Rock Island reverie

(I made an exception to "if it plays it stays" and deleted the previous blog entry filed from the lake. No censorship here -- I just don't want to take away other people's right to decide which of their thoughts to share with others. For more, see comment one blog entry down.)


The distance between places around Smith Mountain Lake often seemed vast. The classic example was the defile of Smith Mountain itself, which dominates the landscape in this relatively remote part of the Virginia foothills: right across a channel, but more than an hour's drive away.

Partly it is memory: the endless drive from the DC area, three hours plus another hour down curvy country roads. (My brother-in-law still hasn't figured out the way from Lynchburg, after about a year of staying at the lake.) And the fact that my grandparents could make a trip to the pharmacy in Moneta into a big event. My grandmother would take at least an hour getting ready, and my grandfather would drive at 40-50 mph. It was like country folk going to the market in the old days. Which was ironic, because they never reckoned themselves country folk, even when they first came to the States and were on their sponsor's farm, and if there was anything they really cursed when moods were sour it was being "stuck in the woods" in their retirement.

Yesterday I ran from Moneta to the lake house. It sure flattens out the terrain. I remember being 14 and running the 1.1 mile from the main road to the lake house, in 6:30, and that seemed like a workout.

When the lake was first completed in 1969, you could still drink the water, and drivers of cars you passed on the road greeted you with a wave. It stayed that way well into the 1980s. My dad can tell stories of the weeks when he slept under the stars when he was building my grandparents’ house (which we now, thanks to the vagaries of life, I refer to here as “ours”).

In any case there seemed to be no bad blood with the locals. Somewhere, up to 200 feet below the surface of the artificial lake, you had to assume lay tobacco farms, homesteads, highways, maybe cemeteries. There is still bad blood in Nicholson Hollow up in Shenandoah National Park, people say, so one wonders about what people who lived on the rich bottomland of the Roanoke (and Blackwater) River thought. “Damn, survived the dam-building frenzy in the 1930s, and now this”?.

It took a long time for the lake to catch on as a living destination, for the billboards to appear, or even a sign pointing out the right road when you leave Roanoke. The lake is far from silty, but the freshwater clam population is thriving and some corners of coves can be mucky. The shores of the lake look far from manicured, but things have gradually changed. About half of the homeowners have taken down the yellow pine, oak, dogwood and laurel on their property to do various silly things with terraces and hedges and pampas grass and solitary fast-growing non-native trees. The same people who like hanging embroidered text on their walls and who overcook their vegetables and go to Baptist church.

Half have left the vegetation as it was. Almost no one has as many trees as we do – a combination of neglect and purposeful philosophy. You can barely make our house from the water, though we can see the water just fine. The acreages are all about the same, but we have a long section of lake frontage. So it looks like the boat dock is not connected to the house, though a "jungle trail" connects the two.



On the other side of the house from the lake of course is the garden, a lifelong project for my gradparents, and now a vegetable garden for my sister, who is now also learning her own life lessons on tunnelling rabbits and the limitations of chicken wire.

Our cove hasn’t been very fortunate, though. It does have one house, which for me comes closest to the ideal of a secluded mountain lake getaway. But it also has the house with the ugliest exterior on the lake, bar none.



Some kind of county detention centre cafeteria? We aren’t sure. Anyway, note the absence of a door.

There’s still some properties that are wooded and undeveloped. One is a location on a point with a view of the dam and the island. We used to hike to when we were kids. Still nothing there.

You can always row or paddle out to Rock Island, a 300 x 40 ft piece of no-man’s land a quarter mile out in the water, looking at the manicured properties and riprap /and imagine there will be a gazebo here at some point). Not many people come to Rock Island, but twenty years of picnickers have left a distinct trail from one end to the other and sometime during the last five years, someone has got around to making a firepit and what seems to be a corral for horses, or at least a boat.

Boat traffic is always getting heavier. It’s naïve to think that Rock Island, being one of maybe seven islands, would be overlooked. The lake is a backyard that is everyone's, like the unsecured WiFi signals that seem to float on the top of the sink. Just on Saturday after the skies had finally cleared I came down to the water and there were two guys fishing off our floating dock. Morgan was with me and I had been singing some sort of African-sounding nonsense song on the way down the jungle trail. Then in a moment of probably unnecessary racial hypersensitivity, I pulled up short, thinking it would be unfortunate if there were African Americans out on the cove, which of course would be highly unlikely. But there they were, a father and a son.

