets. I was offered a jacket but I really felt like I didn’t need one, and then when I realized I really did need one I just wrapped myself in a blanket for sitting on that we were carrying.

Things broke up and we returned to the motel. In the morning I hooked up at the Hiawatha dining room another person I was supposed to meet and then went out to the Encampment.

I’m not an Ioway Nation member. I am descended from Ioway.

Above is my great-great grandad G. W. Jr., whose mother was Ioway, and his wife, Belle. When George’s mother died, his sister Addie was boarded out to a white family because, she said, her father wanted her to grow up knowing white ways. What I know about the family is from Addie, who lived into the 1950s, and Addie said their childhood was lived among the Indians, with no fixed household, and that her mother died when they were going down to Oklahoma Indian Territory. She married into the family into which she was boarded, which constructed houses for Indians, a number of which married Osage, as did descendants of Addie, and they lived in Pawhuska. She said her husband didn’t permit her to practice Indian ways and by the 1920 census she gives herself as widowed but her husband was actually alive and they were living apart. G.W. and Belle lived in Chautauqua County, Kansas, on the border of the Osage Reserve, after first being around the Ponca City area. G.W. and Addie were close all their lives. They had siblings, several of whom disappeared, I’ve no knowledge of them and if they died young or went to live with others. Another sibling died at the time their mother died, and another moved to Illinois and married a German then went to California.

Above is my great-grandad and his wife. She was a Crockett who was supposedly part Cherokee. I’ve not found any linkage yet. They lived in Chautauqua County, Kansas.

The lineup above is my dad’s brother, G.W. Jr. (now quite old), an unknown man, my father (the boy in the middle), my great-grandfather’s second wife, my great grandfather, my grandfather and my grandmother, all on my dad’s side. The picture would have been taken in Chautauqua County or Ponca City. My dad’s family, at the time, was living in Ponca City.

Like I said, I’m not an Ioway tribal member but I am descended Ioway, and since it’s several generations removed its importance to me may be wondered at, why. Perhaps one reason is that up until 1920, members of family were always living a household or two away from Ioway or other Ioway-related families. I figure the families were close to have always located near other that way from Iowa down into Ponca City, Oklahoma, and Chautauqua County, Kansas. I figure some things filter down one way or another. And I don’t look at those tumultuous times as being that far removed. Addie died in the late 1950s. G.W. died in the late 1940s. Their history is my history and that history is also a part of the Ioway Nation as well, I figure, what happened to some of its people. The Ioway were a small nation at the time of their removal, still are, and the last full-blooded Ioway died, if I remember correctly, in the 1920s. The story of G.W.’s family, I figure, is a little side note to the history of the people. Just a little. In the manner of any one so descended. And their story will eventually inform my son. He will have a different knowledge of America than is generally taught in schools. It won’t have the same meaning for him as a child who is Ioway Nation and grown up Ioway. But his comprehension will also not be the same as a child with no Indian heritage.

When I was ten years old and living with my father’s parents, I wrote down the little genealogy he could give me and I kind of became the family’s keeper of it. The one who wanted to know. I rode with my grandfather on his drives and he talked about the countryside and people. He told stories. There was a lot he didn’t know. I wanted to learn about it what I could.

And eventually, several years after finding an Ioway website, I was at the 2005 Ioway Fall Encampment and meeting some people I wouldn’t have come to know if not for the internet. It would be my first time to meet them in person. It was good to go knowing people. I’d been invited and without the invitation I don’t know if I would have ever had made the trek out to an Encampment or not.

The Powwow was on the Ioway Reserve on land adjacent to James White Cloud’s old house.

Below people are lining up for the Grand Entry on Saturday.

Saturday and Sunday were blistering hot. It takes some endurance dancing in heavy regalia.

A lot of stunning regalia was present, and it’s a shame that my photos of all of it are blurred. Wish I had a better pic of the below dancer. Incredible color.

Some of the women stately dancing.

Can see the treatment of the back of the hair here on some of the young women.

Beautiful vest on this man.

I like this little girl shawl dancing around outside the circle.

I divorced myself entirely from the internet while on vacation. I really had no choice. But I now regret that I don’t and didn’t have a laptop. Had I laptop and a connection I’d have been able to upload my digital pics on Saturday and see what they weren’t capturing, which wasn’t anything. I have two cameras, a small one and a larger one my father gave me, which is a far better camera. I was using the small one as I simply didn’t want to be too obtrusive and was having difficulties, the camera alerting me to blurred pics, one after another, but had I been able to look at the day’s photos that evening I’d have found that almost all of them were blurred, ones the camera didn’t alert me to, and would have opted to use the larger, better camera on Sunday. Plus my smaller camera has a long delay and that was problematic. Point, shoot, and miss your shot because of the delay and then a longer delay after that waiting for the camera to be ready to shoot again. Anyway, I have loads of pics which could have been good, but aren’t. They’re slightly blurred and useless.

The White Cloud Singers were selling a CD. I should have gotten one. One of those things where it was on Sunday that I thought about getting one but I was running around after H.o.p. and forgot. We did get several of the Ioway t-shirts. Marty purchased some nice sounding gourd rattles for himself and some percussionist friends.

There were a number of vendors. A lot of beaded items and jewelry, some bonafide and some not. There were moccasins and beaded cradle boards and cedar boxes and sweetgrass and sage. H.o.p. fell in love with a little buffalo skull that was all of 75 cents. And these neat things called dinosaur eggs that are magnets. They come in pairs and when you throw them together they make a queer sound like crickets chirping. They were a popular item and by Sunday they were lying here and there around the encampment, lost by their owners. Another popular item was a little, hand-held, battery-powered fan with lights on one of its blades that went for about two dollars. The fan and dinosaur eggs were at a booth that had a lot of children’s novelties and seemed pretty popular.

