Category: Our travel

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Navajo & Hopi Nations

Anybody can eat when he is hungry but it takes a real man to eat when he’s full.

We went east away from the Grand Canyon into the Painted Desert and the Navajo and Hopi nations.  We stopped at a “trading post” in Cameron. 

Information about our trip through the Navajo nation in 2003 are at this link, BTW. 

They had a nice restaurant with very friendly staff and an old fashioned ambiance.  I had Navajo stew, which tasted a lot like traditional beef stew.  It came with fry bread, which is excellent, and the portions were generous.  Chrissy just had the cheese burger and fries. Usually I help Chrissy finish her lunch.  This time I failed. The fry bread is very filling.

That fry bread is really good. I enjoyed it just by itself and I tried a little with butter and honey. Then I got the great idea that it might be even better if it had some tomato sauce, melted cheese and maybe some sausages and mushrooms.  Maybe I should check to see if anybody else has had a similar idea before I open my restaurant.

Space & the Eternity Highway

There is a lot of space out here.  Chrissy joked about those signs you sometimes see on developments, “If you lived here, you would be home already.”  These roads are near nothing. We saw a few lonely cows and horses, but not much else. Sometimes I wondered if we were really moving.  Although we were going 65, the horizon didn’t seem to change. This is the kind of landscape featured on SciFi.   The aliens could abduct you out here and nobody would see.

Proper Picture Protocols

We stopped at the Hopi Museum.  I cannot show you pictures from the actual museum. (The best I can do is the cool looking gas station above, which I assume is culturally appropriate.)  A sign at the museum admonished visitors not even to take notes.  The $3 you pay for admission only goes for you.  Other signs warned that you would have your camera confiscated if you took pictures of various villages or activities. So I don’t have pictures of the Hopi stuff.  I have some Painted Desert pictures below.  There was nobody out there or much sign of life in general.

I have a good memory and could probably tell you about the things I read and saw at the museum, but they seemed unenthusiastic about this sort of sharing, so better not.   Suffice to say that there were some excellent black and white photos from around a century ago of people and places as well as a display of Kachina dolls with narratives complaining about Kachina doll knockoffs and/or imitations based on the concept. 

There was also a lot of information about a boundary dispute between the Hopi and the much larger and faster growing Navajo Nation. As per instructions, I didn’t take notes, but seems that things were not going well. The Navajos and Apache arrived in the area a few hundred years ago and this is only the latest round.  According to the last census, there are almost 300,000 Navajos and fewer than 7,000 Hopi.  The numbers explain a lot.

I framed an excellent picture in my mind.  Outside the museum there were a bunch of guys selling things like firewood, rugs and Kachina dolls from little stands or the backs of pickup trucks.  In the background were spaced pinon pine trees.  Very picturesque.  But business didn’t seem too good and I was intimidated by the picture prohibition.  I didn’t know if I could take a picture or not, but why chance it?  You can find out all you need to know from “National Geographic” and they have better photographers who know the proper picture protocols. I hope I didn’t anger the Kachinas.

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Teddy Roosevelt & the Lodges

Above is the hotel were we stayed. The El Tovar lodge has that rustic elegance characteristic of the early 20th Century.  It was built in 1905, financed by the Santa Fe railroad as a sort of rail destination. President Theodore Roosevelt took the first steps to preserve the canyon about that time and the lodges here reflect that muscular personality of Roosevelt and America of that era. The Canyon was declared a national monument in 1908 and a national park in 1919.

The dark log walls are studded with actual heads of moose, deer, mountain goats and even bison.  I always wanted a moose head for my wall, but I have never had enough walls to handle something as big as a moose head.   You need a really big room with really high walls.  Actually, you probably need something a lot like the room in a big lodge. Moose are not native to Arizona, BTW, so the head came from somewhere else.

Below is Bright Angel Lodge. 

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Feeble Imitations

The pictures I took of the canyon do not do it justice.  It is hard to get my camera to adjust properly to the combination of bright light and dark shadows.   Even when the light works, the colors don’t show exactly right and it is impossible to convey the depth.  But this is the best I can do.  You will have to come here yourself.

