On a Road Trip

2-24:

The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, announced that an expected invasion by Russian forces would commence on the 16th of February 2022.  Zelenskyy declared that date a national day of unity.  But there was no invasion.  Ukrainians, it seemed, were skeptical that the Russians would attack.

Some in the media speculated that the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, did not intend to invade Ukraine.  However, the Biden administration declared that the Russian armies, now numbering about 180,000 troops and poised on Ukraine’s borders would likely to be ordered to attack the country.

On February 24, 2022 around ten o’clock p.m. central standard time, I was watching CNN, monitoring cable news reports from Ukraine while idly flipping through a book review.  An hour before dawn in Kiev (currently spelled Kyiv – the Russo-Ukrainian war is littered with specimens of words difficult to spell: Why are ‘y’s in the name of Ukraine’s president doubled?), Putin announced that he had ordered “a special military operation” in Ukraine, a limited offensive intended to “keep the peace” and “denazify” the country.  Within a few seconds of that announcement (issued at six a.m Moscow time) the bombardment of Ukraine began.  A CNN reporter Matthew Chance was reporting on Putin’s announcement from a hotel-top veranda in the center of Kyiv.  As he faced the camera and reported Putin’s declaration of war, several loud booms, as if carefully stage-managed to accompany his words, sounded in the distance.  Chance was disconcerted and crouched down.  Then, he struggled to don a flak jacket.  Chance fumbled with the flak jacket and a helmet that had suddenly appeared.  The camera wobbled a little and Chance’s microphone wire became entangled between his shirt and the flak jacket.  Several more blasts followed, far away, like the rumble of distant thunder, although exactly how they sounded in Kyiv isn’t clear to me.  Certainly, the roar of the bombardment was enough to alarm the journalist and his broadcast crew.  Behind Chance, along a narrow balcony running along the front of the hotel, some young men emerged from their rooms, studied their cell-phones, and, then, gazed off into the distance.  A faint glow adorned the horizon.  It was not fire from exploding ordinance, but the first light of the rising sun.

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2-25 (Friday):

Backing out of driveway: 5:58 am.  Temp: 8 degrees F.  One inch fresh fallen snow.

Crossing border into Iowa at 6:34 am.  6:53: in the eastern darkness, a vertical pink column searches the sky.  Then, an oblate squashed blob of red appears over the horizon.  The freeway is very slick, scuff marks of ice: some cars have slid into the ditch.  Passing trucks, driving, as trucks always do, too fast for the conditions, inundate my windshield with a grey, sloppy compound of road salt and slush, ruining my prospect of the freeway above.

In the gloom, a sign suspended over the freeway flashes this message: 29 Traffic Deaths this Year / Get Cozy with your Seatbelt.  

Mason City, Iowa: McDonald’s.  7:00 am.  I go into the restaurant to use the toilet.  The kiosk from which to order in the lobby either doesn’t work or I can’t figure out how to use it.  An Asian lady helps me complete my order for the #7 meal, two breakfast burritos with hashbrowns and coffee.  

The freeway remains very slick and, in the sunlight, I see that I am running on two tracks of glare ice ground smooth by traffic.  The left lane is mostly ice-covered as far as I can see.  The car feels unstable, wonky under me.  And I can’t see: my windshield wipers can’t keep pace with the periodic deluges of slush hurled onto me by passing trucks.

Driving brings out OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: I count semi-trucks, struggle to read license plates, observe and enumerate the mile markers on the right shoulder, one stake driven into the ditch every tenth of a mile.  

Gas: Dow’s Junction, Iowa (7:51 am).  Price at the pump: 3.29 per gallon.  About 11 dollars worth.  Temp: - 2 F.  Across the lane from the gas pumps: a rest stop with ornamental tiles celebrating the exploits of Iowa soldiers in the Civil War.  Radio newscasts say that the Russians captured an airport northwest of Kjiv, but that Ukrainian forces have launched a counter-attack and, apparently, recaptured it.  

Ten miles north of Des Moines: Rest Stop.  Temp: 1 F.  Last night, it seems, three inches of snow fell here.  The snow, fallen through frigid night skies, is light and fluffy and would blow, except that there is no appreciable wind.  My windshield is masked with cloudy flares of pale road grime.  I have the impression that I should take off my glasses and clean them.  My vision seems failing.  But, most likely, it’s the strain of navigating ice-slick highways, peering through a windshield all foggy and clotted with salt and sand and frost.  I pick up some handfuls of snow and smear it on my windshield and, before putting the car in gear, engage the wipers that drag, squeaking in protest, over the glass.  But this clears the windshield, at least, for a few minutes.

Then, I ration my vision because I’m concerned that I will run out of windshield cleansing fluid.  How much does the reservoir hold?  I glance at the clock and tell myself that I won’t cut the filth on my windshield until ten minutes have passed and, during that time, visibility decreases until I’m driving through a purgatorial grey murk, shadows of trucks and cars hovering in front of me, dim despite the bright, cold sunshine.  It’s part of highway OCD – clicking off the minutes as I follow I35 past John Wayne’s birthplace toward the Missouri border.

Gas stop: Exit 4 Lamoni, Iowa, a town known to me because there is an Iowa Public Radio transmission tower in that place, something announced periodically when the network declares its call letters and frequency.  I buy gas at a Kum and Go C-store on the west side of the freeway (3.88 per gallon for $20.46 total).  10 F, with warm sun but a distinct chill in the air, slush heaped up around the fuel pumps at the C-Store.  I go into the store, a roomy, bright place full of overpriced chips and soda. Although I don’t discover this until I reach Kansas City, somehow, I drop my debit card out of my wallet after buying some Gatorade.  A sign says that it’s 110 miles to Kansas City.

John Prine on the radio, a sort of upscale hillbilly station affiliated with Missouri Public Radio: “Angel from Montgomery”.  The show is called “Rhythm and Roots” on KXC.  The announcer says that the Junior College in Maryville - St. Joe is presenting Sartre’s No Exit at 7:00 pm at the campus theater.  Passing the Chillicothe exit: 14 F.

The day before, I cut up a half dried Tuscan sausage with some Gouda cheese and I eat this as a snack.  It’s 11:15.  The radio announcer, touting No Exit, says that “Hell is other people.”  

The roads are no longer icy.  Noon: Kansas City, Missouri.  It’s 21 F.  The freeway is lined with little windrows of dirt-colored highway salt.  On the Kansas Turnpike: 12:20.  For some reason, it always takes almost exactly six hours to drive from Austin, Minnesota to Kansas City.  Weather conditions don’t seem to make any difference for I drove four of those hours at speeds between 45 and 60 because of the black ice smeared all over the freeway.  I recall the first time I drove to Kansas City for a deposition in a construction case.  The depositions were at 9:00 am.  The rising sun tinted the glass towers in Overland Park.  

Fuel stop on Kansas Turnpike – the gas and food places are managed by KTA (Kansas Turnpike Authority).  Gas at $3.35, total $17.00.  I discover the debit card is missing.  I call my wife and she, in turn, calls the Lamoni Kum and Go and, in fact, some good Samaritan has found the card, retrieved it from the slush.  My wife tells the clerk that I will be returning along these same highways in about a week and that I can pick up the card as I pass through on my way home.  The clerk says that she will put the card in an envelope bearing my name and keep it in the bottom of the cash register.  

335 W south of Topeka.  A digital sign says: Range Burning Area.  Don’t drive into dense smoke.

2:12 in the afternoon, traversing the Flint Hills, a track of rumpled brown-grey prairie between Emporium and Wichita, Kansas.  The road rises and falls over the hills and, from the crests on the highway, I can see endless, rolling terrain, barren of all trees, with the bottoms of the draws gouged open and leaking sandy clay from cut banks.  The landscape is smeared with snow, now melting a little in the sun.  The temperature is 25 degrees.  On the highest ridge, there is a maze of rickety chutes and corrals, the Bazaar Cattle Pens.  The freeway provides travelers with the sense of riding the high line, shooting over the height of land.  On opposing ridges a mile away, the tawny grass is interrupted by spindly cell-phone towers.  

Matfield Fuel and Food administered by KTA.  Gas at $3.32 a gallon ($13.50).  I get a Big Western burger with bacon combo at the KTA Hardees ($9.00).

Some oil rigs laboring on the flat terrain around El Dorado Lake, a sickly looking white expanse of water, glinting the color of quicksilver in the wan light, a distant railway trestle spanning a cavity in the RR embankment, a drowned forest poking up out of the lake shallows, stark black trees piercing the glaze of the lake.  

Exiting from Kansas Turnpike at 3:20 pm .  30 degrees.  Toll for the freeway: $12.50. Westbound on 54/400.  3:30 pm: Wichita – 31 degrees.  First stop light: 119th Street in Wichita.  A small cluster of stubby skyscrapers like toadstools.  Then, another half-dozen stoplights as I skirt the edges of the City.,

Ukrainian forces are doing far better in their resistance to the Russian invasion than had been expected.  The Russian offensive is already stalled.  

Now, an endless two-lane highway trending west by southwest, little towns at intervals of about twenty miles – sometimes, the highway blasts right through the town; on other occasions, there’s a bypass.  

Fuel: Casey’s at 4:46 ($3.19 per gallon, $14.52 to fill up.)  Pratt, Kansas – something called the OYO Hotel, a marquee covered with gibberish, words that don’t make any sense, some sort of local code.  Stalled-out wind turbines on the horizon, foreground some desultory oil rigs gesturing up and down near rows of rusty tanks.  The landscape could be anywhere between Minot or, even, Manitoba to Fort Worth: flat terrain with a low reef of grey hills on the horizon, slow-moving rivers with many undulations and branches flowing between processions of tattered-looking brown trees, angular-looking shelter belts, towns dominated by grain elevators, at the side of the road a forlorn railroad right of way that stitches the elevator loading docks together.  The road reminds me of the two-lane that runs from the Red River Valley at Wahpeton, North Dakota down to the Minnesota railroad town, Willmar – the same featureless flat land, the railroad paralleling the highway on a very slight embankment that slices through the impoverished towns, tiny creeks slipping under railroad bridges and, then, flowing in steel culverts under the highway right-of-way.  

Crazy Mule Café in Greensburg. Perhaps, this is the town with the world’s largest hand-dug well, not exactly a badge of honor, I think.  54 splits off from 400 and angles south toward the Oklahoma border – it’s now 5:28 pm.

In 1887, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe in cooperation with the Chicago Rockford and Pacific railway lines paid $45,000, a great sum in those days, for the construction of a water well at Greensburg, a whistle-stop along their rights of way.  Water was required to replenish boilers in the locomotives.  The well was cut 109 feet into the ground before encountering water.  Greensburg, as well as the thirsty train engines, used the well water until 1932.  A visitor center that looked vaguely like a small-town gas station was built over the brick-walled cistern and a winding spiral stair was installed so that curious visitors could make the pointless descent to the bottom of the pit.  As an additional attraction, a half-ton meteorite of the rare palassite variety found in a farmer’s field nearby was put on display.  (Palassite is a metallic-looking mineral seared and fused by transit through space and studded with copper- and silver-colored pebbles.)  In 2007, the wood frame visitor center was demolished by a tornado that destroyed most of Greensburg, an E4.5 cyclone that killed eleven people.  The meteorite was missing and not found until sometime later, rolled under a big heap of rubble from the old visitor center.  The town rebuilt the visitor center and it is now an airy glass-walled building with a cupola featuring an observation deck over the small, mostly two-dimensional grid of the town – you can climb up the spiral steps to the observation deck and, then, hump the 109 feet down to the moist grey gravel aquifer underground.  The visitor center smells like a cave and there’s a cool ,dewy quality to its air.  The meteorite is about the size of a car’s engine and, in fact, the slag rock looks a bit like that part of a vehicle.  