There were food vendors. I had the perfect fried bread taco. Couldn’t possibly have been better. H.o.p. nibbled on snow cone after snow cone.

H.o.p., usually cheerful, is shy, like his mom, and it takes him a little time to get comfortable around people. I thought he’d love the music and the goings on, but he was too overwhelmed. And it was hot hot on Saturday and Sunday and not being used to the heat he wilted. Pics before and after show him cheerful and hamming it up for the camera. Pics at the encampment show him droopy, sweaty and his eyes fairly rolling back in his head. His social IQ tends to also be like mine, iffy, and we turn particularly irrelevant and maybe even confusing when disoriented. And lots of stimulus disorients. I once did a radio interview for a play of mine and I said I was nervous and they said I’d get over it and I didn’t and they realized finally I wasn’t going to say a word. At a workshop question and answer session after a play of mine, after my sense of humor flopped, I ended up saying nothing. People asked questions and I would start to respond, say two words, and then pausing for the third word I’d get caught up in thinking of everything I could reply and after a lengthy silence I’d decide hell so long has passed since I started to answer I may as well not answer at all. After that, it was arranged that if there had to be a workshop, someone else would sit in for me to do the question and answer part.

And my social IQ at the encampment was the pits, worse than usual. I went monosyllabic. I wanted pics (and needed them really, wanting to record designs and their colors). But I didn’t want to get in the way. I was worried about H.o.p. because he was overwhelmed. The spider bite was starting to demand its due and I’d begun breaking out in hives that would be in the hundreds by Monday. The welt on my hand was getting bigger and I was itchy. Had H.o.p. not been so overwhelmed I might have been able to orient myself to listen and see in focus, whereas it was instead like a kaleidoscope. Or maybe not. I had a lot of emotions going on, was distracted by them and words that I wanted to soak in kept flying over my head and I forgot how to converse. But that’s par for the course with me. I don’t converse well until the 3rd or 4th time I’m around people.

The most focused I felt was Saturday night in the dance circle with H.o.p. And that was when H.o.p. was able to focus as well. Man, I loved having him in there with me. Having my son in the dance circle with me. And he smiled, calm, throughout, loving it, finally joyful, eyes sparkling.

One friend I made was Pud. She came up to me on the bleachers Saturday night to talk to me and sang me a few cartoon songs. She found us again on Sunday and we spent a while talking and playing and she played with the dinosaur eggs with H.o.p. , trying them out on every metal surface.

I asked if I could take her picture and she said yes.

(Lots of pictures below the fold.)

It was too late Sunday to start back out so we stayed that night at Hiawatha and then in the morning began the next leg of our trip to Arizona. I wanted to go through the glacier cut Flint Hills along the way. And I wanted to take a slight detour through Chautauqua County, Kansas and Sedan, where my great-grandad once owned a seed and feed store on main street. When I got down to Phoenix my dad said that the storefront would still be there, next to a bank. I didn’t know that or I would have taken pics of every store situated next to a bank. And there were three that we saw, I believe, on that short, scenic bit of main street that is endeavoring to become a tourist/art attraction after years of having turned into a virtual ghost town. Wouldn’t imagine a small town with a population of about 1300 would need 3 banks.

The Flint Hills are beautiful. Do I have any pictures of them to show you? No. Kansasflinthills.com does. We appreciated but didn’t stop. What do I have pictures of? Junkyard sculpture in Howard, Kansas. Hubbell’s Rubble. In the midst of it all a big sign for Longhorn Realty. I saw, we passed, I yelled to stop, stop, stop. Marty sighed as we were running against the clock. I said stuff the sigh, you don’t pass a field of junkyard sculpture on a backroad highway without stopping and appreciating the wonder that is humankind, we are here to be an example of this for H.o.p. and besides it had a T Rex and H.o.p. would love it. He said OK. Look to this website for more pics from I guess 2004, taken on a day that wasn’t drained of color by a burning sun. I began to remember how that area of Kansas and Missouri has its own special kind of hot in the summer that had me coming in from the drives to radio stations when I was a kid and despite the air conditioned car, collapsing onto the cool greeny carpet of the sage greeny living room floor, too brain dead to even care about turning on the television and wanting to nap until the usual cold cuts dinner (they took the main meal at noon) but pulling myself to my feet to fullfill plate and silverware obligations.

My favorite was the above pink Nessie which has lettering that reads “I love people”. I at first thought it was a dino but H.o.p. immediately understood it was Nessie. He for some reason is fascinated with Nessie and says he wants to go to Scotland and see the loch where Nessie has been rumored to live. It’s one of those fascinations that won’t let go. I was informing on citrus and Florida and Saint Augustine (where cousins are vacationing) to him today, and some castle like fortifications led him to want to see pics of castles and when he saw one that was in Scotland it was back to Nessie and that’s all she wrote.

Time has done a number on the stagecoach. The horse is unrecognizable from 2004.

Nor has time been kind to this lady. In 2004 she looked like this.

We went from the tin man at Howard to Sedan, which has a yellow brick road and a congratulations engraved on the sale of the 10,000th yellow brick (correction: oops, I did put in initially 10,000 tons…hmmm…wasn’t thinking).

Sedan, Kansas is now principally Bill Kurtis’ “Red Buffalo Country”.

