Far Western States

ALONG THE WAY
Speaking as a westerner…if California could truly be classified as the true west--some would doubt it, and leave it hanging off the Pacific seaboard along with Oregon and Washington as well… I have a yen, a yearn, a hanker for those states west of the 100th meridian. But to get there Truman and I had to cross six fat states so we decided to visit some of the spots missed on former journeys. Poor Truman had a swollen toe and a limp I now suspect was from snakebite so he was taken care of by a vet near Hungry Mother, one of Virginia’s manicured state parks. We had time during his recovery to hear shocking stories about dozens of dogs abandoned in parks and got to play with two recently rescued Bishon Frese fuzzy puppies.

TENNESSEE, PILLAR TO POST
A mama bear with tiny triplets who loved to horse around by pulling each other out of trees, wrestling, tumbling and playing keep-away was the first thing seen at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which were indeed smoky-hazy, especially deep inside the park’s grand valleys and vistas. Moving through lengthy Tennessee (500 miles from end to end and past Crump, TN, a town completely devoted to being one big yard sale), we stopped at David Crockett State Park and enjoyed a visitor’s center furnished with the kind of still he used in his successful fiery-spirits business. Old Davy, angered at the government’s liquor tax later took the squirrel off his head and became a Representative from Tennessee to put to rights what he felt was an un-American tax.

With Shelby Foote’s book “Shiloh” close at hand, that critical battlefield near Corinth was our goal in this state. Notably free of hundreds of 19th century memorials that mark other Civil War sites, the Hornet’s Nest, Sunken Road, the spot where General Johnston fell, Bloody Pond and the other ten points of this terrible battle of April 6th and 7th 1862 on the paved loop were alive with birdsong. A southern sun blazed down on the Peach Orchard where little twiggy peach trees are being planted in rows in the exact spot where ancient ones were destroyed by canister and shot. Soldiers said that peach blossoms “fell like snow.” There were nearly twenty-four thousand casualties during those two days, fully one-fourth of the 100,000 combined troops. They say of all the Civil War battlefields, it is at Shiloh where the now-quiet fields next to the Tennessee River most closely resemble the way it was.

OKLAHOMA, OK
Hard to find but well worth it was the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City with its brilliant exhibits of cowboy delights and thorough historical display of all aspects of life in the west, including the reproduction of a little town. Old cowboy movies reminding me of a thousand Saturday matinees flickered away in a little movie house as Hollywood’s version of western philosophy was repeated time and time again. Amid good paintings, fine sculpture and an excellent history of the American Indian there was a really funny blobby note: In the donor hall stood row upon row of almost identical and wretchedly sculpted donor heads looking like cypress knees sticking out of a swamp…some thanks to patrons for bankrolling one of the most interesting museums in the West.

O MY GOD, WEST TEXAS
On any long trip you’re going to find miserable stretches of road…one of them is Interstate 40 out of Oklahoma City to the armpit of America, Amarillo, Texas. Little RV bucked, swayed, creaked, groaned, moaned and resisted (or was that me?) as the prairie wind yanked at the wheel and blasted her broad sides like a million semi’s. We made a rickrack path down old 40’s rutted, bulging, indifferent surface while having enamel shaken off teeth, and were accompanied by a symphony of knocks, pops, squeaks and chirps at the road’s separated sections every four feet. The white sky trembled with faraway tornados…so flat and no more green. Snowy egrets huddled with their cattle sponsors next to fences and in corners for insect relief, and the crushed corpses of little prehistoric-looking armadillos began to be seen alongside the highway.

NEW MEXICO IN FLORA, EARTH SCULPTURE AND CLOUD
It seemed like a sudden transition…the endless flat gold land of West Texas to deep red earth polka- dotted with forest green, juniper, delicate sage and a hundred other subtle colors offset with faraway, decorative blue mesas…it was beautiful New Mexico...not technically the Far West but appreciated and well-loved. Had a palooka of a nosebleed on the Turquoise Trail and after hours of it, was escorted to a fire station EMT who looked just like Jimmy Smits. He put it all to rights with ice packs and proper nostril pressure before I continued on to another of the lovely scenic byways common in this area, Rt. 550 out of Albuquerque to Durango, part of the way along the Nacimento Mountains over the Continental Divide. In every direction were yellow groundsel, coral bells, orange Indian paintbrush and blue, purple and white wildflowers making a nursery of color all the way to Navajo Lakes where huge cottonwoods with tractor-tire bark shaded fly fishermen casting into the San Juan River. A Navajo family shared their campsite with me because all were taken on this popular weekend.

What a drive! Prosperous, pregnant, exuberant clouds overhead rivaled the living earth sculptures, some with leghorn yellow tops and ebony bottoms, or bone colored with red clawed feet, others like chocolate cream tortes. The clouds seemed full of their own versions of the same stories told by the rocks and hills, while everything was anchored by those profuse wildflowers accenting a basically green-scheme of jade, forest, and pea.

COLORADO FRIENDS AND A WILD RIDE
I was headed for Inge and Jack Silton’s home in Durango, a Colorado town where everyone wants to be for all the fun and beauty of it. With my usual little pigtail of cars and trucks now appearing more westernly with additions of hay wagons, tractors and even mule back riders, I pulled over frequently to watch the entertainment flow by.

Durango still has the Silverton Railroad, a narrow-gauge, open car choo-choo that took Inge and me up the Animas (River of Lost Souls) to the little19th century mining town at the end. We hung over the rails for nearly four hours of glorious mountain scenery alongside the bouncy, chattering river, sometimes braved by kayaks and rafts and became black with smokestack grit, blue with cold and ravenous with appetite. Never has a hamburger tasted so good -- which we had when Jack and dogs met us at the end of the line. Then another thrilling ride north from Silverton over the San Miguel and San Juan Mountains past “Red Mountain” colored a rusty scarlet by ore minerals, to Ouray, a hot springs mountain town. We told many stories at the dinner table until late into the night bringing the sweetest close to a happy visit.