At 5:48, I pick up the discrete, static-laden cough of Texas Public Radio. The Amarillo Symphony Orchestra will play a program featuring a symphony by Rachmaninoff.  Don’t they know that Russia is now a pariah state and its arts are, perhaps, suspect?  Every fifteen miles, I have to slow for a little, fragmentary town, one after another, huddled under the sierra of the big pre-cast concrete elevators.  

Minneola, Kansas at 6:00 pm.  I have been on the road for 12 hours.  Wind turbines casting enormous shadows and two huge grain elevators like vast sea-going vessels pulled up to dock in the little village.  This place could be in the Red River Valley between Minnesota and North Dakota.  On the radio, 91.1 Garden City - Liberal, Kansas Public Radio.  Joe Biden has nominated Katanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.  The Russians are approaching Kjiv but have been repelled from entering Ukraine’s capitol city.  The sky is now an obituary for the sun: dark plains and an endless column of telephone poles marking west to the horizon.  

Meade, Kansas – Dalton Gang hide-out – 6:20 pm.  Sage-brush in deeply eroded gulches.  The sun sets pink, then, granite grey ahead of me and some slim yellow-blue clouds mourn the passing of the light.  It’s 6:30 pm.

Around the time of the Civil War, Lewis Dalton was a tavern-keeper married to the aunt of Cole and Jim Younger, members of the James Gang.  Dalton moved his family from Missouri to Oklahoma Territory and, then, Coffeyville, Kansas, about 120 miles from what is now Oklahoma City.  Dalton and his wife had 15 children of which 13 lived to adulthood, an impressive rate of survival for children born around the time of the Civil War.  The Dalton boys didn’t do so well when they became adults.  But that, as they say, is another story.

The oldest son, Frank, became a federal marshal and was responsible for preventing bootleggers from infiltrating Indian Territory and selling alcohol there.  A booze-smuggler killed Frank and this murder inspired three other brothers, Grattan, Bob, and Emmett to pin on the silver badge, probably in the hope of avenging Frank’s death.  But this didn’t work out and the three decided to switch their allegiance from law and order to crime.  First, Bob began selling whiskey to the Indians.  A warrant was issued for his arrest and Bob fled.   Grat rode west to California and visited his brother, Bill, suggesting that he join his kin as a highwayman.  From their days in law enforcement, the Dalton brothers knew some bad hombres – “Bitter Creek” Newcomb, BillMcElhanie, and “Black-faced” Charley Bryant, so named because of a gun-powder burn, a souvenir of a violent encounter, prominent on his right cheek.  With this gang, the Dalton boys raided a casino in Silver City, New Mexico, escaping with the house’s loot.  In February 1891, Grat was arrested, tried, and but en route to prison the Dalton gang attacked the Southern Pacific Train where he was confined and freed him.  The die was now cast and there was no way to return to law-abiding life.  

In the next 18 months, the Dalton Gang robbed eight trains.  They stole horses and blew safes.  They stalked through passenger cars robbing travelers at gun-point.  After successful forays, the gang split up.  The law caught up to “Black-faced Charley” and he was shot to death.  Bob Dalton was vainglorious and had a kind of inferiority complex when it came to the gang led by Jessie and Frank James.  Bob said that he would rob two banks in one day, a feat that Jesse James had never accomplished.  Bob knew that there were two banks across the street from one another in their old hometown of Coffeyville, Kansas and, so, he planned a robbery at that place.

The Dalton gang rode in Coffeyville on October 5, 1892.  The robbery went wrong and the exploit collapsed into carnage.  The Dalton boys killed four townspeople, men gathered to defend the banks, but paid a heavy price.  A bank teller in the first bank raided said that he couldn’t open the vault due to timer on the safe (this was a lie).  The bank had glass windows and the local citizens saw that the robbery was underway.  They attacked the bank with Winchester repeating rifles, pinning the gangsters down.  The Dalton boys fought their way out of the bank but were ambushed in the street.  In the end, four members of the gang were dead – a famous picture shows the cadavers of Grat and Bob Dalton lying next to Tom Evans and “Texas Jack” Moore (he was killed a half-mile from town as he tried to flee the bloodbath.)  In the photograph, the dead men look very young and handsome – their faces are not disfigured by the bullets that brought them down.  They rest like marionettes whose wires have been snapped on their backs across the planks of a broad hay wain.  The dead men have their hands bound together – their fists and fingers are crossed on their chests as if they were cupped to hold bouquets of flowers; a Winchester lies across the two center bodies, resting on the bellies of the dead men.  Emmett Dalton was badly shot-up, but survived and spent 14 years in prison for his role in gang’s crimes.  A sixth outlaw rode into town with the Dalton gang but escaped, apparently uninjured.  There has been speculation about this man’s identity, but no one has any convincing evidence as to who this outlaw was.  It is said that when the Coffeyville townsfolk pulled the masks off the Dalton boys, people gasped because, of course, the recognize the dead men as neighbors who had grown up with them in Coffeyville.

The townspeople were buried under granite stones and are revered as “the defenders of Coffeyville.”  The four outlaws were thrown in a common grave marked by a metal pipe uprooted from Main Street to which one of the raiders had hitched his horse.  (A few decades later, a monument was erected over the place where the corpses had been buried.)  Bill Dalton, who may have been the sixth outlaw, later formed another gang, the so-called “Wild Bunch” or Dalton-Doolin gang.  Bill Dalton didn’t survive his brothers for long.  After some crimes committed by his gang, he was tracked to a cabin near Ardmore, Oklahoma and gunned down when he fled unarmed through a corn field.  

Meade, Kansas is a tiny town, graced with a small, Queen Ann-style cottage with a fringe of  ornamental wood work framing the porch, a place just off Main Street alleged to be the hangout of the Dalton gang.  In fact, there’s no evidence of any kind to suggest the Dalton boys were ever in this house – the connection between the nicely maintained little bungalow and the bad men is purely conjectural, based on the surmise that one of the boys had a girlfriend who once lived in the place. The real reason that dirty deeds are ascribed to the picturesque cottage was the discovery of tube-like furrow leading from the cellar of the house sixty or seventy feet to a nearby stable.  The tunnel was described as muddy and about three-feet high, but, of course, the proprietors of the place have now reamed out this little underground channel, opened it to the height of six feet and lined its sides with old bricks retrieved from an old church that collapsed after a storm.  The tunnel is described as a secret escape passage, allowing bandits to flee the house if it were besieged and reach their horses without being shot in the getaway.

Eight dollars buys you admission to the cottage and the tunnel.  Half of the house is a gift shop, the other half a small museum where there is a white two-faced calf taxidermically preserved and some rusty firearms of uncertain provenance.  The tunnel is musty but well-lit and ends in a facsimile to a 19th century stable.  The staff are friendly, the women wearing sun-bonnets and the boss resplendent in a ten-gallon cowboy hat.  The parking lot is full RV’s and campers, older people who have stopped to spend a half-hour at the place.  The American frontier is receding from us, fading away in a cloud of recrimination and shame about the genocide of native peoples.  When I was born in 1954, the most popular art form in the country was the Western, movies consumed by people who, in the Midwest, were literally the sons of the pioneers.  But that is a long time ago and you don’t see anyone younger than forty in these places nowadays.  

(What does the term “ten-gallon hat” mean?  In legend, cowboys wore big hats so that they could transport drinking water in them.  There is a famous Stetson advertisement that shows a cowboy offering water to a weary-looking horse from his upturned hat.  But, of course, ten gallons is a lot of water and the biggest hat ever made wouldn’t have anything close to that capacity.  Western historians speculate that “ten gallon” refers to “galon”, a Spanish word for a braided leather hat band.  A big sombrero would have a hat large enough to accommodate “ten galons.”  But this etymology involves a clumsy combination of Spanish and English words.  Likely “ten gallon” refers to the Spanish “tan galan” – a phrase meaning “very gallant” or “handsome.”) 

Mariott Hotel off 54 on the outskirts of Liberal, Kansas.  On the way into town, a broad river valley, perhaps, the Canada River, with a great railroad trestles to the northwest, each iron cross-member clasping a shred of the sunset in its vise-like grip.  It’s hard to drive after dark and the road switches around under me, construction ditches and graders and lanes obscurely marked with orange wizard-hat cones.

The Native girl at the hotel’s front desk tells me about a couple of Mexican restaurants that are good in her opinion.  Another Native girl is standing at the small brightly lit bar next to the lobby dealing Blackjack to a sober, earnest-looking oil roustabout – it’s as if she’s carried her reservation casino with her to facilitate this gambling, although, of course, I don’t know local laws and practice as to wagering in this State.

I find a food truck a couple blocks away, near some dismal-looking railroad crossings.  A fat Hispanic girl wearing a snowmobile suit takes my order.  She emerges from among some parked cars as I gingerly approach the taco truck Tacos Pastorcito compiled from beef tongue (lengua) with diet Coke and a plate of frijoles & arroz – only $6.50.  The wind is scurrying around the vacant lots and trembling in the bare trees and it feels bitterly cold, maybe 6 degrees.  I ask the shivering girl in the snowmobile suit if its usually this cold around here this time of year.  “Colder,” she says.

2-26 (Saturday):

6:22 on the road at Liberal, Kansas.  12 degrees F.  Bright crescent moon, only a sliver pasted into the dark sky.  

Oklahoma border at 6:32 am – now 6 degrees.  The plain stretches in all directions, completely flat with scatters of lights like faraway constellations on the horizon.  The pale shroud of a drive-in movie theater screen hanging over a vacant field at Guymon, Oklahoma, hot huff of sulphur on the town’s outskirts, illumined tubes and scaffolding of an oil refinery – in town, many Mexican restaurants, of course, all of them closed.

54 is a good fast road in Oklahoma, two lanes in both directions, parts of it controlled access.  Texhoma on the border at 7:28, a big cannabis dispensary marking in change of law from one state to the other (I don’t know which allows medical marijuana) – now even colder: 5 degrees.

The sun rises at 7:29 am.  Railroad tracks parallel the highway and I pass a slow-moving train, an endless row of flatbeds carrying blue and orange and yellow storage containers, two to a car.  The sides of the flat beds are painted with graffiti and some of the art is wonderfully inventive and colorful, bulbous tadpole-shaped glyphs outlined in leaden black and arrayed against a cumulo-nimbus of greys and sea-blues with green swaths and rainbows.  Some of the paintings are figurative, Kilroy figures peeping over flat bars of color, a bit like the plump, muscular figures drawn by Robert Crumb, gleaming rainbows linking the little long-nosed spectators gazing out from the rolling stock of the train.  It’s a mile-long painted mural rolling across the absolutely flat and treeless plains.

Radio: “Do you have arachnophobia?  Dial 800 BED BUGS for help?” – Ace Pest Control in Amarillo.

Fuel at Stratford, Texas – Pilot: $3.19 per gallon for a total of $10.17, 7:45 am.  In the toilet, two shaggy-looking truckers brushing their teeth, the loudspeaker announces that there are showers ready and available.  Out by the pumps, the windshield cleaning fluid is bluish under a blue film of ice in which the squeegee is entrapped.  

It takes me ten minutes to catch up with the mural train and pass it again.  At an abandoned supper-club, Big Tex, a 15-foot tall giant stands bow-legged in the fissured parking lot, hands poised at his sides for a quick-draw of his pistols.  I stop to take a picture and, at intervals, trucks roar past, their sound amplified by the columns of a huge grain elevator on the other side of the road.  The mural train catches up again, but I depart, this time, before falling behind the triple yellow locomotives.  54 offers a passing lane about every 8 miles.  

Dalhart, Texas: Tote and Totum C-store.  A flat featureless town with roads about as broad as football fields.  On a back alley: Modern Day Martyrs, a tattoo parlor. 

New Mexico border at 8:58 – but I lose an hour to Mountain Standard Time: so its now 7:48 am.  There’s always a curious exhilarating feeling when time seems to flow backward – I’m an hour younger here.  The news station here is still at about 90 on the frequency dial: a college in Amarillo.  