I was startled at seeing anyone there. I nodded hello awkwardly and I hope not unfriendly-seemingly and got to scooping the five inches of rainwater from the bottom of the canoe.

The humidity...the humidity.. (after Heart of Dampness)

We woke up in our Jackson TN motel room, both of us itching and unable to sleep, the air damp. The chips that had been left out were soggy. I cracked the window for air. It was dark outside. What came in couldn’t have been under 70 degrees. I decided to make some breakfast on the stove but the matches would not light.

Yup, we were barely across the Mississippi River, but it was unmistakable: we were back in the East. And the South. The stickiness could not be denied. I wonder if anyone transitions successfully back to the East Coast after more than a couple months on the West.

Granted, our first full day back in Virginia was a crisp 70s day with incredible visibility.

But until the unsettled weather cleared, the way back was uncomfortable, despite the foliage. Allergies I had forgotten I had arose to life. In some places the rain was the first real rain of the summer and woke up all sorts of nasty moulds.

After Las Vegas, profiled in great detail in the last entry, we wild-camped at Lake Foss, a large reservoir 100 W of Oklahoma City where I had camped on my way out West in May 2003. On the grass under a black locust, it was the best night's sleep both of us had on the trip, and perhaps Morgan as well. We pierced the curtain of moisture around Oklehoma City, where the range ends and the trees really begin. In Seminole, 30 miles east of OK City, we popped into the Jasmine Moran Children's Museum 10 miles off the interstate which turned into an all-afternoon gig. We patronized a Super 8 Motel near Fort Smith, Arkansas. Continued across the state, which this time seemed redneck to an extreme. Meth zombies with long white beards is perhaps more apt. Tennessee was prety much indistinguishable from Virginia, the steep grades started west of Knoxville, then eased again. Tent-camped within the town limits of peaceful, good little Damascus, Virginia, on Thursday night, and arrived back at Smith Mountain Lake the next afternoon.

The other town called The Meadows

People go ga-ga over Santa Fe and Taos, but I swear if there is an energy centre in the Land of Enchantment (New Mexico USA, as it says on the license plates) it is a place called Las Vegas.

I‘m usually reluctant to write about "last undiscovered places“ but in this case, it’s protected by its name. Most people don’t get past asking about Caesar’s Palace and the Nevada desert. And I think Las Vegas-NM people must keep quiet about their hometown when they’re on the road because they’re so sick of explaining how Coronado forded the Galinas here some 350 years before Las Vegas-NV was a gleam in a railroad man’s eye.

Plus it‘s on stretch of relatively remote interstate. We got here this time from Santa Fe, down an untouched stretch of I-25 with nothing but trees and ridges. There are a couple reasons – though it’s a major north-south highway linking the booming Front Range communities, I-25 makes an east-west S for these sixty miles, while I-40 to the south is a far more efficient east-west straight shot across a plain. People who go to Santa Fe will often just take Route 14 back south to the interstate, or go north to Taos or south to Albuquerque. I think only diehard Route 66 buffs come to Vegas.

To the east is the road to Tucumcari (immortalized by Little Feat, for the purposes of alliteration, in their ode to trucking) – 108 miles of nothing but ranches and mesas with jaw-dropping better-slow-down-to-25 curves. If this is the backroads you took to avoid the scales, it's pretty tough terrain for prairie country.

As far as I’m concerned, Las Vegas is perfect. It’s 16,000 people and 6,415 feet high. It has an 1940s-1960s downtown that appeals to the Route 66 set with its neon signs and diner Formica chic. It appears to have survived the period when most traditional downtowns decayed. I don’t see any revival but nor did I see any abandoned storefronts. I took a picture of our motel sign, an example of the genre ...



...but didn't get around to taking others.

Las Vegas also has a 17th century plaza just like Santa Fe, except that instead of being filled with tramps, silver and turqoise rattling tourists, and vendors of astonishingly bad street food, it is shady and has a bandstand like a town in the Midwest. A main street links these two areas, with shops for the more touristy set, but slightly alternative feel of many outdoorsy Western towns (Laramie comes to mind). There is even room for a small college campus with nice early 20th century stone architecture and stately Victorian and Craftsman homes.