The light seems to spill into the canyon when the sun is just over the rim.  There is still a little haze in the air.  I think it is left over from prescribed burns to manage the neighborhood forests, as described in earlier posts.

Grand Canyon panorama AM

Above & below are canyon panoramas.  The bottom one was taken just at dusk, so there are not the shadows.   When you see the canyon in person, the shadows make it much more beautiful as you eyes can move and adjust.  But the pictures come out better w/o the sunlight.  I bet the nicest photos could be made when high clouds blocked some of the direct light. 

View Master

The best pictures of the Grand Canyon were the old View Masters I had as a kid.  The canyon seems very familiar to me today because of the many visits I made via View Master.  The simple technology worked great and the fact that we didn’t have very many options gave me the exposure I still remember more than forty years later.  

The Real Thing Requires a Little Pain

Everything goes in and out of the Canyon on mules or people.  They don’t bring machines, which makes the trails and facilities more primitive and much nicer. 

I hope it never changes. IMO, views and experiences are better when you have to earn them.  Some day I will be too old to make the journey and then I will have only memories and pictures. So sad, but so right.

I don’t want it to be made easily accessible for me or anybody else. Not only would that impact nature adversely, the experience of the Canyon would be different and much shallower if you could just drive down in air conditioned comfort or take an elevator.

It is that way with most things.  A rest you earn with good hard work is different and better than when you just get to lay around.  Achievement easily given is not achievement you value. 

Most people stay on top and marvel at the beauty in a more detached way.  Good. Keep it that way. The more spiritual experience requires a little more skin in the game. The sweat and exertion are part of it.  An erzatz version would be worse than nothing, or at best a feeble imitation.  We already have too much of that in today’s world. 

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Four Legs Good; Two Legs Bad

Chrissy and I went down as far as Indian Gardens.  This is an oasis on the Bright Angel trail and it is the logical terminus of a day hike for a person in average condition.  It took us around three hours to get down but only around two and a half hours to get back up.  It doesn’t make intuitive sense.  I think it is because of all the rocks.  I walk gingerly among them going downhill.  We also had to get to the side of the path to let hikers pass who were coming up or mule trains coming down. There was less oncoming traffic on the return trip and no mule trains came past. 

Of course I am not counting the leisurely lunch-break we spent at Indian Gardens.  The cottonwoods and willow make very pleasant surroundings.  Both are fast-growing adaptive trees but are often unloved because of their weak wood, short lives and susceptibility to wind damage.   Of course, it depends on where they are.  As long as they are not near houses or roads, they do just fine.  Except that they grow in generations, i.e. a lot of them come up the same time and whole clumps grow, live and die together.  This is not a problem except during generational change, when the whole clump of cottonwoods begins to die back about the same time.

PS

The morning later I my complaining muscles reminded me that I am no longer in the top condition I used to imagine.   The pattern of pain was interesting, more characteristic of overdoing cross country skiing than overdoing ordinary hiking.  I suppose it is because of the poles. 

My legs hurt a lot less than I would have guessed, but my arms, chest and lats are screaming. 

I used to cross country ski a lot when we lived in Norway.  I am sure I used the poles the way the Norwegians taught me, which is to push off in back of your body instead of leaning forward on the sticks. I recognize the feelings.   The good news is the pain confirms that the poles worked.  I pulled myself out of the canyon w/o overstraining my legs or knees.  

As they say (for different reasons) in “Animal Farm”, “Four legs good; too legs bad.”

PSPS

The link to my earlier trip down the canyon is at this link.  That time we did it in 117 degree heat and went all the way to the river and back.  That was stupid.  The bottoms of my shoes melted off on the hot rocks. Really. 

This time we had perfect weather. Cool at the top and only warm near Indian Gardens. AND we didn’t go all the way down.

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Route 66 & Mountain Men

Route 66 has been replaced by I-40 through Arizona, but the legend remains.  Among the places showing homage to the “mother road” is the Route 66 Grill.  My guess is that the clientele includes a lot of bikers and truckers. You get to (have to) grill your own lunch. I chose bratwurst, since I was reasonably sure that I couldn’t mess up with a pre-cooked sausage. I just had to blacken the outside.