Welcome to New Mexico: immediately across the border 54 bisects the ghost town of Nara Visa, a scatter of ruined brick and stick-built shacks.  A faux-adobe shed with gothic-pointed arches in its facade fronts the highway – Ira’s Café, according to a vertical marquee bearing yellow letters sun-faded into near illegibility.  Some scraggly tree-lines mark where there were once residential streets and midden-heaps of debris loom over open cellar holes.  Where there was once a town center, now lumber ripped from fallen shacks has been re-purposed to built ramshackle cattle pens and two-by-four inclines for loading cows into trucks.  The wind makes some sagebrush skip across the lonesome main street.   On the edge of town, there’s a big building, still maintained, a heap of brown bricks with some windows arranged in an arched array beneath a red tile roof – the “community center” although there’s no community any longer and the hulking masonry pile isn’t at the center of anything.

Nara Visa was built along the rumor of the Chicago Rockford and Pacific rail line, founded before the tracks were put down, and, in fact, moved a mile or so to accommodate the railroad when it was built.  But the railroad didn’t need a stop in the town and so no sidings were installed there.  Nonetheless, people followed the train tracks, settling in the barren country that is now Quay County, New Mexico – a huge empty sector of land that is mostly arid and flat but cut by deep gorges where water sometimes flows.  Henry King, an employee of the Rockford line, was installed in the village to maintain the tracks.  With his wife he lived in a box-car and, even, sometimes boarded itinerant cowboys – this was in 1901.  Farmers and cattlemen came to the area and, for a couple decades, Nara Visa flourished – a school was built in 1906 and, a decade later, the town boasted four churches, eight saloons and three dance-halls, a pharmacy, hotel, and millinery shop.  In 1921, an elaborate public school replaced the primitive previous school structure, a big concrete shell with brick facade and a commodious arched roof enclosing a large gymnasium.  Nara Visa’s school had a red-tile roof, a variation on the southwestern Mission Style familiar from public buildings in Santa Fe and was a handsome structure. But the school was the town’s last gasp – already population was declining.  By 1968, only seven students were enrolled at the school.  The county had proven too arid for agriculture and the grass too lean for much in the way of cattle-raising and so the population drained out of the area.  Today, no one lives permanently in Nara Visa and the entire zip-code area has 119 people.  A flag was proudly flying over the Nara Visa post office, a humble glass and brick building marked with a big, bright blue mail box beneath the flag pole.

8:34 am – fuel at Logan, New Mexico: $3.72 a gallon ($14.88 total).  Canadian River: a trickle of beleaguered water winding through a shallow cliff-girt draw.  More red cliffs on the horizon.  Then, to Tucumcari (pop. 6,750, elevation 4096), county seat of Quay County  where 54 intersects Interstate 40 – the town boxed-in by a mountain shaped like a woman’s breast, complete with engorged nipple, at least this is the prospect as I reach the battered-looking outskirts of town.  Of course, from a different vantage, the mountain has a different aspect and the slow roads around the edge of Tucumcari rotate me into different perspectives on the butte standing across a shallow sandy-looking valley.  To the west, another long square butte like the side of a colossal barn, traffic flashing and sparking as the sun strikes chrome in the long trough between the mountains.  

In 1601, Don Juan de Onate, the so-called “last conquistador”, followed the Canadian River east into what is presently Oklahoma.  He noted that the land became more green, with walnut trees and bur oak along the stream beds and shrubs bearing paw-paw fruit. Onate’s expedition, searching for a golden city of Quivira, encountered large villages of Indians living in earth lodges, prosperous bison hunters. These Indians were preparing for a major military operation against a neighboring tribe, the Rayados.  Onate and his men traveled with the earth-lodge Indians into Rayados territory, where there were several parleys between the opposing armies.  Onate thought the Rayados were more likely to know the location of Quivira then the bison-hunters and so he made an alliance with them.  This outraged his former hosts and there was a pitched battle resulting in many casualties on both sides.  Onate thought it imprudent to continue his expedition although he observed that the country was heavily populated and that there were rumors that the local tribes paid tribute to a wealthy cacique who lived in a wealthy city somewhere along a great river to the East.  The golden city, of course, is always just a couple hundred miles away, hidden somewhere just beyond the horizon. Onate and his troops limped back to his fort at El Paso.  The area that Onate crossed was called “llano estacadero” or the “staked plains”.  It’s not entirely clear what this phrase means or how it was derived.  Some historians think that travelers over this featureless flat basin encountered stakes driven into the prairie sod, apparently, marking the way across the empty terrain.  (Others say the stakes were really prehistoric cairns erected as way-posts.)  The term “estacadero” means a palisade.  Most likely, the word is applied here to the long escarpments bounding the vast basin, low mesas with serrated cap-rock that look like stockades.  

9:13 am: merging onto I40: 9:13 am.  24 degrees F.

Rest stop on a red hill, mile marker 238 – long lines of semi-trucks parked along the exit to the huddle of adobe structures at the crest of the hill.  The men’s toilet stands as a separate hut from the women’s rest room.  No one stirring, notwithstanding the long queue of dormant trucks.  Some other outbuildings of questionable import – it’s all sky and rock here.  Then, a woman dressed in funereal black appears materializing out of nowhere – her face is enigmatic with big dark sunglasses.  On an opposing hill, where shadow persists, there are some tilted fields of snow.  Now, a couple of other black-clad figures have appeared, stumbling around in the gravel.

Edgewood exit: I40 mile marker 174 – gas at a souvenir shop annexed to a Dairy Queen: $3.59 a gallon ($21.50).  A few suburban-looking buildings in the distance.

Under the east side of Sandia Mountain at 11:25 MST.  The highway ramps down and down and down, suburban traffic intermingled with the long-haul trucks, some of them crusted with snow and ice.  The freeway spins fast and faster down a canyon, its north side draped in snow; to the south, austere walls of chopped up sandstone and tilted facets of stony meadow, high chaparral  On the flat land beyond the mountain: Albuquerque in its wide, shallow gutter under the peak, glass skyscrapers simmering in the smog, here the freeway surging with traffic bumper-to-bumper hustling west.  Then, beyond the city, the long slog uphill, toward the plateau edged with black cliffs (from other trips here, I know those soot-colored boulders are all pecked with pictographs), climbing and climbing again with fringes of blue mountain on the horizon in all directions – the radio (New Mexico Public Radio) is playing a dedication show, people calling in tunes in honor of those they love or honor: someone wants to hear a Mexican tune called “Pepi le Pew” (named after the debonair skunk devised by Chuck Jones in 1945 and featured thereafter in cartoons produced by Warner Brothers under the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies label).  The lyrics of the song are in Spanish except a refrain: “Pepi le Pew, Pepi le Pew / He likes all the girls but he doesn’t like you.”  The song is a fast polka with oom-pah-pah tuba and chattering mariachi trumpets; the singing whoops and cries out “Ay-yi-yi” with a high-pitched trill.  

Pepi le Pew is on furlough now, a sort of administrative leave, on the basis of accusations of speciesism and normalizing rape culture. The proprietors of his cartoons agree that there are some, shall we say, disturbing aspects to the striped skunk’s character and demeanor.  Certainly, his romantic obsessions, particularly with respect to his love-interest, Penelope Pussycat, verge on stalking and seduction, in broad terms, and sometimes swerve uncomfortably close to attempted rape.  Furthermore, Pepi le Pew invites us to feel superior to striped skunks and the French in general.  And, the little creatures stinks – he is usually portrayed swathed in white flowing fumes like a toga or caftan.  I assume that a similar fate has befallen his imitator at MGM, “Li’l ‘tinker.” 

White Lagunas Pueblo on its promontory over a red canyon bent double. Exit to Acoma sky city, a huge casino like a flying saucer landed just to the north of the freeway.  Khe Sanh bridge crossing as an overpass above the freeway – built and maintained by the people of the Acoma pueblo.  Named for a long ago war – Indian radio is excited about a deployment of divisions with Native soldiers ordered to Poland: war is life – let the women tend to the corn and squash.

1:17 pm: Grant, New Mexico.  White dome of Mount Taylor at the head of a pine-clad valley running southeast, smooth rounded ridges all buried in snow, the sort of summit that you can reach by strolling uphill for five or six miles, although I suppose the bland heights conceal some precipitous places, a few alpine canyons howling with meltwater descending through boulder sluices. I check into a roadside motel, apparently a tribal enterprise (probably owned by Acoma Pueblo) because the Indian businesses all require masks and the clerks and counter-girls in those places have their lower faces covered by blue surgical masks while no one else in the State (except Federal employees) seems to care one whit about the pandemic and all go about bare-faced. 

The girl at the desk tells me to eat at a place called Cafecito, enthusiastically advising that the family that runs the restaurant grows their own chilis and, then, roasts them to make sauces for the food that they serve – “it’s so good,” the young woman tells me, almost moaning with pleasure.  (There’s a red chili pepper displayed on most New Mexico license plates.)  Grant, itself, is a single boulevard that runs parallel to the freeway for two miles, a barren spot under the dry-looking hills flecked with pinon pines.  Some trailer courts hang above the boulevard on hill-side terraces and, it appears, that half the businesses in town are closed, some of them recently demolished it seems, since there are vacant lots with alleys crisscrossing behind them, spectral feral dogs in the brush, the whole place with an odd dispirited vibe...

Gas at the Krispy Krunch Chicken place, a C-store with Indian trinkets for sale a few hundred feet from my motel room: $3.89.9 a gallon – $14.80.  The natives in the store, which also retails liquor, are all masked.  Pleasant smell of broasted chicken.

I go for an afternoon drive, over to the El Malpais National Monument Visitor Center about four miles away, a small kiosk poised over an indented plain all ribbed and serrated with black lava fields, barren charred heaps of contorted stone, seamed with eroded ravines full of tortured-looking brush.  I decide to drive to El Morro, a pinnacle of rock rising over a pond – the stone flanks of the monolith, as high as a man can comfortably climb, are mottled with inscriptions, both pictographs and writings, some in Spanish and others English.  It’s a 47 mile drive to the southwest on the two-lane blacktop that runs to Ramah and Zuni.  

The route to El Morro skirts the fanged lava badlands and, imperceptibly, gains elevation.  Smaller evergreens yield to stately ponderosa pines and the long wooded escarpments are snowy.  It takes an hour to reach the rock spires at El Morro, no towns at all along this road and only a few muddy-looking forest lanes intersecting the highway.  I have the radio for company, Susan Viga and another announcer named, Steve, speaking an exotic mixture of Spanish and English, as they take telephone dedications and play tunes for their listeners, mostly Mexican polkas and mariachi band music with heavy metal and blues interspersed.  Nothing is off-limits – periodically someone will request a Broadway show-tune, something from Sweeney Todd or Oklahoma.  The woman announcer plays straight to Steve who clowns around on-air.  Someone wants to hear “Una Paloma Blanca” in a certain version and Susan Viga says that the tune is dedicated Chico Sanchez on the date of his sixtieth birthday.  “Sixty,” scoffs Steve, “just a boy.”  Susan replies: “Well, he passed last year.  It’s in his honor.”  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Steve says.  The song is a Dutch Schlager, a pop masterpiece – I’ve never heard the song, but it has the effect of persuading me that I’ve always known the tune.  The rhythm marches forward insistently, banging away mechanically, a train chugging along while flutophones trill in imitation of the white dove.  “Once I had my share of losing / For they locked me on a chain / They tried to break my spirit / I can still feel the pain.”  Of course, the singer is now liberated: “Una Paloma Blanca / I’m just a bird in the sky / Una Paloma Blanca / Over the mountains I fly.”  Somewhere, Chico Sanchez is grinning.  

The escarpment cliffs draw closer and the road rises to a forested saddle between ridges.  El Morro is a clutch of bottle-shaped spires, a bit like the steeples of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona or the round flanks of a big grain elevator chiseled from yellow-grey sandstone.  The slopes under the rocks are steep, full of fallen boulders like irregular tombstones, and there is deep snow next to the trail that leads up to the inscriptions.