If you start at the plaza, the highest point, and go down main street past the shops, over the river(bed) and through the said townie downtown, and turn left on what used to be Route 66, eventually you will get the turnoff for Route 65 , which takes you to some hot springs in just 6 miles, plus a real life castle where Armand Hammer has his United World College (no doubt too much soaking in the springs and books by Marx, then you go on to sow chaos and leftist coups around the world).

On the Monday morning that we went to the hot springs, a German American gentleman was holding court in the middle pool, espousing more conservative views to two local women, but the atmosphere was convivial. Conversation ranged widely on home improvement and food additives, He came to the country in 1954 but had an accent as thick as Kissinger’s. He reminisced about the battles around Khe Sanh in 1968 – he had been an officer. Then we talked about translating, me in Estonia, he in Colorado Springs for the Military Officers Association of America.

After a while everybody took their leave, the German with a bow, and Tiia-Triin, who had forgotten her swimsuit, could go in for a dip.

Later a black guy with a chiselled body and dreadlocks and a dog named Buddha drove down in his pickup from the hills where he was building a cabin, and got in the superhot, near-scalding 115 degree upper tub, displacing a lot of water onto us. Four years ago I went into that tub, too, but I couldn’t manage imore than my legs this time.

The hills above Vegas are nice Black Hills type pine-clad mountains, with The Hermit (El Solitario) standing at 10,000 ft (check this), and small farmers who look as authentic as anything as I saw in Spain’s Sierra Nevada.

I also have subjective simiplistic criteria for why I like certain towns. When I was here in 2003, I walked into the first café for breakfast and met the editor of the newspaper, a city councilman and police chief and had a great conversation and some leads. I also took a picture of a confirmation for a member of the large Hispanic community, which I thought was a masterpiece…



..while none of my photographs in Santa Fe, renowned for its light, ever seemed to come out. Though this one of Tiia-Triin this time around on Water St. is pretty enough.



Finally, there's Estrella's Cafe, just shy of the plaza, as near perfect a "red (chile) or green?" New Mexico eatery as you can hope to find. I had the red, with beans added, which seems not to be the sacrilege it is in Texas. The chile, BTW, is just that -- no meat, no cumin, maybe garlic, but that's it -- just a smoking hot puree, served up with a deep fried sopapailla (sopailla in these here parts) or tortilla. The rest of the family stuck to the American side of the menu -- ham and cheese with two orders or fries did them well. Total with OJ: 11.50 dollars.

Low desert to high desert

I'm up at 5 am. Morgan woke after nine hours of sleep and wanted to "park cars". My solution is simple -- the light does not exist. It is not available. If we were camping, there would be no lamp. He should not be up yet, and because he does not nap at all anymore, it is essential that he get his 11-12 hours at night. That is what a Quality Inn is for. Sleep for everyone, including teh French Canadian bikers who have been very well-behaved since 9pm.

But Tiia-Triin, ever indulgent, caved in at first. I can see her side, plus am sure the French Canadian bikers would not want to hear a baby crying in the next room. Between our inevitable argument and the sudden blinding light in my face, any chance of sleeping till seven vanished.

In the end, the light got switched off and Morgan was sleeping again by 6 am.

At this point I stole down to the motel lobby and hit the work again. I have a huge translation due for the Social Ministry, "Sex buyers speak -- the hidden side of prostitution". (This makes for interesting misunderstandings when people ask me what I am working on, by the way.)

With four hours of sleep under my own belt, today should be an interesting day on the road. The best strategy to stay awake is not to eat and drink coffee moderately all day long. Probably Tiia-Triin will drive. But the altitude of 6800 ft is somewhat invigorating here.

I would like to stop in Santa Fe today -- city of strange light, a great stop after two and a half hours and then spend the night in Vegas -- the Spanish colonial one in New Mexico of course, seeing as I would not set ifoot in the one in Nevada. I'll see what the guys are up to and how they are feeling.

____


We pulled out of Phoenix this morning as a cold front blew into the desert. We tried to take I-17 to Sedona and FLagstaff but there was a Saturday morning traffic jam. Seemed the Phoenicians all wanted to see the aspens changing color. So we turned around and left due east by the back door -- Shea Boulevard, which led probably 18 miles past identical looking bungalows and ranches (all of them with "river rock" as ground cover, and the occasional saguaro).