MESA VERDE CLIFF DWELLERS
Fortified with friendship, Truman and I revisited Mesa Verde pueblo ruins at the MV National Park, now with restrictions of movement made necessary by increased tourist hordes. Delicate clay structures cling to their moorings under eyebrow ledges of limestone… apartment houses for ancient families nimbly living for ten centuries in this arid land. These cliff settlements, built around 1250 A.D., were a frantic move from open canyon living to nearly inaccessible rock dwellings. They offered defense and protection for only a little while before they were abandoned by 1300 a.d. due to internal warfare, violence and cannibalism. Apparently, goon squads, massacres, society-wide paranoia, starvation and a 23-year drought brought on the “push” that prompted the Anasazi to flee south and east. There was also the “pull” of the Kachina Cult of Mesoamerican origin they adopted which offered as many as 400 deities who interceded with the gods to ensure rain and fertility. Descendents of the Anasazi are today’s Pueblo Indians, such as the Hopi and the Zuni, who live in 20 communities along the Rio Grande, in Arizona and in New Mexico. In the old days, by the 10th and 11th centuries, Chaco Canyon, in western New Mexico, was the cultural center of 30,000 square miles of Anasazi homeland.* Despite their desperate seven-century fight to avoid genocide in crisis after crisis, most of their traditions of language, religion and craft have survived.

*David Roberts, “Riddles of the Anasazi,” Smithsonian, July, 2003

BUGS
Now, being an expert on bites, I have to talk with you about insects. I have been the bitee of every bug with a proboscis from Maine to California, including target-bestowing ticks, hornets, bees, wasps, no-see-ums, mosquitoes, fleas, biting flies and chiggers, but none have been as bad as the wretched cedar gnats of the West. They make big ulcerated sores that burn and itch like Hades and look like leprosy. Avoid them. Don’t wear blue, yellow, red or white. Apply Deet, no perfumes; bring gallons of Benedryl, alcohol and ice. Lotsa luck!

UTAH, LOOKING INTO INNER-EARTH
By this time I was agog to see the five big National Parks in Southern Utah starting with Canyonlands National Park on the state’s southeastern flank. All five look completely different from each other, but are equally splendid awe-inspiring geological forms sculpted when ancient oceans receded, leaving a base of salt and limestone. Nearby mountains pushed up and leached red minerals onto beach sand blown in over millions of years. Ancient rivers, now known as the Colorado and the Green, eroded the forms while wind, rain and ice carved them. Now, that is a grossly simplified explanation of what happened scientifically, but you have to see them artistically to pay the homage they deserve. It was at a remote spot in Canyonlands this year where an experienced hiker was trapped for 5 days by falling rock and had to sever his own hand above the wrist in order to survive.

You go through the Morman town of Moab, Utah to get to Arches National Park, my very favorite. Why? It had everything: dazzling monoliths, tender arches, sweeping vistas, petroglyphs, quiet glades and the absolutely last available campsite…all gone by 9:30 a.m. Between hikes Truman and I rested and read “People of the Valley” by Frank Waters. Being in an RV might be something like weighing 500 pounds. You can get to the major places but not really to the secret, interesting and restricted areas you’re dying to see. There are NO RVs warnings everywhere but we drove in anyway…risking it.
.
And was it ever worth it. Driving with a finger and a knee while dangling out the driver’s seat window with the camcorder, I photographed wrinkled rocks in fantastic forms adorned with tapestry-like etchings. Folds, pleats, towers, fans in unending glory at Capitol Reefs National Park along its scenic canyon drive. On the way, from Arches to Capitol Reefs, there is a 25 mile round-trip Scenic Road which includes a hair-raising jaunt on a teeny land bridge over a place called Capitol Gorge, something you just have to do to believe you’ve done it. Another stunning drive is on All-American Highway Route 12 south from Capitol Reefs toward Bryce, certainly one of the most beautiful in the world. That drive takes you up on top of 10,000 foot Boulder Mountain where a million tall aspen reach for the sky on thin white ballerina legs.

I liked the name Kodachrome Basin State Park and stayed there a night but couldn’t walk far in 100+ degree heat; Truman burned his toes. Unique hoodoos shaped by calcite flowing into geyser holes which then eroded blossom here, but we were distracted by the nasty cedar gnat bites and a large party of German tourists celebrating the moon until the wee hours. Had to chuckle when group of camping kids parked next to them were awake and yelling around at 5:30 a.m. I loved nearby Bryce National Park for its miles and miles of castellated amphitheaters recalling golden scenes from “Lord of The Rings.”

Little Mormon settlements and a bright red canyon lined the 90 miles from Bryce to Zion. But so much ado when there: "twenty dollars please"—right, left and center, from entrance fees to tunnel fees, camping fees, hiking fees, shuttles only…don’t do this, that or anything else. Yikes. But underneath it all…so lovely, and so glad it’s there—protected and paid for.

All these hikes we’ve taken—along miles and miles of peachy sand—often following revealing footprints, not to mention paw prints, have been intriguing. If I were a detective or on one of the many CSI teams I could identify my suspect easily by the evidence presented in the sand: size, sex, wealth, age, health, personality and sometimes even character snooped out through a foot’s imprinted and cryptic messages.

ARIZONA, THE GRANDEST CANYON
If you have a choice, go to the North Rim and stay at DeMott Forest Service Campground, the very best so far. You will be surrounded by aspen groves and huge orange-barked Ponderosa Pines. Go to Imperial Point and Angels Peak to get the idea of an upside-down mountain so you can experience the Grand Canyon as an opening into inner earth, a vast colored crack 277 miles long, its outer brim lined with you’s and me’s straining to see inside and trying not to misapprehend.

Though there are only ten miles as the crow flies from rim to rim, it is a long, long drive around the canyon to get to the other side...part of the 215 miles go past the Vermillion Cliffs, in Navajo country, where 18th century priests conducted mapping and surveying parties and many lost their lives in the everlasting search for water. The South Rim is a different story altogether…jammed with people, touristy in nature, restricted in access. But the canyon itself is a hazy splendor oblivious to human regulation.

Am I getting jaded, road weary, uppity? Where was the sublime in the Oak Creek Canyon I once crooned over? What on earth happened to the charm of Sedona where my mom lived for over twenty years? All so changed into upscale strip malls I didn’t linger but drove on through Prescott, Clarkdale (yes, that’s the CGAs copper king, William Clark), darling little Jerome and up over the mountain, coasting the rest of the way into my natal state, always in my heart, home sweet other home.