Farther down the road is Williams.  We visited here in 2003 and you can read about that at this link.  Williams has a superb natural location with a nice cool climate in the middle of the ponderosa pine forests on the way to the Grand Canyon, but it is just a little too far out of the way.  It has always been thus.  The town is named for the mountain man (and son of plainly unimaginative parents) William Williams.  According to the plaque at the monument, Williams organized the regional mountain man rendezvous at the site of the current down and generally “did a heap of living.” 

Those rendezvous must have been something to experience, with the grizzly men coming out of the woods once a year to trade their pelts for the goods they needed, including whiskey, women & weapons.  Merchants came from all over to trade and probably rip them off.  Of course, it was dangerous to cross a man who lived by himself most of the time and whose daily life required him to kill animals & fight Indians.  Fuel that guy with rye whiskey and you had murder and mayhem waiting to happen.

Mountain men like Jeddiah Smith, Jim Bridger and William Williams went up to the mountains to get away from civilization, but their activities opened up the wilderness and allowed in what they were trying to escape. 

The mountain man epoch lasted less than a generation.  A lot of their activity was based on chasing beavers to satisfy the vagaries of fashion. The pelts were used for felt hats worn by gentlemen in Europe and the Eastern U.S. The bottom fell out of the market when fashions changed and silk hats became all the rage. Anyway, by that time settlers were moving in and the railroads were binding the nation together. There was no longer any room for the mountain men.  Their legend has endured longer than their moment in history.

The story of our 2003 trip to Williams is here.

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Montezuma’s Castle & Red Rocks

We headed up to the Grand Canyon via Sedona, which took us through the red rock country along Oak Creek.  Our first stop was Montezuma’s Castle, misnamed after the legendary King of the Aztecs, whose people never got this far north.   Castle is also a bit of a misnomer.  It is essentially a lightly fortified cliff dwelling and it was a Pueblo type people who made the structure as a refuge against enemies.  Archeologists call them Sinaqua people.

Looking at the extent that people lived in fortified villages reminds us how precarious life was in the past.   Violent marauders or dangerous animals could appear at any time and the lookouts could only detect as far as their naked eyes could see.   Since old guys, less useful working in the fields, evidently often got the lookout job, sighting distances were cut even further by failing eyesight.

However, as far as stone-age communities go, this was a top of the line location. It was defensible, as mentioned above. Oak Creek provides a steady supply of water, important to human life and attractive to game animals and the loose soils near the creek were easily worked with simple tools available. 

The community thrived for centuries and then just disappeared around 600 years ago. Nobody is sure what happened.  There was significant climate change at the time, with the area becoming drier. This might have changed availability of game species.  That cannot be the only explanation; since the creek did not dry up and no matter how tough conditions were near the creek, they must have been worse away from it. Below is Oak Creek near Sedona.

I blame Rousseau and his “noble savage” myth for giving us the misconception that life before civilization was good. In fact, life for most was violent, unpredictable, generally brief and often unpleasant. A better question to ask is how people persisted for so long rather than why they disappeared. It was probably a combination of war and changing ecological conditions that drove the people away from this area. Of course, sometimes things just happen. Only around fifty people lived in this village. With a small, preliterate culture a few bad decisions, a couple of nasty neighbors or just a run of bad luck can doom a community. I suppose a bigger question is why they didn’t come back.

I didn’t think of Arizona as a beautiful autumn location, but the sycamore trees along creek were showing off a rich golden color.  It was a beautiful fall day at Montezuma’s castle, as you can see from the nearby pictures. We moved up the road and upstream to the town of Oak Creek and the Sedona area. We stayed at the Best Western in Sedona.  Below is the view from the balcony.