El Morro is groined with a blackened vertical sluice in the joint between the cliffs.  This hollow place echoes and the rocks seem to overhang as a vault in which a dark pond is cupped.  The stone channels above are tear-tracked with long dark stains where meltwater and rain follow the groove down into the pool.  The little lagoon is forty feet long and, maybe, half that dimension wide, fringed with reeds and, it seems, mostly hidden in shadow.  This is El Estanque del Peno, “the pool by the great rock”, and an important landmark for travelers through this arid region.  During the Spanish colonial era, old paths made by the Indians linked the pueblos, here the cliffs run along the road between Zuni and Acoma.  The shade under the big tubular-shaped cliffs and the water puddled at the base of the stone pillars made the place a welcome rest stop.  People have picnicked under the rock for a thousand years, probably longer, and the lower flanks of the big pinnacle are inscribed with thousands of pictographs, Anglo names and dates, and impressively lettered Spanish inscriptions.  Some of the Spanish characters, cut neatly into the stone, are very old.  There is a 1692 inscription with ornate italic capitals lanced into the stone by Don Diego de Vargas – he passed by this rock with a company of infantry and armored horseman, marching to conquer and subdue the pueblos at Santa Fe and along the Rio Grande after the great revolt of 1680.  De Vargas says that he “conquers for the Holy Faith – S (ante) Fe – and has raised his militia a su costa (“at his own expense”).  Even older is an inscription, also neatly lettered (and helpfully now vandalized – someone has smeared graphite into the row of characters chopped into the rock): Don Juan de Onate passed through here “after his discovery of the Southern Sea” (referring to the Pacific Ocean) – the column of letters is dated April 16, 1605, although it’s ambiguous as to whether the date refers to the decubrimyenta de la mar del sur, or the date that the inscription was made.

Four-hundred years before Onate’s expedition camped here, Indians lived in a pueblo on top of the cliffs, above some steep steps chiseled into a fissure in the rock.  There are ruins on top of the ramparts, but the trail leading to them is dangerous with ice on the day of my visit and a chain barrier slung between fallen rock blocks the way upward.

After walking the trail to the cliffs and the gallery of inscriptions, I drive back toward Grants – traveling in this direction, the road offers different prospects, some scuffed open-cut mines in the green hills, the long valley stretching down toward the freeway with Mount Taylor brooding over the empty landscape.  

Juan de Onate rides a great bronze horse in the town square at Alcalde, New Mexico.  He wears a helmet with pointed crest, a pistol strapped to his groin, and carries a long slender sword.  Onate’s spurs are spiked starbursts.  The statue, cast in bronze, was raised atop a rough granite ashlar in 1994, three years before the 400th anniversary of Onate’s expedition into New Mexico.  In 1997, in the middle of the night, some men from the Acoma Pueblo used a hacksaw to ampute Onate’s booted and spurred right foot.  Someone painted “Fair is Fair” on the maimed bronze figure. The sculptor, Reynaldo Rivera, re-cast the statue’s missing foot, remarking that chopping feet was “the nature of discipline 400 years ago.”  A few weeks later, the Acoma men returned and painted the newly restored foot bright red.  When Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in 2020, protests erupted around the statue in Alcalde of the so-called “last conquistador” and the Commissioners of Rio Arriba County ordered that the life-size equestrian bronze be removed “to protect it from vandalism.”  Just before dawn, workmen with acetylene torches cut the horse’s hooves free of the stone plinth.  This was June 15, 2020.  A front-end loader hoisted the bronze horse and rider off its pedestal and put the statue under a tarpaulin on a flatbed truck.  A man from the Ohkey Owingeh tribe danced.  Other people gathered.  Some of them said that they were “Spaniards” and that removal of the statue dishonored their people.  There were shoving matches and, when the truck drove away, some of the people cried ‘Que Viva Onante!”  Others hurled vituperation at the fallen bronze warrior.

Onate has been a controversial figure in the Southwest for 400 years.  In 1597, the Spanish King ordered him to explore the territory called Nuevo Mexico north along the Rio Grande.  Onate was one of the wealthiest men in Mexico, living in a palace in Zacatecas with his wife, the Aztec ruler Montezuma’s great-grandaughter (and the granddaughter of Henan Cortes)  Leading an expeditionary force, Onate reached the Rio Grande del Norte at the place where modern-day El Paso is located on April 30, 1598, the Feast of the Ascension.  Onate continued north into what is now New Mexico.  He established a base camp twenty miles south of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and mounted additional sorties into the vicinity, searching for the mythical golden city of Quivira.  One of these expeditions stopped at the Acoma Pueblo in October 1598, parleying with the Indians for food stores gathered by the Indians as provisions for the coming Winter.  The Spaniards demanded that the Indians deliver these provisions to them and there was a fight.  A little later, a band of 11 Spaniards, one of them Onate’s nephew, was ambushed by the Acoma warriors and slaughtered.  Onate, outraged at the death of his nephew, declared war on the Acoma and sent his second-in-command to mount a full-scale siege of the “sky city” at Acoma, the ancient pueblo perched atop a five-hundred foot high mesa.  After some fierce fighting, the Spaniards, covered by artillery fire from a three-pound cannon that they had dragged to the siege, breached the mesa defenses and a massacre ensued – about 500 hundred Acoma warriors and three-hundred women and children non-combatants were killed.  The pueblo was set on fire.  Onate ordered that all the surviving men be enslaved, allegedly after having their right feet amputated.  (Actual records show that Onate’s revenge was satisfied by having the “points of the right foot” hacked off, that is, toes – otherwise useful human capital in the form of slaves would have been ruined.)  Sixty of the pueblo’s young women were led away from the ruined village and parceled out as servants to various convents around Mexico City, never to return again.  (I recall hearing about the girls and the amputated feet many years ago when I attended a tour on the Acoma mesa.)

Onate’s punishment of the Acoma people was extreme even by the standards of the day.  When reports of the atrocity reached Mexico City, an investigation was convened.  Meanwhile, Onate led two additional expeditions into what is now Oklahoma and Kansas, reaching as far, it is thought as Wichita.  (We have followed him across the “staked plains” earlier in this writing.)  In 1606, he was summoned to Mexico City to stand trial for his war crimes in Nuevo Mexico.  Onate was convicted, stripped of his wealth and powers, and exiled back to Spain.  There he proved useful and died in 1626, once more wealthy, as the royal commissioner of mines.  

Onate’s exploits are chronicled in an epic poem written by one of his lieutenants Gaspar Perez de Villagra, “De Historia de la Nuevo Mexico”.  The verse follows the model of Virgil’s “Aeniad” commencing with the lines: “I sing of arms and the man...” – in this case the man being Don Juan de Onate.

There’s still some daylight and so I drive along the east side of the lava badlands.  A badly washboarded gravel road leads to some low sandstone cliffs, a ribbon of sculpted rock formations bedded in soft drifts of pure white sand.  Some indistinct foot trails explore around the hunchback bulge of the cliffs, but the footing is uncertain and I’m afraid of slipping and falling – no one is likely coming to my rescue out here.  In my car, I inch back to the asphalt road, driving four miles an hour, over the road-bed corrugation that jars my vehicle and rattles the coins on the console and the pop-cans on the floor.  Another five miles down the asphalt road, I stop to walk through the scrubby sage and creosote bushes to a vantage on the Ventana arch.  In the twenty-story cliff, water has bored an oculus through the stone hanging above a deeply indented rock shelter.  The area where I am walking probably flash-floods when it rains – the gullies are full of stone debris knocked off the cliffs.  I reach a place where the sandstone arch hangs overhead, a patch of darkening blue sky cupped in the pierced rock, a specimen of the heavens like something observed through the hatch of a mountain observatory.  The wind picks up a little.  Some ragged-looking hikers emerge from a slot in the canyon.  A big bird hangs overhead like a child’s kite and the thorny creosote trembles in the cold breeze.  It will be dark soon.  

The Cafecito in Grants sits on the main road, occupying an intersection between some vacant lots filled with rubbish and car parts. Someone has left a forlorn shopping cart along the side of the boulevard. The place is run by the Acoma tribe: everyone is masked as a Kachina dancer, but less colorfully. I order the chili sauce on the side – I’m concerned that it will be far too hot for me.  I get a taco, enchilada, and tamale platter. The taco and enchilada have been deep-fried to within an inch of their lives.  There’s a side of frijoles y arroz and a basket of doughy fry-bread sopapilas.  (A big flask of honey sits with salt and pepper and the ubiquitous Cholula red sauce.)  Two cups of chili are provided: red and green.  I can tolerate a tiny bit of red chili cautiously drizzled on my food.  The green is much too hot for me, an inferno in a saucer. 

Fuel at the Acoma Pueblo gas station on the freeway: $3.55 per gallon for $13.25 in the tank.  

 

February 27: Sunday.

Driving at 5:47 am.  11 degrees.  Sliver moon. 

As I drive down the entry ramp to I40, I see an icy glare on the flank of a mountain, concrete walls and watchtowers all bathed in a bright incandescent light, a carceral mirage that shines pale green and pale blue against the darkness.  So this is the explanation for the glum aspect of the town, it’s empty streets and ragged-looking trailer parks on hillsides overlooking the black putty of lava flows: Grants is a prison-town, home to the Northwestern New Mexico Correctional Center – no one stays here voluntarily.  At the El Malpais visitor center, the government employee who told me that the park was a “no fee” area, assumed that I was staying in Gallup and seemed bemused when I said that I was at a motel in Grants.  Now, I know why.  It seems odd that I didn’t notice the big compound like a seam of cement and halogen lights against the side of the mountain – I guess I never looked in that direction and, during daylight, the prison on the terrace probably blended into the terrain and may have been hard to see.  I don’t know.  But now, before dawn, the place is a bright white slash against the darkness.

A few miles down the road: another refinery, also lit green-blue and white, incandescent: one could make a likeness to the prison, even devise some kind of metaphor on that theme, but it’s tiring to think in these terms so early in the morning.

In the gloom, buttes that look like towering cruise ships docked over the sprawl of Gallup – signs for a “Red Rock” park, but in the grey fog, the cliffs are angular, dark shadows without color above the town.

The high desert is covered with snow.

KAAN Public Radio – the voice of the Navajo Nation.

Cars pass by, speeding, with turquoise beads dangling from rear-view mirrors.

Burger King in West Gallup: 6:50 am.  Native lady at the window.  Eggnormous burrito ($7.42) with coffee and tater tots.  Reddish rim-rock in all directions hemming-in the valley floor.

I40 westbound: desert with long lance-shaped ridges, stratigraphy arrowed upward as if the rock were bursting forth from the sand and gravel wasteland.  The whole landscape looks as if its been frozen, arrested in its ascendant motion, everything tilted and angled in one direction as if trying to escape some lethal destiny under the earth.  Ridge-tops glow pink and yellow in the dawn: about 7:00 am.

Arizona border: 7:07 (15 degrees).  Exit to Window Rock, Navajo tribal headquarters.  Scatter of hogans on display just beyond the border where the sentinel rocks open up onto snowy pastures.  

94.5 KYAT – Navajo Country.  On an upcoming weekend in March, the royalty will be gathered at a hardware store and there will be a give-away of some kind: the three princesses – Miss Intertribal Gallup, Miss Zuni, and Miss Navajo.  

8:10 am – Holbrook, Arizona: fuel – @$3.66 for $21.40.  The town is crouched in ravines below the freeway.  My route is 377, the old Hashknife Stagecoach road.  

The Aztec Land & Cattle Company was incorporated in New York in 1885.  The firm, comprised of East Coast investors, was formed to buy land south of the east-west road bed of the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad.  Ultimately, the company acquired over a million acres in a swath running 40 miles wide and ninety miles long between Holbrook and Flagstaff, Arizona.  The company’s cowboys and trail bosses were hired in Texas and used a brand well-known in that State – the “hash-knife”.  The brand is tee-shaped handle affixed to a crescent blade, a knife used to cut hash by chuck-wagon cooks.  Horses and mules were branded with the blade pointing up; cattle were branded with cutting edge turned downward.