CALIFORNIA, WHERE IT'S AT
I just couldn’t get over the rock formations at Joshua Tree National Park and must have taken over 50 photographs of their bun-like shapes and of the soft heathery colors of the true desert surrounding them. The Cholla Cactus Garden in the Pinto Basin was thick with teddy bear cholla whose ability to throw off its barbs commands a great deal of respect. The odd Joshua tree, thought to be so-named for the outstretched arms of the Biblical prophet beckoning Mormons to a promised land, can grow to 50 feet and live 700 years. I was shaken beyond description at the 2-G ascent from desert floor to 7,000 feet within a few miles at a 16% grade over the San Bernardino Mountains, trying to get to Big Bear Lake from the east where Jim was waiting at Wolf Cottage, a pretty highlands house rented for ten days from a friend.

THE SAD TRUTH
And now that I am freshly reminded, it is time to confess to you that in every one of these RV journeys through all 48 states, over all those mountains, rivers, deserts, plains, skinny bridges and roads wide enough only for motorcycles, on highways totally unfit for human travel, through cities haunted by crazy people in cars, after 36,000 miles of driving a blimp, I never, ever got used to it and was terrified most of the time behind the wheel. True, my elbow sometimes found its way to a resting spot on the window sill, especially when I was belting out country songs, but it didn’t mean I was ever really, really relaxed and white knuckles were always the color of the day. So, don’t do it.

I must say, it’s fun just to lie about and not worry about mileage, maps, time tables or where your next meal is coming from. Southern California weather lived up to its balmy reputation at Big Bear Lake, a busy ski resort town near enough to L.A. for weekends, and ten perfect days floated by like feathers on a breeze.

CALIFORNIA EAST
It was another lengthy drive up Route 395 fighting brown valley smog, past China Lake’s Naval Weapons Center, through arid wilderness into Death Valley National Park’s Panamint Springs. The heart of Death Valley has indescribable beauty: alluvial fans stretch out for miles from their mosaic mother mountains; smudged mineral hues make up a pastel dream on Artist’s Drive; Dante’s View presented a classic otherworldly vista; gorgeous Zabriskie Point offered patterns and textures from lava flows that strained the imagination, and the Devil’s Golf Course was a sea of salts that stuck up like fangs.

I found old Harmony Borax Works 20-mule team wagons with seven-foot-tall wheels and peeked into reconstructed hovels where Chinese laborers had so-called lived. It was 116 hammering degrees at 9 a.m. and a gallon of gas was available at $3.15. Truman wanted to stay in with the a/c, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

From the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, at -282 feet below sea level, to the highest in the lower 48 states at 14,494 feet is not a great distance. Away we went, west to ex-hippy Lone Pine, nestling at the foot of soaring, saw-toothed Mount Whitney and *Hopalong Cassidy’s Alabama Hills (where I kibitzed endlessly to the patient Visitor Center staff about CGA’s Mount Corcoran), then turned due north again along the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada with the mountains a comforting sidekick all the way to Yosemite and beyond. A touch of the cap to artist Albert Bierstadt, whose 19th century work in so many places on this journey captured grandeur like no other. Manzanar National Historical Site where ten-thousand Japanese-Americans were locked up for three years during WWII would break your heart. Little pagoda-shaped stone guardhouses and some rubble provide a history lesson urgently needed in today’s world.

*Don’t tell me you don’t remember old Hoppy in his white hat! What was that horse’s name?

YOSEMITE
At the foot of Yosemite’s eastern entrance lies alkaline Mono Lake, a weird place littered with delicate tufas, calcium carbonate deposits that grow like chia-pets in the Sailor Blue water if you leave them alone and, against a roaring sunset, look like every science fiction novel Ray Bradbury ever wrote--definitely your idea of the dark side of the moon. By now, one is getting used to earth’s strange beauty, but what can prepare you for Yosemite’s Indian Red mountains streaked with Sugar White, sprinkled with Hunter’s Green and each one dangling its feet into Cobalt Blue lakes? At 10,000 feet, Tioga Pass is a heavy-breather and the little RV gathered quite a queue. But what’s the big rush? In surroundings like this we should be crawling on our knees, not racing to the finish. Tuolumne Meadows Campground was packed with socially idyllic groups of Benetton-Californians brimming with cheerfulness: great to meet you, glad to be here, where did you say you went to school? Pass the wineskin, let’s hike! Me, too. All my latent native- California traits suddenly appeared, lending a sparkle of warmth to the experience of rediscovery.

There wasn’t a chance I would leave this park without seeing every little thing, and so I did, though it cost 300 tough miles in one day. Unforgettable Glacier Point lay at the end of a narrow screwball road so treacherous I had to pull over 24 times. But, hey, look what was at the end: a panorama of silver monoliths rising from green-gladed valleys thousands of feet below, refreshed by white horsetail falls catapulting down from the top to meet them. The same totally rewarded effort also goes for the tiny grove of Giant Sequoias that the park jealously nurtures.

You have work to see them, they live at the bottom of a steep incline so that you are laddering two miles down and back up, but oh, there’s nothing like them in the world. Some lie on their sides as long and large as freight trains, forty feet in diameter. Their distinctive cinnamon-colored bark up to two feet thick and weights of two million pounds proclaim these titans to be among the world’s most massive living things. Some brag that a tree this size could provide a village of 50 six-room houses. Their spongy and fibrous bark is loaded with insect-proof tannin, doesn’t rot and is as fireproof as asbestos. They have no sap at all. Inside, the wood is a salmon pink that weathers to burgundy. About the only things that could topple a tree like this (other than man, of course) are a change of climate, earthquakes and erosion.

At one end of the fallen goliath I studied was a fan of roots that must have measured an acre but didn’t have a taproot. A mature tree like that one, at least 500 years old, and possibly five times that age, can reach heights of 350 feet and more. Though their teeny-weeny pinhead seeds can hardly take root—in fact, the odds against them are a billion to one—they are capable of reproducing themselves if left alone. As you know, great effort was put forth by lumber companies to wipe them off the face of the earth…and still is being made, kids…they are now nominally protected and are modestly starting to increase in number, so we can look forward to 5004 A.D.

GOLD, GRAFT AND GODLESS
There were no trees at all in Bodie, a rootin’ tootin’ mid-19th century unrestored ghost town at the end of a washboard road, now beautifully preserved as one of California’s countless state parks. The gambling, vice and violence that blazed nightly in this gold boomtown is still evident in the carefully placed artifacts in each of the 170 remaining buildings. I expected a chair to come crashing out a window any moment. In fact, a famous diary entry made by a little girl moving there prayed, “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.” Wandering in the hillside cemetery noting sentiments and Victorian design will remind you of a dozen stories by Bret Harte, Mark Twain and Jack London.