This is the red rock canyons area with natural beauty all around.  It reminded both Chrissy and me of the Petra area of Jordan.   Sedona was a cowboy movie location during the 1940s and 1950s and there were markers with handprints of famous actors who played in the movies.  The only ones I recognized were Gene Autry and Ernest Borgnine.  More recently, it has become a center of arts and crafts and a kind of aging hippie hangout.  There is supposed to be some kind of vortex that connects to other dimensions or releases psychic energy or something like that.  This and the lyrically beautiful scenery attract various sorts of people.  There are also plenty of trails for outdoor activity.  It is a nice place generally.

Past Sedona you climb the mountain in a series of switchbacks.  You are still following Oak Creek, more or less.  That little creek is responsible for most of the beautiful topography.  The natural communities change as you climb with scrub, juniper and pinion pines giving way to open ponderosa forests.

The forest service has been managing these piney woods well, at least near the roads where I could see it.  I noticed the results of prescribed burning programs and the trees were often in clumps, as they would be in healthy ponderosa forests of the past.   I saw lots of evidence of fire along the road.  I took a picture of an area that was still warm from the recent burn to show what is supposed to look like.  We saw smoke in the distance the day before, which may account for some of the haze we noticed in Sedona. 

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Roman Restoration

When one of my computers crashed a couple years ago, I thought I lost a whole set of pictures from trips to Istanbul and Rome, as well as a good many Warsaw photos.    Well … I did back them up on a disk, which I came across today.   I have been having a good time looking through the slide show. 

When I thought I lost the pictures, I tried to write up the lost memory.   The text is below, but now I have included some of the formerly lost pictures.

Roman Forum

We lost the computer memory that included my pictures of the trip Alex and I took to Rome in February 2002.  I enjoyed looking at them from time to time.  I had a really good time with Alex that time.  He was interested in learning and enthusiastic about Rome. 

Maybe a picture is worth a thousand words and I can write that much about it.

The flight down was not bad except that we sat next to a woman who seemed to have a cold.  We did not get sick, but it was unpleasant to sit next to her.  Coming down into the airport, the thing you notice is umbrella pines.  I was hoping to see a little of Rome, but the airport is far away.

It was hard to find our way around from the Rome airport.  We finally got our bearing and took the train to Rome.  I remember the train was very comfortable.  We went past a lot of rural slums.  Lots of gypsies lived along the tracks.   They had little trailer villages surrounded by garbage.   I was surprised how warm and kind of desert like it was.  It was a little like S. California or maybe even some of the less arid parts of Arizona.

German barbarian on Arch of Constantine

Our hotel was out of town.  We took the train and then a taxi.  It was a Holiday Inn Express and it had a free shuttle to the subway.  Next door was a big supermarket, which was good to have for coke and snacks. 

On the first night, we walked to this commercial area where there were shops and restaurants.  It was very lively and the weather was warm, very different from February in Poland. Restaurants were not open in the early evening.  Italians don’t eat until late.  As I recall, we had to eat at a Chinese place, since that was all that was open.

We got up early the next day and caught the subway into town.  It was dreary and gray. The subway was depressing and crowded.  It seems like the start of a bad day.  It wasn’t.  As we came out of the subway station, the sun came out with that fresh look after a rain and we saw the Coliseum, behind was the Forum. It was a magic moment.  Alex was excited.  I had pictures of him at the Coliseum and in various places in the Forum.   He is skinny and wearing my red coat. It is too big for him.

That day we also went to the Circus Maximus and the Palatine and Capitoline Hill.  The Palatine is where the emperors had their homes.  Now it is park like around ruins.  We walked a lot that day. 

The next day we went along the Adrian wall and downtown.  The most interesting was the Pantheon.  I had a picture of the sunlight coming in though the hole in the top of the roof.  We also saw Hadrian’s column.  There was a nice picture of Alex in front of it.   The Tiber is a small river, but it is nice nearby.  Lots of sycamore trees.

We walked all along and came to the Vatican.  It is very clean and neat.  There are lots of things to see.  The Vatican museum has many of those famous works of art that you always see in books.  We also saw the Sistine Chapel.  There were big crowds.  We went to St. Peters.  I had various pictures.  It is an impressive place.   It rained hard that day.  My Goretex did okay.  Poor Alex was soaked worse, but he didn’t complain. 