Kurtis lives in Chicago but now owns an 8000 acre ranch outside Sedan that has weekend getaways and another 3000 acre ranch nearby where stands Laura Ingalls’ “Little House on the Prairie Home”. Bill Kurtis started buying up Sedan and rennovating main street. Sedan’s industry is now weekend tourism and has an art gallery and antique stores. It was a store that I guess is part of the Red Buffalo antique store into which I went to ask about something, I forget what, and saw they served real coffee and ordered some and talked a bit to the woman working there, who wasn’t from Sedan. It was Monday. Nothing was happening. She took care with the lattes and they were good.

I took pics but the sun bled them all out so go to the above website to get a small glimpse of current Sedan.

Sedan’s public library is located next to city hall.

I went to the Court House to look for old wills. The Court House was larger than City Hall. It looked like an old school and had two floors. In the office that handled probate there was a large medical-looking poster showing the muscles of the body and if I remember correctly discussing the effects of alcohol on the body. H.o.p. stared and wondered at it. The woman who brought me the probate book, a Deputy, was so unenthused and put out that even my husband noticed. I was startled that there was one probate book and that in that one probate book there were about three pages of Mc’s. That’s all. From way back when to now. Same with C’s and so on. And I thus learned that my ancestors didn’t bother much with probated wills. Most of my father’s father’s line and their relations were in Chautauqua from the 1870s to the 1970s and there were only two wills, neither what I was looking for. I hoped for a pen and paper to write the numbers down on but the woman waiting on me wasn’t about to trust a pen and piece of paper to me, for which reason she had cause to be extremely exasperated with me when she went to get the docket of the newer will and brought me the wrong one, she having written the number down incorrectly. She told me the place I’d have to go to in order to get a copy of one of the old wills (but neglected to tell me they were closed). The old will perhaps will tell me where the Crockett homestead was so that I may one day perhaps go there to see if any one knows where is the boulder that has the Crockett name carved on it.

I left my sunglasses in the office and the woman who never cracked a smile was kind enough to catch me at the water fountain on the second floor landing and return them to me. I was glad I’d stopped to take a drink because I believe if I had gone on down the steps that would have been the end of my sunglasses.

At the Court House I remembered that Emmett Kelly was born in Sedan.

On the first floor I found another office and asked where the museum was. Then it occurred to me I have a distant relative on my father’s mother’s side who works with the Emmett Kelly museum and I asked the woman if she knew him and she said yes and looked for his phone number. She was very amiable, as was another woman who appeared to be working with her in the office. She told me the museum was probably closed and it was. I ended up not calling my relative because I’d thought about him too late and we needed to be on our way, our goal being Amarillo, Texas that night. I think he will be disappointed in me when I let him know we drove through Sedan and didn’t phone him. I’m disappointed we didn’t have the time. I have several distant relatives in Oklahoma and Kansas who I want to meet and haven’t yet had the opportunity.

H.o.p. sees the above picture and says he’s sorry the museum was closed.

We went through Pawhuska. We went through Ponca City where my dad grew up, delivering newspapers on Main Street. We went through Oklahoma City where we got the worst coffee we’ve ever had. Marty took a taste and said it was horrible coffee, the worst he’d ever had, not even coffee, and I thought well it’s probably bad coffee like all convenience store coffee is bad. I took a sip and spat it back out. Whatever it was, the liquid was pure foulness. Mostly hot water with maybe some essence of hazelnut thrown in and a shot of powdered milk (we’d gotten it black) and god knows what else that made it so bad it deserved to be spat out.

We noticed something was smelly in Oklahoma City and then passed by the cattle yards. There were a lot of neon signs partially burned out in Oklahoma City.

Eventually we drove into the Texas panhandle where we were confronted with the Holy Lone Star Sepulchre of the Windmill.

Marty stayed in the car with H.o.p. I had to go in. It was a must visit. There was a trucker inside and we each read, in respectful silence, the Stations of the Sacred Windmill.

It was a working windmill that twirls in accordance with the outside winds, and a panel informs those winds reach up to 100 miles per hour in that area during storms. It must be pretty harsh in that building during a storm on a cold day. I’ve decided that after I die, on one of those cold, stormy days, I want my ashes dispersed in that building by that windmill. Attendants will have to hold open the doors so that a few of my ashes may be perhaps blown outside, unless the outer winds are aiming directly into the building, in which case the sifting will have to be delayed until the winds blow proper. I’m not sure how I feel about a good part of my ashes probably being spread all over the interior of a rest station. I’m not even sure I feel very good about any of them coming to rest on Texas soil. I don’t like Texas. It’s just the windmill and Don Quixote and some queer idea I have of breezing my Bush Empire contrary remains over a bit of Texas highway and ranch land. I am already thinking of ways it can work out. For instance, my ashes that settle in the rest area, some of them may perhaps be picked up on the soles of visitors to the narrow panhandle, travel back out to their cars and trucks and on to other states. But I may change my mind about all this by tomorrow, since I only came up with the idea a few minutes ago.

We spent that night in Amarillo.

Marty got up Sunday morning to prepare for a benefit with Heaven Davis that afternoon, and got a phone call that the preceding band, the Breeze Kings, had been in an accident on the way back from Florida. The drummer, Tim Gunther, was killed. He had played with Heaven for several years. The benefit that day was for the Preservation Hall Musician’s Fund. It was difficult but they went ahead and played the benefit. It was Heaven’s idea, she and Mike Geier put the show together with the manager for Blind Boys of Alabama. Heaven emceed and Marty stage-managed. There were five acts there. Melanie Masell, Jim White, League of Decency, King Johnson and Heaven Davis. Heaven’s Band played the Breeze King’s show with Tommy Brown, then played her show. Oliver Wood played three shows in a row, doing King Johnson then the show with Tommy Brown and then the show with Heaven Davis. That night there was a larger show featuring Beausalais and the Subdudes which was also part of the benefit. Kingsized also played the evening show.