The employees of the Aztec Land & Cattle Company were hired on-the-cheap and many of the cowhands were fugitives from justice.  The company was generally known as the Hashknife Operation in northern Arizona.  The firm’s cowboys were implicated in a number of murders and shootings in Holbrook, Winslow, and Flagstaff, Arizona.  Although the ranch was enormous, it wasn’t very profitable – the land was mostly too arid and cattle didn’t thrive on its range.  Nonetheless, the firm still owns vast tracts of territory in northern Arizona, profitable primarily on the basis of mineral leases.

Around the turn of the century, the unofficial headquarters for the cowboys associated with Hashknife outfit was a place called the Wigwam bar in Winslow, Arizona.  On April 8, 1905, two ranch-hands, William Evans and John Shaw, from the Hashknife were drinking shots at the Wigwam.  They were bad hombres, apparently ex-convicts from Texas.  Evans and Shaw downed their rot-gut and, then, ordered another couple shots, booze that was left on the bar when the two men drew their side-arms and robbed the gamblers in the place of the coin piled up on the tables.  (It’s estimated that they escaped with about 200 to 300 dollars worth of silver.)

Evans and Shaw rode away from Winslow and ended up in an even rougher and more notorious place, Canyon Diablo.  This was a shanty town built for the rest and recreation of workers on Atlantic and Pacific roadbed constructed twenty years earlier.  At its height, Canyon Diablo had four brothels and eight saloons; it’s first five marshals were all killed in quick succession by the bad men who frequented the town – the five lawmen ended up in the village’s lonesome boothill, shot down within the scope of a year.  When the railroad work ended, the town withered away.  It was mostly a ghost town when Evans and Shaw took refuge in the place.

Two lawmen from Winslow, Navajo County sheriff Peter Pemberton and Deputy Chet Houck followed a trail of silver coins apparently dropped by the robbers during their hasty escape. (The town marshal, Bob Giles pointed out the coins glittering on the ground.) Pemberton and Houck correctly guessed that the two fugitives were making for Canyon Diablo 25 miles away.  The lawmen flagged down a passing train, hopping a ride to Canyon Diablo.  They got off the train a mile from the ruins of the village and walked into town on Hell Street (the actual name of Canyon Diablo’s main drag).  Pemberton and Houck saw the two robbers standing outside of the town’s trading post – Canyon Diablo is on the border of the Navajo Reservation.  The two deputies approached the cowboys and demanded to search them.  Shaw shouted: “No one searches us!” and went for his side-arm.  The robbers were six feet from the law-men.  In the three-second exchange of gunfire, Shaw took a bullet to the head and was shot several times in the belly.  Evans went down with several wounds and had half his leg blown off.  Houck’s stomach was grazed by a bullet and his duster was later found to have been pierced by several shots. Twenty-five shots were fired in the affray, almost all of them misses.  

Houck and Pemberton enlisted some Indians at the trading post to bury John Shaw in a pine box in a shallow grave – the ground at Canyon Diablo is very rocky.  Late night April 9, 1905, a group of cowboys from the Hashknife ranch were getting drunk at the Wigwam in Winslow.  The bartender mentioned that the two robbers had ordered a round of shots but let them unconsumed when they drew down on the gamblers.  This intrigued the cowboys and they decided that dead John Shaw needed to finish his drink.  The boys bought a bottle of whiskey, found some shovels (and a Kodak brownie camera) and hopped the train east-bound to Canyon Diablo.  They reached the ghost town mid-morning and drunkenly demanded that the trader, Fred Voltz, show them where Shaw had been buried.  Voltz thought the mission was macabre and foolish and resisted, but, when guns were drawn, he showed the boys where the corpse had been interred.  The cowboys dug open the grave and pulled John Shaw’s body out of the ground.  They sloshed some whiskey into his mouth and down the front of his shirt.  One of the men took a picture of two of the cowboys holding John Shaw upright.  Someone said that the rictus on Shaw’s face meant that he was grinning at them and, after a couple of minutes, the festive gathering turned solemn – no one prayed, but some of cowhands were crying and, then, a panic ensued.  Someone, then, started praying and the bottle of whiskey was inserted in the pine box with Shaw’s cadaver and quickly reburied.

The Kodak pictures of Shaw held upright by the cowboys were displayed in the Wigwam Bar until 1940 when the old saloon was demolished.  Nine-months after the shoot-out, Deputy Pemberton got drunk and ambushed the Winslow town marshal, Bob Giles.  He was convicted of murder and sent to the territorial prison at Yuma where Evans was serving 14 years for his role in that murder.

Since the mid-forties, there has been a mounted posse headquartered in Holbrook, involved periodically in search and rescue missions, the so-called Hashknife Pony Express.  (The posse was instrumental in a number of winter-blizzard rescues above the Mogollon Rim in 1948 and, also, saved a group of aviators stranded in the high country when their Navy bomber crashed near Joseph City in 1957.)  Each year, the Pony Express posse carries twenty-thousand letters from Holbrook to Scottsdale.  People can get their correspondence post-marked “Hashknife Pony Express”.  The event ends in Scottsdale with an annual parade of the mounted posse down the suburb’s main street.    

If you want to go to Canyon Diablo and see the site of the shoot-out, you will need a jeep or high-clearance vehicle.  The roads to that remote place are often impassable.  Some crumbling stone walls point skeletal fingers into the sky and a couple of burned-out vehicles are parked in the ruins.  In the cemetery, there’s a big headstone in German, the burial place of an Indian trader named Hermann Wolfe who died in 1899 – reportedly, the headstone was carved in Germany and transported to the desolate Boothill graveyard in the years after World War Two.  (The iron pipes screwed together to make a fence protecting the gravesite have now fallen apart and lay rusting in the sage grass.)  There’s an iconic desert railroad trestle that hangs over the deep arroyo at the edge of town and locomotive enthusiasts sometimes jeep out to the ghost town to take pictures of the bridge, waiting in the gorge, for a train to pass over the high span.  

On the internet, someone suggests that rotgut liquor was the poor quality alcohol used to preserve corpses that had been robbed from graves for dissection in medical colleges.  Supposedly, the cunning bodysnatchers, after decanting the corpses, sold the liquor so it could be consumed by medical students.  This story is too good to be true and, probably, apocryphal.  Someone proposes that rotgut whiskey isn’t distilled – it’s a mixture of ethyl alcohol, tobacco for color, and sulfuric acid for bite.  This is also probably untrue.  Of course, the derivation of the terms seems to be intrinsic to the words.  The early attested use of the term is 1633: “Let not a Teaster ‘scape to be consumed in rot-gut.”  A “teaster” is someone who drinks tea, here “escaping” to “rot-gut” booze.  

No towns, no crossroads, an endless snowy steppe dotted with man-high pine brush, each tree instituting a zone of exclusion around it because the climate is very arid here and the spacing of the trees is, in fact, a measure of that aridity, the number of square feet required to support the root-system of a living tree.  Gradually, imperceptibly, the trees stand more upright and are taller and, then, at Heber-Overgaard (8:55 am) I am driving in a forest of ponderosa pine and douglas fir, big trees closely gathered around the car and stretching in green waves to the horizon, tree-trunks bedded in deep snow.  At first, the ridges look like the Black Hills in South Dakota, long escarpments dark with forest, then, it seems that I am driving on the top of a mountain for 80 miles, a huge empty land with no lakes and no rivers, some logging roads running into the timber and, perhaps, vacation houses off the highway, hidden in the woods.

The edge of plateau drops away to the south, a green rim extending to the horizon broken-up with black rock monoliths like guard posts, fortification towers hovering over the abyss.  This is the Mogollon rim, made famous by Zane Grey: as the road snakes down in switchbacks, I can see the tops of mountains below all drowned in snow, a half-dozen ranges that are below the rim with their great tilted drainages filled with millions of pine trees, no sign of the desert from this vantage, country that falls and falls and falls to a lower shelf where the highway runs parallel to the cliffs and high snowy ridges and, then, suddenly zooms down to an even lower terrace, still black with pines, the mouths of rocky canyons opening up into the escarpment.

Payson is at five-thousand feet, a resort town with upscale restaurants and log cabin affectations.  Chevron: $11.50 at 3.99 a gallon.  Eight dollars for a car wash: the lady hands me a jasmine air freshener and an orange wash cloth.  The car-wash tunnel flashes different colors of neon in the gush of water pouring over the car, then, the floppy mops are all around – the conveyor drags me out into the wet sunlight: it’s very bright.  The attendant says: “Your car was pretty dirty” and, indeed, this was true, metal and chrome and headlights caked in brown-grey road grime from the snowstorms in Minnesota and Iowa.  

A drop of another thousand feet: the snow-striated peaks that I saw from above at the rim now tower over the road and there are parallel gorges slashed in the range, all red and eroded.  After awhile the trees vanish and the highway falls through another tangle of switchbacks, another thousand foot descent at 6% downgrade – this country is very desolate, saguaro standing on the stony hillsides, jumbled heaps of rock, more canyons clogged with fractured boulders, then, a flat featureless plain with a stoplight in the middle of desert: Scottsdale, suburbs in the distance, gated communities white behind walls, fountains flaring over the neighborhoods and shopping malls.

11:30 am: Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport: Hilton Garden Inn, someone watering a lawn with a hose, planes suspended overhead.  My wife, Julie, who has flown here is reading a mystery in the hotel room upstairs...  75 degrees.

  

Phoenix and Tucson –

About 37 years ago, the senior partner in my law firm showed me his secret route to downtown St. Paul.  The route followed two-lane black top through several agricultural counties, passing through small villages every ten or twelve miles.  After a long, lonely stretch of highway crossing the flood plain of the Cannon River, the highway joined 52 (the main road between St. Paul and Rochester) just south of the pipes and stinking aerial lattice-work of the refinery at the Pine Bend of the Mississippi River.  From 52, you took an inconspicuous frontage road in a suburb, made a couple turns among residential neighborhoods, and, then, hustled along an old winding highway through nondescript suburbs with only a couple of stoplights slowing you on the way to downtown St. Paul.  (About five years after I mastered this route, the freeway bypass called I35E made the rural route to St. Paul superfluous.  I’ve driven to St. Paul on those country roads only a couple of times in the last quarter century and, on each trip, was afflicting with annihilating depression, a terrible sorrow that came out of nowhere and had no clear source in any of my thoughts or memories.)

Starting near the junction with 52 in the flat Cannon Valley flood-plain, the northbound driver encounters roads that are numerically designated – first, I think, is 250th street, then, a couple miles closer to St. Paul 225 and, then, 210 and 200, intersections out in the country that, nonetheless, seem to bear reference to the system of streets in St. Paul.  Indeed, the numbers of the intersecting lanes become progressively smaller as you approach the Capitol city and, I assume, the intersection of Roberts and Kellog, near the Federal Court building (that was usually the destination for these trips) could also be called First and First, that is the target at the center of the concentric circles traversed by the traveler.  I had the idea that I might, one day, bring a camera and take pictures of each of these intersections – starting with State Highway 52 and 250th Street, a bleak crossroads in a cornfield with no buildings anywhere visible, to 200th, a café next to a gas station out in the country, and so on, documenting each major road-crossing until I reached the skyscrapers and iron bridges and the monuments of downtown St. Paul.  The idea would be to show how a city gradually arises from the agricultural country that surrounds it, intersection after intersection increasingly built-up and, then, urban until traveler penetrates to the center of the capitol with its masses of buildings, parking lots, sidewalks, and statues.  

I never completed this project.  Indeed, I never even commenced work on it.

It’s fascinating to imagine that all the streets and byways on a continent are connected to one another.  I can drive from my residential street in Austin, Minnesota to Tucson, Arizona.  The road leading to Race Point on the tip of Cape Cod connects, through a maze of streets and byways, to the end of the highway in Key West.  You can drive from Cape Cod to Nome if you have a reliable car and a well-funded credit card.   