GROWING UP
I know those stories because my brothers, girlfriends and I grew up in a happy valley filled with orchards and groves nestled somewhere between purple mountain’s majesty and crashing, rugged shore. It was northeast of Sacramento with its wedding-cake capitol, right smack on the American River and near century-old gold fields of the mother lode with place names like Hangtown, Angels Camp, Pokerville and Fiddletown. We lived in a cornucopia of “u-name-it” fruits, nuts and vegetables, everything from apricots to pomegranates, from olives to walnuts. Our Bing cherries were as large as hen’s eggs, date palms as tall as redwoods, eucalyptus as fragrant as frankincense. We were always in a tree, lunching on bounty. Our talented mothers kept gardens that looked like state fair displays with vegetables and flowers vying for a first place ribbon. Not all that difficult when you live in a rural paradise blessed with eternal sunshine and fine, rich charcoal soil that responded like Jack’s beanstalk to a little encouragement.

In our family the attractive parents had three criteria for their children: be beautiful in face and form, work hard, be humble. Scoring a big zero on all three, especially #s one and three, I dreamed on the family fringes and spent all my waking hours playing "Pretend." When I couldn’t find a baby animal to play Heidi with me, I turned to paper dolls embellished with dramatic lifestyles picked up in Zane Grey novels. Later, it was getting lost in my books and, always, always in the movies where mannerisms, modes, mores, humor and romantic love was available to any little kid for the adaptation. We were all products of a “back-in-the-day” California school system which was then a light unto the path of public education in our country, and each shared a vaguely Protestant spiritual source. In high school I pulled my nose out of books long enough to admire and empathize with the electrifying teenage lives of my cute and popular girlfriends. I want to tell you all this by way of introduction. Those dear old girlfriends and I were about to blend once again in a Lake Tahoe B& B for the better part of a week.

REUNION
There was Barbie D and Jill (otherwise known as Little Bear and Baby Bear – see Trip #5), Carole (otherwise known as Creoly) and Lynna Jo (nicknamed Kid). I can tell you what we did; describe the walks, idle conversations of richness and pleasure, dinners, drives, laughing half the night, the rivers of shared tears, moseying through historical homes, the dazzling boat ride on the sapphire lake with its emerald bays. But how do I tell you what it meant to each of us to be transparent in our honesty, able to shed a camouflage of scars accumulated by our minds and bodies through just plain living? We all felt blessed in comforts of complete acceptance by friends with whom we shared a heritage. People who have known your parents and even grandparents can provide the sympathetic warmth we all hunger for and feel sincere compassion about what was to become of us all. This haven supplied broad shoulders, shared joy, generosity, tenderness and, most of all:

a sense of sanctuary that is the essence of love

- John Gardner

There was plenty of time to reflect, chuckle and mourn as Truman and I drove on. Here was Squaw Valley where we skied as kids; over there, Donner Pass where the Reed family suffered so; on and on through the Sierra Nevada foothills and into central valley farmland where we saw golden waves of grain and miles of Italian-American fruit grower’s farms. We camped at Mt. Shasta; saw a bear, a snake and another darling town. We drove north over Grants Pass into Oregon, then curved back down into California to the Del Norte Redwoods National Park at Mill Creek to see the enormous old-growth redwood stumps thirty and forty feet in diameter in, around and among every campsite. Truman was denied them but I was able to take otherworldly hikes through ancient coastal redwood forests, filming all the way. Then, a don’t-miss-this visit to still-lovely Prairie Creek State Park and its excruciating drive to Gold Bluffs Beach and Fern Canyon. Every bump and grind was worth the reward: lonely elk bachelors on the beach soon trumped by the entire herd of close to 100 elk family members parading over the sand. Truman was in surf and sand heaven.

Another dreamy sight was Cape Blanco, Oregon. One of the best of the many Oregon state parks, this one was located on a bluff overlooking monolithic rocks, shell-filled beaches, a lighthouse and a prairie. At Cape Lookout State Park' s wide beach up the coast we joined dozens of people and dogs who were sitting on cast up logs waiting for the sun to set beyond the horizon. When it did, spontaneous applause broke out.

COASTAL OREGON
My grandparents lived on the Alsea River near Waldport, Oregon for many years. Our family (their eldest child’s) had the most delightful memories of visiting there: crayfish hot pots, reunions, chicken coops, apple orchards and the sweetest peas in Grandma’s garden. My cousin, Sally, and I had high hopes of looking up the remnants of Dell and Lillian Willis’s twenty-two grandchildren, most of whom we had never even met. But it was not meant to be so I bought Gma & Gpa a memorial brick at the lively Newport Aquarium to commemorate both their Oregon presence for over forty years, and those wonderful summer stopovers. On Rt. 101, the coast fringe road to Alsea we would pass a private Sea Lion Emporium and beg our dad to stop…you know the routine: “Please, please, please Dad, we’ll be good…pleeeeeease!” And etc. But we never did stop, either to see the sea lions or our childish wrangling for moral authority. However, right now there was only Truman here to deny this long-awaited pleasure, and he was taking a nap.

Sea Lion Caves are well worth your time because you get to be Jacques Cousteau or imagine yourself a Darwin visiting the Galapagos and witnessing sea lion life as it truly is, way down where surf crashes into caves and hundreds of slick brown bodies flop around on rocks while bellowing for one thing or another…come to think of it, just like family vacations at the beach! Fort Clatsop on the Columbia River was a real highlight of the trip. As a fan of Lewis and Clark and avid reader of their journals, stories about them, narratives and films, I was thrilled to see a fine reproduction of the fort they had built upon reaching their Pacific Ocean goal in 1805. Good interpreters made the scene even more realistic with demonstrations of rifle loading and shot plus explanations of the Corps of Discovery’s tribulations during their wintering-over months here. This included enthusiastic description of the inevitable results of the Corps’s indiscriminate venereal assignation with local ladies (but not by the Captains!).

