tres

hours: 13 (last of the big days!!!!!)
states crossed: 3

I made a major discover today. ready? Iowa is beautiful! really. if you are from there you know that, but poor Iowa get such a bad rap for being the center of the most boring universe. but considering how many 'great' people were born there: Bob Dylan, John Wayne and my very own small town hero, Lance Hellman, how could it not be beautiful? Iowa was lush and pulsing with growth. Its rolling hills dotted with old farm houses and the occasional animal made for a real soul vista.

i am grateful again for another lovely day. and for whatever protecting angels have been watching over me on this grand adventure. grateful also for family. i visited Lance's boyhood home today. 'the farm' as it is know in fables. it was as beautiful, magic, special a place as I had heard Lance and Micheala describe it. My heart ached for all the Hellman history there. stories they have told me came to life in front of me. Micheala baling hay in the fields, riding her pony to town to get ice cream, lance fixing a car in the drive way, riding his horse Scout, sketching a dead bird, playing cowboys and indians in the hundreds of acres of corn Michaela grandmother working in their garden, the hollyhocks, dogs running about, Carle's booming voice coming from inside the house. I could feel and see all these things happening at once as I stood near the farm house and looked out upon the land.

dia numero dos

dia numero dos

number of hours driven: 13
states crossed: 2.5

Long day. I am grateful for another amazing drive, for the health of my body and my car. Right now the former is in worse shape than the latter. Go Black beauty go! (that is my Honda's new name!!!! after 4 years she finally found a name in Wyoming)

Wyoming was so beautiful i kept thinking, "i can't believe they waste all this beauty on the freeway travelers. Thanks to the information provided by rest stops i have learned that i have been following the Oregon Trail and the Lincoln highwa. Two historic transcontinental paths. The oregon trail, of course, was carved by the wagon trains of the pioneers and the Lincoln highway carved out by another kind of pioneer the sightseeing kind. The lincoln highway was America's first transcontinental auto road and, i guess, was the brain child of the Henry B. Joy. I had to give him the thumbs up and a thanks as I admired his monument, pictured here, at a rest stop that was also the highest point on the highway. I was also able to accumulate some good driving karma by tossing in some change upon ole Henry's monument. (I assumed that's why my fellow travelers where throwing their pennies in there).


breath taking sight #3 Wyoming Mesa
Coming out of the mountains around Salt Lake was all up and down, up and down, hills and mountains. As I summated one of these hills what lay infront of me me resembled the dress shirt of a giant. It was a massive, green, long sleeved, botton up shirt and it was stretched out on the hill in front of me. The four lanes of east and west bound traffic, the shirt's front, and the dotted lines of the road, its buttons. I dropped the car into a lower gear for the steep grade. As i summated, this shirt, i expected the other side to be a downslope. Instead what i found was that all breath left had left my body as I saw, not another side or a down hill, but, across! This was a giant mesa! On top was a paradise of a green peaceful meadows where sheep grazed. I felt like i had just discovered a new earth. I stared. shaking my head in amazement.

left portland early this AM to the land of the rising sun. There it is for you.
and, that's a rather scary shot of me pumping gas for the first time in 10 months! It's illegal to pump your own in Oregon.

Day Numero Uno

Number of hours driven: 12.5
States crossed: 3

Breath-taking Sight #1
6 A.M. Colombia river still as ice with morning blues, pinks and greens dancing on its surface. I couldn't help but see the greatness of this river. In that light it was the Nile or Gangies. One of Oregon's many holy waters.

Breath taking sight #2
Idaho sneaker canyon. Flat, dry, vast cattle fields lulled me into thinking: 'this is it. this is what Idaho is going to look like from now on.' So, I was shocked and alarmed to see something unfamiliar on the horizon. It looked like a huge square building. but it wasn't. 'Was it a mesa?' i thought 'no. could it be? Oh my goodness! I said, as i gripped the wheel and and took in the full vista of it. it was a huge canyon! Its walls rose higher and higher in front of me and the land all around dropped down and over into its abyss like a massive water fall. As the road turned i wasn't entirely sure if it would keep going or just drop right off into the canyon.
Lesson taught by the road #1
Just when you get attached to something being one way it changes.

My route: Oregon to Utah to Nebraska to Chicago to Bloomington Indiana to Geary Indiana to Pennsylvania to New York to Portsmouth New Hampshire!

Worlds most essential travel gear: Really big sunglasses and a mala made by mom.

Successfully made it to Washington state, by the way. Last long travel day!!!!! Only 3 hours to the coast. Yeehaw!

rocky mountain 'haze'

Montana means mountain! did you know that? i was impressed and overwhelmed by their size and ruggedness. i felt soft and out of place as a i drove through them. "and they are so darn hazy," I thought as i motored along. "it must be VERY hot to make them this hazy" When i stepped out of the car at my campground i realized the sad truth. It was all smoke, no haze. Smoke from giant forest fires 20 miles away. I am in no danger, i was assured.

Bozeman Montana Co-op

Ghost town South Dakota

More on corn.

South Dakota was more of the same long long stretches of NOTHING but c-o-r-n. I should try to be fair and say South Eastern South Dakota. I should not claim to have a sense of all of this state merely from the view off of interstate 90. But by the time I was almost across it, my impression was dismal and sad. What struck me most in the eastern part was the vast agriculture.

A sure fire way to burst anyone's bubble of idealism? Drive cross country. Being brought up in a small city with white collar parents i developed in my late teens and 20's a romanticized image of farming. A 'back to the land' sort of philosophy about it and even after i had run a farm crew on a high production organic farm this bubble had not burst- entirely (it still hasn't but some healthy punctures have been made in it...) Still I could see that this was a souless industry.

Maybe other states manage to hide the exploitation of natural resources. In North Craolina i never saw, with my own eyes, the strip mining or mountain top removal sites. But here eastern S.D.’s contribution to the hungry machine of American consumerism is displayed prominently along 300 miles of the state’s most well traveled road. All around, literally as far as the eye can see into the tree less, contourless landscape are farm fields.

Their sight makes me uneasy for two reasons. One, because its a clear illustration of how this land is valued. It is a means to an end; a forum for a profit. Two, (I am embarrassed to admit) I am not sure what this land would look like without the synthetic mask of industrial agriculture.

No less embarrassing is the source of my two closest guesses: Hollywood. Kevin Costner came to mind for some reason and since I just past the Laura Ingles Wilder home, I am guessing its something like the snippets of the TV series I saw as a child.