That was quite a trek the Breeze Kings were making for the show. They were run off the road by a drunk driver.

Today this comes in the email box and as it’s asked to be spread around I thought I’d post it here.

Hello, this is Carlos from the Breeze Kings

- Carlos Capote

The vote to gut the Endangered Species Act and a look at Wise Use and white supremacy. Skookum, who has also written on white supremacy in the Northwest, points to a post at Orcinus.

And may I recommend a couple of hysterical posts at Stone Bridge. How not to be a subversive and A perhaps meaningless anecdote on the subject of communists.

Me, it’s 7:30 p.m. and I’m still trying to organize my day while playing catch-up after vacation here and there. And trying to catch the porn and other spams as fast as they hit this site. Agh. I turned off trackbacks and have my comments so they must be a pre-approved commentor and the trackback and comment spam has subsided some but is still flowing in and I keep deleting and marking as spam. It’s driving me nuts and eating time.

I have on my desk, Kate of Broken Window’s “Sky/Map, an Earth Work Diary”.

It is on Indian Burial Mounds. Beautifully presented and filled with beautiful photographs. The entry below the first photograph reads,

The birth of the universe was slow and arduous. The sky swelled and swelled over decades and centuries, as stars were born and died, and born again. Eventually it burst, but not with a loud noise or giant spectacle.

The universe was born slowly, as the sky’s swollen belly let it out with the patience of a rock’s erosion by gentle waves at the bottom of a river.

I’ve not have an opportunity to delve deep into it yet, just having returned from vacation, but I look forward to reading it, which obviously will be a pleasure.

Thanks, Kate. This is special.

(Pics below the fold.)

Marty went in to check in at the motel in Amarillo that Monday night. There was a line though it was after midnight. People were also coming and going looking perplexed. I think I waited with H.o.p. in the car a good 15 minutes, an unheard of amount of time for checking in. Turns out the managers were new, had only a little earlier that evening driven in from Kansas. They didn’t know what they were doing. People were coming and going because they’d been given keys that didn’t open their rooms. When we got in the room we realized the previous managers had really let it go. But the room was great. A cheap room but it had a vaulted ceiling and a great bathroom with an old 60s style shower door with triangle graphics. The bottom sheet immediately came off the bed, revealing the mattress below, as it did in all the motels we stayed in. When we got up the next AM, I stepped out on the balcony, which hadn’t been cleaned in quite a while but was shaded by a nice large tree. A few feet away was a pool and kiddie pool, both filled with trash. The ice machine had a sign on it that said “Broken” and next to it someone had written “And it won’t be fixed”. I’d recommend the place in a heartbeat if I could remember the name of it, assuming that the new managers from Kansas clean it up a bit.

We waited until noon to hit Burger King or McDonalds for breakfast. It was the 6th day of H.o.p. eating only Burger King or McDonald Happy Meals. Because of the toys. And he had decided that hamburgers were all he was going to eat for the duration. Much of the trip, for H.o.p., was deciding what toy he wanted to treasure hunt at the next Burger King or McDonalds. This kept him quite happy. I dealt with it by ordering bad salads everywhere. We rarely eat McDonalds or Burger King at home, fast food is a once every two weeks maybe if that much kind of thing. We ate enough McDonalds and Burger King during the trip to make up for it. Drive to Burger King or McDonalds for H.o.p. and then look elsewhere for a Subway or Taco Bell for the adults when we couldn’t take it anymore. Subway was good for the chocolate chip cookies. Taco Bell was good in that I’d get to pretend I was eating Mexican.

Despite my spinning a globe in front of H.o.p. on a regular basis, he has no concept of geography. For years he thought his uncle Rob lived in either Australia or Russia. Which is, I suppose, because Rob spent a lot of time traveling to Australia and Russia for work when he was little. So, never mind, that’s valid. But still, no concept of geography. Before we left for the trip I bought BrainQuest’s “It’s OK to be Smart” game with 1000 questions for ages 7 to 8 that cover a variety of subjects. Every so often I’d pull it out and ask H.o.p. questions and every so often he’d make his mom giddy asking to do some more of the question game. And I kept reminding him what states we’d traveled through. Tennessee was where Ruby Falls was. Kentucky was where the blue grass was that we didn’t see (and where we’d run into two torrential rain storms, zero visibility, really pretty frightening). Illinois was where it had stunk. There was the Mississippi River, a country all its own. Missouri was where the big arch was (H.o.p. was unimpressed) and the Missouri River. Kansas was where the powwow was. Oklahoma was where the bad coffee was. Texas was where the windmill and files were. Then we hit New Mexico and I forgot about doing that because of the scenery, and I forgot all about the BrainQuest too. And I figured that was just fine because it was all experience anyway. “H.o.p., look!” I said every ten minutes throughout the trip, and then we hit New Mexico and I said, “H.o.p., look!” every five minutes. “H.o.p., look! H.o.p., look!” H.o.p., look!” I was quite annoying in my enthusiasm and my thinking of little exciting things to point out to him like he’d never seen them before. “Look, H.o.p., a train!” “Look, H.o.p., dirt!” “Look, H.o.p., water!” “Look, H.o.p., mountains!” And H.o.p. would lift his head from his drawing or his Leap pad or his DVD player in that “not again” way and in his “not again” way say, “I looked,” then resubmerge.

H.o.p.’s mom gets so excited about hills and mountains and different colors of rocks and dirt, and tumbleweed and sage and cottonwood and juniper. And beetles. Anything.

It’s like this. Before H.o.p. came into the world I’d look at something and think about how I’d write about it. After H.o.p. I look at something, for instance one of those big beetles crawling over the New Mexico truck stop parking lots, and than I drag over H.o.p. and say, “Look! Look! Look how big that beetle is!!!!!”