WASHINGTON AND NORTHERN IDAHO
After a couple of blowouts as scary as drive-bys, the little RV was outfitted with six brand new shoes, ready in every way to tackle the hefty return trip after our next stop in Lacey, Washington. That is where my perfect, witty, beautiful, one-and-only niece lives with her adorable family. Loaded up on love there and headed for majestic Mt. Rainier where I soaked up more awesome views at Cougar Rock and beyond. The tip-top of Idaho was a blur except for a pretty city with a name like a dessert, Coeur d’Alene, and a sparkling morning at the confluence of the Kootenai and Moyie rivers where bald eagles circled looking for a fishy breakfast. I had been looking forward to seeing the Nez Perce and their Appaloosa horses in Eastern Idaho but took one of several wrong turns and wasn’t to find them until two more states went by. And then, at long last, we were at Glacier National Park.

MONTANA, ALMOST INDESCRIBABLE
Classical description of this entire Rocky Mountain region as a “geological wonderland,” the “Crown of the Continent,” “a festival of alpine glory” and much more is best summed up by the editors of Time in a forty-year-old introduction to their reissue of “The Big Sky,” written by A.B. Guthrie and originally published in 1947:

Ever since Lewis and Clark, writers had tried to describe the mountain world, its lonely expanse, its mystery and enchantment, its magnetic attraction and the lurking sense of fear that it generated. But the weakness of all this writing was that the most extravagant accounts fell far short of the astounding reality. The writers invariably lapsed into purple prose: the literature of the Rockies dwindles away into monotonous references to sublime vistas, grand and majestic panoramas, sunsets beyond compare and sunrises touching the distant peaks with unearthly beauty…

GUILTY! It is undeniable that yours truly is in love with her adjectives, commas and run-on sentences, also with superlatives of every shape and constantly looks for landscape to paste them to. You, gentle reader, are to be commended for your indulgence of vivid prosy in search of adequate description.

I know that most of you have seen the places I describe in these “Notes,” and hope my experiences coincide with some of your memories, too. The famous 50-mile “Going to the Sun Road” at Glacier is a lifeline threading through stirring Technicolor views of 1,600 square miles belonging to this park. It’s a non-stop show that will take your breath away. Because the road no longer accepts even little RVs, I was the front seat shuttle passenger of a misanthropic driver nicknamed “Mike the Hiker.” As Mike groused about civilization and its residents in general, I emitted strangled cries of shock and awe at what I was seeing and begged this sour boy to stop, or at least slow down at regular intervals. He tore over the road as I hung out the window from McDonald Lake to St. Mary’s Lake and back, through falls, passes, glacial lakes, hanging gardens and trailheads. We saw no fewer than twelve wild animals! There was my first full-grown bighorn sheep right in the road, and a grizzly bear, several black bear, a dot I called a moose, and even mountain goats. What a thrill.

The glaciers in the park, all remnants of a minor ice age that occurred about 4,000 years ago, have melted back drastically during the last hundred years of persistent global-warming. There are only 50 or so left and melting fast.

MOUNTAIN MEN IN A LONG PARAGRAPH
Grouchy old Mike and his complaints reminded me of many if not most of the early western mountain men whose characters easily withstood months and years of solitary living in the Rocky Mountains. Men like Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Jedediah Smith, Hugh Glass and a few others are the true unsung heroes of the West, much more so than the movie-inspired cult of the cowboy, however well-seated in rodeo. Mountain men, so unheralded and reclusive, were heroes, not for their occupations as buffalo hunters or for trapping the beaver to extinction, nor even as wilderness guides, but because of the extreme hazards they daily overcame to be able to live an idyllic life in this untamed sanctuary. They had to deal with pitiless weather, hostile Indians, terrible distances, the killer-effects of whiskey, illness, cheating traders and the unknown intentions of other trappers. They never made any money, but all they really needed were good horses, guns and traps. Everything else they made themselves or traded for it. They used their mythic virtues to survive: courage, strength, endurance, wiliness, pride, resourcefulness and intimacy with nature. At mountain rendezvous like Jackson Hole, the collective mountain man would sing, dance, gamble, drink, fornicate, race horses, play at rough games, trade, get current information and generally get his fill of human companionship for another two years. The mountain man lasted only one generation (roughly 1815-1845) and left no surviving record or documentation, not surprising since they were usually illiterate and silent, leaving no tracks of any kind behind. He was the first, a legitimate descendent of backwoods leatherstockings like Daniel Boone. Those who came after him, the sod buster, cavalryman, lumberjack, railroader or early litterbugs like the covered-wagon pioneers and forty-niners all nurtured their own stories and have been recognized in song, myth and movie ever since.

The only ones who really knew him were the Indian tribes they often wintered with. Crow, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Nez Perce and Sioux were companions, teachers, wives and worthy foes. These tribes, often decimated by diseases brought to them by traders had sharpened their vigilance since the 1804-6 Lewis and Clark expedition. Their lives and territorial range were still their own then, before wars and broken treaties crowded them into reservations.

Truman and I were intensely pleased with life as we swept down the shining valley of the Garnet Range into Deer Lodge with its historic prison (including a theater donated by William Clark’s son), a huge 19th century ranch now a National Historic Site, and the National Bison Range. The Bitterroot Mountain Range near Lima contained a peak colored and shaped like no other, not so far from the Lemhi Pass, that had to be photographed a dozen times.

But I was in a rush to meet lovely, gentle Jessica, studying as a freshman coed at BYU, Idaho before she flew east for a Cape Cod vacation. I made it on time despite a tearing electrical storm over the sage-filled desert (which made me hungry for turkey dressing) and we packed a week into one joyful day.

WYOMING, OUT OF THIS EARTH
We came at Wyoming’s radiant northeast corner like a bear to honey from the south, alongside the writhing Snake River with its boatloads of squealing tourists running the rapids every 5 minutes, through an unrecognizable Jackson, now packed with people who wouldn’t know a trap line from a clothesline, and wouldn’t recognize one of those, either.

One wondered at the rapacity of small business, but wished the folks all the joy of their vacations as we entered the safety zone of the stunning Teton Range. Straight up from Jackson’s Hole valley floor rises a cathedral of peaks, three of which are named Teewinot, Grand, and Owen. They certainly don’t resemble a bosom unless it’s Madonna’s torpedo bra, but are likely so-named because of an overheated French mountain man’s imagination. And there, at the Snake River Lookout made famous by Ansel Adams, was a huge mother moose and her big baby munching watery foliage that was thriving in the three-month growing season. There were elk all over the roads inside Yellowstone National Park. People stopped their cars to stumble after them with cameras…me too. It was something like the holy cattle we hear about in India…honored, revered and feared.