Friday: March 4, 2022

Tucson: gas at station on Averno Road – @3.99 – $12.32.  Setting forth at 9:16 am.  (70 miles to Nogales in Mexico.)

Freeway crossing desert basin – dusty green fields where there is enough irrigation to grow cotton or soybeans.  High cross-winds: 82 degrees.  Ribbons of lead-colored mountains on the horizon.  Dust-devils whirling up spiral spouts of sand.  Road-side signs warn of limited visibility due to blowing dust.  

12:10 – Pilot Truckstop at Florence-Coolidge exit on I-10.  Gas @ $4.05 a gallon – but this is a restroom pause primarily and the tank tops off at $7.50.  Hard, hot wind snapping across the concrete plaza in front of the gas station.  Little whirlwinds leaking yellow sand up into the sky.

Rain at the airport, the highway snaked into curlicues between the terminals.  Warm mist in the air.  My wife gets out at the Delta terminal.  She’s carrying a purse and one plastic bag.  I have the rest of her luggage in the rear of my car.  The radio warns that rain is making things slick and that cars have crashed on all major freeways.  I make my way through endless dim suburbs to the east along the ferocious-looking escarpment of the Superstition Mountains.  Now 65 degrees.

East of Apache Junction the road (60) narrows from freeway to limited access highway, two-lanes in both directions.  The traffic is heavy and starts and stops: accident ahead.  Six fire-trucks screen a bad crash, a couple of RV trailers on their sides and a crumpled pick-up truck, ambulance crews gingerly loading casualties onto gurneys – four-mile column of stalled traffic oncoming.  The jagged mass of the Superstition Mountains, hacked into deep valleys overflowing with blue shadow overhead.  The air is moist but the sky is clear now – 65 degrees.  

Globe is in an amphitheater made by mountain ranges dark along their upper ridges with pine forests.  The town is above a nasty scramble up some crooked gorges jammed-up with spires and pinnacles of red rock.  An unfriendly gas station on the outskirts of the town, a place huddled on narrow bluffs above the tense, spring-taut bends of a twisting ravine.  

Long ascents up toward the plateau all edged with mountains.  Then, the sudden enormous defile of the Salt River Canyon, a drop of two-thousand feet and, then, another steep climb up to the north rim –branching gorges stretching in both directions with a tiny rivulet of water far below, some sage brush drifted up against the stone-retaining wall at the edge of the pull-out over the gorge.

Radio reports that there are blizzard conditions at Flagstaff, maybe two-hundred miles to the west on the Colorado Plateau – it’s high up there, a flat park-like forest that laps up against the perpetually snow-covrtrf peaks of the San Francisco Mountains.  Weather warnings  – get to shelter and hunker down, the snow storm is coming.  

Fuel at Super America at Show Low just off the main drag, Deuce of Clubs – gas priced at $3.84 a gallon – $12.82.  42 degrees.  Show Low is like Payson, a resort town catering to wealthy folks from Phoenix who have summer houses here in this high, pine-dotted chaparral.  It’s 4:40 pm, the shadows lengthening and some towering blue clouds reaching up to the zenith to the west in the direction of Flagstaff.  Between Globe and I40 at Holbrook and the Painted Desert – there are no towns except Show Low, a distance of about 150 miles.

Show Low is named after a legendary poker game.  Two ranchers were equal partners in a 100,000 acre ranch.  But they clashed and decided to stake the ranch on an all-or-nothing game of “Seven Up,” a kind of stud poker.  The two men played for several days without any clear outcome.  So, at last, they agreed to each draw a card from the deck, the low card (“Show Low”) designated the winner and, therefore, the sole proprietor of the ranch.  The first rancher drew the deuce of clubs and, of course, thereby, won the ranch.  The main street of Show Low is called “Deuce of Clubs Avenue.”  There are various versions of this story.  Some claim that the decisive poker game was for the right to ranch the area and that the men weren’t partners when they played.  Other versions omit the long, indecisive poker game and compress the wager into the draw of a single card – Corydon Cooley, a leader of the Apache scouts at a nearby fort, drew a card from Marian Clark’s deck: it was the deuce of clubs with Cooley declaring “Show low it is!”  A map made in 1874, marks the town and calls it “Show Low” – although it was said to have only one inhabitant.  

The two-lane arrows across the snowy plateau.  So far its windy but clear, smooth driving – sometimes, the highway slips down into huge naked-looking valleys where there might be an exhausted-looking church, maybe a school with metal-roof outbuildings, some cattle-guards inset in the asphalt protecting a tiny scatter of trailer houses and shacks with wrecked car bodies marking notional roads that are receding into the scrub grass and dust – you come to inexplicable stop signs where the cross-road is well-nigh illegible, a cart track over the bare prairie.  Great draws like beaches with the road running on a causeway over the sand – maybe, one car oncoming every ten miles.  Vast, empty, frightening terrain with the radio incessantly warning of the blizzard careening east from Flagstaff –

My plan is to take a 26 mile winding road over the Painted Desert up to an exit onto I-40 – then, I will be only three or four miles from my destination, a hotel off the freeway on the Navajo Reservation at a place called Chambers.  I’m nervous about the oncoming storm, now a wall of blue haze that has mostly blotted out the sun – when will it be dark?  I don’t want to drive on these empty winding roads after the sun sets.  My eyes are weak and the wind buffets the car and about every fifteen minutes the temperature drops another degree – it’s now 38 degrees, then 36.

Beyond a shallow beige draw, about a half-mile long, I see the cut-off to the byway over the Painted Desert.  It’s the only logical route to the freeway: Holbrook is twenty miles out of my way to the west; St. John is thirty miles out of my way to the east.  After the turn, I pass between some flat, embattled-looking sheds, long pole barns with tin roofs from which the locals sell Indian pots and petrified wood.  There are ornamental cairns of petrified wood heaped around the empty parking lot.  Not a trace of life at this emporium, an old truck parked up against a sand-blasted wall that doesn’t look as if it has been started for a decade.  Then, narrow winding black top up to the National Park entrance, a kiosk shack empty between lanes coming and going, a sign that says “Fee Area” and another notice on the side of the kiosk that tells me that the park hours are 8:00 to 5:00 – it’s now 5:17 pm, the sun low on the horizon and peeping out aghast from the edges of the blizzard darkening the western sky.  The road isn’t blocked – there’s no gate or orange cones in the road (the wind would blow those away anyhow), no chain barring the highway and so, I assume, that the byway is used by locals to access the freeway near Chambers 26 miles to the north and in defiance of the notice that the park is closed, I continue north along the park access road...

A mile past the entrance gate, the lane takes a right turn through a compound of old buildings.  There’s no one around, no cars parked in the big lot between the one-story Mission-style buildings.  Long verandas stretch along the fronts of the buildings, adobe facades with vacant, empty windows and dark protruding vigas, ancient wood as mute and impervious as the fat columns of petrified trees standing on the badland hillsides.  This is the “Historical Park HQ” so-named on some signs, a sort of spectral plaza between official buildings, but everything locked up now and silent.  

The bare hills beyond the park buildings have been scuffed and abraded down to their clay bones, ribs of red and yellow and blue earth exposed as rolling badlands extending out to the horizon.  The clay ravines spread across the hills like many-branched horizontal trees and the edges of the barrens are spiked and studded with knee-high chips of petrified wood.  My car rolls forward along the low hill-tops, pretty vistas in all directions, and the sun behind me so that I am perpetually driving into the shadow of my car.  Sometimes, the road angles to one side or another so that the car’s shadow is dragged over the motley-colored ravines at the side of the road.  It’s a narrow, much-patched way no shoulder, just some black-top painted over the top the hills and snaking toward the horizon.  

At mile-marker 13, I see a long white SUV facing me, a park service vehicle that flashes its emergency lights in my eyes.  I pull up next to the SUV and see a Native guy wearing a khaki uniform.  He scowls at me over his open window.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“Trying to reach the freeway, I-40,” I tell him.

“How did you get in here?”

“I just drove in.”

“The gate wasn’t closed,” he asks.

“No,” I say.  “Does this go through to I-40?”

“The park is closed,” he says.  “You can’t come this way.”

No doubt I’m in violation of about 10 different Federal laws, probably some of the same laws for which people are being prosecuted for breaching the Capitol building on January 6, 2022.

“You have to turn around,” the man says.

“I’ll follow you out,” I say.

“No you won’t.  Turn around here and I’ll come behind,” he tells me.

It takes me a few maneuvers to turn around: the road is narrow and there’s no shoulder – the edge just drops off into a clay pit.

On the way back to the entrance, I take care to drive the speed-limit, 25 to 35 mph.  I don’t want the guy to charge me with speeding.  The SUV follows along for about ten miles and, then, vanishes.  I don’t know where it goes because it seems that there is only one road here, not even any gravel tracks leading away from the by-way.  

I pass through the spooky deserted park headquarters, past the still, deserted kiosk and, then, out to the main highway.  It’s 20 miles to Holbrook and, then, 28 miles back on I-40 to Chambers.  And it’s now 6:00 pm.  The public radio station at Flagstaff says that the snow is falling hard and blowing in the wind.  

I take the route toward Holbrook, driving into the face of the storm that now seems a black-grey vortex that conceals the setting sun.  Naked Holbrook is treeless, stark, full of vacant motels and taverns with neon marquees that flash Indian chiefs and bucking stallions.  The roads are all deserted.  On I-40 some semi trucks churn by caked in ice and snow.  It’s dark now and catastrophically windy.  The gale kicks hard against my car and I’m anxious to get off the freeway.  

Dark and wind make it hard to read the map in my car.  The motel I’m seeking is at a place called Chambers, about 25 miles east of Holbrook.  But I don’t encounter any exits marked with that name.  The wind buffets me and it’s now 33 degrees with some sleet flickering in the air.  I’m reduced to reading road side billboards for some clue as to where I’m located.  The signs are starting to cake with ice, white scabs covering the letter, but I can see a motel advertised for the Ganado exit.  Perhaps, this is Chambers under a different name.  

The wind is now booming in the underpasses.  A few hundred yards east of the exit, I can see a lit marquee for a motel quivering in the wind.  It’s a cheerless place, concrete blocks heaped up to make a two-story building stranded on the desert in front of a narrow parking lot.  The freeway is so nearby that passing trucks kick up slush over the wire-link fence, big fountains of the stuff spurting off the Interstate and drizzling down onto the outer edge of the parking lot.  The lobby is empty, overheated, stinking of burnt coffee – a Navajo girl comes sullenly from somewhere in the court of rooms along the parking lot.  It’s the kind of place where they require a 20 dollar key deposit.  (Fuel at a Mobil Station next to the motel: $4.29 – $17.00). 

The motel, previously called The Chieftain, but, now, unnamed, perhaps, since the neon sign of the big Indian in a plumed headdress hand raised in greeting: “How!” is darkened, a dark, ghostly giant beckoning in the roaring wind, an outline of skeletal, unlit neon-tube bones hanging over the edge of the long  building.  The room is spartan but functional.   A café is hitched to the motel; a sign in the window says OPE (the “N” is burned-out).  The entry to the place is a unprepossessing, a collage of handbills on the steel-framed glass door advertising sheep auctions, missing Native women, church services, and dogs for sale.  The glass on the door is broken, the fracture mended with peeling duct-tape.  A placard tells me to wipe my feet before entering. One of the keyholes on the door is also taped shut and there are some postings in Navajo.

A fat Indian girl sits on a stool along a counter; she’s peering into her cell-phone and seems to be related to the sole waitress working here tonight.  A Native woman and three small children are in a booth against the wall: the children implore their mother for pop, chocolate and dessert, ice cream or fudge.  The mother makes one phone call after another, apparently to relatives, indicating that the furnace is out in their house and that it’s too cold to stay there and “he” is on-the-road, possibly driving long-haul, and, so, what are they to do?  An atmosphere of sour despair clings to every surface in the café, blurring things and importing darkness into the room.  A couple of German tourists, disoriented by the wind and the cold, order salads – the pair seem to have come off some remote trail in the wilderness.  The woman’s hair is unwashed and stringy, dishwater blonde and she seems pretty disgruntled. 