H.o.p.’s mom is a simple-minded creature.

At a truck stop I accosted people as they emerged to ask them what kind of beetles were all over the sidewalk and parking lot. “Those are big beetles!” I said, hoping to impress upon them that they should be just as amazed. They weren’t. “I don’t know,” everyone said. So I went back to stand and look at the beetles. All of which were dead except one that was trying to climb into a crevice and away from the wind.

But back to the panhandle of Texas which does have its charms. Observed through the tatters of bugs on the windshield. We cleaned the windshield each time we stopped, by the way.

New Mexico was incredible. I’ve got pics I’ll post another day of it and a place we stopped at in Texas that was so beautiful I said, “Stop, stop”, a part of Texas that knew it would have that effect on people as there appeared then a little picnic area.

Today I’m instead posting pics of another place that caused me to yell, “Stop, stop!” Marty sighed, exasperated and asked why I always had to yell stop stop after we’d passed the place. I crabbed back and said I forget what. And so we turned around, went back and did some touristing at Yellowhorse’s Navajoland on the border of New Mexico and Arizona where Marty saw a piece of pottery he fell in love with but didn’t buy then decided he did want it later and he planned to stop at Yellow Horse on our way back to Georgia but it was closed by the time we got to it.

As you look at the photo below, you can see, can’t you, why I yelled, “Stop! Stop!”

Those are animal figures up on that ledge. Someone put those animal figures up there. It’s pretty high up.

There was a painting, folk tourist art, big as a building, on the rock face above a section of the stores. Click here for an enlarged view.

But the main attraction was a hollow in the rock wall. A huge hollow that you can’t begin to imagine the grandeur of from the photo. It was what had caused me to yell, “Stop! Stop!”

And I thought H.o.p. would like it. I thought H.o.p. would go wow.

Yellowhorse is Navajo run by who else but the Yellowhorse family.

We bought H.o.p. a big plastic snake. The tourist places know their targets and this one did especially with its offerings for kids who are bored to death with scenery and driving and want creepy-crawly spiders, snakes and dragons. (Looking at the pics H.o.p. says he should have gotten a green dragon that was there instead. He says of the dragon that it, “felt like family.”) I bought a cheap Mexican straw hat for H.o.p. that looks great on him and because I thought it would be good to have a 4.99 Mexican straw hat and because he loves hats. And O.K. so they’re cheap and someone can probably tell me a thousand reasons not to buy them but I love Mexican blankets that sell for $5.99, especially when I can’t afford even cheap Navajo ones. A friend of mine who played in the symphony in Mexico brought me back a Mexican blanket many many years ago and I’ve had it draped over my computer chair forever. So, I bought two Mexican blankets. I wanted three for $15.00 but as I always take one french fry rather than two, I bought two blankets rather than three and felt extremely very super extravegant. I should have purchased three. In that shop Frank Yellowhorse was behind the counter.

In another section of the shops Marty got several rough gourd rattles for himself and his percussionist friends who always bring him back percussion instruments from when they go home to Brazil. And we got a small cheap kachina for H.o.p. We were trying to get H.o.p. interested in the really really cheap kachinas for $5 but he was focused on super beautiful ones that sold for high prices and he wasn’t to be denied. Not high high prices but too high for us. We kept telling him no, we can’t, and he went from nice kachina to nice kachina saying how about this one instead, but kept returning to two in particular. The woman at the counter understood our situation and pointed out a table of $30 kachinas selling for $15 that were nicer than the cheap cheap and suggesting those, saying they were made by a local woman, when we were receptive, seeing how H.o.p. was interested she explained to H.o.p. about each kachina. She began with describing several that each would have made nice choices. Instead he picked the ogre who keeps kids in line. I said H.o.p. “Uhm, H.o.p., are you sure you want that one?” He said oh yeah, because of the colors. She confirmed for him that it does have very nice colors.

This site says that Yellowhorse was built for Kirk Douglas’ movie The Big Carnival.

When I saw Frank Yellowhorse’s card and picked it up he said oh let me sign it for you (I was so happy, that’s going in a keepsake box) and because it had a web address on it I am able to point you to the Frank Yellowhorse website at Yellowhorseltd.com that gives the story of the Yellow Horse souvenir stand. Juan and Frank Yellowhorse, brothers, started the business.

Frank Yellowhorse signed the business card! Really, you don’t know how that pleases me. I kept track of that card through the trip. Put it in plastic. I was going to make sure I didn’t lose that card.

A search gives also a Yellowhorse.com which has a tribute to Juan who made bracelets incorporating petrified wood into the design. It showcases some beautiful jewelry in the gallery. There’s also a museum section in which is this magnificent bracelet which is not for sale. And if it was there’s no way I’d be able to buy it. But what a bracelet that would be to have and to wear like slices of sky. It’s one of the more beautiful I think I’ve seen. The pettipoint ones are pretty impressive as well.

The jewelry of Ben Yellow Horse, Juan’s son, is shown here and here.

The jewelry of Alvin and Byron Yellow Horse, who were showcased in an August 1999 issue of the Smithsonian, is shown here.

We didn’t see the jewelry store as it was already closing for the evening.

Yellowhorsegallery.com has some beautiful bracelets. I especially like the Night Scene Yei bracelet.

Here’s another shot of Yellowhorse Trading Post from 2001.

Here’s what it looked like, shutting down for the evening, as we prepared to drive away.

Magnificent. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

I don’t know what’s going on but H.o.p. is running around saying, “Everything’s mine! The future is mine! The future is mine!”