The next day we went to outskirts of town.  Very nice gardens.  We also went to the Via Appia.  It is very pretty with interesting ruins all along.  This was the major highway to and from Rome and the the road where Jesus met St Peter as he was fleeing Rome during Nero’s pogrom.  Peter asks Jesus Quo Vadis (where are you going).  Jesus said he was going to Rome to be with his people. Peter went back to Rome where he was martyred by being crucified upside down.  A large part of the Roman road is a park available only to foot traffic.  Unfortunately, it is truly scary getting there on foot. The road is narrow and cars zoom along.  It scared the crap out of us.  Never again should we do something like that.  But once you get out of town, it is quiet and quaint.  One thing I like about Euro cities is that they end.  In the U.S. you would have endless suburbs.

We caught a bus back to town.  That was our last day in Rome.  I really don’t recall much about catching the train back to the airport.  I remember passing the Gypsy village again.

I am sad to lose the pictures of Alex in Rome.  It was one of the happy times of my life and I hope of his.  

Oh yeah.  We shared a room.  That boy can snore.  I had to stuff rags into my ears to be able to sleep.

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Useless Activities & Useful Idiots

Potlatch

The Pacific Northwest is blessed by nature with great fisheries, fertile soils, ample resources and a moderate climate.  People are drawn by that and by the natural beauty you see everywhere you look.  Living is good in the Northwest and it has been that way for a long time.  The Indians of the region were prosperous.   It didn’t take much effort to gather nuts & berries, hunt or fish in such a rich place and the inhabitants developed a fascinating custom called the potlatch.    The potlatch was a big feast where the host gave away, wasted or destroyed his possessions.    

Anthropologists have studied the phenomenon.   I first heard about it when I studied Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class.”   He used it as an example of a wasteful custom practiced by rich people to show their status.   According to the theory, the rich demonstrated their status by wasting what others don’t have. 

They are actually doing more.    The individual consistently doing the giving uses his ostensible generosity to establish dominance over the habitual recipient.  That is one reason why chronic recipients are often not very grateful for the largess they receive.   The potlatch demonstrates this too.   The rich chiefs made great public shows of generosity but they kept control of the productive assets.   The potlatch was a perverse variation of the old saying “give a man to fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for life.”  The fat-cats gave away fish but carefully kept the fishing grounds.   In a society w/o good storage facilities, giving away nature’s surplus bounty was about as generous as a tree shedding its leaves in fall.  

We find the same thing in today’s society.   Rich celebrities make big deals of their generosity, but they usually don’t change the equation.   There are exceptions.  The late Paul Newman was clearly a good man and it seems to me that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are really trying to do the right thing, but very often the rich assuage their consciences and demonstrate their status by holding high powered fund raisers and concerts for politically correct good causes.    It is more than ironic when they hold a million dollar gala to fight world poverty.

Useful Idiots

Back when some people still thought communism was a viable alternative to the free market, Kremlin leaders used to call them useful idiots.  They were people  in the West who went along with their communist aims w/o really understanding them .  In the current American context you have people who act as foot soldiers in the various anti-whatever demonstrations set up by radicals.    

The good thing about Portland is that it is tolerant and easy, but that also means that it has more than its share of listless young people with no visible means of support or obvious places to be.  They hang around the center of town and beg for money.  They even do this listlessly.   One woman complained to Mariza that she would be working but was being prevented by the Republicans.   I saw a lot of these sorts of young people gathering to protest against the war in Iraq.   I started to talk to a few of them but soon gave up.   They just don’t have the capacity to understand the nuances.   I felt like the character in the movie “the Time Machine,” the original one from the 1960s.   In one frustrating scene the guy tries to ask some questions and talk about serious issues but the vapid people of the distant future are just interested in their hedonistic pursuits.   Everything is provided to them and they have no idea where it comes from.