YELLOWSTONE
Truman had a Dr. Seuss Dog Party at Old Faithful where a thousand snarling tourists and their sweet-natured pets were gathered to watch the earnest effort of the ancient ritual: First the overture: agilmente…gurgle, splash, plop…then the crescendo furioso…roar, fume, spray…finally the diminuendo delicato…murmur, tinkle, babble. This trustworthy geyser and its 125 nearby cousins get their energy from water seepage collected in goose-neck pools heated by a seething mass of molten lava located not very far under our pudgy little feet. And just in case you’d really like to know—it all happened 640,000 years ago when indescribable volcanic eruptions caused this surface of ground to collapse and form a giant caldera, thus producing the world’s largest collection of geysers, hot springs, mud pots, fumeroles and other geothermal superstars, just like on New York City streets.

Even the naples-yellow stones of Inspiration Point overlooking the supreme spectacle of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone were caused by hot water and steam. On a good day the bottle-green river spills 60,000 gallons of water a minute over the Lower Falls. You know this incredible sight from Thomas Moran’s mighty efforts to put it all on canvas, impressing Congress to take steps to save it from destruction forevermore by making Yellowstone the world’s first national park in 1872.

In all my visits to Yellowstone over the years I had never been to the travertine terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs. Here, still-growing Opal Terrace and Minerva Terrace host elk families in winter when they nestle up on the eerie theater platforms, steam rising all around. Large, beautifully built graystone buildings form a little city nearby, remnants of Fort Yellowstone, a U.S. Army base that protected the park from 1886 to 1916.

PARADISE
And then, a motor trip to remember all your life: Rt. 212 East across the Blacktail Deer Plateau, past the glittering black face of Obsidian Cliff and petrified forests of maple, sycamore, magnolia and redwood all turned to stone by volcanic eruption. Mountain man John Colter, originally a valuable member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, first reported these fossils and claimed that the forests contained petrified birds singing petrified songs—(too much grog, I think). On and on, along bubbling Soda Butte Creek through the amazing Lamar Valley with its herds of wild buffalo, moose, coyote and bear.

Fortified by Huevos Rancheros at the lofty Roosevelt Lodge and a chewbone for Truman, we tackled the Absaroka Range with its peaks named Druid, Thunderer, Barronette and Abiathar, up and up over the pinnacle known as the Bear's Tooth, cresting at nearly 10,000 feet in the air. Charles Kuralt called the Beartooth Highway "The Most Beautiful Road in America" and you'll be first in line to agree. It contorts itself in a series of switchbacks (at one point on the eastern slope dropping 6,000 feet in ten miles) that reveal a panorama of glaciers, lakes, peaks, valleys, waterfalls, canyon-cutting rivers, flowery meadows and forests sprinkled with snow. The air is thin on top and you can imagine pack trains struggling to breathe through the passes, looking for Index and Pilot peaks, two soaring, ragged horns used for centuries as landmarks.

You’ll be ready for grog yourself at the end of this unparalleled 100-mile wonderland and will find it a-plenty in Red Lodge, Montana, an authentic little town in the very heart of the true West. It has become a little self-conscious in the past 25 years or so and probably no longer has bodies of tipplers littering their restaurant floors as the boys and I saw back in ’76.

Just outside of Red Lodge on the back road to Cody I spotted the first of several signs advertising “The Best Banana Cream Pie in the World!” Always ready for an adventure in food, I was ravenous by the time I arrived in the tiny ghost town where the old Smith Mine Disaster had cleared the citizens away. My pie was truly the very best in the world and I didn’t eat just one slice, either. The baker, who should be the Bakery Chef du Supreme at the Hotel Ritz, was generous in the extreme, but she wouldn’t give me the secret ingredient in her recipe for love nor money. Savoring the perfectly blended flavors helped me rev up my musing gene for the long, lonely drive down the eastern slope of the Beartooth Mountains to Buffalo Bill’s wild and wooly Cody, Wyoming:

Musings

Quaking Aspens that inspired a poem from me because of their Hollywood beauty, excitable leaves, rather useless wood, resemblance to Colonial soldiers with leggings, victims in bandages, and Degas Ballerinas in tights sagging a little at the knee.
Wondering who determines where the scenic turnouts should be and wanting to know that person—good eye!
Battling strong headwinds along the Vermillion Cliffs through Navajo country, dust devils everywhere among Indian outposts like little forts, shimmering through a golden gauze of dust.
The old saying about a trail: “The best way to preserve it and to keep it alive is to walk on it, because when you do you create it again.”
Ten bone-white cows in deep aqua-green grasses.
Pebbles on the sand at Lake McDonald that were all different colors like trail mix sprinkled on a peanut butter beach.
Of the thousands of cars that have passed me, the most surreal was the parade of antique cars, one after another, including a Model T, a DeSoto Woody, and I’m not fibbing, an ancient hearse!
The cute towns of Bolivar, TN, Ellis, KS, Jerome, AZ, and Florence, OR..Moving neck and neck with a mile-long train bearing three engines and covered front to back in graffiti.
The bizarre but beautiful Banana Slugs on the trail in Oregon.
Feeling like a soaring bird over mountain passes despite teeth clenched as though a bridle and bit were lodged there as I hauled my 2-ton Tillie up and over.
Why select a plain word when an ornate alternative may be possible?
The fact that the northern Cheyenne were the tallest people in the world in the late 19th century at an average of five feet ten inches.
Big Hispanic families whose campsites always smell like heavenly cooking.
Thousands of motorcyclist-tourists in the parks looking like Quick-Draw McGraw, leather head to toe, Hogs at the ready, with their formerly sleek babes now morphed into hefty wives plumped into sidecars.
The most popular car in the American west has to be small and white, with little silver ones coming in second.
A charcoal cow, a pinto cow, a charcoal horse and a pinto horse standing in front of an apricot torte-like hill in Arizona.
The Burlington, Colorado town famous for its legumes with a huge welcoming sign saying “Happiness is a Crock of Beans.”
Like the South with an alligator in every puddle, the West has a horse in every other yard. Cows should be our National Beast, they’re everywhere.
Studying my precious girlfriends to find out what life would have been like if I’d stayed where I belonged instead of leaving at 18.