Hmmmm. Yeah, well it is, but I’ve not heard many seven year olds running back and forth through an apartment crowing about it.

So we swung back on the road and drove to Cottonwood that night where we’d be visiting with my mom for several days. She met us at the parking lot of Wal-Mart and we followed her back to her place. She has a big painting on the wall of Mexican ruins that immediately grabs the eye when you walk in. And here and there on the walls the watercolors she paints of the desert. We sat on the swing on her back screened in porch and drank a decent cup of coffee.

Pure poetry aided and abetted by Erik Satie, recommended by Norwegianity.

Every afternoon at four o’clock, he finds himself in a room where he sits and watches the passing of the telephone lines playing on the opposite wall.

The other day H.o.p. saw something that was only a positive archetypal figure in a brief story. I forget what it was. But he said to me, “That’s not the whole story.” I said why not, what did he mean, I thought it was very nice. And he replied, “Every story has a villain. Where’s the villain?”

Writing 101 via a seven-year-old.

Today he watches the above short cartoon with me, “Away”. Then of course he wants to see the other short animations archived at Monkmus. The symbolism was a bit complex for him. “A Day at the Park” had me explaining the meaning of being stabbed in the back. We were both entertained by “Orson”. He thought “Fender Bender” very amusing and laughed throughout and said he wanted to make his own cartoon. He was puzzled by “Basin Street Blues.”

The last one we watched was “Year of the Rat” and if you watch it too you will know at what point he started smiling and smiled to the end.

My mother used to live in Sedona. We drove all of a few minutes over to it to eat at the popular Coffee Pot, named for one of the rock formations above Sedona. We had a nice breakfast.

We then went to a couple of sites to walk around a bit. The red rock scenery in Sedona is, of course, spectacular.

Shades of “Close Encounters”, apropos for Sedona.

I did a search and found a pretty interesting Sedona pic that a Russian guy named Giorgio took. Follow the link. That’s a potentially great image going through adolescent growing pains. Find the same tree and take just a few pains with a better image and you’re on your way to a career. He has some other pics of Sedona up that are quite nice with a pleasant looking person named Masha. Congrats to Giorgio, by the way, on finishing his dissertation back in 2004. (He announces the accomplishment on one of his pages.)

Oh, on the reason for the why of the spiral twisting of junipers and other conifers, forget energy vortexes or vortices which the vortex guides at Sedona say is the reason, it’s survival advantage on harsh sites. Read more about it at Golden Arrow Bonsai . In his article, “Why Do They Twist?”, Andrew Smith writes:

To get to the point right away, Kubler found that spiral growth conferred two main survival advantages for trees on harsh sites. First, spiral growth allowed water from each individual root to reach around to nearly every branch on the tree. And second, branches with spiral growth bent more easily, which allowed them to be more effective at dumping heavy snowfalls, and tended to prevent breakage in high winds. Both of these traits would be important for trees growing in harsh mountaintop conditions.

No cause for the direction of spiralling was given, but Kubler did note that almost all conifers start life with a left spiral, that is, the grain spirals upwards and to the left as you look at the tree. Then, after they become 10-15 years of age, almost all conifers switch to a right spiral for the remainder of their lives. As yet, this trait remains unexplained. And some trees switch back and forth throughout their lives.

As for survival advantage, Kubler found that spiral grain was definitely adaptive for dry, rocky sites. This has proved true in my experience; the rockier the site, the more twisted the trees are likely to be. And very seldom have I ever seen a tree with a noticeable spiral grain growing in good bottom land. In theory, the branches on a perfectly straight grained tree are fed only by the roots that are directly below them. Water from the root system follows the grain of the stem wood up the tree with minimal lateral movement. So, in a straight grained tree, if all the roots on the south side of the tree were cut, or did not receive moisture, the branches on that side of the tree would eventually die.

On a tree with spiral grain however, each root feeds nearly the whole tree, so if all the roots on one side of the tree die the foliage should survive unharmed. The reason for this is because the xylem, the stem wood that carries moisture from the roots to the crown, will spiral less far around the stem as the tree grows and stem diameter increases. Each new year of growth will be slightly offset from previous years growth, with the end result that the flow from one root will be distributed nearly completely around the tree bole, rather than just in a narrow band spiralling around the stem. This has been proven by injecting conifers with dye at the base. As conditions get harsher, the grain will tend to spiral at a more extreme angle around the stem.

And the system works in reverse too. Tree nutrients descend from the foliage in a spiral path to feed the whole root system, rather than just a single root. This return system is not quite as efficient as the root-to-foliage system is, since nutrients are transported only in a very thin layer of living cells called the phloem. Since the phloem is never more than one or two years growth thick, it lacks the depth to distribute its flow as widely as the xylem does. However, this is not a serious problem since tree roots can live for months or longer without food, while the foliage can generally only live a few days without water.

Old trees with spiral grain frequently have a beautiful corkscrew pattern of dead wood running up the stem. In extreme cases the majority of the stem is dead weathered wood, and only a thin strip of bark spiralling around the trunk is keeping the tree alive. I am not sure what causes this, but I would tend to believe that it probably originates from some stress in the foliage, with the resultant death of a narrow band of phloem cells down the stem, rather than from some stress in the roots.

Kubler also found that spiral grain actually made trees structurally weaker, but at the same time allowed them to bend more under wind and snow, and thus avoid breakage. So while a tree with a pronounced spiral grain will not make nearly as good a grade of lumber as its straight grained counterpart, it will have a definite survival advantage when it comes to shedding heavy loads of snow, or surviving a mountain windstorm.