Most of the kids (a few of these “kids” BTW are still left over from the 1960s) hanging around the streets are probably harmless most of the time.   It is sort of like a “big Lebowski” club.   They don’t really do much of anything that smacks of effort besides Frisbee and hacky sack.   Mariza and I got a cup of hot chocolate at a local Starbucks and as we drank it watched a couple guys play hacky sack.  They were good.  You know that skill at hacky sack is inversely related to success in life.  Think about the time it takes to get good at something like that.   The same thing goes for lots of those sorts of things.   I had a colleague once who was the best player of minesweeper that I had ever seen.   She was not promoted.

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Good Things about Portland

Portland is a very well run and welcoming city.   A thing I especially liked was the ubiquitous bubblers.   I consider bubblers a sign of civic virtue.   Another unique feature is the free public transportation.   Yes – free, at least within the city.  That keeps down the traffic and makes the city more open.   

You notice but do not immediately comprehend that all the buildings in the downtown area have retail space on the street level and even the streets near tall buildings are tree lined.   This makes the city livelier and more pleasant.   Nothing is so depressing for a city street than to have it made into a canyon of blank walls.   I suppose the challenge is to keep stores in those many storefronts but it doesn’t have to be all retail.  There were things like Bally’s and some offices.

Mariza and I had supper at Jake’s Grill.  It was founded in the early part of the 20th Century.   A lot of the buildings are from around then.  They are well maintained.   We had lunch at Old Town Pizza.  Mariza wanted to go because she read that it was haunted.  According to the story the place is haunted by the ghost of a prostitute murdered by her employers after she tried to get out of the business.   I think they just made that up. 

Below is Mariza on the Portland street.  She saw a lot more of the city than I did, since she did not attend the tree farm conference.  I hope she will contribute an entry.

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Medieval Castles, Crusaders & Returning to Iraq

We drove from Jerash a dozen kilometers and eight centuries to the castle at Ajloun.   It was built in 1184 by the Muslims to secure local iron mines and as a counter to the Crusader castle at Belvoir, across the plains.  They say you can see Belvoir from Ajloun, but the day was a little too hazy in that direction for that, or maybe we didn’t look in the right spot.  If you notice the picture up top is very clear sky. That is looking NE.  I don’t know why there was so much haze to the west.

Ajloun never fulfilled its original purpose.  Saladin defeated the Crusaders at the battle of the Horns of Hattin in 1189, which was the beginning of their expulsion from the region.  Castles are interesting to look at and sometimes beautiful, but it is well to remember that they were part of a military technology.  Before the advent of accurate cannon, it was very difficult to capture a well defended castle.  It was a real force multiplier and also a potent psychological symbol of the power and control. 

This castle looks like others I have seen.  It is a little less sophisticated than those I saw in Poland or Germany since it is an earlier version than most of those.  The most sophisticated castle I have ever seen in the Teutonic Knight’s castle at Malbork in Northern Poland.  That one is made of bricks, however, not stone.

below are some pines on the landscape. I think they are Turkish or Alleppo pines, but I am not very good at identifying such species.  Some of them almost look like my loblolly pines.

Ajloun is situated on a hilltop with wonderful views of the surrounding area.  The area here is semi-arid, but it supports olive, apricot and pistachio groves as well as significant pine forests.  As you can see from the pictures, it is a pleasant countryside.

As I write this, the pleasant countryside is a pleasant memory.   I am on my way back to Al Asad.   Right now I am stuck in Baghdad, in the Internet café waiting.  I have learned that I cannot get a flight to AA until Tuesday and then I have to go a circuitous route, on rotary wing, so I figure there will certainly be a dust storm somewhere to strand me in some shit hole along the way.   I have decided to go down to Kuwait instead.   I have a good chance of getting there tonight and then I have a better chance of catching a fixed wing flight to Al Asad.   The longer way sometimes leads faster home.  Wish me luck. It is going to be a long trip no matter what.

I am looking forward to getting back to work at Al Asad.  The work is usually interesting, even if conditions are sometimes challenging. There is still a lot for me to do in my last months.  I read the news about improvements in Iraq.  Casualties are way down for both Iraqis and Americans.  I think we are going to succeed here in Iraq put we have to finish our job and I have to finish mine.  Less than four months to do.  Hard to believe.  Time flies when you are having fun.