One of the scary things about driving long distances alone is that you suddenly discover you’ve been rummaging around in the attic of your subconscious and wonder who’s been driving this rig for the last 50 miles? If you’re lucky, a warm pink tongue in a furry face begging for another chewbone puts an end to the muse for a while.

Like the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center is wildly popular, and deservedly so. A natural history section with interactive exhibits, the Plains Indian Museum, a whole section on Bill himself, some very nice guns—is that an oxymoron? And the famous Whitney Gallery of Western Art can all be seen in one day if you hurry. It was filled with tourists, of course. One big hat and no cattle was talking away on his cell phone in a voice you’d use to halloo for hogs so I had to bull dog himuntil he was chewing gravel and suffered the mulligrubs for the rest of the day. That’s cowboy talk, partner.

BILL AND CO.
Here I was in the heart of the West. After the Civil War, place names like Tombstone, Deadwood, Dodge City and Cody substituted for the old mountain man rendezvous gatherings of old. Riding through were famous outlaws like Black Bart, Billy the Kid, Belle Starr, the Wild Bunch, the James and Younger Brothers and the Hole in the Wall Gang. Most of the time they just rustled cattle, held up trains and stagecoaches, ran illegal guns and whiskey and killed as many folks as they could. But there was never anyone like William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody.

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive
pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is how you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

- e.e.cummings

Old Bill was never a cowboy but he was a buffalo hunter and, if truth be told, probably responsible for a significant role in the near-disappearance of the breed. He was a Pony Express rider and widely-admired army scout and cavalry soldier. With years of accumulated glory under his belt he decided to put on a show called “The Wild West” in 1882. What a success! Bill arranged battle reenactments, cowboy rodeo skills and their daring pursuit of the Deadwood Stage. The performers were authentic cowboys and Indians, including a very well-paid Sitting Bull. Annie Oakley, “Little Miss Sure Shot,” was a star famous for cutting a playing card in two at 30 paces. The troop traveled all over America and Europe where they were endlessly fawned over by kings and queens and made lots of money. Bill’s widespread fame created a market for western theatrics, legends and myth that enjoyed over a century of worldwide fame.

One learns all these wonderful things by leaning a nose against museum glass, a habit I picked up in youth and never shook.

THE APPALOOSA
All this while I’d been looking for an Appaloosa horse, hopefully with a Nez Perce on his back, but had just about given it up when, what do you know…just south of Thermopolis and north of Shoshoni, by the Owl Creek Mountains and right inside Wind River Canyon, there it was! The coat patterns, mottled skin, white sclera and striped hooves of the true Appaloosa tethered to a stake next to two cream-colored tipis! I pulled over the best I could and stared with binoculars at some rare beauty. This spotty young fellow had a roan blanket and showed his famous selective breeding in a strong, long body. The careful selection among horses was originated by the Nez Perce, the only Native Americans known have bred their horses this way. They helped that remarkable general, Chief Joseph, and his people elude the U.S. Cavalry over several months and 1300 miles to the very border of Canada. Of course the Army confiscated most of the horses and nearly lost their prized characteristics over subsequent years of indiscriminate breeding.
How happy I was! I got my painting after all.

I would love to tell you about the many famous ‘worthy foe’ Indian leaders of the West. Those triumphant descendents of Folsom Man and Clovis Man were survivors of a massive migration from Mongolia in eastern Asia over 30,000 years ago. How brave they were, with the highest degree of intelligence, agility, craft, strength and daring, and now honored at last by our new Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. But we have to pass on through the rest of Wyoming now, bumping into shards of the Lewis and Clark Trail, the Mormon Trail, Oregon Trail, old buffalo trails, Continental Divide and others several times over. We were pointed down and across, through Casper, Chugwater and Cheyenne toward the last of the great National Parks on my agenda: Rocky Mountain.

COLORADO NORTH
One learns over time how to get yourself and your big rig into a campsite without reservations in a big National Park during the summer, it’s simple: grovel, wheedle, maneuver and lurk. Bribery does no good, but tears and a limp definitely go a long way…remember that you are talking to rangers whose idea of camping is a sleeping-roll under the stars and who will give you the gimlet eye as they assess the gross kilowatts your RV will require to perform its basic duties. At this fine park I had to change sites four times at their request and was happy to do it ...(add be obsequient).

Truman and I were on a Rocky Mountain ramble up Trail Ridge Road to see some of the 70 peaks over 12,000 feet, the sun-blushed valleys and alpine tundra at Rock Cut. Once again, elk served the day in prolific numbers and another bighorn ram was spotted. Innumerable small animals with long yellow teeth and a cocky air can be seen behind every other rock. Up on top of the world in the Never-Summer Mountains the wind can blow at 200 mph shaping snow into 30 ft drifts at temperatures up to 60 degrees below zero in winter. While the forest constantly struggles to overtake the treeless tundra, those howling winds beat it back by sandblasting the trees with bits of granite and ice, killing all new growth on the windward side and twisting the advancing tree fringe into grotesque shapes.

Feeling I was paying homage, I attempted the perpendicular trail up to Bierstadt Lake, having to have a gasping little lie-down under a shrub several times in the effort. The way up was spectacular, all right, with painterly views of Bierstadt’s Long’s Peak, Lady Washington, Pagoda, Chief’s Head, Storm, Thatchtop and McHenrys, all benevolence and stoic majesty. After supreme effort, thousands of miles from home, a mile and a half into the stratosphere, isolated and half-lost, who should I find dabbling a toe into the blue, blue Bierstadt? Some Virginia neighbors…

LET'S EAT!
That night I had some good old western fare; try them but, for heaven’s sake, chew some Beano first:

FRONTIER BEANS (for Gale)
1 lb or so mixed beans, 1 ½ t oregano, 6 c. chicken broth, ¼ t ground cloves, 2 cloves garlic (mashed), ¼ t cayenne pepper, 2 medium onions (chopped) 2 lbs ground round, 1 T oil, 3 c. grated Jack cheese, 2 t ground cumin, Salsa and sour cream

Saute beef, combine first 10 items, bring to boil, simmer 3 hours. Toss in a package of Chili-O for deeper flavor. Add more broth and garnish with cheese, salsa and cream.

Here is a Native prayer of comfort and Thanksgiving to recite around the campfire:

Calm down, little brother. Time heals all wounds. No matter how much one is weeping, the moon always follows the sun. Eat your bananas and fresh leaves and don’t cry anymore, because ever and forever the moon will follow the sun. We thank thee Lord, for happy hearts, for rain and sunny weather. We thank thee for this our food and that we are together. Amen

I think it means that “this, too, shall pass.” And, so, my long trail was coming to an end.