The big neon Indian now consigned to darkness is featured on the menu.  I order seared lamb on frybread with fries.  The meat is savory and has been marinated in some kind of chili sauce, but it is very tough, shoe-leather, and hard to eat.  Between the pile of shaved lamb, a bit like gyros meat, and the frybread bun there’s a big poblano pepper, roasted and full of seeds, and very sweet and hot.  The menu is labeled: “We reserve the right to refuse service to ANYONE!”  

It’s snowing when I walk back along the side of the building to my room.  I go to sleep.  At 12:30 pm, someone is pounding with closed fist on my door.  At first, I hope the noise will go away, but it doesn’t and so I get up and cautiously look between the black-out drapes, made of some sort of slimy plastic, and the window-frame.  A middle-aged Native woman is hammering at the door.  In one hand, she holds a striped beach towel and cradles a bottle in a paper-sack and a plastic cup.  The woman sees me and begins to apologize.  “Wrong room,” I tell her.  “I’m so sorry,” she says.  I can see pick-up trucks in the wan exterior light cast by the arcade – the vehicles are all covered with swirls and curlicues of slush as if painted with white cake frosting.  I can’t get back to sleep because the storm worries me and each truck that passes on the freeway sounds like a waterfall.  Is it the wind roaring against the building or just semi-trucks roaring along the nearby freeway.

Chambers, exit 333 on I-40, isn’t marked because it really doesn’t exist – it’s a census-designated place, but unincorporated, apparently a couple of dwellings that house the people who work at the motel, the café, and the Mobil station, all apparently tribal enterprises. (Chambers, named after some local worthy, became Halloysite Town in 1926.  Halloysite is an alum-silica compound that has various applications including use in kaolin clay and adsorbing impurities in oil.  A large mine extracting the mineral from the red buttes was located near Chambers and so the name of the place was changed.  But the name didn’t catch on, the mine closed-down, and by 1937 Chambers or Halloysite Town or whatever you want to call the place had ceased to exist – it was omitted from a Rand-McNally road atlas at that time.)  Ganado is fifty miles north on a two-lane highway (191) that runs to Canyon de Chelly and Shiprock.  It’s part of the old Fort Defiance reservation, a military outpost founded to pacify the Navajo Apaches forced into this area after their wars with the government and the so-called “Long Walk.”  A famous trading post, the Hubbell store, is located at Ganado.

This area was once part of the Chaco territory, a network of so-called Great Houses, big dynastic palaces, linked by an elaborate system of well-marked and -maintained ceremonial roads. (The great drought of the 13th century may have been one reason that the polity collapsed.)  The Great Houses located remote from Chaco Canyon, the place where the culture was centered, are called Outliers.  One of the largest of these outliers was the so-called Wide Ruin, a big abandoned pueblo on the road to Ganado.  In the 19th century, the Wide Ruin had dressed stone walls, some as high as twelve feet, marking a number of rooms as well as kivas and a plaza.  The Navajo living in this area thought the Chaco people were sorcerers and have contempt for their ruins – the name in Navajo for the Chaco pueblo-dwellers is “Anasazi” which means “ancient enemy.”  The Navajo knocked down the walls of Wide Ruin to salvage the stone for their own construction projects.  Most of the pueblo was gone by the 1920's.  A trading post was built on the site using the remaining stone and the last wall from the old Great House  was gone a decade later.

In the early 18th century, someone named Jiheel, a Native man of uncertain origin, moved into the area.  Jiheel was a very swift runner – it was said that he was so fleet of foot that he could out-race deer and wrestle them to the ground.  Jiheel (whose name means something like “Brain-Basher,” a sort of war-club) was said to have enormous feet.  When his footprints were seen, people shivered with fear because he was cruel and war-like.  Jiheel carried “huge arrows” and built fortifications from which to oppress the people who lived in the area.  He is reputed to have constructed the “Wide Ruins” on the Ganado road and another citadel atop a nearby mesa, the so-called “Upstanding House”.  From these places, Jiheel shot arrows at travelers passing-by and raided their sheep flocks.  When not harassing the local Indians, Jiheel tutored them in the arts of civilization – he taught them how to raise crops, mostly squash and beans, invented irrigation, and showed the people how to build with stone.  Some say that he was part Spanish but also from the Red Streak Passing Into Water clan of the Navajo.  The hillside at Upstanding House was reputedly littered with the skulls of warriors killed by Jiheel who seems to have been a cannibal and some sort of ogre.  Anthropologists describe Jiheel as a figure stalking the contested borderlands between the Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo nations.  (Of course, he didn’t erect the Great House at Wide Ruins or the citadel at Upstanding House – these were ancestral Puebloan, or Chaco culture sites, abandoned five-hundred years before Jiheel is supposed to have made his appearance in the area.)

Saturday: March 5 – I will never see the landscape at Chambers, Arizona or the Chieftain Motel and Café in the light of day.  On the road at 6:07 am (35 degrees but with the car moving: 32 degrees).  Easy to knock the slush off my car.  I-40 is clear and, even, dry – the bad driving that I expected doesn’t happen although the freeway signs are all snowballed with thick deposits of slushy snow – 

Grey cliffs swathed in fog.  Snow on the roadside.  

New Mexico border: 6:30 am.

Breakfast at McDonald’s, Gallup – breakfast burritos, hash browns, coffee: it’s 7:06 am.  

Route 66 Travel Center – outskirts of Albuquerque: gas @ $3.85 for $20.32.  It’s 9:06 am.  

My sister, Celeste, lives in Bernalillo, a suburb north of Albuquerque.  I call her from the truckstop and ask if I may visit.  She seems enthusiastic about the idea and, so, I exit I-40 as it enters the city, get lost for awhile, and, then, follow some broad curving roads north, suburban boulevards that follow notional stream beds, dry troughs gouged out of the land by flashfloods, passing through shabby-looking residential neighborhoods to a cross-town highway with exits onto the freeway that runs north to Santa Fe (I-25).  The interstate parallels the steep whale-back of the Sandia Mountains, a vast rock curb that hovers over the city.  Bernalillo is 15 miles north and, even, on Saturday, the traffic is brisk and there are long lines of cars jammed up behind stoplights.  My sister’s home is located in a very upscale development of new houses west of the freeway, tracts of adobe-style dwellings riding a curving terrace above the Rio Grande Valley.  (Before my sister moved to Bernalillo, about seven years ago, I visited the Coronado National Monument, the site of the ruins of a large Tewa (sometimes called “Tiwa”or “Tiguex”) settlement, the Kuaua (“Evergreen”) pueblo.  Coronado spent a season at the pueblo, mooching off the Indians’ stores of squash, corn and beans.  Of course, the arrangement was one-sided and, in recompense for their hospitality, the Indians decided to kill and eat some of Coronado’s mules and horses. In turn, Coronado’s men requisitioned the better parts of several of the Tiguex villages for his men, quartering his men in the pueblos, more comfortable housing than the straw and twig wigwams where they had been living – there were 12 villages along the Rio Grande in this area.  A war ensued with the predictable consequence that the Tiguex were largely slaughtered, their villages reduced to rubble, and their women enslaved.  Finally, the Tiguex got rid of Coronado by persuading him that the desolate plains of what is now Kansas were full of golden cities – the gullible Spaniards marched off to the East having, more or less, wrecked the Tiguex people and their culture.  The historical site, which features 14 murals restored from pre-Columbian kivas, is on a pleasant green riverbank entirely encircled by carburetor repair shops, check-cashing storefronts and fast food places.)  I am able to find my way into the neighborhood, but I take a wrong turn and end up inside a gated community.  I’m not familiar with such places and assume that I’ve committed some sort of awful transgression and will now be trapped behind the spiked iron fence guarding the road.  A little panicked, I call my sister who informs me that I’m two blocks away, but somehow inside the gated neighborhood, although, not to worry – she tells me to just drive slowly toward the gate and a machine will sense my presence so that the barrier will slide open.  This is accurate and a few minutes later, I am at her house.

My sister lives will Bill Terriquez, a famous track and field coach (he was at Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota).  Their home is large, tastefully appointed, with immense rooms furnished in the southwestern style.  Most notably, the house has a balcony that overlooks the other dwellings in the neighborhood and that affords a spectacular view of the Sandia massif.  I’ve seen many pictures that Celeste has posted of the mountain range and know that it is often fringed with snow on its barren upper ridges; in some pictures, the mountain glows with supernatural radiance at sunset.  I’ve always assumed that these photographs were taken from a narrow ledge perched on the backside of the house.  But, in fact, the balcony is broad and long, capacious and solidly built from concrete finished like adobe, a structure that must be reinforced by iron girders; it’s really another commodious room in the house.  After a tour of the home, I’m anxious to drive again – I have a long road ahead of me: I need to be in Liberal, Kansas before sunset.

Bill says that I don’t need to backtrack to I-40 but should take 25 north toward Santa Fe, then, skirt the Sangre de Cristo mountains on their eastern flank.  Another diagonally running highway N-NW crosses eastern New Mexico, passing through Oklahoma to Liberal.  My sister gives me a baggie full of treats and I depart around 11:00.

Bill’s route is fast and pleasant enough.  Oncoming lanes of the freeway are clogged with traffic returning from Santa Fe and there seems to be a perpetual six-mile back-up north of Bernalillo in the southbound lanes – this doesn’t trouble me because I’m driving north.  The highway crosses the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo, running through shapely gorges with green slanting hillsides and fluted cap-rock.  Then, the freeway advances over rolling, treeless plains.

Las Vegas, New Mexico: Mobile Station gas $3.85 ($18.50).  West, hanging over the dirty-looking little town, Truchas peak, a slovenly white sprawl on a couch of dark tree-covered ridges.  I’ve never seen this mountain from the east, but always instead from the ancient village of Truchas on a long ridge west of the peak, a narrow tongue of land surrounded by deep ravines that seems to tilt up toward the snowy peak.  (This is where the Penitentes held their rites, embarking on a Lenten pilgrimage into the snow on the high summit, a procession of flagellants dragging carts with square wheels up the steep slopes, other members of the brotherhood hunched under heavy crosses embedding splinters in their shoulders.)  Truchas Peak from this vantage looks seductive, even, voluptuous, a woman in white lingerie deshabille stretched out across her boudoir divan.  The sky is acid-blue.

Exiting I-25 at Springer, another wretched-looking town, shacks and dirt lanes, lots of abandoned homes, a scary gas station with a man and a woman attacking a 24-hour credit-card pump with a crowbar while some locals loiter around, four tourists waiting in a mournful line for the single toilet on-site – gas is $3.49 for only $9.00.  I want a full tank since the map assures me that there are no towns anywhere along the road I am about to drive.  To the west, Wheeler Peak, the highest mountain in New Mexico – probably fifty miles away, a big serene crest of snow and ice hanging high over the mountains black with evergreen.  