In Scottsdale the homes became swankier and more clustered, until finally the plain ended in the crumbly red rock formations that dot and surround the metro area. We entered the Tonto National Forest, which was still desert contry. As cactuses cannot be destroyed and must be replanted, I can't imagine what they log in the Tonto. We climbed gradually until we reached the Mogollon Rim. The highway scaled the wall and led onto a high piney plateau in another national forest that was actually a forest.

Temperatures will go down to 24 degrees F. tonight in Gallup, New Mexico. Staying at the Quality Inn is a gang of French-speaking bikers -- either Swiss or Canadian. They seem well-heeled but are loud, like people in a ski resort. Hopefully only two more nights in motels for us, and Amarillo will still be warm enough at nght to camp. There's no cash crunch but I would love to stay under the price of airfare and be back to old Virginny soon.

Phoenix

This desert is very livable. Yesterday it was 37 degrees C on our trip across the Sonoran desert from Joshua Tree National Park to Phoenix -- just above average -- but it felt like 28. The speed limit is 120 kmh and the wind rushing by at that speed has a slight coolness to it.

We have not seen a cloud in the sky since evening on Pismo Beach, six days ago -- not a wisp.

Phoenix is huge. Somewhere there is a 24-lane expressway (we were on a 12-lane) so traffic is not so bad. It's a largely new city.

It has two red rocky mountains within city limits. A little like the Flatirons in Boulder, but more surreal.




We're staying with my godparents in the northern suburbs in their lovely home, certainly the nicest place we have stayed at (of the various people we have dropped iin on the West Coast). Their three our-aged kids are grown and gone, so there is a lot of room.



Their parents were good friends with my grandparents in the DP camps in Germany in the 1940s and they have maintained contact ever since. When they moved from suburban Maryland to Phoenix, it broke part of our hearts. We had fun with their kids growing up. My parents have still not been to the Southwest to visit them -- which is more to illustrate that it is a long way, rather to say they should.

Of course the population centre has shifted with all the migration to the Sun Belt which began around when the Mägis moved here. My impression is that they have worked their asses off but have apparently done well for themselves with their small businesses.

Most people in this neighbourhood don't have lawns, but a dun-coloured gravel with individual trees and cacti in their yards.



Our hosts' backyard (not pictured) looks a little like the courtyard of a monastery we visited in Crete, with walled-in expanses of raked gravel and a parade-ground square of grass. And a swimming pool -- everybody has them, it is the great leveller.

Many of the trees are said to be dying (from frost, acutely, though the record number of 45-degree days this summer has weakened them) and things will change once more, though -- cheap pun -- probably the city will persevere, rise from the ashes?

ROAD: Pasadena

Got some pictures back: here's the man at Huntington Gardens in Pasadena:


We arrived in Pasadena Friday night, a truly epic traffic jam all through the valley. My friend Josh had emailed me and I had learned that day that he had tickets to Ulrich Schnauss, an electronica artist. I was tired, but decided to make the trip into LA.

Last time I visited him, Josh lived with a band in a super-lo-rent in the Downtown Industrial District. Thousands of homeless people lived on the street a block up. Trash fires burned. The Capitol record company exectives who ahd signed the band were afraid to visit the band. But there was a fraternal spirit to the place and the locals never hassled the band members. But after I refused to give a panhandler a donation, my car --the same Subaru -- was broken into in fairly short order. The rest of the trip ended up being a lot of runaround. Once I got the glass repaired, I refused to park anywhere but Beverly Hills, six miles away, and rode a bike back and forth.

This time Josh said he had a parking space in a gated apartment building garage and directed me by phone to exit the 110 onto 3rd toward Alvarado. I noted that deserted streets except for a few soup kitchens. I thoght immediately to the Red Chili Peppers and Under the Bridge Downtown.

We took his Camry and parked in a secret space just outside Beverly Hills in West Hollywood. Schnauss was playing at the Troubadour. A pudgy German guy with a laptop and keyboard and no backing musicians. We each had a Chivas on the rocks. Not Schnauss, but Josh and I. There were a couple moments where I thought someone had put something else in the drink -- the music coupled with some pretty impressive liquid DVD projections certainly got under the skin. There was a bit of a new age feel to the music -- most of his "tunes" were four chord progressions. The Chemical Borthers were making impressive electronic music like this ten years ago. But impressive and pure sound. He even had some stereo effects -- which is rare, usually everything comes out of the centre of the PA at clubs.