HOMEWARD BOUND
Yodeling down the mountain canyon through Estes Park, an environmental blemish filled with Gucci, Lauren and Velcro—not to mention hundreds of condominiums protecting the environment by covering it up completely—I was reflecting on my Rocky Mountain highs through these ten western states and through all the continental states of our splendid country over the last four years.* I remembered writing from a Chinese scroll painting that said, “nature is more fully realized when a human being pauses to regard it.” And that has well and truly happened.

Still, I had to further take my life into my own hands, clamped, by the way, to the steering wheel on the insane urban interstate through Denver—that gleefully removed a quarter-inch of new-tire rubber (and after which I needed a lengthy rest cure). Then barrel past Colorado oil wells pumping inside corn fields, and race through Kansas and Missouri on that beeline known as Rt. 70 East. I noted how many far-flung midwestern villages were hometowns to semi-famous persons, including a string of astronauts, and looked forward to celebrating the end of stately travel with a long-awaited visit to my friend Karen, in St. Louis.

*I have lots of reference material from several past visits to Alaska, and Hawaii where I lived four years.

MEET ME IN SAINT LOUIS
In three spinning days we toured the entire city, four museums, attended a two-church AMC meeting with 50 people, had a major dinner party at home, ate out, worked out at a spa, walked miles at a blistering pace and attended a Kerry-Edwards rally. Karen, a former television journalist, is now a modern-day philanthropist who has a famous Victorian style house filled with plenty of pets and a knock-your-eye-out contemporary art collection. She’s also a loving, generous friend, not only to me, but to hundreds of her other admirers.

I was intrigued in a drive through a section of town between Forest Park and Lindell and Waterman Blvds. on the north and south, and Kingshighway and Union Blvd. on the east and west. Here, lining Westmoreland and Portland Place, were about 75 grand homes built in America’s Golden Age around the turn of the 20th century by industrial barons and families of mercantile, banking, brewery, tobacco and real estate fortunes fat from Civil War gains. These buildings, each looking like a government seat, were described in a 1903 National Magazine article:

Many homes were “veritable palaces in every particular of richness, appointment and setting—even the size.” Each was “surrounded by stretching green lawns, fresh and sparkling… diversified and enriched by luxuriant shrubs, flowers and trees.”

Now, traveling the cities of America you see a lot of wealth manifested in housing, but even Newport, RI with its famous mansions would strain to match this neighborhood. Karen loaned me a book called “Westmoreland and Portland Places—The History and Architecture of America’s Premier Private Streets, 1888-1988” by Julius K. Hunter. What fun to read all about this: the residential committees who determined who could and could not live there, the social scramble, the interlocking competitions, the inveterate snobbery, the tragedy of losing your help to WWII war efforts, and the near impossibility of upgrading and maintaining these remarkable places, surely a hallmark in America’s constant redefinition of itself.

Although I enjoyed reading a dozen books on cd while driving, I missed the book clubs, public libraries and my own overloaded bookshelves at home. Listen to this excerpt from Louise Erdrich’s “The Master Butcher’s Singing Club.” She’s described herself, me, and, many other bookworms I know, to a T.

The pleasure of this sort of life—bookish—a reading life—had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another. That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force. When she came to the end of a novel, and put it down and with reluctance left its world, sometimes she thought of herself as a character in the book of her own life. She regarded the ins and outs, the possibilities and strangeness of her narrative…

HOME, AGAIN
Quickly, then, through Illinois corn, blue Pennsylvania hills and my very last campsite ever next to a yellow-green field full of white horses; through the top of Maryland and down, down at last to the familiar trees and fresh scents of Virginia and home. While we were away, Three Bears Farm had been tenderly cared for by a dear young couple who were actually married in Little Washington while they stayed here. I look forward, now, to using my brand new studio to fervently record the seven journeys accomplished since leaving the Corcoran in June of 2000, will post updates from time to time on my website, www.barbaramatteo.com. and have exhbitions of the art works. This last journey to the Great West was the most affecting one of all and will absorb lots of paint during this next year. Meanwhile, the farm is perfect as a locale where one can:

Mark time, cool your heels, hold your horses, keep your shirt on, and otherwise negotiate the transitions between episodes of productive activity. They are the physical embodiment of the state known as limbo—the most prevalent condition of modern life.

- From a mysterious Atlantic Monthly article corner, torn from page 12, sometime in 2004

ADDING UP
You may be a little shocked to hear, as was I, when I finally added up the costs of the project: RV, gasoline, taxes, maintenance, insurance, repairs, campground fees and supplies, museum entries, photography equipment, film, paint, canvas, frames and more to come, that it all came to slightly over $7,000 per journey, or about $1.35 a mile. Was it worth it? No question! But don’t tell me how many times around the world I could have traveled for that amount—I already know. (See paragraph one, about denial)

CAMP SPIKE
Not all is reading, canvases and limbo, however. Once a year I have the joy of seeing seven peppy little boys come charging up the hill to participate with all their hearts in thematic play at Camp Spike (my nickname). These are my cherubic grandsons, ages 3-12, here in August to immerse themselves in a Lewis and Clark theme, being taught by their patient parents, Jim and myself important frontier skills like surveying, finding longitude and latitude, archery, medical procedures, marksmanship, river skills, specimen gathering, Native American games, music and stories, campfires, keeping a journal, watercolors, reading history, whittling a stick, making moccasins and pemmican, fly fishing and making a film of the Corps of Discovery’s travel impressions, starring them. Next year, the boys want to continue with the Native American theme, so save your feathers, furs and beads. We’re making a real tipi. You can come too, but you have to teach.

SAYING GOODBYE
It’s been great to share Truman’s and my adventures with you over the last four years and I’ll miss talking with you in this special way. Though, as Thoreau said, “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.” I hope you can come see us at Three Bears where the teapot is always on. Later, after the landscapes are all done, maybe I can fulfill an old dream and write a little book for kids about a furry blond dog with big brown eyes and long eyelashes encountering events in American history across the land, featuring you-know-who. And, who knows, maybe this time Gracie the cat can come along, too. Meanwhile, we send our love and ask you to remember this:

It is a great art to saunter.

- Henry David Thoreau Journal, 1841