Kubler found that genetics, age, and exposure to wind and dry conditions were the main determinants of spiral grain. Some trees seem genetically predetermined to show spiral grain no matter where they grow. In most however, spiral grain is a sign of harsh conditions; of fierce winds, unpredictable precipitation and great age.

So now, when you see that twisted old pine or juniper in a pot, you will know that this tree is a long term survivor of all nature has to offer. I have found that since spiral grain generally indicates decades or even centuries of poor growing conditions and very slow growth, it is one of the most accurate indicators of very old age in a tree, at least in the species I am familiar with. As such, it lends all the charm and charisma of bona fide antiquity to the trees it graces.

Check out Andrew Smith’s viewing stones.

I love bonsai. One day I’ll get one. A brother and his wife gave us a bonsai for Christmas last year but it proved to be an outdoor specimen. We should have given it back to him or another relative who could keep it outdoors rather than trying to make a go of it in our apartment. Didn’t work and it still feels like one of those needless losses. It was a pretty little tree.

So, Wednesday last, we then went to Tuzigoot and Jerome.

The visitor’s center at Tuzigoot was built as a WPA project in the 30s. I wondered about the individuals who built it and what their professions had been previously and how many had already been skilled in construction. It houses I suppose a fairly nice exhibit. Not that I would know much about it. One’s ability to peruse, absorb, reflect is not enhanced by a seven-year-old who sees nothing interesting in grinding stones and pottery shards. The National Park Service website on Tuzigoot says Junior Park Ranger activity guides are provided on request but we weren’t aware of the availability (whatever the guides are) and didn’t request and they weren’t offered.

Outside are specimens of local flora identified with plaques, which I appreciated because I was always asking what such-and-such was and I took pictures of each one.

Here’s a map to Tuzigoot.

There are two trails. The Loop trail and the Tavas Marsh Overlook trail which is wheelchair accessible. I wasn’t even aware of the Marsh Overlook trail, from which one can view one of the few freshwater marshes in Arizona. Wish I’d known. I was managing a seven-year-old but we walked in, did the processing, and weren’t given any info by the ranger behind the desk. I read that a trail guide is available on request but the ranger didn’t make us aware of the fact and so we didn’t request. (Marty passes by and says he didn’t know there were guides available and says it’s another form, he guesses, of don’t ask, don’t tell.)

Outside the front of the visitor’s center looking up the path to the ruins.

A grinding stone. There was also a metal folding chair leaning against the wall. The folding chair was not an enhancement but I took a picture of it as I was amused by the notion of it being part of the Tuzigoot exhibit.

Imagine no roads and what your daily view might have been like as a dweller at Tuzigoot.

You don’t get a sense of the size of Tuzigoot, built around 1000 AD by the Sinagua. Neither through these photos or through the walk. But it was 11o rooms.

It was remarkably cool inside. In all the illustrations one sees of roof-top living, the people are shown exposed to the sun and elements. But I have to assume they were as anxious for shade as we are and on the rooftops there would have been open shelter? Am I right here? Maybe Stone Bridge knows something about it.

Now this is an impressive shot of Tuzigoot.

We then drove on to Jerome, Arizona, which used to be a hill-top mining town and is now a tourist stop and artist’s center. One view is here. Another is here. And more photos here.

I really liked Jerome, as did Marty.

You know those pics of places that show tourists milling around in the distance and you wonder who they are? I walked past all the people below. Most of them were European.

The above is from my little digital that I was using most of the trip but I was using a nice digital camera for the rest of the Grand Canyon. Because I had more images I wanted to display than would comfortably fit on a page, I went ahead and set up an image gallery. Seriously, I was using a good camera and got some nice images. I should have been using this camera throughout. There is a link above each image where you can view them larger. The first picture is at the cafeteria we ate at and the rest are from around the canyon’s south rim.

I should have used this nicer camera throughout the trip but I opted for the little camera that I could stick in a little bag slung under my arm.

Wrong choice.

To see the gallery of images of the Grand Canyon, click here.

(Pics below the fold.)

What I then did on my summer vacation.

My dad had driven up to Cottonwood and spent three days with us there, touring around. Then on Saturday we went down to Phoenix for three days.

When we were getting close, cactus began appearing everywhere.

There were palm trees. Lots of palm trees.

Lots of different kinds of palm trees and cactus.

I’ve decided I adore palm trees and cactus.

At night, I sat on my dad’s comfy back patio that looks over a small garden with a pond and cactus and two palm trees that are now two stories high but were seedlings when H.o.p. was born, and I stared up at the stars, amazed how many one could see in the city of Phoenix, when you can’t see any in Atlanta. On our drive returning from the Grand Canyon, mile after mile I had watched the first evening star in the sky, having not seen anything like it in quite some while, looking often so bright and so close that it seemed it stood over the top of the nearest hill.

On Sunday we went to the Heard Museum at my dad’s suggestion.

It has an indoors that’s almost outdoors.

And an outdoors in its indoors. A courtyard where I now wish I was drinking iced coffee.

I turned over my backpack at the welcome counter. I saw a sign that said photography was permitted. Bowled over by these kachinas, first I took this picture.

Then I took this picture.