80 miles to the Oklahoma border: I pass three ranch houses, none too prosperous, along the road, no towns and only a few intersections.  The grasslands are golden in the afternoon sun, long angular ridges spreading across the land and the sense that the highway is coursing along a privileged high line in the terrain, some distant mountains with fractured, stony skulls peeping up over the horizon.  Sometimes, a long line of trucks and cars approaches, oncoming – the land is hilly and it’s hard to pass.  New Mexico public radio plays hoo-hah Mexican polkas with wheezing accordions gossiping over the four-square beat of drums and tuba – out here, even the radio announcers don’t seem to have heard of the war in Ukraine –

Clayton, New Mexico is a few miles from the border with Oklahoma.  It’s the only town on the road.  Two buttes rise over the landscape north of town, the Rabbit Ears.  Clayton is fairly substantial with heavily built downtown structures, heaps of quarried local stone – an old guidebook said that the buildings had to be brick-built or the wind would blow them away.  An antique hotel, the Ecklund, a square block of dark brick with ranks of windows overlooking main street, stands next to the highway.  There’s a café with the letter NUART spelled vertically on a stave displayed over the sidewalk.  A block away The Luna Theater (built in 1916) is still showing movies.  Everything looks sun-blasted, stripped bare and minimalist with one exception – a gigantic house stretches along a hundred yards of the highway, just two or three blocks from the downtown businesses.  The house is also dark and heavy with great brick walls supporting mission-style tile roofs, several separate wings extending back and away from the roadside.  The huge structure has an elaborate porte cochere at what seems to be its principal entrance – today there’s a Subaru station wagon parked under the big masonry arch.  The home has the effect of a Frank Lloyd Wright design, linear and hugging the ground with some man-sized concrete urns poised on low terraces flanking the house, but the whole thing magnified in size, enormous and portentous.  The place has the aura of legend or myth – it’s a fate, a destiny.  

Four miles south of Clayton, not visible from 87 (the road I’m driving), New Mexico maintains another prison, the Northeastern New Mexico Correctional Facility.  The most famous resident of that prison was “Blackjack” Tom Ketchum.  Ketchum and his brother, Sam, were outlaws who robbed trains with members of Butch Cassidy’s “Wild Bunch” around the turn of the 20th century.  Tom Ketchum began his criminal exploits in Tucumcari.  At that time, he was a cowboy drifting between range-hand jobs with a record of petty larceny.  Caught in the thunderstorm, he asked to take shelter in Levi and Morris Hetzstein’ dry goods emporium, an institution that the locals called “the Jew store.”  Levi Hetzstein offered the man shelter and, in return, Ketchum burglarized the place.  Outraged, Levi Hetzstein formed a posse to pursue Ketchum who had fled town.  The posse caught up with Ketchum and a couple of associates in an arroyo a few miles from town.  There was a shoot-out and Ketchum was knocked off his horse, but, firing from the ground, killed Levi Hetzstein and another man.  Ketchum escaped, made his way into the wilderness, and, then, spent the next three or four years robbing trains on the high plains of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.  Tom Ketchum was a volatile fellow – once when a girlfriend jilted him, he read the girl’s letter out loud to a gang of outlaws, all the while pistol-whipping himself until his face and head were bloody.  (There was another bad man in the territory, “Black Jack” Christian, and, apparently he and Ketchum were sometimes confused – the last names may have sounded a little alike to people.  This seems to have been how he acquired his sobriquet.)

The stories of these western outlaws can be a bit monotonous.  Robbing trains is a dangerous business and, sooner or later, hands specializing in this sort of crime end up dead or captured.  Sam Ketchum, Tom’s brother, took a shot-gun blast to the chest, was badly wounded, and the day after the botched robbery was found leaning against a cotton-wood tree trying to pick the buckshot out of his body.  This self-surgery didn’t work and he died.  A few months later, Black Jack Tom tried to rob the same train that had brought his brother to grief.  He chose the same technique and angle of attack and the conductor shot him when he tried to board the locomotive.  Black Jack Tom was taken to Santa Fe – by the time, he reached town his arm was green with gangrene and had to be amputated.  There was a trial and Ketchum was sent back to Clayton to be hanged.  The surgery and trial had taken a few months and, although Black Jack was captured in 1898, the executioner at the prison at Clayton didn’t get around to hanging him until April 26, 1901.  Prison food suited Ketchum and he had gained a few pounds when he walked out to the scaffold to be hanged.

With characteristic bravado, Ketchum had refused the ministrations of local clergy – “I’ll die the way I lived,” he told the pastor.  As he was escorted to the gallows, Ketchum reportedly made the jaunty comment that he “would be in Hell, before you boys finish your breakfast.”  His last words were  “Good-bye. Please dig my grave very deep. All right, let’s hurry up.”  No one had ever been hanged before in Clayton and executioner was nervous.  The drop was too long and Ketchum’s weight too great – the noose didn’t just break his neck, it snapped off his head.  This impressed everyone in attendance and many photographs were taken – some of them show Ketchum on the scaffold, but most depict the body lying headless at the foot of the gallows with a couple of men kneeling at his side and the outlaw’s hooded head next to the corpse trussed up like a Christmas turkey.  People agreed that even a bad hombre shouldn’t be decapitated by his hanging and so the local mortician sewed the head back onto his stretched neck so that some more commemorative photographs could be made.  The gruesome pictures on sepia tone postcards were displayed in the Ecklund Hotel dining room until the late forties.  Guidebook writers noted that the locals didn’t pay any attention to them.   

At the Oklahoma border, clock-time reverts to CST – it’s now 4:37 pm.  

Fuel at Boise City, Oklahoma – the “Home of the Wildcats”: 5:10 pm. @3.49 for $10.00.  The town is bare, unsheltered.

Completely flat land – Highway 64, running East (56 degrees).  You can see the white rivet of the grain elevators for ten or twelve miles – the elevators are spaced along the highway so that no sooner do you pass one of them, then, the next appears on the horizon.  The road is an abstraction in an abstract Euclidean landscape, point to point connected by a ribbon of highway.  The sun is behind me and it tilts the shadow of my car into infinity: a black moving mark that paints darkness across three states – towns like Texline and Texhoma in the distance – a white plover bursts like a shot across the highway.  Here the road-builders are afraid that the solitude and immensity will put drivers to sleep: the center of the road is equipped with saw-tooth edge to rattle you awake if your car strays...

The directions to Liberal from this place are a little bit baroque – there’s a ten mile stretch on a road that is not numbered but lettered: it’s O or, if a number, maybe zero, a narrow strip of black top running between old oilfields.  Each pumping station is self-contained, a little hammer-shaped derrick industriously rising and falling, three silver tanks to hold the oil extracted from the earth, a small shed next to the tanks, containing, I suppose, tools and equipment to keep the pump maintained and operating.

Town of Hooker: a marijuana dispensary at the Texas border.  A little bunker-shaped building that advertises that it is a Massage and Chinese Therapy emporium: neon flashes OPEN.  A sign points the way to Black Mesa State Park – the Black Mesa is the highest point in Oklahoma, a long questa rimmed with crumbling cliffs and aimed at the western horizon.

Strange radio station: 89.5: music alternates between Philip Glass, death metal, and languid, emotionally rapt folk-music.  There’s even a scene from John Adams opera Nixon in China. 

Sunset: molten tear drop.  It’s 6:40 for both the sunset and as I cross the state line into Kansas.  Liberal at 6:45 pm.

After checking in to the hotel, I go down the street to the Cattleman’s Café – it’s crowded on Saturday night.  On the wall: there’s a big photograph of a twister snaking across the barren plains.  Liberal claims to be where Dorothy lived before the tornado whirled her away to Oz.  Somewhere off main street you can see her house and the homes of several of the other folks who appeared in the novel and movie The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  This seems odd to me because Dorothy lives on a farm in the movie not a small town and I had the impression that the part of the story set in Kansas was fictional, that, indeed, Kansas itself was a figment of the author’s imagination.   As to the truth of Oz, I have no doubts.  

March 6, 2022 – Sunday.

6:15 am – I visit the breakfast room at the hotel and take a plate to-go: two boiled eggs, two sausages, a banana and an orange.

Still cold: 15 degrees.

Fuel at Meade, Kansas (Dalton gang hide-out): $3.69 a gallon – $19.42 at the Gas & Tote, a cube of pale greenish light in the darkness.

Sunrise at 7:06 (19 degrees).  Why did Homer describe the sunrise as “rosy-fingered”?  This is not what dawn looks like, at least here on the steppes of west Kansas.  Probably, the Greek kenning serves a metrical function and is justified in that context.

Pratt City: 8:43 gas @$3.62 – $13.83.  It’s now 25 degrees.  The parking lots of the churches are full.  On the radio, there is the usual news about Ukraine – incessant bombardments and refugees dying in the outskirts of smoking, ruined towns.  Tornados clipped through Iowa, Madison County near Des Moines and there are six dead with 11 injured.  Across from the gas station: the Storm Cellar Pub and Grill.  

Highway 61 to Hutchinson, Kansas – a roadside marker points the way to the “Salt Discovery Well”.  

I have a hot dog off a roller grill in a gas station.  What does it taste like?  It tastes exactly like a hot dog off a roller grill at a gas station.

Fast Start: Newton, Kansas – $12.00 gas at $3.79.  Problem at the pump: the gas pump’s console won’t let me enter my zip code, a necessity in order to purchase fuel.  I pick another pump.  A woman comes in to the Fast Start carrying a job application and a small round and furry dog.  The old lady behind the counter tells me that the ultra-modern pumps haven’t been working right this weekend.  

The highway crosses the Flint Hills in a discrete groove of river bed occupied by road, railroad tracks, and the somber-looking river and a string of pools surrounded by cattails.  The trees lining the river are an invasive species.  Out here everything but grass is invasive.    

More trains: gaudy murals dragged across the landscape.

Rest Stop on 35, now 52 miles south of Kansas City – it’s 12:20.

I reach the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in KC about 1:30 am.

The galleries are crowded.  My WAC reciprocal membership works to get me into the galleries for free, but I have to buy a ticket for the special exhibition.  For some reason, the museum smells of Chinese food, moo goo gai pan or moo shu pork.  

The sky is dark and threatening storm as I find the freeway, 35 again, north-bound.  

I reach my destination for the night, Kearney, Missouri about 25 miles north of KC.  Sleet is falling – it’s 36 degrees with strong cold winds.  The intersection at the Comfort Inn has a couple of fast food places, a diagonal of strip mall running toward some cheerless trees and a water feature formed by the drainage from the intersection boulevards. Up on the hill, there’s a Chinese restaurant and, for some reason, I have a strong appetite for that kind of food tonight.  

Gas at the Phillips 66 @$3.69 for $11.51.  I drive up to the Chinese restaurant with small, round ice pellets pelting my windshield.  In front of the restaurant, the parking lot is empty but when I put my food down on the concrete pavement, I find that the surface is slick with thick ice, ice accumulating even as I peer through the darkness to the warm red light of the restaurant.  I don’t trust myself to walk on that ice into the restaurant and, in fact, I’m concerned that if I leave my car in the lot for an hour or so it will become solidly encased in ice and, perhaps, maddeningly inaccessible to me.  So I retreat, use the drive-through at Burger King to order a double-whopper, not Chinese food, but the best I can do in these circumstances.  It’s now 32 degrees, dark and windy with the air heavily laden with falling ice.

At the motel, the desk clerk asks me about the weather.  “Very bad,” I say.  “If you can get out of here, you should,” I tell her.  She’s worried and says that she has to get home.  Her dog is chained-up outside.

March 7, 2022 – grim and grey outside, the cars in the parking lot are locked-up in blocks of ice.

I go back to bed and sleep until 8:00.  No point in leaving early in this kind of weather.

The ice on the car is mostly slush and it yields fairly easily to my scraper.  I’m on the road at 8:32 – temp. 26 degrees.

Slow-going for awhile, with some spin-outs sulking in the median and freeway ditch.  But the driving isn’t as bad as I feared and I make the Iowa border at 10:01 am.

Then, Lamoni: Kum and Go: gas at $4.04 for $15.69 in the tank.  The slush is ankle deep in the parking lot, but the clouds are ripped open by wind in the sky and some fragments of blue show overhead.  The woman at the counter has my debit card in an envelope in the bottom of the cash register. “Someone picked it up in the driveway,” the woman tells me.  I thank her.  It’s 10:10 am.  Big semi-trucks are prowling the Kum and Go parking lot.

Radio: “There are no practice fields in agriculture”.  I wonder how the performance of Sartre’s Huis Clos went.

12:38 pm – gas at Joy Brothers, @ $3.54 for $20.50.  30 degrees at mile marker 145 on I-35.  

North of this exit no snow, no ice.  31 degrees.

Back in Austin around 2:00 pm.