ROAD: West Coast finale -- California

In the old days, sailors drifted too far south and found themselves under strange stars. That is what I feel like when I arrive in California. There are the same old swells and ridges of the land, but the plants are unfamiliar -- odd barks and fronds and spines, new textures.

Anyway, after our layover in Arcata, we continued a Sunday driving down route 101 in unsettled weater. The redwoods were as impressive as they were the last time, but no more so than the Sitka spruce and northern conifers in the Northwest. This time we drove through a redwood for four dollars. We agreed this was a reasonable price.

We camped on Lake Mendocino, its shorelines 200 yards from full pond. There was supposed to be a ftont moving in with rain but it never really materialized.

Lunch(internet stop on Monday, Oct. 1 was in the courthouse district of Ukiah, the pleasant enough seat of Mendocino County. TTT ordered The Verdict at Schatt's cafe, frequented by policemen in at least three different uniforms. Instead of continuing to Marin County and San Francisco, we detoured around the Bay Area via Napa Valley and the Sacramento river delta, a big weird bleak area that leads imperceptibly into the central valley.

We camped outside Modesto in Caswell State Park, which reminded me of brush country somehwere in the southern Midwest – deafening cicadas, black walnut trees and oak, kudzu, a sleepy river laden with agricultural runoff, high chalky banks.

California's central valley is a microcosm of the Midwest. The area around Caswell is like Iowa, except with trees instead of corn stalks. A different section of the valley outdoes the Great Plains at its own game -- not a tree as far as the eye can see, mountains on each side invisible behind the horizon, just a few dust devils if you are lucky.

On Tuesday. Oct. 2 we headed for the dun foothills of the Sierra Nevada, making a stop at Mariposa for some visitor parking lot taco and hot dog stand grub. We then slabbed across the dun foothills to the similar town of Oakhurst at the same elevation of 2000 feet and a pleasant enough empty new chain motel.

On Wednesday Oct. 3 we did the unthinkable (to the people at the information centre we stopped at in Oakhurst) -- skipped Yosemite. The waterfalls are dry at this time of year and the weather seemed too good for there not to still be crowds. We opted instead for Mono Hot Springs, because it looked good on the map as a pleasant half-day outing. As these things usually turn out, the 90 mile trip was harder and longer than predicted and I wondered if I had finally pushed the Subaru too far. A one-lane paved but very cobbled and patched road led over the final 9,200+ft Kaiser Pass into a remote valley next to the Ansel Adams wilderness. No snow was on the peaks but the feeling was that we were in a very high and far place. Here no roads cross the divide for hudres of miles. The resort down at 6,500 ft near the source of the San Joaquin River pumps hot water from the springs for a spa and massage centre but has left the actual springs themselves free for the public. The restaurant was closed on this Wednesday, but the general store proprietor was friendly. Only die-hards make it this deep into the mountains.

TTT was scheduled to have her meeting on Thursday. We hesitated too long with finding a motel in the nice mountain lake communities we passed on the way back to Fresno and all of a sudden there were no more motels or mountain communities or mountains. So we drove all the way into Fresno in the dark, entering the still very agriculture centred city by its back door across the fields on route 168 and then finding ourselves in a large deserted downtown area. Eventually we located a Vagabond Inn. Fresno wasn't bad, though it had been universally put down by everyone we told of our plans. TTT met with her advisor at a café near the city college. The cafe was nice as they come but must be somewhat unique.

Rather than drive to Pasadena/L.A. on the interstate through Bakersfield, we decided to see the coast one last time, a detour that would only add 90 minutes of driving time. We camped in the Oceano Dunes primitive area near Pismo Beach, wisely avoiding the official camping area, which resembled a desert community out of Mad Max with huge trailers pulling OHVs, some of them flying Confederate flags proudly and somewhat ludicrously.

Our lunch stop was in Santa Barbara, a conservative, wealthy city an hour and a half from LA. We sat in the attractive downtown in a noble, European sort of cafe with a courtyard and high ceilings but noticed that the only other customers were homeless or socially challenged people, meeting with social workers. They were well-groomed and well-behaved apart from one cup of coffee getting tossed across the counter at the poor barista, and no shopping carts were visible, but it was odd. I wasn't sure whether it was a kind of enlightened liberalism like San Fran's or just the local social structure being out of whack.

An epic Friday evening commute across the San Fernando Valley brought us into Pasadena and our last stop before heading back east. More in next post.