Which is when a woman tapped me on the shoulder and said “No flash!” in a brusque voice like I had made too much noise in the lunch line and she was going to pinch me by the ear and drag me to the principal’s office. She startled me as I was already far away in the land of design. I’d forgotten about flash not being usually allowed in museums and felt busted and tagged as bad when I was the kid in the proverbial candy store. Museums freak me out anyway when there’s so much to absorb and I know I can’t get it all in and I begin to panic because worlds and worlds of imagination and archetype and talent and blood and sweat and tears and hope and love and joy and the breadth and length and depth of human experience is there which must be given its due and it’s impossible to give it the meditation it deserves to absorb all that it is and is saying because there isn’t the time. And being already elated and distraught, I was primed to be freaked by someone tapping me on the shoulder and barking at me. If I had known I wasn’t supposed to use flash I wouldn’t have. If the sign said, “No flash!” I didn’t notice it. Neither did Marty. Thus I went nuts trying to figure out how to switch off the flash on my little camera, which is a recent replacement for one that broke during the warranty period and its programming is slightly different because it had been replaced with the next model up and turning off the flash was not the same procedure as on the former camera. Marty went on the tour with my dad while I entertained H.o.p. in the children’s section. I took lots of pictures. My camera kept informing me they were blurred and I kept retaking and retaking and retaking and retaking, sometimes taking 5 shots of an exhibit before giving up or supposedly getting it. I needn’t have bothered. I got home and all the images were blurred with the exception of a couple. And I was real sorry about this because here I was rushing through the Heard in an afternoon whith a child who thought a quick glance at anything was all that was needed when one could easily spend a year at the Heard. There are cases that would demand a week’s worth of study or two weeks or a month.

Though the Heard is devoted to the art of the southwest Indian Nations, they had the below in the children’s area. I took a photo of H.o.p. in front of the Pacific Northwest exhibit but it didn’t come out either.

In the children’s area they also had a few Objibwa and other woodlands bandolier bags, and a table where you could sort-of not-at-all make your own by punching holes in a prepared white bag and tying yarn through them and a ribbon for the shoulder band at the top.

I had a major case of deja vu in the children’s section when I was photographing an Otoe blanket and turned to face, from the Otoe blanket exhibit, the Ojibwa bandolier bag exhibit across the room. One of those feelings where you step into a time and place where you’ve already been. I haven’t had one of those in a while.

Upstairs there was an exhibit on the boarding schools. H.o.p. was freaked out by a barber’s chair with hunks of hair beside it. It really disturbed him.

Though blurred, I’m including here a portion of the mural that’s painted around the top of the wall in the children’s area.

I’m still broken up over all my photos not coming out.

When leaving we stopped by the store. Well, Marty stopped by the store but I stayed outside as I assumed they would want my knapsack (a sign said they would) and I was by then too tired to deal with it so I sat outside. For some reason, it just seemed like too much effort to check my knapsack again and I was already feeling fairly intimidated by seeing other people tapped by what I’m assuming to have been docents for doing this or that which were no-no’s at the Heard but they didn’t know it. Though the guides were great. One guide had approached and talked a bit to me where an exhibit of modern paintings and sculpture was (wonderful) and said she was glad the exhibit had been very well received. And then there was the Hopi woman who was giving a tour of the Barry Goldwater collection of kachinas, who was relating the nature of kachinas, speaking of their being spirits, and a woman said, “But they’re really people dressed up, aren’t they?” and the Hopi woman said no, they were spirits, and the woman said, “But they’re really people just dressed up, aren’t they?”, to which the Hopi woman said, no, they were spirits who coming down from the mountains assumed human form, that this is what she truly believed, and the woman turned and said to the person behind her, “They’re people dressed up in costumes.” There must be a stress relief room in there somewhere for the guides, where they can go in and bang their heads on soft padded walls. H.o.p. has a thing for pretty girls and he may not have cared for the kachina tour as there was “a lot of talking” but he was drawn like a magnet to iron when he saw the Hopi woman and stood at her feet in rapt appreciation, gazing up with adoring eyes.

Anyway, back to the gift shop. I was already feeling pretty intimidated as I was saying, aided and abetted by the fact that museums always make me nervous as there is always so much to see and so little time to see it in. I know that I haven’t the opportunity to take in but a portion, that the rest will be lost, I’ll forget it, I’ve not the time to give it the due it’s worth. Such as even the modern paintings. I could have sat in there a day at least gazing and meditating. So I was already zonked-out over-stimulated and just couldn’t handle anything else. In the meanwhile, a man was shuffled out of the gift shop with his knapsack and the knapsack of his wife by security. He apparently didn’t want to turn them over and so he’d been ushered outside and sat and fumed. Then Marty came and got me and said I had to come in to look at the bracelets. “No,” I said, “I don’t want to deal with the knapsack.” Marty said they wouldn’t care. I said they would, that they’d just turned out one man. He said they wouldn’t care and to come in. Tired and nervous I went in and went to the jewelry counter. He owes me a coral and turquoise bracelet, has owed me one for about fifteen years, and he wanted me to look at the ones there. For some reason no one asked me for my knapsack, they ignored it. I looked at bracelets and they were nice but of course they were very expensive, which one would expect with the quality items you’ll find at the Heard. The woman waiting on me acted like I was going to buy one even though I’d said no don’t believe so. She ignored my raging case of hives. I zeroed in eventually on a bracelet with petrified wood and turquoise. I liked it but not enough to buy it. The woman asked me wouldn’t I like to try it on anyway and I said no, thanks. She offered again and wasn’t being pushy, seeming more like she felt these bracelets needed to be worn and wanting to see them on someone’s wrist. I didn’t buy a bracelet but because of it I looked for a book to buy and found one and got that.

We then went to Papago park. It was near sunset. I didn’t have a chance to get photos so here is a website that already has a lot of pics of Papago park.

I kept trying to decide whether I liked Phoenix better or Jerome better. In a way I like Phoenix better but I decided on jJerome as I like putting on a coat in the winter and because I’d be situated midway some amazing places and because if I was in a place like Arizona I’d want to be an easy distance from wandering the open desert and sheltering canyons.

You just about had it with all the pics and the fifth grade level of reporting on my summer vacation? Sorry but we’ve still got a few days to go. The next installment is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.